card_classification.csv

EDU,"The backbone of the armed forces, the men and women who wear the uniform, are at risk of voting with their feet if the education of their children suffers because of their choice to serve the nation. Military readiness, a measure of the ability of a military unit to accomplish its mission, is closely watched by leaders. Readiness typically is a function of length of deployments and the frequency of successive deployments, and it can be exacerbated by equipment problems or lack of training. But it is also impacted by issues on the home front, such as the quality of education for military-connected children. At the root is something all American parents contend with: education standards that are inconsistent from school district to school district or state to state and that don’t properly prepare a child for career or college. What sets military families apart is that they are highly nomadic – Department of Defense dependents attend as many as nine schools during their K-12 years. What that means is more than one million military-connected children, most of whom attend public schools, are exposed to the vagaries of U.S. education at a rate far exceeding that of their civilian counterparts. The education of military children can suffer as students are regularly put at a disadvantage of being either ahead of or behind their peers. That academic disadvantage is having an impact on military readiness. Military families now make choices about whether to accept a particular duty station or, worse, even depart the armed forces based in part on the quality of the surrounding schools. A recent survey by the Military Times, a leading publication widely read by active duty and former U.S. personnel, puts a finer point on the connection between the K-12 education of military-connected children and readiness. Over one-third of respondents, 35 percent, said that dissatisfaction with a child’s education was or is “a significant factor” in deciding whether to continue military service. At the same time, 40 percent of respondents said that they have either declined or would decline a career-advancing job at a different installation to remain at their current military facility because of high performing schools. While making regular moves around the country is a staple of military life, the findings suggest that neither the armed forces nor local communities have cracked the code on ensuring smooth transitions for the military-connected kids. A whopping 70 percent of respondents said that regularly moving between states added challenges to their children's education. The online survey of Military Times readers polled over 200 respondents, with representation from all U.S. military services; 78 percent of respondents have served 11 or more years in the armed forces, and nearly half – 48 percent—current serve on active duty. The survey took place from Jan. 12 – 24. U.S. military leaders recognize the readiness connection. Pentagon leaders last year unveiled a policy allowing personnel to remain longer at a particular duty station in exchange for extended service. The action was in response to complaints by military parents who are loathe to move if the next duty station has poorly performing schools. Similarly, the federal government recognizes that being in a mobile military family has the potential to pose significant threats to student achievement. The new K-12 federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, created a newly-referenced demographic category -- military-student identifier. For the first time, federal law requires states to identify military connected students and track their test scores, attendance and graduation rates. For Melissa Helmick, an Army spouse, the mobility of military life added a major stress unfamiliar to most Americans. “We moved every two to three years to a different part of the country or another continent,” said Helmick, a member of the education group Military Families for High Standards. “The pace presented challenges as my children navigated new school systems while, we hoped, gathering sufficient knowledge and ability to succeed in college.” Hope has its place, but it is an insufficient plan for the thousands of military families with children in the K-12 years. That’s the reason why school districts near military installations are teaming up with non-profits to give military-connected children a better chance at a quality public school education. One of our organizations, the National Math and Science Initiative, recently provided a $400,000 DoD-sponsored grant to the Knob Noster School District in central Missouri to dramatically expand Advanced Placement (AP) math, science and English course offerings and provide the necessary supports to ensure student and teacher success. The school district serves 1,600 students, two-thirds of whom have parents assigned to nearby Whiteman Air Force Base. What precipitated the grant was a push by military personnel with children. “We heard an outcry from military families,” said Superintendent Jerrod Wheeler. “They wanted more academic rigor and challenges for their children. So the grant will allow us to establish seven new AP courses that will benefit military-connected students, as well as the entire student body.” This type of grant-making for districts that serve military children is essential. It highlights that simply setting high standards is not enough. Districts, especially those with large numbers of military-connected students, must redouble efforts to provide teacher training and evidence-based student supports – ensuring that students are able to meet and even exceed those standards. The goal is two-fold: to fully prepare students for life after high school and demonstrate to military parents that their children are not being shortchanged academically by their continued service. Military readiness is a multi-faceted challenge. And the education of military-connected children plays a vital role."
EDU,"The backbone of the armed forces, the men and women who wear the uniform, are at risk of voting with their feet if the education of their children suffers because of their choice to serve the nation. Military readiness, a measure of the ability of a military unit to accomplish its mission, is closely watched by leaders. Readiness typically is a function of length of deployments and the frequency of successive deployments, and it can be exacerbated by equipment problems or lack of training. But it is also impacted by issues on the home front, such as the quality of education for military-connected children. At the root is something all American parents contend with: education standards that are inconsistent from school district to school district or state to state and that don’t properly prepare a child for career or college. What sets military families apart is that they are highly nomadic – Department of Defense dependents attend as many as nine schools during their K-12 years. What that means is more than one million military-connected children, most of whom attend public schools, are exposed to the vagaries of U.S. education at a rate far exceeding that of their civilian counterparts. The education of military children can suffer as students are regularly put at a disadvantage of being either ahead of or behind their peers. That academic disadvantage is having an impact on military readiness. Military families now make choices about whether to accept a particular duty station or, worse, even depart the armed forces based in part on the quality of the surrounding schools. A recent survey by the Military Times, a leading publication widely read by active duty and former U.S. personnel, puts a finer point on the connection between the K-12 education of military-connected children and readiness. Over one-third of respondents, 35 percent, said that dissatisfaction with a child’s education was or is “a significant factor” in deciding whether to continue military service. At the same time, 40 percent of respondents said that they have either declined or would decline a career-advancing job at a different installation to remain at their current military facility because of high performing schools. While making regular moves around the country is a staple of military life, the findings suggest that neither the armed forces nor local communities have cracked the code on ensuring smooth transitions for the military-connected kids. A whopping 70 percent of respondents said that regularly moving between states added challenges to their children's education. The online survey of Military Times readers polled over 200 respondents, with representation from all U.S. military services; 78 percent of respondents have served 11 or more years in the armed forces, and nearly half – 48 percent—current serve on active duty. The survey took place from Jan. 12 – 24. U.S. military leaders recognize the readiness connection. Pentagon leaders last year unveiled a policy allowing personnel to remain longer at a particular duty station in exchange for extended service. The action was in response to complaints by military parents who are loathe to move if the next duty station has poorly performing schools. Similarly, the federal government recognizes that being in a mobile military family has the potential to pose significant threats to student achievement. The new K-12 federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, created a newly-referenced demographic category -- military-student identifier. For the first time, federal law requires states to identify military connected students and track their test scores, attendance and graduation rates. For Melissa Helmick, an Army spouse, the mobility of military life added a major stress unfamiliar to most Americans. “We moved every two to three years to a different part of the country or another continent,” said Helmick, a member of the education group Military Families for High Standards. “The pace presented challenges as my children navigated new school systems while, we hoped, gathering sufficient knowledge and ability to succeed in college.” Hope has its place, but it is an insufficient plan for the thousands of military families with children in the K-12 years. That’s the reason why school districts near military installations are teaming up with non-profits to give military-connected children a better chance at a quality public school education. One of our organizations, the National Math and Science Initiative, recently provided a $400,000 DoD-sponsored grant to the Knob Noster School District in central Missouri to dramatically expand Advanced Placement (AP) math, science and English course offerings and provide the necessary supports to ensure student and teacher success. The school district serves 1,600 students, two-thirds of whom have parents assigned to nearby Whiteman Air Force Base. What precipitated the grant was a push by military personnel with children. “We heard an outcry from military families,” said Superintendent Jerrod Wheeler. “They wanted more academic rigor and challenges for their children. So the grant will allow us to establish seven new AP courses that will benefit military-connected students, as well as the entire student body.” This type of grant-making for districts that serve military children is essential. It highlights that simply setting high standards is not enough. Districts, especially those with large numbers of military-connected students, must redouble efforts to provide teacher training and evidence-based student supports – ensuring that students are able to meet and even exceed those standards. The goal is two-fold: to fully prepare students for life after high school and demonstrate to military parents that their children are not being shortchanged academically by their continued service. Military readiness is a multi-faceted challenge. And the education of military-connected children plays a vital role."
EDU,"A strong national defense depends on a well-supported military. Members of the armed services and their families are the most important resource the U.S. has in terms of national defense. Individuals who have served deserve to be well-served through education opportunities for themselves and their children that enable the pursuit of life and career goals. All military members volunteer to deploy into harm’s way. For a service member preparing for deployment or already deployed far from home, the education options available to their children can be a point of great concern. The schooling options available to military-connected children can play a role in whether a family accepts an assignment, even factoring into decisions to leave military service altogether.1"
HEG,"Executive Summary As the global security environment becomes more complex and unpredictable, the U.S. military’s state of preparedness has become a central focus for policymakers on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon. Military readiness is the metric commonly used to discuss whether the military is prepared to confront a multitude of threats. Top defense leaders have sounded the alarm over the current state of military readiness, especially when speaking about the military’s ability to succeed in a conflict against a near-peer or high-end adversary. Before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2016, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said, “Nothing is more important to us than readiness, which is why it was the highest priority we had in preparing the 2017 defense budget—partly to rebuild full-spectrum readiness after 15 years of counterinsurgency operations and partly to restore damage done over the last several years that was caused by the effects of sequestration cuts.”1 Discussions around readiness levels most often revolve around resources (whether the military is adequately funded) and operational tempo, or “OPTEMPO” (whether the pace of military operations is too high or too low). Often missing from this discussion is how readiness levels are impacted by the military personnel system. People are the heart of a ready force. The Pentagon explicitly recognizes this truism by housing both personnel and readiness policy in the same office: the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. The two concepts are inextricably linked. Current military personnel policies exacerbate today’s readiness challenges by amplifying the impact of low funding and high OPTEMPO to create a recruiting and retention death spiral. Low readiness leads to low morale and vice versa; which is why readiness, once lost, is so difficult to recover. Falling readiness levels negatively impact recruiting and retention, as service members lose confidence in their ability to succeed in their missions, which in turn increases the geostrategic risks facing the nation. Despite this relationship between readiness and personnel, there is little attention paid to the system that manages the people who fight the nation’s wars. The U.S. armed forces face constantly evolving missions, yet the personnel system that serves them is uniform and stagnant. The up-or-out nature of military careers force service members to miss out on key training activities, while the inflexibility of the system leaves service members and their families particularly vulnerable to budgetary instability. Meanwhile, as the military continues to shrink, current personnel procedure places ever-higher demand on the smaller number of troops who remain—particularly those small number of troops who operate at the “tip of the spear” of U.S. combat capability. As the Pentagon tries to mount a concerted readiness recovery, the system that manages service-member careers impedes progress. In an era where OPTEMPO demands are unlikely to fall and the defense budget is unlikely to significantly rise, Pentagon leaders should view personnel reform as the most important opportunity to improve long-term military-readiness levels. If the brave men and women who work for the Defense Department are not fully prepared to face emerging threats, then no amount of money or other incentive will be enough to recruit and retain the highly talented workforce the military needs to succeed in the future. This paper will analyze readiness in the context of its impact on service members and their families. In early 2017, BPC’s Task Force on Defense Personnel will make recommendations to boost readiness levels by increasing the flexibility of the personnel system and by making military service more attractive to the next generation of Americans. Understanding Full-Spectrum Readiness Readiness is an amorphous term. Former acting Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Brad Carson and his senior adviser Morgan Plummer have written that the lack of clarity on the topic “has left military ‘readiness’ a notion more mystical than scientific.”2 Perhaps the most authoritative document on military readiness is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Guide to the Chairman’s Readiness System, which says, “One of the major obstacles to ensuring a force is ready is understanding what readiness really means.”3 The Guide provides a useful answer to this obstacle by stipulating that readiness levels should be tracked against the military’s ability to execute The National Military Strategy. 4 The National Military Strategy is a regularly updated document that describes the role of the military in advancing U.S. national interests and in supporting the goals of the president’s national security strategy. The most recent National Security Strategy of the United States—a document regularly updated by the White House for Congress—requires the military be “ready to deter and defeat threats to the homeland, including against missile, cyber, and terrorist attacks, while mitigating the effects of potential attacks and natural disasters.”5 This short statement illustrates the variety of threats the military must be prepared to confront. No other military in the world is tasked with the volume of responsibilities, both at home and abroad, that the U.S. armed forces must be prepared for. Defense leaders characterize the variety of threats on a continuum, called the “spectrum of conflict,” which dictates a range of military options (see Figure 1). [ Figure 1. Legacy Spectrum-of-Conflict Model OMITTED ] Since the spectrum of conflict is so broad, a military prepared for one mission may not be ready for a different one. This unfortunate position is where the U.S. military finds itself today. The legacy spectrum-of-conflict model is no longer accurate for today’s threat environment. A more accurate depiction is illustrated in the “new normal” spectrum of conflict (see Figure 2). This model shows that even in times of relative peace, the U.S. military is called upon to provide a persistent global presence, which comes at a significant cost. Additionally, over the last 15 years, the military has realized that counterinsurgency campaigns, though lower in intensity, come at a high cost in terms of both lives and dollars. Based on recent testimony, the military is currently only adequately funded for a small number of the total missions it is responsible for. This is why the Pentagon’s FY 2017 budget request is focused on restoring “full-spectrum readiness” after discovering readiness deficiencies resulting from “14 years of counterinsurgency-centric campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.”6 [ Figure 2. New Normal Spectrum-of-Conflict Model OMITTED ] Evidence of Readiness Shortfall Objective evidence of a readiness shortfall is difficult to find, but that does not mean the shortfall is any less real. For national security reasons, the Defense Department is reluctant to publicly broadcast the precise state of U.S. military preparedness. Even organizations like the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) have a difficult time precisely measuring military-readiness levels. A 2013 GAO report concluded that the Pentagon “sometimes presents detailed readiness data without sufficient context on how this information relates to or affects the information it provides on … areas, such as equipment, personnel, and training.”7 Even reports designed to communicate readiness levels to policymakers are largely not sufficient to inform resourcing and other strategic decisions. The Defense Department is required to provide a Quarterly Readiness Report to Congress (QRRC). This classified report is intended to help lawmakers track military-readiness levels and determine if the military is properly funded to meet its mission. The QRRC primarily provides readiness insight by using two main systems: the Status of Resources and Training System (SORTS) and the Defense Readiness Report System (DRRS). Both systems rely on a combination of objective resource information (for example, personnel, equipment, supply, training) and subjective commander assessments of unit capability. However, despite the importance of these reports and the long-standing challenge of measuring the military’s overall readiness, SORTS and DRRS are still criticized for lacking insight. A 2013 CBO report found that these quarterly reports lack the information that could best assist Congress, saying, “The QRRC simply does not systematically address many readiness questions, such as the pace of operations and its effect on readiness or morale and psychological well-being.”8 Since detailed readiness metrics are either nonexistent or classified, and even reports to Congress are incomplete, outsiders must rely on a combination of analytical methods to develop an accurate assessment of military-readiness levels. Public testimony from defense leaders provides a first-hand, if sometimes biased, expert account of military capability. Budgetary inputs provide additional context and present an objective measurement of changes over time. Other metrics, like retention levels and survey data, can add additional background and help paint a more complete picture of overall military readiness. Military Leaders Are Worried Pentagon leaders have repeatedly made public statements plainly stating that the military is struggling with its overall, full-spectrum readiness levels. During recent testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford stated that the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps will not be able to address “their readiness challenges” until 2020, while the Air Force could take until 2028 to be sufficiently ready for their full-spectrum missions.9 These are worrying admissions and speak to the depth of the problem. The caps on the defense budget are set to expire in 2022, so for the Air Force at least, the readiness recovery seems to be affected by other factors in addition to the budget caps mandated by the Budget Control Act (BCA). During posture hearings for the FY 2017 defense budget, service leaders have been nearly unanimous in their assessments of the military’s state of readiness. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, said the Army’s readiness is “not at a level that is appropriate for what the American people expect to defend them.”10 Marine Commandant Gen. Robert Neller recently stated that the Marine Corps’ aviation units “are currently unable to meet our training and mission requirements primarily due to Ready Basic Aircraft shortfalls.”11 While former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh ominously stated, “The average age of our aircraft is at an all-time high, and the size of our force and state of our full-spectrum readiness are at or near all-time lows.”12 Lastly, Navy chief Adm. John Richardson painted the rosiest picture, saying the Navy is “still digging out” from maintenance and readiness shortfalls.13 Gen. Milley has frequently sounded the alarm over the Army’s current state of overall readiness. Since 2001, the Army has dedicated most of its training and preparation to fighting terrorist networks and counterinsurgency conflicts. Indeed, according to Milley, the Army has “very good current capability and capacity to fight the counterterrorist and counterinsurgency fight.”14 However, on a recent trip to Africa, Milley said that against “higher-end threats, our skills have atrophied over the last 15 years.”15 Furthermore, at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Daniel Allyn testified, “Less than one-third of Army forces are at acceptable levels of readiness to conduct sustained ground combat in a full-spectrum environment.”16 The Air Force is in a similar position when it comes to high-end readiness. Although the Army and Marine Corps boots-on-the-ground deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have steeply declined over the last several years, that has done little to ease demand on an Air Force tasked with executing large-scale air campaigns over Libya and against ISIS, in addition to maintaining a continuous air presence over Afghanistan. These operations are mostly focused on close air support and tactical air-to-ground attacks. While these operations are inherently risky, today’s American pilots have enjoyed theater air dominance and have not had to confront enemy air defenses. In an extraordinary statement from a budget document, the FY 2017 Air Force budget request stated, “Though very proficient at current low-end operations, less than 50 percent of Combat Air Forces (CAF) are proficient in other required high-end mission sets.”17 These are worrying trends for a military that has global responsibilities and a full spectrum-of-conflict mission. Troubling Budget Dynamics While the statements of top service commanders are certainly alarming, additional analysis is warranted. The annual defense budget provides a glimpse into internal DOD planning and provides a high-level view of the inputs that shape military readiness. It is important to highlight that the budget merely provides information on readiness inputs, such as funding for flying hours and training rotations, rather than readiness outputs, such as targeting accuracy and unit performance ratings.18 Outsiders can see trends and make inferences about the state of the military, but these inferences should be linked to other data to make accurate assessments of overall readiness levels. The base defense budget is divided among five main appropriations: Military Personnel (MILPERS); Operations and Maintenance (O&M); Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E); Procurement; and Military Construction (MILCON). As a general rule, MILPERS and O&M make up roughly two-thirds of the annual budget, while RDT&E and Procurement make up most of the remainder. MILCON is usually only about 1 percent of the annual budget. Each appropriation has different governing rules, but all can be linked to building military readiness in some way.19 Though each defense appropriation is implicitly tied to readiness, the O&M budget request is explicitly justified to Congress in terms of its impact on readiness. The 2017 defense budget requested $205.8 billion for the O&M account and justified this by saying, “O&M programs support the Services’ efforts to enhance readiness by focusing on recovering full-spectrum readiness to meet current demands and to ensure our Joint Force is ready for future contingencies.”20 The O&M account provides funds for the most obvious “readiness-building” activities. For example, in order to prepare pilots for combat, pilots must fly an adequate number of training hours. For the Army, units are rotated through combat-training centers to train for potential future conflicts and upcoming deployments. The Navy builds readiness through ship-steaming days, depot maintenance, weapon sustainment, and other training activities. All of these activities are funded from the O&M account. From a funding perspective, one of the best ways to evaluate the military’s overall readiness level is to closely track the O&M budget. [ Figure 3. Funded Army Combat Training-Center Rotations OMITTED ] Over the last several years, the funding for each military service’s primary readiness-building activities has been inconsistent, at best, and heavily cut, at worst. For the Army, the number of funded combat training-center rotations was cut from 24 in FY 2012, to just 14 in FY 2013 (see Figure 3). These training-center rotations were described by former Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno as “the culminating event of readiness for brigade combat teams.”21 Since 2013, the Army has increased the number of funded training-center rotations but is still only projecting 19 rotations in FY 2017, which is 21 percent lower than in 2012. If one uses 2012 as a baseline, cumulatively the Army has canceled 28 training-center rotations over the last five years, or more than one full year of training. [ Figure 4. Funded Navy and Marine Corps Flying Hours OMITTED ] [ Figure 5. Funded Air Force Flying Hours OMITTED ] For the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, flying hours is one of the metrics used to measure readiness for aviation units. Unfortunately for all three branches, flying hours have declined since FY 2012 (see Figure 4 and Figure 5). The problem is particularly pronounced in the Navy and Marine Corps, which have seen a 6 and 19 percent reduction in flying hours, respectively, from FY 2012 to FY 2015. A Marine spokesperson summed up the situation: “We do not have enough ready basic aircraft. … That means we are not getting enough flight hours, and we aren’t up on our maintenance requirements for those specific aircraft.”22 The Marine Corps has requested an additional $460 million for the next fiscal year to address “readiness shortfalls.”23 While the Air Force has recently experienced a return to pre-FY-2013 flying-hour levels, it’s particularly notable that the Air Force experienced a 6 percent dip in flying hours from FY 2012 to FY 2013. In 2013, the Air Force temporarily grounded 13 combat squadrons—nearly one-third of active-duty fighter and bomber units— due to a $591 million cut to the flying-hours program.24 The Army made a similar readiness-harming decision when it canceled major training events for 78 percent of its combat brigades—essentially every unit that was not tapped to deploy.25 Meanwhile, the Navy delayed the planned deployment of the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group due to sequestration-driven budget cuts.26 These major decisions have long-lasting repercussions: Once individual readiness levels fall, it can take years for the military to recover. Retention Levels and Survey Data The budget realities of the last several years have forced the military to downsize overall. Since 2012, the total size of the active force has decreased by nearly 100,000 personnel. The reduction in force has, to some degree, masked any specific retention problems. Over the last year, however, some cracks in retention have begun to form, most obviously in the case of fighter pilots, who form a key combat capability for the U.S. military. No American service member on the ground has been killed by an enemy aircraft attack since the Korean War in 1953.27 This amazing streak of air dominance has been enabled by the readiness of American fighter pilots who have sufficient experience and are well-trained for their missions. This capability is in danger now as the result of numerous readiness-related challenges. In August 2016, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said, if current trends continue, “in just a couple years” the Air Force could be short of approximately 1,000 fighter pilots. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein attributed the main reason for this shortage to readiness, stating, “Pilots who don’t fly, maintainers who don’t maintain, and controllers who don’t control are not going to stay.”28 Recent Pentagon survey data backs up Goldfein’s assertion. The most recent Status of Forces survey of active-duty personnel states, “Overall, retention, stress in work life, and unit readiness [are] generally worse in 2014 than 2013.” Additionally, only 65 percent of those surveyed said that “their units were well prepared to perform their wartime mission.”29 This is 3 to 7 percentage points lower than most of the survey results from the preceding ten years. Causes of Readiness Shortfal If measuring the readiness shortfall is a challenge, determining the cause of the shortfall is comparably easy. Today’s readiness shortfall is primarily caused by a combination of three factors: (1) persistently high OPTEMPO, (2) stagnant or decreasing defense budgets, and (3) an inflexible personnel system. Two of these issues reside mostly outside of the Pentagon’s purview. Global events largely dictate the military demands that drive OPTEMPO, while the defense budget is a product of the legislative branch and domestic political trends. Therefore, one of the few places where defense leaders can improve long-term readiness levels is through modernizing a personnel system that has not been renovated since the end of World War II. High OPTEMPO Drains Readiness OPTEMPO, or the pace of military operations, is another factor that can impact military readiness. Though some level of deployment activity enhances individual and unit readiness by providing opportunities to utilize skills developed in training, excessively high OPTEMPO can actually negatively impact overall readiness by eliminating the opportunity to train for other kinds of missions (see Figure 6).30 The Defense Science Board spoke to this dynamic, saying, “OPTEMPO intensity levels, if sustained beyond normal for extended periods, can actually reduce the ability of our forces to train for all assigned missions.”31 For example, in 2007, at the peak of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the military focused the majority of its energy on fighting and winning a counterinsurgency fight. This focus could have distracted the military from its nuclear-deterrent mission, leading to the accidental transportation of nuclear weapons across the country (see Box 1). The wide array of missions that the U.S. military has engaged in since the sequester cuts in FY 2013 has further exacerbated the demand problem. The following is a condensed list of “major deployments” from the Congressional Research Service: • The war in Afghanistan • The continuing U.S. presence in Iraq • The fight against ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups • Various movements and operations in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Liberia, Libya, Niger, Poland, Senegal, Somalia, South Korea, South Sudan, Ukraine, and Uganda • The Ebola epidemic • Various disaster-relief missions • New force presence in Australia • And this is only a list of “major deployments.” The U.S. military has also engaged in numerous non-major deployments since FY 2013. In testimony to the House Subcommittee on Readiness relating to the pace of military operations, Rear Adm. Jeffrey A. Harley stated, “After years of operating above sustainable levels, we remain challenged to meet the necessary surge capacity in quantity and readiness across a wide array of forces.”32 [ Figure 6. Readiness vs. OPTEMPO Model OMITTED ] The 2007 Air Force Nuclear Weapons Incident The risk of a force that is not ready to execute its assigned missions takes on added danger when it involves nuclear weapons. While the Air Force was consumed with the counterinsurgency fight in the Middle East, it lost focus on its nuclear responsibilities. This resulted in a highly unsafe event: On August 29, 2007, six nuclear-armed cruise missiles were accidentally loaded onto a B-52 bomber and flown from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, to Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. The nuclear warheads on the missiles were supposed to have been removed prior to loading. The error was not discovered until 36 hours later, after the nuclear warheads had been left mostly unguarded while mounted to the aircraft. This incident led to a massive shakeup within the Air Force, with the resignation of the secretary of the Air Force and the chief of staff and with the eventual creation of the Air Force Global Strike Command to oversee all Air Force nuclear operations. The Defense Science Board formed an independent task force to determine the cause of such a lapse in the performance of a “no-fail” mission. The board retraced the steps that led to the unauthorized relocation of nuclear weapons and determined several areas of lax oversight and failure to follow proper procedures. However, the deeper concern raised by the board was “the perception in the force that nuclear forces and the nuclear-deterrent mission are increasingly devalued.”33 This perception arose from the frequent transfer of responsibility for nuclear forces following the end of the Cold War. As the nuclear mission became less prominent, the personnel assigned to the mission felt neglected by the Air Force chain of command, resulting in lower morale and, consequently, lower readiness. The task force highlighted an Air Force report identifying an “urgent need for attention to personnel matters for nuclear-experienced people.”24 A Constrained Budget The dynamics of the post-BCA defense budget have forced defense leaders to cut readiness funding in order to meet budget caps that have constrained overall military spending. The FY 2016 defense budget (including overseas-contingency-operation funding) is approximately $104 billion smaller in real terms than in FY 2012, the last year before the BCA went into effect (see Figure 7). In FY 2013 alone, the Defense Department had to confront $52 billion in near-instantaneous cuts resulting from sequestration triggered by the BCA.35 Rapidly implemented budget cuts would be troublesome for most government agencies, but for an organization as complex as the Pentagon, sequestration and the follow-on budget caps present particularly difficult trade-offs that directly impact U.S. national security. Unfortunately, one of the repercussions of the BCA was a need to delay the training and maintenance that most directly impacts military personnel preparing to respond to future threats [ Figure 7. Defense Budget Cuts Since Sequestration (FY 2017 Constant Dollars) OMITTED ] The year-on-year fluctuations of the various defense budget accounts show how budget dynamics have intensified the readiness struggle that has impacted the military since BCA-mandated budget caps came into effect. When sequestration struck the Pentagon in 2013, the department cut O&M outlays by approximately 9 percent from the prior year. Meanwhile, the Procurement, RDT&E, and MILPERS accounts were only cut by a combined average of 6 percent. Of the $53 billion cut by the BCA in FY 2013, roughly 54 percent was taken from the O&M budget, despite O&M consuming only 43 percent of the total defense budget (see Figure 8). The department was forced to adversely cut O&M funding, even while facing a recognized readiness challenge due to the structure of the defense budget. Pentagon planners had to go where the money was in order to meet the sequestration requirements. While it takes years to shrink the size of the force and it can actually increase costs to prematurely break acquisition contracts, O&M activities are easier to cut on a shorter time line. [ Figure 8. FY 2013 Sequester Cuts Disproportionately Impacted Readiness OMITTED ] Personnel Systems Exacerbate Readiness Challenge As dwindling defense dollars force Pentagon leaders to sacrifice readiness-building activities, the inflexibility of current personnel practices exacerbates the readiness struggle. Up-or-out and one-size-fits-all career tracks leave few options to mitigate the negative impact of readiness shortfalls created by canceled training events. If a service member misses out on a training activity or other critical experience, the current system does not allow for individuals to make up for that missed opportunity. For example, 78 percent of the Army captains who were combat-unit company commanders in 2013 were forced to miss major training events that are crucial for learning small-unit tactics and leadership.36 Since the personnel system limits company command to only a two-year assignment, there is almost zero opportunity to reschedule the missed training. The up-or-out promotion system forces the Army to rotate officers on an inflexible timetable in order to ensure that all officers receive comparable experience. Company command is one of the foundational leadership assignments for junior officers. Successful company commanders often go on to senior leadership roles within the Army, eventually commanding large troop formations when they are promoted to serve as battalion and even brigade commanders. Missed training events at the company level leave an experience gap that could last the length of an officer’s career. As former Army Deputy Chief of Staff Major Gen. Gary Cheek said, if during a two-year company-command assignment, a captain misses crucial training experiences, “it’s gone forever.”37 The same can be said for crucial assignments in the Navy and Air Force. As Air Force Secretary James recently wrote, the military, “unlike many private-sector companies, which can fill vacancies by simply tapping an experienced and flexible labor pool, ... the military has to grow its own set of skilled specialties, and that can take years.”38 Today’s personnel systems artificially limit the military’s ability to adapt its forces to budgetary instability and readiness challenges. The experience and readiness gaps created during the initial years of the BCA will have long-lasting ripple effects. Retention Harmed by Readiness Shortfall Service members join and stay in the military for numerous reasons. While compensation and quality-of-life are important, the military’s main retention tool is its unique mission. Protecting the nation is a calling, and if the military is forced to shortchange that mission through cuts to readiness and training, many service members will decide to leave. The current Air Force fighter-pilot shortage is in many ways a product of the consistent readiness struggles of the last several years.39 Dollars spent on readiness-producing activities like flying hours serve a dual purpose: It allows service members to be better prepared for future conflict, but readiness also acts as an important retention tool. As current Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein recently said: “In my mind, readiness and morale are inextricably linked. Where we have high readiness, we have high morale. Where we have low readiness, we have our lowest morale.” As a result, in 2013, when the Air Force first started dealing with drastic flying-hour reductions and pilot shortages, then-acting Air Force Secretary Eric Fanning said the main reason pilots are leaving are “flying-hour issues” because “pilots want to fly.”40 Perhaps the most glaring shortcoming of the one-size-fits-all, up-or-out personnel system is the amount of time it takes to recover from unanticipated setbacks and adversity. The Air Force fighter-pilot shortage will take years to correct. In FY 2016, the Air Force projected a shortage of 723 fighter pilots. The pilot training system can produce approximately 200 new pilots every year at a cost of about $2.6 million each. Even in the absolute best-case scenario, where no additional pilots leave the Air Force, it would take nearly four years to get back to full-strength. However, over the last two years, the service has lost an average of about 355 pilots per year.41 Unless major changes are made to how personnel are managed, the Air Force could be facing significant retention challenges for the foreseeable future. The Readiness Death Spiral While the conversation around readiness is often abstract or theoretical, it is important to remember that for individual service members, the consequence of low readiness is an increased risk of injury or death. Unless otherwise interrupted, low readiness levels create a death spiral that negatively impacts retention, recruiting, and puts more Americans in danger. As decreased defense funding disproportionately impacts readiness accounts, service members have fewer opportunities to train and improve their skills. When critical combat skills atrophy, military personnel lose confidence in their ability to successfully perform their missions, which erodes unit cohesion and morale. Eventually low morale has a negative impact on military retention levels. As the most experienced and skilled service members decide to hang up their uniforms, those left behind must carry more of the burden, which places further stress upon an already stressed force and makes recruiting the next generation even more difficult. Ultimately, adversaries of the United States will take notice of this readiness death spiral and the level of national security risk will rise, while at the same time, the military’s ability to respond continues to fall. The precursors to the readiness death spiral described above are already evident. In January 2016, two Marine Corps CH-53 Super Stallions were conducting a nighttime training mission off the coast of Hawaii. The "
EX,"Within months of taking office, President Donald Trump is likely to face one or more major international crises, possibly entailing a risk of nuclear escalation. Not since the end of the Cold War has a new chief executive been confronted with as many potential flashpoints involving such a risk of explosive conflict. This proliferation of crises has been brewing for some time, but the situation appears especially ominous now given Trump’s pledge to bring American military force swiftly to bear on any threats of foreign transgression. With so much at risk, it’s none too soon to go on a permanent escalation watch, monitoring the major global hotspots for any sign of imminent flare-ups, hoping that early warnings (and the outcry that goes with them) might help avert catastrophe. Looking at the world today, four areas appear to pose an especially high risk of sudden crisis and conflict: North Korea, the South China Sea, the Baltic Sea region, and the Middle East. Each of them has been the past site of recurring clashes, and all are primed to explode early in the Trump presidency. Why are we seeing so many potential crises now? Is this period really different from earlier presidential transitions? It’s true that the changeover from one presidential administration to another can be a time of global uncertainty, given America’s pivotal importance in world affairs and the natural inclination of rival powers to test the mettle of the country’s new leader. There are, however, other factors that make this moment particularly worrisome, including the changing nature of the world order, the personalities of its key leaders, and an ominous shift in military doctrine. Just as the United States is going through a major political transition, so is the planet at large. The sole-superpower system of the post-Cold War era is finally giving way to a multipolar, if not increasingly fragmented, world in which the United States must share the limelight with other major actors, including China, Russia, India, and Iran. Political scientists remind us that transitional periods can often prove disruptive, as “status quo” powers (in this case, the United States) resist challenges to their dominance from “revisionist” states seeking to alter the global power equation. Typically, this can entail proxy wars and other kinds of sparring over contested areas, as has recently been the case in Syria, the Baltic, and the South China Sea. This is where the personalities of key leaders enter the equation. Though President Obama oversaw constant warfare, he was temperamentally disinclined to respond with force to every overseas crisis and provocation, fearing involvement in yet more foreign wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. His critics, including Donald Trump, complained bitterly that this stance only encouraged foreign adversaries to up their game, convinced that the U.S. had lost its will to resist provocation. In a Trump administration, as The Donald indicated on the campaign trail last year, America’s adversaries should expect far tougher responses. Asked in September, for instance, about an incident in the Persian Gulf in which Iranian gunboats approached American warships in a threatening manner, he typically told reporters, “When they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and make gestures that... they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.” Although with Russia, unlike Iran, Trump has promised to improve relations, there’s no escaping the fact that Vladimir Putin’s urge to restore some of his country’s long-lost superpower glory could lead to confrontations with NATO powers that would put the new American president in a distinctly awkward position. Regarding Asia, Trump has often spoken of his intent to punish China for what he considers its predatory trade practices, a stance guaranteed to clash with President Xi Jinping’s goal of restoring his country’s greatness. This should, in turn, generate additional possibilities for confrontation, especially in the contested South China Sea. Both Putin and Xi, moreover, are facing economic difficulties at home and view foreign adventurism as a way of distracting public attention from disappointing domestic performances. These factors alone would ensure that this was a moment of potential international crisis, but something else gives it a truly dangerous edge: a growing strategic reliance in Russia and elsewhere on the early use of nuclear weapons to overcome deficiencies in “conventional” firepower. For the United States, with its overwhelming superiority in such firepower, nuclear weapons have lost all conceivable use except as a “deterrent” against a highly unlikely first-strike attack by an enemy power. For Russia, however, lacking the means to compete on equal terms with the West in conventional weaponry, this no longer seems reasonable. So Russian strategists, feeling threatened by the way NATO has moved ever closer to its borders, are now callingfor the early use of “tactical” nuclear munitions to overpower stronger enemy forces. Under Russia’s latest military doctrine, major combat units are now to be trained and equipped to employ such weapons at the first sign of impending defeat, either to blackmail enemy countries into submission or annihilate them. Following this doctrine, Russia has developed the nuclear-capable Iskander ballistic missile (a successor to the infamous “Scud” missile used by Saddam Hussein in attacks on Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia) and forward deployed it to Kaliningrad, a small sliver of Russian territory sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. In response, NATO strategists are discussing ways to more forcefully demonstrate the West’s own capacity to use tactical nuclear arms in Europe, for example by including more nuclear-capable bombers in future NATO exercises. As a result, the “firebreak” between conventional and nuclear warfare -- that theoretical barrier to escalation -- seems to be narrowing, and you have a situation in which every crisis involving a nuclear state may potentially prove to be a nuclear crisis. With that in mind, consider the four most dangerous potential flashpoints for the new Trump administration. North Korea North Korea’s stepped-up development of nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles may present the Trump administration with its first great international challenge. In recent years, the North Koreans appear to have made substantial progress in producing such missiles and designing small nuclear warheads to fit on them. In 2016, the country conducted two underground nuclear tests (its fourth and fifth since 2006), along with numerous tests of various missile systems. On September 20th, it also tested a powerful rocket engine that some observers believe could be used as the first stage of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that might someday be capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the western United States. North Korea’s erratic leader, Kim Jong-un, has repeatedly spoken of his determination to acquire nuclear weapons and the ability to use them in attacks on his adversaries, including the U.S. Following a series of missile tests last spring, he insisted that his country should continue to bolster its nuclear force “both in quality and quantity,” stressing “the need to get the nuclear warheads deployed for national defense always on standby so as to be fired at any moment.” This could mean, he added, using these weapons “in a preemptive attack.” On January 1st, Kim reiterated his commitment to future preemptive nuclear action, adding that his country would soon test-fire an ICBM. President Obama responded by imposing increasingly tough economic sanctions and attempting -- with only limited success -- to persuade China, Pyongyang’s crucial ally, to use its political and economic clout to usher Kim into nuclear disarmament talks. None of this seemed to make the slightest difference, which means President Trump will be faced with an increasingly well-armed North Korea that may be capable of fielding usable ICBMs within the coming years. How will Trump respond to this peril? Three options seem available to him: somehow persuade China to compel Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear quest; negotiate a disarmament deal directly with Kim, possibly even on a face-to-face basis; or engage in (presumably nonnuclear) preemptive strikes aimed at destroying the North’s nuclear and missile-production capabilities. Imposing yet more sanctions and talking with China would look suspiciously like the Obama approach, while obtaining China’s cooperation would undoubtedly mean compromising on trade or the South China Sea (either of which would undoubtedly involve humiliating concessions for a man like Trump). Even were he to recruit Chinese President Xi as a helpmate, it’s unclear that Pyongyang would be deterred. As for direct talks with Kim, Trump, unlike every previous president, has already indicated that he’s willing. “I would have no problem speaking to him,” he told Reuters last May. But what exactly would he offer the North in return for its nuclear arsenal? The withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea? Any such solution would leave the president looking like a patsy (inconceivable for someone whose key slogan has been “Make America Great Again”). That leaves a preemptive strike. Trump appears to have implicitly countenanced that option, too, in a recent tweet. (“North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!”) In other words, he is open to the military option, rejected in the past because of the high risk of triggering an unpredictable response from the North, including a cataclysmic invasion of South Korea (and potential attacks on U.S. troops stationed there). Under the circumstances, the unpredictability not just of Kim Jong-un but also of Donald Trump leaves North Korea in the highest alert category of global crises as the new era begins. The South China Sea The next most dangerous flashpoint? The ongoing dispute over control of the South China Sea, an area bounded by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and the island of Borneo. Citing ancient ties to islands in those waters, China now claims the entire region as part of its national maritime territory. Some of the same islands are, however, also claimed by Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Although not claiming any territory in the region itself, the U.S. has a defense treaty with the Philippines, relies on free passage through the area to move its warships from bases in the Pacific to war zones in the Middle East, and of course considers itself the preeminent Pacific power and plans to keep it that way. In the past, China has clashed with local powers over possession of individual islands, but more recently has sought control over all of them. As part of that process, it has begun to convert low-lying islets and atolls under its control into military bases, equipping them with airstrips and missile defense systems. This has sparked protests from Vietnam and the Philippines, which claim some of those islets, and from the United States, which insists that such Chinese moves infringe on its Navy’s “freedom of navigation” through international waters. President Obama responded to provocative Chinese moves in the South China Sea by ordering U.S. warships to patrol in close proximity to the islands being militarized. For Trump, this has been far too minimal a response. “China’s toying with us,” he told David Sanger of the New York Times last March. “They are when they’re building in the South China Sea. They should not be doing that but they have no respect for our country and they have no respect for our president.” Asked if he was prepared to use military force in response to the Chinese buildup, he responded, “Maybe.” The South China Sea may prove to be an early test of Trump’s promise to fight what he views as China’s predatory trade behavior and Beijing’s determination to resist bullying by Washington. Last month, Chinese sailors seized an American underwater surveillance drone near one of their atolls. Many observers interpreted the move as a response to Trump’s decision to take a phone call of congratulations from the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, shortly after his election victory. That gesture, unique in recent American presidencies, was viewed in Beijing, which considers Taiwan a renegade province, as an insult to China. Any further moves by Trump to aggravate or punish China on the economic front could result in further provocations in the South China Sea, opening the possibility of a clash with U.S. air and naval forces in the region. All this is worrisome enough, but the prospects for a clash in the South China Sea increased significantly on January 11th, thanks to comments made by Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil and presumptive secretary of state, during his confirmation hearing in Washington. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he said, “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.” Since the Chinese are unlikely to abandon those islands -- which they consider part of their sovereign territory -- just because Trump and Tillerson order them to do so, the only kind of ""signal"" that might carry any weight would be military action. What form would such a confrontation take and where might it lead? At this point, no one can be sure, but once such a conflict began, room for maneuver could prove limited indeed. A U.S. effort to deny China access to the islands could involve anything from a naval blockade to air and missile attacks on the military installations built there to the sinking of Chinese warships. It’s hard to imagine that Beijing would refrain from taking retaliatory steps in response, and as one move tumbled onto the next, the two nuclear-armed countries might suddenly find themselves at the brink of full-scale war. So consider this our second global high alert. The Baltic Sea Area If Hillary Clinton had been elected, I would have placed the region adjoining the Baltic Sea at the top of my list of potential flashpoints, as it’s where Vladimir Putin would have been most likely to channel his hostility to her in particular and the West more generally. That’s because NATO forces have moved most deeply into the territory of the former Soviet Union in the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Those countries are also believed to be especially vulnerable to the kind of “hybrid” warfare -- involving covert operations, disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, and the like -- that Russia perfected in Crimea and Ukraine. With Donald Trump promising to improve relations with Moscow, it’s now far less likely that Putin would launch such attacks, though the Russians continue to strengthen their military assets (including their nuclear war-fighting capabilities) in the region, and so the risk of a future clash cannot be ruled out. The danger there arises from geography, history, and policy. The three Baltic republics only became independent after the breakup of the USSR in 1991; today, they are members of both the European Union and NATO. Two of them, Estonia and Latvia, share borders with Russia proper, while Lithuania and nearby Poland surround the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Through their NATO membership, they provide a theoretical bridgehead for a hypothetical Western invasion of Russia. By the same token, the meager forces of the three republics could easily be overwhelmed by superior Russian ones, leaving the rest of NATO to decide whether and in what fashion to confront a Russian assault on member nations. Following Russia’s intervention in eastern Ukraine, which demonstrated both Moscow’s willingness and ability to engage in hybrid warfare against a neighboring European state, the NATO powers decided to bolster the alliance’s forward presence in the Baltic region. At a summit meeting in Warsaw in June 2016, the alliance agreed to deploy four reinforced multinational battalions in Poland and the three Baltic republics. Russia views this with alarm as a dangerous violation of promises made to Moscow in the wake of the Cold War that no NATO forces would be permanently garrisoned on the territory of the former Soviet Union. NATO has tried to deflect Russian complaints by insisting that, since the four battalions will be rotated in and out of the region, they are somehow not “permanent.” Nevertheless, from Moscow’s perspective, the NATO move represents a serious threat to Russian security and so justifies a comparable buildup of Russian forces in adjacent areas. Adding to the obvious dangers of such a mutual build-up, NATO and Russian forces have been conducting military “exercises,” often in close proximity to each other. Last summer, for example, NATO oversaw Anaconda 2016 in Poland and Lithuania, the largest such maneuvers in the region since the end of the Cold War. As part of the exercise, NATO forces crossed from Poland to Lithuania, making clear their ability to encircle Kaliningrad, which was bound to cause deep unease in Moscow. Not that the Russians have been passive. During related NATO naval exercises in the Baltic Sea, Russian planes flew within a few feet of an American warship, the USS Donald Cook, nearly provoking a shooting incident that could have triggered a far more dangerous confrontation. Will Putin ease up on the pressure he’s been exerting on the Baltic states once Trump is in power? Will Trump agree to cancel or downsize the U.S. and NATO deployments there in return for Russian acquiescence on other issues? Such questions will be on the minds of many in Eastern Europe in the coming months. It’s reasonable to predict a period of relative calm as Putin tests Trump’s willingness to forge a new relationship with Moscow, but the underlying stresses will remain as long as the Baltic states stay in NATO and Russia views that as a threat to its security. So chalk the region up as high alert three on a global scale. The Middle East The Middle East has long been a major flashpoint. President Obama, for instance, came to office hoping to end U.S. involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet U.S. troops are still fighting in both countries today. The question is: How might this picture change in the months ahead? Given the convoluted history of the region and its demonstrated capacity for surprise, any predictions should be offered with caution. Trump has promised to intensify the war against ISIS, which will undoubtedly require the deployment of additional American air, sea, and ground forces in the region. As he put it during the election campaign, speaking of the Islamic State, “I would bomb the shit out of them.” So expect accelerated air strikes on ISIS-held locations, leading to more civilian casualties, desperate migrants, and heightened clashes between Shiites and Sunnis. As ISIS loses control of physical territory and returns to guerilla-style warfare, it will surely respond by increasing terrorist attacks on “soft” civilian targets in neighboring Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey, as well as in more distant locations. No one knows how all this will play out, but don’t be surprised if terrorist violence only increases and Washington once again finds itself drawn more deeply into an endless quagmire in the Greater Middle East and northern Africa. The overriding question, of course, is how Donald Trump will behave toward Iran. He has repeatedly affirmed his opposition to the nuclear deal signed by the United States, the European Union, Russia, and China and insisted that he would either scrap it or renegotiate it, but it’s hard to imagine how that might come to pass. All of the other signatories are satisfied with the deal and seek to do business with Iran, so any new negotiations would have to proceed without those parties. As many U.S. strategists also see merit in the agreement, since it deprives Iran of a nuclear option for at least a decade or more, a decisive shift on the nuclear deal appears unlikely. On the other hand, Trump could be pressured by his close associates -- especially his pick for national security advisor, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, a notoriously outspoken Iranophobe -- to counter the Iranians on other fronts. This could take a variety of forms, including stepped-up sanctions, increased aid to Saudi Arabia in its war against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, or attacks on Iranian proxies in the Middle East. Any of these would no doubt prompt countermoves by Tehran, and from there a cycle of escalation could lead in numerous directions, all dangerous, including military action by the U.S., Israel, or Saudi Arabia. So mark this one as flash point four and take a deep breath. Going on Watch Starting on January 20th, as Donald Trump takes office, the clock will already be ticking in each of these flashpoint regions. No one knows which will be the first to erupt, or what will happen when it does, but don’t count on our escaping at least one, and possibly more, major international crises in the not-too-distant future. Given the stakes involved, it’s essential to keep a close watch on all of them for signs of anything that might trigger a major conflagration and for indications of a prematurely violent Trumpian response (the moment to raise a hue and cry). Keeping the spotlight shining on these four potential flashpoints may not be much, but it’s the least we can do to avert Armageddon."
HEG,"Deterrence Strategy In stark contrast to the bipolar Cold War nuclear setting, today’s security environment includes multiple, independent nuclear actors. Some of these independent nuclear weasecurity guarantees and assurance sufficient to prevent the initiation of catalytic warfare by an ally, while deterring an adversary from resorting to nuclear escalation. America may also need simultaneously to deter more than one other nuclear state. Deterrencpons states are potential adversaries, some are rivals, and some are friends, but the initial decision for action by any one of them may lie beyond U.S. control. The United States may need to influence, signal, and restrain enemies, and it may need to continue to provide security guarantees to non-nuclear friends and allies. America may also face catalytic warfare, where, for example, a U.S. ally such as Israel or a third party such as China could initiate action that might escalate to a nuclear exchange. Although the United States would not be a party to the nuclear escalation decision process, it could be drawn into the conflict. Compared to a bipolar world, very little is known about strategic nuclear interaction and escalation in a multipolar world. The U.S. nuclear deterrent must restrain a wider variety of actors today than during the Cold War. This requires a range of capabilities and the capacity to address specific challenges. The deterrent must provide e requirements include four critical elements: early warning, C2, delivery systems, and weapons. The Air Force plays an indispensable role in furnishing the U.S. early warning system in its entirety through satellites and radar networks. In command and control, infrastructure is provided by the Air Force, including Milstar satellites and, in the future, advanced extremely high frequency (AEHF) satellites. In the area of delivery systems and weapons, two-thirds of the strategic triad – intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and bombers – is furnished by the Air Force and its Global Strike Command. U.S. Overseas Basing and the Anti-Access/Area-Denial Threat The increased availability of anti-access/area-denial assets coupled with growing threats to the sea, air, space, and cyberspace commons are challenging the power projection capabilities of the United States. These threats, in the form of aircraft and long-range missiles carrying conventional or nuclear munitions, present problems for our overseas bases. States such as North Korea, China, and Iran jeopardize the notion that forward-deployed U.S. forces and bases will be safe from enemy attack. Consequently, the United States must create a more flexible basing structure encompassing a passive and active defense posture that includes these features: dispersal, hardening, increased warning time of attack, and air defenses. Simultaneously, the United States must continue to develop long-range, offensive systems such as low-observable manned and remotely piloted strike aircraft, precision missiles, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms to penetrate heavily defended A2/AD environments. This approach will increase the survivability of U.S. forward-deployed assets and power projection capabilities and thus bolster deterrence and U.S. guarantees to America’s allies and friends. Asymmetric Challenges The increasing number of actors gaining access to advanced and dual-use technologies augments the potential for asymmetric attacks against the United States and its allies by those who are unable to match U.S. military capabilities. Those actors pose increasing challenges to the ability of the United States to project power through the global commons. Such attacks could target specific U.S. vulnerabilities, ranging from space assets to the financial, transportation, communications, and/or energy infrastructures, and to the food and water supply, to mention only the most obvious. Asymmetric attacks denying access to critical networks and capabilities may be the most cost-effective approach to circumventing traditional U.S. force advantages. The USAF and DoD must develop systems and technologies that can offset and defend against asymmetric capabilities. This will require a robust R&D program and enhanced USAF cooperation with its sister services and international partners and allies. Space Dominance Space is increasingly a contested domain where U.S. dominance is no longer assured given the growing number of actors in space and the potential for kinetic and non-kinetic attacks, including ASAT weapons, EMP, and jamming. As a result, the United States must protect vital space-based platforms and networks by reducing their vulnerability to attack or disruption and increasing the country’s resilience if an attack does occur. Required steps include hardening and incorporating stealth into next generation space systems and developing rapid replenishment capacity (including micro-satellite technologies and systems and new launch capabilities). At the same time, America must reduce its dependence on space capabilities with air-based substitutes such as high altitude, long endurance, and penetrating ISR platforms. Increased cooperation among the services and with U.S. allies to develop such capabilities will also be paramount. Cyber Security Cyber operations are vital to conducting USAF and joint land, sea, air, and space missions. Given the significance of the cyber threat (private, public, and DoD cyber and information networks are routinely under attack), the United States is attempting to construct a layered and robust capability to detect and mitigate cyber intrusions and attacks. The USAF’s cyber operations must be capable of operating in a contested cyber domain to support vital land, sea, air, and space missions. USAF cyberspace priorities include developing capabilities to protect essential military cyber systems and to speed their recovery if an attack does occur; enhancing the Air Force’s capacity to provide USAF personnel with the resolution of technical questions; and training/recruitment of personnel with cyber skills. In addition, the USAF and DoD need to develop technologies that quickly and precisely attribute attacks in cyberspace. Cyber attacks can spread quickly among networks, making it extremely difficult to attribute their perpetrator, and therefore to develop a deterrence strategy based on retaliation. In addition, some cyber issues are in the legal arena, including questions about civil liberties. It is likely that the trend of increased military support to civil authorities (for example, in disaster relief operations) will develop in the cyber arena as well. These efforts will entail greater service, interagency, international, and private-sector collaboration. Organizational Change and Joint Force Operations To address growing national security challenges and increasing fiscal constraints, and to become more effective, the joint force needs to adapt its organizations and processes to the exigencies of the information age and the security setting of the second decade of the twenty-first century. This entails developing a strategy that places increased emphasis on joint operations in which each service acts in greater concert with the others, leverages capacities across the services (two land services, three naval services, and five air services) without duplicating efforts, and encourages interoperability. This would provide combatant commanders (CCDRs) with a greater range of capabilities, allowing heightened flexibility to use force. A good example of this approach is the Air-Sea Battle concept being developed jointly by the Air Force and Navy, which envisions heightened cooperation between the two services and potentially with allies and coalition partners. Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Capabilities There is an increasing demand for ISR capabilities able to access and persist in contested airspace in order to track a range of high-value mobile and hard-to-find targets, such as missile launchers and underground bunkers. This increases the need for stealthy, survivable systems and the development of next-generation unmanned platforms. The USAF must continue to emphasize precision targeting, both for strike and close-air-support missions. High-fidelity target identification and discrimination enabled by advanced radars and directed-energy systems, including the ability to find, track, and target individuals within a crowd, will provide battlefield commanders with improved options and new opportunities for leveraging joint assets. Engagement and International Security Cooperation Allies and coalition partners bring important capabilities from which the USAF and other services have long benefited. For example, allies and coalition partners can provide enhanced situational awareness and early warning of impending crises as well as assist in understanding the interests, motivations, traditions, and cultures of potential adversaries and prospective coalition partners. Moreover, foreign partner engagement and outreach are an avenue to influence partner and adversary perspectives, thus shaping the environment in ways favorable to U.S. national security interests. Engagement also may be a key to realizing another Air Force and joint priority: to sustain or gain access to forward operating bases and logistical infrastructure. This is particularly important given the growing availability of A2/AD assets and their ability to impede U.S. power projection capabilities. Procurement Choices and Affordability The USAF needs to field capabilities to support current operations and pressing missions while at the same time pursuing promising technologies to build the force of the future. Affordability, effectiveness, time urgency, and industrial base issues inevitably shape procurement choices and reform. The Air Force must maintain today’s critical assets while also allocating resources to meet future needs. Given the long lifespan anticipated for many weapon systems, planners need to make the most reliable cost estimates and identify problems at the outset of a weapons system’s development phase so that they can be corrected as early and cost-effectively as possible. Support to Civil Authorities As evidenced in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile (the Chile earthquake hit after this conference), the USAF has a vital role to play in the U.S. response to international relief operations and support to civil authorities. In Haiti, the USAF reopened the airport and deployed contingency response elements, while also providing ISR support for the joint forces in the theater. In Chile, USAF satellite communication capabilities were critical to the recovery and relief efforts. USAF civil support roles are likely to grow to include greater use of the Reserve Components. Consequently, USAF planners should reassess the active and reserve component mix of forces and capabilities to identify potential mobilization and requirement shortfalls. CLOSING CONFERENCE THOUGHTS A recurring conference theme was the need for the USAF to continue to examine specific issues of opportunity and vulnerability more closely. For example, a future initiative could include focused working groups that would examine such questions and issues as: • How can air, space, and cyberspace capabilities best support deterrence, preserve U.S. freedom of action, and support national objectives? • How should the USAF leadership reconceptualize its vision, institutional identity, and force posture to align as closely as possible with the future national security setting? • What is the appropriate balance between high-end and low-end air and space capabilities that will maximize military options for national decision makers, given emerging threats and fiscal constraints? • What are the opportunities, options, and tradeoffs for investment and divestment in science and technology, infrastructure, and programmed capabilities? • What are additional interdependent concepts, similar to Air-Sea Battle, that leverage cross-service investments to identify and foster the development of new joint capabilities? • What are alternative approaches to officer accessions and development to support shifting and emerging Air Force missions, operations, and force structure, including cyber warfare? • How can the USAF best interact with Congress to help preserve or refocus the defense-industrial base as well as to minimize mandates and restrictions that weigh on future Air Force investments? Finally, the USAF must continue to be an organization that views debate, as the Chief of Staff of the Air Force put it in his opening conference address, “…as the whetstone upon which we sharpen our strategic thinking.” This debate must also be used in pursuit of political support and to ensure that the USAF maintains and develops critical capabilities to support U.S. national security priorities. The 38th IFPA-Fletcher Conference on National Security Strategy and Policy was conceived as a contribution to that debate. Almost a century has passed since the advent of airpower and Billy Mitchell’s demonstration of its operational potential with the sinking of the Ostfriesland on July 21, 1921. For most of that time, the United States has benefitted from the rapid development of air and space power projection capabilities, and, as a result, it has prevailed in successive conflicts, contributed to war deterrence and crisis management, and provided essential humanitarian relief to allies and friends around the world. As we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the U.S. Air Force (USAF), like its service counterparts, is re-assessing strategies, operational concepts, and force structure. Across the conflict spectrum, security challenges are evolving, and potential adversaries–state and non-state actors–are developing anti-access and other asymmetric capabilities, and irregular warfare challenges are becoming more prevalent. The potential exists for “hybrid” warfare in which state adversaries and/or non-state actors use a mix of conventional and unconventional capabilities against the United States, a possibility made more feasible by the diffusion of such capabilities to a larger number of actors. Furthermore, twenty-first-century security challenges and threats may emanate from highly adaptive adversaries who ignore the Geneva Conventions of war and use military and/or civilian technologies to offset our military superiority. As it develops strategy and force structure in this global setting, the Air Force confronts constraints that will have important implications for budget and procurement programs, basic research and development (R&D), and the maintenance of critical skills, as well as recruitment, education, training, and retention. Given the dynamic nature of the security setting and looming defense budget constraints, questions of where to assume risk will demand bold, innovative, and decisive leadership. The imperative for joint operations and U.S. military-civilian partnerships is clear, underscoring the need for a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach that encompasses international and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). THE UNITED STATES AS AN AEROSPACE NATION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES In his address opening the conference, General Norton A. Schwartz, Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF), pointed out how, with its inherent characteristics of speed, range, and flexibility, airpower has forever changed warfare. Its advent rendered land and maritime forces vulnerable from the air, thus adding an important new dimension to warfare. Control of the air has become indispensable to national security because it allows the United States and friendly forces to maneuver and operate free from enemy air attack. With control of the air the United States can leverage the advantages of air and space as well as cyberspace. In these interdependent domains the Air Force possesses unique capabilities for ensuring global mobility, long-range strike, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). The benefits of airpower extend beyond the air domain, and operations among the air, land, maritime, space, and cyber domains are increasingly interdependent. General Schwartz stated that the Air Force’s challenge is to succeed in a protracted struggle against elements of violent extremism and irreconcilable actors while confronting peer and near-peer rivals. The Air Force must be able to operate with great precision and lethality across a broad spectrum of conflict that has high and low ends but that defies an orderly taxonomy. Warfare in the twenty-first century takes on a hybrid complexity, with regular and irregular elements using myriad tools and tactics. Technology can be an enabler but can also create weaknesses: adversaries with increased access to space and cyberspace can use emerging technologies against the United States and/or its allies. In addition, the United States faces the prospect of the proliferation of precision weapons, including ballistic and cruise missiles as well as increasingly accurate mortars, rockets, and artillery, which will put U.S. and allied/coalition forces at risk. In response to mounting irregular warfare challenges American leaders have to adopt innovative and creative strategies. For its part, the USAF must develop airmen who have the creativity to anticipate and plan for this challenging environment. Leadership, intellectual creativity, capacity, and ingenuity, together with innovative technology, will be crucial to addressing these challenges in a constrained fiscal environment. System Versatility In meeting the broad range of contingencies – high, low, regular, irregular, and hybrid – the Air Force must maintain and develop systems that are versatile, both functionally (including strike or ISR) and in terms of various employment modes, such as manned versus remotely piloted, and penetrating versus stand-off systems. General Schwartz emphasized the need to be able to operate in conflict settings where there will be demands for persistent ISR systems able to gain access to, and then loiter in, contested or denied airspace. The targets to be identified and tracked may be mobile or deeply buried, of high value, and difficult to locate without penetrating systems. General Schwartz also called attention to the need for what he described as a “family of systems” that could be deployed in multiple ways with maximum versatility depending on requirements. Few systems will remain inherently single purpose. Indeed, he emphasized that the Air Force must purposefully design versatility into its new systems, with the majority of future systems being able to operate in various threat environments. As part of this effort further joint integration and inter-service cooperation to achieve greater air-land and air-sea interoperability will continue to be a strategic necessity. Space Access and Control Space access, control, and situational awareness remain essential to U.S. national security. As potential rivals develop their own space programs, the United States faces challenges to its unrestricted access to space. Ensuring continuing access to the four global commons – maritime, air, space, and cyberspace – will be a major challenge in which the USAF has a key role. The Air Force has long recognized the importance of space and is endeavoring to make certain that U.S. requirements in and for space are met and anticipated. Space situational awareness is vital to America’s ability to help evaluate and attribute attacks. Attribution, of course, is essential to deterrence. The USAF is exploring options to reduce U.S. dependence on the Global Positioning System (GPS), which could become vulnerable to jamming. Promising new technologies, such as “cold atoms,” pseudolites, and imaging inertial navigation systems that use laser radar are being investigated as means to reduce our vulnerability. Cyber Capabilities The USAF continues to develop cyber capabilities to address opportunities and challenges. Cyber threats present challenges to homeland security and other national security interests. Key civilian and military networks are vulnerable to cyber attacks. Preparing for cyber warfare and refining critical infrastructure protection and consequence management will require new capabilities, focused training, and greater interagency, international, and private sector collaboration. Challenges for the Air Force General Schwartz set forth a series of challenges for the Air Force, which he urged conference participants to address. They included: • How can the Air Force better address the growing demand for real-time ISR from remotely piloted systems, which are providing unprecedented and unmatched situational awareness? • How can the USAF better guarantee the credibility and viability of the nation’s nuclear forces for the complex and uncertain security environment of this century? • What is the way ahead for the next generation of long-range strike and ISR platforms? What trade-offs, especially between manned and unmanned platforms, should the USAF consider? How can the USAF improve acquisition of such systems? How can the USAF better exploit the advantage of low-observables? • How can the Air Force better prepare itself to operate in an opposed network environment in which communications and data links will be challenged, including how to assure command and control (C2) in bandwidth-constrained environments? • In counter-land operations, how can the USAF achieve improved target discrimination in high collateral damage situations? • How should the USAF posture its overseas forces to ensure access? What basing structure, logistical considerations, andprotection measures are required to mitigate emerging anti-access threats? • How can the Air Force reduce its reliance on GPS to ensure operations in a GPS-denied environment? • How can the USAF lessen its vulnerability to petroleum shortages, rising energy prices, and resulting logistical and operational challenges? • How can the Air Force enhance partnerships with its sister services and the interagency community? How can it better collaborate with allies and coalition partners to improve support of national security interests? These issues were addressed in subsequent conference sessions. The opening session focused on the multidimensional and dynamic security setting in which the Air Force will operate in the years ahead. The session included a discussion of the need to prioritize necessary capabilities and to gauge “acceptable risks.” Previous Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDRs) rested on the basic assumption that the United States would be able to support operations simultaneously or nearly simultaneously in two major regional contingencies, with the additional capacity to respond to smaller disaster-relief and/or stability operations missions. However, while the 2010 QDR1 maintains the need for U.S. forces to operate in two nearly simultaneous major wars, it places far greater emphasis on the need to address irregular warfare challenges. Its focus is maintaining and rebalancing U.S. force structure to fight the wars in which the United States is engaged today while looking ahead to the emerging security setting. The QDR further seeks to develop flexible and tailored capabilities to confront an array of smaller-scale contingencies, including natural disasters, perhaps simultaneously, as was the case with the war in Afghanistan, stability operations in Iraq, and the Haiti relief effort. The 2010 QDR highlights important trends in the global security environment, especially unconventional threats and asymmetric challenges. It suggests that a conflict with a near-peer competitor such as China, or a conflict with Iran, would involve a mix, or hybrid, of capabilities that would test U.S. forces in very different ways. Although predicting the future security setting is a very difficult if not an impossible exercise, the 2010 QDR outlines major challenges for the United States and its allies, including technology proliferation and diffusion; anti-access threats and the shrinking global basing infrastructure; the possibility of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) use against the U.S. homeland and/or against U.S. forces abroad; critical infrastructure protection and the massed effects of a cyber or space attack; unconventional warfare and irregular challenges; and the emergence of new issue areas such as Arctic security, U.S. energy dependence, demographic shifts and urbanization, the potential for resource wars (particularly over access to water), and the erosion or collapse of governance in weak or failing states. TECHNOLOGY DIFFUSION Technology proliferation is accelerating. Compounding the problem is the reality that existing multilateral and/or international export regimes and controls have not kept pace with technology, and efforts to constrain access are complicated by dual-use technologies and chemical/biological agents. The battlefields of the future are likely to be more lethal as combatants take advantage of commercially based navigation aids for precision guidance and advanced weapons systems and as global and theater boundaries disappear with longer-range missile systems becoming more common in enemy arsenals. Non-state entities such as Hezbollah have already used more advanced missile systems to target state adversaries. The proliferation of precision technologies and longer-range delivery platforms puts the United States and its partners increasingly at risk. This proliferation also is likely to affect U.S. operations from forward operating locations, placing additional constraints on American force deployments within the territories of allies. Moreover, as longer-range ballistic and cruise missiles become more widespread, U.S. forces will find it increasingly difficult to operate in conflicts ranging from irregular warfare to high-intensity combat. As highlighted throughout the conference, this will require that the United States develop and field new-generation low-observable penetration assets and related capabilities to operate in non-permissive environments. PROLIFERATION TRENDS The twenty-first-century security setting features several proliferation trends that were discussed in the opening session. These trends, six of which were outlined by Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., President of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Security Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University, framed subsequent discussions. First, the number of actors–states and armed non-state groups–is growing, together with strategies and capabilities based on more widely available technologies, including WMD and conventional weapons. This is leading to a blurring of categories of warfare that may include state and non-state actors and encompass intra-state, trans-state, and inter-state armed conflict as well as hybrid threats. Second, some of these actors subscribe to ideologies and goals that welcome martyrdom. This raises many questions about dissuasion and deterrence and the need to think of twenty-first-century deterrence based on offensive and defensive strategies and capabilities. Third, given the sheer numbers of actors capable of challenging the United States and their unprecedented capabilities, the opportunity for asymmetric operations against the United States and its allies will grow. The United States will need to work to reduce key areas of vulnerability, including its financial systems, transportation, communications, and energy infrastructures, its food and water supply, and its space assets. Fourth, the twenty-first-century world contains flashpoints for state-to-state conflict. This includes North Korea, which possesses nuclear weapons, and Iran, which is developing them. In addition, China is developing an impressive array of weaponry which, as the Commander of U.S. Pacific Command stated in congressional testimony, appears “designed to challenge U.S. freedom of action in the region and, if necessary, enforce China’s influence over its neighbors – including our regional allies and partners’ weaponry.”2 These threats include ballistic missiles, aircraft, naval forces, cyber capabilities, anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, and other power-projection capabilities. The global paradigm of the twenty-first century is further complicated by state actors who may supply advanced arms to non-state actors and terrorist organizations. Fifth, the potential for irregular warfare is rising dramatically with the growth of armed non-state actors. The proliferation of more lethal capabilities, including WMD, to armed non-state actors is a logical projection of present trends. Substantial numbers of fractured, unstable, and ungoverned states serve as breeding grounds of armed non-state actors who will resort to various forms of violence and coercion based on irregular tactics and formations and who will increasingly have the capabilities to do so. Sixth, the twenty-first-century security setting contains yet another obvious dimension: the permeability of the frontiers of the nation state, rendering domestic populations highly vulnerable to destruction not only by states that can launch missiles but also by terrorists and other transnational groups. As we have seen in recent years, these entities can attack U.S. information systems, creating the possibility of a digital Pearl Harbor. Taken together, these trends show an unprecedented proliferation of actors and advanced capabilities confronting the United States; the resulting need to prepare for high-end and low-end conflict; and the requirement to think of a seamless web of threats and other security challenges extending from overseas to domestic locales. Another way to think about the twenty-first-century security setting, Dr. Pfaltzgraff pointed out, is to develop scenarios such as the following, which are more illustrative than comprehensive: • A nuclear Iran that engages in or supports terrorist operations in a more assertive foreign policy • An unstable Pakistan that loses control of its nuclear weapons, which fall into the hands of extremists • A Taiwan Straits crisis that escalates to war • A nuclear North Korea that escalates tensions on the Korean peninsula What all of these have in common is the indispensable role that airpower would play in U.S. strategy and crisis management."
HEG,"After 12 years and numerous requests from the Defense Department since the last round of military base closures, 2017 may finally offer a peek of sunlight for another base realignment and closure cycle. Congressional resistance to BRAC is faltering, said Chris Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, and that may bring some fiscal savings to DoD. Opposition to BRAC “is weakening for a couple reasons. One, the Pentagon is quite insistent that they do have excess capacity,” Preble told Federal News Radio. “Even if President Trump gets his wish of dramatically increasing military spending, it’s still not entirely clear where some of that money will come from, but he says some of the additional funding will come from waste. A key aspect of waste inside the Pentagon budget is excess overhead.” Preble said BRAC would be part of a package of things that need to be done to squeeze more money out of DoD. The Trump administration announced today it will attempt to add $54 billion more to the defense budget by lowering the domestic budget the same amount. A few members of Congress already stepped forward with their support for another BRAC round. House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said he will introduce legislation this year to start BRAC. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Congress showed “cowardice” for its inability to work on BRAC, and the committee’s ranking member Sen. Jack Reed (D, R.I.) said he is considering BRAC as well. Savings from BRAC could give DoD more bang for its buck, but wouldn’t solve Pentagon budget problems by any means. A 2016 report from the Pentagon stated the military is operating 22 percent over capacity when it comes to bases. The Army has 33 percent more stateside infrastructure than it needs, according to the report. Similarly, the Air Force has an excess of 32 percent. But the Navy and Marine Corps have just 7 percent extra, and facilities managed by the Defense Logistics Agency have 12 percent. DoD estimates another BRAC round could save $2 billion annually, on top of the savings already realized from previous rounds."
HEG,"After 12 years and numerous requests from the Defense Department since the last round of military base closures, 2017 may finally offer a peek of sunlight for another base realignment and closure cycle. Congressional resistance to BRAC is faltering, said Chris Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, and that may bring some fiscal savings to DoD. Opposition to BRAC “is weakening for a couple reasons. One, the Pentagon is quite insistent that they do have excess capacity,” Preble told Federal News Radio. “Even if President Trump gets his wish of dramatically increasing military spending, it’s still not entirely clear where some of that money will come from, but he says some of the additional funding will come from waste. A key aspect of waste inside the Pentagon budget is excess overhead.” Preble said BRAC would be part of a package of things that need to be done to squeeze more money out of DoD. The Trump administration announced today it will attempt to add $54 billion more to the defense budget by lowering the domestic budget the same amount. A few members of Congress already stepped forward with their support for another BRAC round. House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said he will introduce legislation this year to start BRAC. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Congress showed “cowardice” for its inability to work on BRAC, and the committee’s ranking member Sen. Jack Reed (D, R.I.) said he is considering BRAC as well. Savings from BRAC could give DoD more bang for its buck, but wouldn’t solve Pentagon budget problems by any means. A 2016 report from the Pentagon stated the military is operating 22 percent over capacity when it comes to bases. The Army has 33 percent more stateside infrastructure than it needs, according to the report. Similarly, the Air Force has an excess of 32 percent. But the Navy and Marine Corps have just 7 percent extra, and facilities managed by the Defense Logistics Agency have 12 percent. DoD estimates another BRAC round could save $2 billion annually, on top of the savings already realized from previous rounds."
HEG,"Armed with a new study on excess space, the Defense Department says it will mothball parts of military installations or attempt wholesale shutdowns unless Congress approves another base-closing round. A key congressional committee says not so fast. The House Armed Services readiness panel, chaired by Northern Neck Republican Rob Wittman, has approved language that rejects the administration's request for another Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commission in 2019. It is part of the proposed 2017 defense authorization bill. The committee left open the door for more study, just not the one the department is currently peddling. ""We're not against looking at another BRAC,"" said Wittman, R-Westmoreland. ""But let's make sure we're doing it on parameters set by Congress."" Wittman's panel has endorsed language that calls for another study of excess inventory. It doesn't spell out specifics, but Wittman said he would like to see a comparison of space based on fiscal year 2012 troop levels. The Defense Department's study released last month shows 22 percent excess capacity based on fiscal year 2019 force levels. The congressman said 2019 is not the best yardstick, because Congress might put the brakes on troop draw-downs between now and then. ""The reality we're dealing with is close to fiscal year 2012,"" he said. Congress has repeatedly rebuffed the Obama administration's BRAC requests. The last one came in 2005. It closed Fort Monroe in Hampton and threatened Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach. It reshuffled major commands and changed how forces were aligned. It resulted in two joint-base operations locally: Langley Air Force Base and Fort Eustis on the Peninsula, and Fort Story and Little Creek in South Hampton Roads. The 22 percent overall excess falls heaviest on the Army and Air Force, which have 33 percent and 32 percent extra capacity, respectively. The Navy comes in at 7 percent. The Defense Logistics Agency is at 12 percent. The study calls BRAC the fairest, most transparent way to save taxpayers' money by getting rid of wasted space and overhead. Without BRAC, the cuts will still come down, the study says. ""The alternative to BRAC is either attempting to close individual installations or making reductions to personnel and shuttering or mothballing parts of installations across the country,"" the study concludes. ""Neither of these options is optimal, and both prevent communities from taking advantage of the structured redevelopment process that is available with the BRAC process."" ""They have the ability to do some of those things,"" Wittman said. ""If they have inefficiencies on the base, they can tear down those old buildings."" But he doesn't want to see attempted closures that would hurt the military's ability to respond to an attack or crisis. Once the military closes something, it is very difficult to reconstitute that capacity, he said. The death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach is exactly what concerns communities that depend on military bases, said Tim Ford, CEO of the Association of Defense Communities, which educates and provides information on the subject. It represents 275 communities, states and organizations. ""The concern is that cuts are happening anyway on a smaller scale,"" he said. ""Downsizing is occurring, but in a piece meal manner. It is impacting local economies."" John Simmons co-founded The Roosevelt Group, a Washington lobbying firm that goes to bat for Hampton Roads and the state. He said Hampton Roads is well positioned to withstand another BRAC round. Moves to reduce encroachment around Oceana and Langley, for example, should pay dividends. And bases with major missions are safe overall. ""You're never going to lose Norfolk Naval Station,"" he said. And he doesn't think any other base in Hampton Roads would be a candidate for closure. ""It would take a lot of money to duplicate the capacity of the bases we have,"" he said."
HEG,"Trump’s 2018 DOE budget proposal also calls for the elimination of $66.8 billion in federal Impact Aid Support for Federal Property. In Kansas, roughly $30 million in impact aid includes basic support payments, payments for students with disabilities and payment for other costs for school districts that are located near military or other federal installations that do not contribute property tax revenue to those school districts’ revenue streams. Elimination of federal impact aid would not only affect the education of military‐connected students, but would also make those installations vulnerable to troop force reductions or base closures under Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) proceedings due to perceived or actual lack of support for military families. Military bases in Kansas contribute hundreds of millions in tax revenue, billions of dollars of gross state product and more than 9 percent of total employment to the state’s economy."
EX,"Let me posit a radical idea: The most critical threat facing the United States now and for the foreseeable future is not a rising China, a reckless North Korea, a nuclear Iran, modern terrorism, or climate change. Although all of these constitute potential or actual threats, the biggest challenges facing the US are its burgeoning debt, crumbling infrastructure, second-rate primary and secondary schools, outdated immigration system, and slow economic growth – in short, the domestic foundations of American power. Readers in other countries may be tempted to react to this judgment with a dose of schadenfreude, finding more than a little satisfaction in America’s difficulties. Such a response should not be surprising. The US and those representing it have been guilty of hubris (the US may often be the indispensable nation, but it would be better if others pointed this out), and examples of inconsistency between America’s practices and its principles understandably provoke charges of hypocrisy. When America does not adhere to the principles that it preaches to others, it breeds resentment. But, like most temptations, the urge to gloat at America’s imperfections and struggles ought to be resisted. People around the globe should be careful what they wish for. America’s failure to deal with its internal challenges would come at a steep price. Indeed, the rest of the world’s stake in American success is nearly as large as that of the US itself. Part of the reason is economic. The US economy still accounts for about one-quarter of global output. If US growth accelerates, America’s capacity to consume other countries’ goods and services will increase, thereby boosting growth around the world. At a time when Europe is drifting and Asia is slowing, only the US (or, more broadly, North America) has the potential to drive global economic recovery. The US remains a unique source of innovation. Most of the world’s citizens communicate with mobile devices based on technology developed in Silicon Valley; likewise, the Internet was made in America. More recently, new technologies developed in the US greatly increase the ability to extract oil and natural gas from underground formations. This technology is now making its way around the globe, allowing other societies to increase their energy production and decrease both their reliance on costly imports and their carbon emissions. The US is also an invaluable source of ideas. Its world-class universities educate a significant percentage of future world leaders. More fundamentally, the US has long been a leading example of what market economies and democratic politics can accomplish. People and governments around the world are far more likely to become more open if the American model is perceived to be succeeding. Finally, the world faces many serious challenges, ranging from the need to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction, fight climate change, and maintain a functioning world economic order that promotes trade and investment to regulating practices in cyberspace, improving global health, and preventing armed conflicts. These problems will not simply go away or sort themselves out. While Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” may ensure the success of free markets, it is powerless in the world of geopolitics. Order requires the visible hand of leadership to formulate and realize global responses to global challenges. Don’t get me wrong: None of this is meant to suggest that the US can deal effectively with the world’s problems on its own. Unilateralism rarely works. It is not just that the US lacks the means; the very nature of contemporary global problems suggests that only collective responses stand a good chance of succeeding. But multilateralism is much easier to advocate than to design and implement. Right now there is only one candidate for this role: the US. No other country has the necessary combination of capability and outlook. This brings me back to the argument that the US must put its house in order – economically, physically, socially, and politically – if it is to have the resources needed to promote order in the world. Everyone should hope that it does: The alternative to a world led by the US is not a world led by China, Europe, Russia, Japan, India, or any other country, but rather a world that is not led at all. Such a world would almost certainly be characterized by chronic crisis and conflict. That would be bad not just for Americans, but for the vast majority of the planet’s inhabitants."
HEG,"The House is working on the military budget for 2018, and the Pentagon is not pleased. Not only does the plan fall short of the ""historic"" boost in spending promised by President Donald Trump, but the proposal doesn't even include one of the military's own suggestions for saving money. There's a reason for that: The Pentagon's proposal — a new commission to look into base closures and realignments — is politically toxic. Nevertheless, for reasons of both fiscal prudence and national security, Congress needs to consider a new round of closings. It makes no sense that the House Armed Services Committee and its chairman, Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, omitted mention of a new BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) committee in the House defense authorization bill. There is little doubt that the Defense Department has too many domestic bases. A Pentagon study found that by 2019 the military will be using less than 80 percent of its capacity. Closing some bases entirely and shrinking others can save real money, even by Pentagon standards: While shutting bases costs money up front, the Defense Department says the five major rounds undertaken since 1988 have saved around $12 billion a year. It estimates that it could save $10 billion over five years with another round. A new round of BRAC could even improve on the old model, which looked mostly at just closures and downsizing, to include studies of repairing and modernizing existing bases. It could also consider proposals such as shuttering the dozens of schools on domestic bases; service members can send their children to local public schools. The main obstacle to such changes isn't fiscal, but political. Bases bring money into local economies, and House members, especially, dread the prospect of losing any in their districts. Long-term studies by the Defense Department, however, have found that jobs lost in these communities are eventually replaced, and the local economy gets more diverse and less dependent on the federal government. And even House members should realize that the organized base-closing committees are far better than what's happening now: The Pentagon is shrinking bases in a piecemeal manner with little consideration of local economic effects. The good news is that the Senate Armed Services Committee will be working on its military policy bill this week, and both Chairman John McCain, R-Arizona, and the ranking Democrat, Jack Reed, favor looking into another round of closings. It's a sensible and modest idea that the House should also adopt."
FED,"You may not have heard of the “Nullification Crisis” that President Andrew Jackson faced in 1832. But there are many unfortunate similarities between it and what is happening today on immigration. From the unjustified obstruction of immigration law by some activist federal judges to the defiance of the federal government on sanctuary policies by governors and city mayors such as Ed Murray of Seattle, there are some interesting parallels — and lessons. I was reminded of the Nullification Crisis recently on a tour of James Madison’s home, Montpelier, which is close to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the docents related how President Jackson had visited Madison in the midst of his reelection campaign to get his advice. This crisis was about high tariffs which, before the implementation of the income tax in 1913 through the Sixteenth Amendment, was one of the main sources of income for the federal government. High tariff rates were resented throughout the South, particularly in South Carolina. While they benefited manufacturers in the northern states, they hurt the mostly agricultural southern states. Led by John Calhoun, South Carolina and other states asserted that they had the final authority to declare federal laws unconstitutional and thus null and void within their states. While Jackson was a moderate on tariffs and respectful of the rights states retained in our federal system, he was scornful of the nullification theory. He considered it an unconstitutional, “abominable doctrine” that “will dissolve the Union.” In 1832, the nullifiers took control of the South Carolina government and passed the infamous “Ordinance of Nullification.” They expressed the same type of virulent hostility and contempt for (and defiance of) the Jackson administration and the tariff system that we are seeing today towards the Trump administration over enforcement of federal immigration law, including provisions against certain sanctuary policies. Those states and cities are pushing the same concept of nullification of federal law, although they are doing it in federal court. As one would expect of Andrew Jackson, he reacted strongly to this threat from South Carolina, including issuing a Nullification Proclamation on Dec. 10, 1832. Nullification was “incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed,” He wrote. The crisis was resolved by a compromise bill on tariffs that Congress passed in 1833 after passing the Force Bill, which gave the president the power to use state militias and federal forces against the nullifiers. The similarity between these events and what is happening today are eerie. While there are many areas over which the states and the federal government share responsibility — or where the Tenth Amendment gives responsibility to the states — immigration is not one of them. Section 8 of Article I gives Congress exclusive authority to “establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization,” just as Section 8 gives Congress the exclusive authority to establish and collect all “Imposts and Excises” or tariffs. The states have no authority in these areas at all. They can no more dispute the immigration rules established by Congress than they could dispute the tariffs imposed by Congress back in 1832. This makes perfect sense. Any other rule would produce chaos. Think of the enormous problems that would be caused by border states such as Texas or California deciding that they would ignore federal law and apply their own immigration rules to individuals coming across the Mexican border into the United States — or if states decided that they would impose their own tariffs on foreign goods coming into their states in addition to those imposed by the federal government. In fact, it was that kind of behavior that was restricting trade under the Articles of Confederation between states such as Virginia and Maryland that helped lead to the call for a constitutional convention. When it comes to immigration and the entry of aliens into the U.S., Congress delegated to the president the extremely broad authority under 8 U.S.C. §1182 (f) to suspend the entry of any aliens or class of aliens into the U.S. if he believes it “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” As five dissenting judges at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently pointed out, there are a long series of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the authority of prior presidents under this provision and severely limiting the ability of the courts to review the president’s decision. Unfortunately, at the urging of certain states, the courts have in large part ignored the Constitution, federal law, and prior precedents. They are instead substituting their judgment for that of the president, and enjoining the president’s executive order by implementing a temporary halt to entry from certain terrorist safe havens. In essence, states such as Hawaii and Washington are turning to activist federal judges to nullify the exclusive authority of the federal government over immigration and the security of our national border — and those judges are complying. The sanctuary policies implemented by cities such as San Francisco and Seattle also seek to nullify federal immigration law and obstruct its enforcement. 8 U.S.C. §1373 prohibits states and local jurisdictions from preventing their law enforcement officials from exchanging information with federal officials on the citizenship status of individuals they have arrested or detained. The Supreme Court upheld this provision in 2012 in Arizona v. United States. Quite appropriately, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has announced that he will not award any discretionary federal grants from the Justice Department to cities that violate §1373. Seattle has filed suit, claiming that the federal government has no right to cut off its access to discretionary funding. The city also makes the meritless claims that its policy does not violate federal immigration law. Sanctuary cities are claiming that Sessions is trying to force them to enforce federal immigration law and that the loss of federal funds would violate the holding in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012). This is the Supreme Court decision that upheld Obamacare but found that the Medicaid portion of Obamacare, which required states to significantly expand their Medicaid coverage or risk losing all Medicaid funding, violated the Spending Clause of the Constitution. The federal government was “commandeering” the states by compelling them to “enact or administer a federal regulatory program.” But Sessions is simply trying to get states to not obstruct federal enforcement. That includes abiding by the ban contained in Section 1373. Sanctuary cities are trying to prevent federal officials from finding out about criminal alien murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals that these cities would apparently rather release than have picked up and deported so they cannot further victimize Americans. Section 1373 doesn’t force local law enforcement officials to notify federal officials when they detain an illegal alien; It simply says that local governments can’t ban law enforcement officials from doing so. The spurious legal argument that §1373 violates the anti-commandeering principle was raised by the City of New York in a lawsuit against the federal government only 11 days after the provision became federal law. New York also had a policy in place that forbade city officials from transmitting information on the immigration status of any individual to federal immigration authorities. In City of New York v. U.S. (1999), the Second Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the city’s case because the federal law was constitutional and well within congressional authority on immigration. As the court pointed out, §1373 does not compel “state and local governments to enact or administer any federal regulatory program. Nor has it affirmatively conscripted states, localities, or their employees into the federal government’s service.” The only thing the provision does is prohibit state and local governmental entities or officials from “directly restricting the voluntary exchange of immigration information with the INS.” A contrary holding would cause chaos: “If Congress may not forbid states from outlawing even voluntary cooperation with federal programs by state and local officials, states will at times have the power to frustrate effectuation of some programs.” That is clearly what is happening here: sanctuary states and cities want to “frustrate effectuation” of federal enforcement of our immigration laws. The absence of such cooperation, as the Second Circuit said, would force federal officials to “resort to legal processes in every routine or trivial matter, often a practical impossibility.” This was the same type of resistance exhibited by local governments to Brown v. Board of Education: “a refusal by local government to cooperate until under a court order to do so.” Furthermore, refusing to award sanctuary cities funds that have to be applied for and that are entirely discretionary within the judgement of the attorney general does not come anywhere close to “commandeering” a “State’s legislative or administrative apparatus for federal purposes,” which was the key factor in the NFIB decision. The Supreme Court said that there is no violation of the Spending Clause “when a State has a legitimate choice whether to accept the federal conditions in exchange for federal funds.” States can make their own decisions on whether to apply for a portion of the $4.1 billion the Justice Department has available to local jurisdictions for improving their law enforcement programs. In fact, this situation raises even fewer concerns than a federal law that the Supreme Court upheld in South Dakota v. Dole (1987). That law provided that states would lose five percent of their federal highway funds if they did not raise the drinking age to 21. This was “relatively mild encouragement” compared to the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare, where the Court described the potential loss of all Medicaid funding as a “gun to the head.” Similarly, when it comes to sanctuary cities, the Justice Department isn’t threatening the cutoff of any major entitlement funds such as Medicaid or even state highway funds. What’s at stake are discretionary grants that the states may or may not decide to apply for, and which the Justice Department may or may not choose to grant. The Nullification Crisis was resolved when South Carolina rescinded its nullification ordinance after President Jackson issued his Nullification Proclamation. We can only hope that the current nullification crisis will also be resolved once and for all when all of the lawsuits being filed by the states to prevent the enforcement of federal immigration law reach the Supreme Court."
POL,"Several cities and public universities have vowed to resist President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to deport undocumented criminals by doubling down on sanctuary policies. In response, Trump has pledged to curtail federal funding for sanctuary providers. Activists, predictably, are crying foul, and some legal scholars, such as Harvard’s Noah Feldman, have even claimed that such a response would be unconstitutional. But whatever one thinks about Trump’s strategy, it almost certainly would pass muster at the Supreme Court. Feldman and others point to New York v. United States (1992) and Printz v. United States (1997), in which the Supreme Court concluded that the federal government cannot conscript state or local officials to carry out federal law. The federal government must enforce its own laws, using federal personnel. So when state or local police arrest immigrants who are present in the country illegally, they are under no obligation to deport them, as deportation is the responsibility of the federal government alone. This “anti-commandeering” doctrine, however, doesn’t protect sanctuary cities or public universities — because it doesn’t apply when Congress merely requests information. For example, in Reno v. Condon (2000), the Court unanimously rejected an anti-commandeering challenge to the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which required states under certain circumstances to disclose some personal details about license holders. The court concluded that, because the DPPA requested information and “did not require state officials to assist in the enforcement of federal statutes,” it was consistent with the New York and Printz cases. It follows that, consistent with the anti-commandeering doctrine, Congress can require state, local or university police to tell federal agents when they arrest an immigrant present in the country illegally. It’s true that cities such as Los Angeles instruct city employees not to ask about immigration status, but they may still have access to that information. Under California law, for example, driver’s licenses issued to immigrants in the country illegally contain prominent distinguishing language stating, “federal limits apply.” Indeed, Congress could specify that licenses issued to immigrants in the country illegally must include a distinguishing feature, or they won’t be accepted for federal purposes, such as TSA airport security. Congress already has enacted the Real ID Act, which mandates that driver’s licenses display certain details. A separate constitutional doctrine, the anti-coercion doctrine, likewise won’t shield sanctuaries. This doctrine holds that while Congress may impose conditions on receipt of federal funds, it cannot coerce states into accepting those conditions. In the 1980s, Congress passed a law withholding 5% of highway funds from any state that refused to adopt a minimum drinking age of 21. The Supreme Court, in South Dakota v. Dole (1987), upheld it. Because highway funds are expended — in part — to ensure safe travel, the court reasoned that raising the drinking age was “relevant to the federal interest in the project and the overall objectives thereof.” More significantly, withholding 5% of federal funds wasn’t coercive because while it represented a loss of $615 million dollars, it was only 0.19% of states’ total budgets. By contrast, in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), the Supreme Court found that Congress violated the anti-coercion doctrine. Specifically, in the Affordable Care Act, Congress withheld 100% of states’ Medicaid funding if they didn’t expand those programs. A court plurality characterized this as a coercive “gun to the head” because it involved a loss of over $233 billion dollars — more than 20% of states’ budgets. The South Dakota and NFIB cases teach that Congress can cut off funds if the conditions imposed are relevant “to the federal interest in the project” and the threatened loss of money doesn’t amount to a “gun to the head,” defined by a substantial percentage — approaching approximately 20% — of states’ budgets. Congress certainly could meet these standards. Many federal programs provide billions to universities and state and local law enforcement. Provided the percentage withheld didn’t approach the 20% threshold, it should be constitutional. As with the highway funds in South Dakota, these programs are designed in part to improve safety of campuses and communities. This goal would be furthered by withholding funds from cities and universities that provide sanctuary for criminals present in the country illegally. Such individuals, by definition, not only are unvetted by the federal government, but have committed crimes while here. Whatever one’s view of the best immigration policy, it should be uniform. Some, including the Washington Post's editorial board, have suggested that Congress should give sanctuary cities flexibility to report only those who’ve committed the most serious violent offenses. But precisely which criminals should be subject to deportation requires resolution by Congress, not each city or university. Sanctuary policies create Balkanization on an issue with important foreign policy implications and corresponding potential for diplomatic embarrassment. As the Supreme Court affirmed in Arizona v. United States (2012), “the removal process is entrusted to the discretion of the Federal Government” because it “touch[es] on foreign relations and must be made with one voice.” The Constitution is clear that power to determine deportation policies belongs to Congress, not states, municipalities or universities."
CAP,"Critical education scholars have raised their concerns about the educational reforms and practices in our neoliberal moment in parallel to multiculturalism, suggesting that the transformative social justice scope of multiculturalism has become captured by a neoliberal socio-economic and educational dispositive that sets up administrative terrains of controlling social justice discourses (Darder, 2012; Giroux, 2009). Engin Atasay 180 | P a g e Multicultural education attempts to pose a subversive, progressive and transformative educational experience and practice but these hopes are hindered by being encapsulating in a discourse of “neoliberal multiculturalism” (Mitchell, 2003; Hale, 2005; Melamed, 2006; Darder, 2012). Katharyne Mitchell’s (2003) essay, Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times, raises attention to how this neoliberal discourse is co-opted in multicultural educational discourses. Mitchell argues that the spirit of multiculturalism in education has shifted from a concern with the formation of tolerant and democratic national citizens who can work with and through difference, to a more strategic use of citizenship and diversity for competitive advantage in the global marketplace. This shift is directly linked with and helps to facilitate the entrenchment of neoliberalism as it supports a privatization agenda, reduces the costs of social reproduction for the government, and aids in the constitution of subjects oriented to individual survival and/or success in the global economy. Neoliberal multiculturalism, as Darder puts it, is a Conservative ideology of multiculturalism that deploys a meritocratic justification linked principally to economic benefit to justify inequalities. As such, those who practice neoliberal multiculturalism enact a structure of public recognition, acknowledgement and acceptance of multicultural subjects, based on an ethos of self-reliance, individualism, and competition, while simultaneously (and conveniently) undermining discourses and social practices that call for collective social action and fundamental structural change (Darder, 2012, p. 417). Indeed, the discourse of multiculturalism often entails an economic rationale in the United States. The ‘social justice education’ discourse— broadly defined by multicultural education texts as democratic educational practices that strive to provide equal access and opportunity for underrepresented students in learning and educational attainment— is particularly vulnerable and at risk of being co-opted into a neoliberal economic discourse. As the social welfare agenda of neoliberal reforms seek to pursue the fictitious premise of ‘raising all boats’ within a market driven coalition, social justice discourses are being captured by this Neoliberal Multiculturalism Embedded in Social Justice Education 181 | P a g e liberal promise. The United States context offers a compelling example of how neoliberal economic reforms and policies operate through social justice education discourse in schools and education initiatives. The Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy (U.S. Dept of State), suggests a multicultural movement in which the U.S. takes the lead in opening markets as well as minds to accept greater intereconomic and cultural exchange. In this regime of freedom, multiculturalism provides the inclusive doctrine that will include all the world’s poor in the expanding circle of development. The document outlines an economic re-structuring of U.S. schools as well as schools around the world in accordance with principles of social “freedom” and “opening” of local economies to investment. Jodi Melamed’s (2006) essay title, The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Multicultural Neoliberalism, suggests that such neoliberal discourses that preach ‘inclusive pluralism’ revise a racial logic.. Melamed argues that: Like racial liberalism, contemporary neoliberal multiculturalism sutures official antiracism to state policy in a manner that prevents the calling into question of global capitalism. However, it deracializes official antiracism to an unprecedented degree, turning (deracialized) racial reference into a series of rhetorical gestures of ethical right and certainty. Concepts previously associated with 1980s and 1990s liberal multiculturalism— “openness,” “diversity,” and “freedom” — are recycled such that “open societies” and “economic freedoms” (shibboleths for neoliberal measures) come to signify human rights that the United States has a duty to secure for the world (2006, p.16). The re-structuring proposals are designed to “unleash” and capture the productive potential of all individuals, stressing the social freedoms associated with transforming their economies, needless to say, are not merely altruistic attempts to foster experiential education. The educational freedoms are acceptable only if the learning coincides with the demands of the neoliberal market. MCE scholars mentioned in the previous section have already placed attention to this emerging Engin Atasay 182 | P a g e economic discourse which threatens to create greater social disparities based on social membership/capital. However, MCE texts fail to offer reconceptualizations of how we may define democratic education that is not co-opted by the neoliberal discourse. Charles R. Hale’s (2005) work, which illustrates a market driven multicultural movement, may shed light as to how MCE texts are constrained by neoliberal multiculturalism, which acts as a veil; a ‘wolf cloaked in sheep’s clothing’ so to speak. Hale argues that neoliberal governance includes the limited recognition of cultural rights, the strengthening of civil society, and endorsement of the principle of intercultural equality, which makes it appealing to social justice concerns MCE scholars advocate for. Hale asserts:"
CAP,"Here, we find a strong connection between academic knowledge on the one hand and social practice and the world of work and the production of human capital on the other. In terms of theory, for instance, and in pursuit of the end goal of ‘professional competencies’, teacher training at universities screens study requirements so that they replicate the practical activities of the profession. The shift in aligning teacher training to the ‘needs of schools’ is a consequence of a general transformation in university education within the framework of neoliberal policies; at the same time, the neoliberal view may even cast doubt on university teacher training courses as such (Sultana 2005) and lead to proposals that substantially reduce the length (and economic burden) of teacher training, as it was suggested recently in the Czech Republic. At the very least, there ‘have been developments to make university courses and programmes more relevant to the world of work, as well as changes in the nature of knowledge’ in the name of neoliberalism (Ollsen and Peters 2005, 328). Work-based teacher training that stems from the neoliberal transformation of universities is currently supported by a constructivist interpretation of teachers’ professional development. The change in the way in which the nature of teachers’ knowledge is understood introduces the notion of an individual conception of teachers’ beliefs on teaching, in which the individual experience of the teacher and the way it is interpreted is being transformed in terms of the practical utility of individual knowledge (Prawat 1992). This concept legitimizes practical sources of knowledge, while individualized knowledge is understood as a reflection of the practice to which it is directly connected. The neoliberal shift to work-based teacher training also includes an epistemological pillar – the notion of the teacher as a reflective practitioner (Schön 1983), which has been significantly influencing conceptions of the teaching profession and the development of study programmes at universities since the 1990s. Partnerships between schools and universities are thus built on an epistemological argument that operates within the wider framework of the ‘learning community’. In addition, practice- and experience-motivated work-based teacher training finds support in the humanistic visions of an individualized learning methodology. Consequently, as Ollsen and Peters (2005, 328–9) remind us, the concepts of situated learning and of communities of practice ‘link with the concept of the “reflective practitioner”, and also with those of “experiential learning”, “critical thinking” and “critical reflection”, to constitute a transformed theoretical infrastructure for the new understanding of academy theory as preparation for the world of professional work’. The work-based transformation of teacher training linked to the standardization of levels of professional performance is the basic policy agenda of the EU expressed in terms of authoritative policy documents and declarations, mostly relating to the Lisbon Strategy: ‘Higher education institutions have an important role to play in developing effective partnerships with schools and other stakeholders to ensure that their teacher education courses are based upon solid evidence and good classroom practice. Those responsible for educating teachers (and for educating teacher educators) should possess practical experience of classroom teaching and have attained a very high standard in the skills, attitudes and competences demanded of teachers’ (Commission 2007). towards the practical sphere is concurrently leading to the production of non-theorybased Professional Standards Frameworks, initiated by professional associations and the bureaucratic structures of the EU. Professional self-regulation via standardization of performance The influence of professional standards on the planning of teacher education represents a form of education defined according to the principles of monitoring the outcomes of education conceived of as professional competencies. Standards thus represent an external and centralized regulatory tool in education, which is applied in the long-term monitoring of professional outcomes. The neoliberal strengthening of the autonomy of education disciplines is linked to centralized audits of professional outcomes and the performance culture (Gleeson and Husbands 2001). ‘The de-regulation of teacher training providers and exposure of teacher education to market reforms led to greater regulation of teacher outputs and thus to tighter definitions of “professionalism” ’ (Jorgensen and Hansen 2009, 8). The standardization of outcomes in the teaching profession is part of the increase in surveillance in a decentralized educational sector, symptomatically labelled as ‘the age of standards’ (Roth 1996). Regulating teachers’ careers according to ‘performance indicators’ should guarantee a high level of professionality and control over the self-development of teachers and establish a framework for the individual professional development of teachers. Concurrently, it should encourage a higher-quality student performance since ‘educators inspired by neo-liberal perspectives tend to feel that a teacher’s worth is to be measured by his or her ability to deliver good student results’ (Sultana 2005, 226). Attempts by neoliberal managerialism to introduce greater objectivity through the standardization of teacher and student outcomes (and testing them) should guarantee high levels of professionality in the work of both teachers and students. Transferring this into results means that the lives of teachers and students will be ‘fully standardized with specifications about what is to be learned, when, and with what required outcomes’ (Gunter 2010, 114). Over the past few years, in Slovakia (and also in neighbouring countries such as the Czech Republic), the creation and introduction of standards within the teaching profession has become the nodal point of the reforms to initial and in-service training for teachers, and also for the way in which teaching is viewed as a profession. The implementation (in Slovakia in 2009) of new legislation for pedagogical personnel introduces a new standard for the teaching profession as a fundamental tool for the regulation of teacher training and for the professional development of all categories of teachers, the final aim of which is to improve the professionality, quality and autonomy of teachers. The centrally established standards for the teaching profession are designed to represent the framework for creating initial teacher training programmes, and to harmonize a wide range of different courses on offer to teachers for lifelong study, and represent the orientation points of the career of a professional teacher, where the focus is on supporting the unique traits of each teacher and their own motivation for self-improvement (Valica and Pavlov 2006). The professional standards define the pathway of ‘continuing education’ for teachers in that it is to further strengthen their autonomy and self-regulatory activities through the introduction of a system of accumulative credits and support for flexible options in lifelong learning. However, as Gunter stresses (Valica and Pavlov 2010, 113–4) standards are not neutral indicators of educational performance but are a political construction designed to deliver a marketized public sector ... used to make interventions in public education in such a way as to enable neo-liberal ideas, cultures and practices to be accepted as normal. Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 15:20 10 September 2015 80 O. Kascak et al. The actual form of the professional standards, as they have been drawn up (although as yet still not officially published), will clearly harness humanistic rhetoric for the purposes of neoliberal culture. In terms of the content defined within the standards (e.g. for primary school teachers) in the teacher competency profile are represented by the humanistic declaration: the competency of ‘accepting the individuality of each child at a young school age’, ‘understanding the significance of conveying the aim of learning to the child’ and ‘identifying with the role facilitator’ are to become the standard. The individual teacher must ‘know how to establish the goals of their own professional development according to their own educational needs’ so that he or she can regulate his or her own professional development on an autonomous basis and in accordance with the logic of a self-regulating subject. Standardizing the profession, which in terms of humanism means the inevitable necessity of being a self-regulating subject (whether that is individual teacher or school), is correspondingly linked to the system of continual evaluative and self-evaluative procedures, which are to monitor the success of the self-management of the subject in a decentralized learning environment. Both the implementation of evaluation techniques of various kinds in the management of the teacher’s educational pathway and the creation of a school culture as a ‘learning organization’, which encourages the professional development of its own employees, produce a typically neoliberal model of teacher: the ‘managed professional’ in the global education industry (Codd 2005). Evaluation procedures are made possible through the creation of a system indicating the achievement of standards (defined as competencies), which should identify these competencies as being the demonstrable skills, attitudes and knowledge of the teacher. The route to the professionality of the teacher is found in the culture of professional standards and new management (and self-management) of professional development, which is to be accompanied by an increase in the performativity of the subjects, who will be required to continually document their capability of remaining in the labour market. The humanistic personalized teacher is therefore becoming one of the unities of the neoliberal administration of education and the regulation of the labour market through innovative models of professional development. Teacher training comes under the current conception of lifelong learning, which, as analyses of neoliberal governmentality in education have demonstrated (Kašˇcák and Pupala 2010a), has filtered the logic of neoliberal economics into all aspects of social conduct through the consistent dissemination of the ‘entrepreneurial culture’ (Peters 2001). The teacher, like every other subject of the current diffuse learning environment, is governed by a rationality similar to Foucault’s ‘homo oeconomicus’, who is guided by the need for autonomy, to invest in the self and invest the self (Foucault 2009). The standards of the teaching profession employ neoliberal autonomy in two ways. On the one hand, the content of the standards themselves are articulated through humanism and encourage the teachers to favour the neoliberal version of the humanistic approaches in their own teaching and in the way they perceive their own teaching; on the other hand, the professional standards themselves are designed to produce a new kind of teacher subjectivity, in which autonomy is delegated and combined with the ethos of neoliberal professionality. As Wong’s (2006) study emphasizes, however, the growing decentralization in education in association with indirect forms of assessing teacher outcomes based on a school-management system in no way leads to an increase in the professionality of teachers. Rather, it leads to ‘deprofessionalization’ and ‘deskilling’, and only in a few cases where there is a competitive environment created by the neoliberal education reforms does it lead to the ‘reprofessionalization’ of their work and the ‘reskilling’ of teaching techniques. The concept of ‘deprofessionalization’ is of course used quite differently here to the meaning intended by Sloterdijk, who uses this concept to express the humanistic call for the school teaching/learning process to be liberated from restrictive curricular planning. At the same time, professional standards set the normative framework for teacher training at universities, thereby closing the circle of neoliberal governmentality. Humanistic discourse on partnerships, community learning and supporting autonomy in teacher training is also connected to neoliberal standardization (Kašˇcák and Pupala 2010b). This is most aptly noted by Sander (1998, 44): the many fascinating (?) tales now being told about the new managerialism in the public sector, about the marketization of education, about the increasing autonomy of teacher education, schools and teachers etc. and about the success of such policies in establishing new modes of perfect control are nothing but vague ideologies depicting utopias of a reinvigorated state mechanism. The end result is that neoliberal ideology is legitimized through measures intended to objectify and centralize. Webb, Briscoe and Mussman (2009) call this kind of neoliberal social control the ‘neoliberal panopticon’. And it has a supranational globalizing impact, especially in the European Union, where the convergent conceptions of the professional profile of a ‘European teacher’ are being formulated on a political or bureaucratic professional basis (see, e.g. Schratz 2004)."
ANB,"The Black Panther Party (BPP) firmly believed that schools were implicated in the reproduction of social and cultural inequality in American society. This tenet was central to the Black Panther Party and appeared as the fifth point of the party’s 10-point program: We want decent education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of the self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society and in the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.75). Moreover, those affiliated with the Black Panther Party believed that children’s backgrounds and experience outside of school were highly predictive of their educational attainment and employment opportunities later in life. The purpose of the creation of the Intercommunal Youth Institute (IYI) in 1971, which would change its name to the Oakland Community School (OCS) in 1974, is explained in The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs, the book edited by former Panther David Hilliard and published by The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation (2008): The institute was initiated in direct response to the public school system, which has systematically produced individuals totally incapable of thinking in an analytical way. The failure of the public school system to educate Black and poor youth has caused generation after generation of our people to be inadequately prepared to participate and survive in our highly technological society. In order to begin to break this seemingly endless cycle of oppression, the Black Panther Party established the Youth Institute (p.5; Huggins and LeBlanc-Ernest, 2009, p.170). With such knowledge and purpose, BPP educators at the Oakland Community School (OCS) sought to not only satisfy “the dire need for quality education” of Black and poor youth, but to serve their youth in ways not usually associated with the traditional role of American schools in order to challenge the reproduction of social and cultural inequality that they saw occurring (i.e. providing breakfast, lunch, and dinner to all their students, healthcare, etc.) (Huggins and LeBlanc-Ernest, 2009, p.163). How did the Black Panther Party seek to challenge the reproduction of social and cultural inequality impacting particularly Black and poor youth? How did the Black Panther Party’s premier educational institution, the Oakland Community School, seek to address the reproduction of social and cultural inequality through its resources, pedagogy, and education? Social reproduction is the process by which different social classes in society are maintained and reproduced to their former respective positions. Social reproduction is a concept describing the pattern of how the children of poor families often become poor themselves once they become adults; this frequently being aligned with other patterns of social stratification, most notably race in the United States. However, social reproduction is rarely an overwhelming phenomenon and classes are never completely reproduced in their entirety from generation to generation; as there are poor kids who end up rich and rich kids that end up poor. Nonetheless, social theorists are fascinated with how the children of rich parents often end up in the same upper strata as their rich parents, the same pattern occurring with middle-class, working-class, and poor kids. Theorists have called this social phenomenon social reproduction. Cultural production is the original creation of a set of practices, norms, ideas, and/or beliefs created by a group of people. Cultural reproduction is when and how a set of practices, norms, ideas, and/or beliefs is passed from one group of people to another. Cultural reproduction is distinctive from cultural production because cultural production indicates that the culture being created is original. Thus when hip-hop music and culture was first created by the first artists in the Bronx, this was cultural production. Although hip-hop music and culture continues to produce new artists, these artists are participating in cultural reproduction as hip-hop music and culture is maintaining its essential qualities as it is passed from person to person, generation to generation. Unfortunately in the case of hip-hop music and culture, much of the culture has been commodified and come to be closely controlled and monitored by big business; as a result the cultural reproduction of hip-hop is being modified and filtered to fit the monetary goals of those disseminating hip-hop as popular music and culture. The BPP was one organization which sought to disrupt the social and cultural reproduction perpetuating inequality in the United States; although the BPP sought to operate in solidarity with all vulnerable and oppressed peoples, the BPP was specifically focused upon addressing the brutal inequality facing African Americans. The Black Panther Party Addressing Social and Cultural Reproduction: Educating the “Whole” Child While schools have traditionally been analyzed for their academic and social effectiveness on the basis of what is done within the school itself, the Oakland Community School (OCS) cannot be looked at in the same way. Founded by members of the Black Panther Party (BPP), originally serving the function of educating BPP children away from public institutions which were stigmatizing BPP children, the OCS became the “flagship Black Panther Party community program” representing the educational interests of the BPP (Huggins, 2010, p.37). Although the OCS had many services offered to its children at the school itself, which will be covered in detail later in this thesis, it would be remiss to ignore the many different programs which the BPP was operating in an effort to alleviate factors contributing to the social and cultural reproduction perpetuating inequality affecting children outside of the school. Members of the OCS staff, particularly the female administrators, were actively working in these other BPP programs in addition to their school responsibilities: Each administrator was a BPP member at the time she became a school leader, organizing and educating communities, feeding and teaching children in before- and after-school programs, selling BPP newspapers, administering health care, organizing for prisoners’ rights, and engaging in voter registration and in local political campaigns. OCS women organized their communities by working with fellow BPP members, actively engaged in coalition politics. (Huggins and LeBlanc-Ernest, 2009, p.163). As Huggins and Leblanc-Ernest (2009) point out, specifically female administrators at the BPP saw their work at the OCS directly connected with their work for the BPP outside of school, “In terms of their resistance and organizing tradition, the educational activism of the women staff of the OCS during the 1970s was revolutionary. OCS administrators were able to apply lessons from their experience as BPP members to their teaching and community outreach” (p.163). Decades before Geoffrey Canada would gain fame for his bold experiment in Harlem with the Harlem Children’s Zone, the BPP was already aggressively seeking to confront factors they saw influencing children and their families through survival programs outside of the school in the communities that they were representing. The BPP fully intended for their actions in the community to positively affect children and their learning experiences in school. Ultimately the Black Panther Party’s efforts to disrupt the social inequalities facing Black and poor youth can best be described in their words as an effort to educate “the whole child” (Huggins and LeBlanc-Ernest, 2009, p.174). For the BPP this meant working both outside and inside of the Oakland Community School to challenge as many of the social, economic, and cultural factors impacting the potential rise of Black and poor youth as possible. It meant reinventing pedagogy, re-determining the purpose of education, and creating programs outside of the school when necessary to address social, economic, and cultural factors negatively affecting and impacting the potential of Black and poor youth. It meant operating the neighboring nonprofit Oakland Community Learning Center (OCLC) within the Oakland Community School during evenings and weekends (E. Huggins, personal communication, May 27, 2012). As the Oakland Community School grew and attained more resources, the OCS began to gain the capabilities to address many of the needs it had already been addressing outside of the school, as food and health care, within the school itself. Even before the Intercommunal Youth Institute (IYI) became the Oakland Community School (OCS), and before the Intercommunal Youth Institute was established, the Black Panther Party (BPP) was operating community-based survival programs. The Oakland Community School was only one of nearly two dozen survival programs which would be instated by the BPP in order to “meet the needs of the people” (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.xii; Alkebulan, 2007, p.28). The programs below were some of the most ambitious and/or successful of these efforts by the BPP to address the reproduction of social and cultural inequality affecting the communities that they were serving, and thus the children in these communities as well. Intercommunal News Service: The Black Panther Although not a program granting immediate tangible sustenance to the community, the “Intercommunal News Service” was the first BPP survival program and began publishing The Black Panther weekly beginning on April 25, 1967. According to the work released by The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation (2008) and edited by former Panther David Hilliard, The Black Panther was a newspaper that provided: . . . news and information about the work of the Black Panther Party chapters throughout the country; news and news analysis of the Black and other oppressed communities in the United States, Africa, and around the world; theoretical writings of party ideologists; and general news features on all matters relative to the liberation of humankind from oppression of any kind (p.47) The Black Panther not only provided news about the BPP specifically, but sought to counter the reproduction of false-consciousness created by the dissemination of news and information not fairly representing the non-dominant and non-privileged communities in the United States and the world (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.47-53). Moreover, according to the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation (2008), The Black Panther hoped to increase “understanding of the nature and condition of our society” and increase “understanding of the reader of their oneness with the oppressed of the world and strengthen[s] the reader’s resolve to intensify his or her efforts toward freedom” (p.49-50). The Intercommunal News Service, through The Black Panther, desired to create an awareness which would inspire African Americans and other oppressed peoples to stop accepting their unequal position in society and to take action to move toward enlightened social, mental, and economic self-determination. It should also be noted that The Black Panther also became a space where children attending BPP educational programs and schools could express themselves alongside the educators who were serving them. Ultimately the Intercommunal News Service’s The Black Panther could be considered one of the BPP’s most ambitious educational efforts. Health Care Programs of the Black Panther Party While health care was addressed directly within the Oakland Community School, outside of the school the BPP also established programs concerned with the well-being of all those not traditionally served or neglected by America’s health care system. This effort was not random, as providing “medical attention and care” through research and “free of charge” health facilities was Point Six of the BPP’s Ten-Point Program (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.21). Some of the most prominent and aspiring of these programs was the People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinics, the Sickle-Cell Anemia Research Foundation, and the People’s Free Ambulance Service. While it is difficult to ascertain how successful the clinics were at achieving their ambitions and goals without further research, the People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinics were founded for the purpose of providing “comprehensive health care for the community” (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.21; Alkebulan, 2007, p.41). This comprehensive health care was to include doctors who could treat “common physical ailments” and refer to specialists, laboratory testing which could be administered in “conjunction with local hospitals,” and significantly a complete “Child Health Care Program” (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.21). According to the Huey P. Newton Foundation (2008) the Child Health Care Program was to offer, “immunization; screening for sickle-cell anemia, and tuberculosis; referrals; and complete physical examinations as well as treatment of illnesses” (p.21-22). In addition to these offerings, the Child Health Care Program emphasized how one of its central goals was following-up and giving ongoing attention to those children who needed such maintenance (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.22). According to former Panther and Virginia State University History Assistant Professor Dr. Paul Alkebulan (2007), discussed in his work Survival pending revolution: The history of the Black Panther Party, there were BPP free medical clinics operating in, “Kansas City, Seattle, Los Angeles, Berkeley, New Haven, Portland, Chicago, Rockford (Illinois), Boston, Philadelphia, and multiple sites in New York” (p.35). According to Alkebulan (2007), the Staten Island BPP free medical clinic was able to offer quite a bit of the services it hoped to provide: The BPP Staten Island health cadre recruited ‘revolutionary doctors’ who provided house calls to needy community people. They treated anemia, worms, malnutrition, weapon injuries, hearing and vision, and gum diseases. The Staten Island office also gave free physical exams and draft counseling to young men (p.35). Beyond Staten Island, medical programs were also operating in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, and Queens, and “medical cadre” from these locales were able to gather on a weekly basis to “sustain joint activities and share medical technology” (p.35-36). Alkebulan’s (2007) research found that the two most successful of the BPP medical programs operated in Boston and Chicago. Alkebulan (2007) elaborates on the Chicago free health clinic: The Spurgeon “Jake” Winters Clinic in Chicago was named after a Panther killed by police in November 1969. Panthers worked with medical professionals who provided expertise in the areas of gynecology, obstetrics, pediatrics, optometry, and dentistry. Volunteers and medical students canvassed the community to facilitate the provision of services and information. The BPP claimed the clinic served more than two thousand people during the first two months of its existence (p.36). Operating with very similar capabilities to the free health clinic in Chicago, the Boston People’s Free Health Clinic opened in May of 1970. The Boston People’s Free Health Clinic was able to distinguish itself with its ability to train nurse assistants, lab technicians, and medical secretaries (Alkebulan, 2007, p.36). In communication with former Oakland Community School Director and BPP member Ericka Huggins (personal communication, May 27, 2012), I was also able to discover that the BPP operated what they referred to as a “Free Health Clinic Consortium.” In the Bay Area twelve community clinics collaborated and worked together in offering services; four of these clinics are still active (E. Huggins, personal communication, May 27, 2012). In addition to offering broad medical treatment, particularly for children, the People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinics served an important role in working with the Sickle-Cell Anemia Research Foundation to inform, “. . . people about sickle-cell anemia and maintain[s] a national advisory committee of doctors to research this crippling disease” (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.24). The BPP took the research of Sickle-Cell Anemia very seriously and targeted Sickle-Cell Anemia as one prominent disease which was receiving a lack of attention by the medical research community, “While the government has spent large amounts of funds and a great deal of time researching such fatal diseases as leukemia and cancer, it has shown little interest in sickle-cell anemia until the last two or three years” (The Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.26). According to the Huey P. Newton Foundation (2008) the BPP clinics, in conjunction with the Sickle-Cell Anemia Research Foundation, were able to test nearly half a million people in a period of three years (p.24). Alkebulan (2007) increases this number and claims in his work that BPP clinics were able to test and counsel more than one million black patients. During its operation the foundation ran a national headquarters in Oakland, CA which was able to publish and disseminate educational materials about Sickle-Cell Anemia materials on a large scale (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.24-26). Alkebulan (2007) informs us that Dr. Tolbert Small was the national chairman of the BPP Sickle Cell Anemia Project. In addition to the medical services offered, the BPP also began the People’s Free Ambulance Service to offer, “. . . free, rapid transportation for sick or injured people without time-consuming checks into the patients’ financial status or means” (Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.27). It is not evident how extensive the ambulance service was across the country, but according to the Huey P. Newton Foundation (2008) one prominent city to offer successful services was Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The city was able to offer ambulance service due to a grant received from the National Episcopal Church’s General Convention Special Program (p.28). Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program and the Liberation Schools Perhaps the best known, widely considered the first Black Panther Party survival program (when the Intercommunal News Service is not considered), was the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program (Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.30). The first Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program began on January 20, 1969 at the St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, CA with the support and encouragement of Father Earl Neal. By November of 1969 the coordinator for the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program claimed that twenty thousand children were being served by twenty-two chapters and branches across the United States (Alkebulan, 2007, p.32). Not only is this number of children served supported as fully plausible through analysis by scholars like Alkebulan (2007), but at the time the success of the program was commented on by a top governmental official, “The Panthers are feeding more kids than we are” (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.30). The Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program aimed to alleviate the hunger that they saw affecting the ability of children to function and learn. Paul Crayton, Lieutenant of Religion of the Milwaukee Panthers, at the time elaborated, “. . . the main purpose of the (Breakfast) program is to feed kids in the community that are hungry. Many times kids go to school hungry and they can’t function like they want to” (Witt, 2007, p.73). Years later the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation (2008) illuminates further goals of the program: The program will raise (sic) consciousness in the form of people participating in a program that they put together themselves to serve themselves and their children. People will come to understand a concept of getting businesspeople in the community to give something back to the community and do so in a way that the businesspeople can understand. The consciousness of the children will be raised in that they will see someone outside of the structure of their own family working in their interest and motivated by love and concern (p.34). While primarily motivated to support and raise the consciousness of Black and poor youth, as well as “educate the community about the contradictions in a capitalist society between rich and poor,” Alkebulan (2007) reveals that the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program had additional purpose. According to Alkebulan (2007), among other initial survival programs, the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program was created as a tool to raise consciousness and discipline among the membership as the BPP grew. Thus the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program was also utilized as a positive national community empowerment initiative to motivate Panther members from steering away from participating in activities that could further strengthen social and cultural reproduction maintaining Black and poor people in an unequal position in American society: This program also helps more people relate to the party. They see that the party is not a bunch of avaricious fools. We have kicked out the people who robbed those banks and robbed those taverns and liquor stores for 200 and 300 and 80 dollars. . . . They will relate to the fact that the Party is really trying to serve them (Alkebulan, 2007, p.31) While the children ate, the BPP also took the opportunity to “talk to children about community concerns,” and raise political consciousness in youth which would come to be both applauded and criticized. In his work “Minds Stayed on Freedom: Politics, Pedagogy, and the African American Freedom Struggle” Daniel Perlstein (2002) brings to light the words of former Panther Akua Njeri who operated a Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program in Chicago: Black children went to school “and learned nothing,” Njeri argued, “not because they’re stupid, not because they’re ignorant. . . .We would say, ‘You came from a rich culture. You came from a place where you were kings and queens. You are brilliant children. But this government is fearful of you realizing who you are. This government has placed you in an educational situation that constantly tells you you’re stupid and you can’t learn and stifles you at every turn” (p.263). Importantly, it can be seen that another objective of the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Programs was bolstering the self-esteem of children in light of an education system which the BPP saw as clearly underfunding and undervaluing the education of particularly Black youth; analysis of the success and failures of school districts like Oakland during this time period can be seen to support the BPP’s conclusions (Huggins and LeBlanc, 2009). Words coming from Panthers like Akua Njeri above would be taken into serious consideration by the FBI who would come to their own conclusion regarding the BPP’s Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program. According to the San Francisco Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as delineated in the final report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (also referred to as the Church Report), the “Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program” was one of the most dangerous programs of the Black Panther Party (Williamson, 2005, p.145; The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008, p.30). The San Francisco Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as illuminated by former Stanford University Assistant Professor Dr. Joy Ann Williamson (2005), “. . . identified the Panther Free Breakfast Program – which was closely related to the Liberation Schools – as a prime target because of its ‘potentially successful effort . . . to teach children to hate police and spread ‘anti-white propaganda’” (p.145). The FBI’s efforts to paint the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program as a program of hate did not end with rhetoric. In San Diego, California the FBI would successfully disrupt a Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program operating under the support of Father Frank Curran by calling his superiors and impersonating parishioners upset with his activities (Alkebulan, 2007, p.32). On another occasion, the FBI would attempt to spoil food during a raid at an office in New York (Alkebulan, 2007, p.33). As the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Programs spread successfully across the country, in spite of the FBI’s disruptions, the BPP sought to expand the educational and political consciousness component into what the BPP referred to as the Liberation Schools, “Party liberation schools resulted from the good relations that began with the free breakfasts. Panthers began to encourage children to return for other activities” (Alkebulan, 2007, p.33). The Liberation Schools followed closely after the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Programs and the first began as early as June 1969 in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, California (Alkebulan, 2007, p.33; Williamson, 2005, p.143). Thus the first BPP Liberation Schools frequently established themselves in churches already participating in hosting the BPP’s “free breakfast programs, community recreational centers, and BPP offices” (Jones and Gayles, 2008, p.101). The BPP Liberation Schools would go on to spread across the United States with varying success (Alkebulan, 2007, p.33-34). According to Jones and Gayles (2008) the Liberation Schools enrolled, “. . . a broad cross-section of Black children from the nation’s urban communities who ranged from 2 to 15 years old. Many of the BPP affiliates regularly attracted more than 50 youngsters to their respective schools” (p.101). While scholars as Jones and Gayles (2008) emphasize the enrollment of Black children, Huggins (personal communication, May 27, 2012) points out that Latino/a and White children were present in many programs as well. Initially the weekly curriculum followed very closely to that which occurred at the San Francisco liberation school which came to serve twenty-five children daily, “Monday, history day; Tuesday, culture day; Wednesday, field trips; Thursdays, revolutionary films; and Friday, current events. Songs and games were utilized to convey the Panther message. Children learned how to recite and explain the ten-point platform” (Alkebulan, 2007, p.33). While the daily curricular focuses would vary by location and school, the primary purpose of the Liberation Schools remained essentially the same across schools: The curriculum at most liberation schools consisted of basic academic skills and current events gleaned from newspapers and party literature. Community volunteers and Panthers staffed the schools . . . Professional academic instruction, however, was not the primary goal of the liberation schools from 1969 to 1971. Instruction in Panther ideology and African American history were the most important items in the curriculum. This was not only because the Panthers lacked the expertise to do anything else but also because the academic potential of the liberation schools was not yet recognized by the leadership. The oversight was corrected in two years (Alkebulan, 2007, p.34). As Alkebulan (2007) brings to light, the Liberation Schools were founded as institutions designed less for assisting students in their daily school instruction, but for enlightening students about their position in the world. This also meant fostering what was referred to as “interconnectedness” with those in their community as well as the world, “. . . Panthers used the phrase ‘Big Family’ in the classroom, as a tool to teach the students about their interconnectedness with other oppressed people across the globe . . .” (Williamson, 2005, p.143). Williamson (2005) makes sure to note that although this was fostered in the BPP Liberation Schools that, “. . . the Liberation Schools remained primarily Black in attendance” (p.143). Some of the innovative pedagogical methodologies which would come to be commonplace at the acclaimed Oakland Community School were also emerging at the Liberation Schools: . . . according to Val Douglas, an assistant teacher in the Berkeley school, students could self-direct some of their learning by choosing local or world events of interest for class study. Douglas remembered that a mother of one of the children was impressed by the fact that “their work shows that they can relate to what is happening to them and to other poor people in the world.” (Williamson, 2005, p.144)."
EDU,"Yet new international research points to a significant downside of such programs: Students may benefit early in their careers, but are harmed later in life as the economy changes and they lack the general skills necessary to adapt.¶ The study raises concerns about the trade-offs that could come with significantly expanding career and technical training in the United States—at least any version that substitutes for broad knowledge and skills transferable across jobs.¶  “Individuals with general education initially face worse employment outcomes but experience improved employment probability as they become older relative to individuals with vocational education,” write four researchers in the study, which appeared in the winter 2017 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Resources.¶ Many European and developing countries provide extensive vocational education, including apprenticeships with involvement from industry, the authors note. That stands in contrast with the U.S., which has reduced or eliminated separate vocational tracks in most high schools.¶ Looking at 11 European countries, the researchers compared students within the same country who went on the vocational track to similar students who went through a general-education program. (The study excludes women, citing changes over time in their likelihood of participating in the workforce.)¶ The takeaway is that although vocational students make higher salaries and are more likely to be employed as young adults, that advantage fades over time; by their late forties, those who went through a general education program have higher employment rates. Those findings were confirmed with more granular data from Germany and Austria.¶ “The advantages of vocational training in smoothing entry into the labor market have to be set against disadvantages later in life,” the study concludes."
EDU,"Given this positive evidence and broad stakeholder support, schools should stand at the ready to quickly scale up career and technical education in a major way, right? Not so fast; based on the human talent behind these classes, it looks like we should be thinking about long-term growth strategies rather than quick startups. Let me explain. First, there’s an ongoing national teacher shortage in career and technical education. According to the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium, the last few years have seen a rapid increase of student enrollments in these courses (surging by more than 65 percent in the last decade). At the same time, the supply of teachers specialized in career and technical education is shrinking due to fewer education schools offering this certification compounded by baby-boomer retirees. A second related issue is the dynamic nature of in-demand career and technical skills. The formula for providing kids with the academic skills needed for college does not vary much over time. Yet, the most valuable career and technical skills are determined by market forces, which can fluctuate considerably over time. The most in-demand career specializations, based on the most recent data, are in health science and STEM areas (science, technology, engineering, and math). These are likely not the same specialties that were in vogue when many of today’s current technical educators were hired in years past. And finally, in thinking about expansions of career and technical offerings we need to consider the implicit tradeoffs between quantity and quality of instruction. Quick expansions may offer more quantity soon, but will likely come at the expense of lower quality instruction in the classroom (as with class-size reduction policies in years past). Though instructor quality was not factored into the Fordham report in Arkansas, it likely played an unobserved role in the success (or not) of individual students."
EDU,"As shown in Table 4, community college students from high school CTE programs had lower ACT scores relative to both students from general curriculum and college prep programs. However, the differences were larger between the CTE and college prep students. Also, a higher percentage of high school CTE students fell into the two lowest high school GPA categories when compared with students from general curriculum and college prep students. However, once again, the differences between the CTE students and college prep students were much larger than the differences between CTE students and general curriculum students. A substantially higher proportion of the CTE group was male. The group of community college students from high school CTE programs was also more racially diverse than either the college prep or general curriculum groups and a higher proportion of the students from the CTE group were from Chicago (fewer CTE students were from suburban locales). More of the college prep students were in the high income categories, while fewer were in the low income categories relative to both CTE and general curriculum students. In terms of community college outcome attainment, students from college prep programs had significantly higher rates of transferring to four-year colleges both with and without credentials. This was relative to both students from CTE and general curriculum programs. Also, general curriculum students maintained a descriptive advantage over CTE students in terms of the proportion of group members transferring to four-year colleges. CTE students had a slightly higher percentage earning community college credentials without transferring. In terms of the rate of overall community college outcome, substantially more of the college prep students had achieved one or more of the outcomes relative to both CTE students and general curriculum students."
EDU,"The country's recent narrow focus on preparing STEM workers is misguided and won't make the U.S. successful, argues Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria. In a much-read piece published March 26, he writes, ""Every month, it seems, we hear about our children's bad test scores in math and science—and about new initiatives from companies, universities or foundations to expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities."" As a reporter who covers STEM education, I can say that's undoubtedly true. I receive press releases daily citing the U.S.' middling international test scores (in math, 29 countries outperformed the U.S. on the recent PISA, and 22 did so in science) and proclaiming the need for better STEM programs in computer science, robotics, engineering, coding, etc. Zakaria, author of ""In Defense of a Liberal Education,"" says such scores are not good predictors of a country's innovative prowess. The U.S. has ""dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation"" despite its Program for International Student Assessment scores. Neither Sweden nor Israel fared particularly well on that test either, yet they top most other countries in research and development. Many of the Asian countries that perform well on PISA are trying to add liberal arts into their curricula. ""America overcomes its disadvantage—a less-technically-trained workforce—with other advantages such as creativity, critical thinking, and an optimistic outlook,"" he writes. For the jobs of the future, ""[y]ou could not do better than to follow your passion, engage with a breadth of material in both science and the humanities, and perhaps above all, study the human condition."" A Parallel Push His argument is compelling, and a good foil to the bombardment of marketing and publicity around STEM education. But the piece fails to mention the parallel push in U.S. K-12 schools for just what he is advocating: critical thinking. The Common Core State Standards for English/language arts, which more than 40 states are now implementing, are all about teaching students to read more closely and think more deeply. Problem solving, critical thinking, and analysis are explicit goals within the standards. The new tests associated with them have more writing and require students to read more complex texts than most previous state assessments. There's also an underlying assumption throughout the piece that STEM and liberal arts skills—reading, writing, thinking, all of which Zakaria calls ""uniquely human""—are taught separately. But the essence of STEM, as many K-12 teachers explain it, is that it's focused on integrating skills, and solving ""real world,"" often human-focused problems. The push for moving from STEM to STEAM, adding arts to the acronym and emphasizing design, exemplifies the efforts teachers are making to infuse their science instruction with creativity and innovation. The ""maker movement,"" a campaign to get students inventing and tinkering by providing raw materials and workspaces, is above all about exercising critical thinking. As I saw at the White House science fair last week, students around the country are certainly following their passions and keeping the human condition in mind—for instance by making wheelchairs more user friendly and designing earthquake proof houses for Haiti. Plus, the Next Generation Science Standards, which 13 states and D.C. have adopted so far, and other states are considering, also emphasize inquiry, analysis, and critical thinking. As I wrote recently, some educators are advocating teaching these new standards through ""mysteries""—by presenting real-world problems and allowing students to navigate their way through complicated scenarios, coming up with further questions for study along the way. To be fair, Zakaria may be more concerned with higher education and technical training programs than K-12. But it's worth considering that along with the salient, industry-led focus on technical skills in the U.S., there's also a less flashy emphasis on the ""uniquely human"" liberal arts skills that undergird innovative work."
EDU,"When we talk about education, he notes, we mean more than just the specific degree conferred or something that can be quantified by a cost-benefit analysis of your expected earning potential. ""The world has always needed people who aren't guided solely by the pragmatic or the profitable,"" says Sherrill. ""The impulse to create and the drive to understand 'the big picture' are things that mark us as human. We make for the sake of making, and to share what we have made. Nurturing this creative impulse is the thing I value above all as an educator, and I'm proud that Penn State has been recognized for valuing it as well."" Explains Sherrill, our concept of liberal arts education has roots in ancient Greece. The Greeks believed that studying grammar, rhetoric and logic gave free citizens the intellectual and moral preparation they needed to participate in a democracy. Today a liberal arts curriculum includes the study of languages, literature, philosophy and history, as well as science and mathematics. The hallmark of a liberal arts education -- as opposed to specialized vocational or professional training -- is the emphasis on learning as a means to deepen human understanding, Sherrill notes. But, he acknowledges, it's understandable that the struggling economy and rising cost of college have given rise to the idea that pursuing liberal arts is an impractical waste of money. Yet even from a strictly economic perspective, we shouldn't be so quick to pooh-pooh such degrees as philosophy, literature or history, Sherrill believes. While it's tempting to think that majoring in a specialized subject is ""money in the bank,"" it may be a shortsighted solution. ""Technology and the economy are rapidly changing,"" he says. ""Adaptability and flexibility are more than important; they are necessary. Students in the arts and humanities learn how to explore and discover and innovate, not just how to perform specialized tasks."" The pendulum of public opinion might be swinging back toward the ""real world"" value of a liberal arts education. Recent studies suggest that employers are starting to recognize the value of workers with broader sets of skills. Many have noted that the complex global challenges of the 21st century will require leaders who are flexible thinkers and persuasive multilingual communicators, with knowledge of history and well-developed intercultural competencies. An education in the liberal arts and sciences, says Sherrill, is an excellent foundation in this context. Even countries known for their emphasis on science and technology training, such as China and India, are now weighing the benefits of having more educated generalists in the workforce, alongside more narrowly trained experts. Sherrill, an accomplished novelist and painter (and amateur ukelelist, he might add) is quick to note that no matter what path students ultimately pursue, taking some creative arts classes during college might teach them some important things. ""What it takes to make progress in the arts,"" he explains, ""is diligence, perseverance and discipline. The arts require a receptiveness and openness in the way one sees the world and thinks about things. These are key traits for innovators and leaders in any field."" Ultimately, Sherrill maintains, the most important thing to teach students may be ""the ability to be comfortable pursuing new ideas despite doubt and uncertainty, a willingness to follow your imagination, to continue onward to what may or may not be a dead end, to risk failure in the pursuit of something you believe in."
ANB,"[1] Anti-blackness operates axiomatically. This is the case, at least, insofar as we speak of what Frank B. Wilderson, III, has called ""the world"" (Wilderson 2003: 234).[1] {1. ""World"" here refers not to reality as such, but more precisely to the paradigmatic operations by which reality is structured, positioned, and rendered sensible. Yet this does not mean that one can directly express or pose reality as distinct from the world, for the world governs the very conditions of possibility for expression or position. Even purportedly universal terms, such as humanity, social life, and—to invoke the concern of this essay—being itself, are operations of the world. The Afro-Pessimist thesis, following Wilderson, is that this world constitutes itself and maintains its coherence, at essence, through anti-blackness: the world has being insofar as blackness does not. Since the grammar of this world, or the logic of the aforementioned operations, is so naturalized—enacted and assumed by/from power—that it generally has no need to appear (much less defend itself), the articulation of reality without the anti-black world must begin as an articulation against this world.} The aim of this essay is to address the consequences of this axiomatic operation for some rather classical terms of reference within continental philosophy, such as being, analogy,[2] communication, possibility, and knowledge. {2. Both the reading of Lazzarato I provide below and my general argument, which revolves around the question of negativity and analogy, are deeply shaped by—and only conceivable thanks to—the writings of Wilderson, whose claim about analogy is summarized in the following remark, made in conversation with Hartman: ""In my own work, obviously I'm not saying that in this space of negation, which is blackness, there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together. In fact, the trajectory of our life (within our terrain of civil death) is bound up in claiming—sometimes individually, sometimes collectively—the violence which Fanon writes about in The Wretched of the Earth, that trajectory which, as he says, is 'a splinter to the heart of the world' and 'puts the settler out of the picture.' So, it doesn't help us politically or psychologically to try to find ways in which how we live is analogous to how white positionality lives, because, as I think your book suggests, whites gain their coherence by knowing what they are not"" (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 187).} Such terms are the means by which the world claims to grant itself coherence; they form the grammatical ground, the structuring condition, of the world. If the ""gratuitous violence"" of anti-blackness extends into the very ""grammar"" of the world (Wilderson 2010: 38, 131),[3] then the aforementioned terms—far from providing retreat into a ""metaphysical"" domain unaffected by the historical and material—serve as points for the articulation of antagonism toward anti-blackness. In fact, the gratuity of such violence—its irreducibility to purposive meaning—entails a refusal of the coherent ground that these very terms claim to supply. This is to say that being—or the possibility thereof—grounds itself not through its own coherence, but through an enactment of power that is staged by anti-black violence. Power precedes grammatical ground."
ANB,"W. E. B. DuBois, writing about integration of schools in 1935, argued that segregated schools were still needed due to the “growing animosity of the whites” (p. 328). White public opinion, he explained, was overwhelmingly opposed to establishing racially integrated schools. In such a context, he believed, it was impossible for Black children to receive “a proper education,” which, in his view, included “sympathetic touch between teacher and pupil” and the teaching of knowledge about Black history and culture as a group, as citizens. One can read DuBois as seeking an education for Black people that creates spaces to disrupt the exclusion of the Black from the cultural and political regard extended to those who are presumed Human. Most educators would like to believe that modern Americans live in a different time than DuBois—that the animosity of whites against Black people has declined, or is no longer the norm, especially among well-intentioned educators who profess to care about all children and who are likely to have been educated in colleges of education with expressed commitments to equity and diversity. The scholarship on antiblackness insists that the very imagination of all children was never intended to include the Black, and that the Black becomes antagonistically positioned in relation to diversity visions and goals. It is the Black that is feared, despised, (socially) dead. But how is any of this helpful? First, as Wilderson (2010) suggested, it is important for educators to acknowledge that antiblackness infects educators’ work in schools, and serves as a form of (everyday) violence against Black children and their families. This acknowledgement is different from a broad stance against intolerance or racism, or an admission of the existence of white privilege. Teachers, administrators, and district leaders should create opportunities to engage in honest and very specific conversations about Black bodies, blackness, and Black historical memories in and of the school and local community. They all might explore together what it means to educate a group of people who were never meant to be educated and, in fact, were never meant to be, to exist as humans. More systemically, educators might begin to imagine an education policy discourse and processes of policy implementation that take antiblackness for granted. Thus, any racial disparity in education should be assumed to be facilitated, or at least exacerbated, by disdain and disregard for the Black. Differences in academic achievement; frequency and severity of school discipline; rate of neighborhood school closures; fundraising capacity of PTAs; access to arts, music, and unstructured playtime—these are all sites of antiblackness. That is to say, these are all policies in which the Black is positioned on the bottom, and as much as one might wring one’s hands about it all, and pursue various interventions, radical improvements are impossible without a broader, radical shift in the racial order. This is perhaps, however fittingly, a pessimistic view of education policy. However, its possibility is in fomenting a new politics, a new practice of education, committed to Black—and therefore human—emancipation."
ANB,"What I find most intriguing about the timbre of the argument of “The Case of Blackness,” and the black optimism it articulates against a certain construal of afro-pessimism, is the way that it works away from a discourse of black pathology only to swerve right back into it as an ascription to those found to be taking up and holding themselves in “the stance of the pathologist” in relation to black folks. I say this not only because there is, in this version of events, a recourse to psychoanalytic terminology (“fetishization,” “obsession,” “repetition,”), but also because there is at the heart of the matter a rhetorical question that establishes both the bad advice of a wild analysis and a tacit diagnosis affording a certain speaker’s benefit: “So why is it repressed?” The “it” that has been afflicted by the psychopathology of obsessional neurosis is the understanding, which is also to say the celebration, of the ontological priority or previousness of blackness relative to the antiblackness that establishes itself against it, a priority or previousness that is also termed “knowledge of freedom” or, pace Chandler, comprehension of “the constitutive force of the African American subject(s)” (Chandler 2000: 261). [21] What does not occur here is a consideration of the possibility that something might be unfolding in the project or projections of afro-pessimism “knowing full well the danger of a kind of negative reification” associated with its analytical claims to the paradigmatic (Moten 2004: 279). That is to say, it might just be the case that an object lesson in the phenomenology of the thing is a gratuity that folds a new encounter into older habits of thought through a reinscription of (black) pathology that reassigns its cause and relocates its source without ever really getting inside it. In a way, what we’re talking about relates not to a disagreement about “unthought positions” (and their de-formation) but to a disagreement, or discrepancy, about “unthought dispositions” (and their in-formation). I would maintain this insofar as the misrecognition at work in the reading of that motley crew listed in the ninth footnote regards, perhaps ironically, the performative dimension or signifying aspect of a “generalized impropriety” so improper as to appear as the same old propriety returning through the back door. Without sufficient consideration of the gap between statement and enunciation here, to say nothing of quaint notions like context or audience or historical conjuncture, the discourse of afro-pessimism, even as it approaches otherwise important questions, can only seem like a “tragically neurotic” instance of “certain discourse on the relation between blackness and death” (Moten 2007: 9).xiii Fanon and his interlocutors, or what appear rather as his fateful adherents, would seem to have a problem embracing black social life because they never really come to believe in it, because they cannot acknowledge the social life from which they speak and of which they speak—as negation and impossibility—as their own (Moten 2008: 192). Another way of putting this might be to say that they are caught in a performative contradiction enabled by disavowal. I wonder, however, whether things are even this clear in Fanon and the readings his writing might facilitate. Lewis Gordon’s sustained engagement finds Fanon situated in an ethical stance grounded in the affirmation of blackness in the historic antiblack world. In a response to the discourse of multiracialism emergent in the late twentieth-century United States, for instance, Gordon writes, following Fanon, that “there is no way to reject the thesis that there is something wrong with being black beyond the willingness to ‘be’ black – in terms of convenient fads of playing blackness, but in paying the costs of antiblackness on a global scale. Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world” (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to ‘be’ black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? [23] Elsewhere, in a discussion of Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the antiblack world developed across his first several books: “Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies—they become them. In our antiblack world, blacks are pathology” (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support Moten’s contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Black Man and Language”: “A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment” (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—“above all, don’t be black” (Gordon 1997: 63)—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that “resides in the idea that ‘I am thought of as less than human’” (Nyong’o 2002: 389).xiv In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos"
ANB,"What does it mean to suggest that education policy is a site of antiblackness? Fundamentally, it is an acknowledgment of the long history of Black struggle for educational opportunity, which is to say a struggle against what has always been (and continues to be) a struggle against specific anti-Black ideologies, discourses, representations, (mal)distribution of material resources, and physical and psychic assaults on Black bodies in schools. During the years of statesanctioned slavery, white slaveowners would often beat their Black property for attempting to learn to read; for Black people in bondage, learning to read was understood not only as a pathway to economic mobility, but, perhaps more importantly, as assertion of their own humanity, a resistance to being propertied (Anderson, 1988; Dumas, 2010). A century later, Black children faced down snarling, spitting mobs of white parents and elected officials who were incensed that their own white children would have to sit next to Black children, and fearful that their white education would be sullied by the presence of the Black. And this, then, is the essence of antiblackness in education policy: the Black is constructed as always already problem—as nonhuman; inherently uneducable, or at very least, unworthy of education; and, even in a multiracial society, always a threat to what Sexton (2008, p. 13) described as “everything else.” School desegregation is perhaps the most prominent education policy of the past century in which Black people have been positioned as problem. Racial desegregation of schools in the United States has been made necessary due to generations of state-supported residential segregation, a form of “American apartheid” (Massey & Denton, 1993) in which government housing policies allowed whites to accumulate land (and, therefore, wealth) at the expense of Black people (Dumas, 2015; Roithmayr, 2014). Residential segregation was rationalized as a necessary means to avoid race mixing—the presence of Black people particularly, but other people of color as well, was seen as a detriment to the quality of life and economic stability to which white people were entitled as a result of their skin color. A similar narrative emerged as whites organized in opposition to school integration; anti-Black racism was at least one primary cause of white flight from school districts that were ordered to desegregate (Kohn, 1996). In many cities, whites went to great lengths to create districts or school-assignment plans that concentrated whites in the most heavily resourced schools, and relegated Black children to underfunded schools with less experienced teachers and crumbling physical infrastructures (Dumas, 2011, 2014; Horsford, Sampson & Forletta, 2013). In short, school desegregation policy was precipitated by antiblackness. However, school desegregation researchers are more likely to frame their analyses through the lenses of access and diversity, emphasizing the educational benefits of cross-cultural interaction and the importance of providing more equitable allocation of educational resources (Orfield & Eaton, 1996; Orfield & Lee, 2004; Wells, 1995; Wells, Duran, & White, 2008). In contrast, theorizing antiblackness in school desegregation policy shifts the focus to interrogation of policies that led to the displacement of Black educators and the destruction of school communities that affirmed Black humanity (Tillman, 2004). Antiblackness allows one to capture the depths of suffering of Black children and educators in predominantly white schools, and connect this contemporary trauma to the longue dure´e of slavery from bondage to its afterlife in desegregating (and now resegregating) schools. And taking Sexton’s (2008) analysis of multiracialism into account leads to a more nuanced and careful critique of how schools pit the academic success of (some) Asian American students against and above the academic difficulties of Black students. Here, schools can be celebrated as diverse despite the absence of Black students in the building and/ or in the higher academic tracks. Ultimately, the slave has no place in the most privileged and highly-regarded school spaces; the Black becomes a kind of educational anachronism, not quite suited for our idealized multicultural learning community."
ANB,"Many scholars who have studied the charter/choice governance model have pointed out how such free market reform policies continue legacies of population fragmentation and containment within urban cities along racial, class, and language lines (Buras, 2014; Lipman, 2011; Parker & Margonis, 1996; Wells, Slayton, & Scott, 2002). In her incisive study of the Chicago public school system, Lipman (2011) situates neoliberal economic policy and educational/urban reform within the historical projects of wealth accumulation and White supremacy. While Lipman gestures toward the ‘‘pivotal’’ 400- year legacy of White supremacy in the U.S. nation state, her analysis of the charter/choice debate is largely concerned with how to rehabilitate the project of public education from the damaging forms of enclosures brought on through neoliberal governance models (cf. Stern & Hussain, 2015). What is missing from the critical literature on charter/choice policies is an accounting of how even Marxist critiques retain modern European notions of equity, citizenship, and rights built on the dehumanization of Blacks and the ‘‘dark world.’’ Alternatively, a caste analysis would ask whether existing critiques of charter/choice policies assume a democratic potential in the public school system that was never a design feature. If schools are democratic institutions only insofar as they can support and augment White supremacy and accumulation, what would an adequate response to neoliberal caste strategies such as charter/choice governance be? One contribution a caste analysis makes to the existing research literature on race/class and educational inequality is that it sheds a pessimistic light on the prospect of the public education system in the United States as a recuperable institution. Such a pessimistic assessment stems from the fact that a caste analytic is rooted in a genealogical understanding of U.S. schooling as a population management tool of the racial capitalist state. The founding of the public school in the United States, Du Bois (1935/1998, 1999) argued, was not born out of the application of Enlightenment ideals of democracy and equality but rather from a moment of crisis in the coarticulating projects of White supremacy and capital accumulation during the colonial-plantation period and aftermath of the Civil War. As such, liberal reform and Marxist strategies for dealing with economic and racial inequalities through schooling are untenable because even in these models, democracy and equity have not adequately been washed of their White supremacist and accumulatory origins. From Pessimism to Abolitionary Democracy The second contribution Du Bois’s caste analytic provides to existing literature on choice/charter reform is a call to develop practical expressions of ‘‘abolition democracy’’ (Davis, 2005; Du Bois, 1935/1998; Lipsitz, 2004; Olson, 2004). Different from liberal education reforms based on the assumption that equal political and social standing has been established in the post– Civil Rights era, an abolitionary democratic position starts from the premise that democracy has been thwarted from the onset by the racial capitalist state after its brief period of existence following the Civil War (Du Bois, 1934/ 1998). As Angela Davis (2005) puts it, Du Bois argued that the abolition of slavery was accomplished only in the negative sense. In order to achieve the comprehensive abolition of slavery—after the institution was rendered illegal and black people were released from their chains—new institutions should have been created to incorporate black people into the social order. (p. 95) From an abolitionary democratic standpoint, then, the reconstruction of the public education system in the United States needs to start from Du Bois’s insight that ‘‘by betraying the Negro . . . white Americans betrayed themselves as well, because they destroyed the most democratic and egalitarian force in their national politics, while strengthening the power of the most elite, plutocratic and undemocratic elements in their country’’ (Lipsitz, 2004, p. 277). A caste analysis of U.S. schooling logically points to abolitionary responses to (neo)liberal educational reform. Charter/choice strategies are seen for what they are: the continuation of a historical betrayal that empowers an elite White oligarchy (the 1%) while denigrating all Whites (despite their very real material privileges) through the continued dehumanization of the dark world. A caste analysis call for a second abolitionary education movement pushes beyond existing critiques of charter/choice strategies in another important way by forefronting a fundamental claim in work that has come to be known as Afro-pessimism. As Dumas (2015a) points out, one of the most salient insights from Afro-pessimist thinkers such as Frank Wilderson (2010) is that through chattel slavery the world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent; and with these joys and struggles the Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks. (Dumas, 2015a, p. 20) Du Bois’s caste analytic and Wilderson’s claim that the European humanistic tradition is based on the fungibility of Black bodies converge around a central thesis: Schools in racial capitalist society are biopolitical to their core, a constituent part of the life and death processes associated with White supremacy and anti-Blackness upon which caste control is built.6 Caste schooling carries with it a material politics of humanity (and therefore democracy) whereby Black bodies and populations are necessarily rooted in an ontological condition of less than human that supports Whiteness as a fully human condition (Wilderson, 2010). In the context of the charter/choice debate, caste and fungibility work together as complementary concepts. When school districts in New Orleans or Philadelphia are handed over to charter management companies, caste populations are being (re)produced. However, they are also working within the historical circuits of Black fungibility because charter/choice policies are framed as an ‘‘innovative’’ approach to rescuing impoverished people of color from a failed public school system. Just as the formerly enslaved and free African American were used to avert a crisis in production and White supremacy after the Civil War by propping up and extending the racial hate and privileges of poor Whites in work and educational spaces, the Black figure (and other students of color) is needed today to sustain governing strategies aimed at ‘‘fixing’’ problems such as the achievement gap student and ‘‘turn around’’ school. As replaceable parts in racial capitalist society, the Black fungible body and populations form a base for neoliberal caste reconstruction because choice/charter policies help provide Whites access to greater assets for thriving through wages of Whiteness generated from the currency of Black social death. One reason high-performing elite charter schools exist is because failing ‘‘urban’’ schools that capture surplus populations of underperforming and ‘‘at-risk’’ students call for innovative market solutions. The fungible populations and bodies of the dark world are part of the measurement and thus the valuation of social life as it is either enhanced (invested in through accumulatory benefits that elite charters provide) or left to whither (in disinvested, underfunded schools). It is through the historical reservoir of antiBlackness that caste reconstruction operates through the charter/choice governance model today. A rejection of charter/choice policies and other neoliberal governing strategies must include a problematized understanding of how the fungibility of Black bodies and populations undergird the humanist (liberal, Marxist, and neo-Marxist) ideal of a democratic education system and the type of human and less than human it can produce. Lacking such a critique, we risk falling back into a romantic notion of democratic education that fails to see how it is based on the ontological ‘‘grammar of suffering’’ of Black bodies and populations (Dumas, 2014; Wilderson, 2010). Du Bois’s caste analysis of education therefore situates the U.S. public education system as part of the ongoing project of caste control in that schools in the neoliberal era help produce the political and ontological conditions of social death and social life. Social life produced through neoliberal education governance strategies foregrounds a historical materialism where charter/choice policies should be read as part of a specific emergence of freedom—as economic value, political category, legal right, cultural practice, lived experience—from the modern transformation of slavery into what Robin Blackburn terms the ‘‘Great Captivity’’ of the New World: the convergence of the private property regime and the invention of racial blackness. (Sexton, 2011, p. 19) There is more at stake in the school choice movement and ‘‘innovative’’ charter governance approach than the loss of a potentially democratic and egalitarian institution of the public school. What is at stake, and what Du Bois’s caste analytic shows, is that the very definitions of freedom, equality, and justice are based on the social death of Black bodies and populations."
ANB,"Within the field of educational research W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the most important thinkers in the 20th century. Yet, as Banks (1992), Gordon (1995), Alridge (1999, 2008), Johnson (2000), Brown (2010), and Grant, Brown, and Brown (2016) argue, critical educational thought is rarely conceptualized from the standpoint of the Black intellectual tradition. One result has been a failure to recognize one of the most important theoretical contributions to educational research in the 20th century: Du Bois’s devastating and comprehensive historical and sociological analysis of schooling in the United States, which he termed caste education. For Du Bois, schools played a central role in preserving the caste society established in the colonialplantation period. After the fall of the old caste system based on slave codes, a type of reconstruction took place, according to Du Bois—one in which the public school became a primary place where the racial privileges of the ‘‘white world’’ and the dehumanizing conditions the ‘‘dark world’’ were educated into existence and the old caste codes were dressed in new Jim Crow clothing. Du Bois’s work on caste formation through schooling underscores the dynamic and adaptive nature of caste control in U.S. society, which continues today in the school, prison, hyper-policed communities, court, housing, and health systems (Alexander, 2010). With the application of corporate ‘‘turnaround’’ tactics working in concert with city gentrification projects (Buras, 2014; Lipman, 2011), schools have become tools of caste formation that create ‘‘gated communities for children of privilege’’ (Novak, 2014). In this sense, Du Bois’s caste analysis helps us understand what Ladson-Billings (2006) has called the ongoing educational ‘‘debt’’ as a necessary byproduct of the inextricable projects of White supremacy and capitalist accumulation through schooling. A caste analysis of schools thus emphasizes the fact that there are no intentions of ever paying off the educational ‘‘debt’’ in a racial capitalist society. Doing so would mean the public schooling system ceasing to be one of the most important sites of caste reconstruction necessary for producing racial and economic competition between the White and non-White worlds. In developing Du Bois’s caste analysis of schooling in racial capitalist society, I proceed as follows. First, I discuss Du Bois’s marginalization in education research and how this example of ‘‘epistemic apartheid’’ has obscured his highly original biopolitical critique of schooling in the United States. Next, I define racial capitalism and its relation to caste education. Specifically, I outline how Du Bois’s historical materialist understanding of racial capitalism grounds his caste analysis of U.S. schools within a biopolitical framework; schools, for Du Bois, are one of the most important governing tools for managing and producing social life in line with the racial capitalist needs of the industrial/state nexus. In developing Du Bois’s biopolitical analysis of education, I focus next on clarifying what a caste analysis consists of in his writings on education, race, and economic injustice. The next section puts the conceptual strengths of caste into conversation with the debate on the intersection of race and class in the education research literature. I argue here that Du Bois’s caste analytic bridges a gap in the literature through its biopolitical approach that differs from other models generated from Marxist, neo-Marxist, critical race theory (CRT), and other critical social theory traditions. I then turn to Du Bois’s concept of ‘‘double consciousness’’ to look at how unequal forms of social life are produced in segregated schools. Here I focus on how subjects think of themselves and others in schooled spaces organized through caste tools—what I call veil technologies. Du Bois’s focus on the production of subjectivity in caste school settings offers a powerful biopolitical perspective on how racial and economic inequality is reproduced through states’ school governing strategies. In the last section, I apply Du Bois’s caste analytic to the choice/charter policy debate as a way of introducing a new direction that moves away from liberal reform models and European-informed Marxist strategies of resistance. Turning to recent work in Afro-pessimism, I argue that despite the difference between them, both models of social and political change assume a problematic understanding of the human subject supportive of White supremacy and accumulation. Finally, a brief note on the methodology I use in this essay to articulate Du Bois’s analytic of caste. To support the claim that Du Bois’s analytic of caste is a biopolitical methodology, I trace its historical development as it evolves throughout Du Bois’s large interdisciplinary body of research on education, race, capitalism, and imperialism. In connecting the diffuse pieces of work where Du Bois provides caste analyses of education throughout his early sociological and historical work to his later Marxist revolutionary and anti-imperialist phase, a highly relevant methodological framework is apparent. Namely, the caste analytic I outline and unify from Du Bois’s work provides an important interdisciplinary research model that puts human life as the stakes of the public education system—the very ability of people of color to live without being cut down by the systematic violence of the white world. When Du Bois (1973/2001) says in the opening quote to this essay that ‘‘either we do this or we die,’’ he means that the abolition of caste education and caste society in general requires developing an education system that can create an ‘‘alternative of not dying like hogs’’ (p. 121). For Du Bois then, part of ‘‘guid[ing] our future so as to ensure our physical survival, our spiritual freedom and our social growth’’ for the dark world depends on picking up and utilizing caste as a methodological tool as we move into the next hundred years of educational research. In the neoliberal era when caste schooling still persists as an important appendage to the racial capitalist state, social death is now wrapped in free market myths and discourses of individual responsibility. It is now imperative more than ever for educational research to carry on and advance Du Bois’s study of caste education. Now let us, however, turn to some of the reasons Du Bois’s caste analytic has remained obscured as a method of educational research."
ANB,"Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.” Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When pared down to thirteen words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker “crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not “Should the U.S. be overthrown?” or even “Would it be overthrown?” but rather when and how—and, for some, what—would come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of “success,” but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case—by way of a paradigmatic analysis—that the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks. One could (and many did) acknowledge America’s strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called “balance of forces.” The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who “retired” from struggle. The question’s echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the “crazies” shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave estate’s destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is “no” in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but “yes” in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptoms—it registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present, Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positionalities, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of “family values”), the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontology—or non-ontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the grammar of political ethics—the grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering—which underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows."
ANB,"What I find most intriguing about the timbre of the argument of “The Case of Blackness,” and the black optimism it articulates against a certain construal of afro-pessimism, is the way that it works away from a discourse of black pathology only to swerve right back into it as an ascription to those found to be taking up and holding themselves in “the stance of the pathologist” in relation to black folks. I say this not only because there is, in this version of events, a recourse to psychoanalytic terminology (“fetishization,” “obsession,” “repetition,”), but also because there is at the heart of the matter a rhetorical question that establishes both the bad advice of a wild analysis and a tacit diagnosis affording a certain speaker’s benefit: “So why is it repressed?” The “it” that has been afflicted by the psychopathology of obsessional neurosis is the understanding, which is also to say the celebration, of the ontological priority or previousness of blackness relative to the antiblackness that establishes itself against it, a priority or previousness that is also termed “knowledge of freedom” or, pace Chandler, comprehension of “the constitutive force of the African American subject(s)” (Chandler 2000: 261). [21] What does not occur here is a consideration of the possibility that something might be unfolding in the project or projections of afro-pessimism “knowing full well the danger of a kind of negative reification” associated with its analytical claims to the paradigmatic (Moten 2004: 279). That is to say, it might just be the case that an object lesson in the phenomenology of the thing is a gratuity that folds a new encounter into older habits of thought through a reinscription of (black) pathology that reassigns its cause and relocates its source without ever really getting inside it. In a way, what we’re talking about relates not to a disagreement about “unthought positions” (and their de-formation) but to a disagreement, or discrepancy, about “unthought dispositions” (and their in-formation). I would maintain this insofar as the misrecognition at work in the reading of that motley crew listed in the ninth footnote regards, perhaps ironically, the performative dimension or signifying aspect of a “generalized impropriety” so improper as to appear as the same old propriety returning through the back door. Without sufficient consideration of the gap between statement and enunciation here, to say nothing of quaint notions like context or audience or historical conjuncture, the discourse of afro-pessimism, even as it approaches otherwise important questions, can only seem like a “tragically neurotic” instance of “certain discourse on the relation between blackness and death” (Moten 2007: 9).xiii Fanon and his interlocutors, or what appear rather as his fateful adherents, would seem to have a problem embracing black social life because they never really come to believe in it, because they cannot acknowledge the social life from which they speak and of which they speak—as negation and impossibility—as their own (Moten 2008: 192). Another way of putting this might be to say that they are caught in a performative contradiction enabled by disavowal. I wonder, however, whether things are even this clear in Fanon and the readings his writing might facilitate. Lewis Gordon’s sustained engagement finds Fanon situated in an ethical stance grounded in the affirmation of blackness in the historic antiblack world. In a response to the discourse of multiracialism emergent in the late twentieth-century United States, for instance, Gordon writes, following Fanon, that “there is no way to reject the thesis that there is something wrong with being black beyond the willingness to ‘be’ black – in terms of convenient fads of playing blackness, but in paying the costs of antiblackness on a global scale. Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world” (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to ‘be’ black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? [23] Elsewhere, in a discussion of Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the antiblack world developed across his first several books: “Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies—they become them. In our antiblack world, blacks are pathology” (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support Moten’s contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Black Man and Language”: “A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment” (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—“above all, don’t be black” (Gordon 1997: 63)—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that “resides in the idea that ‘I am thought of as less than human’” (Nyong’o 2002: 389).xiv In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos."
ECON,"The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-point Wednesday, the third such increase in six months and a message of confidence in the strengthening of the U.S. economy. The increase, which brought the Fed funds rate to between 1 percent and 1.25 percent, was highly anticipated by the markets. On Wednesday morning before the rate increase, Fed futures pointed to a 93.5 percent chance of a rate hike. The rate hike ""reflects the progress the economy has made and is expected to make toward maximum employment and price stability,"" Fed Chair Janet Yellen said Wednesday in a press conference. The Fed also laid out plans to begin rolling back the more than $4 trillion balance sheet it accumulated in an effort to prop up the economy after the financial crisis. On Wednesday, Yellen said the process was designed to be as predictable and orderly as possible, and that the Fed hoped it would be as exciting as ""watching paint dry."" The increase was the second rate hike this year and the fourth since the Federal Reserve began raising rates in December 2015. As such, consumers will begin to feel the impact of higher costs for lending — especially those with large mortgages or those who carry credit-card debt, said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate. “For a lot of people, they don’t even notice,” he said. “But for those where budgets are tight and their debt burdens have been growing the last few years, this is where the signs of strain begin to emerge.” The Fed described the rate hike as evidence of a stronger economy. It said that job gains had “moderated” but were still “solid, on average, since the beginning of the year.” As it has in previous months, it said its interest rate remains “accommodative,” meaning that it is still low enough to help fuel economic activity. The Fed is mandated by Congress to consider two goals: Maintaining a healthy labor market where Americans who want jobs are able to find them, and restraining potentially destabilizing increases in prices. [These banks have been sweetening their savings accounts as the Fed has raised rates] The U.S. job market has been growing robustly, and the unemployment rate reached a 16-year low in May. Yet metrics of inflation, including the Fed’s favored measure, have consistently come in below the Fed’s target, convincing some that the Fed should put off future interest rate hikes. In its news release Wednesday, the Fed said it expected inflation to remain somewhat below its 2 percent target in the near term but to eventually rise to meet that goal. It added that it was “monitoring inflation developments closely.” “The rate hike signals that the Fed believes the economy is improving and is going to be resilient to those hikes,” said Tara Sinclair, a professor at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the jobs website Indeed. During the press conference on Wednesday, Yellen argued that a gradual path of rate increases was the best way to avoid a more damaging scenario for the economy. ""We want to keep the expansion on a sustainable path and avoid the risk that ... we find ourselves in a situation where we've done nothing, and then need to raise the funds rate so rapidly that we risk a recession,"" she said. ""But we are attentive to the fact that inflation is running below our 2 percent objective."" Board members didn’t alter their projections for the economy and their own actions much compared with what they had expected in March. They continued to predict one more rate increase this year, as well as three rate increases next year. Their projections indicate that the Fed expects the economy to grow 2.2 percent in 2017 and 2.1 percent in 2018 -- far below the 3 percent growth that the Trump administration is targeting. Board members did lower their estimates for the unemployment rate and inflation, metrics that have consistently fallen below their expectations. The Fed’s decision was nearly unanimous. Eight members of the deciding Federal Open Market Committee voted in favor of the rate increase. Only one, Neel Kashkari, the president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, voted against it. The Fed also laid out a plan to gradually roll back its balance sheet before the end of the year, a change that many analysts expect could lead longer-term interest rates to rise, potentially raising costs for mortgage holders. The Fed currently uses the principal from maturing bonds to buy new ones, but under the new plan, it will gradually phase that out. For Treasury securities, the Fed said it will begin reinvesting only those payments that exceed a cap of $6 billion a month, initially. Then it will lift the cap by $6 billion every three months over a period of a year, until the cap reaches a level of $30 billion per month. For agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, the cap will be $4 billion per month initially, rising in steps of $4 billion every three months until it reaches $20 billion per month. After that, the Fed plans to hold the caps in place “until the Committee judges that the Federal Reserve is holding no more securities than necessary.” Eventually, it said, the amount will decline to a level below that of recent years, but more than before the financial crisis. Madhavi Bokil, a vice president at Moody’s Investor Services, said her group was closely monitoring information about how the Fed will roll down its balance sheet, to analyze what the effect might be on credit conditions. “We think that if the same gradual approach is followed, then any potential negative spillover would be limited,” she said."
EDU,"There’s a curious line in the summary of President Barack Obama’s proposed fiscal 2012 Department of Education budget. “Now more than ever,” it reads, “we cannot waste taxpayer dollars on programs that do not work.” It’s curious because no federal education programs appear to work, yet the Obama administration is proposing to increase Education Department spending from $64 billion to $77 billion. It’s a bankrupting contradiction, but don’t get angry at Obama: We only have ourselves to blame. Educational outcomes prove that federal education involvement has practically been the definition of profligate spending. First, elementary and secondary schooling. While real, federal per-pupil expenditures have more than doubled since the early 1970s, the scores of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the so-called “Nation’s Report Card” — have been pancake flat. We’ve spent tons with no educational returns to show. We have, though, got bloat such as a near doubling of school employees per-student, and opulent buildings like the half-billion-dollar Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex that opened in Los Angeles last year. In higher education, the federal government has focused on providing financial aid to make college more affordable. The problem is, policymakers have ignored basic economics. The more Washington gives to students, the higher schools can raise their prices, wiping out the value of the aid. In addition to being a major cause of the disease it wants to cure, Washington has fostered higher-ed failure by encouraging an increasing number of people often unready for college to pursue degrees. That’s a likely reason the most recent federal assessment of adult literacy recorded big literacy drops from 1992-2003 among Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree. It’s also no doubt a significant factor behind only about 56 percent of students in four-year programs completing their studies in six years. Wasting federal dollars on schools is not, importantly, exclusively a Democratic problem. Both parties have used education spending to try to signal that they “care” about Americans, especially cute little child-Americans. And while the House GOP has identified about $4.9 billion in cuts for the Education Department, that’s less than 8 percent off the Department’s $64 billion budget. So how is all this the fault of the American people? Isn’t the real problem that politicians lack integrity and will try to buy votes using things that sound wonderful even if they’re toxic? While it would be nice if politicians would start looking at results and stop throwing money into black holes, the fact is they’re human, and, like all of us, they ultimately want what is best for themselves. For politicians that’s votes, and when it comes to education Americans don’t like cuts. When presented with several federal undertakings that could be targets for deficit-reducing cuts in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, education finished second only to Social Security for protection. A full 63 percent of respondents wanted no education reductions, versus 13 percent calling for “major” cuts. In contrast, the top candidate for gutting — foreign aid — saw 11 percent of people call for no reductions and 52 percent demand major slashing. Why do Americans want more of a bad thing? The problem is, they don’t know it’s bad. As with most things you buy, people generally expect that spending more on education will get a better product. Moreover, the public constantly hears, especially from huge special interests like teachers’ unions, that our schools have been surviving on table scraps for decades. It’s no surprise, then, that average Americans — people with jobs, families, and lots of other pressing concerns that make analyzing education policy hugely cost prohibitive — recoil at the idea of taking money from schools. But take we must, because federal money does no discernable educational good, and our nation can simply no longer afford pointless spending. Unfortunately, there is only one way to get sustained sanity in federal policy, and it will require slow, hard work. People who know the reality of federal education spending must tell others about it as forcefully and clearly as possible. They must change the public’s attitude so that what’s in politicians’ self-interest will also change. Ultimately, federal politicians must be rewarded not for giving away dollars in the name of education, but for leaving them in the hands of hardworking taxpayers"
ECON,"Debt overhang reduces economic growth significantly and for a prolonged period of time in three main ways. 1. Higher Interest Rates. Creditors may lose confidence in the country’s ability to service its debt and demand higher interest rates to offset the additional risk. Or, interest rates may rise simply because the government is attempting to sell more debt than private bondholders are willing to buy at current prices. Either way, higher interest rates raise the cost of the debt, and the government must then either tax its citizens more, which would reduce economic activity; reduce government spending in other areas; or take on even more debt, which could cause a debt spiral. Higher interest rates on government bonds also lead to higher rates for other domestic investments, including mortgages, credit cards, consumer loans, and business loans. Higher interest rates on mortgages, car loans, and other loans would make it more costly for families to borrow money. Families may then have to delay purchasing their first home and other means of building financial security. For many Americans, the dream of starting a business would no longer be in reach. Higher interest rates have a real and pronounced impact on the lives of ordinary citizens and translate into less investment and thus slow growth in the rest of the economy. A weaker economy in turn would provide fewer career opportunities and lower wages and salaries for workers. However, higher interest rates do not always materialize in countries suffering a debt overhang. According to Reinhart, Reinhart, and Rogoff, in 11 of the 26 cases where public debt was above 90 percent of GDP, real interest rates were either lower, or about the same, as during years of lower debt ratios. Soaring debt matters for economic growth even when market actors are willing to absorb it at low interest.[14] Interpreted another way, in more than half of debt overhang cases, interest rates rose. In the case of the U.S., the Federal Reserve’s policy of repeated quantitative easing has contributed to interest rates dropping to historical lows. Interest rates will likely rise at some point over the next several years. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that interest costs on the debt will more than double before the end of the decade, rising from 1.4 percent of GDP in 2013 to 2.9 percent as early as 2020.[15] High levels of U.S. public debt could push interest rates even higher with severe impacts for the American economy."
EX,"Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party. Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene."
ECON,"It may be too early to claim that, after just seven weeks as president, Donald Trump has already made the economy great again. But Friday’s jobs numbers — along with other indicators — are certainly grounds for optimism. The Labor Department said non-farm payroll employment grew by 235,000 in February. That’s a larger gain than expected — and more than twice the average monthly jobs growth under President Barack Obama. Construction jobs, in particular, shot up by 58,000 — the biggest jump in almost 10 years. And that came on top of a January surge of 40,000 new construction jobs. Overall unemployment, meanwhile, held steady at a reasonable 4.7 percent. And notably, labor-force participation among a key age group, 25- to 54-year-olds, ticked up a point — to 81.7 percent in February, from 80.6 percent in September 2015, a low not seen since 1984. That may mean working-age folks who gave up looking for a job under Obama may now be starting to jump back into the game. And all this is taking place as the stock market has hit record highs: The Dow closed Friday up more than 13 percent since Trump won the November election. There’s more. Consumer confidence is at a 15-year high. And the Federal Reserve is apparently upbeat, too: It’s widely expected to raise interest rates this moth. Trump’s critics pooh-pooh all the good news. They note — rightly — that February was unusually warm and that job growth actually began under Obama. And, again, it’s a bit early to give Trump too much credit here. Yet it’s also hard to deny that Trump’s approach — deregulation that’s already under way, the promise of tax cuts coming reasonably soon, the move to replace ObamaCare and his heavy focus on the economy generally — is striking a sweet note with both businesses and consumers. Heck, if the numbers keep improving, at some point even Trump’s critics will have to give him some points."
ECON,"President Trump's economy isn't bursting out of the gates. All signs are that it is starting 2017 with more of the same sluggish growth the U.S. experienced during President Obama's term. But as with the final years of Obama's presidency, there's reason to be optimistic about the current state of the economy under Trump. The government will publish the first report of economic growth in the Trump era on Friday. The Atlanta Federal Reserve is predicting 0.5% annual growth in the first three months of the year; private economists are forecasting 1.1%. The Trump administration isn't really responsible for the slow growth yet. The reason: Many of his policies haven't become law, and none of them have had enough time to work through the economy. ""What happened in the first quarter of the year is entirely beyond credit or blame of the Trump administration or the 115th Congress,"" says Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, an accounting firm. ""That'll be a 2018 story."" Trump's proposals -- from tax cuts to infrastructure spending -- likely won't have an impact on the economy until next year if they get passed through Congress. That's a big ""if,"" too. Related: Trump relies on magic wand of growth to pay for tax cuts But Friday's figure will illustrate Trump's uphill battle ahead. He's promised 4% annual growth. The Fed forecasts 2% growth for the next few years. America's economic growth has been glacial since the Great Recession ended in 2009, averaging about 2% a year since 2010. During the late 1990s, annual growth hit a strong 4% a year. Many factors have held down U.S. growth over that time. To name a few: A weak global economy, a strong dollar that hurt U.S. trade, and Americans who have become too hesitant to spend after a scarring recession. One big difference so far this year is that Americans' optimism in the economy's future has improved dramatically. Confidence -- from consumers to big business -- has shot up, partially because of the hope underpinning Trump's policies. But so far there's no evidence that it's leading to actual spending. Consumer spending, the real engine of growth, has been sluggish so far this year. Related: Fast track to the middle class: Become a dental hygienist Some say that's a post-election wake up call. ""What we're seeing in this first quarter is the beginning of some genuine skepticism that all that optimism was overdone,"" says Bernard Baumohl, chief economist at the Economic Outlook Group, a research firm. The problem isn't so much that things are getting worse. Experts stress the U.S. economy is in good shape overall: Unemployment is low, at 4.5%. Job growth is solid. Gas prices are low. Wage growth has picked up. Global economic risks are low for now too, which also helps boost business confidence. The issue is whether the GOP-controlled White House and Congress can quickly pass new economic reforms this year that will truly boost the economy out of this slow-growth phase. Related: Trump promised big infrastructure bill. His budget cuts it ""That looks unlikely now,"" adds Bauhmohl. ""There's this undercurrent of real concern that Washington is still broken."" One of Trump's proposals, infrastructure spending, could provide America with the shot in the arm it needs. New infrastructure -- improving America's roads, bridges and rails -- would create construction jobs and help other workers (we're looking at you, morning commuters) get from point A to point B faster. Less time traveling means more time at work or at home -- more productive time. Related: Trump wants billionaire developers lead infrastructure plans But a grand infrastructure bill from Trump and Republicans in Congress isn't on the horizon this year. Repealing Obamacare, renegotiating NAFTA and cutting taxes are 2017 priorities. So at least to start the Trump era, economic growth looks to be more of the same. It's important to remember that the first quarter number is notoriously low and often gets revised up a bit. And keep in mind: overall, America is in solid shape. ""The economy is doing just fine,"" says Paul Ashworth, chief US economist at Capital Economics, a research firm. ""I don't think there's any serious concerns about the US economy."
ECON,"NO STATEMENT from the Federal Reserve is complete without a promise to make decisions based on the data. In each of the past two years, a souring outlook for the world economy prompted the Fed to delay interest-rate rises. And quite right, too. Yet if the Fed raises rates on June 14th in the face of low inflation, as it has strongly hinted, it would bring into question its commitment both to the data and also to its 2% inflation target. The central bank has raised rates three times since December 2015 (the latest rise came in March). It is good that monetary policy is a little tighter than it was back then. The unemployment rate, at 4.3%, is lower than at any time since early 2001. A broad range of earnings data shows a modest pickup in wage growth. The Fed is right to think that it is better to slow the economy gradually than be forced to bring it to a screeching halt later, if wage and price rises get out of hand. The rate increases to date have been reasonable insurance against an inflationary surge. But no such surge has yet struck. Unexpectedly low inflation in both March and April has left consumer prices no higher than they were in January. According to the Fed’s preferred index, core inflation—that is, excluding volatile food and energy prices—has fallen to 1.5%, down from 1.8% earlier this year. It is now well below the 2% target. Nor does a surge seem imminent. For a while, Donald Trump’s promises to cut taxes and spend freely on infrastructure made higher rates appear all the wiser. But fiscal stimulus looks less likely by the week. Tax cuts are stuck in the legislative queue behind health-care reform, and Mr Trump’s administration has tied itself in knots over whether it will increase the deficit. Meanwhile, the current “infrastructure week” in Washington may generate more headlines than proper plans. Even so, the Fed is expected to go ahead and raise rates this month. The markets think there is a 90% probability of an increase of 25 basis points (hundredths of a percentage point). It is possible that more inflation is coming. An economy that is stimulated will eventually overheat. The central bank may believe that low unemployment is about to cause inflation. But the truth is that nobody is sure how far unemployment can fall before prices and wages soar. Not many years ago some rate-setters put this “natural” rate of unemployment at over 6%; the median rate-setter’s estimate is now 4.7%. Advertisement The only way to find the labour market’s limits is to feel them out. Falling inflation and middling wage growth both suggest that these limits are some way off, for two possible reasons. First, higher wage growth could yet tempt more of the jobless to seek work (those who are not actively job-hunting do not count as unemployed). The proportion of 25- to 54-year-olds in employment is lower than before the recession, by an amount representing almost 2.4m people. By this measure, which fell in May, joblessness is worse in America than in France, where the overall unemployment rate stands at 9.5%. Second, even the moderate pickup in wage growth to date might encourage firms to invest more, lifting productivity out of the doldrums and dampening inflationary pressure. I like hike Jobs growth in America has already slowed from a monthly average of 187,000 in 2016 to 121,000 in the past three months. That is enough to reduce slack in the economy, but only just. Slowing it still further is needless so long as inflation remains quiescent. It makes still less sense when you consider the asymmetry of risks before the Fed. If tighter money tips the economy into recession, the central bank has only a little bit of room to cut rates before it hits zero. But if inflation rises, it can raise them as much as it likes."
ECON,"The U.S. economy added 222,000 jobs in June and monthly employment statistics from May and April were revised higher. The strong jobs report, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, means the U.S. economy is consistently adding nearly 200,000 jobs a month and unemployment remains low, allowing the Federal Reserve to continue hiking interest rates in the second half of the year. Economists had predicted an increase of 178,000 jobs in June according to Bloomberg data, signaling the June report beat high expectations. The monthly report is currently the most watched piece of economic data by investors because steady growth in the U.S. has positioned the Fed as a first mover among major global central banks in moving away from the rock-bottom interest rates that carried markets out of the the 2008 crisis. Since late 2016, the Fed has hiked interest rates three times on account of low unemployment, steady growth, and signs of stabilizing inflation. Friday's jobs report will give Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen the ability to plot a deliberate course on rate hikes and a trimming of the central bank's balance sheet.. ""We think that the Fed will see this wage data as satisfactory and clearly can execute a September decision (and quick implementation) on initiating balance-sheet reduction,"" said Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of fixed income at BlackRock and portfolio manager of three of the firm's bond funds. ""This also allows the Fed a good deal more time to decide on a December rate hike after having begun its balance sheet reduction program,"" he added of the Fed's options. Payrolls in April and May were revised higher by a total of 47,000 jobs, putting three month job gains at an average of 194,000. The national unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.4%, slightly higher than predictions of 4.3%, as some workers returned to the job market. This data means investors around the world will continue to adjust their portfolios to account for a moderate step off from the crisis-era tools like zero rates and central bank bond buying that kept fears of deflation at bay. Instead, there are signs of steady inflation and gross domestic product growth years into the economic recovery, a boon to confidence. Economists at Deutsche Bank characterized Friday's jobs report as ""perfect"" for risk assets like stocks. U.S. equities Friday trading with the S&P 500 closing up 0.64% at $2,425.18, while safe haven assets like the 10-year Treasury and gold fell. ""The job market remains in good shape eight years into the economic expansion,"" said Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial. ""The big increase in jobs in June, with upward revisions to job growth in April and May, has alleviated concerns in recent months about slowing job growth,"" he added. Average hourly earnings rose by 4-cents in June to $26.25, meaning wages have risen 2.5% in the past year. This wage growth, which fell slightly behind expectations, is being closely watched by the Fed as a proxy on inflation. Data continued to show strong hiring in sectors like professional services, home healthcare, finance, and food services, which have carried the recovery and put unemployment solidly below 5%. Other more cyclical parts of the U.S. economy such as mining, construction and oilfield services are also showing hiring gains as commodity prices stabilize and manufacturing expands. Retail, a new trouble spot in the economy due to the rise of e-commerce, added 24,500 jobs reversing months of net losses. In Washington, policymakers may look to Friday's report as evidence there continues to be slack in the U.S. economy. The labor force participation rate was 62.7% and 1.6 million Americans were marginally attached to the workforce. There were also 5.3 million part-time workers, who would have preferred full-time work. Business friendly policies proposed by the Trump administration, from tax cuts to deregulation and fiscal stimulus, have been pitched as further bolstering overall employment. There were no major surprises in Friday's bullish report. For now, the U.S. economy continues to be the ballast for predictions on an economic return to normalcy. ""This June report, with positive revisions in April and May, keeps the Fed on its current path for another rate hike in [the second half of 2017] and starting to slowly unwind the Fed’s $4.5 trillion balance sheet,"" said Phil Orlando, chief equity strategist at Federated Investors. In Europe, Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, is offering signs of following in Yellen's footsteps as growth returns to the region. Some of the world's smartest investors are looking at current economic data as paradigm shift for markets. ""We think that longer-term interest rates now pivot more off of international rate policy, such as that stemming from the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan, and not solely on what the Fed is doing,"" said BlackRock's Rieder. Ray Dalio, chief investment officer of the world's largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, believes it is ""mission accomplished"" for central bankers like Yellen and Draghi who've overseen the near-decade-long move from crisis. ""Generally speaking (depending on the country), it is appropriate for central banks to lessen the aggressiveness of their unconventional policies because these policies have successfully brought about beautiful deleveragings. In my opinion, at this point of transition, we should savor this accomplishment and thank the policy makers who fought to bring about these policies. They had to fight hard to do it and have been more maligned than appreciated. Let’s thank them,"" Dalio said on LinkedIn on Thursday. Of the new paradigm, Dalio added: For the last nine years, central banks drove interest rates to nil and pumped money into the system creating favorable carries and abundant cash. These actions pushed up asset prices, drove nominal interest rates below nominal growth rates, pushed real interest rates on cash negative, and drove real bond yields down to near zero percent, which created beautiful deleveragings, brought about balance sheet repairs, and led to more conventional economic conditions in which credit growth and economic growth are growing in relatively good balance with debt growth. That era is ending. Central bankers have clearly and understandably told us that henceforth those flows from their punch bowls will be tapered rather than increased—i.e., that the directions of policy are reversing so we are at a) the end of that nine-year era of continuous pressings down on interest rates and pushing out of money that created the liquidity-fueled moves in the economies and markets, and b) the beginning of the late-cycle phase of the business/short-term debt cycle, in which central bankers try to tighten at paces that are exactly right in order to keep growth and inflation neither too hot nor too cold, until they don’t get it right and we have our next downturn. Recognizing that, our responsibility now is to keep dancing but closer to the exit and with a sharp eye on the tea leaves."
ECON,"The U.S. economy added 222,000 jobs in June, as the jobless rate ticked up to 4.4%, the Labor Department reported on Friday, the latest sign of renewed economic momentum. Along with an upward revision of 47,000 to April and May payrolls, it now looks like the apparent slowdown in hiring never happened. The average monthly job gain over the past three months is 194,000, after preliminary data last month showed payroll growth had slowed to a near five-year low of 121,000. Headline wage figures were tame, but key details suggest solid income gains. Although the jobless rate edged higher from June's 16-year low, as more people joined the workforce, the labor market momentum could add pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise rates again at its September meeting. The jobs data follow strong reports on manufacturing and the service sector from the Institute for Supply Management ""The rebound in payrolls strongly supports (the Fed) view that the soft-looking spring data were 'transitory,'"" wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. ""If payroll gains are sustained at anything like their June pace,"" Shepherdson says, the Fed has every reason to expect that the jobless rate will keep moving lower and wage pressures will finally pick up. He thinks the Fed may be forced to hike in September. For now, markets aren't buying it, with just 14% odds of a September hike, according to the CME Group FedWatch tool. Treasury yields, which have rallied strongly over the past week, oscillated up and down slightly after the jobs report. The sudden surge in recent days has had less to do with the Fed than the European Central Bank's readiness to begin scaling back its bond-buying program. The major averages recovered some lost ground on the stock market today, with the Dow Jones industrial average and S&P 500 index up 0.2% and the Nasdaq composite 0.5%. The S&P 500 is just above its 50-day moving average after closing below that key level on Thursday. The Labor Department said that the hard-hit retail sector added 8,100 jobs in June, after a string of monthly losses. Meanwhile, Amazon (AMZN) continues to hire apace, recently holding job fairs in Tacoma, Wash., Las Vegas, and Kansas City, Kan. Amazon also announced in April that it will hire 5,000 part-time customer-service reps to work out of their homes. McDonald's (MCD) recently said the fast-food chain and its franchisees will add 250,000 workers this summer — more than a year ago. McDonald's announced a partnership with Snap (SNAP) to recruit via its Snapchat social media site. Snap will connect users to an online application if they click on a McDonald's recruitment ad. The Institute for Supply Management service-sector and manufacturing surveys both pointed to strong employment gains in June. It's a different story for the auto industry, which has seen slumping car sales lately from Ford (F), General Motors (GM) and others. Ford and General Motors have both announced layoffs recently. Overall, the manufacturing sector added 1,000 jobs last month. IBD'S TAKE: IBD changed its market outlook to ""uptrend under pressure"" on Tuesday, June 27, a signal to investors to exercise extra caution in buying stocks and to take some money off the table to deploy when the turbulence subsides. Make sure to read IBD's The Big Picture each day to get the latest on the market trend and what it means for your investments. The one notable weak spot in the report was wage growth. Hourly average wages rose 0.2% on the month, below the 0.3% expected, putting the annual gain at a tepid 2.5%. Yet despite that dreary news on hourly pay, the report contained pretty good overall news about income growth. Factoring in hours worked and wage levels, average weekly pay rose 2.8% in June, matching the best total since July 2011. Aggregate pay, which also factors in employment growth, rose 4.5% from a year ago, tied for the best result since January 2016. One oddity from the report was a 35,000 rise in local government employment. That may have partly largely related to seasonal issues tied to the school calendar. The Fed still has two more jobs reports to sift through before the September 19-20 meeting. Small business hiring will be important to watch between now and then. The Paychex/IHS Small Business Employment watch showed that hiring by small firms is now growing at the slowest pace since 2011 after a four-month deceleration. Meanwhile, the National Federation of Independent Business said its survey showed that the percentage of firms reducing employment overtook the share increasing payrolls in June. ""Small business owners seem to be in a holding pattern while they wait to see what Congress will do with taxes and health care,"" said NFIB President and CEO Juanita Duggan. Of those looking to hire, 85% said they had trouble finding qualified workers. Over time, that tightness — full employment, as the Fed sees it — is expected to feed through to higher wage inflation, justifying less accommodative monetary policy."
ECON,"WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Board officials said at a meeting early this month that they wanted to see evidence of stronger economic growth before continuing to increase the Fed’s benchmark interest rate, according to minutes of the meeting published on Wednesday. But the account presented in the minutes did not shake a widespread conviction that the Fed will raise rates at its next meeting, which is scheduled for mid-June. Analysts said recent economic data was strong enough to reassure the Fed, and investors increased their bets on a June rate hike. Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC, noted that shortly after the May meeting, the government estimated that the economy had added 211,000 jobs in April and that the unemployment rate had fallen to 4.4 percent. “That’s the kind of stuff they were looking for, that they were expecting, and they just wanted to see come to fruition,” Mr. Faucher said, “and I think it did, and so now they can go ahead” with a rate hike at the June meeting. Investors also learned for the first time on Wednesday how the central bank is likely to reduce its holdings of more than $4 trillion in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. A reduction of those holdings would be the last step in the Fed’s retreat from its economic stimulus campaign. The account of the May meeting reiterated that the Fed would probably begin taking that step later this year. The Fed raised its benchmark rate in March to a range between 0.75 percent and 1 percent, the third increase since the 2008 financial crisis. Rates remain at a low level that supports economic growth by encouraging borrowing and risk-taking. The Fed is gradually reducing those incentives by raising rates because it believes the economy is expanding at roughly the maximum sustainable pace. Although the Fed left the rate unchanged this month, its statement after the meeting was widely interpreted as setting the stage for a rate increase because of its reference to slow growth in the first quarter as “likely to be transitory.” The account of the May meeting, published by the Fed after a standard three-week delay, generally reflects that optimism, describing most officials as ready to raise rates “soon,” provided the economy shows signs of the expected rebound. But the minutes also offered an unexpected note of caution. “Members generally judged that it would be prudent to await additional evidence indicating that the recent slowdown in the pace of economic activity had been transitory before taking another step in removing accommodation,” the account said, referring to the members of the Federal Open Market Committee, which determines monetary policy. The account noted that job growth remained strong, and it described anecdotal evidence of a tightening labor market, including companies’ raising wages and investing in training programs. It also noted that the global economy, a drag on domestic growth in recent years, was showing signs of renewed strength. The continuing decline in the unemployment rate is likely to weigh in favor of raising rates more quickly. The May minutes also noted that financial conditions had loosened since the last rate hike. Borrowing costs have declined since March, and the dollar has weakened, the opposite of what the Fed had intended. Before the release of the minutes, the chances of a June rate increase stood at 78.5 percent, according to a measure derived from asset prices by CME Group; by the end of Wednesday, the chances were 83.1 percent. The account of the meeting also noted that the government had regularly reported slow winter growth in recent years, and there was some evidence to suggest that the problem was not the economy but the methodology. But inflation has increased more slowly than the Fed had hoped it would at the beginning of the year, remaining below the 2 percent annual pace that policy makers regard as healthy. The share of Americans who are working also remains significantly lower than before the recession. Some Fed officials see the combination as evidence that the economy is still benefiting from low interest rates. Robert S. Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said Monday that he still expected the Fed to raise rates twice more this year. “I intend to be patient in critically assessing upcoming data to evaluate whether we are continuing to make progress in reaching our inflation objective,” Mr. Kaplan wrote in a paper on current policy. The plan to reduce the Fed’s asset holdings, which help to hold down borrowing costs, was presented by Fed staff members, and the minutes said it was viewed favorably by “nearly all” of the board’s policy makers. The Fed plans to reduce its holdings without selling securities. Instead, as securities mature, the Fed will keep the proceeds rather than following its current policy of investing in new securities. Under the proposed plan, the Fed would begin by keeping a fixed amount of the monthly proceeds and then increase the cap every three months until proceeds were no longer being reinvested. The schedule, including the caps, would be detailed in advance."
ECON,"They are judged in large part according to how wages, jobs, and retirement nest eggs perform on their watch. Yet they have little control over that performance. Growth, ultimately, is determined by long-term (and in some cases mysterious) factors: demographic trends, business innovation and technological progress, the education level of the workforce. Under the right circumstances, some measures—tax cuts, government spending—can boost growth, at least for a while. But for the most part, presidents cannot quickly influence the deeper elements that govern growth. There is, however, one lever that seems temptingly close to their grasp. If the Fed can be persuaded to hold down interest rates, cheap loans can boost home purchases, car purchases, and business’s spending on factories and machines, pumping up demand and juicing the economy. The Fed’s power is especially tantalizing because of the technocratic tidiness of its decisions—a single committee of experts sets the short-term interest rate as it pleases, with no need to run the gantlet of lobbyists, advocates, and congressional committees. In the long run, of course, lower interest rates are not a magic elixir. The extra demand may run ahead of the economy’s ability to supply things, causing scarcity that leads buyers to bid up prices, thus boosting inflation; and inflation, once permitted, can be tamed only by means of painful job losses. But in the short run, a Fed-created sugar high can transform a president’s fortunes. Now, after years of rock-bottom interest rates following the 2008 crisis, the possibility of hiring bottlenecks and price pressures has reappeared on the horizon. Having recovered painfully and slowly from the crash, the U.S. economy is expected to grow by more than 2 percent this year—not very fast, but faster than the roughly 1.8 percent that the Fed considers to be sustainable without increasing the rate of inflation. The labor market, after all, is tight: Headline unemployment stands at 4.5 percent, considerably below its average of 6.2 percent since the start of 2000. The broader measure of unemployment—including workers who have given up looking for jobs and part-time workers who’d prefer to work full-time—tells a similar story. With workers now relatively scarce, companies must offer more to attract them. Higher wages, when matched by higher productivity, are a good thing. But if wages rise merely because of worker scarcity, companies may have to pass on the costs to consumers, stoking inflation. Given these facts, the Fed has little choice but to hike the short-term interest rate from its current low level—if inflation is allowed to accelerate too much, workers will pay a terrible price later. Sure enough, the Fed has already started down that path, lifting borrowing costs in December and then again in March; two more hikes are expected before 2017 is over. In a normal political climate, this might feel routine. After all, the Fed is still paying people to borrow, in the sense that its lending rate is negative after accounting for inflation. But today’s political climate is far from normal. If Trump believes even part of his own rhetoric, his reaction to Fed tightening could well become aggressive. Trump officially maintains that the economy can grow at an annual rate of 4 percent. Some of his advisers have tried to dial back this expectation: Mnuchin has said that growth of 3 percent is achievable. But even that is way above the Fed’s 1.8 percent estimate of sustainable growth. If the Fed, acting on its judgment of the safe speed limit, continues to raise interest rates, it will be announcing that the administration’s growth ambitions are delusional. The president, for his part, can be expected to believe that the monetary gurus are conspiring to frustrate his promises to voters. Higher interest rates do not merely dampen growth; they do so through specific channels. Interest-rate-sensitive parts of the economy get squeezed first; the prime example is real estate, which may not be welcome news to this particular president. The tradable parts of the economy also suffer, because higher interest rates attract capital from abroad, putting upward pressure on the dollar and hence making it more expensive for foreigners to buy American goods. That will appeal even less to Trump, because The tradable parts of the economy also suffer, because higher interest rates attract capital from abroad, putting upward pressure on the dollar and hence making it more expensive for foreigners to buy American goods. That will appeal even less to Trump, because the most tradable sector of all is manufacturing. During his campaign, Trump pledged to protect blue-collar workers in the industrial swing states. If the Fed sustains a strong dollar, precisely those workers will suffer. Trump likewise pledged to cut the trade deficit. A strong dollar may cause its expansion. Even Trump’s election promises about immigration may be undone. The stronger the dollar, the greater the incentive for a Mexican worker to earn wages in the U.S. and send money home to relatives. In sum, the White House and the Fed are likely to find themselves at loggerheads. The question is how the parties to this conflict will choose to behave. Trump may indulge his belligerent instincts, or he may listen to his pragmatic counselors. The Fed, for its part, may cave in to pressure, as it did under Martin and then Burns. Or it may resist, following the Greenspan model. As a street-fighting defender of the Fed’s independence, Greenspan was a master. During his showdown with George H. W. Bush’s administration, the Treasury tried to get a bill through Congress that would have curbed the Fed’s regulatory power; Greenspan used his relationships with lawmakers to bury the initiative. When Bush’s lieutenants came after him, whispering slanders to the press, they got a taste of their own medicine: Greenspan was on friendly terms with journalists, and he could plant stories better than anyone. So skillfully did Greenspan manage his reputation that he proved impossible to unseat. The Bush team reluctantly appointed him to a second term, fearing that removing him might shake Wall Street’s confidence. Janet Yellen will struggle to replicate some parts of the Greenspan model. Whereas Greenspan had strong ties to both Republicans and Democrats, Yellen lacks Republican allies—a vulnerability, given the makeup of today’s Congress. Whereas Greenspan operated in pre-Twitter Washington, Yellen faces a vicious media free-for-all. Yet there is one big historical lesson that Yellen can apply. And she holds an ace, if she is willing to use it. The lesson is that it pays to manage the Fed’s board ruthlessly. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s team undermined Greenspan’s predecessor, the redoubtable Paul A. Volcker, by appointing administration loyalists as Fed governors. Toward the end of his tenure, Volcker lost votes on three occasions; with at least four of the seven governors on the Fed’s board prepared to gang up against him, he no longer fully controlled his own institution. Greenspan applied the dark arts of bureaucratic politics to avoid this fate. When Clinton appointed a potential challenger as Fed vice chairman, Greenspan sidelined him so firmly that he eventually left (some possibly not-coincidental press criticism may have encouraged his departure). When Clinton tried to appoint a troublemaker in his stead, Greenspan used his Senate connections to block confirmation. Since Greenspan’s retirement in 2006, fashion has swung against his domineering style; Fed governors feel free to express their views in public, and the power of the interest-rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee is less concentrated in the chair. But now, with the Fed’s independence in peril, the pendulum must swing back. Three of the seven governorships currently stand empty. Trump will get the Fed he wants unless Yellen actively resists. The ace that Yellen holds is that, although her term as chair expires in February, her appointment as a governor runs to 2024. Fed chairs usually resign from the board when their term expires, but they are not obligated to do so. If Trump refuses to keep her in the driver’s seat, she could remain on the Fed’s board and do some vigorous back-seat driving. The last chair to stay on—Marriner S. Eccles, in 1948—proved devastatingly effective. By force of character and intellect, he remained an influential voice, achieving his full revenge in 1951, when he helped lead a Fed revolt against the president who had demoted him. If, despite recent conciliatory signals, Trump were to drop Chair Yellen, a back-seat-driving Governor Yellen could be formidable. Her public pronouncements might sway markets more than those of the new chair; she could lead a posse within the interest-rate-setting committee, and her backers might include the heads of the regional Feds, whose appointments are largely free of presidential influence. The mere prospect that Yellen might do this could be enough to cause the administration to back down. The Fed’s independence is not enshrined in law, but a determined central banker with the stomach for a fight can find ways to sustain it."
ECON,"That’s all for today. Here’s a quick round-up. The US Federal Reserve has pressed on with the normalisation of interest rate policy, by hiking borrowing costs for the second time this year. The Fed funds rate is now 1% to 1.25%. The Fed is also broadly sticking to its previous guidance for interest rate rises over the next couple of years. Chair Janet Yellen tried to cool speculation that recent weak inflation might make the central bank more dovish. The Fed remains confident that the US economy is recovering, saying: The Committee continues to expect that, with gradual adjustments in the stance of monetary policy, economic activity will expand at a moderate pace, and labor market conditions will strengthen somewhat further. Economists said the move shows that the Fed believes the recovery is on track. Ian Kernohan, senior economist at Royal London Asset Management, says: “The Fed made little changes in the language or projections for further interest rate hikes. They acknowledged that inflation was running below target, but also that job gains have been solid. We expect another rate hike and some balance sheet normalisation before the end of the year.” In another sign of confidence, the Fed outlined its plans to start selling off some of the assets bought during its stimulus programme. During a press conference, Janet Yellen said she’d not discussed her future with president Trump. She remains committed to serving her full term (to February 2018). Wall Street took the news in its stride, with the Dow Jones ending the day at a new high thanks to rising financial stocks. The US dollar also strengthened during Yellen’s press conference, as traders anticipated further rate hikes down the line. Scott Minerd of investment firm Guggenheim Partners sums it up: That’s all for tonight. Thanks for reading and commenting. GW"
ECON,"The US Federal Reserve announced it was raising short-term interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Wednesday as the central bank continued to unwind the huge economic stimulus plan brought in after the great recession. After a two-day meeting, the Fed raised the target range of the federal funds rate from 1% to 1.25%, the third consecutive quarterly increase. The move follows a record run of jobs growth in the US that has driven the unemployment rate down to its lowest level in 16 years. “Information received since the federal open market committee met in May indicates that the labor market has continued to strengthen and that economic activity has been rising moderately so far this year,” the Fed said in a statement. The committee signaled that more rises were on the horizon and that it “expects that economic conditions will evolve in a manner that will warrant gradual increases in the federal funds rate”. One member of the Fed’s committee objected to the rate rise. Neel Kashkari, chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, wanted to maintain the existing target range for the federal funds rate. Kashkari, who has been tipped as a potential successor to the current chair, Janet Yellen, has consistently warned against raising rates, fearing that it might harm the recovery. “We are still coming up short on our inflation target, and the job market continues to strengthen, suggesting that slack remains,” Kashkari wrote after objecting to a rate rise earlier this year. The Fed also put out a statement about its plans to unwind its gigantic bond portfolio, bought as part of its bid to restart the US economy after the 2007-09 recession. In the wake of that recession, the Fed went on an enormous spending spree, buying bonds in order to keep interest rates down and encourage spending to kickstart the economy. After three rounds of so-called quantitative easing, the Fed acquired $4.5tn worth of bonds, including $1.8tn in mortgage securities. The committee said it planned to “gradually reduce the Federal Reserve’s securities holdings”. In a press conference, Yellen said the Fed intended the sale to be a quiet process that her colleague Patrick Harker, the Philadelphia Fed president, joked should be like “watching paint dry”. The latest move by the Fed shows that the central bank continues to believe that the US economy is strengthening. Economic activity has “been rising moderately so far this year”, household spending has “picked up” and and hiring remains “solid”, the Fed said. The Fed’s meeting was the first since May’s job report was released. Continued hiring brought the unemployment rate down to a level unseen since 2001 and it was the 80th consecutive month of jobs growth. Hiring has, however, “moderated”, as the Fed pointed out, and Yellen has expressed concern about the high number of people still in part-time work who are looking for full-time employment. Greg McBride, Bankrate’s chief financial analyst, said: “As expected, the Federal Reserve followed through with an interest rate hike – the third in the past six months and fourth in the past 18 months. “But this could be the last hike for a while. Until we see a reversal of the recent weakness in economic growth, retail sales and inflation, the Fed will be on the sidelines.”"
ECON,"Federal spending cuts would spur economic growth by shifting resources from lower-valued government activities to higher-valued private ones. Cuts would expand freedom by giving people more control over their lives and reducing the regulations that come with spending programs. The federal government has expanded into many areas that should be left to state and local governments, businesses, charities, and individuals. That expansion is sucking the life out of the private economy and creating a top-down bureaucratic society that is alien to American traditions. So cutting federal spending would enhance civil liberties by dispersing power from Washington. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that federal spending will rise from 20.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017 to 23.4 percent by 2027 under current law.1 Over the same period, tax revenues are expected to rise much more slowly, reaching 18.4 percent of GDP by 2027. As a consequence, fast-growing spending will produce increasingly large deficits. Policymakers should change course. They should cut spending and eliminate deficits. The plan presented here would balance the budget within a decade and generate growing surpluses after that. Spending would be reduced to 18.0 percent of GDP by 2027, or almost one-quarter less than the CBO projection for that year. Some economists claim that cutting government spending would hurt the economy, but that notion is based on faulty Keynesian theories. In fact, spending cuts would shift resources from often mismanaged and damaging government programs to more productive private activities, thus increasing overall GDP. Markets have mechanisms to allocate resources to high-value activities, but the government has no such capabilities.2 It is true that private businesses make many mistakes, but entrepreneurs and competition are constantly fixing them. By contrast, federal agencies follow failed and obsolete approaches decade after decade.3 So moving resources out of the government would be a net gain for the economy. Consider Canada's experience. In the mid-1990s, the federal government faced a debt crisis caused by overspending, which is similar to America's current situation. But the Canadian government reversed course and slashed spending from 23 percent of GDP in 1993, to 17 percent by 2000, to just 15 percent today.4 The Canadian economy did not sink into a recession from the cuts as Keynesians would have expected, but instead grew strongly during the 1990s and 2000s. Thus policymakers should not think of spending cuts as a necessary evil to reduce deficits. Rather, the U.S. government's fiscal mess is an opportunity to make reforms that would spur growth and expand individual freedom. The plan proposed here includes a menu of spending reforms for policymakers to consider. These and other reforms are discussed further at www.DownsizingGovernment.org. Spending Cut Overview This section describes how cutting spending would eliminate the federal deficit within a decade and generate growing surpluses after that. The starting point for the plan is the CBO's baseline projection from January 2017.5 Figure 1 shows CBO projections for revenues (black line) and spending (red line) as a percent of GDP. The gap between the two lines is the federal deficit, which is expected to grow steadily without reforms. › The blue line shows projected spending under the reform plan proposed here. Under the plan, spending would decline from 20.7 percent of GDP today to 18.0 percent by 2027. The deficit would be eliminated by 2024 and growing surpluses would be generated after that. Under the plan, spending cuts would be phased in over 10 years and would total $1.5 trillion annually by 2027, including about $225 billion in reduced interest costs that year.6 Falling spending and deficits would allow room for tax reforms. One reform would be to repeal the tax increases under the 2010 Affordable Care Act.7 Another reform would be to slash the federal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, which would match the reformed Canadian rate. Such a cut would spur stronger economic growth and lose little revenue over the long term.8 In sum, the best fiscal approach would be to cut spending and reform the most damaging parts of the tax code. That would end the harmful build-up of debt, expand personal freedom, and generate benefits for all Americans from a growing economy. Spending Cut Details Tables 1 and 2 below list proposed cuts to reduce federal spending to 18.0 percent of GDP by 2027. Table 1 shows the cuts for health care and Social Security. These reforms would be implemented right away, but the value of savings would grow larger over time. The figures shown are the estimated annual savings by 2027, generally based on CBO projections.9 Table 2 shows cuts to discretionary programs and entitlements other than health care and Social Security.10 These cuts would be valued at $499 billion in 2017, but the plan assumes that they would be phased in one-tenth each year over the next decade.11 The reforms listed in Tables 1 and 2 are deeper than the savings from ""duplication"" and ""waste"" often discussed by federal policymakers. We should cut hundreds of billions of dollars of ""meat"" from federal departments, not just the obvious ""fat."" If the activities cut are useful to society, then state governments or private groups should fund them, and those entities would be more efficient at doing so. The proposed cuts are illustrative of how to start getting the federal budget under control. Further reforms are needed in addition to these cuts, such as major structural changes to Medicare. The important thing is to start cutting as soon as possible because the longer we wait, the deeper will be the debt hole that is dug."
EDU,"Over the last five years, Congress has cut federal funding for K-12 education by nearly 20 percent, about five times more than overall spending cuts, according to a new report. In an analysis of the federal budget released Wednesday, the bipartisan advocacy organization First Focus found federal spending that affects children – including funding aimed at preventing child abuse and neglect, for housing allocated to children, and for programs targeted toward homeless youths, as well as education funding – has dropped 9.4 percent since 2011, when federal stimulus funds ran out. Overall federal spending dropped 4 percent in the same time. The decreases have been compounded by across-the-board sequestration cuts, and education was hit the hardest of any children's investment, the report says. ""When families face tough budget choices, parents' first priority is to protect the kids,"" First Focus President Bruce Lesley said in a statement. ""But Congress is actually cutting funding for children more than twice as fast as spending overall."" Although some years saw nominal increases, funding levels for education dropped from year to year after adjusting for inflation in most cases. Overall, cuts to education spending – including to programs like Title I grants (6.8 percent), Impact Aid for districts housed on American Indian or federal lands (5.3 percent), the Advanced Placement program (38.4 percent) and civic education (100 percent) – resulted in an overall 19.8 percent decrease between 2011 and 2015. Congress has cut millions of dollars for Title I grants to school districts serving low-income students. And after hundreds of millions of dollars were cut from several education programs, schools suffered, according to the report. ""Districts were forced to lay off teachers and support staff, increase class sizes, and cut services like tutoring, athletics and before- and after-school programs,"" the report says. ""Some school districts even contemplated limiting their school bus routes."" Education spending as a percentage of all government spending has also consistently decreased over the last five years, down to just over 1 percent in 2015 from 1.27 percent in 2011. The report additionally compares how President Barack Obama's 2016 budget proposal stacks up against previous years. Overall, there would be a slight increase to many programs that have seen significant cuts or that have been entirely defunded. At the same time, the House and Senate both have appropriations bills in the works that make further education-related cuts, such as to the Obama administration's Investment in Innovation Fund, or i3. ""From schools to hunger to homelessness, Congress is cutting investments in nearly every aspect of children's lives,"" Lesley said. ""If Congress is going to turn this around next year, they've got to raise the budget caps for kids, not just weapons systems."
ECON,"We have a state budget, and if the Legislature does it right, everyone will be a little bit unhappy. Legislative sources Friday morning reported the $1.1 billion budget stabilization account is untouched, but this year’s $400 million in extraordinary revenue growth will be used to increase education spending instead of going into the rainy day fund per the normal rules. Tax system changes will result in higher taxes for some, lower for others and more for the state. And there will still be a few sweeps of excess funds in what are supposed to be dedicated fund accounts, but with less impact than previous years. Budget season reminds me of a movie catchphrase from the original version of “Fun with Dick and Jane,” starring George Segal and Jane Fonda. Upper-class father, mother, son and daughter are seated at the dinner table. The maid silently brings in the food. Dick has lost his cushy vice president job at an aerospace corporation and breaks the news to the family as the plates are delivered. He announces a few economies. No more French wine, no more ski lessons, they won’t heat the swimming pool. The kids groan. The maid snorts. Jane spritely says, “I’ll drop the Book of the Month Club.” The camera cuts to the kitchen, where the maid pragmatically thumbs through the help wanted ads. Dropping ski lessons and subscriptions isn’t going to cut it. Dick and Jane continue to spend like they have it. Dick and Jane eventually decide bank robbery is a viable solution. We approach state and federal budgeting like Dick and Jane. We keep spending money when we don’t have it. And that’s a collective we, because we’re the ones who put the pressure on our elected officials to protect our personal Book of the Month Club. The U.S. Congress has treated the Social Security Trust Fund like an easily robbed bank since it began in 1935. Works for awhile, but eventually there are consequences. According to the National Debt Clock, every citizen of the United States is carrying $61,364 in debt as of June 30. Every citizen of Washington carries an additional $12,467 in state debt for unfunded liabilities, the IOUs written to pensions and other dedicated accounts. If you’re a classic family of four, it’s over a quarter-million dollars. If we stopped accumulating debt today, that’s still a hefty extra mortgage payment worth of debt for every family for the next 30 years. In the 1980s, President Ronal Reagan said, “We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.” Thirty years later, we’re approaching $20 trillion in debt. The last time the national debt went down was under Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Under Reagan, Social Security payroll taxes went up to pre-fund the baby boomer bulge, but the borrowing kept apace through the Clinton and Bush years. The debt inevitably accelerated its growth under President Barack Obama because nothing has changed except raised expectations for more federal health care spending. We’re continuing to run up the credit card while making minimum payments. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the difference in economic impact between closing the gap with higher taxes or reduced spending are less significant than the unsustainable trajectory of federal debt growing faster than the economy. The CBO projected in its 2007 report that by 2029 our total revenues collected will only cover the interest. We’ll be totally debt financing our government. That’s not sustainable. Fix the Debt, a bipartisan group of former legislators, governors and pragmatists, is blunt in their warnings: If we don’t control growing health care costs, including Medicare and Medicaid, we will have less to spend on investments in infrastructure and research for the next generation, and a broken safety net. Every graduate facing a mountain of student loan debt understands how debt diminishes freedom. President Thomas Jefferson said, “The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” If we truly want to live the pursuit of happiness on this Independence Day, we need to fix the debt."
EDU,"The Trump administration is seeking to cut $9.2 billion — or 13.5 percent — from the Education Department’s budget, a dramatic downsizing that would reduce or eliminate grants for teacher training, after-school programs and aid to ­low-income and first-generation college students. Along with the cuts, among the steepest the agency has ever sustained, the administration is also proposing to shift $1.4 billion toward one of President Trump’s key priorities: Expanding charter schools, private-school vouchers and other alternatives to traditional public schools. His $59 billion education budget for 2018 would include an unprecedented federal investment in such “school choice” initiatives, signaling a push to reshape K-12 education in America. The president is proposing a $168 million increase for charter schools — 50 percent above the current level — and a new $250 million private-school choice program, which would probably provide vouchers for families to use at private or parochial schools. Vouchers are one of the most polarizing issues in education, drawing fierce resistance from Democrats and some Republicans, particularly those in rural states. Trump also wants an additional $1 billion for Title I, a $15 billion grant program for schools with high concentrations of poor children. The new funds would be used to encourage districts to adopt a controversial form of choice: Allowing local, state and federal funds to follow children to whichever public school they choose. That policy, known as “portability,” was rejected in the Republican-led Senate during deliberations over the main K-12 education law in 2015. Many Democrats see portability as the first step toward federal vouchers for private schools and argue that it would siphon dollars from schools with high poverty and profound needs to those in more affluent neighborhoods. The slim budget summary released Thursday frames the new spending as the first step toward meeting Trump’s campaign pledge to invest $20 billion in school-choice initiatives. The document makes no mention of another policy Trump is expected to promote through a tax bill: a new tax credit for donations to private-school scholarships. The budget summary also is silent on the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which many in the civil rights community fear will be targeted for deep cuts. A host of programs aimed at ­low-income students are slated for cuts. Federal work-study funds that help students work their way through college would be reduced “significantly.” The proposal also calls for nearly $200 million in cuts to federal TRIO and Gear Up programs, which help disadvantaged students in middle and high schools prepare for college. The Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, a $732 million program that provided aid to 1.6 million students in the 2014-15 academic year, is also on the chopping block. Rather than pour those savings into Pell Grants — which the document describes as a better way to deliver need-based aid — the budget maintains the current funding level for Pell grants and calls for the “cancellation” of $3.9 billion in Pell reserves, money that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had hoped would be used to help students take summer classes. The department would also eliminate $2.4 billion in grants to states for preparing and training teachers and school leaders, along with $1.2 billion in funding for after-school and summer enrichment programs. In addition, it would shrink or kill 20 programs the administration deemed duplicative or outside the scope of the agency. They include $43 million in grants to colleges for teacher preparation and $66 million in “impact aid” to offset tax revenue losses that communities face when they have federal property within their bounds. . There would be no significant change to one of the department’s largest outlays, a $13 billion program that provides money to educate students with disabilities. Advocates and some key lawmakers have long sought to increase that aid. Congress has promised for decades to give states 40 percent of the cost of special education, but has never come close to paying that much."
NAT,"The tribe’s approach to energy development is consistent with its values of self-determination. The tribe conducts its own audits and environmental assessments and operates a land division that is adept at navigating the complex layers of federal agencies that oversee energy projects. Revenues from energy development enable the tribe to pay for government and social services. The tribal-owned energy companies are able to take advantage of their exemption from many of the taxes non-Indian operators must pay. The tribal government has also made efforts to separate politics from business, enabling tribal companies to make their own business decisions."
NAT,"The tribe’s approach to energy development is consistent with its values of self-determination. The tribe conducts its own audits and environmental assessments and operates a land division that is adept at navigating the complex layers of federal agencies that oversee energy projects. Revenues from energy development enable the tribe to pay for government and social services. The tribal-owned energy companies are able to take advantage of their exemption from many of the taxes non-Indian operators must pay. The tribal government has also made efforts to separate politics from business, enabling tribal companies to make their own business decisions."
NAT,"The federal government runs a large array of programs for the roughly 1 million American Indians who live on reservations. Many of the programs are housed within the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Bureau of Indian Education (BIE). These two agencies have about 9,000 employees and spend $2.9 billion annually.1 Since the 1970s, the federal government has promoted Indian ""self-determination,"" but tribes still receive federal subsidies and are burdened by layers of federal regulations. In addition, the government continues to oversee 55 million acres of land held in trust for Indians and tribes.2 Unfortunately, Indians who live on reservations are still very dependent on the federal government. Indians and the federal government have a long, complex, and often sordid relationship. The government has taken many actions depriving Indians of their lands, resources, and freedom. A former top BIA official admitted that federal policies have sometimes been ""ghastly,"" including the government's ""futile and destructive efforts to annihilate Indian cultures.""3 The BIA has administered federal Indian policies since 1824, and its history is marked by episodes of appalling mismanagement. Some of the BIA's scandals are reviewed here, including the Indian trust-fund mess that was recently resolved in a $3.4 billion legal settlement—after a century of federal bungling. This essay also reviews the effects of two special regulatory regimes for Native Americans. One regime is tribal gaming, which has exploded in size since changes to federal law in the 1980s. A number of Indian tribes have become wealthy from casinos, but gaming has also spawned lobbying and litigation because special preferences are given to some tribes and not to other tribes or other Americans. Another problematic regime discussed here is the system of procurement rules that Congress has created for Alaska Native Corporations. American Indians and Alaskan Natives have a unique history and a special relationship with the federal government. However, subsidies and regulatory preferences are not a good way to create broad-based and durable economic growth for these peoples. Subsidies are also inconsistent with the movement toward Indian self-determination. A better way to generate a lasting rise in Indian prosperity is to make institutional reforms to property rights and tribal governance on reservations. These reforms are discussed in the last section."
EX,"Even aloof Americans and West- Europeans are affected by “foreign affairs”. The lacking concern’s cause is supported the impression that all troubles happen “abroad”. It is the good fortune of the American continent, and largely of Europe’s west, that it avoided numerous destructive territorial-ethnic disputes. Borders played a role among the violent forces that had shaped the 20th century. Several components have contributed. One is the case of peoples that, devoid of historic independence, lack/ed their own state. Furthermore, boundaries ignore ethnicity: such borders separate what is apt to want to belong together. The world wars had led to the redrawing of boundaries and to the creation and to the abolition of states. The problems of unfair and inappropriate borders remain. We are mired in the morass of arbitrary borders and the states they define that created populations that perceive of them as “prisons”. Here an example. The reorganization of the USSR and Yugoslavia into successor states tells of the problem caused by boundaries designed to settle disputes but that feed new tensions. In Europe alone, much continues to hide under covers. A sample: Laplanders, Germans in several countries, Austrians in Italy, Sorbs in Germany, Frisians, Catalans, Basques, Bretons, Ocsitanians, Scots, Kasubs, Albanians, Serbs, Flemiss, Corsicans, Moldovans, Macedonians, Russians, Ukranians, Romanians, Gypsies, Magyars and Jews. New maps make teachers despair; they need to upgrade displays and to learn something new. Cartographers benefit. The discrepancy between existing borders and their possible adjustment to connect what belongs together and to separate what is different, fuels disputes. Our instincts are territorial. We share this trait with dogs that raise a leg. The difference is that we have missiles. We claim to be cleverer than our canines, yet a few square miles can cause bitter conflicts. Therefore, rules to guide the processes of adjustment are crucial. Even if understood, this does not make solutions, easy. The Kosovo question, being far from the Western reader and unconnected to the writer’s background, is suited to illustrate some generalizations. To its misfortune, Kosovo represents much that defines territorial quarrels. Typically, allegations backing good claims are pit against each other. However, the invoked facts lack a common denominator and sometimes prove only the fantasy of their inventors. Who should own contested territory that had several past owners? Actual demographics, facts and myths collide. Regarding Kosovo, a battle lost by the Christians against the Turks creates a “clearly unclear” case. In fact, there were two clashes. The Serbs prefer to remember the second one. No wonder. In the first encounter, a neighbor did the heavy lifting. It is a role that Serbs now resent because of claims to a district newly administered by Serbia. Actually, the second battle on Kosovo Meadow was fought by an alliance in 1389. The defeat brought the ruin of the Serbs that represented Europe’s resistance to armed Islam. The glorious defeat, became an icon by which the Serbs define themselves. Subsequently, this identification grew into a complication. The essentials tend to be repeated in areas that were under the rule of alien empires. Today’s contested Kosovo’s original Serb population moved north – into Hungary’s south where they became a majority. WW1’s generous victors gave the land to Serbia. Earlier, through migration, Kosovo became Albanian and Muslim. While alleging that demography prevails over Hungary’s historical claim, in Kosovo the claim is reversed to assert that history overrides demography. A conclusion is suggested by world wars; common borders can make for bad neighbors. Territorialized disputes tend to make the involved communities lose their sound judgment. Reason, fairness, common interests, as well as the facts, are abandoned in favor of claims presented as temper tantrums that demand land. Examine the case of contested borders: only rarely can “good lines” be drawn –ones that respect the identity of all locals. Borders that reduce tensions, rather than to nurture them, are not the rule. The great peace treaties (Vienna 1814, Paris 1919 and Yalta/Potsdam 1945 share an element. The victors claimed to lay down the basis of a lasting peace. Just borders creating states that rely on a supportive people were to be the solution. Sound borders were to facilitate internal harmony. Stability was to be served by eliminating territorial disputes between ethnic states. To support the edifice, the integrity of the entities was to be inviolable. Such commitments lasted until the “next war” and the repetition of the charades at peace treaties. Much is wrong with the alleged stabilizing result of inviolable borders that ignore the artificial divisions they impose. Equally wobbly is a related assumption. It is that borders, drawn without the consent of the affected, secure the state behind them. Also, the fiction is believed, that states with reluctant subjects can become national states and as such will function as homogenous democratic and stable communities. Therefore, in principle, the entities created are declared untouchable. The conditional inserted into an absolute is not the result of logical inconsistency. Obviously, great powers are, such as Russia in the Crimea, exempted. The equation that sacrosanct borders guarantee peace is wrong. The theory attempts to overlook a component of reality which is the lot of ethnics assigned to the “wrong” state. Forcing local ethnic majorities to submit to a “national state” of another people has consequences. The contradiction between claimed homogeneity and ethnic diversity brings internal strife first and then interstate conflicts. It is hard to be loyal to a state that claims not to be yours. This outcome arises because the denial of rights must occur when arbitrary borders incorporate resented and suspected populations into structures that are alien to them and which they will resent. Suppressed ethnic groups tend to overlap interstate boundaries. Thus, the distance between internal and international strife is small. “What is to be done?” Let us begin with an admission. It is senseless to support centrally governed multi-ethnic states that want to eliminate minorities whose existence provokes the “people of state”. Suppression in the pursuit of stability is a bad policy. In the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this effort led to the Great War. Those who wish to preserve multi-ethnic states governed by the pretention that they are mono-ethnic, need to be nudged to grant local self-government. Failing that, separatism will emerge. The international community must abandon the view that all autonomists are separatists and that the former are therefore a threat to peace. For some time now, the contrary approach was thought to provide stability. As in Iraq, major powers support allies that suppress minorities. This has consequences. By ignoring federal solutions, countries whose minorities might have a state across the border, limit democracy alone for the majority. With a built-in enemy, much will be sacrificed to combat the feared collusion of domestic and foreign foes. Such a project will also hinder the development of peoples that discover “brothers” in need of liberation. The derived duty to irredentism or to conformity will be exploited by ultras that demand the kind of unity on which dictatorship feeds. The problem is soluble even if the ailment seems to be a chronic. The international community must use its influence not to re-draw borders but to change their consequence. Not borders need to be moved: their outcome must be revised. To save the country, ultras claim that power be used to create a uniform people. Yet the openly multi-ethnic state must not be a threat. Nor is forced unity a pre-condition of greatness. These are the errors of the past – successful societies have avoided the disease. Minority status must not be a punishment. The land of the minorities is not conquered territory kept down to secure imperial survival. Disputes recede once rights are respected because they apply to “man” and do not express ethnic privilege. The rule of law instead of the rule of a lording majority, defuses ticking bombs."
NAT,"The Crow Nation sits above one of the largest coal reserves in the United States. An estimated nine billion tons of coal lie beneath the tribe’s reservation in southeastern Montana—a vast landscape of rolling hills at the edge of the Powder River Basin. Oil, natural gas, and various minerals are also found on the reservation, but it is coal that offers the greatest economic opportunity for the impoverished tribe. Yet the tribe’s 13,000 members have little to show for their massive energy reserves. Although half of the tribe’s revenue comes from coal, most of it remains underground. Where development does occur, the process is slow and cumbersome. Unemployment approaches 50 percent on the reservation, and tribal members suffer from high rates of homelessness, crime, and inadequate housing. This policy report focuses on why tribes such as the Crow struggle to capitalize on their energy resources. As energy production in the United States reaches record levels, tribes find themselves missing out on a revolution that is bringing economic opportunities to countless communities across the nation. The energy resources beneath Indian lands are hardly trivial. Reservations contain almost 30 percent of the nation’s coal reserves west of the Mississippi, 50 percent of potential uranium reserves, and 20 percent of all known oil and gas reserves in the United States.1 The Council of Energy Resource Tribes, a tribal energy consortium, estimates Indian energy resources to be worth nearly $1.5 trillion.2 But federal control of Indian lands largely deprives tribes of the opportunity to benefit from such wealth. Throughout Indian Country, the vast majority of energy resources are undeveloped. Indian lands are managed in trust by the federal government. Any attempt to explore or develop resources on tribal lands must endure a costly rigmarole of bureaucracy and regulations. Making matters worse, the legacy of the federal trusteeship of Indian lands has left most tribes with complicated property institutions that are virtually anathema to economic growth. The consequences are that even tribes with significant energy resources remain locked in a poverty trap. Their resources amount to “dead capital”—unable to generate benefits for tribal communities or the broader economy.3 Policy reforms that enable tribes to more easily convert their resources into “live capital” are sorely needed."
NAT,"On Indian lands, companies must go through at least four federal agencies and 49 steps to acquire a permit for energy development, compared to as few as four steps off reservations. The effect of this complicated bureaucracy is to raise the cost of entering into resource development agreements with tribes or individual Indians.13 The number of agencies and regulations involved in Indian energy development results in confusion, overlap, and a lack of coordination between agencies. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has the primary authority over the management of Indian trust assets, but other agencies are involved in related issues such as revenue flows and oversight of resource extraction. These include the Bureau of Land Management, the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians, and if coal is involved, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. It is not uncommon for several years to pass before the necessary approvals are acquired to begin energy development on Indian lands—a process that takes only a few months on private lands. At any time, a federal agency may demand more information or shut down development activity. Simply completing title search requests results in delays from the BIA. Indians have waited six years to receive title search reports that other Americans can get in a few days.14"
NAT,"Indian poverty persists despite the fact that many Native American reservations contain considerable energy wealth. The Department of the Interior recently estimated that Indian lands have the potential to produce 5.35 billion barrels of oil, 37.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 53 billion tons of coal. According to another estimate, Indian energy resources amount to 30 percent of the nation’s coal reserves west of the Mississippi, 50 percent of potential uranium reserves, and 20 percent of known oil and gas reserves.6 These resources can provide substantial economic opportunities for Native Americans if they choose to pursue energy development. In 2009, the Council of Energy Resource Tribes estimated that, at existing prices, the value of energy resources on Indian lands amounted to nearly $1.5 trillion.7 Recent technological advancements in hydraulic fracturing have only increased this potential value. For many tribes, energy development is the primary revenue generator to fund education, infrastructure, and other public services on tribal land. Some also view energy development as a path to promoting tribal self-determination. Revenue from coal development on the Crow reservation in Montana, for instance, enables the tribe to control more of its own affairs apart from the federal government’s trusteeship of Indian lands."
NAT,"Indian lands contain tremendous resource wealth, but the vast majority of tribal lands with energy resources remain undeveloped. The Department of the Interior estimates that energy development is taking place on only 2.1 million acres of Indian lands while an additional 15 million acres with energy potential remain untapped. In other words, 88 percent of Indian lands with energy potential have yet to be developed.8 The Fort Berthold reservation, for instance, is located at the center of the shale oil boom in North Dakota. Since 2010, hundreds of wells have been drilled on Fort Berthold, generating more than $40 million per month for the affiliated tribes in 2013. Just outside the reservation, however, roughly twice as many wells have been drilled per square mile. Lease payments to mineral owners are also higher off the reservation compared to tribal lands, leading many tribal members to question why they are not able to take full advantage of the energy boom occurring around them.9"
NAT,"Nearly every aspect of Indian energy development is controlled at some level by the federal government. The Secretary of the Interior must review and authorize all leases and agreements. Federal agencies also collect royalty payments on behalf of tribes and individual Indians and then redistribute them as royalty disbursements to Indian mineral owners. The government’s authority over Indian lands traces its roots to the federal trusteeship established in the early nineteenth century. In 1831, Chief Justice John Marshall described tribes as “nations within a nation,” unable to negotiate treaties with foreign nations but implying that they retained the power to govern themselves. Marshall, however, went on to describe the relationship between tribes and the United States as “that of a ward to his guardian.”10 From this conception, the federal government became the trustee of Indian lands. The government holds the legal title to all Indian lands and is required to manage those lands for the benefit of all Indians. Underlying the federal trust responsibility is the notion that tribes are incapable of managing their own lands. For much of the twentieth century, tribes had little or no control over their energy resources. Royalties and other payments were historically set by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The agency consistently undervalued Indian resources and, by all accounts, did a poor job of negotiating and collecting royalty payments.11 In 1977, the Indian Policy Review Commission concluded that “the leases negotiated on behalf of Indians are among the poorest agreements ever made.”12 In practice, the federal trusteeship of Indian lands limits opportunities for tribal resource development and self-determination. Although tribes have gradually been granted more control over energy development decisions on their reservations, tribes still must acquire approval for every lease, a process that is notoriously slow and cumbersome. Many investors and energy companies simply avoid Indian lands altogether. In addition, Indians themselves are often skeptical of energy development due to past abuses and mismanagement by the government."
NAT,"Not only does the government’s trust authority raise the cost of energy development on Indian lands, it has a long history of not living up to its fiduciary responsibility. The recent class action suit Cobell v. Salazar alleged that the U.S. government incorrectly accounted for income from trust assets belonging to Indian landowners.18 Elouise Cobell, a director of a nonprofit Native American bank, filed the suit on behalf of thousands of Indians claiming that the United States mishandled billions of dollars of Indian trust assets. The case settled in 2009 with the government agreeing to pay individual Indians and tribes $3.4 billion, an amount far less than what was lost by the federal government. The agencies responsible for overseeing energy development have little or no incentive to ensure that Indian income is properly documented and distributed. Inaccuracies and mismanagement are a persistent problem among the agencies involved in Indian Country. Partly as a result of this problem, the Minerals Management Service was disbanded in 2010 and replaced with the Office of Natural Resources Revenue. Whether this reform has improved the management of Indian trust assets remains to be seen.19"
NAT,"Imagine if the government were responsible for looking after your best interests. All of your assets must be managed by bureaucrats on your behalf. A special bureau is even set up to oversee your affairs. Every important decision you make requires approval, and every approval comes with a mountain of regulations. How well would this work? Just ask Native Americans. The federal government is responsible for managing Indian affairs for the benefit of all Indians. But by all accounts the government has failed to live up to this responsibility. As a result, Native American reservations are among the poorest communities in the United States. Here’s how the government keeps Native Americans in poverty. Indian lands are owned and managed by the federal government. Chief Justice John Marshall set Native Americans on the path to poverty in 1831 when he characterized the relationship between Indians and the government as “resembling that of a ward to his guardian.” With these words, Marshall established the federal trust doctrine, which assigns the government as the trustee of Indian affairs. That trusteeship continues today, but it has not served Indians well. Underlying this doctrine is the notion that tribes are not capable of owning or managing their lands. The government is the legal owner of all land and assets in Indian Country and is required to manage them for the benefit of Indians. But because Indians do not generally own their land or homes on reservations, they cannot mortgage their assets for loans like other Americans. This makes it incredibly difficult to start a business in Indian Country. Even tribes with valuable natural resources remain locked in poverty. Their resources amount to “dead capital”—unable to generate growth for tribal communities. Nearly every aspect of economic development is controlled by federal agencies. All development projects on Indian land must be reviewed and authorized by the government, a process that is notoriously slow and burdensome. On Indian lands, companies must go through at least four federal agencies and 49 steps to acquire a permit for energy development. Off reservation, it takes only four steps. This bureaucracy prevents tribes from capitalizing on their resources. It’s not uncommon for years to pass before the necessary approvals are acquired to begin energy development on Indian lands—a process that takes only a few months on private lands. At any time, an agency may demand more information or shut down development. Simply completing a title search can cause delays. Indians have waited six years to receive title search reports that other Americans can get in just a few days. The result is that many investors avoid Indian lands altogether. When development does occur, federal agencies are involved in every detail, even collecting payments on behalf of tribes. The royalties are then distributed back to Indians—that is, if the government doesn’t lose the money in the process. Reservations have a complex legal framework that hinders economic growth. Thanks to the legacy of federal control, reservations have complicated legal and property systems that are detrimental to economic growth. Jurisdiction and land ownership can vary widely on reservations as a result of the government’s allotment policies of the nineteenth century. Navigating this complex system makes development and growth difficult on Indian lands."
NAT,"The challenges facing tribes are multifaceted, but one thing is certain: The federal government has not lived up to its fiduciary responsibility to manage Indian lands for the benefit of tribes and their members. Tribes such as the Southern Ute and Salish-Kootenai have demonstrated their ability to manage their resources, and other tribes are eager to replicate their success. If policymakers continue to relinquish control over Indian affairs, tribes could more easily benefit from their energy wealth. Several other policy proposals could support tribal sovereignty over energy development and address the obstacles imposed by the federal government. These include: Expanding the HEARTH Act to apply to traditional forms of subsurface energy development; Extending the federal government’s “one-stop shops,” which streamline the approval process for energy development on the Fort Berthold and Navajo reservations, to apply throughout Indian Country; Allowing individual Indian mineral owners to negotiate IMDA or TERA agreements and eliminate many of the steps required to process such leases; Repealing the $6,500 fee assessed by the Bureau of Land Management for processing each application to drill on Indian lands; and Streamlining the TERA approval process to make it a more practical and effective alternative for tribes.28 Another initiative underway from within Indian Country is the adoption of business and commercial laws that promote certainty for lenders and other businesses. One example that is used by a growing number of tribes is the Model Tribal Secured Transactions Act (MTSTA). This model commercial law has enabled tribes to harmonize their legal framework for many types of commercial transactions with the laws of state and other tribal jurisdictions. This has helped to reduce some of the uncertainty and confusion that lenders and investors often face when attempting to do business in Indian Country. Tribes that have adopted laws such as the MTSTA have done so to help reduce the cost of doing business in their jurisdictions and to promote access to capital and credit for their tribal and member-owned businesses. Today, however, many tribes still lack effective and relevant commercial laws.29 First Nations in Canada are exploring other policy solutions that address similar challenges to those faced by tribes in the United States. The proposed First Nation Property Ownership Initiative would give First Nations the opportunity to hold full legal title to their lands, just like any other Canadian. Each First Nation would have the option to choose whether to participate in the initiative. Those that participate would have the power to transfer the legal title to individuals while retaining First Nation jurisdiction over the land. A similar initiative in the United States would have dramatic implications for Native American economies, not the least of which would be to reduce the authority of the federal government over Indian resource development.30"
NAT,"Another issue is that the federal government has a long-standing ""trust responsibility"" to Indian tribes. That means that while Congress holds ultimate power over tribal governments, it is supposed to consider the best interests of the tribes when it makes decisions.46 The BIA says that the trust responsibility is ""a legally enforceable fiduciary obligation on the part of the United States to protect tribal treaty rights, lands, assets, and resources.""47 However, as the tribes move further toward self-governance, the trust responsibility becomes less relevant, as the Supreme Court has suggested.48 That is, as tribes gain greater control over their lands, natural resources, and trust funds, it becomes their own responsibility to manage them well, not the federal government's responsibility. It had long been understood that the BIA was supposed to ""work itself out of a job"" as it helped Indians become self-sufficient.49 Indian advocates sometimes say that the federal trust responsibility includes not just the protection of Indian lands and resources, but the protection of subsidies as well—as if tribes should receive subsidies in perpetuity. But BIA expert Theodore Taylor noted that this is ""loose use"" of the trust idea that is factually incorrect, and that legally, Indian subsidies are ""gratuitous"" benefits that can be cut off whenever Congress decides to do so.50 Indian self-determination is inconsistent with continued Indian dependence on the government for subsidies. Besides, Indian subsidies have similar negative economic effects as other government subsidies, such as farm subsidies and welfare subsidies. Subsidies reduce the incentive of recipients to pursue productive activities. As far back as the 1928 Meriam report, experts have observed that BIA subsidies reduced the incentive of Indians to work.51"
NAT,"The assumption of tribal government incompetence has very high costs. Not only is it offensive to Indian nations, but it leads states to approach tribal-state partnerships—if they consider them at all—with hesitation and a demand for extra assurances or performance guarantees. These in turn make it harder for tribes and states to come to agreement and handicap tribal development efforts. In some cases, states refuse to partner with tribes at all. It goes without saying that some tribal governments are incompetent, but this hardly distinguishes Indian nations from other societies. Across the universe of tribes—as across the universe of countries—we find both good and bad examples of governance. Unfortunately, however, the bad examples often get the publicity, but there is ample evidence on the good government side as well. For example, a number of studies indicate that, on average, when tribes take over services under PL-638, they outperform federal agencies. They create more value, operate more efficiently, introduce more services, and build more public infrastructure than outside operators do.8 The reasons are simple and predictable. When tribes take over responsibility for a reservation program, two things happen. First, program administration begins to reflect their agendas instead of outsiders’ agendas. Second, decisions and their consequences are linked more closely to each other. Tribes begin to pay the price of bad decisions and reap the benefits of good decisions; as a result, over time, the quality of the decisions improves. Perhaps more striking, tribes are increasingly administering complex and innovative programs in ways that make them best-in-class not just in Indian Country but across governing units in the United States. Some quick examples: the Jicarilla Apache wildlife management program in New Mexico is arguably the premier program in the West, with striking achievements to its credit in the restoration of trophy- quality game herds and fisheries. The State of Minnesota has drawn attention to the Fond du Lac tribe’s foster care program not because it is an outstanding Indian program but because it is an outstanding foster care program. The tribal college run by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation in Montana is getting applications from nonIndian students because it provides superior quality education. Not only is the assumption of tribal government incompetence out of step with a growing body of contrary evidence, but its implied conclusion—that the state response should be to resist partnerships with tribes—is logically flawed. Even in cases where tribal program operation is problematic, the solution is not for the states to walk away from these potentially beneficial partnerships, but for the tribes and the states to jointly work out capacity-building arrangements that can improve tribal governance. This is the clear implication of the Harvard Project research finding, noted above, that tribal control is essential to tribal development. It is in the interest of both states and tribes to build the capacity of Indian nations to govern effectively. Our evidence indicates that, in doing so, states will be lining up for eventual spillover benefits."
NAT,"Finally, the fear that tribes are economically desperate and, therefore, will cut regulatory corners in order to attract economic development or foist costs onto the states has motivated states to assert jurisdiction over tribes in some cases or walk away from productive partnerships in others. Of course there’s a paternalistic edge to this argument, which suggests that states are best able to determine appropriate policy for reservations. But it also assumes that tribes will be willing to turn their homelands into toxic cesspools or their factories into sweatshops. The evidence suggests otherwise. Economic development on most reservations has meant significant improvements in quality of life, not deterioration. Economically successful tribes tend to provide more services, maintain newer schools, shorten fire and rescue response times, impose higher environmental standards, and in other ways exceed the levels of federal and state service provision that prevailed before development took off. The Jicarilla Apaches have improved wildlife management in the northern part of New Mexico; Sandia Pueblo has imposed the toughest water quality standards along a major stretch of the Rio Grande; the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians has improved the health of its own people by taking over management of health care; the Cabazon Band has strengthened regional fire and police operations with high quality training and links to non-Indian community services. Once again, the critical issue is tribal capability. As Indian nations improve their own governing capacities, they typically take the kinds of actions that would logically reduce state risks and concerns—and they become better partners in the effort to mitigate those risks that remain."
NAT,"One such difficulty is fractionated land ownership. Federal inheritance laws required many Indian lands to be passed in equal shares to multiple heirs. After several generations, these lands have become so fractionated that there are often hundreds of owners per parcel. Managing these fractionated lands is nearly impossible, and much of the land remains idle. Energy regulations make it difficult for tribes to develop their resources. Darrin Old Coyote, chairman of the Crow Tribe in Montana, puts it plainly: “The war on coal is a war on our families and our children.” Coal provides the greatest economic opportunity for the impoverished tribe, but regulations are making it hard for the tribe to capitalize on their natural resources. Some are even trying to prevent the tribe from exporting coal to Asia. The federal government has repeatedly mismanaged Indian assets. Tribes historically had little or no control over their energy resources. Royalties were set by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but the agency consistently undervalued Indian resources. A federal commission concluded in 1977 that leases negotiated on behalf of Indians were “among the poorest agreements ever made.” Unfortunately, it hasn’t gotten much better. A recent class action suit alleged that the government mismanaged billions of dollars in Indian assets. The case settled in 2009 for $3.4 billion—far less than what was lost by the feds. -- Reservations contain valuable natural resources worth nearly $1.5 trillion, according to a recent estimate. But the vast majority of these resources remain undeveloped because the federal government gets in the way. Ron Crossguns of the Blackfeet Tribe recently put it this way: “It’s our right. We say yes or no. I don’t think the outside world should come out here and dictate to us what we should do with our properties.” As long as tribes are denied the right to control their own resources, they will remain locked in poverty and dependence. But if tribes are given the dignity they deserve, they will have the opportunity to unleash the tremendous wealth of Indian nations."
NAT,"The fact is that capable and sovereign tribal governments advance state goals as well as tribal goals. No state has an incentive to allow the kind of poverty and economic underdevelopment that has characterized Indian reservations for so long to continue to fester within its borders. That said, twelve years of research at the Udall Center and Harvard Project emphasizes that tribal control over tribal affairs is the only policy that works for economic development. We have been unable to find a single reservation where major decisions are controlled by outsiders—the states, the federal government, or special interests—where successful economic development has taken root. In short, if states want Indian poverty and its off-reservation consequences to be adequately addressed, they have to stop insisting that their rules apply to the exclusion of tribes’ rules. The evidence is compelling that where tribes have taken advantage of the federal self-determination policy to gain control of their own resources and of economic and other activity within their borders, and have backed up that control with good governance, they have invigorated their economies and produced positive economic spillovers to states."
HEG,"Aging hardware is indeed a top concern of Pentagon leaders. In 2010, the General Accountability Office reported that Navy officials found that fleet readiness had “declined over the previous ten years and was well below the levels necessary to support reliable, sustained operations at sea.” Military leaders told lawmakers in March that aircraft are now anywhere from 22 to 29 years old and F-18 jets are being flown for 60 percent more hours than the lifespan for which they were designed. Just last week, the Air Force -- which has been launching airstrikes on ISIS for 15 months -- warned of a possible shortage of bombs."
HEG,"Techno-nationalist arguments based on sound bytes or parsimonious economic models cannot deal with the complexity of the multiplayer game. They rarely distinguish between different levels and kinds of know-how. Instead, they equate innovation with scientific publications or patents on cutting-edge technology produced in universities or in commercial research labs. They ignore the contributions of the other players in the innovation game that don’t result in publications or patents. Techno-nationalists also tend to oversimplify the phenomenon of globalization, often assuming that high-level know-how never crosses national borders—only the final products made using the know-how are traded.19 This assumption is pivotal in theoretical models of “North-South” trade that Richard Freeman invokes to predict the woeful consequences of the erosion of U.S. technological leadership. The reality, however, is that high-level ideas cross national borders rather easily, whereas a large proportion of “final” output, especially in the service sector, does not. The Propositions My analysis of the multiplayer game and cross-border interactions suggests outcomes that differ sharply from the dire predictions of the techno-nationalists. According to my assessment, the United States is not locked into a “winner-take-all” race for scientific and technological leadership, and the growth of research capabilities in China and India—and thus their share of cutting-edge research—does not reduce U.S. prosperity. Indeed my analysis suggests that advances abroad will improve living standards in the U.S. Moreover, the benefits I identify are different from the conventional economist’s account whereby prosperity abroad increases opportunities for U.S. exporters. Instead, I show that cutting-edge research developed abroad benefits domestic production and consumption in the service sector. And contrary to the policy prescriptions of techno-nationalists, I suggest that the U.S. embrace the expansion of research capabilities abroad instead of devoting more resources to maintaining its lead in science and cutting-edge technology.20 My assessment and prescriptions differ so sharply from those of the techno-nationalists for reasons that I summarize below: The world is a long way from being “flat”—China and India aren’t anywhere close to catching up with the U.S. in their capacity to develop and use technological innovations. Starting afresh may allow China and India to leapfrog ahead in some fields, in building advanced mobile phone networks, for example. But excelling in the overall innovation game requires a great and diverse team, which, history suggests, takes a very long time to build. Consider Japan, which began to “enter the world” after the Boshin War of 1868. In the subsequent Meiji Restoration, the country abolished its feudal system and instituted a Western legal system and a quasi-parliamentary constitutional government. In a few decades, Japan had modernized its industry, its military, and its educational system. Today Japan is a highly developed economy and makes important contributions to advancing the technological frontier. But nearly a century and a half after Japan started modernizing, its overall capacity to develop and use innovations, as evidenced by the country’s average productivity, remains behind that of the U.S. Similarly, Korea and Taiwan started industrializing (as it happens, under Japanese rule) about a century ago and enjoyed miraculous rates of growth after the 1960s. In several sectors of the electronics industry, Korean and Taiwanese companies are technological leaders. Yet their overall productivity suggests they have less capacity than Japan to develop and use innovations. Is it likely, then, that within any reader’s lifetime China and India will attain the parity with the U.S. that has eluded Japan, Korea, and Taiwan? The fear of offshoring of innovation is similarly exaggerated—don’t expect to hear a giant sucking sound anytime soon. The massive relocation of innovation appears highly unlikely. The fact that U.S. companies have started R&D centers abroad that do high-level research doesn’t mean that all lower-level know-how development will quickly follow. Of the many activities included in the innovation game, only some are performed well in remote, low-cost locations. Many mid-level activities, for instance, are best conducted close to potential customers. Any catch-up, even if it takes place gradually and in the normal course of development, will to some degree reduce the U.S. “lead.” Furthermore, the global influence of techno-nationalism could accelerate this process. As alarmists in the U.S. continue to remind us, governments in “emerging” countries such as China and India—also in the thrall of techno-nationalist thinking—are making a determined effort to leap ahead in cutting-edge science and technology. But I am skeptical that these efforts are going to do any more good for China’s and India’s economy than similar efforts in Europe and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s.21 But putting aside the issue of whether investing in cutting-edge research represents a good use of Chinese and Indian resources, does whatever erosion of U.S. primacy in developing high-level know-how this might cause really threaten U.S. prosperity? Should the U.S. government respond in kind by putting even more money into research? Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has long decried what he refers to as the “dangerous obsession” with “national competitiveness.” As Krugman wrote in a 1994 article in Foreign Affairs, the widespread tendency to think that “the United States and Japan are competitors in the same sense that Coca-Cola competes with Pepsi” is “flatly, completely and demonstrably wrong.” Although “competitive problems could arise in principle, as a practical, empirical matter,” Krugman goes on to say, “the major nations of the world are not to any significant degree in economic competition with each other.”22 The techno-nationalist claim that U.S. prosperity requires that the country “maintain its scientific and technological lead” is particularly dubious: the argument fails to recognize that the development of scientific knowledge or cutting-edge technology is not a zero-sum competition. The results of scientific research are available at no charge to anyone anywhere in the world. Most arguments for the public funding of scientific research are in fact based on the unwillingness of private investors to undertake research that cannot yield a profit. Cutting-edge technology (as opposed to scientific research) has commercial value because it can be patented; but patent owners generally don’t charge higher fees to foreign licensors. The then tiny Japanese company Sony was one of the first licensors of Bell Labs’ transistor patent. Sony paid all of $50,000—and only after first obtaining special permission from the Japanese Ministry of Finance—for the license that started it on the road to becoming a household name in consumer electronics. Moreover, if patent holders choose not to grant licenses but to exploit their inventions on their own, this does not mean that the country of origin secures most of the benefit at the expense of other countries. Suppose IBM chooses to exploit internally, instead of licensing, a breakthrough from its China Research Laboratory (employing 150 research staff in Beijing). This does not help China and hurt everyone else. Rather, as I discuss at length later, the benefits go to IBM’s stockholders, to employees who make or market the product that embodies the invention, and—above all—to customers, who secure the lion’s share of the benefit from most innovations. These stockholders, employees, and customers, who number in the tens of millions, are located all over the world. In a world where breakthrough ideas easily cross national borders, the origin of ideas is inconsequential. Contrary to Thomas Friedman’s assertion, it does not matter that Google’s search algorithm was invented in California. After all, a Briton invented the protocols of the World Wide Web—in a lab in Switzerland. A Swede and a Dane in Tallinn, Estonia, started Skype, the leading provider of peer-to-peer Internet telephony. How did the foreign origins of these innovations harm the U.S. economy? The techno-nationalist preoccupation with high-level research also obscures the importance of what happens at lower levels of the innovation game. High-level breakthroughs that originate in China or India can in principle be used to develop mid- and ground-level products of value to workers and consumers everywhere. But the benefits are not automatic: realizing the value of high-level innovation requires “venturesome” lower-level players who have the resourcefulness and gumption to solve challenging technical and business problems. Without venturesome radio manufacturers such as Sony, transistors might have remained lab curiosities. Moreover, the benefits of lower-level venturesome consumption often remain in the country where it occurs, and all countries don’t have the same capacity for such consumption. Therefore, I argue, because high-level ideas cross borders easily, a nation’s “venturesome consumption”—the willingness and ability of intermediate producers and individual consumers to take a chance on and effectively use new know-how and products—is at least as important as its capacity to undertake high-level research. Maryland has a higher per capita income than Mississippi, Norway has a higher per capita income than Nigeria, and Bosnia has a higher per capita income than Bangladesh; the richer places are not ahead because they are (or once were) significant developers of breakthrough technologies. Rather, they are wealthier because of their capacity to benefit from innovations that originated elsewhere. Conversely, the city of Rochester, New York (home to Xerox, Kodak, and the University of Rochester) is reputed to have one of the highest number of patents per capita of any city in the U.S. It is far from the most economically vibrant. The United States, according to my analysis, has more than just great scientists and research labs: it also hosts an innovation game with many players who can exploit high-level breakthroughs regardless of where they originate. Therefore, the erosion of the U.S. lead in cutting-edge research, far from hurting the U.S. economy, may well be a blessing for the following reason: an increase in the world’s supply of high-level know-how provides more raw material for mid- and ground-level innovations that increase living standards in the United States. The U.S. technological lead narrowed after World War II as Western Europe and Japan rebuilt their economies and research capabilities. This led not to a decrease, but to an increase in U.S. prosperity.23 And the U.S. likely enjoys a higher standard of living because Taiwan and Korea have started contributing to the world’s supply of scientific and technological knowledge."
HEG,"March 21 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of the Army is boosting its end strength to 1,018,000 soldiers by the end of September with the addition of 28,000 soldiers to its ranks."
HEG,"Now that the US Army has officially announced cuts to reduce its active duty force to 450,000, the howls and screams of protest coming from many directions, and especially from Capitol Hill, are deafening. Many will complain that this will be the smallest Army since the start of World War II. Similarly, the Navy will sink to some 280 ships and pre-World War II size. And the Air Force too has made sharp cuts in its aircraft fleet. But are these fears and dire predictions of America’s fate due to smaller land, sea and air forces justified? Or are there other views and reasons from which to draw different conclusions? Unfortunately, emotion rather than thoughtful analysis is dominating reactions to these drawdowns. And of course, no one refers to the Constitution in this debate that grants Congress the power “to raise an army ... and to maintain a navy.” People forget that the US actually has other armies by different names. The first is the US Marine Corps, some 175,000 strong. Even if the Army were to be reduced further to 425,000, America would have an active ground force of 600,000. Unless the United States decides to re-occupy Iraq or invade Syria or Iran, that number seems more than enough to keep the nation safe. And if the US stumbled into a war with China and its population of 1.3 billion, even the 12 million in uniform during World War II would not necessarily be up to the task. As a retired four star general wryly remarked after visiting China before its current defense build-up, the US does not have enough bullets to win a land war in Asia. The US also has a sizable Army National Guard and reserve component of about a million, a force it did not have in any quantity before World War II. And no mention has been made about the technologically advanced weapons that the services wield, orders of magnitude more effective and destructive than what was in the field 75 years ago. If the Navy’s 280 ships found itself in battle with the World War II Navy that was more than 20 times larger in total numbers, including 27 large and 90 small deck aircraft carriers, how long would it take to send that fleet to the bottom? Not long. The point is that numbers alone say very little without a strategic or operational context. Similarly, the Air Force of today and tomorrow is light years more advanced than even its predecessor of 20 years ago. Of course, quantity can have a quality of its own. And reductions can go too far in preventing the formation of a critical mass of military capability. While this furor over cuts is substituting for a real debate, a far greater threat faces the US military, a threat likely to be more damaging than a recrudescent Russia, a more muscular China and an expanding Islamic State. This danger is uncontrollable internal cost growth that will erode and deplete military capability and capacity unless it is checked now. Unfortunately, few realize the consequences and fewer are prepared to take necessary corrective action that indeed could exceed the ability of a political system and its broken government in Washington to effect. The sources of this exploding cost growth are no secret. By way of comparison, in constant dollars, more is being spent on defense today than at the height of the Reagan defense build-up more than a quarter of a century ago when nearly a million more people were serving on active duty in uniform. Cost of the all-volunteer force, health care, overhead, operations and maintenance, procurement, retirees, research and development, and all the other budget line items are increasing in some cases by 5-7% a year. Even if the defense budget is significantly increased, which it will not be short of an existential crisis, this cost growth will exceed the most optimistic estimates of any plus ups for the Pentagon. As a result, if action is not taken now, a 21st century version of the dreaded “hollow force” that plagued the military after the Vietnam War will recur. The issue will not be the size of the military. The issue will be how the nation will cope with a military that is not fully prepared or capable of defending the country, our friends and our interests. Rather than bemoan the current reductions, let’s get on with actions to contain this exploding cost growth so that the term hollow force remains an artifact of history."
HEG,"Trump’s election marks the end of the long phase of American world hegemony. Despite the electoral slogan “Make America Great Again” and the great expectations this may have generated, his presidency will presumably be characterized by an overall retrenchment. Many different interpretations have been provided on the reasons of Trump’s success ranging from populist framing to FBI support. Contrary to the mainstream debate, I see a more fundamental reason underpinning his victory: the changed costs/benefits balance in the US role in the world. The theory of hegemonic stability holds that at some point the hegemon will start to decline due to the increased costs of the management of the system which outbalance the benefits the hegemon gains out of it."
HEG,"America’s declining world role under Donald Trump’s leadership is the greatest menace facing the global community, a former head of the Secret Intelligence Service says. “The biggest threat the world faces is how we all adjust to the progressive withdrawal of responsible American leadership and the network of alliances that America maintained with Europe, with Asian countries and the pattern of alliances and partnerships they had across this region”, John Sawers told an Israeli security conference according to Agence France Presse. “It's going to have a major disruptive effect and no one is yet adjusting to it”, Mr Sawers added. He also noted that some of the affects have already been felt on the international stage. “It is now having a major impact in the security world, and I think it's how we adjust to that — the behaviours of other countries trying to take advantage of it — which poses the biggest threat in the world”, he said. Mr Trump has taken a series of actions since becoming president that have pulled the US away from international leadership. That includes lukewarm pledges to assist in ensuring the security of NATO allies, and withdrawing the US from the 2015 Paris climate change accords. Mr Sawers says that the populist uprising in the US has led to a massive change in politics on a global scale. “I've got serious reservations about Donald Trump as president of the United States”, he said. “But I see him not as the cause of these problems, but as a consequence of the changes in American society and America's willingness to uphold the burdens of the world as it has for the past 70 years or so”. There may be several contributing factors, he said. That includes a recovery from the world financial crash that has still left average workers in distress, as well as a lack of success in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan."
POL,"Although he has only been in office a few months, Donald Trump’s presidency has had a major impact on how the world sees the United States. Trump and many of his key policies are broadly unpopular around the globe, and ratings for the U.S. have declined steeply in many nations. According to a new Pew Research Center survey spanning 37 nations, a median of just 22% has confidence in Trump to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs. This stands in contrast to the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when a median of 64% expressed confidence in Trump’s predecessor to direct America’s role in the world. The sharp decline in how much global publics trust the U.S. president on the world stage is especially pronounced among some of America’s closest allies in Europe and Asia, as well as neighboring Mexico and Canada. Across the 37 nations polled, Trump gets higher marks than Obama in only two countries: Russia and Israel. In countries where confidence in the U.S. president fell most, America’s overall image has also tended to suffer more. In the closing years of the Obama presidency, a median of 64% had a positive view of the U.S. Today, just 49% are favorably inclined toward America. Again, some of the steepest declines in U.S. image are found among long-standing allies. Since 2002, when Pew Research Center first asked about America’s image abroad, favorable opinion of the U.S. has frequently tracked with confidence in the country’s president. Prior to this spring, one of the biggest shifts in attitudes toward the U.S. occurred with the change from George W. Bush’s administration to Obama’s. At that time, positive views of the U.S. climbed in Europe and other regions, as did trust in how the new president would handle world affairs. Even though the 2017 shift in views of the U.S. and its president is in the opposite direction compared with eight years ago, publics on balance are not necessarily convinced that this will affect bilateral relations with the U.S. The prevailing view among the 37 countries surveyed is that their country’s relationship with the U.S. will be unchanged over the next few years. Among those who do anticipate a change, however, more predict relations will worsen, rather than improve. Confidence in President Trump is influenced by reactions to both his policies and his character. With regard to the former, some of his signature policy initiatives are widely opposed around the globe. His plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, is opposed by a median of 76% across the 37 countries surveyed. Opposition is especially intense in Mexico, where more than nine-in-ten (94%) oppose the U.S. government erecting a wall. Similar levels of global opposition greet Trump’s policy stances on withdrawing from international trade agreements and climate change accords. And most across the nations surveyed also disapprove of the new administration’s efforts to restrict entry into the U.S. by people from certain Muslim-majority nations. Trump’s intention to back away from the nuclear weapons agreement with Iran meets less opposition than his other policy initiatives, but even here publics around the world disapprove of such an action by a wide margin."
POL,"WASHINGTON — Four and a half months is not long, but President Trump has accomplished an extraordinary amount in a short time. With shocking speed, he has wreaked havoc: hobbling our core alliances, jettisoning American values and abdicating United States leadership of the world. That’s a whole lot of winning — for Russia and China. This work began promptly on Jan. 23, when the United States withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, leaving key allies empty-handed, fearful of the strategic benefit that will inevitably accrue to China. Then the secretary of state made plain that American values now take a back seat to security interests, even though those interests are enhanced by our partnerships with democracies that respect human rights and undermined by regimes that repress their citizens. Witness the brutal crackdown on opposition elements in Egypt and Bahrain after President Trump told their leaders that the United States no longer cares how they treat their people. The president’s budget would slash funding for the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department by nearly 30 percent, rendering our embassies vulnerable to attack and shuttering vital programs that advance our interests. The budget would also starve the United Nations and its peacekeeping operations of essential support. This will condemn the United States to pariah status at this important, if flawed, institution, where our leadership has been unrivaled. At NATO, the president’s reckless refusal to reaffirm our commitment to the defense of our allies under Article 5, while hectoring them publicly about their military spending, made our allies conclude they must go it alone. Nothing could have thrilled President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia more, or done more damage to the strength and unity of the Western world. And now the president has pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, putting us at odds with virtually the entire world. Europe and China stand together on the Paris accord, while the United States is isolated. This last, disastrous decision is the coup de grâce for America’s postwar global leadership for the foreseeable future. It was not taken from us by any adversary, nor lost as a result of economic crisis or collapse of empire. America voluntarily gave up that leadership — because we quit the field. How consequential is this choice? The network of alliances that distinguishes America from other powers and has kept our nation safe and strong for decades is now in jeopardy. We will see the cost when next we need the world to rally to our side. Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world. Contrary to the view of this White House, we do not live in a zero-sum world. We live in a world where our security and prosperity are maximized when others enjoy the same. Today’s threats — terrorism, nuclear proliferation, disease, climate change, violent cartels — are not amenable to simple military solutions, nor can they be tackled by any one country acting alone. They require effective collective action, and thus, willing partners. When the United States called after the Sept. 11 attacks, NATO answered, and for nearly 16 years the alliance has fought alongside us to defeat Al Qaeda and strengthen the Afghan government. Over 65 countries joined the fight against the Islamic State, and we rely on their enduring commitment to roll back terrorist havens. And when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine, the United States led the effort to impose sanctions on Russia. It won’t be long before a fresh crisis arises. In 2014, I saw President Barack Obama successfully coax our allies to help contain and eradicate the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. If there is a flu pandemic that requires a similar coordinated international response, will our European friends heed President Trump’s call? Or if China takes aggressive action in the South China Sea, threatening our Asian allies as well as our own freedom of navigation, will our Western allies risk the economic repercussions of confronting China to stand beside an “America First” president who refuses to affirm our NATO commitments? Our friends’ profound disappointment with the United States is a measure of the damage already done to America’s global standing by this administration. Most Americans surely still see the benefits of the United States being the strongest, most trusted and respected country in the world. So, we must take steps now to recover and regroup. Congress must insist, on a bipartisan basis, that the United States continue to play its traditional leadership role, by fully funding both defense and our foreign assistance programs. Congress should ensure the United States meets its obligations to the United Nations. It must also scrutinize foreign military sales to align our policies with our values. Congressional delegations, governors and mayors can reassure our key allies that the American people still value them and that we do not intend to cede our global leadership. We must make clear to our foreign partners that this present policy is an aberration, not the new normal. American corporations and civil society groups can assist by demonstrating that the United States remains committed to its integration into the global economy and to our democratic principles. In the absence of White House leadership, the American people should act as informal ambassadors, via contacts through tourism, study-abroad programs and cultural exchanges. We can all contribute to showing other nations that we hold dear America’s place at the forefront of moral and political leadership in the world. And we must remain steadfast until, once again, we have a president willing to lead in accordance with American interests, traditions and values."
HEG,"It’s time to stop asking  whether  the Trump administration believes in U.S. global leadership as we’ve known it since World War II. The answer is clear now.  It doesn’t. It’s also time to stop hoping that the officials around Trump can prop up international institutions as fast as he assaults them. Cabinet secretaries and career diplomats may be soothing Americans, but they aren’t fooling foreigners. No, President Trump and his enablers are ushering us into a new, post-American stage of global relations, at the speed of Twitter. Increasingly,  Washington is viewed by other nations a problem to be managed rather than a leader to be sought.  World  leaders are building new relationships – and jockeying for the space we’ve left behind – as fast as they  can,  while the U.S. trashes its relations and fights over the last election at home.  On security, politics, and economics, no one is waiting for the grown-ups, the midterms, or Vice-President Pence. Consider our closest ally, the United Kingdom. The country has suffered two grievous terror attacks in the last two weeks.  Its sitting prime minister is one of few world leaders with whom the Trump White House enjoyed cordial relations — so much so that the White House floated the idea of a Trump visit after the most recent London attacks. The British government was having none of it though. Trump and his team had  both undercut Prime Minister May’s short-term political prospects and  run over some of the  two countries’  most basic shared interests.  When  Trump raced to Twitter to exploit the London attacks for domestic political points even before basic facts were clear — including  twisting the words of the popular (and Muslim) mayor of London — he demonstrated why the ruling Conservative Party thinks of him as a loose cannon whose presence might send British voters into the arms of the Labour Party when the country votes on Thursday. There’s  also  the awkward matter of Nigel  Farage, the former head of the right-wing U.K. Independence Party, who’s been namedas a “person of interest” in the FBI’s investigation of Trump–Russia 2016 campaign contacts.   U.K. conservatives are quietly picking up former UKIP voters — and don’t need the embarrassment of the connection being spotlighted. Suddenly America is that kind of country though — an ally to keep at a wary, and often awkward, distance. Hanging over the whole election is the stark new reality that the next British government will have to contend with. Washington  broke  confidentiality agreements and  enraged  U.K. law  enforcement with leaks after the Manchester attacks.  And Trump’s  refusal to reaffirm NATO’s core principle — an attack on one is an attack on all — leaves the U.K. badly exposed between a Europe it has left and a U.S. it can no longer count on. Other key European allies have also started treating us in ways that would have been unthinkable until last year. The  French and German publics  are so angry at Trump  that leaders  are mocking him to rile up their supporters. French president Emmanuel Macron and his government are trolling the U.S.  daily  in (English-language) social media ahead of France’s parliamentary election — in which his party has surged to an unexpectedly strong lead in polling.  German premier  Angela Merkel, who once looked to be in trouble  in German elections this fall, is riding high as she soberly tells the German public that the days they could depend on others  outside Europe are over. Campaign  insults may be forgotten, but the  follow-up  actions to build relationships and institutions that don’t depend on Washington — and downgrade those that do — will be harder to reverse.  American businesses want U.S.-EU agreements that harmonize environmental and health regulations, which saves them money — but after Trump left the popular Paris accord those will be harder to come by. The general chill in relations is likely to mean a decline in European support for any potential U.S. military actions. That means more deployments for American service members, and more of the bill footed by American taxpayers. It may also mean less European willingness to host and help pay for the U.S. military bases that support Middle East operations. In the long term, the perception that Europe’s interests are different are likely to lead toward exactly the opposite of Trump’s call for Europe to spend more money on NATO. Instead, we may see moves toward security institutions based on the EU — where the U.S. is out of the loop — instead of NATO. Outside Europe, countries that we are used to thinking of as partners — and perhaps junior partners — are stepping up to fill space the U.S. is vacating. China  has amped up its rhetoric about being a global climate leader  — rolling out a new partnership with the European Union and lecturing about “international responsibility” to manage global warming, in tones we’re more used to hearing from Washington, not directed at it. You can’t open a foreign-policy journal without finding an article on “One Belt One Road,” China’s regional economic plan which it is touting as a vehicle for foreign investment and integration — a stirring contrast to the U.S. pullout from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (even if there is less to “One Belt” than meets the eye). And as Beijing offers diplomatic and economic carrots, it has kept up its shows of force in maritime territories  it disputes with U.S. partners and allies. China is building its own leadership on its own terms, thank you very much. So is India. President Trump had scarcely left Europe when Indian prime minister Modi arrived for a four-country tour, including trade talks and pledges to strengthen the global order with Germany and — on the heels of Trump’s Paris climate-deal pullout — work together on the environment with France’s Macron. At the same time, Indian defense officials were at a regional meeting pledging assistance to Vietnam’s military. Memories of Indian reluctance to commit on climate, and its discomfort at Washington’s role supporting Vietnam and other Southeast Asian powers, were fading fast — as fast as any expectation that Washington would take the lead again soon, on either front."
HEG,"John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that Trump has shown that unlike some European allies, he is not embracing “this ideological commitment to multi­lateralism for its own sake.” Bolton said that the administration of President George W. Bush, in which he served, was branded as isolationist for several actions during its tenure, including a decision to pull out of the International Criminal Court. What was happening then — and now — is “a series of decisions about what was in the best interests of the United States,” he said. Like Trump, Bush was just a few months into his presidency when he decided to withdraw the United States from a major multi­national climate agreement negotiated by his predecessor. The 1997 Kyoto treaty on global warming had been signed by 192 nations, almost as many as the 195 that signed the Paris agreement. Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University, said no president has done so much so early in his term to unilaterally alter the world order. “Ronald Reagan had to have a partner in upending the world order, and that was Mikhail Gorbachev,” he said. “Nixon tried to change American foreign policy, but it took him several years. Trump seems to be doing it on caffeine.” But the old world order has been declining for years now, with China’s rise as an economic and military power. Now, China is positioned to move into the void left by the United States. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a speech extolling the virtues of globalized trade as the United States appeared to be turning inward. The U.S. abandonment of the Paris accord represents another opportunity. On Thursday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stood beside Merkel in Berlin and declared the fight against climate change a “global consensus” and an “international responsibility.” He noted that China was one of the first countries to ratify the Paris accord. “Xi Jinping is sitting in Beijing and can’t believe what’s happening to him,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. representative to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “The United States’ retreat from leadership means China can move in America’s wake. We’re seeing the possibility of a shift in global leadership, away from Washington and the United States toward Beijing and China.” Others see no cause for alarm. Stephen Moore, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that Trump was exerting a different kind of leadership by pulling out of an agreement that he said would cost middle-class jobs and lead to an increase in energy prices for Americans. “The most important role for the United States is to lead by example,” said Moore, who has advised Trump on economic issues. “When we get it right on economic policy, it tends to get exported to the rest of the world. It’s important that the U.S. show leadership on free-market policies.”"
HEG,"It’s now ten years since the start of the great financial crisis, and, on the surface, waters stand still. In the US, exuberant stock markets have celebrated the advent of Donald Trump’s administration with a 12% rally since the US presidential election and the Federal Reserve feels sufficiently confident to move to normalise its monetary policy, announcing a series of interest rate rises, and is considering reducing its $4.5tn balance sheet. In Europe, uncertainties are still running high, but the election of a former investment banker as the head-of-state in tumultuous France is icing on the cake for cheerful financiers, who have already embraced the enthusiastic mood of their US counterparts. As seen from the stock market, the wounds of the financial crisis have long been repaired and investors are betting on the next expansion. But, deep down, all is not so rosey. Far from being resolved, the underlying contradictions that caused 2008 financial meltdown have, if anything, grown stronger in the past few years. Beyond the current deceiving calm, a tectonic socio-political shift is on its way, waiting for a minor incident to unleash a new wave of financial turbulences and draw a caesura of historical magnitude. Fortunately, the 2008 crisis was not allowed to run its course. Ordinary people suffered a lot, but government and central bank interventions succeeded in averting a complete economic collapse. In doing so they not only intercepted the debunking of many unsustainable financial claims but also opened the way for increasing financial risk. Indeed, as public management successfully mitigates financial catastrophes, investors take extra risks as they put their faith in the ability of government to save them again when something bad occurs. In the meantime, regulators, if they are not simply overconfident, are neither strong nor determined enough to rein in their appetite for greedy financial innovations. This has led to far more risk-taking by private investors – why should they be prudent? – and deficient regulation and oversight, which are both key ingredients for an even more violent tremor in future. This is the main lesson taught by the great post-keynesian economist Hyman Minsky, briefly remembered at height of the crisis, although forgotten again now. Private finance saved by public money is now strong enough to push the Goldman Sachs-staffed US administration to reverse the timid regulation of the Obama years and to convince the European Commission to promote securitisation, the very kind of network finance that produced the 2008 rout. Financial hegemony dresses up in the liberal trappings of the market, yet captures the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the social body to feed its own profits. The illusion that financial assets can create value “as it is the property of pear-trees to bear pears” is nowadays much more vivid than in Marx’s times. This fetishisation of finance and its empowerment are the reasons why the main avenue to roll back the danger of a debt-deflation spiral was a huge monetary stimulus. As acknowledged by Claudio Borio, a prominent figure at the Bank of International Settlement, rich economies became addicted to low interest rates and central bankers have dramatically increased the dose in the past few years with near zero or even below zero key interest rates and assets purchase programs. The outcome of this sequence is an outrageously unsustainable dynamic: on the one hand, financial fragility is on the rise again, in particular with excessive corporate debt in the US, persistent bank fragility in Europe, and overvalued stock markets. In the real economy, this monetary stimulus has not delivered much: growth rates are anaemic, underemployment endemic, productivity sluggish and investment hardly sufficient to prevent a productive involution throughout the developed world. It seems, then, that there is no recovery but only a renewed financial assertiveness backed by highly biased policies. But as the hard data brings more bad news, of the kind of the dramatic slowing of the US economy to an annual rate of 0.7 in the first quarter of 2017 or the rebound of unemployment in France in March, disruption is just around the corner. The elementary forms of finance capital – stock-market capitalization, credit to the private non-financial sector, and public debt – now represent more than 350% of GDP on average in the major high-income countries compared to 150% in the early eighties, and 330% before the crisis. In order to be sustained, the value of these financial claims require that the expected financial incomes fall in due time: debt must be honoured, interests paid, dividends disbursed. But how can that be in stagnating economies? The first possibility is just ponziying further: as more debt floods in, everything moves smoothly. But this puts central banks in a deadlock. If they move back to more usual monetary policies, they will trigger a recession and increasing financial distress. The fact that long-term interest rate in the US are still trending downward in spite of recent Federal Reserve rises indicate that markets do not believe in a normalisation of monetary policy. However, if central bankers do not move forward, financial imbalances will continue to build up, favouring misallocation of resources and increasing the amplitude of the next crash. Indeed, when the future upturn ends, as surely it will, could the global economy see, to use Freud’s term, a return of the repressed? What would this be? It is necessary to exploit labour to create value and for this to be captured to sustain financial incomes. Yet this financial, or “fictitious”, capital has ceased to be a dynamic factor in accumulation, instead becoming a dead weight on the whole social reproduction process. Financial hegemony dresses up in the liberal trappings of the market, yet captures the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the social body to feed its own profits. This ruse of liberal reason allowed financial hegemony to survive a few additional years in intensive care – but now is the time to say farewell. The next crash won’t be a repetition of 2008: this time the credibility of central banks will be at stake, with the risk of a full blown monetary crisis. The left should be prepared for this predictable unfolding of events. It should already make clear that private finance will not be saved again, that delirious financial claims of the wealthiest over the work of the rest of us won’t be anymore validated by government intervention. Meanwhile agitation for the socialization of the banks, debt jubilee, universal pension, education and healthcare systems, ecological investment planning and open data should be deployed to prepare this forthcoming historical window of opportunity. Freeing our societies from the financial time-bond will require a new ability to engineer the future."
HEG,"Carlos Lozada’s June 18 Outlook review, “Is the Western order becoming irrelevant?,” didn’t counter the implication offered in two British books that though the United States has made mistakes, abdication of its role in world leadership would leave a gap. Really? The United States arguably reached a high point in international statesmanship in the immediate aftermath of World War II with the Marshall Plan and policies toward defeated Axis nations. But since then, has the United States really had a principled and positive role in world affairs? Has it contributed to peace and stability? Consider history: ●With President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s approval, the CIA contrived with British intelligence to overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 because he planned to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. Mossadegh was Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, a brilliantly talented and principled leader elected with nearly 90 percent vote in the Iranian Majlis (parliament). He rejected both Soviet and Western influence. ●The bungled Bay of Pigs attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1961 led to the Russian missile crisis in Cuba in 1962. ●In 1963, President John F. Kennedy assented to South Vietnamese generals’ plan to remove President Ngo Diem Dinh and his brother. Despite promises of safe passage, they were killed. According to Mark Moyar’s book “Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965,” Ho Chi Minh said he could “scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid.” ●The Pentagon Papers, released by Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times in 1971, revealed that Lyndon Johnson’s administration had systematically lied about U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, not only to the public but also to Congress. ●Under President Richard M. Nixon, the United States materially supported Pakistan in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, which resulted in horrendous loss of life, genocide against the East Pakistan intelligentsia and systematic rapes. ●The Reagan-Bush administration supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the bloody Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) with several billion dollars’ worth of economic aid, weapons sales, intelligence and training. Can we understand that Iran’s hostility toward the United States may have legitimate roots? ●After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States did almost nothing to support the former Communist superpower in its deep economic crisis and fledgling attempts to form a democratic system. Meanwhile, it supplied billions in weaponry to Egypt and other nations. And that doesn’t take into account recent history. In short, the United States has talked lofty principles while both Democratic and Republican administrations have been ready to interfere in other nations’ affairs whenever perceived U.S. interests were involved. While it continued to provide billions in aid to other nations, it expressed only satisfaction over the collapse of the Soviet Union, failing to step in with meaningful support when this might have helped head off authoritarian rule in Russia. Compare this with the history of the European Union and its extraordinary commitment in the Middle East refugee crisis. Give me E.U. leadership any day."
HEG,"Air power seems like the perfect middle ground between a large ground force invasion and inaction: a way to hit the Islamic State hard while avoiding an Iraq-like quagmire. The previously cited poll also showed that 72 percent of Americans favor airstrikes on the Islamic State, and apparently our president-elect is among their ranks. As Eliot Cohen, one of our country’s leading military analysts, once wryly remarked, “Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.” Yet air power, if not used carefully, runs all the risks of a one-night stand: it can create false expectations, drag America into unwanted relationships with flawed partners, and winds up meaning little in the long-term."
HEG,"The politicization of Russian influence has unfortunately created misperceptions about how and to what extent Russia threatens American interests. The American people must take a moment and ensure they are not fearing Russia more than is necessary. This is important because misperception can have grave consequences: distraction from other more serious threats, limited geostrategic maneuverability and potential future conflict.¶ A quick skim of the headlines will show that Russia is the United States’ latest foreign-policy villain. Its hacking of the Democratic National Convention last year was proof it poses a national-security threat. And the awareness of this threat is not new—there have been government investigations since early last year into Russia’s interference in American politics, and specifically its support of the Trump campaign.¶ Not surprisingly, Russia is viewed with particular suspicion on the political left. At the Women’s March and subsequent demonstrations, protesters waved a variety of signs claiming Trump is a Putin stooge. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Czar, Putin Made You What You Are.” “Say No to Putin’s Puppet!”¶ The truth of the matter, though, is that although Russia does present a threat, that threat has been greatly exaggerated by domestic political mudslinging.¶ Think back to mid-2016. At that time, it was becoming apparent—dreadfully so to the Democrats—that Trump might actually win the election. One of the main ways in which Trump was beating Hillary Clinton was with his “America first” rhetoric. According to him, Hillary and the Obama administration she worked for gave birth to ISIS, were responsible for the Benghazi attacks, were letting China take advantage of the United States and were allowing Latin American immigrants to hurt the economy. Trump furthermore accused Hillary of being influenced by foreign powers via the Clinton Foundation. These claims convinced many Americans that Trump was the right man to protect the country in an increasingly dangerous world.¶ It was also true that Russian interference in American politics was becoming more of a concern at this time. Although not widely reported until mid-June, the DNC became aware of Russia-linked hacking a few months earlier. Putin had already shown his preference for Trump over Hillary.¶ As is natural for a politician of her abilities, Hillary realized Trump’s murky Russian connections were good debate fodder. During the first debate, she made good use of this material: “There’s no doubt now that Russia has used cyberattacks against all kinds of organizations in our country, and I am deeply concerned about this. I know Donald’s very praiseworthy of Vladimir Putin.”¶ She painted Russia as a threat, implying that Moscow was insidiously using Trump as a twenty-first-century Manchurian candidate. It was cringeworthy when Hillary did this. To put it bluntly, she realized xenophobia sells.¶ Why does all this matter? Because it means both the public and the government agencies that investigate national-security threats—remember, those agencies’ members are part of the public, too—have a heightened focus on Russia that is not entirely the result of sober analysis. Campaign politics, hilarious memes and a good number of conspiracy theories have made people more certain than they should be about the severity of the Russian threat.¶ Being overly afraid of Russia is a problem for three reasons. First, it is dangerous because it is distracting. Public fixation may cause reallocation of limited government resources towards a threat of perceived importance, at the expense of detecting other threats. The reallocation of resources is happening now, as evidenced by the House Select Intelligence Committee’s recent decision to look into Russian influence in the election.¶ While Russia poses a serious espionage threat to the United States, it is just one of many national-security concerns. Putting too much effort into watching for a Russian hack might prevent government agencies from detecting other threats. The consequences of such cognitive bias are not without precedent. In the 1980s, for instance, when the Cold War was still on and the Soviet Union presented the primary foreign-policy threat to the United States, an American intelligence officer named Jonathan Pollard spied on the United States on behalf of Israel, an allied country. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but not before spying for five years.¶ Second, public hostility to Russia limits Washington’s ability to take a flexible approach to Moscow. This is precisely the trap that Barack Obama fell into: when Russia becomes defined as a bad actor, it is difficult to work with it precisely when the United States needs to the most. Escalating tensions with Russia hamstring the United States on a variety of fronts. If Washington plans to address Venezuela’s instability or China’s behavior in the South China Sea, it is better to approach Russia as a potential partner. Russia has a unique opportunity to prevent the United States from taking action in many parts of the world, and it persistently challenges American initiatives to force its way to the negotiating table.¶ Finally, fear can be a precursor to war, even though at present that seems unlikely. Fear makes Americans forget that Russia is full of people just like them. The leaders of feared countries—such as Putin—are thought of as dangerous monsters, and this cognitive bias distorts threat perceptions and strategic decisionmaking. Remember 9/11? Remember the irrational linkages between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein? Remember the yellowcake that proved the United States needed to act?¶ Of course, there are a few factors in play that limit the likelihood of full-blown conflict between the United States and Russia anytime soon. One important one is that Trump does not seem responsive to public or even congressional sentiment about Russia. Another is that Russia is cautiously optimistic about bilateral relations under Trump. Despite this, it must not be forgotten that antagonism still increases the likelihood of eventual conflict. As disagreements with China over maritime sovereignty in Asia show, the more that harsh words are exchanged, the more explosive confrontations become."
HEG,"Indeed, when Russia sought to reproduce its Crimean success in other parts of the Ukraine, it encountered substantially stiffer opposition, and the war in eastern Ukraine bogged down into an unproductive stalemate. Conquering decrepit Soviet-era factories in Luhansk and Donetsk hardly pays for the war, and it certainly does not offset the costs of international sanctions.¶ The conquest of Crimea notwithstanding, it seems that in the twenty-first century the most successful strategy is to keep your peace and let others do the fighting for you. Why has it become so difficult for major powers to wage successful wars?¶ One reason is the change in the nature of the economy. In the past, if you defeated your enemy on the battlefield, you could easily cash in by looting enemy cities, selling enemy civilians in the slave markets and occupying valuable wheat fields and gold mines. Yet in the twenty-first century, only puny profits could be made that way. Today, the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge — and you cannot conquer knowledge through war. An organization such as ISIS may flourish by looting cities and oil wells in the Middle East — in 2014, ISIS seized more than $500 million from Iraqi banks and in 2015 made an additional $500 million from selling oil. But China and the U.S. are unlikely to start a war for a paltry billion. As for spending trillions of dollars on a war against the U.S., how could China repay these expenses and balance all the war damages and lost trade opportunities? Would the victorious People’s Liberation Army loot the riches of Silicon Valley? True, corporations such as Apple, Facebook and Google are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but you cannot seize these fortunes by force. There are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley.¶ A successful war could theoretically still bring huge profits by enabling the victor to rearrange the global trade system in its favor, as the U.S. did after its victory over Hitler. However, present-day military technology would make it extremely difficult to repeat this feat. By definition, profits large enough to make a global war worthwhile for the victor will also make it worthwhile for the loser to resort to weapons of mass destruction. The atom bomb has turned “victory” in a World War into collective suicide. It is no coincidence that since Hiroshima superpowers never fought one another directly, and engaged only in what (for them) were low-stake conflicts in which none was tempted to use nuclear weapons to avert defeat. Indeed, even attacking a second-rate nuclear power such as Iran or North Korea is an extremely unattractive proposition."
HEG,"In the 25 years since the Soviet Union fell, Russia has punctuated military buildups on its border with the occasional rattle of its nuclear saber in response to U.S. provocations. But a muted reaction to President-elect Donald Trump's recent suggestion that the United States should expand its nuclear weapons arsenal reflects a different military and economic reality for Russia, one in which the Kremlin realizes it could not afford to keep up in a new nuclear arms race.¶ Trump's Dec. 23 pronouncement that the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be beefed up came as President Barack Obama signed a wide-ranging $618.7 billion defense spending bill. Trump's remarks, particularly his quip about reigniting an arms race, elicited criticism from the Kremlin. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitri Peskov responded that his country would not take part in any arms race, and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova criticized the United States for trying to spend Russia to death. In years past, Russia used news of U.S. arms buildups to justify expanding its own arsenals, but echoes of the disastrous Soviet defense spending spree in the 1980s have given Moscow pause. Russia's more moderate tone does not mean it will pull back on its defense plans, but rather that the Kremlin does not want to repeat a history of military overspending that helped accelerate the demise of the Soviet Union.¶ Analysis¶ The United States and Russia have long been locked in a bitter standoff over Moscow's borderlands, and the tensions between the two have intensified since 2014 over the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. Washington and Russia are implementing long-term plans in expectation of prolonged antagonism. The United States is driving measures to bolster NATO's forces along Europe's eastern flank. It established a ground-based missile-defense system in Romania in May and plans to expand NATO troop rotations starting next year. The United States also is in the midst of a $350 billion plan to modernize all three legs of its nuclear weapons triad — bombers, submarines and land-based missiles — but those upgrades do not equate to an expansion of its arsenal.¶ In response, Russia is transforming its military by implementing a division-level structure that is focused on high-end conventional warfare against a potential enemy like NATO. It has deployed its 1st Guards Tank Army along its western border as a spearhead force prepared for offensive and defensive operations in Europe, with plans to add three brigades with the same mission and capabilities. Moscow announced in November that it will send S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missiles and nuclear-capable Iskander short-range mobile missile systems to its European exclave of Kaliningrad.¶ But Russia is attempting to shape its strategic one-upmanship to today's reality and not repeat Cold War mistakes. Under Russia's current foreign policy strategy, known as the Strategic Concept, it plans for future hostilities with the West that take the form of more asymmetric and regionalized proxy conflicts, such as the one in Ukraine, rather than a direct military or nuclear confrontation. Global proxy wars played a significant role in Moscow's Cold War calculations, but its tactics today are more focused on struggles closer to home. NATO remains a top concern, as evidenced by the steps Moscow is taking to shore up its military position, but Russia can afford to go only so far in its push against the West.¶ An enduring economic recession and stagnant oil prices forced the Kremlin to trim the national budget in 2016. Military spending dropped from $66 billion in 2015 to $50 billion, or 4 percent of gross domestic product, this year. However, the modest oil price recovery over the past few months has allowed the Kremlin to toss an extra $12 billion to its defense industry. Even though Moscow plans to raise its defense budget to $60 billion in 2017, U.S. military spending still exceeds that figure tenfold. But Russia's decision to keep half of its 2017 federal budget secret means that the true amount it spends on defense is unknown. By making the budget opaque, the Kremlin gains the flexibility to shift money to its defenses without exposing itself to the disapproval of an increasingly impoverished Russian population, which has seen its social support funds diminish.¶ Its budget-shifting ability still would not afford the Kremlin the ability to engage in the kind of arms race that defined the last years of the Cold War and helped bankrupt the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, Washington was gripped by the idea that the Soviets were far more powerful than its allies. The Pentagon shifted its strategy to boost the offensive potential it could bring against the Soviets by doubling defense spending between 1980 and 1989, a financial race the Soviets could not win. In addition, the launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative anti-ballistic missile system (colloquially known as Star Wars) showed off the United States' vast technological advantage over the Soviets."
HEG,"Nato defence ministers are reviewing progress in what's known as the alliance's ""enhanced forward presence"" - its deployment of troops eastwards to reassure worried allies, and deter any Russian move west. Nato has dispatched four battalion-sized battle groups, one deployed in Poland and one in each of the three Baltic republics: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The US has also begun to bring back heavy armoured units to western Europe. The whole effort is prompted by the shock emanating from Russia's seizure and subsequent annexation of the Crimea, and its continuing support for rebel groups in eastern Ukraine. If Moscow could tear up the rule-book of security in post-Cold War Europe by carving off a slice of Ukraine (as it previously did in Georgia), many feared the Baltic republics - also territory of the former Soviet Union - could be next. Russia says that in response to these Nato moves, it is making new deployments of its own. But the reality is rather more complex. I've been speaking to some of the leading Western experts on the Russian military to get a sense of what is behind Russia's modernisation effort, and to determine what threat it really poses and to whom. ""Russia would like us to think that its current militarisation and preparations for conflict are a response to Nato doing the same, but it's simply not true."" That's the view of Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre, and probably Britain's leading watcher of Russian military matters. “Russia's enormously expensive reorganisation and rearmament programme,"" he told me, ""was already in full swing well before the crisis over Ukraine, while Nato nations were still winding down their militaries. ""As late as 2013, the US withdrew all its armour from Europe - while Russia was already busy investing billions in upgrading its forces."" Analyst Dmitry Gorenburg of Harvard University dates the start of the Russian modernisation programme to 2009. It was a response, he says, to the evident shortcomings in the Russian military campaign against Georgia. He says the main focus was ""the improvement of the speed of decision-making and communication of decisions to the troops, and interoperability among military branches, followed by the replacement of Soviet-era equipment that was rapidly reaching the end of its service life"". The results have been significant. According to Michael Kofman of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, ""by 2012 Russia had reorganised its armed forces from a Soviet mass mobilisation army into a permanent standing force, and began improving quality across the board"". This was coupled with an intense regimen of snap checks on readiness and countless exercises, to the extent that ""by 2014 the Russian military was markedly improved compared to its lacklustre performance in the Russia-Georgia war in 2008,"" he says. All the experts I spoke to insist that the initial focus of the Russian effort has been on Ukraine, not the Baltics. Indeed, Michael Kofman argues that the war in Ukraine imposed unexpected requirements on Russia's military, which found itself lacking permanently stationed forces on the country's borders, and ill-positioned for the conflict. ""Russian armed forces,"" he says, ""were, and still are, in transition."" To address the prospect of war with Ukraine in the medium to long term, he says, Russia ""has spent much of the past three years repositioning units around Ukraine, building three new divisions, rebasing several brigades, and creating an entire new combined-arms army. The intent is for Russian ground forces to be in place just across the border should they need to reinforce proxies in the Donbas, invade from several vectors, or simply deter Kiev from thinking it could quickly retake the separatist regions by force"". Ukraine may be the immediate strategic concern of the Russian general staff. But as Keir Giles notes, ""Russia is developing its military infrastructure all the way along its western periphery - not just opposite Ukraine, but also Belarus, the Baltic states and even Finland. They have re-organised in order to be able to deliver combat troops to the western border as rapidly as possible"". This includes ""setting up new heavy road transport units in order to reduce their traditional reliance on railways to deliver armour to the operational area. That gives them a lot more flexibility to move in areas where road networks are better developed - primarily the west of Russia, including across the border in Russia's western neighbours,"" he tells me. Given Moscow's focus on Ukraine, have some Nato countries over-reacted to the perceived Russian threat? Not at all, says Keir Giles. On the contrary, he insists, the concern is that Nato has under-reacted. ""The direct military challenge from Russia, and confirmation of Russia's willingness to use military force against its neighbours,"" he argues, ""with few exceptions, hasn't translated into European countries taking a serious interest in defending themselves."" He adds that the failure of many Nato allies to meet even symbolic commitments, like the pledge to spend 2% of GDP on defence, let alone urgent real measures like regenerating the capacity for high-intensity warfare to match Russia's developing capabilities, ""speaks of an unwillingness to recognise politically inconvenient reality"".¶ That reality, according to Michael Kofman, is nothing short of a transformation of the Russian military. ""Reform, modernisation and the combat experience gleaned from Ukraine and Syria will have lasting effects on the Russian armed forces,"" he told me. ""Russia,"" he says, ""retains the ability to deploy decisive force anywhere on its borders, overpowering any former Soviet republic. In terms of its strategic nuclear arsenal, Russia is not only a peer to the United States, but actually ahead in modernisation and investment in non-strategic nuclear weapons. ""Meanwhile Russia's conventional forces are now capable of imposing high costs on even a technologically superior adversary such as Nato in a high-end conflict - i.e. a fight would be quite bloody for both sides."" That is hopefully an unthinkable situation. At root, though, Dmitry Gorenburg believes that ""Russia's conventional capabilities will be nowhere near as strong as those of the US military or Nato forces as a whole"". Above all it is readiness, proximity, and the ability to mass fire-power quickly that gives Russia an immediate local advantage. But Nato needs to get the threat into perspective. As Michael Kofman notes, ""Russia is a Eurasian land power, bringing a lot of firepower to the fight, but its strength shines when fighting close to home."" Nato's defence and research budget dwarfs Russia's, as does the base capacity of the alliance to generate forces and equip them in a prolonged conflict. ""The bottom line,"" he says, is that ""while Nato has genuine worries on what a short-term conflict with Russia might look like, the reality is that this is the world's pre-eminent military alliance, at the core of which is still an incredibly potent military power, and a sustained fight would probably end disastrously for Moscow."" The Russian military is simply not structured to hold substantial territory, or to generate the forces needed for a prolonged conflict. Nato needs to be ready, in the view of experts. If deterrence is going to be credible it needs to restore its ability to fight high-intensity combat, a capacity that has atrophied during the counter-insurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. The consensus among the experts seems to be that Ukraine was a warning bell. Russia's newfound assertiveness is not to be confused with a desire to launch a military attack westwards."
HEG,"We'd love to solve things diplomatically but it's very difficult.” Mr Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for ‘trying very hard’ to rein in Pyongyang, adding: “He certainly doesn’t want to see turmoil and death.” ¶ Dr Natasha Ezrow, a senior lecturer in government at the University of Essex, said she would be very shocked if Mr Trump got any more involved in North Korea. The political scientist, who is a leading authority on dictatorships, said that she cannot see how a US attack on North Korea could be “politically possible”.¶ “I can’t see any political benefit for Trump of getting marred in this situation any more,” she said, noting that it would only lead to danger. ¶ Not only is there no public appetite for war against North Korea, Pyongyang has the power to launch missile attacks against South Korea, Japan and US bases in both nations. ¶ But Dr Ezrow said: “A nuclear war is very unlikely, it is way too costly. It would be suicide for the North Korean regime to engage in that. It is almost completely unlikely.” Despite Kim Jong-un’s sabre rattling, Dr Ezrow said that North Korea’s regime has been “all talk but no bite in the past” and depends on China for its survival. ¶ If North Korea goes too far then it risks falling out with China, which is the economic lifeline of Kim-Jong Un’s reclusive, isolated regime. ¶ Dr Ezrow said that the regime makes threats to get attention and increase its bargaining power, adding: “It can’t survive without China.” "
HEG,"U.S. special operations forces are set to conduct operations against North Korean nuclear, missile, and other weapons of mass destruction sites in any future conflict, the commander of Special Operations Command told Congress Tuesday.¶ Army Gen. Raymond A. Thomas stated in testimony to a House subcommittee that Army, Navy, and Air Force commandos are based both permanently and in rotations on the Korean peninsula in case conflict breaks out.¶ The special operations training and preparation is a warfighting priority, Thomas said in prepared testimony. There are currently around 8,000 special operations troops deployed in more than 80 countries.¶ ""We are actively pursuing a training path to ensure readiness for the entire range of contingency operations in which [special operations forces], to include our exquisite [countering weapons of mass destruction] capabilities, may play a critical role,"" he told the subcommittee on emerging threats.¶ ""We are looking comprehensively at our force structure and capabilities on the peninsula and across the region to maximize our support to U.S. [Pacific Command] and [U.S. Forces Korea]. This is my warfighting priority for planning and support.""¶ Disclosure of the commander's comments comes as tensions remain high on the peninsula. President Trump has vowed to deal harshly with North Korea should another underground nuclear test be carried out. Test preparations have been identified in recent weeks, U.S. officials have said.¶ Trump said on Sunday that China appears to be pressuring North Korea but that he would be upset if North Korea carries out another nuclear test.¶ ""If he does a nuclear test, I will not be happy,"" he said on CBS Face the Nation. Asked if his unhappiness would translate into a U.S. military response, Trump said: ""I don't know. I mean, we'll see.""¶ Gen. Thomas' testimony did not include details of what missions the commandos would carry out.¶ A spokesman for the Special Operations Command referred questions about potential operations in Korea to the Pacific Command.¶ Special forces troops would be responsible for locating and destroying North Korean nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems, such as mobile missiles. They also would seek to prevent the movement of the weapons out of the country during a conflict.¶ Additionally, special operations commandos could be used for operations to kill North Korean leaders, such as supreme leader Kim Jong Un and other senior regime figures.¶ Special operations missions are said by military experts to include intelligence gathering on the location of nuclear and chemical weapons sites for targeting by bombers. They also are likely to include direct action assaults on facilities to sabotage the weapons, or to prevent the weapons from being stolen, or set off at the sites by the North Koreans.¶ A defense official said U.S. commandos in the past have trained for covert operations against several types of nuclear facilities, including reactors and research centers. Scale models of some North Korean weapons facilities have been built in the United States for practice operations by commandos.¶ The most secret direct action operations would be carried out by special units, such as the Navy's Seal Team Six or the Army's Delta Force."
HEG,"There have already been plenty of signs that ISIS would like to go nuclear. After the series of ISIS-linked bombings in Brussels killed at least 32 people in March 2016, Belgian authorities revealed that a suspected member of a terrorist cell had surveillance footage of a Belgian nuclear official with access to radioactive materials. The country's nuclear-safety agency then said there were ""concrete indications"" that the cell intended ""to do something involving one of our four nuclear sites."" About a year earlier, in May 2015, ISIS suggested in an issue of its propaganda magazine that it was wealthy enough to purchase a nuclear device on the black market—and to ""pull off something truly epic.""¶ Though the group is unlikely to possess the technical skill to build an actual nuclear weapon, there are indications it could already possess nuclear materials. After the group's fighters took control of the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014, they seized about 40 kg of uranium compounds that were stored at a university, according to a letter an Iraqi diplomat sent to the U.N. in July of that year. But the U.N.'s nuclear agency said the material was likely ""low grade"" and not potentially harmful. ""In a sense we've been lucky so far,"" says Sharon Squassoni, who heads the program to stop nuclear proliferation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. ""I honestly think it is only a matter of time before we see one of these dirty-bomb attacks.""¶ Obtaining ingredients for such a weapon is not, it turns out, the hard part. According to Chaduneli's lawyer, Tamila Kutateladze, his associates found the box of uranium in one of the scrapyards where he would find old bric-a-brac to sell. His co-defendant in the case, Mikheil Jincharadze, told police that ""unknown persons"" had delivered the box inside a sack of scrap iron, according to interrogation records and other court documents obtained by TIME in Georgia."
HEG,"The United Nations and outside experts cast doubt Thursday on the danger posed by nuclear material that Iraq says was stolen from a university by the insurgent group known as ISIS.¶ The Iraqi ambassador to the U.N., in a letter to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon earlier this week, said that ISIS had gotten its hands on 88 pounds of uranium compounds from Mosul University.¶ Iraq said the material had been intended for scientific research. The letter, obtained by Reuters, appealed for help to “stave off the threat of their use by terrorists in Iraq or abroad.”¶ Bob Kelly, who was a U.N. nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s, told NBC News that the uranium probably posed more danger as a toxin, like lead, than as radioactive material.¶ “Putting it in a dirty bomb is a pretty silly idea,” he said. “If you spread uranium over a large area, it is just going to disappear.”¶ He added: “If you are standing right next to the bomb when it goes off and the explosion does not kill you there will be some toxic material in the air for a bit, but the radiation is not going to cause you that much of a problem.”¶ Far more dangerous, he said, would be something like cesium-137, which comes in powder form and dissolves in water.¶ He did say that he was surprised the university was allowed to keep the uranium, which he described as “a big amount,” after the war. He also said the ambassador, Mohamed Ali Alhakim, should have gone to the U.N. nuclear agency, not the secretary-general.¶ “It’s clear what the ambassador is trying to get out of this — help to deal with ISIS,” he said.¶ ISIS militants have swept across swaths of Iraq and are threatening to fracture the country. ISIS, short for Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, aims to establish an Islamic state across the broader Middle East.¶ “It would just be a case of getting the fire department to wash down the pavements,” one expert says.¶ The U.N. nuclear agency itself said Thursday it believed that whatever nuclear material has fallen under ISIS control was “low-grade” and did not pose a high risk.¶ “Nevertheless, any loss of regulatory control over nuclear and other radioactive materials is a cause for concern,” said Gill Tudor, a spokeswoman for the agency. The agency plans to seek further details, she said.¶ Senior U.S. officials also told NBC News that the uranium was not enriched, and thus could not be turned into something of counterterrorism concern.¶ Kelly, who retired from the nuclear agency in 2005, stressed his experience in the field and said he “respects danger,” but he said that if ISIS “comes to my neighborhood and blows up a dirty bomb with uranium, we would deal with it.”¶ “Let’s just wash down the pavements and that would be it,” he said.¶ Asked whether Iraq would be as equipped to handle such an event, he said: “It would just be a case of getting the fire department to wash down the pavements, so, yes, I think they could just about manage.”"
CAP,"Decentralization, autonomy and accountability … mechanisms of neoliberal governance in disguise? Problematizing neoliberalism The politics of the later part of the twentieth century have been denoted by the emergence of neoliberalism (Doherty 2007), which has thus become the dominant political and ideological paradigm of our time (Pinto 2015). Peters (2001b, 143–144) offers a very succinct outline of the main elements constituting neoliberal governmentality. I will not elaborate on each one due to article length constraints, but will briefly mention those relevant to the issues being explored in this article. Neoliberalism fosters a critique of State reason, thus constituting a permanent appraisal of the activity of rule and government. A current iteration of this is the neoliberal critique of the welfare state. Government is conceived as the community of free, autonomous, self-regulated individuals with an emphasis on the ‘responsibilization’ of individuals as moral agents. It also incorporates quasi-autonomous individuals and entities through the promotion of self-management, as well as ‘degovernmentalization’ of the State. ‘Government at a distance’ is developed through new forms of social accounting, simultaneously with increasing decentralization, ‘devolution’ and delegation of power, authority and responsibility from the centre to the local institution. Neoliberalism as a form of government has been subject to critique on various grounds. Harvey (2005) notes a shift from government to governance, that is, from state power on its own to a broader configuration. According to Dean (1999), however, ‘The notion of freedom and the free conduct of individuals once again becomes the principle by which government is to be rationalized and reformed’ (155). Accordingly, Joseph (2007) describes neoliberalism as ‘a political discourse concerned with the governing of individuals from a distance’ (7), further stating that it ‘gives the pretence of freedom while acting in a coercive way’ (8). Government may have become ‘more multiple, diffuse, facilitative and empowering’, but it is also ‘more disciplinary, stringent and punitive’ (Dean 1999, 171). This hegemonic neoliberalism has been portrayed as ‘the closest thing to a global metanarrative’ (Peters 2001a, viii), ‘at least we live and move in a world whose geography is being refashioned by the evolving project of an imperious neoliberalism’ (Doherty 2007, 202). Bailey (2013) defines neoliberalism as both a political rationality and as a discourse – it incites people to govern themselves while aligning their conducts with the exigencies of the State, whilst constructing a particular conception of the human subject and his relationship to him/herself [themselves]* , the State and society. Consequently, the global policy climate is ‘now impregnated by the tenets, assumptions, ambitions and operational technologies of a neoliberal ethos of government’ (Doherty 2007, 202). Neoliberalism can be thus regarded as a set of accountability practices, ‘paradoxically re-assert[ing] the State’s role … centraliz[ing] and decentraliz[ing] the State’ (Webb 2011, 736), with the intention of developing ‘governmentality constellations’ (ibid., 735). Neoliberal policy tends to be centrally conceived, imposed and reproduced in the absence of democratic practices and the involvement of the potential perpetrators (Pinto 2015). Such policies, often propelled by narrative in the form of educational crises, provide governments with a rationale to hastily implement reform in a rhetorical move to provide constancy and manipulation of the crisis situation (Sonu 2011; Pinto 2012). Rigorous neoliberal control embedded in policy layers, constructs and performs educators as regulatory tools of the State (Honan 2004; Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012), besides eroding their professional autonomy. Neoliberal policy within the education system is often characterized by the desire to do away with local government and control, thus allocating more independence and self-management to the schools. Notwithstanding, ‘neoliberal public policy quite often runs in tandem with neo-conservative attitudes’ (Gillies 2013, 76), as evident in top-down leadership and prescribed curricula. Decentralization, autonomy and accountability? The move towards networks, collaboratives and partnership working represents a defining global trend in schools in the twenty-first century, reflecting ‘a shift from competition to collaboration, Journal of Education Policy 451 from top-down control to organizational autonomy’ (Hopkins 2009, 2). Keddie (2015) states that there has been ‘a proliferation and formalising of such collaboration in recent times … evident in the current concerted emphasis on school networks in education policy as a mechanism to support school improvement’ (8). This concomitant move towards ‘network governance’ is regarded as a process contributing to the ‘shake-up’ of the material landscape of policy (Bailey 2013), perceived as ‘one regulatory element of the policy dispositif ’ (ibid., 817). According to Foucault (2008), neoliberal policy involves ‘constructing a social fabric in which the basic units would have the form of the enterprise … It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, the formative power of society’ (148). Ranson (2008) provides a rationale for the dominance of the networks paradigm within the contemporary theorizing of governance. The restructuring of the state entailed a new theory of ‘governance without governing’ (207), whereas the functions of the unitary state were distributed, resulting in self-organizing networks exercising significant autonomy where ‘governments could only steer at a distance’ (208). Hartley (2007a), while commenting on the proliferation of collaboration and partnership in education, draws attention to the infusion of public services vocabulary (in the UK) with the prefixes ‘inter-’, ‘multi-’ and ‘co-’, translated in ‘multi-’ or ‘inter-agency’ configurations, distributed leadership, and so on and so forth. He refers to this tendency as the ‘“inter”-regnum in education policy … [which] is asserting itself as a fashion, a new “reigning philosophy”’ (Tyack and Hansot 1982, cited in Hartley 2007a, 695–696). Wright (2012) criticizes this propensity for affiliation and distribution, revealing it, instead, as being complemented by ‘an ideological fantasy of “empowerment”, which conceals the subordination of actors to these neoliberal logics by constituting [them] … as powerful actors who have been freed from … constraints forced upon them by central government’ (279). He regards the empowerment agenda as ‘the primary method of legitimising, cementing and reproducing the ideas and practices that coincide with this neoliberal project’, which results in ‘the exact opposite of the fantasmatic picture it projects’ (ibid., 292). Thus, Ranson’s (2008) model of governance seems to be contradicted by the seemingly wider international trend for school autonomy and novel forms of state control. This trend, according to Helgøy, Homme, and Gewirtz (2007), incorporates both accountability and ‘re-regulation’ where the ‘centre reclaims control, often in an indirect manner, through target setting, performance measurement and the use of quality indicators’ (198). For Ball (2003), this simply leads to the appearance of freedom in a ‘devolved environment’, as he further states that ‘it is a mis-recognition to see these reform processes as simply a strategy of de-regulation, they are processes of re-regulation’ (217, original emphasis). According to Lingard and Sellar (2012), a government’s agenda which ties in decentralization and autonomy with accountability is a veiled effort to steer schooling policy from a distance, as ‘such governance is strictly regulated through policy setting … and holding providers to account’ (Keddie 2015, 2). In what the FACT policy sets out to be a ‘heterarchical’ rather than hierarchical system of relations, the State still exercises hegemonic power – a ‘governing through governance’ (ibid., 4) – as it becomes a ‘contractor, performance monitor, benchmarker and target-setter’ (Ball and Junemann 2012, 133). Higham and Earley (2013) problematize the simultaneous emphasis by the state on aspects of policy concentrating on decentralization and autonomy. This leads to the paradox experienced by school leaders within an environment of ‘growing’ autonomy and ‘constraining’ government requirements (Glatter 2012). Higham and Earley (2013) question whether this translates into ‘autonomy around the edges’ (704) for the school leaders, who may end up being local implementers of reform (Forrester and Gunter 2009), with their leadership unfolding as tactical interpretation rather than genuine stage-managing (Hartley 2007b). Interpreting school autonomy A ‘condition and effect’ of school autonomy is ‘increased monitoring and surveillance’ (Wilkins 2015, 182), with good governance operating as a new method of state power and intervention, with the aim of achieving the ‘control of control’ (Power 1994). It is merely a re-invention of the state where schools and school governors are disciplined within new regimes of professionalization, inspection 452 D. Mifsud and accountability (Wilkins 2015), trends which resonate with Ball’s (2003) notion of ‘performativity’ (215). Hatcher (2012) writes about the subservience of collaborative network governance to State-driven hierarchy through the performativity regime, in order to ensure that networks served government agendas. The ‘“silent, absent force” of coercion’ under the guise of accountability, ‘ensured compliance … if it did not secure willing consent’ (30). This performativity, as a new mode of state regulation, ‘produces opacity rather than transparency as individuals and organizations take even greater care in the construction and maintenance of fabrications’ (Ball 2003, 215). This, in turn, results in the ‘doubling effect produced by processes of decentralization and deregulation’ where ‘regulation is exercised at a distance – through discourses of professionalization and accountability’ (Wilkins 2015, 197). Autonomy is thus a relative concept, therefore, one might have to reconsider the contextual influence on policy enactment (Glatter 2012; Higham and Earley 2013). This problematic relationship between autonomy and accountability reflects the paradox of ‘decentralized centralism’ (Karlsen 2000) where the State relentlessly strives for the retention of hegemony, as mediated through the exercise of disciplinary power and the shadow of hierarchy. This may inadvertently lead to the ‘expansion of neoliberal hegemony’ (Wright 2012, 292) within the education policy discourse. This ‘infrastructure of accountability’ (Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge and Jacobsen 2013, cited in Lingard, Martino, and Rezai-Rashti 2013, 540) has been identified as ‘a form of global panopticism’ (Lingard, Martino, and Rezai-Rashti 2013, 540), which is part of a reform of state structures and policy frames at macro-level, associated with neoliberal globalization. This literature review exploring the concept of neoliberalism and its subjectification of decentralization, autonomy and accountability, postulates a critical, if albeit contested discursive scaffolding within which to position my policy narrative."
CAP,"Steps Forward in Theory and Practice In moving the agenda forward on theory and practice against and beyond neoliberalism in education, I believe there are several crucial directions that my argument in this book implicitly emphasizes. With regard to practice, in this section, I direct my comments mainly to movement work rather than teaching itself, since I have already described in some detail here and in previous chapters my vision for alternative pedagogical practices in this context. The Critical Imagination In the first place, an important aspect of my project in this volume has been to expose the links that bring together seemingly disparate elements of social experience in the present. In particular, it is crucial to expose the relationship between neoliberal educational processes and broader global trends. Even now, when “neoliberalism” is no longer an unfamiliar term in the conversations of educational researchers (which was not always the case), too often this term is used as shorthand for particular policies (e.g., school choice and standardized testing) or for vague imputations of a “corporate” orientation in schooling, rather than as properly naming a broader politicaleconomic and ideological project within contemporary global capitalism. It is crucial for progressive researchers and educators to study the underlying logic that makes, for instance, the unfolding assault on southern Europe by global financial institutions continuous with attacks on public schools by business and policy elites in the United States. Needless to say, this suggests that a basic literacy in critical political economy (including Marxism itself) is indispensable for those who are serious about confronting these processes. In addition, it is important to expose the inextricability of economy and culture, of race and capital, of subjectivity and materiality. Research in education and the social sciences generally compartmentalizes these concerns such that researchers are identified, for instance, as scholars of race or “critical theorists.” Given the way that racisms globally are built on and through capitalism and neoliberalism and, on the other hand, the fact that capitalist modernity in general and the turn to punishment in neoliberalism in particular are fundamentally racial systems, the intellectual and disciplinary separation of these problems makes little sense. The importance of making links here is a practical as well as an intellectual matter, since those who are most oppressed in the present (and also most of those who are oppressed in a global context) confront a complex coloniality that simultaneously exploits the legacies of imperialism to bolster economic accumulation (i.e., through the international division of labor) and deploys neoliberal discourses of efficiency to shore up long- standing structures of racial marginalization (as in the prison system). Education itself is a crucial site where this interpenetration can be seen, as for instance in the shuttering of historic public schools in communities of color that accompanies gentrification— the hardly invisible White hand of capital in action (Lipman, 2011). This complex assault works not only at the level of structure and system but also at the level of subjectivity. We are encircled, at once, as subjects and societies, which is why a broad struggle against the carceralization of schools and society needs to be united with an attention to the enclosure of the understanding and imagination. The ideological fantasy that undergirds neoliberalism organizes a set of compulsions that are enacted both collectively and individually. However, the technical rationality that underlies even progressive efforts in educational and social scientific scholarship makes these kinds of juxtapositions between structure and subject uncomfortable— why should an expert on policy, it is thought, concern himself or herself with difficult epistemological problems? The discomfort this question points to is itself a symptom of the fragmentation of understanding that capital ubiquitously organizes. The kind of intellectual imagination that can challenge the limits of the present will need to be uncomfortable in exactly this way. Toward a “Right to the School” If neoliberalism colonizes the imagination at the same that it reconstructs institutions and social structures, then clearly we need to do more than argue against it. What is called for is a repudiation of and departure from the limits of this form of life and a reclaiming of social space for the common and the collective. The Occupy movement pointed a way forward, for a moment, yet, from the start, it was organized as an exception, an extraordinary coming together outside of the time of everyday life. In fact, we need to be able to occupy and reclaim everyday life itself rather than seeking to flee from its spaces to other ones. More consequential than the occupation of Zuccotti Park, after all, are the campus movements and housing- based struggles that grew out of the initial encampments; in these movements, people have laid claim to the spaces in which they live, learn and work. These efforts have not just defied power but also put forth philosophical and practical demands that begin to create a path beyond the given: the principle, for instance, that the university belongs to students before it belongs to administrators (in both a material and intellectual sense) or the notion that people have a fundamental right to the houses that they have made into homes. The reclaiming of space that enacts this “right to the city” (Harvey, 2008) should be translated in the educational sphere as a movement that insists on a democratic “right to the school.” This needs to be understood in more than a territorial sense. The procedures of accountability, the flattening of curriculum, the gutting of infrastructure, and the ethos of punishment all express the proprietary claim of elites on the meaning and possibilities of school. These are expressed not as proposals to the public but rather as already given and required answers, preconstituted symbolic systems. (Since the public system is essentially unaccountable, the story goes, no amount of auditing is excessive, and nothing should stave off the eventual breakup of the system.) In this context, we need a radical departure from the neoliberal imagination, which would be, at the same time, a radical return to the space of school itself. In fact, we are currently witnessing the emergence of such a movement. Increasingly, we see wholesale mobilizations of communities against school closures and chartering, massive opting out of standardized testing by students, and entire school faculties refusing to administer these same tests. As I have argued with Alex Means and Ken Saltman (De Lissovoy, Means, and Saltman, 2014), far from being irresponsible or precipitous, these developments are exactly the kinds of starting points that should be organized and multiplied to create a national insurgency on the terrain of school. However, this reclaiming of the space of education needs to reach to the level of knowledge as well and needs to fundamentally reorder the cultural order of schooling. An educational movement against and beyond neoliberalism needs to confront the whiteness of curriculum and the epistemology that underlies it, as well as the whiteness of the rituals and procedures of the school, which literally place communities of color at a distance or else enclose them in the alienating spaces of campus councils or parent- teacher organizations. What would it mean, instead, to make family and cultural resources the source of the school’s mission— within a sense of authority as grounded in a responsibility to the most marginalized? What would it mean to allow into the space of teaching not just the funds of knowledge of different communities but the juxtaposition of radically different epistemologies? More to the point of the emphasis of the current chapter, how might a movement be built that could demand these cultural and epistemological rights in relation to schooling at the same time that it demanded a return of the material structures and resources of education to the community? The point here is that a movement against neoliberal schooling needs to be the site of a cultural revolution as well, a decolonial project against the coloniality that structures our senses of the basic possibilities of teaching and learning. Conclusion Transitioning out of the dominative system that presently organizes society globally is obviously a matter of more than simple adjustment or even dramatic reform. It is a matter of transformation, of a radical departure. Inherently oriented toward the future in its concern with young people and with collective purposes, education is a crucial site for this project of transformation. In this volume, I have tried to indicate some important directions forward in this regard. The situation often can be discouraging. But there are hopeful signs too, and we can be encouraged by the fact that change often occurs when it is least expected. The normal persists as an integument over a situation that has changed in its fundamentals until the moment when that fundamental change breaks forth into the everyday and shatters its surface. At that point, the authority that always seemed to belong to the given comes apart in ribbons. This is the condition that we are living in today. The basic impossibility— in ethical, economic, and ecological terms— of the logic that has organized social life in the modern period has now passed from the mode of the abstract to the concrete. This impossibility is being felt as political crisis, economic decline, and environmental devastation. The real is finally collecting on the debts that are owed to it by a social system whose rationality sustains itself only in the imaginary. In this moment, in order to survive, we have to make a shift to a different social logic, a different mode of being, and a different history. There are hopeful directions for such a transition in the new global movements for democracy, social justice, decolonization, and sustainability that are presently emerging, as well as in collective uprisings on the terrain of education. My arguments here aim to contribute to these moments and movements and to assist at the beginning of a different history, even if that history does not come without struggle. In theory, practice, and pedagogy, we need to trace the outlines of that struggle and crucially participate in pressing it forward."
TOP,"In the narrow sense, regulation is a specific form of subordinate or delegated legislation that is derived from statute. Legislative authority to create this form of law is generally delegated to Cabinet, an individual or to a body (Pal 2014). Unlike statutes, which must be debated and passed by the legislative branch of government, regulations carry the weight of law, but are more nimble. Not subject to the legislative session, regulations are developed and assented to by the delegated body granted the authority to create them."
TOP,"In the narrow sense, regulation is a specific form of subordinate or delegated legislation that is derived from statute. Legislative authority to create this form of law is generally delegated to Cabinet, an individual or to a body (Pal 2014). Unlike statutes, which must be debated and passed by the legislative branch of government, regulations carry the weight of law, but are more nimble. Not subject to the legislative session, regulations are developed and assented to by the delegated body granted the authority to create them."
TOP,"In the narrow sense, regulation is a specific form of subordinate or delegated legislation that is derived from statute. Legislative authority to create this form of law is generally delegated to Cabinet, an individual or to a body (Pal 2014). Unlike statutes, which must be debated and passed by the legislative branch of government, regulations carry the weight of law, but are more nimble. Not subject to the legislative session, regulations are developed and assented to by the delegated body granted the authority to create them."
EDU,"1. The Department of Education— establishes policies relating to federal financial aid for education, administers distribution of those funds and monitors their use. Like most federal activities, Department of Education programs must first be authorized by Congress through legislation that is signed into law by the president. The Department then develops regulations that determine exactly how a program will be operated. These regulations are published in the Federal Register for public comment and reviewed by Congress. Congress must also vote to appropriate the money that each program will receive annually."
TOP,"Even with the broad methodological and substantive diversity reflected in the essays reproduced in this volume, those that we have selected still do not adequately represent the entire range of social scientific approaches to the study of regulation, or the entire range of social control processes that might be considered spheres of ‘regulation’. All branches of law – criminal law, contract law, tort law, traffic law and so on – have some regulatory function, for they are designed to deter behaviours that have been politically defined as harmful or antisocial, and thereby to encourage socially responsible behaviour. But in conventional legal discourse, which we used in our selection criteria for this volume, the term ‘regulation’ has been reserved for bodies of law that are elaborated through the promulgation of specialized rules, enforced by government agencies and aimed at the behaviour of business firms, other large organizations, and professional service providers. Whereas criminal and civil law typically are enforced via prosecutions and lawsuits against alleged violators, brought after a harmful act or omission has occurred, regulation is primarily prophylactic in purpose, designed to prevent harmful actions before they occur. Furthermore, unlike civil law enforcement, where the initial costs are borne by injured parties who must gather evidence and hire lawyers, in regulatory programmes (as in the enforcement of criminal law by police departments) the government shoulders the cost of investigation and prosecution of complaints."
TOP,"Many times in casual conversation the term ‘regulation’ is used to refer to any restriction imposed by the government that defines certain actions as legal or illegal, but the definition is actually more specific. Regulation occurs when a legislature delegates some of its lawmaking power to a regulatory agency, which then issues detailed rules, the purpose of which is to carry out the intention of the legislature. Regulations are issued by a regulatory agency, with the intention of filling in the gaps in legislation. In the case of federal regulation, it fills in the gaps left by the U.S. Congress."
TOP,"Many times in casual conversation the term ‘regulation’ is used to refer to any restriction imposed by the government that defines certain actions as legal or illegal, but the definition is actually more specific. Regulation occurs when a legislature delegates some of its lawmaking power to a regulatory agency, which then issues detailed rules, the purpose of which is to carry out the intention of the legislature. Regulations are issued by a regulatory agency, with the intention of filling in the gaps in legislation. In the case of federal regulation, it fills in the gaps left by the U.S. Congress."
TOP,"Congress annually considers several appropriations measures, which provide discretionary funding for numerous activities—for example, national defense, education, and homeland security—as well as general government operations. Congress has developed certain rules and practices for the consideration of appropriations measures, referred to as the congressional appropriations process. The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of this process."
TOP,"Regulations are issued by various federal government departments and agencies to carry out the intent of legislation enacted by Congress. Administrative agencies, often called ""the bureaucracy,"" perform a number of different government functions, including rule making. The rules issued by these agencies are called regulations and are designed to guide the activity of those regulated by the agency and also the activity of the agency's employees. Regulations also function to ensure uniform application of the law."
TOP,"Regulations are issued by various federal government departments and agencies to carry out the intent of legislation enacted by Congress. Administrative agencies, often called ""the bureaucracy,"" perform a number of different government functions, including rule making. The rules issued by these agencies are called regulations and are designed to guide the activity of those regulated by the agency and also the activity of the agency's employees. Regulations also function to ensure uniform application of the law."
TOP,"Regulations are issued by various federal government departments and agencies to carry out the intent of legislation enacted by Congress. Administrative agencies, often called ""the bureaucracy,"" perform a number of different government functions, including rule making. The rules issued by these agencies are called regulations and are designed to guide the activity of those regulated by the agency and also the activity of the agency's employees. Regulations also function to ensure uniform application of the law."
TOP,"Even with the broad methodological and substantive diversity reflected in the essays reproduced in this volume, those that we have selected still do not adequately represent the entire range of social scientific approaches to the study of regulation, or the entire range of social control processes that might be considered spheres of ‘regulation’. All branches of law – criminal law, contract law, tort law, traffic law and so on – have some regulatory function, for they are designed to deter behaviours that have been politically defined as harmful or antisocial, and thereby to encourage socially responsible behaviour. But in conventional legal discourse, which we used in our selection criteria for this volume, the term ‘regulation’ has been reserved for bodies of law that are elaborated through the promulgation of specialized rules, enforced by government agencies and aimed at the behaviour of business firms, other large organizations, and professional service providers. Whereas criminal and civil law typically are enforced via prosecutions and lawsuits against alleged violators, brought after a harmful act or omission has occurred, regulation is primarily prophylactic in purpose, designed to prevent harmful actions before they occur. Furthermore, unlike civil law enforcement, where the initial costs are borne by injured parties who must gather evidence and hire lawyers, in regulatory programmes (as in the enforcement of criminal law by police departments) the government shoulders the cost of investigation and prosecution of complaints."
TOP,"California Government Code § 815.6 provides as follows: ""Where a public entity is under a mandatory duty imposed by an enactment that is designed to protect against the risk of a particular kind of injury, the public entity is liable for an injury of that kind proximately caused by its failure to discharge the duty unless the public entity establishes that it [*77] exercised reasonable diligence to discharge the duty."" Plaintiff's tenth claim under this statute is based upon the allegation that Defendants breached various duties owed to her under several enactments, including 42 U.S.C. § 1983, California Constitution, article I, section 1 (right to privacy), the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and the Federal Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 3604, 3617. Liability may be imposed on a public entity pursuant to section 815.6 if three factors are met: ""'(1) an enactment must impose a mandatory, not discretionary, duty; (2) the enactment must intend to protect against the kind of risk of injury suffered …; and (3) breach of the mandatory duty must be a proximate cause of the injury suffered.'"" MacDonald v. California, 230 Cal.App.3d 319, 327, 281 Cal. Rptr. 317 (1991) (quoting California v. Superior Court, 150 Cal.App.3d 848, 854, 197 Cal. Rptr. 914 (1984)). For purposes of section 815.6, an enactment includes a constitutional provision, statute, ordinance, or regulation. See Cal. Gov't Code § 810.6. A regulation is defined as ""a rule, regulation, order or standard, having the force of law, adopted by an employee or agency of the United States pursuant to the federal Administrative [*78] Procedures Act."" Cal. Gov't Code § 811.6. ""A mandatory duty must impose an affirmative duty to take action or carry out measures."" Bowden v. Redwood Institute for Designed Education, Inc., 1999 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2881, 1999 WL 138889. *6 (N.D. Cal. March 9, 1999)(citing Clausing v. San Francisco Unified School Dist., 221 Cal.App.3d 1224, 1240, 271 Cal. Rptr. 72 (1990)). The assertion of a right or prohibition ""without specific rules and guidelines for implementation of that right or prohibition cannot create a mandatory duty."" See id."
TOP,"The issue raised in the second count is that the RTM action was ineffective for failure of the Town Clerk to publish the action of the RTM in accordance with Section C5-9.A. HN8 That section requires any action, adopting, amending or repealing an ordinance by the RTM to be published, within 10 days after the adjournment of the meeting, in a newspaper. In the instant case the RTM action was not published. Section C5-1A HN9 of the Charter provides that all legislative power of the Town, including power to enact ordinances shall be vested in the RTM, § 1-1(n) C.G.S. reads: [*9] HN10 ""Ordinance shall mean an enactment under the provisions of section 7-157."" Section 7-157 HN11 entitled Publication, Referendum. Publication of Summary ""empowers the legislative body of any town or city to enact ordinances. It further provides that municipalities whose charter provide for the manner in which they may enact ordinances, may follow their charters as is the case in Westport. ""An ordinance is a municipal legislative enactment."" Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. v. Schevy, 148 Conn. 721, 723. HN12 Under section C5-1(A) the power to enact ordinances is given solely to the RTM. Under section C26-2 entitled ""powers and Duties"" the PZC is given the powers and duties conferred or imposed by law on Planning and Zoning Commissions. Section 8-2 entitled ""Regulations"" provide for the zoning commission of a municipality to regulate zoning, and in every instance refers to regulating not the enactment of ordinances. Section 1 of the Zoning Regulations entitled ""Legislative Intent"" defines its intent and states . . . HN13 hereby adopts and promulgates the following rules and regulations in accordance with the authority vested in it the said commission by Chapter 242 of the Public Acts of [*10] the State of Connecticut and Chapter 124 of Title 8 of the Connecticut General Statutes. . ."" Section C5-1(F) HN14 provides the RTM with the power to review any action of the PZC adopting, amending or repealing any zoning regulation and section C26-4 subdivision B states that in the event of the RTM reversing the action of the PZC such action shall be void. Of significance is that nowhere in the charter is ther a provision for publishing the action of the RTM and of even more significance is the statement that the PZC action is null and void as of the reversal of the PZC action, in this case Amendment 389. HN15 Regulation is defined as "". . . meaning to ""govern or direct according to rule . . . to bring under the control of law or constituted authority."" ""Regulation connotes . . . the power to permit and control as well as to prohibit."" Greenwich v. Connecticut Transportation Authority, 166 Conn 337, 342. The plaintiff's claim that the Westport Zoning Regulations were amended on January 8th by Amendment 389 has no basis in law. It was not effective before March 7th and the RTM voided it before that date on February 7th. The plaintiff reliance on Morris v. Town of Newington, 36 [*11] Conn. Sup. 74 is misplaced since it contains no legal proposition to sustain his position. Since the Westport Charter contains no requirement of publication of its action when it acts on a regulation of the PZC, no publication is required. HN16 The statement in § C4-6 that the rejected regulation is void indicates an intent to have an immediate effect, without a resort to a municipal referendum which is provided for in other similar actions of the RTM. This review is different from the RTM adopting, amending or repealing an ordinance which provides for a week to elapse after publication for any of those actions to be effective. The failure of the Town Clerk to publish the action of the RTM reversing the action of the PZC in enacting Amendment 389 did not affect its action in voiding it."
HEG,"US military interventions since WW II have spanned the globe, with at least 67 major intrusions recorded from 1945 to 1999, over 80% of which occurred in the global South.2323. Blum, Rogue State. Since then, particularly with the promulgation of the ‘Bush Doctrine’ in 2002 – articulating the option of initiating unilateral war as part of the National Security Strategy of the USA – US incursions have increased and broadened under conditions of constant war-fighting. According to a Congressional Research Service report, from the beginning of 2000 to August 2014 presidents have used the War Powers Resolution, or its equivalent, to authorise military interventions on 81 occasions, including re-approval of some previous interventions.2424. Salazar Torreon, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces, 19–33. Of these interventions, up to August 2014 all occurred in the global South, save several in the Balkan region (part of what Raúl Prebisch described as the ‘periphery’) as the former Yugoslavia was dismembered."
HEG,"From the perspective of the overall peacefulness of the international system, then, no U.S. grand strategy is, as in the Goldilocks tale, “just right.”116 In fact, each strategic option available to the unipole produces significant conflict. Whereas offensive and defensive dominance will entangle it in wars against recalcitrant minor powers, disengagement will produce regional wars among minor and major powers. Regardless of U.S. strategy, conflict will abound. Indeed, if my argument is correct, the significant level of conflict the world has experienced over the last two decades will continue for as long  as U.S. power  remains preponderant. From the narrower perspective of the unipole’s ability to avoid being involved in wars, however, disengagement is the best strategy. A unipolar structure provides no incentives for conflict involving a disengaged unipole. Disengagement would extricate the unipole’s forces from wars against recalcitrant minor powers and decrease systemic pressures for nuclear proliferation. There is, however, a downside. Disengagement would lead to heightened conflict beyond the unipole’s region and increase regional pressures for nuclear proliferation. As regards the unipole’s grand strategy, then, the choice is between a strategy of dominance, which leads to involvement in numerous conflicts, and a strategy of disengagement, which allows conflict between others to fester. In a sense, then, strategies of defensive and offensive dominance are self-defeating. They create incentives for recalcitrant  minor powers to bolster their capabilities and present the United States with a tough choice: allowing them to succeed or resorting to war in order to thwart them. This will either drag U.S. forces into numerous conflicts or result in an increasing number of major powers. In any case, U.S. ability to convert  power into favorable outcomes peacefully  will be constrained.117This last point highlights one of the crucial issues where Wohlforth and I differ—the benefits of the unipole’s power preponderance. Whereas Wohlforth believes that the power preponderance of the United States will lead all states in the system to bandwagon with the unipole, I predict that states engaged  in security competition with the unipole’s allies and states for whom the status quo otherwise has lesser value will not accommodate the unipole. To the contrary, these  minor powers will become recalcitrant despite U.S. power preponderance, displaying the limited pacifying effects of U.S. power. What, then, is the value of unipolarity for the unipole? What can a unipole do that a great power in bipolarity or multipolarity cannot? My argument hints at the possibility that—at least in the security realm—unipolarity does not give the unipole greater influence over international outcomes.118 If unipolarity provides structural incentives for nuclear proliferation, it may, as Robert Jervis has hinted, “have within it the seeds if not of its own destruction, then at least of its modification.”119 For Jervis, “[t]his raises the question of what would remain of a unipolar system in a proliferated world. The American ability to coerce others would decrease but so would its need to defend friendly powers that would now have their own deterrents. The world would still be unipolar by most measures and considerations, but many countries would be able to protect themselves, perhaps even against the superpower. . . . In any event, the polarity of the system may become less important.”120 At the same time, nothing in my argument determines the decline of U.S. power. The level of conflict entailed by the strategies of defensive dominance, offensive dominance, and disengagement may be acceptable to the unipole and have only a marginal effect on its ability to maintain its preeminent position. Whether a unipole will be economically or militarily overstretched is an empirical question that depends on the magnitude of the disparity in power between it and major powers and the magnitude of the conflicts in which it gets involved. Neither of these factors can be addressed a priori, and so a theory of unipolarity must acknowledge the possibility of frequent conflict in a nonetheless durable unipolar system. Finally, my argument points to a “paradox of power preponderance.”121  By putting other states in extreme self-help, a systemic imbalance of power requires the unipole to act in ways that minimize the threat it poses. Only by exercising great restraint can it avoid being involved in wars. If the unipole fails to exercise restraint, other  states will  develop their capabilities, including nuclear weapons—restraining it all the same.122 Paradoxically, then, more relative power does not necessarily lead to greater influence and a better ability to convert capabilities into favorable outcomes peacefully. In effect, unparalleled relative power requires unequaled self-restraint"
EX,"Further, the large number of states that became capable of building nuclear weapons over the years, but chose not to, can be reasonably well explained by the fact that most were formally allied with either the United States or the Soviet Union. Both these superpowers had strong nuclear forces and put great pressure on their allies not to build nuclear weapons. Since the Cold War, the US has retained all its allies. In addition, NATO has extended its protection to some of the previous allies of the Soviet Union and plans on taking in more. Nuclear proliferation by India and Pakistan, and proliferation programmes by North Korea, Iran and Iraq, all involve states in the opposite situation: all judged that they faced serious military opposition and had little prospect of establishing a reliable supporting alliance with a suitably strong, nuclear-armed state. What would await the world if strong protectors, especially the United States, were [was] no longer seen as willing to protect states from nuclear-backed aggression? At least a few additional states would begin to build their own nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to distant targets, and these initiatives would spur increasing numbers of the world’s capable states to follow suit. Restraint would seem ever less necessary and ever more dangerous. Meanwhile, more states are becoming capable of building nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Many, perhaps most, of the world’s states are becoming sufficiently wealthy, and the technology for building nuclear forces continues to improve and spread. Finally, it seems highly likely that at some point, halting proliferation will come to be seen as a lost cause and the restraints on it will disappear. Once that happens, the transition to a highly proliferated world would probably be very rapid. While some regions might be able to hold the line for a time, the threats posed by wildfire proliferation in most other areas could create pressures that would finally overcome all restraint. Many readers are probably willing to accept that nuclear proliferation is such a grave threat to world peace that every effort should be made to avoid it. However, every effort has not been made in the past, and we are talking about much more substantial efforts now. For new and substantially more burdensome efforts to be made to slow or stop nuclear proliferation, it needs to be established that the highly proliferated nuclear world that would sooner or later evolve without such efforts is not going to be acceptable. And, for many reasons, it is not. First, the dynamics of getting to a highly proliferated world could be very dangerous. Proliferating states will feel great pressures to obtain nuclear weapons and delivery systems before any potential opponent does. Those who succeed in outracing an opponent may consider preemptive nuclear war before the opponent becomes capable of nuclear retaliation. Those who lag behind might try to preempt their opponent’s nuclear programme or defeat the opponent using conventional forces. And those who feel threatened but are incapable of building nuclear weapons may still be able to join in this arms race by building other types of weapons of mass destruction, such as biological weapons. Second, as the world approaches complete proliferation, the hazards posed by nuclear weapons today will be magnified many times over. Fifty or more nations capable of launching nuclear weapons means that the risk of nuclear accidents that could cause serious damage not only to their own populations and environments, but those of others, is hugely increased. The chances of such weapons failing into the hands of renegade military units or terrorists is far greater, as is the number of nations carrying out hazardous manufacturing and storage activities. Worse still, in a highly proliferated world there would be more frequent opportunities for the use of nuclear weapons. And more frequent opportunities means shorter expected times between conflicts in which nuclear weapons get used, unless the probability of use at any opportunity is actually zero. To be sure, some theorists on nuclear deterrence appear to think that in any confrontation between two states known to have reliable nuclear capabilities, the probability of nuclear weapons being used is zero.’ These theorists think that such states will be so fearful of escalation to nuclear war that they would always avoid or terminate confrontations between them, short of even conventional war. They believe this to be true even if the two states have different cultures or leaders with very eccentric personalities. History and human nature, however, suggest that they are almost surely wrong. History includes instances in which states ‘known to possess nuclear weapons did engage in direct conventional conflict. China and Russia fought battles along their common border even after both had nuclear weapons. Moreover, logic suggests that if states with nuclear weapons always avoided conflict with one another, surely states without nuclear weapons would avoid conflict with states that had them. Again, history provides counter-examples Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 even though it saw Israel as a nuclear power at the time. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and fought Britain’s efforts to take them back, even though Britain had nuclear weapons. Those who claim that two states with reliable nuclear capabilities to devastate each other will not engage in conventional conflict risking nuclear war also assume that any leader from any culture would not choose suicide for his nation. But history provides unhappy examples of states whose leaders were ready to choose suicide for themselves and their fellow citizens. Hitler tried to impose a ‘victory or destruction’’ policy on his people as Nazi Germany was going down to defeat. And Japan’s war minister, during debates on how to respond to the American atomic bombing, suggested ‘Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” If leaders are willing to engage in conflict with nuclear-armed nations, use of nuclear weapons in any particular instance may not be likely, but its probability would still be dangerously significant. In particular, human nature suggests that the threat of retaliation with nuclear weapons is not a reliable guarantee against a disastrous first use of these weapons. While national leaders and their advisors everywhere are usually talented and experienced people, even their most important decisions cannot be counted on to be the product of well-informed and thorough assessments of all options from all relevant points of view. This is especially so when the stakes are so large as to defy assessment and there are substantial pressures to act quickly, as could be expected in intense and fast-moving crises between nuclear-armed states. Instead, like other human beings, national leaders can be seduced by wishful thinking. They can misinterpret the words or actions of opposing leaders. Their advisors may produce answers that they think the leader wants to hear, or coalesce around what they know is an inferior decision because the group urgently needs the confidence or the sharing of responsibility that results from settling on something. Moreover, leaders may not recognize clearly where their personal or party interests diverge from those of their citizens. Under great stress, human beings can lose their ability to think carefully. They can refuse to believe that the worst could really happen, oversimplify the problem at hand, think in terms of simplistic analogies and play hunches. The intuitive rules for how individuals should respond to insults or signs of weakness in an opponent may too readily suggest a rash course of action. Anger, fear, greed, ambition and pride can all lead to bad decisions. The desire for a decisive solution to the problem at hand may lead to an unnecessarily extreme course of action. We can almost hear the kinds of words that could flow from discussions in nuclear crises or war. ‘These people are not willing to die for this interest’. ‘No sane person would actually use such weapons’. ‘Perhaps the opponent will back down if we show him we mean business by demonstrating a willingness to use nuclear weapons’. ‘If I don’t hit them back really hard, I am going to be driven from office, if not killed’. Whether right or wrong, in the stressful atmosphere of a nuclear crisis or war, such words from others, or silently from within, might resonate too readily with a harried leader. Thus, both history and human nature suggest that nuclear deterrence can be expected to fail from time to time, and we are fortunate it has not happened yet. But the threat of nuclear war is not just a matter of a few weapons being used. It could get much worse. Once a conflict reaches the point where nuclear weapons are employed, the stresses felt by the leaderships would rise enormously. These stresses can be expected to further degrade their decision-making. The pressures to force the enemy to stop fighting or to surrender could argue for more forceful and decisive military action, which might be the right thing to do in the circumstances, but maybe not. And the horrors of the carnage already suffered may be seen as justification for visiting the most devastating punishment possible on the enemy.’ Again, history demonstrates how intense conflict can lead the combatants to escalate violence to the maximum possible levels. In the Second World War, early promises not to bomb cities soon gave way to essentially indiscriminate bombing of civilians. The war between Iran and Iraq during the 1980s led to the use of chemical weapons on both sides and exchanges of missiles against each other’s cities. And more recently, violence in the Middle East escalated in a few months from rocks and small arms to heavy weapons on one side, and from police actions to air strikes and armoured attacks on the other. Escalation of violence is also basic human nature. Once the violence starts, retaliatory exchanges of violent acts can escalate to levels unimagined by the participants before hand. Intense and blinding anger is a common response to fear or humiliation or abuse. And such anger can lead us to impose on our opponents whatever levels of violence are readily accessible. In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a substantial probability of escalat[e]ing to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear 'six-shooters' on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations."
HEG,"Kagan deployed a form of reductionism that is truly remarkable. The role of the one ‘indispensable nation’ essentially explains the trajectory of most nations over the past seven decades! And all this was ostensibly accomplished by a nation that was unable to militarily defeat an   anti-colonial peasant culture after a long and costly war in Vietnam. Here Kagan demonstrated the limitless US narcissism embedded in the concept of exceptionalism by celebrating the alleged high degree to which ‘the rest of the nations in the liberal world generally accepted and even welcomed America’s overwhelming power’.6060. Ibid. Who? When? Where? This account certainly fails to accord with events in Latin America, where US-backed coup followed US-backed coup, under leadership cadres that had been trained at the US School of the Americas. Given this institutionalised structure, the US and several Latin American governments eventually descended into the black depths of Operation Condor in the 1970s."
HEG,"A core premise of deep engagement is that it prevents the  emergence of a far more dangerous global   security environment. For one thing, as noted above, the United States’ overseas presence gives it the  leverage to restrain partners from taking  provocative action. Perhaps more important, its core alliance commitments also deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony  from contemplating  expansion and make its partners more secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to their security problems that threaten others and thus stoke security dilemmas. The contention that engaged U.S. power dampens the baleful  effects of anarchy is consistent with influential variants of realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would emerge absent the “American Pacifier” is provided in the works of John Mearsheimer, who forecasts dangerous  multipolar regions replete with security  competition, arms races, nuclear proliferation and associated preventive war temptations, regional rivalries, and even runs at regional hegemony and full-scale  great power war. 72 How do retrenchment advocates, the bulk of whom are realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are complicated, but two capture most of the variation: (1) U.S. security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S. interest. Each response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes sense given that the whole debate hinges on a complex future counterfactual (what would happen to Eurasia’s security setting if the United States truly disengaged?). Although a certain answer is impossible, each of these responses is nonetheless a weaker argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other international relations theories that discount the conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73 Defensive realists maintain that the high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense dominance, and an array of policies and practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that Eurasia’s major states could manage regional multipolarity peacefully without the American pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on this scholarship, particularly in regions where the kinds of stabilizers that nonrealist theories point to—such as democratic governance or dense institutional linkages—are either absent or weakly present. There are three other major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before making this bet. First is regional expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding each region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few experts expect a return of intense great power competition in a post-American Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of increased EU defense cooperation and the budgetary costs of increasing military outlays. 74 The result might be a Europe that is incapable of securing itself from various threats that could be destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars), lacks capacity for global security missions in which U.S. leaders might want European participation, and is vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of Eurasia where the United States has a substantial military presence? Regarding the Middle East, the balance begins to swing toward pessimists concerned that states currently backed by Washington— notably Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—might  take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that would intensify security dilemmas."
HEG,"In theory, the United States could refrain from intervening abroad. But, in practice, will it? Many assume today that the American public has had it with interventions, and Alice Rivlin certainly reflects a strong current of opinion when she says that “much of the public does not believe that we need to go in and take over other people’s countries.” That sentiment has often been heard after interventions, especially those with mixed or dubious results. It was heard after the four-year-long war in the Philippines, which cost 4,000 American lives and untold Filipino casualties. It was heard after Korea and after Vietnam. It was heard after Somalia. Yet the reality has been that after each intervention, the sentiment against foreign involvement has faded, and the United States has intervened again. ¶ Depending on how one chooses to count, the United States has undertaken roughly 25 overseas interventions since 1898: Cuba, 1898 The Philippines, 1898-1902 China, 1900 Cuba, 1906 Nicaragua, 1910 & 1912 Mexico, 1914 Haiti, 1915 Dominican Republic, 1916 Mexico, 1917 World War I, 1917-1918 Nicaragua, 1927 World War II, 1941-1945 Korea, 1950-1953 Lebanon, 1958 Vietnam, 1963-1973 Dominican Republic, 1965 Grenada, 1983 Panama, 1989 First Persian Gulf war, 1991 Somalia, 1992 Haiti, 1994 Bosnia, 1995 Kosovo, 1999 Afghanistan, 2001-present Iraq, 2003-present¶ That is one intervention every 4.5 years on average. Overall, the United States has intervened or been engaged in combat somewhere in 52 out of the last 112 years, or roughly 47 percent of the time. Since the end of the Cold War, it is true, the rate of U.S. interventions has increased, with an intervention roughly once every 2.5 years and American troops intervening or engaged in combat in 16 out of 22 years, or over 70 percent of the time, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. ¶ The argument for returning to “normal” begs the question: What is normal for the United States? The historical record of the last century suggests that it is not a policy of nonintervention. This record ought to raise doubts about the theory that American behavior these past two decades is the product of certain unique ideological or doctrinal movements, whether “liberal imperialism” or “neoconservatism.” Allegedly “realist” presidents in this era have been just as likely to order interventions as their more idealistic colleagues. George H.W. Bush was as profligate an intervener as Bill Clinton. He invaded Panama in 1989, intervened in Somalia in 1992—both on primarily idealistic and humanitarian grounds—which along with the first Persian Gulf war in 1991 made for three interventions in a single four-year term. Since 1898 the list of presidents who ordered armed interventions abroad has included William McKinley, Theodore Roose-velt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. One would be hard-pressed to find a common ideological or doctrinal thread among them—unless it is the doctrine and ideology of a mainstream American foreign policy that leans more toward intervention than many imagine or would care to admit. ¶ Many don’t want to admit it, and the only thing as consistent as this pattern of American behavior has been the claim by contemporary critics that it is abnormal and a departure from American traditions. The anti-imperialists of the late 1890s, the isolationists of the 1920s and 1930s, the critics of Korea and Vietnam, and the critics of the first Persian Gulf war, the interventions in the Balkans, and the more recent wars of the Bush years have all insisted that the nation had in those instances behaved unusually or irrationally. And yet the behavior has continued.¶ To note this consistency is not the same as justifying it. The United States may have been wrong for much of the past 112 years. Some critics would endorse the sentiment expressed by the historian Howard K. Beale in the 1950s, that “the men of 1900” had steered the United States onto a disastrous course of world power which for the subsequent half-century had done the United States and the world no end of harm. But whether one lauds or condemns this past century of American foreign policy—and one can find reasons to do both—the fact of this consistency remains. It would require not just a modest reshaping of American foreign policy priorities but a sharp departure from this tradition to bring about the kinds of changes that would allow the United States to make do with a substantially smaller force structure. ¶ Is such a sharp departure in the offing? It is no doubt true that many Americans are unhappy with the on-going warfare in Afghanistan and to a lesser extent in Iraq, and that, if asked, a majority would say the United States should intervene less frequently in foreign nations, or perhaps not at all. It may also be true that the effect of long military involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan may cause Americans and their leaders to shun further interventions at least for a few years—as they did for nine years after World War I, five years after World War II, and a decade after Vietnam. This may be further reinforced by the difficult economic times in which Americans are currently suffering. The longest period of nonintervention in the past century was during the 1930s, when unhappy memories of World War I combined with the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression to constrain American interventionism to an unusual degree and produce the first and perhaps only genuinely isolationist period in American history. ¶ So are we back to the mentality of the 1930s? It wouldn’t appear so. There is no great wave of isolationism sweeping the country. There is not even the equivalent of a Patrick Buchanan, who received 3 million votes in the 1992 Republican primaries. Any isolationist tendencies that might exist are severely tempered by continuing fears of terrorist attacks that might be launched from overseas. Nor are the vast majority of Americans suffering from economic calamity to nearly the degree that they did in the Great Depression. ¶ Even if we were to repeat the policies of the 1930s, however, it is worth recalling that the unusual restraint of those years was not sufficient to keep the United States out of war. On the contrary, the United States took actions which ultimately led to the greatest and most costly foreign intervention in its history. Even the most determined and in those years powerful isolationists could not prevent it. ¶ Today there are a number of obvious possible contingencies that might lead the United States to substantial interventions overseas, notwithstanding the preference of the public and its political leaders to avoid them. Few Americans want a war with Iran, for instance. But it is not implausible that a president—indeed, this president—might find himself in a situation where military conflict at some level is hard to avoid. The continued success of the international sanctions regime that the Obama administration has so skillfully put into place, for instance, might eventually cause the Iranian government to lash out in some way—perhaps by attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz. Recall that Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor in no small part as a response to oil sanctions imposed by a Roosevelt administration that had not the slightest interest or intention of fighting a war against Japan but was merely expressing moral outrage at Japanese behavior on the Chinese mainland. Perhaps in an Iranian contingency, the military actions would stay limited. But perhaps, too, they would escalate. One could well imagine an American public, now so eager to avoid intervention, suddenly demanding that their president retaliate. Then there is the possibility that a military exchange between Israel and Iran, initiated by Israel, could drag the United States into conflict with Iran. Are such scenarios so farfetched that they can be ruled out by Pentagon planners? ¶ Other possible contingencies include a war on the Korean Peninsula, where the United States is bound by treaty to come to the aid of its South Korean ally; and possible interventions in Yemen or Somalia, should those states fail even more than they already have and become even more fertile ground for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. And what about those “humanitarian” interventions that are first on everyone’s list to be avoided? Should another earthquake or some other natural or man-made catastrophe strike, say, Haiti and present the looming prospect of mass starvation and disease and political anarchy just a few hundred miles off U.S. shores, with the possibility of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of refugees, can anyone be confident that an American president will not feel compelled to send an intervention force to help?¶ Some may hope that a smaller U.S. military, compelled by the necessity of budget constraints, would prevent a president from intervening. More likely, however, it would simply prevent a president from intervening effectively. This, after all, was the experience of the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both because of constraints and as a conscious strategic choice, the Bush administration sent too few troops to both countries. The results were lengthy, unsuccessful conflicts, burgeoning counterinsurgencies, and loss of confidence in American will and capacity, as well as large annual expenditures. Would it not have been better, and also cheaper, to have sent larger numbers of forces initially to both places and brought about a more rapid conclusion to the fighting? The point is, it may prove cheaper in the long run to have larger forces that can fight wars quickly and conclusively, as Colin Powell long ago suggested, than to have smaller forces that can’t. Would a defense planner trying to anticipate future American actions be wise to base planned force structure on the assumption that the United States is out of the intervention business? Or would that be the kind of penny-wise, pound-foolish calculation that, in matters of national security, can prove so unfortunate?¶ The debates over whether and how the United States should respond to the world’s strategic challenges will and should continue. Armed interventions overseas should be weighed carefully, as always, with an eye to whether the risk of inaction is greater than the risks of action. And as always, these judgments will be merely that: judgments, made with inadequate information and intelligence and no certainty about the outcomes. No foreign policy doctrine can avoid errors of omission and commission. But history has provided some lessons, and for the United States the lesson has been fairly clear: The world is better off, and the United States is better off, in the kind of international system that American power has built and defended."
HEG,"But states and policymakers habitually overestimate the impact of nuclear weapons. This happens among both proliferators and anti-proliferators. Would-be proliferators seem to expect that possessing a nuclear weapon will confer “a seat at the table” as well as solve a host of minor and major foreign policy problems. Existing nuclear powers fear that new entrants will act unpredictably, destabilize regions and throw existing diplomatic arrangements into flux. These predictions almost invariably turn out wrong; nuclear weapons consistently fail to undo the existing power relationships of the international system. The North Korean example is instructive. In spite of the dire warnings about the dangers of a North Korean nuclear weapon, the region has weathered Pyongyang’s nuclear proliferation in altogether sound fashion. Though some might argue that nukes have “enabled” North Korea to engage in a variety of bad behaviors, that was already the case prior to its nuclear test. The crucial deterrent to U.S. or South Korean action continues to be North Korea’s conventional capabilities, as well as the incalculable costs of governing North Korea after a war. Moreover, despite the usual dire predictions of nonproliferation professionals, the North Korean nuclear program has yet to inspire Tokyo or Seoul to follow suit. The DPRK’s program represents a tremendous waste of resources and human capital for a poor state, and it may prove a problem if North Korea endures a messy collapse. Thus far, however, the effects of the arsenal have been minimal. Israel represents another case in which the benefits of nuclear weapons remain unclear. Although Israel adopted a policy of ambiguity about its nuclear program, most in the region understood that Israel possessed nuclear weapons by the late-1960s. These weapons did not deter Syria or Egypt from launching a large-scale conventional assault in 1973, however. Nor did they help the Israeli Defense Force compel acquiescence in Lebanon in 1982 or 2006. Nuclear weapons have not resolved the Palestinian question, and when it came to removing the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, Israel relied not on its nuclear arsenal but on the United States to do so -- through conventional means -- in 2003. Israeli nukes have thus far failed to intimidate the Iranians into freezing their nuclear program. Moreover, Israel has pursued a defense policy designed around the goal of maintaining superiority at every level of military escalation, from asymmetrical anti-terror efforts to high-intensity conventional combat. Thus, it is unclear whether the nuclear program has even saved Israel any money. The problem with nukes is that there are strong material and normative pressures against their use, not least because states that use nukes risk incurring nuclear retaliation. Part of the appeal of nuclear weapons is their bluntness, but for foreign policy objectives requiring a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer, they are useless. As a result, states with nuclear neighbors quickly find that they can engage in all manner of harassment and escalation without risking nuclear retaliation. The weapons themselves are often more expensive than the foreign policy objectives that they would be used to attain. Moreover, normative pressures do matter. Even “outlaw” nations recognize that the world views the use of nuclear -- not to mention chemical or biological -- weapons differently than other expressions of force. And almost without exception, even outlaw nations require the goodwill of at least some segments of the international community. Given all this, it is not at all surprising that many countries eschew nuclear programs, even when they could easily attain nuclear status. Setting aside the legal problems, nuclear programs tend to be expensive, and they provide relatively little in terms of foreign policy return on investment. Brazil, for example, does not need nuclear weapons to exercise influence in Latin America or deter its rivals. Turkey, like Germany, Japan and South Korea, decided a long time ago that the nuclear “problem” could be solved most efficiently through alignment with an existing nuclear power. Why do policymakers, analysts and journalists so consistently overrate the importance of nuclear weapons? The answer is that everyone has a strong incentive to lie about their importance. The Iranians will lie to the world about the extent of their program and to their people about the fruits of going nuclear. The various U.S. client states in the region will lie to Washington about how terrified they are of a nuclear Iran, warning of the need for “strategic re-evaluation,” while also using the Iranian menace as an excuse for brutality against their own populations. Nonproliferation advocates will lie about the terrors of unrestrained proliferation because they do not want anyone to shift focus to the manageability of a post-nuclear Iran. The United States will lie to everyone in order to reassure its clients and maintain the cohesion of the anti-Iran block. None of these lies are particularly dishonorable; they represent the normal course of diplomacy. But they are lies nevertheless, and serious analysts of foreign policy and international relations need to be wary of them. Nonproliferation is a good idea, if only because states should not waste tremendous resources on weapons of limited utility. Nuclear weapons also represent a genuine risk of accidents, especially for states that have not yet developed appropriately robust security precautions. Instability and collapse in nuclear states has been harrowing in the past and will undoubtedly be harrowing in the future. All of these threats should be taken seriously by policymakers. Unfortunately, as long as deception remains the rule in the practice of nuclear diplomacy, exaggerated alarmism will substitute for a realistic appraisal of the policy landscape."
EDU,"We present our calculations of the economic burden associated with the oppor- tunity gap—the cost that is paid later when current educational investments are insufficient. Education develops human capital, the skills and knowledge that equip people to be productive workers and capable citizens. e individual gains in terms of higher incomes and more secure employment, as well as in a host of other ways. Equally importantly, when individuals are more educated, taxpayers gain, since those who earn more pay more in taxes and rely less on public services. Society gains, too; individuals who earn more are healthier, less likely to commit crimes, and more likely to participate actively in the democratic process.1 Conversely, when students fail to acquire adequate skills, the economic costs are considerable. e skills required for stable employment are multiplying. In e Race between Education and Technology, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz demon- strate that wage levels and economic growth depend on how well workers can keep up with changes in the complexity of job tasks.2 In the twentieth century, increas- ing proportions of young people attended high school and, later, college. Jobs were available for high school dropouts, but these are now being replaced by physical capital (machines) or outsourced. Current high school and college graduates will need to be more flexible, and to keep up with technological changes, they will need a strong foundation of literacy and numeracy. Yet, many students lack this foundation. People who acquired very little human capital during high school are clustered in urban areas, where demographic changes intersect with low-quality schooling.3 Helping these individuals gain credentials that have strong value in the labor market is vital for the economy over future decades. Alternatively, we could ask whether the educational opportunities available to students are fair or equitable (see Moses and Rogers, chapter 15 in this volume). Usually, the economic efficiency and equity approaches are expressed in terms of a trade-off: efficiency can be increased at the expense of equity. However, in this case enhancing educational opportunities not only would reduce inequities in life- time economic outcomes, but would be more efficient from a societal perspective. Both the moral and economic perspectives make clear the urgency of addressing the opportunity gap."
EDU,"Rodriguez did leave the door open for subsequent educational equality litigation by noting that there may be a constitutional right to ""some identifiable quantum of education."" n44 The implication was a glimmer of hope for equal education proponents and prompted another lawsuit, Plyler v. Doe. n45 There, the Supreme Court held unconstitutional a Texas statute that completely barred children of undocumented immigrants from participating in public education. n46 The Court noted that denying these children access to education would impose a ""lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status."" n47 Plyler, however, has not set a trend counter to Rodriguez. Although a federally guaranteed right to a ""quantum"" of education exists, only a complete denial of education violates that right. n48 Thus, school finance systems based on the use of local property taxation, despite their archaic and unbalanced approach to granting localities control over education, remain constitutionally permissible. Because the Supreme Court has given no indication that it will reverse course on the issue, n49 reformers have turned to state courts and legislatures. [*1487] B. The Failures of State Court Litigation and State-Based Legislation Although state courts have occasionally been sympathetic to concerns about school finance equity, they have been very inconsistent in recognizing the need for such equity. After the limited success of Plyler, litigants turned to state courts to seek greater equity under state constitutional provisions on either public education or equal protection. n50 States are about equally split: some have accorded education the status of a fundamental right and have consequently mandated more equal funding schemes, others have chosen not to do so, and still others have declared that the state is required to give every child an adequate level of education--the definition of which is rarely specified. n51 The line of Abbott decisions from New Jersey arguably represents the most extreme example of a state supreme court enforcing school finance equality. These cases, brought by the Education Law Center beginning in 1981, challenged New Jersey's Public School Education Act of 1975, arguing that its reliance on property taxes caused substantial inequalities in funding between New Jersey school districts. n52 Almost a decade later, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that the Act violated New Jersey's constitution, that it must be revised to ""assure funding of education in poorer urban districts at the level of property-rich districts,"" and that this funding could not depend on a district's ability to levy property taxes. n53 This led to further litigation over the New Jersey legislature's failed attempts to ensure parity between district funding. n54 Although this was probably the single most sweeping state court order regarding school finance, several other lawsuits have also achieved some level of success in state court. n55 [*1488] Conversely, several state constitutional challenges have failed. In Maine, for example, students and school districts challenged the state's School Finance Act because its cuts in state aid disproportionately harmed low-property-value school districts. The Supreme Judicial Court of Maine declined to decide whether education is a fundamental right because the plaintiffs did not present any evidence that the Act affected the quality of their education. n56 The court ultimately held the Act to be rationally related to the legitimate government interest of subsidizing education while staying within the limits of the state budget. n57 Several other state supreme courts have arrived at similar conclusions, n58 thus creating an interstate rift in educational equality jurisprudence. This rift is especially problematic given recent research that stresses the importance of improving our educational systems across the board to be able to compete in a global economy. n59 The disagreement over education's status as a fundamental right significantly disadvantages students in states that do not recognize it as such a right. This is especially true for students in poor, urban school districts who are denied equal educational opportunities due to a lack of funding available to their schools. The proposal outlined in Part III would address this problem, both in states that do not recognize education as a fundamental right and in states that do but have failed to implement truly equitable systems. State legislatures have also failed to address these issues, even in the face of court-ordered relief. In Ohio, for example, the state supreme court ordered the legislature to reconfigure its school finance scheme because it did not provide a ""thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state."" n60 The state legislature failed to respond adequately, which prompted additional court opinions--also unheeded--holding that the school finance scheme was unconstitutional. n61 The plaintiffs ultimately petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, which was summarily denied. n62 Education advocates encountered a similar situation in New York. [*1489] There, a state court ordered more funding for state schools, n63 and the legislature complied with the order by drafting a plan to phase in more appropriations for education. n64 During the 2008 recession, however, New York defaulted on that promise. n65 In short, states have largely failed to ensure educational equality for their students. Even where states' highest courts have declared the school finance systems unconstitutional, such as in Ohio and New York, students were ultimately still subjected to inequitable treatment. Given the federal structure of the U.S. government, state action is necessary in promoting educational equality, but such action alone has proved insufficient."
POL,"In a divisive political environment, it is tempting to assume that progress toward federal reform is impossible. But even today, the need to confront problems in the way we arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate remains a rare point of trans-partisan agreement. Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders alike acknowledge that unnecessarily long federal prison sentences continue to impede rehabilitation, driving recidivism and economic inequality. And according to a new poll from the Charles Koch Institute, 81 percent of Trump voters believe criminal justice reform is a “very important” or “somewhat important” issue. More than half know someone who is in or has been to prison.5"
EDU,"Recidivism is crippling to our state and national economies. In nearly every state, the cost of state prisons has grown substantially in the past decade. In 2007 alone, Massachusetts spent over $500 million on its prison system. Total spending on corrections nationwide exceeds $60 billion per year. These are huge, crippling amounts of tax dollars being spent on a system which fails most of the time. With each new recidivist, a new victim of crime is created, yet more tax dollars must go to re-incarceration, and more funds are siphoned off from essential early education programs and social services, both of which help to stop initial crime in the first place. As noted above, prison education strives to stop this continuing -- and often intergenerational -- cycle of crime. When funds are spent on creating and sustaining such prison education programs, the savings as a result of slashed recidivism rates more than pay for the programs, to say nothing of monies garnered when educated ex-prisoners are working, paying taxes, and contributing financially to their communities by engaging in commerce."
EDU,"Of course, because 87 percent of prisoners are housed in state facilities,4 changes to state and local law are necessary. But history proves that decisions made in Washington affect the whole criminal justice system, for   better or worse. Federal funding drives state policy, and helped create our current crisis of mass incarceration.   And the federal government sets the national tone, which is critical to increasing public support and national momentum for change. Without a strong national movement, the bold reforms needed at the state and local level cannot emerge."
ANB,"We might recognize this reform framework as an effort to refuse and supplant prisons and punitive policing with other social projects--with employment, housing, quality education--as well as to proliferate mechanisms for restorative accountability. In the words of historian and [*704] prison activist Dan Berger, this may be understood as ""reform in pursuit of abolition."" n287 It is a call at once for ""eradication of prison"" and basic economic security, but also for more modest, practicable, immediately achievable ends: ""publication of data relating to racially biased policing, and the development of best practices."" n288 Andrea Smith, of INCITE!: Women of Color Against Violence, explains of contemporary U.S. prison-abolitionist discourse: ""When we think about the prison abolition movement... it's not 'Tear down all prison walls tomorrow,' it's 'crowd out prisons' with other things that work effectively and bring communities together rather than destroying them."" n289 An advocate with Decarcerate PA put it in these terms: ""Abolition is a complicated goal which involves tearing down one world and building another."" n290 Relatedly, the Movement for Black Lives recognizes that the human right to freedom from police and vigilante violence cannot be enjoyed without the human right to housing, education, and basic economic well-being."
EDU,"Despite those long odds, the last decade - and especially the last few years - have seen the creation of dozens, even hundreds, of schools across the country dedicated to precisely that mission: delivering consistently high results with a population that generally achieves consistently low results. The schools that have taken on this mission most aggressively tend to be charter schools- the publicly financed, privately run institutions that make up one of the most controversial educational experiments of our time. Because charters exist outside the control of public-school boards and are generally not required to adhere to union contracts with their teachers, they have attracted significant opposition, and their opponents are able to point to plenty of evidence that the charter project has failed. Early charter advocates claimed the schools would raise test scores across the board, and that hasn't happened; nationally, scores for charter school students are the same as or lower than scores for public-school students. But by another measure, charter schools have succeeded: by allowing educators to experiment in ways that they generally can't inside public-school systems, they have led to the creation of a small but growing corps of schools with new and ambitious methods for educating students facing real academic challenges."
EDU,"“If you don’t put your name on your homework, you get a detention,” one eighth grader complained. “If you are one minute late, you get a detention. If you breathe really hard, you get a detention. When we get too loud, they get mad.” The myriad school rules that school leaders believe are necessary to ensure student achievement leave students with little room to make their own decisions or their own mistakes. On any given afternoon, the cafeteria is filled with students in detention who have violated one of the school’s meticulous rules: refusing to lift a head off a desk, talking in the hallway, leaving a homework problem blank, chewing gum, getting out of their seat without permission, and the catch-all, disrespecting a teacher. Detention adds an hour of silence to students’ already full schedules, which can include sports, after-school clubs, family and work responsibilities, and several hours of homework."
EDU,"In the theoretical section of the chapter, I work out how charter schools affect school district performance and the costs and efficiency of providing education. The empirical strategy aims at estimating the effects of charter school enrollments on efficiency while controlling for costs and performance. Utilizing data for all New York State school districts (excluding New York City) from 1998/99 to 2009/10, I find that charter school increase the efficiency of providing education. The results are confirmed by several falsification and robustness checks. The magnitude of the efficiency effect differs depending on the number of students enrolled in charter schools. The effect ranges between -1.1 and -3.4 for enrollments between 50 and 5000 162 charter school students holding performance and cost factors constant. Given average per pupil expenditures of $15,395 (including charter payments), charter school reduce district expenditure on average between $169 and $523 per pupil. The caveat in the interpretation of the coefficient attached on charter school enrollment as efficiency variable is that I have to control for all potential cost factors associated with charter schools that could influence per pupil expenditures. However, in this draft of the chapter, I cannot control for the ability of the students crossing district borders. Later drafts will shine more light into transferring students and will instrument for charter school enrollment. Given multiple outputs and input sharing in the production of education, the reduction of inefficiencies in the production of test scores may have two different sources. First, the reduction could reflect decreases in spending for outputs other than test scores. Second, the reduction could reflect the use of more efficient technologies to educate students."
POL,"Twenty moderate Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives warned on Friday that efforts to overhaul the federal tax code could be jeopardized by demands for including major spending cuts in a fiscal 2018 budget resolution. In a June 30 letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, lawmakers from the moderate Tuesday Group said that including hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to mandatory programs could be ""extremely problematic"" for tax reform and asked for a budget delay until Senate Republicans finish their debate on healthcare legislation. ""We fear that if the House persists on pursuing this course, it could imperil tax reform,"" wrote the lawmakers, who were led by Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania. Republicans must pass a 2018 budget resolution to unlock a key legislative tool known as reconciliation, which the party needs to move a tax bill forward without support from Democrats. But members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus say they will back a spending plan only if it cuts mandatory programs including Medicaid and food stamps, reductions that moderates oppose. ""House Republicans have made significant progress on budget decisions and these family discussions will continue amongst the conference,"" Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said in a statement. The Freedom Caucus and Tuesday Group each represents enough House Republicans to stymie legislation on its own. Outside organizations including powerful business lobby groups are increasingly worried that the disagreement could lead to a political stand-off that prevents tax reform from occurring. ""No other reforms under consideration rise to the importance of pro-growth, comprehensive tax reform,"" the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Business said in a joint letter to Republican and Democratic congressional leaders on Wednesday. Republican moderates also worry that adding mandatory cuts to a reconciliation bill would create unpalatable legislation that reduces benefits for the poor while granting tax cuts to corporations and wealthy individuals, according to aides. The House Budget Committee canceled plans to send a resolution for fiscal 2018 to the floor this week, after the chairmen of several other committees rejected efforts to wring $250 billion in mandatory spending from spending. Freedom Caucus members want much larger cuts."
POL,"Donald Trump is a man who throws down gauntlets, and he threw down several big ones during his campaign for president -- confronting the status quos on immigration, on healthcare and on taxes, to name a few. He is now pursuing bold policy changes on each. But it could be Trump's action on taxes that matters most to whether the stock market continues to ride high, GDP growth returns to a healthy 3% and, therefore, whether his presidency is judged well in posterity. News about taxes has been relatively slow thus far in Trump's administration. Judicial blowback against his immigration policies and Congressional blowback on healthcare reform have received far more attention than the general tax-plan principles he announced in April. Still, achieving detailed tax reform may prove even more difficult than his other policy struggles once the wheels start turning. Before making tax reform a year-end goal, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin initially said he hoped to complete tax reform by August. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reacted by saying that tax reform is a ""very complicated subject"" and harder to do now than the last time Congress achieved it in 1986. And passing the 1986 tax reform legislation was no easy task -- it required winning the support of a Democratic House and a Republican president, and took nearly two years of intense negotiations. Alluding more cynically to the significant political obstacles that often impede changing the tax code, former House Speaker John Boehner said the passing of a tax code overhaul is ""just a bunch of happy talk."" Now, however, current Speaker Paul Ryan is also pushing for tax reform by the end of 2017, making these obstacles appear a little less daunting than if the administration were going it alone. Aside from whether tax experts and Washington politicians are willing to upend the tax code, it is important to note where the American people stand on the need for action on taxes. It must be remembered that taxpayers may dislike the current tax system but not be convinced that Congress and the Trump administration will make it any better -- change could be worse. Without a strong push from the American people, Trump's tax reform might not materialize. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Gallup tested several of candidate Trump's tax proposals. He advocated eliminating most federal income tax deductions and loopholes for the very rich, and Gallup found 63% of American adults favoring this with just 17% opposed. His proposal to simplify the federal tax code -- reducing the current seven tax brackets to four -- was also popular, with 47% agreeing and only 12% disagreeing. Trump's plan to eliminate the estate tax paid when someone dies garnered considerably more agreement than disagreement from Americans, 54% to 19%. Notably, this is an issue that Congress and the wider public have considered in the recent past, and public sentiment on the issue today is in line with past Gallup polls on this issue, such as when it asked about keeping the estate tax from increasing in 2010. More recently, in March 2017, Americans viewed President Trump's general plan to ""significantly cut federal income taxes for the middle class"" positively: 61% agreed with the plan (with no mention of Trump in the question), 26% disagreed and 13% had no opinion. Trump's proposal to lower corporate tax rates, however, elicited a split decision, with 38% reacting positively, 43% negatively and the potentially decisive 19% ""no opinion"" group apparently needing more information. These findings suggest Americans could respond favorably to many of the specific elements of Trump's ultimate tax plan, provided they make it into whatever legislation Congress winds up debating. For example, in spite of closing tax loopholes that favor the rich, the plan is expected to end up cutting taxes on the wealthy, not raising them. But as long as the plan also cuts taxes on the middle class, that fact alone is unlikely to sink it with Americans. Bush's across-the-board tax cuts in 2001, which more Americans at the time said were a ""good thing"" than a ""bad thing,"" are a perfect illustration of this. Whether Americans feel a sense of urgency about enacting tax reform is another matter. In April 2017, Gallup found that Americans' concern about their own federal tax burden had actually cooled somewhat, as barely half (51%) felt their taxes were ""too high,"" down from 57% in 2016. By contrast, in June 1985, the year before the revolutionary Tax Reform Act of 1986 went into effect, 63% of Americans said their taxes were too high. While public demand for lowering taxes may have waned, it is not gone. Public concern about taxes fell the most over the past year among Republicans -- a familiar political pattern given the partisan shift in presidential power. With a Republican in the White House, the Republican rank and file are less likely to say anything negative about the government, including about taxes. Still, 62% of Republicans call their taxes too high, as do 52% of independents and 39% of Democrats. The implication? While not as intense as Congressional leaders may have expected, public demand for tax reform is still there, especially among the Republicans who may matter most to GOP lawmakers. Common Ground Exists on Tax Reform As the U.S. Congress is about to start its summer recess, tax reform remains ill defined by the administration, and negotiations over sub-issues like the border adjustment tax have stalled any pivot to immediate tax legislation. More importantly, there seems to be no bipartisan support this time, while there was under Reagan in 1986. Granted, this may seem like less of an issue now, as Republicans today control both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. But real tax reform always makes for winners and losers, and it is problematic for only one party to pass new reforms. One need only look at the electoral consequences that Democrats have repeatedly suffered since 2010, the year they passed major healthcare reform legislation on party-line votes, to understand the danger Republicans could face if they pursue tax reform alone. To make tax reform possible from a bipartisan standpoint, Congress needs to make sure the bill can be branded a ""middle-class winner."" As noted previously, Americans favor tax cuts for the middle class, and as the following table shows, Republicans and Democrats are also more likely to believe middle-income people are currently paying too much in taxes than to say they are paying their fair share or paying too little. With the Trump administration wanting tax reform before the end of 2017, Ryan is now promising to put it on the front burner. However, even Republican leaders' enthusiasm for tax reform may not be enough to overcome the triad of legislative challenges that exist: the slimness of the Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, the lack of bipartisanship in Washington and the power of special interest groups in Washington, D.C., to protect their vested interests. This is why comprehensive tax reform is historically so rare. One thing working in Republicans' favor is that a majority of Americans support tax relief for the middle class, and members of both major parties tend to believe middle-class taxes are too high. If the bill can be positioned strongly as middle-class tax relief, its chances for success will be higher."
POL,"Republican congressmen are divided over the idea of a long-term approach to overhauling the tax code by extending the budget window beyond a traditional 10-year time limit, The Hill reported on Wednesday. Supporters of the idea say it would allow Congress to pass temporary tax cuts that could last for a longer period of time, while opponents argue that tax reform should be permanent and therefore revenue neutral. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey first raised the idea in May, telling The Washington Times that ""a longer time frame [for the budget window], in combination with proposed reforms, will help us realize a robust economic revival [because] many business choices hinge on forecasting beyond"" a 10-year period. The budget window is relevant to tax reform because congressional Republicans plan to pass tax legislation using reconciliation, which means the legislation would need only a simple majority to pass, according to The Hill. But reconciliation bills are not allowed to add to the deficit outside of the budget window, which means a tax bill either needs to be permanent and revenue neutral or have at least some provisions that are temporary. Toomey said last week that he's getting a ""fair amount"" of support for his idea, but it has not gained the backing of the GOP leadership in the House. And outside tax and budget groups also have expressed opposition to extending the budget window for a tax bill. ""Tax reform should be fully paid for, regardless of the budget window,"" Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget President Maya MacGuineas said in a statement. ""If the only purpose of moving to a 20-year budget window is to add to the debt, then it is a gimmick."" Even among those with authority who favor the idea, such as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, say it is unlikely to happen. ""We're pretty well stuck on the 10 years,"" he said, pointing out that the Congressional Budget Office is used to providing 10-year estimates of bills' budgetary impacts."
POL,"As Senate Republicans look for a way to save their struggling health care bill, some of them are floating a once-unthinkable possibility: keeping some of the taxes imposed by the Affordable Care Act. It may not happen, but that it’s even on the table helps illustrate why broader tax reform is going to be so tricky for the GOP. Democrats paid for their big expansion of the health care system via a series of new taxes on medical devices, health insurers and, especially, wealthy people. When Republicans came to power this year, they pledged to abolish most of those taxes as part of their plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. Both the bill that was passed by the House and the one that is now being considered by the Senate would cut taxes by billions of dollars. But getting rid of the Obamacare taxes poses two big problems for Republicans. The first is political: The cuts would go overwhelmingly to the richest Americans. The Tax Policy Center, a think tank that leans to the left but whose analyses are generally respected by both sides, estimates that nearly 45 percent of the Senate bill’s tax cuts would go to the top 1 percent of households by earnings. One tax that the GOP wants to repeal, the “net investment income tax,” is even more skewed: 90 percent of its revenue comes from the top 1 percent, and 62 percent from the top 0.1 percent. That has made it easy for Democrats (including former President Barack Obama himself) to tar the Republican plan as a tax cut for the rich. The tax cuts also create a math problem for Republicans: The more they give up in tax revenue, the more they have to cut spending on health care programs.1 That could make it harder to appease moderate Republicans who want more money to fight the opioid epidemic, smaller cuts to Medicaid and more generous subsidies for low-income Americans to buy insurance. Now some Republican senators are suggesting that they keep at least the investment tax, which is expected to generate $172 billion in revenue over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. “It’s not an acceptable proposition to have a bill that increases the burden on lower-income citizens and lessens the burden on wealthy citizens,” Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee told reporters. Two other GOP senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Mike Rounds of South Dakota, have expressed similar concerns. Some Senate conservatives are likely to oppose any effort to keep the investment tax, and, as with everything in health care right now, it’s unclear how things will shake out in the end. But whatever happens, the debate provides a preview of the coming fight over tax reform, which Republicans have vowed to tackle once the health care process wraps up. President Trump hasn’t yet released a detailed tax plan, but the outline he has provided suggests that the plan will, like the health care tax cuts so far, disproportionately benefit the rich and lead to big reductions in government revenue (making it harder to pay for spending on infrastructure, the military and Trump’s border wall, among other priorities). The parallels aren’t perfect. It’s unlikely that any GOP tax reform proposal will favor the rich quite to the degree that repealing the Obamacare taxes would. And a stand-alone tax bill won’t have the same one-to-one tradeoff of revenue and spending as the health care overhaul. But broad tax reform is also more complicated than simply repealing the Obamacare taxes. There are dueling interests and competing priorities, even among Republicans, that could prove difficult to resolve. If Republicans are having trouble repealing taxes that they all agree they want to get rid of, it’s a safe bet that real tax reform isn’t going to be any easier."
POL,"For now, however, I am going to take a much simpler position on taxes: We should leave bad enough alone. Every tax proposal that the Republicans in Congress have suggested would take us in the wrong direction. Better to sit tight than to move backward. Before getting into the policy details, however, one must always acknowledge that the first issue in tax reform is and always will be politics. And the politics of tax reform are always impossible. In the maelstrom of Donald Trump’s presidency, we are already seeing cycles repeat themselves. Repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the priority for a few days or weeks. Then Trump does some outrageous things, and we all forget about policy. After a few days of confusion, we are told that tax cuts are the real Republican priority. We are currently in the “repeal the ACA” part of this cycle. Now that Senate Republicans have finally revealed their hyper-secret health care bill—which, as everyone should know by now, is really a combination of huge spending cuts for middle class and poor people along with an enormous tax cut for rich people—public opposition is growing, and that is not good for Trump or the Republicans. That means that it will soon be time for Republicans to change the subject again (especially because Trump is always tweeting himself into ever deeper legal trouble). Even before the Senate’s health bill was revealed, House Speaker Paul Ryan was already calling on his troops to get behind a “once in a generation” opportunity to rewrite the tax code in his regressive image. Actually, it is not just Democrats and liberals (two groups that do not completely overlap) who should be opposed to Ryan’s push on taxes. As a conservative columnist recently pointed out, Trump himself has given congressional Republicans every reason to walk away from voting for any major legislation (regarding taxes or anything else): If they pass Trump’s tax cuts, they run the risk that Trump will call it a giveaway to the rich, or if they pass repeal of Dodd-Frank, they might get labeled Wall Street pawns by the president. The immediate motivation for that statement was Trump’s recent statement that the House-passed repeal-and-replace health care/tax cut bill is “mean, mean, mean.” Trump and Republican leaders leaned heavily on their members to vote for that bill, but Trump did not hesitate to hang them out to dry. In that environment, why would anyone vote for what will surely be a hugely regressive tax giveaway to the ultra-rich? To do the president a solid? Loyalty is expected in TrumpWorld, but it is most definitely not rewarded. Although some congressional Republicans will surely fear Trump’s wrath if they do not go along with everything he demands, there is now every good reason for anyone from a not-absolutely-safe seat to think more than twice about backing a tax cut bill that will be easy to attack (because it will be awful). Even so, talking about tax reform is a surprisingly alluring trap for politicians of all stripes. A big part of the problem is that taxes are complicated enough that even smart people can be bamboozled by Republican talking points. For example, a liberal legal scholar recently wrote in The New York Times : “Supply-side economics … is bad science but savvy politics, because it communicates to working-class whites that Republicans understand what they want: jobs. ” How in the world could anyone think that supply-side tax cuts—that is, trickle-down economics, in which businesses and rich people get tax cuts and everyone else waits in vain for the winning to begin—“communicates” to anyone that Republicans care about jobs? That is, what about supply-side economics in particular communicates that point? The Republicans do talk about supply-side economics as an elixir to create jobs, but that is because they are relying on people not to know what supply-side economics really is. One could just as easily say that any policy—any policy at all, no matter how little connection it has to actually creating jobs—“communicates” to people that Republicans understand that people want jobs. After all, any politician can put “policy A” and “jobs” in the same sentence. Even if some people fall for the scam, we cannot conclude that that particular policy is savvy politics, because it can easily be replaced by policy B, and the new version can then be repeated as the next big lie. The point is that, despite convincing some people through pure repetition, Republicans do not have a job-creating policy, and their tax cuts are no more politically savvy than any other policy that falsely claims to creates jobs. What they actually have is a make-the-rich-richer policy that they are willing to describe dishonestly, over and over and over again. In my most recent Verdict column, I returned to the fantasyland of supply-side economics and the magical promise that tax cuts will fully or partially pay for themselves. Although everything that I wrote in that column is still true, my point here applies to Republican tax-cutting ideology more generally. Ronald Reagan’s budget director once famously said that the Reagan tax cuts were a Trojan Horse, that is, a plan that included across-the-board tax cuts that were politically necessary to accomplish what Republicans really wanted, which was tax cuts for the rich. Now, Ryan-led Republicans are so ignorant, stupid, or malevolent that they are willing to build a see-through Trojan Horse. They still make noises about supply-side fantasies, but it sometimes seems more like a matter of muscle memory than actual conviction on their part. It is all about making inequality worse, and they care less and less about hiding that fact."
POL,"Getting tax cuts through Congress this fall to boost the economy is a bigger priority than overall tax reform, a top White House official said Monday. White House legislative affairs director Marc Short said the administration is working with House and Senate leaders to produce a single tax-relief package that lawmakers would take up after Labor Day. “We believe that the economy needs to get spurred quickly, and we want to make sure there are sufficient tax cuts,” Mr. Short told reporters. “In order to jump-start the economy, we need to cut taxes for both businesses and individuals.” The president is seeking a cut in the corporate tax rate from about 35 percent to 15 percent, as well as cuts in individual rates. While congressional Republicans have been aiming at revenue-neutral tax reform in a comprehensive rewrite of the tax code, Mr. Short said “our greater priority is to provide growth.” Asked if the White House is backing off a more comprehensive tax overhaul, Mr. Short replied, “Right now, we want it to be revenue neutral. We are still supportive of tax reform, but I am also saying to you that what we believe is most important to get the economy going is a tax cut.” Mr. Trump will host lawmakers at the White House Tuesday to discuss his legislative agenda for the rest of the year. While job growth has been relatively strong so far this year, the overall economy is still showing signs of sluggishness, with growth of just 0.7 percent in the first quarter. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin has proposed a border-adjustment tax to raise revenue in an overall tax reform plan, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said the proposal likely couldn’t pass the Senate. White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn said late last week that the administration still prefers comprehensive tax reform to a slimmed-down package of tax rate cuts. “We are really driven to do the big reform and cut,” he told Fox Business Network. “Reform is still part of our agenda. The president ran on a reform agenda.” Mr. Short said the White House is still pushing for the Senate to complete a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare by the end of July, after the House passed a health-care measure this spring. He also said the administration wants Congress to raise the nation’s debt ceiling before lawmakers’ traditional August recess."
POL,"Tax reform is coming in September, regardless of what happens with health care, says Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council. President Donald Trump has promised tax reform since taking office in January, but some have questioned whether he can accomplish it this year, especially if Congress' attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act fail. Cohn dismissed concerns, telling MSNBC on Thursday that the White House will ""absolutely"" get tax reform done. ""We were going to get to tax reform if this passes or it doesn't pass,"" Cohn said, referring to the Senate's health-care bill. ""We are on a tax reform agenda when we come back in September when the August recess is over. We will be 100 percent engaged in tax reform."" The two areas Cohn said the administration has to work on to grow the economy are the tax code and regulations. He also pushed back at criticism that the Trump administration's goal of reaching 3 percent GDP is unrealistic. Shortly before Cohn's interview aired, the Commerce Department released figures showing GDP increased at a 1.4 percent annual rate. ""We do not think 3 percent GDP is that lofty of a goal,"" Cohn said. ""We think we're setting very realistic expectations."" Cohn sidestepped responding to speculation he might succeed Janet Yellen as Fed chairman, saying he has the opportunity to reform the tax code and infrastructure."
ECON,"Most everyone agrees that the current tax code is outdated and holding back the economy. The question is what to do about it. Updating the tax code should focus on removing or at least reducing the main impediments to economic growth. The chief culprit is America’s unusually high corporate income tax rate. Currently topping out at almost 40 percent, it is the highest in the developed world. It puts U.S. corporations at a tremendous competitive disadvantage, leaving U.S. workers and investors — and the economy as a whole — worse off than they would fare under a more reasonable tax burden. Any tax reform plan should drive the corporate tax rate as low as possible — if not get rid of it all together. This would certainly help workers. Most of the recent economic research shows that workers actually pay a majority of the corporate income tax in the form of lower wages. A working paper from the Congressional Budget Office finds that U.S. labor bears more than 70 percent of the corporate income tax. High corporate tax rates also make it harder for businesses to   invest in new equipment, factories, and research and development. Slow investment caused by high and distortionary taxes further limits job creation and wage growth. This isn’t some hidden truth known only to economists. Almost 80 percent of Americans understand that high corporate taxes both lower wages and encourage corporations to do business outside of the U.S. When polled, a majority of Americans also say the corporate income tax is too high and support lowering it. Supported by economic theory and American sentiments, a 15 percent business tax rate, as proposed by President Trump, would reverse some of the negative economic consequences of the current system and help spur economic growth. At 15 percent, the U.S. could have a tax rate well below the average of our major trading partners and would be a more attractive place to do business. A lower rate alone could mean an economy that is permanently 4.3 percent larger, according to a Tax Foundation estimate. A second and equally important reform for economic growth requires simplifying the current tax treatment of business capital expenses. Although a less easily understood reform, allowing the immediate deduction of capital purchases could permanently boost the economy by an additional 5 percent or more. Called “full expensing,” this reform would simplify the complex and economically harmful system of “depreciation” now in place. Simply put, depreciation makes capital purchases more expensive by not allowing the full cost to be realized for tax purposes until years later. Treating capital purchases as a current expense in the same way the tax code treats labor costs would allow for additional investment, job creation and economic growth. In recent years, America has been losing the global competition for businesses. Prominent American firms, such as Burger King and Anheuser-Busch, have moved their headquarters overseas through a process known as corporate inversions. A lower corporate tax rate can help reverse the inversions. America can win the competition for international business by also moving toward full expensing. Tax reform’s primary goal should be to reenergize economic growth. In addition to rationalizing business taxes, comprehensive tax reform should allow American families to keep more of the money they earn, instead of sending it to Washington. This should be done by applying simple and transparent low rates on a broad base that eliminates the double taxation of investment. Furthermore, to keep taxes low now and in the future, Congress must also address the main drivers of current and future government debt. Entitlement and discretionary spending reforms are necessary to make tax reform sustainable in the long run. Without spending reforms, deficits will continue to grow, requiring even higher taxes in the future. The time for tax reform is now. The current U.S. tax code impedes economic growth. Pro-growth reforms will also help mitigate high debt and growing deficits by getting the economy growing at normal rates again. Lowering the corporate income tax rate, expensing and other reforms will reverse the tide of businesses leaving the U.S., increase domestic investment and ensure a more stable tax base. Economists and the American public agree that the current system of taxation is outdated and in need of serious improvement."
ECON,"The most important question in the Washington tax code debate isn’t being discussed at all: Whatever Congress ultimately passes, how long will it endure? We don't need a short-term fix. What we really need is a tax code built to outlast partisan storms and political personalities, something people on Main Street and Wall Street can count on long term. This must be a built-to-endure mission, in the vein of famous business consultant Jim Collins. What the details should look like is open to question. I’ve never taken a public position on tax proposals, for or against, and I won’t start doing so now. The details always get negotiated to oblivion, so I see no point in slicing and dicing the Trump administration’s tax reform outline. Much more important is that the plan is built to endure so people can make long-term investment decisions on the expectation that property rights won’t change. People are really good at wiggling around rules as they change, but that’s all short-termism. Whatever Congress passes should have long-term credibility and viability, not simply a law you can take advantage of for just a little while before the Democrats get in power and flip it back. People get hung up on details, such as corporate tax rates. But what matters most is defining property rights between government and citizens. That's what the tax code does. What does the government get? What do people get to keep? What do we get to do with what we keep? Where do we draw the line, and is that line bright and enduring? Having confidence that property rights won’t change enables businesses to make long-term capital expenditures — new plants, new research and development, new equipment, new software. If we drop the corporate tax rate to 15%, fine, but if everyone believes it will rise again in 2021 or 2025, we’ll get business transactions between now and then that help for the next four years but don’t change the world. Trump's taxes must be released before tax reform: Painter and Eisen Enduring change would break the last 20-plus years’ vicious cycle of finessing the tax code, fussing with its minutiae, and tinkering endlessly to create wiggle room. We’ve passed a lot of rules that lasted only briefly, creating uncertainty whenever they were sunsetting. Remember the 2012 ""fiscal cliff"" debate? That came from temporary tax tweaks. Businesses and markets handled it, but it takes lots of accounting cuteness to navigate an ever changing tax landscape. If business leaders are forever trying to maximize profits within a short low-tax window, they’re making more short-term decisions and far fewer long-term decisions. Spending more on consultants and tax compliance, less on productive employees and capital expenditures. True for Main Street and Wall Street alike. The threat of change, whether through taxes or regulations, creates fear of future loss. And that fear is much more powerful than hope for a corresponding gain. Hence in the face of the unknown, potential losers envision scenarios far worse than whatever is realistically likely to happen and make short-term decisions to avoid them. If the Republican Congress passes another round of mere tweaks to the tax code — taking this out, putting that in as necessary to pass it along party lines — the tax reform that President Trump signs will do no good. All the wiggles are counterproductive if people believe the Democrats will erase it all the first chance they get. Most people and businesses will focus on squeezing out as much as they can in the next four years. Far fewer will bother writing a 10- or 20-year business plan, let alone investing in one to make it a reality. If the GOP can only pass something 52-48, then the Democrats can probably undo it when they regain the edge. Only broad, bipartisan reform is believable. Hence any changes should be simple and consistent with values that may not be universal but at least extend beyond party lines. Even a mediocre plan, if implemented with bipartisan support, will help people know what’s what. Main Street and Wall Street will get a sense of clarity, and you’ll start getting those 10-year business plans and the flood of investment that comes with it. Simply knowing what portion of profits will go to the government every year, indefinitely, frees up capital for all manner of productive use. All tax changes create winners and losers. But short -term changes create more losers, because someone has to pay for the winners who get to make hay in that small window. Credible, long-term change maximizes winners and does the most for our economy and markets. It’s time to finally make that “grand bargain.”"
ECON,"At his rally in Iowa last week, President Trump said we are “one of the highest taxed countries in the world.” While it is true no one enjoys paying taxes, and there are an awful lot of them, the claim that we are one of the highest taxed countries? Well that’s just not even close to being true. All told, U.S. tax revenues are 26 percent of our economy when including federal state and local taxes. This includes everything from individual income taxes, to the corporate tax, to payroll taxes, to state sales taxes. This falls on the low end of the spectrum for developed countries, where the average total tax is 34 percent, and it’s about one-half of Denmark, where almost half of income is paid in taxes. Of the 35 countries the OECD include in their data, only Ireland, Mexico, Chile and Korea are lower than the U.S. Yet, even as we are a low-tax country overall, our income tax is relatively large and certainly not conducive to growth. In the U.S., individuals pay a top marginal tax rate that averages 46 percent (depending on the state), compared to an OECD average of 43 percent. At 35 percent, our federal corporate rate is the highest in the OECD and one of the highest in the world. For that reason, reducing the corporate tax rate to make us more competitive is an important objective of tax reform. Our high marginal tax rates distort incentives, but we have so many tax breaks in our code, the high rate doesn’t translate to paying more overall in taxes. It mainly means we collect our taxes in a highly-complex and often inefficient manner, which is why there is so much we can do to improve our tax code. There are more than $1.5 trillion annually in tax deductions, exclusions, exemptions and credits in the corporate and individual income taxes. Many of these tax breaks complicate the tax code, distort decisionmaking, chiefly benefit the wealthy and favor particular industries over others. There is a great case for tax reform, which reduces these deductions in exchange for lower rates, a simplified tax code and, ideally, reducing the deficit. Well-designed tax reform could boost economic growth and improve incentives to work and invest. But the current focus on tax cuts rather than reform is highly problematic. Our debt is a near record levels — there is no credible justification in this economy for growing it more. Moreover, paying for tax reform is more pro-growth than deficit-financed cuts. Large cuts could actually slow growth even lower than the 1.8 percent it’s already projected to average over the next decade, since the drag from higher deficits could outweigh the growth from lower rates. Given that a major reason for tax reform is to promote growth, the costs should clearly be fully offset. There are many options for offsetting costs. There are many specific tax breaks that could be altered, including the healthcare exclusion, which economists from across the political spectrum say drives up healthcare costs; the state and local tax deduction, which require low-tax states to subsidize high-costs states though they get higher services; and/or the home mortgage deduction which is regressive and is a boon to the housing industry. On the business side, lawmakers could repeal a number of special interest tax breaks, as well as the deductibility of interest, which creates perverse incentives to borrow more. The list goes on. Or, if this is too politically challenging (and it seems that just about everything is these days), rate reductions could be paid for by a tax expenditures cap (something Martin Feldstein, Dan Feenberg and I have proposed) that would limit tax expenditures as a share of one's income or to a set dollar amount. We don’t need to have the highest taxes in the world to need tax reform. But reform is very different than cuts, and it is tax reform that we should be pursuing."
FED,"You really have to hand it to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. He knows how to promote the doctrines of federalism and states’ rights, and tout the importance of the 10th Amendment. The diminutive, 70-year-old attorney general of the United States, whom “The Daily Show” loves to mock as a mean-spirited hobbit from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, has spent much of his long and virulently conservative career in politics and the law supporting such ideas in an effort to limit the scope of federal authority, especially in the fields of civil and voting rights. Now, with the GOP firmly in control of all three branches of government and Sessions hypocritically threatening to enforce President Trump’s Executive Order (EO) No. 13,768—which, among other provisions, calls for cutting off federal funds to so-called sanctuary cities—Sessions has managed to convert a growing number of liberals and progressives to the federalist cause. We are, as a result, witnessing the spread of a new, progressive form of federalism. When you think about it, the conversion makes perfect sense. To derail the Trump administration’s domestic agenda—not just as it affects sanctuary jurisdictions, but also on gay and transgender rights, criminal justice and police reform, abortion, federal enforcement of marijuana laws, and the erosion of environmental safeguards—progressives are taking a cue from the right to bolster the autonomy of states and cities as they enact and defend initiatives aimed at protecting minorities, the poor, the undocumented and our ecosystems. For much of the 20th century to the present, federalism was code for political reaction under the guise of strict constructionism. From economic questions, such as the legality of the federal minimum wage, to issues of school desegregation, conservatives time and again invoked the 10th Amendment as a basis for preserving the privileges of local elites, corporations and racial and misogynistic hierarchies, while liberals sought to expand the reach of the Constitution and national regulatory oversight."
EDU,"President Donald Trump signed another executive order Wednesday, the latest of several since January -- this time to determine whether the federal government is too involved in the American educational system. The president signed the order at the U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday afternoon, flanked by department chief Betsy DeVos and Vice President Mike Pence. The action gives DeVos nearly a year to gauge the federal government's role in public education so he can make a determination whether there is overreach. The order is similar in practice to a number of others Trump has issued in the last three months to address varying corners of Washington. If Trump determines that Washington, D.C., has too large a role in U.S. education, he could rein in federal oversight and give more decision-making power to local governments -- a prospect the president classified as ""so important."" DeVos, formerly a heavyweight GOP donor, has been a vocal proponent of instituting a school voucher system to cover the cost of parents putting their children in private schools. ""We know that local communities do it best and know it best,"" Trump said. Although the order only initiates a review, Trump sounded Wednesday as if the rollback of federal education oversight is already a given. Previous administrations have wrongly forced states and schools to comply with federal whims and dictates for what our kids are taught,"" he said. ""The time has come to empower teachers and parents to make the decisions that help their students achieve success."" Trump's education order was signed on the same day as one initiating a review of a federal law that enables presidents to designate national monuments in the United States -- a proclamation that shields the lands from commercial drilling and other exploitation activities.  "
FED,"President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to review the U.S. government's role in school policy, which supporters cheered as the first step in creating more local control in education and critics worried could lead to lower quality schools in poorer neighborhoods. DeVos has 300 days ""to review and, if necessary, modify and repeal regulations and guidance issued by the Department of Education with a clear mandate to identify places where D.C. has overstepped its legal authority,"" said Rob Goad, a Department of Education official, according to a transcript of a White House call with reporters. The second most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives, California's Kevin McCarthy, said the federal government had in recent years exceeded its legal authority in creating regulations and guidance ""Different people in different states and communities will have different goals and ways of achieving those goals. That is something we should celebrate and enable, not try to stop,"" he said in a statement. The Democratic National Committee, though, said the order was politically motivated, with Trump wanting something to show in school policy in his first 100 days. The head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said the current education law, Every Student Succeeds Act, already reduces federal power over schools, especially when it comes to standards and teacher assessments. ""What the new law doesn’t do is abandon the requirement for the federal government to protect the civil rights of our students, even if those rights run counter to what states and districts want to do,"" she said in a statement."
FED,"The 62nd anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education just about coincided with the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding affirmative action, and both reveal something startling about the federal approach to educating students in high-poverty schools. It seems there are trends in public education worse than the implied threat of resegregating schools. In a recent statement to the press, U.S. Education Secretary John King mentioned an uptick in the high-school graduation rates of African American and Latino students but warned that minorities still have “less access to the best teachers and the most challenging courses.” Because of the disparity, King aims to ensure federal education dollars supplement state resources for high-poverty schools. He’s doing this with proposed regulations that would require states to alter their education spending structures, despite loud noises from Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Chairman Lamar Alexander complaining the new education law replacing No Child Left Behind does not give King authority to do so. Yet buried in King’s statement is an agenda that’s more about maintaining high-stakes testing than enhancing the education or learning potential of minorities, since what counts as a quality teacher or challenging course must be measured by student test results. Unfortunately, high-stakes testing compromises rather than bolsters education opportunities for children in need. So King’s mandates are actually counterproductive—what he’s doing in the name of helping poor and minority kids will actually hurt them. Polling on this subject is interesting. According to a 2015 PDK/Gallup Poll, most minority parents think standardized tests are important when comparing the performance of students in other schools. Americans in general support testing, as well. But everyone also agrees there is too much emphasis on testing. In fact, when judging the quality of a public school, most believe that student engagement with classwork, not tests, is the best evidence. Stop Pretending Tests Are the Solution Perhaps one reason for this is that testing assaults teacher autonomy. Don’t get me wrong: tests are important. But I object to the practice of using tests to control schools from the outside. Teachers are best situated to meet the needs of their students. Not even the brightest student can be fully evaluated using assessments that are authorized in legislatures instead of schools. When the autonomy teachers require in the classroom gets disrupted by testing, so does the learning process of literally millions of students. Teachers have long endured the burden of teaching to the test, which is more about managing materials than bringing forth insight and knowledge. Often, teachers find it insulting when bureaucrats micromanage their lessons through testing mandates. This effectively makes teachers beholden to testing. Should teachers just do whatever they want in lieu of testing? Absolutely not. That’s why accountability exists in any decent school between teachers, parents, students, and principals. That’s a much better arrangement than turning trained professionals into paper pushers and time keepers—diverting their attention away from crucial things like student engagement. Local accountability works when it’s not undermined. But the focus on standardized testing in education debates today does the teaching profession a disservice and shifts our attention away from actual classwork. This should be alarming to African Americans, in particular, who poll the highest in their trust and confidence of teachers. The danger to students of overemphasizing tests is that with low-wealth minority students, for whom the value of an education can’t be overstated, standardization gets in the way of teaching critical thinking. Assessing critical thinking is more of a qualitative practice, which is why it contrasts with the U.S. Department of Education’s overreliance on quantitative data. Still, for our children’s sake, because critical thinking is foundational to comprehension and problem solving skills, it shouldn’t be neglected. Despite Data Onrush, Minority Kids Still Behind We’re awash in data these days. The National Center for Education Statistics routinely looks at issues like persistence and outcomes among minorities. In 2013, the National Assessment of Educational Progress pointed to the enduring black-white and Hispanic-white achievement gap. This is where one important study becomes useful. A U.S. News and World Report article published earlier this year and titled “Achievement Gap Between White and Black Students Still Gaping” described a recent analysis of a historic education report. The Coleman Report, named for a prominent sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, was commissioned by the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It became highly influential in shaping education policy. When compared to today’s achievement gap statistics, the report makes clear that in 50 years the gap has narrowed only incrementally. Achievement differentials have hardly narrowed because programs like Title I never really focus on students themselves. Education policy often manages to get caught up in abstractions and data points instead of reality. So it’s no surprise that 50-year-old policies, which have done very little for students, are still being championed. It’s not difficult at all for me to accept that this obstinate gap will likely remain for generations. In fact, I question why federal and state governments think in comparative terms such as “gap” and “disparity” anyway—especially when teachers, including me, are most concerned with maximizing the academic potential of individual students. What is difficult to swallow is the fiction that testing will somehow make education more equitable for students in need, when the facts show otherwise. Title I Hasn’t Helped Poor Kids One goal of Title I—the major source of federal funding for low-income students—is to help low-achieving students reach minimum proficiency on state assessments. But efforts toward this goal have been almost juvenile, with oversight of public funds becoming an afterthought. For instance, in his press statement, King described a situation where large sums of grant money have been given to state bureaucrats who, in turn, have not used those dollars to actually help students languishing in impoverished schools. Unfortunately, Title I has succeeded mostly in creating additional layers of bureaucracy in education funding. Some want to shift the blame to testing companies that design and create the assessments many states use, thanks to federal mandates. An article in The Washington Post last year titled “Big Education Firms Spend Millions Lobbying for Pro-testing Policies” implies that corporations are thirsting after the largesse of programs like Title I. But this is a distraction. The Pearsons and McGraw-Hills of the world aren’t the problem. The truth is that teachers are trained to wisely purchase testing materials. Politicians are not. And Title I wrongly incentivizes lawmakers to make these kinds of decisions. All the same, scrutinizing transactions with testing companies doesn’t get to the heart of the matter and has little, if anything, to do with access to a good education in America today. So the real question remains. How does Title I improve education for minorities trapped in high-poverty schools? It doesn’t. In fact, the testing provision of Title I gets in the way of its own main goals. Testing Degrades the Best Instruction Regardless of their philosophical leanings, some of the greatest education theorists of the twentieth century (Dewey, Freire, Illich) agree that education should be a liberating experience. But making this a reality begins with teaching, not politics. First and foremost, teachers are charged with shaping the minds of students. They need the freedom to plan lessons and find ways to pique student interest. Classrooms across the nation cannot afford to have teachers wasting time moderating eight or more weeks of annual test prep. Amid Title I’s numerous lofty goals, what exactly does it mean by a high-quality education? As an educator, when I think about quality, national and state assessments don’t come to mind. I think about in-class accountability and not the zero-sum game of stigmatizing schools that underperform on tests. I think about an uninhibited process where ideas surface and help generate productive discussion, where insight flows from teacher to student and vice versa. Testing is simply a far cry from this kind of meaningful intellectual exchange, which is all too often sidelined in schools. Education policy analysts like Diane Ravitch have argued that the country has more of a poverty problem than a schools problem. It’s true that poverty influences the way a student pursues education and shapes the support system available to that student. But many assessments of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, including Thomas Sowell’s “Economic Facts and Fallacies,” make the case that government efforts to eradicate poverty have been minimal, at best. And it’s worth noting that Title I of the ESEA was a part of Johnson’s sweeping legislation. Because massive federal programs often lead to one gap or another, public policy should scale back the middle men and women. The provider industry of test developers and anti-poverty agents should also be trimmed. Those programs could then be supplemented with things like access, school choice, and autonomy for teachers and minority students. This is the truly powerful legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, which gets obscured underneath a slew of hollow programs and promises."
FED,"Courts are important players in education reform not by articulating the content of educational policy but by setting the rules governing how education reform can proceed. Educational reform involves an important give and take as interested parties advance their own solutions, but there are constitutional limits on this give and take that should be defined by state courts. The experience of educational adequacy lawsuits indicates that there is an important political dynamic at play here, which involves courts and ultimately inures to the benefit of students, as all education reform should."
FED,"We know that national standards are not needed for success in international comparisons. Back in the 1970s, the United States and Canada were both in the middling, mediocre ranks internationally. Both countries are rather similar in culture and level of commercial and industrial development. The United States has continued to wallow in mediocrity, even as we centralize K-12 education. Yet Canada (which has more competitive federalism in education than the United States and has no Ministry of Education in its central government) has climbed into the ranks of advanced nations in academic performance. Why is this important? Because one of the pillars of the case for national curriculum-content standards is that they are necessary for individuals to succeed in a global marketplace and that all top-performing countries have them. The case of Canada refutes that. Let’s turn to the background of the Common Core. Content standards, tests, and curriculum that had been provided by the states—thus far—will now because of Common Core be provided by federally-endorsed national curriculum-content standards, federally-funded tests, and curriculum (some of it federally funded) based on those tests and curriculum-content standards. The Common Core national standards had their origins in several Washington, D.C.-centric lobbying and policy-advocacy groups—namely, the National Governors Association (NGA), the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and Achieve Inc. Shortly after the Obama administration came to power, it adopted and endorsed the national standards. It used competitive grants to coerce states into adopting Common Core. It paid for Common Core national tests and intervened in the test-creation process. It created a panel to oversee and monitor the national tests. It granted states waivers from the burdens of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—conditional on continued adherence to Common Core or a federally-approved alternative. Central to the thinking (and rhetoric) of the advocates of Common Core on education reform was the idea that state performance standards were already on a downward slide and that, without nationalization, standards would inexorably continue on a “race to the bottom.” The name given to the Obama administration’s signature school reform effort, the Race to the Top program (RttT), reflects this belief. The idea is that to prevent states from following their supposed natural dynamic of a race to the bottom, the federal government needs to step in and lead a race to the top. I would disagree. While providers of public education certainly face the temptation to do what might look like taking the easy way out by letting academic standards slip, there is also countervailing pressure in the direction of higher standards (especially, as long as there are competing standards in other states). If policymakers and education officials let content standards slip, low standards will damage the state’s reputation for having a trained workforce. Such a drop in standards will even damage the policymakers’ own reputations. In 2007, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute looked empirically at state performance standards over time in a study called The Proficiency Illusion. The study showed that while states had a variety of performance standards (as would be expected in a federal system), the supposed “race to the bottom” was not happening. The proponents of the Common Core wrong in their claims that state performance standards were inevitably and everywhere on a downward slide. Why is this important? Because the other case for national curriculum-content standards is that without nationalization there will be a race to bottom and that only national standards can reverse a supposedly already-existing “race to the bottom.” But the facts refute this. This topples the other principal argument for national standards. To finance its Race to the Top program, the U.S. Department of Education took discretionary stimulus money that could be used as conditional grants, and then turned a portion of that money into a competitive grant program. It used the grants to encourage states to adopt the national standards. Policy analyst Michael Petrilli aptly called inducements to adopt the standards “the carrot that feels like a stick.” The department also paid for national consortia to develop national tests aligned with the national curriculum–content standards. The administration created another inducement in the form of No Child Left Behind waivers. In return for adopting the national standards or a federally approved alternative, states could escape NCLB sanctions for not making timely gains in student achievement. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan went beyond what the law allows, by substituting the Obama administration’s favored education reforms (including national curriculum-content standards and tests) for NCLB’s accountability measures. I would add that the new accountability systems under the waivers can all too easily hide deficiencies in the performance of children in previously closely watched sub-groups and may weaken incentives to improve performance of those children. To some extent, federal officials have commandeered state curriculum-content standards and tests and substituted national standards and tests; to some extent, some state officials embraced the national standards-and-testing cartel as a relief from political pressure within their state and a relief from competitive pressure from other states. In any case, national standards and tests will change curriculum content, homogenize what is taught, and profoundly alter the structure of American K-12 public education. Nationalizing standards and tests would, according to this analysis, eliminate them as differentiated school-reform instruments that could be used by states in competition over educational attainment among the states. Sonny Perdue, governor of Georgia at the time Common Core was created, did not like it when the low-performing students of his state were compared with students in other states that had different standards from Georgia’s. He became the lead governor in bringing the NGA into the national standards effort. So, Yes, Common Core does undermine “competitive federalism.” Indeed, in part, it was designed to do so. Federalism is not only distinction from and rivalry between the federal government and the states; it is also rivalry among the states and among local governments within the states. As economist Richard McKenzie writes, the Founders sought to disperse power “among many different and competing governments—at the federal, state, and local levels.” The insight of competitive federalism is that fifty-one state school boards are better than a single federal Executive-branch office. Fifteen-thousand local school boards are better than either fifty-one state school boards or a single federal office. As political scientist Thomas Dye puts it, “intergovernmental competition” was seen by the Founders as an “auxiliary precaution” against the “monopoly abuse of power by a single centralized government.” Competitive federalism encourages innovation, allows movement between jurisdictions that enhances liberty, and permits a better match between policies and voter preferences. Common Core’s national uniformity runs counter to competitive federalism. Let’s turn to Alexis de Tocqueville, the most famous observer of American society in our history and see what he can tell us about national education standards. Tocqueville is famous for his portrait of nineteenth-century America and his philosophic insights on why the American society has flourished—and also where it might go wrong. It is worth reminding ourselves what some of Tocqueville’s insights were. Once we do, we can consider the current nationalization of K-12 public-school curriculum, with Tocqueville’s insights in mind. One of Tocqueville’s major insights was that Americans have benefited from popular participation in the large number of churches, charities, clubs, and voluntary associations in our country, as well as in state and local governments, which stand between the individual and the national government in Washington, D.C. In essence, Tocqueville believed that the civic health of America depended on popular participation in entities like associations to create and maintain religious, private, or charter schools, as well as in local authorities like school districts with fully-empowered schools boards. Such activity fosters civic virtue and “habits of the heart” and encourages everyday citizens to take on necessary social tasks that in pre-modern society lowly subjects were not allowed to undertake, but were instead the duty of the aristocracy. When Tocqueville described nineteenth-century American society he spoke, for example, of township school committees that were deeply rooted in their local communities. In those days, state control of local public education took the form of an annual report sent by the township committee to the state capital. There was no national control. Large sums (much of it taxed from laborers and farmers) were spent by these school committees, and their efforts reflected, Tocqueville thought, a widespread American desire to provide basic schooling as a route to opportunity and advancement. He admired the fact that in self-activating America, one might easily chance upon farmers, who had not waited for official permission from above, but were putting aside their plows “to deliberate upon the project of a public school.” At the same time, Tocqueville observed in European countries that activities like schooling that had formerly been part of the work of guilds, churches, municipalities, and the like were being taken over by the national government of those countries. Tocqueville feared that if either Americans neglected their participation in associations or local governments or Europeans lost their intermediate entities to the national governments, the tendency would be toward a loss of a liberty and a surrender to a soft despotism. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville described how in Europe “the prerogatives of the central power” were increasing every day and making the individual “weaker, more subordinate, and more precarious.”Once, he said, there had been “secondary powers” that represented local interests and administered local matters. Local judiciaries, local privileges, the freedoms of towns, provincial autonomy, local charities—all were gone or going. The national central government, he wrote, “no longer puts up with an intermediary between it and the citizens.” Tocqueville said that, in Europe, education, like charity, “has become a national affair.” The national government receives or even takes “the child from the arms of his mother” and turns the child over to “the agents” of the national government. In nineteenth-century Europe, the national governments already were infusing sentiments in the young and supplying their ideas. “Uniformity reigns” in education, Tocqueville said. Intellectual diversity was disappearing. He feared that both Europe and America were moving toward “centralization” and “despotism.” Tocqueville believed that in non-aristocratic societies (like America), there is strong potential for the national government to become immense and influential, standing above the citizens, not just as a mighty and coercive power, but also as a guardian and tutor. Tocqueville maintained that religion (as a moral anchor) as well as involvement in local government (such as school districts) and voluntary organizations could help America counter the tendency toward tyranny. Joseph Califano, President Jimmy Carter’s Health, Education and Welfare Secretary, articulated Tocqueville-style concerns about a centralization of schooling: “Any set of test questions that the federal government prescribed should surely be suspect as a first step toward a national curriculum. … [Carried to its full extent,] national control of curriculum is a form of national control of ideas.” Unless Common Core is stopped, its officials will dismantle what remains of state and local decision-making on classroom lessons and replace it with a new system of national tests and a national curriculum. This policy is Tocqueville’s nightmare: As in Europe, education “has become a national affair” and Common Core is the vehicle for imposing in America a one-size-fits-all centralization like that administered by the National Ministry of Education in France. Federalism, including horizontal inter-jurisdictional competition, allows policies better matched to needs and preferences of voters. It allows individuals and families to “vote with their feet”—to move to jurisdictions that they like, where the authorities don’t act counter to their liberties and preferences. Competitive federalism allows experimentation by alternative jurisdictions. One state can try one policy, while another state tries something else. This is why it is called the “laboratory of democracy.” This feature of federalism is what brought Massachusetts, Indiana, California and several other states to have the outstanding curriculum-content standards that they had before the Common Core. This is the feature of federalism that facilitates an exit strategy from Common Core: It allows states that are leaving Common Core to repeal and replace the national curriculum-content standards with outstanding pre-Common Core state standards. This can be done on an interim basis, while those states design their own replacement standards for the long run. Then the rivalry that takes place under competitive federalism will go back to work to the benefit of teachers, students, and everyone who wants a well-educated citizenry—and also everyone who wants to have the freedoms that are protected by the U.S. Constitution’s Madisonian system of federalism."
FED,"The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001 sparked widespread controversy over the federal government’s proper role in public education. Opponents criticized the legislation as an unprecedented federal intrusion on state and local governments’ policymaking authority. Whereas previous incarnations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) required local schools and districts to comply with detailed rules about how to spend categorical funds, federal moneys were never before made contingent on a rigorous testing and accountability regime. By requiring annual testing and tying federal funding to student outcomes, the new legislation signaled a shift in the federal government’s role vis à vis subnational governing bodies. This shift in authority led some to question whether state and local governments’ structural protections from federal overreaching are dead—at least in the field of public education. In The Political Safeguards of Federalism, Herbert Wechsler argued that because states’ rights are preserved through the legislative process, the Supreme Court need not intervene to protect states from federal regulatory intervention. The legislative process shelters state autonomy, Wechsler argued, by ensuring that federal legislation must gain the approval of the Senate, which is responsive to state interests, the House, whose congressional districts are dictated by state legislatures, and the president, who depends on states through the Electoral College system. According to critics, congressional acquiescence in President George W. Bush’s drive for top-down standards-based reform (SBR) demonstrates the failure of these traditional safeguards. Beginning in the 1990s, the Supreme Court stopped deferring to federal regulatory authority and began striking down legislation it deemed overly intrusive. According to the Court, national political institutions had failed to protect state interests, thus necessitating a more robust role for the judiciary in preserving the delicate balance between state and federal interests."
FED,"Government intervention is a zero-sum game; every act of centralization comes at the expense of liberty and the civil society institutions upon which this country was founded. Education is no exception. Growing federal intervention in education over the past half century has come at the expense of state and local school autonomy, and has done little to improve academic outcomes. Every new fad and program has brought not academic excellence but bureaucratic red tape for teachers and school leaders, while wresting away decision-making authority from parents. Despite significant growth in federal intervention, American students are hardly better off now than they were in the 1970s. Graduation rates for disadvantaged students, reading performance, and international competitiveness have remained relatively flat, despite a near tripling of real per-pupil federal expenditures and more than 100 federal education programs. Achievement gaps between children from low-income families and their more affluent peers, and between white and minority children, remain stubbornly persistent. While many of these problems stem from a lack of educational choice and a monopolistic public education system, the growth in federal intervention, programs, and spending has only exacerbated them."
FED,"Three of the four values associated with state and local authority support school desegregation's allowance of local control over the remedial process. First, the value of public participation in democracy is furthered by state and local power over desegregating schools. If the alternative is authority by non-elected, life-tenured judges, then the opportunity for participation will only exist within the confines of party participation in litigation. Affording authority to officials in the state and local executive and legislative branches will further democratic ideals by increasing the number of voices heard in the remedial process and by holding the decision makers accountable through any attending electoral process. Second, promoting state and local officials' authority will decrease the chances for tyranny because the checks on the abuses of judicial power-appellate review and impeachment-are significantly weaker than that afforded by the electoral process. Third, local control furthers experimentation in school desegregation more than exclusive judicial control. Given educators' superior knowledge of education, promoting local control has the strong possibility of increasing experimentation. While judges could certainly draw upon the educators' knowledge in any number of ways, imagining judges taking responsibility for educational innovation in school desegregation is difficult. Educators, on the other hand, likely would have the necessary confidence and incentive to undertake experimentation. Further, because school desegregation will vary by locality-local conditions will affect every aspect of school desegregation-then experimentation is of high value and a national standard is of low value. In sum, not only is school desegregation's promotion of local control faithful to the American tradition of school governance, but it is consistent with three values supporting state and local authority."
FED,"Another angle to consider is whether the Necessary and Proper clause is broad enough to cover something as invasive as forcing individuals to be vaccinated. While this may be necessary, it is likely not proper. If the Court found that forcing someone to *buy* insurance is improper, then forcing someone to receive an injection is almost certainly beyond the scope of the federal government’s authority–even if this is within the police power of the state under Jacobson. This is even worse than the so-called broccoli horrible. One more angle concerns the federal displacement of a traditional ground of state law. For centuries, the state police power has entailed regulation over inoculation and quarantines. According to that power, states have crafted various exemptions and approaches that, for better or worse, reflect the considered judgment of their elected branches. A nationwide federal policy would immediately preempt all of those laws. Under NFIB, this counsels against the constitutionality of this invasion of state power. Or, imagine another hypothetical. Congress passes a statute that provides that schools will only receive money if 100% of their students are vaccinated–subject to very narrow religious exemptions (think of the ACA’s contraception mandate).  The requirement to impose the vaccination mandate would be far too great to fall within the enumerated spending power. It would also displace the traditional state power over health and safety laws."
FED,"Madison praised federalism for its potential to improve the overall quality of representation over what was present in the state legislatures prior to federation, bolstering the feasibility of democracy (the Federalist, Elazar 1987, Ostrom 1991), Other benefits of federalism cite the value of decentralization: it may more effectively manage heterogeneous populations; distributing authority at lower levels may serve as a pressure valve, releasing ethnic tensions (the Federalist, Horowitz 1985, Stepan 1999). In the fiscal federalism literature, decentralization permits citizens to elect politicians who will tailor policy to meet local preferences or to move to states that better match their interests (Tiebout 1956, Inman and Rubinfeld 1992, Peterson 1995, Donahue 1997, Oates 1999). Most federations are established for multiple reasons. In the Federalist, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay allude to the unions potential to make the states more secure against foreign invasion, to improve the economy through establishment of a common market, to minimize the incidence and consequences of skirmishes between the states, and (particularly Madison), to improve the quality of representative democracy. A third and fourth reason for federating should be mentioned. First, some federations were established or encouraged by a colonial power with the aim of maintaining dependence, a sort of divide-and-conquer strategy. A fifth objective comes from the political economy of fiscal federalism literature (see especially Cre´mer and Palfrey 1999, 2002 and Hafer and Landa 2004). There are conditions where a majority would prefer federation to either confederation (no federal tax rate) or centralization (no regional tax). However, one must note that these results really concern the divide-the-dollar potential of federalism: that is, how one might divide the federal spoils. Given that federalism is an institutional arrangement, and that institutions create winners and losers, some will prefer federalism—even a majority—if it allows them to take advantage of the minority. This advantage of federalism over unitary or completely decentralized governance does not emphasize federalism’s potential to increase total utility; it is a calculation based upon the utility of single agents. The redistributive aspects of federalism are very real, but are largely a problem of federalism, not a virtue (Filippov et al. 2004). Neither of these reasons are selections that a public would make behind the veil of ignorance; that is, in both cases, federalism is adopted to advantage some over others."
FED,"Our studies of federalism in the United States and throughout the world have convinced us of the advantages that lie in an economy that has a federalist structure. Federalism allows one to achieve a range of social goals, relating to redistribution, political participation, and various efficiencies, including the achievement of scale economies, the matching of benefits to costs, and the innovation flowing from competition among subnational governmental units. Furthermore, within a federal system subnational governments can check central government abuses and promote individual rights and liberties. We are comfortable, therefore, with the principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity requires that one allocate spending and taxing responsibilities to the smallest geographical and/or population jurisdictions that can raise taxes most efficiently and in the process provide the desired level of service quality at the lowest cost per citizen."
FED,"Although the extensive command-and-control environmental regulation that emerged in the 1970’s came after numerous other efforts to control or internalize pollution externalities, the centralization of environmental policy-making was more the result of political urgency and frustration than of careful balancing of the costs and benefits of centralization. Moreover, even the current centralized response to environmental problems requires the cooperation of the states, because the centralized federal government is incapable of managing the tremendous number of local problems encountered in regulating local pollution. Ideally, one of the salutary characteristics of federalism would be be to allow state governments to protect local environmental interests and to tailor to local concerns, while the federal government would set national standards, provide funding, and expertise, and address multistate problems.       "
ANB,"Enrique Dussel, an Argentinian philosopher associated with the philosophy of liberation, has been articulating a strong countermodern argument. I quote from the beginning of his Frankfurt lectures: Modernity is, for many (for Jurgen Habermas or Charles Taylor, for example), an essentially or exclusively European phenomenon. In these lectures, I will argue that modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon, but one constituted in dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the ""center"" of a World history that it inaugurates; the ""periphery"" that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition. The occlusion of this periphery (and of the role of Spain and Portugal in the formation of the modern world system from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries) leads the major contemporary thinkers of the ""center"" into a Eurocentric fallacy in their understanding of modernity. If their understanding of the genealogy of modernity is thus partial and provincial, their attempts at a critique or defense of it are likewise unilateral and, in part, false. (Dussel [19931 1995, 65) The construction of the idea of modernity linked to European expansion, as forged by European intellectuals, was powerful enough to last almost five hundred years. Postcolonial discourses and theories began effectively to question that hegemony, a challenge that was unthinkable (and perhaps unexpected) by those who constructed and presupposed the idea of modernity as a historical period and implicitly as the locus of enunciation—a locus of enunciation that in the name of rationality, science, and philosophy asserted its own privilege over other forms of rationality or over what, from the perspective of modern reason, was nonrational. I would submit, conse quently, that postcolonial literature and postcolonial theories are constructing a new concept of reason as differential loci of enunciation. What does ""differential"" mean? Differential here first means a displacement of the concept and practice of the notions of knowledge, science, theory, and understanding articulated during the modern period.® Thus, Dussel's region alization of modernity could be compared with Homi Bhabha's, both speak ing from different colonial legacies (Spanish and English respectively): ""Driven by the subaltern history of the margins of modernity—rather than by the failures of logocentrism—I have tried, in some small measure, In revise the known, to rename the postmodern from the position of the postcolo nial"" (Bhabha 1994, 175; emphasis added). I find a noteworthy coincidence between Dussel and Bhabha, albeit with some significant differences in accent. The coincidence lies in the very iui portant fact that the task of postcolonial reasoning (i.e., theorizing) is not only linked to the immediate political needs of decolonization (in Asia, Al rica, and the Caribbean) but also to the rereading of the paradigm of modi i n reason. This task is performed by Dussel and Bhabha in different, although complementary ways. After a detailed analysis of Kant's and Hegel's construction of the idea of I nlightenment in European history, Dussel summarizes the elements that i onstitute the myth of modernity: (1) Modern (European) civilization understands itself as the most developed, the superior, civilization; (2) This sense of superiority obliges it, in the form of a categorical imperative, as it were, to ""develop"" (civilize, uplift, educate) the more primitive, barbarous, underdeveloped civilizations; (3) The path of such development should be that followed by Europe in its own development out of antiquity and the Middle Ages; (4) Where the barbarians or the primitive opposes the civilizing process, the praxis of modernity must, in the last instance, have recourse to the violence necessary to remove the obstacles to modernization; (5) This violence, which produces in many different ways, victims, takes on an almost ritualistic character: the civilizing hero invests his victims (the colonized, the slave, the woman, the ecological destruction of the earth, etc.) with the character of being participants in a process of redemptive sacrifice; (6) from the point of view of modernity, the barbarian or primitive is in a state of guilt (for, among other things, opposing the civilizing process). This allows modernity to present itself not only as innocent but also as a force that will emancipate or redeem its victims from their guilt; (7) Given this ""civilizing"" and redemptive character of modernity, the suffering and sacrifices (the costs) of modernization imposed on ""immature"" peoples, slaves, races, the ""weaker"" sex, el cetera, are inevitable and necessary. (Dussel 119931 1995, 75) the myth of modernity is laid out by Dussel to confront alternative interpietations. While Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as postmodernist think• is such as Lyotard, Rorty, or Vattimo, all propose a critique of reason (a v iolent, coercive, and genocidal reason), Dussel proposes a critique of the enlightenment's irrational moments as sacrificial myth not by negating reason but by asserting the reason of the other—thai is, by identifying postcolonial reason as differential locus of enunciation. The intersection between tbi idea of a self-centered modernity grounded in its own appropriation of greco-Roman (classical) legacies and an emerging idea of modernity from the margins (or countermodernity) makes clear that history does not begin in Greece, and that different historical beginnings are, at the same time, anchored to diverse loci of enunciation. This simple axiom is, 1 submit, a bind.internal one for and of postsubaltern reason. Finally, Bhabha's project in lename the postmodern from the position of the postcolonial also finds lis niche in postsubaltern reason as a differential locus of enunciation."
ANB,"In What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Verdery (1996) convincingly argues that the Cold War was “a form of knowledge and a cognitive organization of the world” (330). It shaped mutual perceptions and research practices in far-reaching ways, laying down “coordinates of a conceptual geography grounded in East vs. West and having implications for the further divide between North and South” (330). Stemming from the foundations of Western modernity/coloniality, these coordinates were primarily based on dichotomies—such as capitalism/socialism, religious/atheistic, imperialist/ liberationist, or good/evil—spatially partitioning the world according to the three-worlds ideology and thus further reinscribing imperial and colonial difference globally. While the Cold War is over and the “three worlds” no longer exist, the logic of partitioning the world along this epistemological axis perpetuated into the post–Cold War era, reflecting the enduring legacy of Western modernity/coloniality. This axis is also prevalent in the current knowledge hierarchizing scholarship and body politics of comparative education, materializing in practices that privilege Western epistemologies and humanist research ethical codes (Tikly and Bond 2013), reproduce the hegemonic discourses of “development” and “benchmarking” that reinforce the unequal standing of marginalized populations, contribute to the intellectual dependency of non-Western scholars, and put comparative education research at the service of development agencies.5 Such practices often exclude nonwhite, non-Western (female) academics from academic societies and editorial boards of field-specific journals (Hickling-Hudson 2007b) and disregard alternative epistemologies, while applying distinctively Western-developed theoretical traditions and categories as interpretative frames for empirical cases far removed from the locations where these vantage points were first developed (Takayama 2016). During the 1990s, this epistemological axis became instrumental in constructing a historical rupture between socialist past and capitalist present, using the narrative of “crisis” as a central rhetorical device. For example, research studies and policy reports pointed to the rapidly declining funding for education, the HIV/AIDS epidemic among youth, the declining status of the teaching profession, the erosion of values, and the growing socioeconomic stratification of societies through education.6 Often, the narrative of “crisis” invoked binary conceptual frameworks to understand postsocialist change, whereby Western neoliberal education reform “packages” would be positioned as ideals for emulation (Silova and Steiner-Khamsi 2008; Silova 2010; Takala and Piattoeva 2012). Reflecting on education policy documents in postSoviet Ukraine, for example, Fimyar (2010) explains how policies made use of “traditional binary oppositions such as authoritarian/humanistic, state/civil society, industrial/information-technological [knowledge] society, national nihilism/self-identification, monopoly/decentralization, and totalitarian/democratization” to emphasize the differences between the socialist and neoliberal systems of rule (82). In this context, the socialist pedagogy was constructed as authoritarian and serving a totalitarian state, concluding that it needed to be eradicatedin order to become trulymodern (and ultimately trulyWestern). Such starkly dichotomous representations of postsocialist education transformations have not been limited to particular countries but have rather been attributed to the whole postsocialist region. For example, Perry’s (2003) analysis of 220 policy documents and research studies in 13 countries reveals that most documents portray postsocialist education systems at the negative end of binaries.7 She explains that policy documents present the West as “tolerant, efficient, active, developed, organized, and democratic, and the East as intolerant, corrupt, passive, underdeveloped, chaotic, and undemocratic” (Perry 2009, 177). As such, these binary constructions reorient the postsocialist education space within the post–Cold War East/West conceptual map, contributing to the perception of the region’s marginality vis-à-vis Europe and the West: “The logic of progression embedded in such ‘maps’ builds upon oppositions between communist and neoliberal systems of rule. Conceptual binaries, which present two poles in the map of transition, give the actors a sense of direction and infuse a readily digested meaning into the process of educational reformation” (82). By referencing the past and the future of education at the same time, policy documents and research studies have thus established a singular path for postsocialist transformations. In this context, the West has been uncritically presented as the embodiment of progress, providing “the normative affirmation of the Western modernity project” (Blokker 2005, 504), while constraining possibilities for imagining other pasts and futures. In essence, we see the coloniality of knowledge production at play here: singular Western models, and abstract global universals more recently, are used as the yardsticks for understanding postsocialist transformations, often drawing on racialized hierarchies and epistemologies and subjugating alternative articulations of postsocialist pasts, presents, or futures. Coloniality of knowledge production has inadvertently shaped academic identities, simultaneously socializing the non-Western or not-so-Western scholars into the Western norms of thinking and marginalizing them in the knowledge production processes. The process of Western academic socialization primarily occurred through scholarship programs established by Western European and North American governments and foundations to “promote mutual understanding, build democracy, and foster the transition to market economies in Eurasia through intensive academic study and professional training” (IREX 2016). Since the early 1990s, such programs brought thousands of students from the former socialist countries to pursue degree programs in the United States with the expectation that the returning graduates would “share their first hand understanding of American culture and democratic values in their workplaces and communities and take leadership roles in the non-profit, private, and government sectors” (IREX 2016). Those students who were unable to go to the United States or Western Europe had an opportunity to pursue Western-type education closer to home. In 1992, for example, Central European University (CEU) was established to encounter the “research tradition of the great American universities” (CEU 2015). CEU was conceptualized as “an international university that would help facilitate the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union” (CEU 2015). As in the US fellowship programs, CEU graduates were expected to return to their home countries, bringing with them a “new” imagination of democracy, democratic institutions, and the free market economy. As these Western-trained academics and practitioners returned to their home countries, they often found themselves unable to compete with Western “experts” who occupied dominant positions in the knowledge production field. As Tlostanova (2015) notes, the Global North simply refused “to accept the post-Soviet scholar in the capacity of a rational subject” (38). This epistemic asymmetry became clearly visible in the reports written by various international organizations on the status of education in different postsocialist countries. Whether commenting on education reforms in Latvia, Albania, Kosovo, or Tajikistan, Western “experts” consistently concluded that local policy makers and educators were incapable of independently conducting research, articulating policies, or implementing education reforms. Commenting on Kosovo, for example, an OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) report concluded that “there is a lack of professional capacity in, and strategic vision of, curriculum reform” (OECD 2003, 337). In Albania, “there is a lack of knowledge and skills to aid the reform in the governance of education” (52) and “a lack a meaningful educational research and policy development capacity important for improving the quality of teacher education” (67). In Latvia, “the OECD team is concerned that the MoES [Ministry of Education and Science] is seriously challenged in its capacity to accomplish its current legal mandate” (OECD 2001, 168–69). Rather than pointing to the challenges of postsocialist transformations, these reports incapacitate local efforts to engage in education reform and explicitly position postsocialist policy makers and educators as passive, ignorant, and incapable of meaningful thought and action. These narratives inadvertently reinforce the power of Western “experts,” enabling them to speak for those who supposedly lack the expert knowledge to independently determine their own futures (Silova 2010, 2014; Piattoeva 2015). Even when local expertise is called on, East European scholars are normally expected to provide empirical data and cases, while theorization, abstract thinking, or conceptual work is reserved for Western scholars (Salecl 2002; also Tlostanova et al. 2016). Mignolo (2015) refers to this relationship as “epistemic racism”: It is built on classifications and hierarchies carried out by actors and installed in institutions they have themselves created or inherited the right to classify and rank. That is, actors and institutions that legitimize the zero-point of epistemology as the word of God (Christian theology) or the word of Reason (secular philosophy and science). He who does the classifying classifies himself among the classified (the enunciated), but he is the only one who classifies among all those being classified. Those who are classified as less human do not have much say in the classification (except for dissent), while those who classify always place themselves at the top of the classification. (xv) It is not surprising then that such an epistemic relationship has triggered scholars to provocatively ask, “Can the post-Soviet think?” (Tlostanova 2015), joining the chorus of other postcolonial scholars defying the established epistemic asymmetry: “Can Asians think?” (Mahbubani 2001), or “Can nonEuropeans think?” (Dabashi 2015). While the unanimous answer is, “Yes, [they] can,” as convincingly argued by Walter Mignolo in a foreword to Dabashi’s (2015) book, the intellectual critique points out that delinking from a singular logic, process, and path established by modernity/coloniality offers the potential to simultaneously open up for various alternative histories and visions of education in postsocialist spaces. Our goal is to delink from this logic of coloniality by using three strategies. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting the socialist past(s) through new and multiple frames to reveal potential possibilities for imagining multiple futures. Second, we move to outline some relations of assumedly “different worlds” to question the very logic of modernity/coloniality. Third, we attempt to reflect on and reclaim our own positions as epistemic subjects who are capable of looking at the world from our own origins and lived experiences. While such an approach would normally be considered “beyond the scope of analysis” in many research studies (Blokker 2005, 511), we believe that it is critical in the process of delinking from a singular logic and path established by modernity/coloniality, thus having the potential to simultaneously open up the possibility for multiple histories and alternative visions of education in postsocialist spaces."
ANB,"As recognized earlier, of course, not all writers in the debate ignore the exteriority of interventions. Richmond (2010) has advocated the use of ethnographic methods, combined with principles of empathy and care, as a means of engaging with ‘everyday’ relations and practices outside the vista of international interventions. These methods provide a clear counterweight to the habituated closures of some research, and opens up the possibility of engaging with the ‘critical agency’ or ‘resistance’ of those targeted by intervention. Yet, as earlier elaborated, it has a tendency to prioritize cultural difference, understood through traditions and customs, as the principal site of this politics. As Balibar (1991) has argued, however, we must be wary of accounts and explanations that work on ontologies of ‘cultural difference’, which can functionally replicate ontologies of civilization and race. Many anti-colonial thinkers were also suspicious of using ‘culture’ as a basis for political claim-making, recognizing that more often than not it had become an instrument of political imprisonment and alienation (Fanon, [1967] 2008), or a means of depoliticizing colonial dominance (Said, 1994). Indeed, within anthropology itself there have been strident critiques of the use of ‘culture’ as a framework that persistently reinscribes the ‘West’/‘non-West’, ‘self’/‘Other’ distinction (Abu-Lughod, 1991). The notion of ‘colonial difference’ forwarded by Mignolo and Quijano, emergent from these considerations, can be understood in this respect to repoliticize the distinctions and hierarchies made in assertions of ‘cultural difference’ as the constitutive ontology of the international (see also Neumann, 1996). It does this through conceptualizing the condition of ‘coloniality’ as a complex hierarchy of epistemic, political and material dynamics that have continuously fed into the sustenance of racialized imperial power over the last five centuries (Quijano, 2000). This intellectual move can be understood as the equivalent of moving from understanding gender as a function of biology to understanding it as a function of social powers that are not only constructed but maintain a complex, shifting hierarchy of masculinity over femininity. The alternative to the culturalist framework is to repoliticize the field of action in which different peoples operate. One key strategy in anti-colonial thought was not to focus on the ‘alien’ (i.e. incomprehensible, inauthentic) character of colonial rule, but on its ‘alienating’ character – that is, its displacements, violence, silencing, humiliations and dispossessions, which accrued to people as individuals and as a group. These included the epistemic violence done to symbols, social orders and knowledge. The point is that this becomes a positional, and thus political, story rather than a ‘culturalist’ one about ‘difference’. As a strategy, a positional critique requires a careful engagement with the experiences and critical political consciousness of those who are rendered as ‘objects’ of power, but who were never only silent and/or ‘co-opted’ through their involvement with particular structures. In research, in large part this means engaging with the ways in which different people politicize various aspects of their experiences, narrate the terms of their situations and critically interpret the world around them (Abu-Lughod, 1991). Moreover, while it requires a reflexivity about the limits of one’s own gaze (see Mac Ginty, 2011: 4), it also requires a commitment to the possibility of substantive engagement with the particular politics of the situation (Ortner, 1995). This shift in emphasis I have sketched from ‘alienness’ to ‘alienation’, broadly understood, is an important one in the decolonizing project because it refuses to organize the world into boxes primarily defined by ‘culture’, which tends to limit rather than deepen understanding. Rather, by emphasizing the political content and context of human consciousness, meaning and agency, it repositions the analytic gaze towards a fuller appreciation of the politics of the international. Indeed, there is an important radicality to the refusal of this ordering. This does not mean that ‘culture’ is epiphenomenal to consciousness, meaning and agency (Ortner, 1995: 181–182), but that ‘cultures’ are not the most important subdivisions in international politics, and that ‘individuals’ themselves may never belong to them stably (Walley, 1997)."
ENV,"Without doubt, renewable energy is on a roll. Denmark is producing 43% of its energy from renewables, and it aims for 70% by 2020. Germany, at more than 25% now and 30% soon, is going for 40% to 45% clean power by 2025, 55% to 60% by 2035, and an incredible 80% by 2050. China, despite many challenges, is the world’s leading source of renewable investment, as well as the largest solar manufacturer. The United States, with about 13% renewable energy generation, has some catching up to do, though California (where some developers are incorporating solar into every house they build) points the way forward. The Solar Energy Industries Association reports that the solar market in the U.S. grew by 41% in 2013, and that it made up 20% of all new generating capacity in that year. Both solar and wind are making strides. A global Bloomberg survey predicted that solar will grow more than 20% internationally in 2014 (as it did between 2012 and 2013). And the Global Wind Energy Council projects that 2014 will be a very good year internationally for wind as well, with dramatic increases over 2013 and at least 47 gigawatts of wind installed around the world. Room for Growth But all this positive movement could obscure the fact that renewable energy is still a very small part of the mix both in the U.S. and globally. The big percentage increases start from a small base (even with its rapid growth, solar is still less than 1% of generation in the U.S., and the official consensus is that the world will run on fossil fuel energy for the foreseeable future). The International Energy Agency’s “World Energy Outlook 2013” reports, “Today’s share of fossil fuels in the global mix, at 82%, is the same as it was 25 years ago; the strong rise of renewables only reduces this to around 75% in 2035.” Business as usual is also predicted for the U.S. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) does envision a gradual emissions reduction through energy-efficiency and the use of renewables. The agency said, “Improved efficiency of energy use in the residential and transportation sectors and a shift away from more carbon-intensive fuels such as coal for electricity generation help to stabilize U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.” But the agency’s projections of electricity generation by fuel to 2040 still show overwhelming dominance by natural gas, nuclear energy and coal. At the most, renewable energy could achieve parity with nuclear power, but remain well below the agency’s projections for natural gas and coal. Today’s low oil prices are another challenge to the rise of renewables. According to Sarbjit Nahal, head of thematic investing in the global strategy division of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Beijia Ma, a principal in the group, significant changes are needed to advance renewable sources of energy. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a late 2014 report, “Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts.” Because of a 40% increase in demand in energy by 2035, they say, we’re “on a carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions trajectory consistent with global temperature increases of two to 4.5 degrees Centigrade, making irreversible climate change a reality.” They’re hardly alone in this assessment. “A new world energy economy is emerging,” said Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute. “Our civilization needs to embrace renewable energy on a scale and at a pace we’ve never seen before.” And it’s at least theoretically possible. A study by the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) concluded, “Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.” Under a rapid expansion program, the world could have nearly five million megawatts of wind power by 2020, Brown said. He added, “Combined with an ambitious solar and geothermal expansion, along with new hydro projects in the pipeline, this would total 7.5 million megawatts of renewable generating capacity, enabling us to back out all the coal and oil and most of the natural gas now used to generate electricity.” Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Stanford, and Mark Delucchi, a research scientist at the University of California, Davis’s Institute of Transportation Studies, have devised an ambitious scenario for a renewable energy takeover. “Our plan calls for millions of wind turbines, water machines and solar installations,” they wrote in Scientific American. “The numbers are large, but the scale is not an insurmountable hurdle; society has achieved massive transformations before.” Specifically, their global plan imagines 3.8 million large wind turbines, 90,000 utility-scale solar plants, 490,000 tidal turbines, 5,350 geothermal installations and 900 hydroelectric plants. They estimate that the cost of generating power with this network would be less per kilowatt-hour than generating it with fossil fuels or nuclear power. Other plans concur. “It is technically possible to achieve almost 100% renewable energy sources within the next four decades,” concludes the World Wildlife Federation’s (WWF) 2011 Energy Report, which sees wind, solar, biomass and hydropower as the future major players. “Energy derived from the sun, the wind, the earth’s heat, water and the sea has the potential to meet the world’s electricity needs many times over, even allowing for fluctuations in supply and demand.” The WWF report estimates that a million onshore and 100,000 offshore wind turbines could meet a quarter of the world’s energy demand by 2050. Experts believe that to keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, a goal of the Copenhagen Accord, the world’s energy emissions have to peak by 2020 and then quickly decline, reaching near-zero by approximately 2050. One of the often-cited obstacles to achieving this goal is the world’s reliance on coal for both power and jobs. According to Charles Mann in The Atlantic, coal causes 25% more emissions than oil globally, but cleaning up the sector may not be as difficult as it first appears. Forty percent of the world’s climate emissions come from just 7,000 coal plants. And coal attrition is already happening. The Energy Information Administration reports that the combination of lower-cost natural gas and strong EPA standards for power plants is taking a toll. Not a single coal plant was opened in the U.S. in the first half of the year, and coal was only 39% of U.S. electricity generation in 2013, compared to more than 50% in 2004. The EIA reports that a big flurry of coal closings is expected by 2016. The ongoing decline in coal has already lowered employment in the U.S. industry, lessening fears that a low-carbon future will kill jobs. So too has increased efficiency. Due in part to widespread mountaintop removal mining, which employs far fewer workers than underground mining, U.S. coalfield employment has slipped from more than 280,000 jobs in 1978 to less than 100,000 today—even as coal production increased in the same period to nearly a billion tons. The global picture is complex. Although coal production internationally is still increasing robustly, and the International Energy Agency sees demand growth of 2.1% annually through 2019, employment — at seven million jobs worldwide — has seen some losses. According to the Worldwatch Institute’s Vital Signs, “Many hundreds of thousands of coal mining jobs have been shed in China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and South Africa during the last couple of decades, sometimes in the face of escalating production.” Renewable power is already helping to compensate for coal industry job loss, with the Solar Foundation reporting 142,698 jobs in that industry in 2013, up nearly 20% from 2012. Global wind power could employ 2.1 million in 2030, at which time solar photovoltaics could have created another 6.3 million jobs. Worldwide renewable energy employs 2.3 million people, either directly or in feeder industries, in part, says NREL’s “Dollars and Sense” report, because the technology is labor-intensive (more jobs per dollar invested than conventional electric power). Overall, the Center for American Progress (CAP) estimates that making a 40% cut in greenhouse gas from 2005 levels by 2035 would create 4.2 million overall jobs, with 2.7 million net when “estimated contractions in fossil fuel sectors” are factored in. CAP said the overall effect would be a 1.5% reduction in the unemployment rate. Despite reductions in coal use and projected increases in clean-energy employment, China’s reliance on coal remains a formidable obstacle. Coal produces 70% of China’s energy, and almost four billion tons were burned there in 2012 — a major reason that China has become the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. From 2005 to 2011, China (with vast natural coal reserves) added the equivalent of two 600-megawatt plants every week, and from 2010 through 2013, it added coal plants roughly equal to half of all U.S. generation. (At the same time, China is committed to renewable energy — with hydropower included, it’s already at 20%, compared to 13% in the U.S. But demand is rising and so is production: China is planning to double its power-generating capacity by 2030.) The intermittency of wind and solar power remains a major hurdle, one that’s addressed by Jacobson and Delucchi. To tackle intermittency in renewable energy resources, Jacobson proposes interconnecting geographically dispersed wind, solar and water resources (through a smart grid), and where possible using hydro power to fill in supply gaps. He also advocates demand-response management, over-sizing peak generation (and producing hydrogen with the excess), and storing electric power on site (in batteries) or in grid-connected electric cars. Abyd Karmali, managing director, climate finance, at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, agreed that uncertainty resulting from intermittent renewables can be reduced by ramping up grid interconnections, enabling load sharing. “Also having the right mix is key, such as using hydroelectric for baseline power where possible,” he said. “And, of course, it’s also a misconception to say that only renewable energy suffers from volatility — fossil fuel plants get knocked out for various reasons, and that’s not predicted in advance.” Daniel Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, believes that better battery storage — a holy grail for scientists worldwide — is the key to solving the intermittency problem. According to Arthur van Benthem, assistant professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, current regulatory policy presents another critical obstacle to a low-carbon future. “Incentives for demand response such as real-time pricing for end users are often lacking, but would be instrumental to shift consumption from peak to off-peak hours.” In addition, says van Benthem, “The renewable industry will be at a persistent disadvantage as long as we don’t remove the elephant in the room: the fossil fuel electricity sector should pay the full social cost of their operations. In plain English, we need a carbon tax.” A Ground-level View Some countries are already working toward phasing out fossil fuels, with Germany being the most prominent example. The country, which gets 15% of its energy from nuclear power now, wants to phase it out by 2021 — with help from legislation such as the Renewable Energy Sources Act, which provides feed-in tariffs and other financial support. And its goal is to supply 80% of its electricity from renewables by 2050. In the first quarter of 2014, clean sources produced 27% of Germany’s electricity, with 40.2 billion kilowatt-hours of generation. Nearly half of all new electricity generation in Europe is wind or solar, said George Washington University’s GW Solar Institute. But among the challenges to Germany’s success are power-price surcharges that have raised utility bills for some (and led to unrest among German manufacturers), and at least short-term increases in coal use and imports of renewables are ramped up. Germany’s renewable portfolio is about double the 13% in the U.S., and Europe’s commitment to a 40% carbon cut by 2030 will ratchet up its efforts substantially. Still, some states get a large percentage of their energy from renewables, often because of large hydro-electric resources. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects that electricity generation from renewable sources will increase to 16% in 2040. Renewable portfolio standards (which set percentage goals for renewable energy) are operating in 30 states (plus the District of Columbia), and form a significant incentive if they’re heeded. Corporations are also in the lead. Renewable energy is already providing power for 94% of Apple’s corporate operations. Walmart launched on-site solar for its American operations in 2005, and made its first major wind power agreement in Mexico the next year. By 2013, Walmart had 335 renewable energy projects worldwide, producing 2.2 billion kilowatt-hours annually and meeting nearly a quarter of the company’s energy needs. Walmart’s goal is to reach seven billion kilowatt-hours and be close to 100% renewable by the end of 2020. Smaller companies, too, are making important strides. Steve Melink of Milford, Ohio, founded Melink Corporation, originally a HVAC testing firm, in 1987. In 2004, he attended a green building conference and had a “moment of inspiration. It opened my eyes that we were not on a sustainable path.” Today, Melink has deployed more than 100 strategies to get to its current net-zero energy status. In fact, the company’s embrace of sustainability led it to create a lucrative new business in solar leasing, including installation of two three-megawatt systems in Indianapolis and the $12 million 1.56-megawatt solar canopy system it recently built over the parking lot at the Cincinnati Zoo. According to Sophia Cifuentes, the zoo’s sustainability coordinator, having the solar system has resulted in 50 days a year that are effectively off the grid. The Challenge of Getting There Transportation is actually the fastest growing source of CO2 globally, and as such can offset the gains from installed renewable energy. The world car population topped one billion in 2011, and the International Transport Forum thinks it could reach 2.5 billion by 2050. Clearly, that’s not a sustainable number. Daniel Sperling, founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, believes that the 87 million barrels of oil produced globally each day could climb to 120 million barrels under that scenario. The transition to electric vehicles has the potential to blunt the oil consumption and climate impacts of the world’s cars, but there’s a long way to go. In the U.S. in 2014, 119,710 plug-in vehicles were sold out of 16.5 million total, and the numbers are smaller around the world. Electric cars are currently expensive, but with battery prices dropping, their momentum is likely to increase. Lower-cost (and longer range) cars, which cost much less to operate than conventional cars, will be attractive to buyers globally. Lowering emissions becomes a virtuous circle when the power running zero-emission electric cars comes from plants fueled by renewable energy. Making cars more energy-efficient, as in the U.S. goal of 54.5 mpg fleet averages by 2025, is important, as is moving away from cars altogether. Mass transit is key, but other innovative urban policy is also pointing the way forward: The U.S. remains highly auto-centric, but cities such as Helsinki and Hamburg in Europe have ambitious, technology-aided, plans to go car-free or as close to it as possible. In place of private cars will be telephone-dispatched bus services, ride sharing, municipal bicycles and multiple rail options. Virtually all the experts agree that the transition to a clean energy economy will be difficult. Carl Pope, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, points out that if clean energy investments result in a 5% reduction in global fossil fuel demand, the law of supply and demand would result in a sharp 25% to 30% drop in fossil fuel prices, increasing non-renewables’ appeal to consumers. Robert Giegengack, professor emeritus of earth and environmental science in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees the transition won’t be easy, “but it is inevitable.” Moving to renewables could take as long as 100 years, Esty said. Eric Orts, the director of Wharton’s Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership (IGEL) and a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, also sees a fairly hard road ahead, but it’s an achievable goal. “I don’t think it’s an easy transition at all,” he said. “But I do think it’s possible, and we definitely need to move in that direction.” Orts adds, “Even with wind and solar, it’s not simply zero emission — there are manufacturing costs, mining and maintenance issues. It should be said that the movement toward renewables has to be coupled with energy-efficiency efforts. The easiest way to reduce our large-scale carbon footprint is to become a lot more efficient, and there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit that businesses are beginning to recognize.”"
ENV,"Without doubt, renewable energy is on a roll. Denmark is producing 43% of its energy from renewables, and it aims for 70% by 2020. Germany, at more than 25% now and 30% soon, is going for 40% to 45% clean power by 2025, 55% to 60% by 2035, and an incredible 80% by 2050. China, despite many challenges, is the world’s leading source of renewable investment, as well as the largest solar manufacturer. The United States, with about 13% renewable energy generation, has some catching up to do, though California (where some developers are incorporating solar into every house they build) points the way forward. The Solar Energy Industries Association reports that the solar market in the U.S. grew by 41% in 2013, and that it made up 20% of all new generating capacity in that year. Both solar and wind are making strides. A global Bloomberg survey predicted that solar will grow more than 20% internationally in 2014 (as it did between 2012 and 2013). And the Global Wind Energy Council projects that 2014 will be a very good year internationally for wind as well, with dramatic increases over 2013 and at least 47 gigawatts of wind installed around the world. Room for Growth But all this positive movement could obscure the fact that renewable energy is still a very small part of the mix both in the U.S. and globally. The big percentage increases start from a small base (even with its rapid growth, solar is still less than 1% of generation in the U.S., and the official consensus is that the world will run on fossil fuel energy for the foreseeable future). The International Energy Agency’s “World Energy Outlook 2013” reports, “Today’s share of fossil fuels in the global mix, at 82%, is the same as it was 25 years ago; the strong rise of renewables only reduces this to around 75% in 2035.” Business as usual is also predicted for the U.S. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) does envision a gradual emissions reduction through energy-efficiency and the use of renewables. The agency said, “Improved efficiency of energy use in the residential and transportation sectors and a shift away from more carbon-intensive fuels such as coal for electricity generation help to stabilize U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.” But the agency’s projections of electricity generation by fuel to 2040 still show overwhelming dominance by natural gas, nuclear energy and coal. At the most, renewable energy could achieve parity with nuclear power, but remain well below the agency’s projections for natural gas and coal. Today’s low oil prices are another challenge to the rise of renewables. According to Sarbjit Nahal, head of thematic investing in the global strategy division of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Beijia Ma, a principal in the group, significant changes are needed to advance renewable sources of energy. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a late 2014 report, “Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts.” Because of a 40% increase in demand in energy by 2035, they say, we’re “on a carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions trajectory consistent with global temperature increases of two to 4.5 degrees Centigrade, making irreversible climate change a reality.” They’re hardly alone in this assessment. “A new world energy economy is emerging,” said Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute. “Our civilization needs to embrace renewable energy on a scale and at a pace we’ve never seen before.” And it’s at least theoretically possible. A study by the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) concluded, “Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.” Under a rapid expansion program, the world could have nearly five million megawatts of wind power by 2020, Brown said. He added, “Combined with an ambitious solar and geothermal expansion, along with new hydro projects in the pipeline, this would total 7.5 million megawatts of renewable generating capacity, enabling us to back out all the coal and oil and most of the natural gas now used to generate electricity.” Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Stanford, and Mark Delucchi, a research scientist at the University of California, Davis’s Institute of Transportation Studies, have devised an ambitious scenario for a renewable energy takeover. “Our plan calls for millions of wind turbines, water machines and solar installations,” they wrote in Scientific American. “The numbers are large, but the scale is not an insurmountable hurdle; society has achieved massive transformations before.” Specifically, their global plan imagines 3.8 million large wind turbines, 90,000 utility-scale solar plants, 490,000 tidal turbines, 5,350 geothermal installations and 900 hydroelectric plants. They estimate that the cost of generating power with this network would be less per kilowatt-hour than generating it with fossil fuels or nuclear power. Other plans concur. “It is technically possible to achieve almost 100% renewable energy sources within the next four decades,” concludes the World Wildlife Federation’s (WWF) 2011 Energy Report, which sees wind, solar, biomass and hydropower as the future major players. “Energy derived from the sun, the wind, the earth’s heat, water and the sea has the potential to meet the world’s electricity needs many times over, even allowing for fluctuations in supply and demand.” The WWF report estimates that a million onshore and 100,000 offshore wind turbines could meet a quarter of the world’s energy demand by 2050. Experts believe that to keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, a goal of the Copenhagen Accord, the world’s energy emissions have to peak by 2020 and then quickly decline, reaching near-zero by approximately 2050. One of the often-cited obstacles to achieving this goal is the world’s reliance on coal for both power and jobs. According to Charles Mann in The Atlantic, coal causes 25% more emissions than oil globally, but cleaning up the sector may not be as difficult as it first appears. Forty percent of the world’s climate emissions come from just 7,000 coal plants. And coal attrition is already happening. The Energy Information Administration reports that the combination of lower-cost natural gas and strong EPA standards for power plants is taking a toll. Not a single coal plant was opened in the U.S. in the first half of the year, and coal was only 39% of U.S. electricity generation in 2013, compared to more than 50% in 2004. The EIA reports that a big flurry of coal closings is expected by 2016. The ongoing decline in coal has already lowered employment in the U.S. industry, lessening fears that a low-carbon future will kill jobs. So too has increased efficiency. Due in part to widespread mountaintop removal mining, which employs far fewer workers than underground mining, U.S. coalfield employment has slipped from more than 280,000 jobs in 1978 to less than 100,000 today—even as coal production increased in the same period to nearly a billion tons. The global picture is complex. Although coal production internationally is still increasing robustly, and the International Energy Agency sees demand growth of 2.1% annually through 2019, employment — at seven million jobs worldwide — has seen some losses. According to the Worldwatch Institute’s Vital Signs, “Many hundreds of thousands of coal mining jobs have been shed in China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and South Africa during the last couple of decades, sometimes in the face of escalating production.” Renewable power is already helping to compensate for coal industry job loss, with the Solar Foundation reporting 142,698 jobs in that industry in 2013, up nearly 20% from 2012. Global wind power could employ 2.1 million in 2030, at which time solar photovoltaics could have created another 6.3 million jobs. Worldwide renewable energy employs 2.3 million people, either directly or in feeder industries, in part, says NREL’s “Dollars and Sense” report, because the technology is labor-intensive (more jobs per dollar invested than conventional electric power). Overall, the Center for American Progress (CAP) estimates that making a 40% cut in greenhouse gas from 2005 levels by 2035 would create 4.2 million overall jobs, with 2.7 million net when “estimated contractions in fossil fuel sectors” are factored in. CAP said the overall effect would be a 1.5% reduction in the unemployment rate. Despite reductions in coal use and projected increases in clean-energy employment, China’s reliance on coal remains a formidable obstacle. Coal produces 70% of China’s energy, and almost four billion tons were burned there in 2012 — a major reason that China has become the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. From 2005 to 2011, China (with vast natural coal reserves) added the equivalent of two 600-megawatt plants every week, and from 2010 through 2013, it added coal plants roughly equal to half of all U.S. generation. (At the same time, China is committed to renewable energy — with hydropower included, it’s already at 20%, compared to 13% in the U.S. But demand is rising and so is production: China is planning to double its power-generating capacity by 2030.) The intermittency of wind and solar power remains a major hurdle, one that’s addressed by Jacobson and Delucchi. To tackle intermittency in renewable energy resources, Jacobson proposes interconnecting geographically dispersed wind, solar and water resources (through a smart grid), and where possible using hydro power to fill in supply gaps. He also advocates demand-response management, over-sizing peak generation (and producing hydrogen with the excess), and storing electric power on site (in batteries) or in grid-connected electric cars. Abyd Karmali, managing director, climate finance, at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, agreed that uncertainty resulting from intermittent renewables can be reduced by ramping up grid interconnections, enabling load sharing. “Also having the right mix is key, such as using hydroelectric for baseline power where possible,” he said. “And, of course, it’s also a misconception to say that only renewable energy suffers from volatility — fossil fuel plants get knocked out for various reasons, and that’s not predicted in advance.” Daniel Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, believes that better battery storage — a holy grail for scientists worldwide — is the key to solving the intermittency problem. According to Arthur van Benthem, assistant professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, current regulatory policy presents another critical obstacle to a low-carbon future. “Incentives for demand response such as real-time pricing for end users are often lacking, but would be instrumental to shift consumption from peak to off-peak hours.” In addition, says van Benthem, “The renewable industry will be at a persistent disadvantage as long as we don’t remove the elephant in the room: the fossil fuel electricity sector should pay the full social cost of their operations. In plain English, we need a carbon tax.” A Ground-level View Some countries are already working toward phasing out fossil fuels, with Germany being the most prominent example. The country, which gets 15% of its energy from nuclear power now, wants to phase it out by 2021 — with help from legislation such as the Renewable Energy Sources Act, which provides feed-in tariffs and other financial support. And its goal is to supply 80% of its electricity from renewables by 2050. In the first quarter of 2014, clean sources produced 27% of Germany’s electricity, with 40.2 billion kilowatt-hours of generation. Nearly half of all new electricity generation in Europe is wind or solar, said George Washington University’s GW Solar Institute. But among the challenges to Germany’s success are power-price surcharges that have raised utility bills for some (and led to unrest among German manufacturers), and at least short-term increases in coal use and imports of renewables are ramped up. Germany’s renewable portfolio is about double the 13% in the U.S., and Europe’s commitment to a 40% carbon cut by 2030 will ratchet up its efforts substantially. Still, some states get a large percentage of their energy from renewables, often because of large hydro-electric resources. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects that electricity generation from renewable sources will increase to 16% in 2040. Renewable portfolio standards (which set percentage goals for renewable energy) are operating in 30 states (plus the District of Columbia), and form a significant incentive if they’re heeded. Corporations are also in the lead. Renewable energy is already providing power for 94% of Apple’s corporate operations. Walmart launched on-site solar for its American operations in 2005, and made its first major wind power agreement in Mexico the next year. By 2013, Walmart had 335 renewable energy projects worldwide, producing 2.2 billion kilowatt-hours annually and meeting nearly a quarter of the company’s energy needs. Walmart’s goal is to reach seven billion kilowatt-hours and be close to 100% renewable by the end of 2020. Smaller companies, too, are making important strides. Steve Melink of Milford, Ohio, founded Melink Corporation, originally a HVAC testing firm, in 1987. In 2004, he attended a green building conference and had a “moment of inspiration. It opened my eyes that we were not on a sustainable path.” Today, Melink has deployed more than 100 strategies to get to its current net-zero energy status. In fact, the company’s embrace of sustainability led it to create a lucrative new business in solar leasing, including installation of two three-megawatt systems in Indianapolis and the $12 million 1.56-megawatt solar canopy system it recently built over the parking lot at the Cincinnati Zoo. According to Sophia Cifuentes, the zoo’s sustainability coordinator, having the solar system has resulted in 50 days a year that are effectively off the grid. The Challenge of Getting There Transportation is actually the fastest growing source of CO2 globally, and as such can offset the gains from installed renewable energy. The world car population topped one billion in 2011, and the International Transport Forum thinks it could reach 2.5 billion by 2050. Clearly, that’s not a sustainable number. Daniel Sperling, founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, believes that the 87 million barrels of oil produced globally each day could climb to 120 million barrels under that scenario. The transition to electric vehicles has the potential to blunt the oil consumption and climate impacts of the world’s cars, but there’s a long way to go. In the U.S. in 2014, 119,710 plug-in vehicles were sold out of 16.5 million total, and the numbers are smaller around the world. Electric cars are currently expensive, but with battery prices dropping, their momentum is likely to increase. Lower-cost (and longer range) cars, which cost much less to operate than conventional cars, will be attractive to buyers globally. Lowering emissions becomes a virtuous circle when the power running zero-emission electric cars comes from plants fueled by renewable energy. Making cars more energy-efficient, as in the U.S. goal of 54.5 mpg fleet averages by 2025, is important, as is moving away from cars altogether. Mass transit is key, but other innovative urban policy is also pointing the way forward: The U.S. remains highly auto-centric, but cities such as Helsinki and Hamburg in Europe have ambitious, technology-aided, plans to go car-free or as close to it as possible. In place of private cars will be telephone-dispatched bus services, ride sharing, municipal bicycles and multiple rail options. Virtually all the experts agree that the transition to a clean energy economy will be difficult. Carl Pope, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, points out that if clean energy investments result in a 5% reduction in global fossil fuel demand, the law of supply and demand would result in a sharp 25% to 30% drop in fossil fuel prices, increasing non-renewables’ appeal to consumers. Robert Giegengack, professor emeritus of earth and environmental science in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees the transition won’t be easy, “but it is inevitable.” Moving to renewables could take as long as 100 years, Esty said. Eric Orts, the director of Wharton’s Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership (IGEL) and a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, also sees a fairly hard road ahead, but it’s an achievable goal. “I don’t think it’s an easy transition at all,” he said. “But I do think it’s possible, and we definitely need to move in that direction.” Orts adds, “Even with wind and solar, it’s not simply zero emission — there are manufacturing costs, mining and maintenance issues. It should be said that the movement toward renewables has to be coupled with energy-efficiency efforts. The easiest way to reduce our large-scale carbon footprint is to become a lot more efficient, and there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit that businesses are beginning to recognize.”"
ENV,"The promotion of renewable energy is an essential component of energy and climate policies, but it is increasingly recognized that the transition toward an increased use of renewable energy sources constitutes a complex socio-political process. Policy is manifested in multi-actor networks beyond formal hierarchies and must therefore build on a comprehensive empirical understanding of the local collaboration processes that make investments in renewable energy projects possible. The objectives of this article are to: (a) propose an analytical framework within which the local development processes leading to renewable energy investments can be understood, in particular emphasizing the management of the relevant actor networks; and (b) provide empirical illustrations of the framework based on existing research. The article argues that, based on network management theory, some network structures can be expected to be more successful than others in facilitating renewable energy development, and we recognize the ways in which networks and their structure tend to be placed within certain institutional contexts of rules. By consulting selected research on wind power development at the local level we illustrate the added value of the proposed framework, and outline the seeds of a future research agenda."
ENV,"Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the energy sector can be reduced by 70 per cent by 2050 and completely phased-out by 2060 with a net positive economic outlook – according to new findings. The report “Perspectives for the Energy Transition: Investment Needs for a Low-Carbon Energy Transition” was released on Monday 20 March by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). The report argues that increased deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency in G20 countries and globally can achieve the emissions reductions needed to keep global temperature rise to no more than 2°C, avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change. Adnan Z. Amin, Director-General of IRENA, said: “The Paris Agreement reflected an unprecedented international determination to act on climate. The focus must be on the decarbonision of the global energy system as it accounts for almost two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions.” He went on to say: “Critically, the economic case for the energy transition has never been stronger. Today around the world, new renewable power plants are being built that will generate electricity for less cost than fossil-fuel power plants. And through 2050, the decarbonisation can fuel sustainable economic growth and create more new jobs in renewables.” The energy investment needed for decarbonising the energy sector is substantial – an additional USD 29 trillion until 2050; however, this only amounts to a small share (0.4 per cent) of global gross domestic product (GDP). Amin said: “We are in a good position to transform the global energy system but success will depend on urgent action, as delays will raise the costs of decarbonisation”. In addition, according to IRENA’s macroeconomic analysis such investment creates a stimulus that coupled with pro-growth policies will increase global GDP by 0.8 per cent in 2050, generate new jobs in the renewable energy sector – offsetting the jobs lost in the fossil fuel industry – and improve human welfare through additional environmental and health benefits due to cleaner air. In 2015, 32 gigatonnes (Gt) of energy-related CO2 were emitted across the world. According to the report, emissions will need to decline continuously to 9.5 Gt by 2050, in order to curb global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures. IRENA said that 90 per cent of this energy CO2 reduction can be achieved through the expansion of renewable energy and improving energy efficiency. At present, renewables account for 24 per cent of global power production and 16 per cent of primary energy supply. To achieve this scale of decarbonisation, the report affirms that renewable energy sources should represent 80 per cent of global power generation and 65 per cent of total primary energy supply. The report projects that the energy mix will look significantly different in 2050, with total fossil fuel use standing at a third of present levels. The use of coal will see the most significant decline, while oil demand will fall by 45 per cent. Furthermore, the report outlines that the energy sector’s renewable transition must go beyond the power sector into all end-use sectors. The construction and transport sectors need to adopt more bioenergy, solar heating, and electricity from renewable sources that substitute conventional energy. The report specifies that electric vehicles must become the predominant car type in 2050, liquid biofuel production must grow ten-fold and high efficiency all-electric buildings should become the norm. A combined total of 2 billion buildings will need either to be newly constructed or renovated. Finally, the report calls for policy efforts to create an enabling framework and re-design of current energy markets. It prescribes stronger price signals and carbon pricing to help provide a level playing field when complemented by other measures, emphasising the importance of considering the needs of those without energy access."
ENV,"Electric energy in large amounts cannot be stored at low cost in batteries due to technological limitations; only indirect storage in the form of water in dams is economical. This reality means that the production and consumption of electricity in a given power network must be balanced constantly in order to prevent blackouts, and more generally to preserve system reliability. Because unexpected surges in demand and/or outages of generating equipment can occur, backup generation capacity must be maintained; such backup capacity is termed the ""operating reserve"" for the given network.... Electric supply systems respond to growing demands (""load"") over the course of a day (or year) by increasing output from the lowest-cost generating units first, and then calling upon successively more expensive units as electric loads grow toward the daily (or seasonal) peak. Because of the uncertainties caused by the unreliability of wind and sunlight, most electric generation capacity fueled by renewable energy sources cannot be assumed to be available upon demand; system planning and optimization cannot assume that such power will be available when it is expected to be most economical. Accordingly, it cannot be scheduled (or ""dispatched""). Instead, it requires backup generation capacity to preserve system reliability. And so the cost of that needed backup capacity becomes a crucial parameter usually not mentioned in public discussions of wind and solar power. One study, using figures from the California Independent System Operator, projects that an increase in California renewable generation capacity between 2009 and 2020 would be about 17.7 gigawatts (GW) for a 20 percent renewable requirement, and about 22.4 GW for the 33 percent requirement. The projected needs for backup capacity (of varying types) are, respectively, 0.8 GW (or 4.5 percent) and 4.8 GW (or 21 percent). What would that backup power cost? U.S. wind and solar generation capacity in 2009 was about 34,000 MW. If we assume, conservatively, that this renewable capacity has required investment in backup capacity of about 3 percent (rather than 4.5 percent), that requirement would be about 1000 MW. Cost estimates published by the EIA suggest that this backup capacity has imposed fixed capital and operations and maintenance costs of about $1.7 billion, variable operating costs of approximately $2.00-$4.50 per megawatt-hour, and total costs per megawatt-hour of about $368. That rough estimate is likely to be biased downward. Because state renewables requirements require system operators to take renewable power when it is available, conventional backup generation must be cycled—that is, in effect turned on and off—in coordination with the availability of the renewable generation. In particular for coal-fired generation, but also for gas combined-cycle backup generation, this means that the conventional assets cannot be operated as efficiently as would be the case were they not cycled up and down in response to wind or solar generation conditions. A recent study of the attendant emissions effects for Colorado and Texas found that requirements for the use of wind power impose significant operating and capital costs because of cycling needs for backup generation—particularly coal plants—and actually exacerbate air pollution problems. The projected cost of renewable power in 2016 including the cost of backup capacity is at least five times higher than that for conventional electricity. At the same time, outages of wind capacity due to weak wind conditions are much more likely to be correlated geographically than outages of conventional plants, for the obvious reason that weak winds in part of a given region are likely to be observed in tandem with weak winds in other parts of that region. Because appropriate regions for thermal solar sites and photovoltaic systems are concentrated geographically, the same correlation problem is likely to affect solar electric generation as well. The higher cost of electricity generated with renewable energy sources is only one side of the competitiveness question; the other is the value of that generation, as not all electricity is created equal. In particular, power produced at periods of peak demand is more valuable than off-peak generation, whether during a given daily cycle or across annual seasons. In this context, wind generation in particular is problematic because in general there is an inverse relationship between the daily hours of peak demand and wind velocities, and between peak summertime demands and peak wintertime wind velocities: Winds tend to blow at night and in the winter.... These realities suggest that the purported social benefits of policy support for renewables are illusory. Moreover, ongoing supply and price developments in the market for natural gas are likely to weaken further the competitive position of renewable power generation. At the same time, the subsidies and mandates that have been implemented in support of renewable electricity impose nontrivial costs upon the taxpayers and upon consumers in electricity markets. The upshot is the imposition of substantial net costs upon the U.S. economy as a whole even as the policies bestow important benefits upon particular groups and industries, thus yielding enhanced incentives for innumerable interests to seek favors from government. As has proven to be the case in most contexts, the outcomes of market competition, even as constrained and distorted by tax and regulatory policies, are the best guides for the achievement of resource allocation that is most productive."
ENV,"Even if solar and wind capacity continues to grow at breakneck speed, it will not be fast enough to cap global warming under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the target set down in the landmark 2015 Paris climate treaty, they reported in the journal Nature Climate Change. ""The rapid deployment of wind, solar and electric cars gives some hope,"" lead author Glen Peters, a researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway, told AFP. ""But at this stage, these technologies are not really displacing the growth in fossil fuels or conventional transportation."" Earth is overheating mainly due to the burning of oil, gas and especially coal to power the global economy. Barely 1C (1.8F) of warming so far has already led to deadly heatwaves, drought and superstorms engorged by rising seas. The 196-nation Paris Agreement set a collective goal to cap warming, but lacks the tools to track progress, especially at the country level. To provide a better toolkit, Peters and colleagues broke down the energy system into half-a-dozen indicators—GDP growth, energy used per unit of GDP, CO2 emissions per unit of energy, share of fossil fuels in the energy mix, etc. What emerged was a sobering picture of narrowing options. Barely a dent ""Wind and solar alone are not sufficient to meet the goals,"" Peters said. The bottom line, the study suggests, is how much carbon pollution seeps into the atmosphere, and on that score renewable have—so far—barely made a dent. Investment in solar and wind has soared, outstripping fossil fuels for the first time last year. And renewables' share of global energy consumption has increased five-fold since 2000. But it still only accounts for less than three percent of the total. Moreover, the share of fossil fuels—nearly 87 percent—has not budged due to a retreat in nuclear power over the same 15-year period. Even a renewables Marshall Plan would face an unyielding deadline: To stay under 2C, the global economy must be carbon neutral—producing no more CO2 than can be absorbed by oceans and forests—by mid-century. Compounding the challenge, other key policies and technologies deemed essential for holding down temperatures remain woefully underdeveloped, the study cautioned. In particular, the capacity to keep or pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it securely—a cornerstone of end-of-century projections for a climate-safe world—is practically non-existent. Vetted by the UN's top climate science panel, these scenarios presume that thousands of industrial-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities will be up-and-running by 2030. As of today, there are only one or two, with a couple of dozen in various stages of construction. Negative emissions Another form of clean energy pencilled into most medium- and long-term forecasts that does not yet exist on any meaningful scale is carbon-neutral biofuels. The idea is that CO2 captured while plants grow will compensate for greenhouse gases released when they are burned for energy. On paper, that carbon pollution will also be captured and stored, resulting in ""negative emissions""—a net reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere. But here again, reality is dragging its feet. ""It is uncertain whether bioenergy can be sustainably produced and made carbon-neutral at the scale required,"" the researchers noted. All of these technologies must come on line if we are to have a fighting chance of keeping a lid of global warming, which is currently on track to heat the planet by 3C to 4C (5.4F to 7.2F), the study concluded. Market momentum alone is not enough, Peters added. ""There need to be a shift in focus,"" he said in an email exchange. ""Politician seem happy to support wind, solar and electric vehicles through subsidies. But they are not willing to put prices""—a carbon tax, for example—""on fossil fuels."" ""Unless the emissions from fossil fuels goes down, the 2C target is an impossibility."" In an informal survey last week of top climate scientists, virtually all of them said that goal is probably already out of reachs."
ENV,"Next month, global leaders will convene in Paris for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction strategies are important to reduce and manage the risks of climate change. While the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix is expected to increase, transitioning to a low carbon economy will take time, and coal and natural gas are projected to play a prominent role in the power and industrial sectors for a number of decades. Climate mitigation technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS)—an integrated process of capturing CO2 from power generation or industrial activities and storing it permanently via processing or injection into suitable geological formations–can play an important role in global efforts to limit GHG emissions. CCS is a low-carbon technology that can form part of a balanced portfolio approach to address climate change, while also offering economic and national security advantages. Today, CCS is the only technology that can achieve significant emissions reductions (90 percent capture or higher) from existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Indeed, many studies have suggested that unless CCS becomes a key part of a low carbon technology portfolio, it is increasingly likely that energy-system carbon emissions will not be reduced to levels that limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Climate change is an important global issue, and it has been well documented that continued increases in global carbon emissions are fueled predominantly by fossil fuel usage—particularly coal, and to a lesser extent, oil and natural gas. According to International Energy Agency estimates over the next several decades, coal will play a significant role in the global energy portfolio. While coal demand in OECD countries is projected to fall by 2040, in non-OECD economies such as Africa, India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, and Southeast Asia, coal usage is projected to increase by a third. Coal offers a cheap and abundant feedstock for electricity generation in many emerging markets where increasing access to electricity is a priority. It is also important to note that burning natural gas also results in substantial amounts of CO2 emissions. Given that the International Energy Agency projects the share of natural gas in the global energy mix to rise, CCS for natural gas will, over time, also become a serious political and environmental issue. While many countries support renewable energy in order to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels, it is uncertain whether this approach alone will achieve sufficient emissions reductions to achieve the 2 degree Celsius target. Low-emission technologies such as CCS can play a vital role in contributing to global mitigation efforts, and research has shown that in the long run GHG emission reduction would be more expensive without CCS deployment. In our policy brief, we assess the risks and barriers related to CCS at electricity plants, and the existing policy framework to support its application. Our study aims to identify the major obstacles facing CCS commercialization and offer recommendations for policies that can spur technological innovation and effect further cost reductions. The key conclusions we reached in our analysis are as follows: CCS can meet environmental, economic, and national security objectives: As a carbon disposal approach that can be deployed on new or existing coal- or natural gas-fired power plants, CCS can help in global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. Additionally, positioning the United States at the forefront of CCS technology development fosters export markets for U.S. companies, and including CCS in the global energy technology portfolio lowers the costs of transitioning to a low carbon economy. Finally, CCS bolsters national security by offering a way to take advantage of abundant fossil fuel resources while simultaneously meeting climate mitigation goals. Current policy does not adequately address CCS technology status and risks: While current CCS policy offers early stage financial support for research, development, and demonstration projects, additional policies are needed to spur further development of integrated projects at scale and create markets for CCS technology."
ENV,"Next month, global leaders will convene in Paris for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction strategies are important to reduce and manage the risks of climate change. While the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix is expected to increase, transitioning to a low carbon economy will take time, and coal and natural gas are projected to play a prominent role in the power and industrial sectors for a number of decades. Climate mitigation technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS)—an integrated process of capturing CO2 from power generation or industrial activities and storing it permanently via processing or injection into suitable geological formations–can play an important role in global efforts to limit GHG emissions. CCS is a low-carbon technology that can form part of a balanced portfolio approach to address climate change, while also offering economic and national security advantages. Today, CCS is the only technology that can achieve significant emissions reductions (90 percent capture or higher) from existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Indeed, many studies have suggested that unless CCS becomes a key part of a low carbon technology portfolio, it is increasingly likely that energy-system carbon emissions will not be reduced to levels that limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Climate change is an important global issue, and it has been well documented that continued increases in global carbon emissions are fueled predominantly by fossil fuel usage—particularly coal, and to a lesser extent, oil and natural gas. According to International Energy Agency estimates over the next several decades, coal will play a significant role in the global energy portfolio. While coal demand in OECD countries is projected to fall by 2040, in non-OECD economies such as Africa, India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, and Southeast Asia, coal usage is projected to increase by a third. Coal offers a cheap and abundant feedstock for electricity generation in many emerging markets where increasing access to electricity is a priority. It is also important to note that burning natural gas also results in substantial amounts of CO2 emissions. Given that the International Energy Agency projects the share of natural gas in the global energy mix to rise, CCS for natural gas will, over time, also become a serious political and environmental issue. While many countries support renewable energy in order to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels, it is uncertain whether this approach alone will achieve sufficient emissions reductions to achieve the 2 degree Celsius target. Low-emission technologies such as CCS can play a vital role in contributing to global mitigation efforts, and research has shown that in the long run GHG emission reduction would be more expensive without CCS deployment. In our policy brief, we assess the risks and barriers related to CCS at electricity plants, and the existing policy framework to support its application. Our study aims to identify the major obstacles facing CCS commercialization and offer recommendations for policies that can spur technological innovation and effect further cost reductions. The key conclusions we reached in our analysis are as follows: CCS can meet environmental, economic, and national security objectives: As a carbon disposal approach that can be deployed on new or existing coal- or natural gas-fired power plants, CCS can help in global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. Additionally, positioning the United States at the forefront of CCS technology development fosters export markets for U.S. companies, and including CCS in the global energy technology portfolio lowers the costs of transitioning to a low carbon economy. Finally, CCS bolsters national security by offering a way to take advantage of abundant fossil fuel resources while simultaneously meeting climate mitigation goals. Current policy does not adequately address CCS technology status and risks: While current CCS policy offers early stage financial support for research, development, and demonstration projects, additional policies are needed to spur further development of integrated projects at scale and create markets for CCS technology."
POL,"Bipartisan support is growing on Capitol Hill and beyond to accelerate carbon capture deployment on power plants and industrial sources like steel and cement plants. The first week of April saw bipartisan bills in both the Senate and House to help unleash private capital to scale up more carbon capture projects to promote energy independence and reduce emissions. The Carbon Capture Improvement Act, introduced by Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Michael Bennet (D-CO), would authorize states to use private activity bonds to help finance carbon capture equipment. A companion bill was introduced in the House by Representatives Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) and Marc Veasey (D-TX). Private activity bonds are widely used to develop U.S. infrastructure, such as airports and water and sewer projects. The bonds reduce the costs of financing because interest payments to bondholders are exempt from federal tax and the bonds typically have longer repayment terms than bank debt. The legislation would promote higher rates of carbon capture by requiring projects to capture and inject at least 65 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) to be eligible for 100 percent financing, with lesser capture amounts eligible for financing on a pro-rated basis. Support for these bills comes from lawmakers from both parties representing different regions of the country who all share a common interest in increasing the production of domestic energy resources and reducing carbon emissions. This broad consensus is reflected in the makeup of a coalition convened by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and the Great Plains Institute. The National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative (NEORI) brings together coal, oil and gas, electric power, ethanol, chemical and energy technology companies, labor unions, and national environmental organizations dedicated to expanding deployment of carbon capture as an energy, economic, and environmental solution. Coalition members share a common goal of improved financing policies to accelerate carbon capture deployment. These policies include providing access to private activity bonds and strengthening and extending the Section 45Q tax credit for carbon dioxide sequestration. Section 45Q incentivizes capturing CO2 from power and industrial sources for use in enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR), a decades-old process that produces domestic oil from existing fields, while safely and permanently storing billions of tons of CO2. Together, these incentives could help create conditions like those that enabled wind and solar energy to speed deployment, grow U.S. energy sector jobs, cut energy costs, and reduce emissions. The Western Governors Association and governors from both parties in Arkansas, Montana, and Wyoming have publicly called for federal incentives for carbon capture technology. This growing support comes on top of fresh examples of successful carbon capture deployment in the U.S. In January, NRG began operating the first U.S. retrofit of a coal-fired power plant and the largest of its kind in the world. The Petra Nova project, which came in on time and under budget, will capture 90 percent of the CO2 from a 240 MW slipstream from the existing WA Parish plant near Houston, Texas. The approximately 1.6 million tons of CO2 it will capture annually is used for carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery at an existing oil field nearby and stored underground. In April, the Archer Daniels Midland ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois, became the world’s first commercial-scale biofuels facility with carbon capture technology. The Illinois Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage project will capture and store more than 1 million tons of CO2 in Mount Simon Sandstone. Over a dozen commercial-scale carbon capture, use and storage projects are operating in the U.S., including at natural gas processing facilities, fertilizer plants, and ethanol plants. But many more are needed. Looking ahead, there is a significant opportunity in 2017 for policymakers to build on the growing momentum and bipartisan interest in supporting carbon capture technology as a key strategy to increase American energy independence and reduce carbon emissions."
ENV,"The electric power sector accounts for 29% of the U.S.’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and electricity demand is expected to increase between now and 2050, making GHG emissions reductions from our electricity system one of the most promising ways to address climate change. While many technologies can reduce power sector emissions, carbon capture and storage (CCS) has gained support in Congress – but it’s the most expensive option available. Our analysis shows coal plants equipped with CCS are nearly three times more expensive than onshore wind power and more than twice as expensive as solar photovoltaics (PV). Although these costs will decline with research and development, the potential for cost improvement is limited. Coal with CCS will always need significant subsidies to complete economically with wind and solar. A CCS-equipped power plant burns carbon-based fuels (usually coal) and uses equipment to extract carbon dioxide (CO2) from the exhaust gases. In most instances, the CO2 then must be transported via pipeline for injection and storage underground, such as a depleted oil or gas field, a saline formation, or an unmineable coal seam. Once the storage site is full, the well must be sealed, and the area must be monitored for thousands of years to prevent the release of CO2. CCS is a favorite emissions reduction option for many politicians and coal companies because it does not involve transitioning to a different electricity source (such as wind, solar, or nuclear power). It holds out the promise that we can continue to burn fossil fuels, potentially in large quantities, without negative climate change impacts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the world’s largest oil and gas companies recently invested $1 billion in CCS research. The largest problem facing CCS today is cost. In addition to the costs of an ordinary coal-fired power plant (which in the U.S. is already quite high, about $92 per megawatt-hour [MWh]), a coal plant with CCS requires additional equipment, increasing upfront construction costs, and has additional operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses. Since a considerable amount of energy is required to extract, pump, and compress CO2, a plant with CCS must also purchase and burn more fuel to produce the same amount of electricity as a plant without CCS. Additional costs come from building pipelines to transport the CO2, injecting it underground, and monitoring the injection site. We analyzed the cost of electricity for four types of power plants built in the U.S. in 2017: ultrasupercritical (modern) coal units, coal units that capture and store 90% of their CO2 emissions, onshore wind power, and utility-scale solar PV. We included capital, fuel, and O&M costs; the efficiencies (heat rates) of the coal plants, the plants’ capacity factors (what portion of the year they may generate power), fuel prices, construction time, financing costs (including inflation and interest rates), and depreciation. In the case of coal with CCS, we included the costs of CO2 transportation (assuming a 500 kilometer pipeline) and injection, as well as long-term monitoring. Government subsidies are not included for any of the technologies. Our full data sources (primarily the U.S. EIA and National Renewable Energy Laboratory), assumptions, and calculations are available online to download.Even without CCS, a new coal plant in the U.S. costs more than onshore wind and solar PV per unit of electricity it generates. Coal plants that capture and store 90% of their carbon emissions cost nearly two-thirds more than an equivalent coal plant without CCS to produce the same amount of electricity. A new solar PV or wind plant is between half and a third the price of a new coal unit with CCS and emits zero CO2. As a source of low-carbon power, CCS can’t compete on economics with wind and solar. CCS is a new technology, and costs tend to fall as new technologies are deployed and develop. Could CCS become cost-competitive with onshore wind and solar PV thanks to research progress? The answer is no – the laws of physics limit CCS’ improvement potential. Extra energy is required to extract, compress, and pump the CO2. No matter how efficient CCS equipment becomes, it can never eliminate the need for extra energy to do extra work. Similarly, no matter how cheap CCS equipment becomes, it will never be free. CCS plants will always be more expensive to operate than regular coal plants, which are themselves more expensive than wind and solar. The price in the table above assumes that CCS plants will come in at forecasted costs, but CCS projects have so far been vastly over budget. For example, Southern Company’s Kemper plant was originally forecast to cost $2.2 billion, but it is still incomplete after three years of delays and now has an estimated price tag of $7.3 billion. The Illinois FutureGen project, despite receiving $200 million in subsidies, was ultimately scrapped due to cost and technology concerns. Apart from CCS, coal power is a mature technology, and the costs of coal plants are not declining much in response to research. In contrast, solar PV and wind are already cheaper than new coal, and more cost declines are expected in the coming decade or so, as the technologies continue to mature. In the long term, even coal without CCS is unlikely to compete economically with wind and solar; it is extremely unlikely that coal with CCS will ever do so. Some have proposed subsidizing CCS to help overcome its high costs. However, the subsidies required to put CCS on equal footing with wind or solar are staggering. Bringing CCS costs in line with solar costs today would require a roughly $80 per MWh subsidy, assuming CCS projects stay on-budget. By comparison, the production tax credit for wind plants, which passed on a bipartisan basis in 2015, provides a subsidy of $23 per MWh and will sunset completely in 2020. The investment tax credit for solar plants pays for up to 30% of investment costs, or about $18 per MWh, and will decrease to 10% of investment costs by 2022. Although CCS is a poor option for decarbonizing the power sector, other roles may exist for CCS. For example, CO2 is a byproduct of cement manufacturing, and while some of these emissions can be eliminated through best practices, some emissions are unavoidable. CCS may be the only option to eliminate CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing and certain other industrial activities. While the industry sector might benefit from specific applications of CCS, most hopes for CCS, especially in the power sector, are misplaced. Other technologies, including renewables and energy efficiency, provide more emissions abatement at lower cost. If policymakers wish to provide electricity without artificial subsidies while protecting the climate, the answer is not CCS."
ENV,"Like nuclear, Carbon Capture and Storage (or Sequestration) (CCS)—capturing CO2 from large emission sources and storing it permanently underground—is a technology seen as essential in most modeling efforts of how climate targets are to be achieved. It is therefore disturbing that progress in the near-term has been so slow, particularly in the U.S. Two interesting developments occurred this week regarding these efforts. First, the Department of Energy is returning $1.27 billion in unspent CCS stimulus funding (out of $2 billion allocated) to the Treasury because none of the four remaining potential recipients had met required milestones by the September 30 deadline to distribute those funds. (One positive contrast with the earlier problems with stimulus money— Solyndra etc.—is that these projects had to achieve real milestones before money was handed over, although the failure of so many CCS projects is a major disappointment in the wider context of addressing climate change.) Two of the four projects (Leucadia in Louisiana and Future Gen 2.0 in Illinois) were already dead. A third, HECA (Hydrogen Energy California) has been on life-support since July. The fourth, Summit Power’s Texas Clean Energy Project (TCEP) remains a question mark. Although TCEP will now lose $104 million in DOE grant money, TCEP just announced that the IRS has awarded it $487 million in new federal tax credits (on top of the $324 million it had previously received). Will $800 million in federal largesse be enough to secure the remaining funding for the $2.5 billion plant? Will China’s Export-Import Bank (yes, really) maintain its project financing commitment? Stay tuned. Speaking of CCS tax credits, the second development this week was Southern Company’s admission that it will miss yet another deadline for its Kemper project, and as a result will have to pay back $234 million in those federal subsidies. While no one likes to lose that kind of money (although when you’ve dropped close to $6 billion of your own on a project, another couple of hundred million really may not change things that much), this could actually turn out to be a good thing for the project. Every article about Kemper carries the obligatory phrase about how it will “capture 65% of its CO2 emissions.” As we have previously written, the only possible legal obligation that Kemper do so came as a condition of those Phase II tax credits. With those now gone, Kemper has no CCS obligation in any state or federal law or permit beyond a condition in a DOE grant that Kemper “establish, and actively work toward, the goal of capturing and sequestering 50% of CO2 emissions from the plant by 2020 and thereafter.” Now freed from any actual CCS obligation (if its lawyers cannot make the case that it is actively “working toward” that aspirational goal, having spent $6 billion and with the risk of incurring hundreds of millions of dollars more in future losses, then Southern needs better legal help), Southern is also freed from what we estimated was a loss of at least $20/ton on its CCS operation. Thus, the only possible incentive we see for Kemper to operate its CCS system is to demonstrate the technology. Given that EPA has essentially removed the CCS requirement for any new U.S. coal plants, a demonstration would be targeted to foreign buyers (viz., the Chinese interest in the TCEP project, mentioned above.) That will be an interesting calculation. As we noted, we estimate that it will cost Kemper around $50/ton to capture its CO2, and it has contracts to sell that CO2 for enhanced oil recovery at (again, our estimate) $30/ton. In addition, EPA estimates that Mississippi’s Clean Power Plan compliance costs are about $10/ton; together, these mean that the question is whether Southern thinks a $10/ton loss leader is worth it to demonstrate its technology. It might be, but with the caveat that in 2016 (or whenever Kemper’s CCS comes online), the prospect that the CPP will be imposing costs in 2030 may not be worth all that much. As we’ve said before, we would dearly love to see the spreadsheets where Southern is weighing all these costs and possibilities. The failure—for that is what it is—of recent U.S. CCS efforts blows a hole in any comfortable assumption that CCS can be major contributor to near-term mitigation efforts. But it remains a critically important technology that has to be got right. To revive it means, first, a meaningful carbon price and, second, a workable regulatory regime. CCS advocates, notably those in the coal industry, would be well-advised to focus their efforts on these two goals. More government money may also be needed, but without those two prerequisites, CCS will not succeed no matter how many billions we throw at it."
ENV,"Seeding clouds as a way to change weather began its history as a serious science during WWII, originally as a way to interrupt severe storms or to produce rain and snow. It never developed in practice. But more recently it has been investigated as a way to reflect back heat into space in order to mitigate global warming. Even before the United States pulled out of the Paris climate accords, there was growing skepticism that the world could, or would, decrease its total greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 enough to actually prevent the worst of global warming and keep the temperature rise to only a few degrees. To succeed, we have to reduce human carbon emissions by a total of about 90% by 2050 (see figure). Averaging about 5% reductions per year beginning in 2015 would have done it. But in 2015, emissions were still growing worldwide. The next deadline is 2020, when we have to start reducing emission by almost 10% per year until midcentury. We are unlikely to meet this target as well. So many scientists have wondered how to either remove GHGs from the atmosphere or mitigate the effects some other way. Removing GHGs is really difficult and really expensive. Much more expensive than preventing them from entering in the first place. So if we refuse to spend the amount of money and effort needed to reduce emissions, we certainly wouldn’t spend even more trying to get them back out. The other strategy is to mitigate the effects of warming by directly cooling the planet. Cooling occurs naturally when a greater amount of particles such as soot from huge fires, particulates and gasses from huge volcanic eruptions, or excessive amounts of ice crystals, enter the atmosphere and either block incoming solar rays or reflect them back into space. Cooling also occurs when clouds dissipate fast and allow more radiation from the warmer surface below them to escape into space. Changing the Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, is what these strategies target. Darker albedos capture and hold heat, lighter albedos reflect heat. It’s why snow always melts first on a new asphalt street before most other surfaces around it. We have seen the cooling effects of big fires and big volcanoes in the geologic record going back millions of years, so we know they work. But these processes are uncontrolled and in some cases caused very big climate changes themselves that had their own bad effects. Enter cloud seeding. Rain, snow and ice precipitate out in the atmosphere in one of two ways. Usually, the temperature drops and water begins to precipitate on a particle of something like dust or salt, called atmospheric aerosols. The particle serves as a seed crystal, or a nucleation site, because it provides a surface that makes precipitation possible and easier. It decreases the energy barrier that prevents the gaseous atoms from arranging themselves into the new solid or liquid structure. This is called heterogeneous precipitation. It is possible to precipitate without seed crystals, referred to as homogeneous precipitation, that can occur under special conditions. Homogeneous precipitation may even be the better bet for cloud seeding. After much research, we seem to have settled on a few possible methods for increasing the Earth's albedo. One, inject sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere where it oxidizes to form sulfate aerosol particles which scatter incoming sunlight. Two, use automated ships to spray droplets of seawater into the atmosphere above the ocean where they evaporate to form an elevated concentration of sea-salt aerosols which seed higher concentrations of cloud droplets in clouds over the ocean, increasing their reflectivity. Third, fleets of large drones would crisscross Earth’s upper latitudes during winter, sprinkling the skies with tons of extremely fine dust-like materials every year."
ENV,"Seeding clouds as a way to change weather began its history as a serious science during WWII, originally as a way to interrupt severe storms or to produce rain and snow. It never developed in practice. But more recently it has been investigated as a way to reflect back heat into space in order to mitigate global warming. Even before the United States pulled out of the Paris climate accords, there was growing skepticism that the world could, or would, decrease its total greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 enough to actually prevent the worst of global warming and keep the temperature rise to only a few degrees. To succeed, we have to reduce human carbon emissions by a total of about 90% by 2050 (see figure). Averaging about 5% reductions per year beginning in 2015 would have done it. But in 2015, emissions were still growing worldwide. The next deadline is 2020, when we have to start reducing emission by almost 10% per year until midcentury. We are unlikely to meet this target as well. So many scientists have wondered how to either remove GHGs from the atmosphere or mitigate the effects some other way. Removing GHGs is really difficult and really expensive. Much more expensive than preventing them from entering in the first place. So if we refuse to spend the amount of money and effort needed to reduce emissions, we certainly wouldn’t spend even more trying to get them back out. The other strategy is to mitigate the effects of warming by directly cooling the planet. Cooling occurs naturally when a greater amount of particles such as soot from huge fires, particulates and gasses from huge volcanic eruptions, or excessive amounts of ice crystals, enter the atmosphere and either block incoming solar rays or reflect them back into space. Cooling also occurs when clouds dissipate fast and allow more radiation from the warmer surface below them to escape into space. Changing the Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, is what these strategies target. Darker albedos capture and hold heat, lighter albedos reflect heat. It’s why snow always melts first on a new asphalt street before most other surfaces around it. We have seen the cooling effects of big fires and big volcanoes in the geologic record going back millions of years, so we know they work. But these processes are uncontrolled and in some cases caused very big climate changes themselves that had their own bad effects. Enter cloud seeding. Rain, snow and ice precipitate out in the atmosphere in one of two ways. Usually, the temperature drops and water begins to precipitate on a particle of something like dust or salt, called atmospheric aerosols. The particle serves as a seed crystal, or a nucleation site, because it provides a surface that makes precipitation possible and easier. It decreases the energy barrier that prevents the gaseous atoms from arranging themselves into the new solid or liquid structure. This is called heterogeneous precipitation. It is possible to precipitate without seed crystals, referred to as homogeneous precipitation, that can occur under special conditions. Homogeneous precipitation may even be the better bet for cloud seeding. After much research, we seem to have settled on a few possible methods for increasing the Earth's albedo. One, inject sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere where it oxidizes to form sulfate aerosol particles which scatter incoming sunlight. Two, use automated ships to spray droplets of seawater into the atmosphere above the ocean where they evaporate to form an elevated concentration of sea-salt aerosols which seed higher concentrations of cloud droplets in clouds over the ocean, increasing their reflectivity. Third, fleets of large drones would crisscross Earth’s upper latitudes during winter, sprinkling the skies with tons of extremely fine dust-like materials every year."
ENV,"Seeding clouds as a way to change weather began its history as a serious science during WWII, originally as a way to interrupt severe storms or to produce rain and snow. It never developed in practice. But more recently it has been investigated as a way to reflect back heat into space in order to mitigate global warming. Even before the United States pulled out of the Paris climate accords, there was growing skepticism that the world could, or would, decrease its total greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 enough to actually prevent the worst of global warming and keep the temperature rise to only a few degrees. To succeed, we have to reduce human carbon emissions by a total of about 90% by 2050 (see figure). Averaging about 5% reductions per year beginning in 2015 would have done it. But in 2015, emissions were still growing worldwide. The next deadline is 2020, when we have to start reducing emission by almost 10% per year until midcentury. We are unlikely to meet this target as well. So many scientists have wondered how to either remove GHGs from the atmosphere or mitigate the effects some other way. Removing GHGs is really difficult and really expensive. Much more expensive than preventing them from entering in the first place. So if we refuse to spend the amount of money and effort needed to reduce emissions, we certainly wouldn’t spend even more trying to get them back out. The other strategy is to mitigate the effects of warming by directly cooling the planet. Cooling occurs naturally when a greater amount of particles such as soot from huge fires, particulates and gasses from huge volcanic eruptions, or excessive amounts of ice crystals, enter the atmosphere and either block incoming solar rays or reflect them back into space. Cooling also occurs when clouds dissipate fast and allow more radiation from the warmer surface below them to escape into space. Changing the Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, is what these strategies target. Darker albedos capture and hold heat, lighter albedos reflect heat. It’s why snow always melts first on a new asphalt street before most other surfaces around it. We have seen the cooling effects of big fires and big volcanoes in the geologic record going back millions of years, so we know they work. But these processes are uncontrolled and in some cases caused very big climate changes themselves that had their own bad effects. Enter cloud seeding. Rain, snow and ice precipitate out in the atmosphere in one of two ways. Usually, the temperature drops and water begins to precipitate on a particle of something like dust or salt, called atmospheric aerosols. The particle serves as a seed crystal, or a nucleation site, because it provides a surface that makes precipitation possible and easier. It decreases the energy barrier that prevents the gaseous atoms from arranging themselves into the new solid or liquid structure. This is called heterogeneous precipitation. It is possible to precipitate without seed crystals, referred to as homogeneous precipitation, that can occur under special conditions. Homogeneous precipitation may even be the better bet for cloud seeding. After much research, we seem to have settled on a few possible methods for increasing the Earth's albedo. One, inject sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere where it oxidizes to form sulfate aerosol particles which scatter incoming sunlight. Two, use automated ships to spray droplets of seawater into the atmosphere above the ocean where they evaporate to form an elevated concentration of sea-salt aerosols which seed higher concentrations of cloud droplets in clouds over the ocean, increasing their reflectivity. Third, fleets of large drones would crisscross Earth’s upper latitudes during winter, sprinkling the skies with tons of extremely fine dust-like materials every year."
ENV,"In general the report finds that removing carbon from the atmosphere had the advantage of being less risky but more expensive and a long way off. Whereas tampering with the earth’s reflectivity could be done now, at less cost but could have massive unintended consequences. Stuart Haszeldine a professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh said: “The US National Academy report makes a smart distinction between slowly and deliberately putting carbon back underground, and tinkering with sunlight reflection and adjusting the atmosphere. The first is slower, do-able, visible, and controllable but will cost more. The second is cheaper in the short term, but is poorly understood, will create global regions who are losers, and also means that humans have to keep maintaining the earth’s annual atmospheric injection.” If the global community were to engage in AM, the most likely way would be to send sulphur-burning planes into the stratosphere or within clouds. The compounds released, known as aerosols, absorb and scatter sunlight and affect the brightness of clouds. Modelling suggests that enough aerosols could have a substantive cooling effect. The NAS warned the side effects of such a programme were unpredictable and there could be far reaching human and environmental impacts, including further depletion of the ozone layer and changes to rainfall. Aside from the scientific uncertainty, the deployment of AM would raise serious geopolitical questions. Because it is simple and relatively cheap, a single nation could decide to send sulphur into the atmosphere. Professor Steve Rayner, from Oxford University geoengineering programme and co-author of one of the most influential reports on the subject in 2009, said this type of unilateral action could lead to conflict. “There are issues to do with the perceptions of the technology that make doing the stratospheric aerosol injection something that would be politically very dangerous to do without an international agreement… If you were to do it, any negative event that occurred would be attributed by some party or another to that intervention.” Levels of short-lived aerosols will need constant replenishment, locking the human race into a project of climate maintenance that could last hundreds of years. And in the end, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere does nothing to help the original problem – the accumulation of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. It is a solution that requires another solution."
ENV,"Attempts to reverse the impacts of global warming by injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere could make matters worse, say researchers. A new study suggests the idea, seen as a last-ditch way to deal with runaway climate change, could cut rainfall in the tropics by 30%. This would have devastating impacts on rainforests in South America and Asia The research has been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The concept of curbing rising temperatures by blocking sunlight has been discussed by scientists for many years now. Some of the ideas have been dismissed as crazy notions, but others have been taken more seriously. One of the most credible plans involves using reflective particles called aerosols to reflect solar radiation away from the Earth. This happens naturally when volcanoes erupt, sending plumes of ash into the stratosphere, as with Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Now a team at the University of Reading have modelled the impacts of a large-scale injection of sulphur dioxide particles at high altitudes around the equator of a giant sunshield in space to reflect solar energy is another geoengineering idea ""We have shown that one of the leading candidates for geoengineering could cause a new unintended side-effect over a large part of the planet,"" said Dr Andrew Charlton-Perez, one of the co-authors of the paper. The scientists found that as well as absorbing some of heat coming in from the Sun, the particles also absorb some of the heat energy that comes from the surface of the planet. ""The heating acts to stabilise the part of the atmosphere we live in, by making it more stable it reduces the upwelling of air,"" said Dr Charlton-Perez. ""In the tropics much of the rainfall comes from air moving up rapidly, so this acts to reduce surface precipitation."" Rainfall around the tropics could be cut by 30% with significant impacts on rainforests in South America and Asia and increasing drought in Africa. The changes would happen so quickly there would be little time to adapt, say the researchers. The scientists involved in the study believe that this is a new impact that others have missed until now. ""We modelled sulphate aerosols which is sort of an analogue for when you have a large volcanic eruption - but instead of putting aerosols into your model you can also just reduce the amount of solar radiation coming into your system,"" said Dr Charlton-Perez. ""When you do that you don't get these heating effects and you don't get this slowdown and that's important because some studies have done that but we think they are missing this mechanism."" However some researchers have questioned the experiment and the findings. ""I know of no serious scientist who would advocate introducing 100 megatonnes of sulphur dioxide in a four degree warmer world,"" said Dr Matt Watson, from the University of Bristol, who was previously involved in a British project to test this concept. ""To state that solar radiation management won't work based on one extreme scenario smacks of hype rather than a serious discussion."" Dr Charlton-Perez says that is a fair comment - but he believes his methodology and conclusions are sound. ""What we have done here is a very extreme scenario, we've put lots of CO2 into our model and we've geoengineered to counteract that. ""It is an extreme case, but by doing the extreme case we are able to isolate this effect much more clearly. We think this effect will go on, even if you geoengineer to a much lesser degree."" Researchers around the world continue to explore different climate interventions that might be used in extreme circumstances. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in their recent report, acknowledged that every option should be considered. But according to Prof Piers Forster, from the University of Leeds, the technologies are still in their infancy. ""At present, these injection technologies do not exist, even on paper, and this precludes an evaluation of realistic effectiveness or side effects. ""If we want to suppress global warming the only game in town at present is reducing greenhouse gas emissions."
FED,"First, I want to discuss federalism under our Constitution as designed by James Madison. What is federalism? U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a recent case that the allocation of powers as set forth in the Constitution sets legal “boundaries” between the federal government and the states and provides a way for each of them to maintain their “integrity.” But, just as importantly, having a system of federalism “secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.” Thus, there is vertical federalism between the states and the federal government, and there is horizontal federalism among, for example, water districts, countries, cities, school districts, and among states. We can see that the debate about federalism continues in America. In another case, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on ObamaCare, the court said that the federal government cannot use the threat of cutting off federal spending to coerce states into expanding Medicaid. (This decision may or may not apply to Common Core, but it shows the continuing importance of federalism.) Now, I want to turn to the closely related matter of competitive federalism. Competitive federalism is horizontal competition among jurisdictions. We know that it works in education at the inter-district level. Economist Caroline Hoxby studied metropolitan areas with many school districts (like Boston) vs. metropolitan areas contained within one large district (like Miami or Los Angeles). She found that student performance is better in areas with competing multiple districts, where parents at the same income level can move—at the margin—from one locality to another nearby, in search of a better education for their children. We have seen competitive federalism work in education at the inter-state level. Back in the 1950s, Mississippi and North Carolina were at the same low level. Over the years, North Carolina tried a number of educational experiments and moved well ahead of Mississippi. We have likewise seen Massachusetts move up over the years from mediocre to stellar (though under Common Core, Massachusetts is sinking back again). We know that national standards are not needed for success in international comparisons. Back in the 1970s, the United States and Canada were both in the middling, mediocre ranks internationally. Both countries are rather similar in culture and level of commercial and industrial development. The United States has continued to wallow in mediocrity, even as we centralize K-12 education. Yet Canada (which has more competitive federalism in education than the United States and has no Ministry of Education in its central government) has climbed into the ranks of advanced nations in academic performance. Why is this important? Because one of the pillars of the case for national curriculum-content standards is that they are necessary for individuals to succeed in a global marketplace and that all top-performing countries have them. The case of Canada refutes that. Let’s turn to the background of the Common Core. Content standards, tests, and curriculum that had been provided by the states—thus far—will now because of Common Core be provided by federally-endorsed national curriculum-content standards, federally-funded tests, and curriculum (some of it federally funded) based on those tests and curriculum-content standards. The Common Core national standards had their origins in several Washington, D.C.-centric lobbying and policy-advocacy groups—namely, the National Governors Association (NGA), the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and Achieve Inc. Shortly after the Obama administration came to power, it adopted and endorsed the national standards. It used competitive grants to coerce states into adopting Common Core. It paid for Common Core national tests and intervened in the test-creation process. It created a panel to oversee and monitor the national tests. It granted states waivers from the burdens of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—conditional on continued adherence to Common Core or a federally-approved alternative. Central to the thinking (and rhetoric) of the advocates of Common Core on education reform was the idea that state performance standards were already on a downward slide and that, without nationalization, standards would inexorably continue on a “race to the bottom.” The name given to the Obama administration’s signature school reform effort, the Race to the Top program (RttT), reflects this belief. The idea is that to prevent states from following their supposed natural dynamic of a race to the bottom, the federal government needs to step in and lead a race to the top. I would disagree. While providers of public education certainly face the temptation to do what might look like taking the easy way out by letting academic standards slip, there is also countervailing pressure in the direction of higher standards (especially, as long as there are competing standards in other states). If policymakers and education officials let content standards slip, low standards will damage the state’s reputation for having a trained workforce. Such a drop in standards will even damage the policymakers’ own reputations. In 2007, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute looked empirically at state performance standards over time in a study called The Proficiency Illusion. The study showed that while states had a variety of performance standards (as would be expected in a federal system), the supposed “race to the bottom” was not happening. The proponents of the Common Core wrong in their claims that state performance standards were inevitably and everywhere on a downward slide. Why is this important? Because the other case for national curriculum-content standards is that without nationalization there will be a race to bottom and that only national standards can reverse a supposedly already-existing “race to the bottom.” But the facts refute this. This topples the other principal argument for national standards. To finance its Race to the Top program, the U.S. Department of Education took discretionary stimulus money that could be used as conditional grants, and then turned a portion of that money into a competitive grant program. It used the grants to encourage states to adopt the national standards. Policy analyst Michael Petrilli aptly called inducements to adopt the standards “the carrot that feels like a stick.” The department also paid for national consortia to develop national tests aligned with the national curriculum–content standards. The administration created another inducement in the form of No Child Left Behind waivers. In return for adopting the national standards or a federally approved alternative, states could escape NCLB sanctions for not making timely gains in student achievement. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan went beyond what the law allows, by substituting the Obama administration’s favored education reforms (including national curriculum-content standards and tests) for NCLB’s accountability measures. I would add that the new accountability systems under the waivers can all too easily hide deficiencies in the performance of children in previously closely watched sub-groups and may weaken incentives to improve performance of those children. To some extent, federal officials have commandeered state curriculum-content standards and tests and substituted national standards and tests; to some extent, some state officials embraced the national standards-and-testing cartel as a relief from political pressure within their state and a relief from competitive pressure from other states. In any case, national standards and tests will change curriculum content, homogenize what is taught, and profoundly alter the structure of American K-12 public education. Nationalizing standards and tests would, according to this analysis, eliminate them as differentiated school-reform instruments that could be used by states in competition over educational attainment among the states. Sonny Perdue, governor of Georgia at the time Common Core was created, did not like it when the low-performing students of his state were compared with students in other states that had different standards from Georgia’s. He became the lead governor in bringing the NGA into the national standards effort. So, Yes, Common Core does undermine “competitive federalism.” Indeed, in part, it was designed to do so. Federalism is not only distinction from and rivalry between the federal government and the states; it is also rivalry among the states and among local governments within the states. As economist Richard McKenzie writes, the Founders sought to disperse power “among many different and competing governments—at the federal, state, and local levels.” The insight of competitive federalism is that fifty-one state school boards are better than a single federal Executive-branch office. Fifteen-thousand local school boards are better than either fifty-one state school boards or a single federal office. As political scientist Thomas Dye puts it, “intergovernmental competition” was seen by the Founders as an “auxiliary precaution” against the “monopoly abuse of power by a single centralized government.” Competitive federalism encourages innovation, allows movement between jurisdictions that enhances liberty, and permits a better match between policies and voter preferences. Common Core’s national uniformity runs counter to competitive federalism. Let’s turn to Alexis de Tocqueville, the most famous observer of American society in our history and see what he can tell us about national education standards. Tocqueville is famous for his portrait of nineteenth-century America and his philosophic insights on why the American society has flourished—and also where it might go wrong. It is worth reminding ourselves what some of Tocqueville’s insights were. Once we do, we can consider the current nationalization of K-12 public-school curriculum, with Tocqueville’s insights in mind. One of Tocqueville’s major insights was that Americans have benefited from popular participation in the large number of churches, charities, clubs, and voluntary associations in our country, as well as in state and local governments, which stand between the individual and the national government in Washington, D.C. In essence, Tocqueville believed that the civic health of America depended on popular participation in entities like associations to create and maintain religious, private, or charter schools, as well as in local authorities like school districts with fully-empowered schools boards. Such activity fosters civic virtue and “habits of the heart” and encourages everyday citizens to take on necessary social tasks that in pre-modern society lowly subjects were not allowed to undertake, but were instead the duty of the aristocracy. When Tocqueville described nineteenth-century American society he spoke, for example, of township school committees that were deeply rooted in their local communities. In those days, state control of local public education took the form of an annual report sent by the township committee to the state capital. There was no national control. Large sums (much of it taxed from laborers and farmers) were spent by these school committees, and their efforts reflected, Tocqueville thought, a widespread American desire to provide basic schooling as a route to opportunity and advancement. He admired the fact that in self-activating America, one might easily chance upon farmers, who had not waited for official permission from above, but were putting aside their plows “to deliberate upon the project of a public school.” At the same time, Tocqueville observed in European countries that activities like schooling that had formerly been part of the work of guilds, churches, municipalities, and the like were being taken over by the national government of those countries. Tocqueville feared that if either Americans neglected their participation in associations or local governments or Europeans lost their intermediate entities to the national governments, the tendency would be toward a loss of a liberty and a surrender to a soft despotism. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville described how in Europe “the prerogatives of the central power” were increasing every day and making the individual “weaker, more subordinate, and more precarious.”Once, he said, there had been “secondary powers” that represented local interests and administered local matters. Local judiciaries, local privileges, the freedoms of towns, provincial autonomy, local charities—all were gone or going. The national central government, he wrote, “no longer puts up with an intermediary between it and the citizens.” Tocqueville said that, in Europe, education, like charity, “has become a national affair.” The national government receives or even takes “the child from the arms of his mother” and turns the child over to “the agents” of the national government. In nineteenth-century Europe, the national governments already were infusing sentiments in the young and supplying their ideas. “Uniformity reigns” in education, Tocqueville said. Intellectual diversity was disappearing. He feared that both Europe and America were moving toward “centralization” and “despotism.” Tocqueville believed that in non-aristocratic societies (like America), there is strong potential for the national government to become immense and influential, standing above the citizens, not just as a mighty and coercive power, but also as a guardian and tutor. Tocqueville maintained that religion (as a moral anchor) as well as involvement in local government (such as school districts) and voluntary organizations could help America counter the tendency toward tyranny. Joseph Califano, President Jimmy Carter’s Health, Education and Welfare Secretary, articulated Tocqueville-style concerns about a centralization of schooling: “Any set of test questions that the federal government prescribed should surely be suspect as a first step toward a national curriculum. … [Carried to its full extent,] national control of curriculum is a form of national control of ideas.” Unless Common Core is stopped, its officials will dismantle what remains of state and local decision-making on classroom lessons and replace it with a new system of national tests and a national curriculum. This policy is Tocqueville’s nightmare: As in Europe, education “has become a national affair” and Common Core is the vehicle for imposing in America a one-size-fits-all centralization like that administered by the National Ministry of Education in France. Federalism, including horizontal inter-jurisdictional competition, allows policies better matched to needs and preferences of voters. It allows individuals and families to “vote with their feet”—to move to jurisdictions that they like, where the authorities don’t act counter to their liberties and preferences. Competitive federalism allows experimentation by alternative jurisdictions. One state can try one policy, while another state tries something else. This is why it is called the “laboratory of democracy.” This feature of federalism is what brought Massachusetts, Indiana, California and several other states to have the outstanding curriculum-content standards that they had before the Common Core. This is the feature of federalism that facilitates an exit strategy from Common Core: It allows states that are leaving Common Core to repeal and replace the national curriculum-content standards with outstanding pre-Common Core state standards. This can be done on an interim basis, while those states design their own replacement standards for the long run. Then the rivalry that takes place under competitive federalism will go back to work to the benefit of teachers, students, and everyone who wants a well-educated citizenry—and also everyone who wants to have the freedoms that are protected by the U.S. Constitution’s Madisonian system of federalism."
HEG,"Trumponomics: its possible and likely global consequences The demise of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in the early 1970s was a consequence of the US unilateral abandonment of US dollar-gold convertibility. The so-called “Nixon shocks” rocketed throughout the world economy, producing profound monetary and economic instability, which arguably persists to the present. Contrary to mythologised accounts of “benevolent” US “hegemony”, the actual historical record reveals contradictory policies by the dominant power throughout the post-Bretton Woods era. The present Trump administration’s economic and strategic policies represent important continuities and indeed intensification of past US non-cooperation internationally, rather than an abrupt about-face. Trump’s economic and security policies mostly just radicalise existing US foreign policy practices, although this radicalisation may also involve qualitative changes, for example in US trade policy, where self-regard is now assuming also protectionist forms. Chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, in a 2014 speech, invoked the Italian fascist thinker Julius Evola, saying that “changing the system is not a question of questioning and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up” (Navidi, 2017). This point of view also reflects a new attitude of greater US assertiveness in foreign and security policy. According to former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, attending the recent Munich security conference in mid-February 2017, representatives from several countries, including Turkey, Iran, China, and Russia made speeches invoking the theme of a “Post-Western World” (Glasser, 2017). Albright’s impression of reactions from other states to the new US foreign policy stance reveals a change of mood, “there was a sense that the bullying approach of the Trump administration was alienating people rather than giving them solace in terms of the fact that we still were a united world.” She lamented that at Munich, the US had moved from being the “centre of attention” to becoming “the centre of doubt” (ibid.). Alongside his intentions to conduct a very large infrastructural investment plan, the US president, in a speech on 24 February 2017 to the Conservative Action Conference, pledged to execute “one of the greatest military build-ups in American history”, upgrading all aspects of the US military, both offensive and defensive. First indications of the 2018 federal budget outline by the White House also includes core emphasis on strengthening the US intelligence and national security apparatus, including homeland security and the law enforcement agencies. The commitment by the new administration to a balanced budget approach, however, despite the anticipated large increase in military and security expenditures, means that many other areas of federal spending would undergo very deep cuts, for instance funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, or even the State Department, along with many other federal department budgets and programmes. The Heritage Foundation has apparently initiated discussion circulating on Capitol Hill aiming at cumulative reduction of federal spending of 10.2 trillion US dollars over a ten-year period. However, congressional approval and formal appropriation legislation is necessary for these policy ideas to be translated into reality, and this, given the recent history of deep divisions on fiscal policy issues across the political spectrum in Congress, seems doubtful. If these policies are ever executed in full, this represents nothing less than a radical transformation of the state itself, and a reorientation of its primary roles in both domestic and global contexts. All this is an example of a process that has become self-reinforcing. Over time, this process has led to pathological learning by reducing collective learning capacity and by hardening, on the whole and over time, the will of the changing US foreign policy makers. Trump’s election is a further step in this process. Already in the 1990s and early 2000s there were a large number of US international non-cooperations, including its posture towards ILO conventions, the Law of the Sea Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Kyoto protocol, the International Criminal Court and the Landmines treaty. At present, there are concerns that the new US administration intends to withdraw or not cooperate with the Paris Agreement on climate change, arguably the single most important global issue for effective international cooperation to address a severe threat to human security. There are rumours circulating in Washington that the US administration is considering withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, in part due to alleged “bias against Israel” in that organisation. George Soros, the well-known global financier and promoter of a global open society named the US as “the major obstacle to international cooperation today” already 15 years ago (Soros, 2002, p. 166). Moreover, Soros shared the observation of many that despite the US holding “special responsibility” due to its globally dominant position, the US has “not always sought to abide by the same rules that apply to others” (ibid., p. 167). The exercise of double standards by the US, and the dogged pursuit of its own national sovereignty and narrow “national interests”, contradicts and tends to undermine the course of international cooperation and thus destabilise the world economy (when one is actually applying double standards is of course open to conflicting interpretations). The irony in this historical situation is that the US appears, both past and present, to assume that the “others” will nevertheless continue to abide by the agreed rules, norms and principles, though often it does not do so itself. Future scenarios of global change will now largely pivot upon how all these “others” will respond to changes in US attitudes and actions. Will the US continue to act uncooperatively internationally, and single-mindedly pursue its vision of strengthened “national sovereignty” (at home and abroad)? The consequences of such a course are likely to be highly disruptive, not only for the formal sphere of international cooperation and prospects for future global governance, but for the global economic system as well. A spiral of aggressive actions and retaliatory reactions could be set in motion. The probable long-term consequences of such a pattern are quite well known, as any reading of the first half of the 20th century will reveal (see e.g. Moser, 2016). There are 2 x 3 different possibilities, some of them more likely than others, as depicted in Table 1. First, there are two possibilities regarding how radical Trump’s foreign economic and security policies will turn out to be. It is possible, in principle, that through being forced to make compromises because of checks and balances and multiple interests within the US, and by learning from experiences about the effects of decentralised tit-for-tat sanctions brought about by the international systems of cooperation, Trump will eventually moderate his stance on a number of issues. The full realisation of the stated aims of the Trump administration may require increasingly overt authoritarianism, which in turn is likely to lead to widespread resistance within the US, including in terms of possible efforts to remove President Trump from office. This scenario entails intensifying domestic conflict and ideological polarisation, already arguably rather severe. Such conflict, including in potentially violent forms, could precipitate calls to “restore order”, thus reinforcing the trend towards erosion of checks and balances and greater domestic repression of the opposition. However unlikely it may still be, a “civil war” in the US is not anymore an excluded possibility. Out of the six theoretical possibilities, four seem relevant in practice. Moderate Trump is compatible with (A) double standards or (B) limited retaliation. Radical Trump will either (C) trigger limited and targeted retaliation against the US (the rest of the world will continue to abide by the rules of the WTO and bilateral and regional free trade arrangements amongst themselves) or (D) create a generalizable example to be followed, leading to widespread “beggar-thy-neighbour” policies. B and C mean that the US share of world imports (already down from 17 percent in 2000 to just 12 percent in 2013) and US share of world exports will likely fall further (already down from 12 percent in 2000 to just above 8 percent in 2013).11 D would provoke, at a minimum, a global recession and, at the maximum, a severe global depression. The Trump administration has already announced a new foreign trade doctrine, known officially as the “America First Trade Policy” (see the website of the United States Trade Representative for details at: https://ustr.gov/). The United States Trade Representative website describes the aims of this policy as “ensuring that American workers are given a fair shot at competing across the globe… On a level playing field, Americans can compete fairly and win.” It is a central policy goal to keep existing companies located within the US and that overall “companies compete to set up manufacturing in the U.S.” thus generating new jobs, tax revenues, and prosperity. However, the majority of jobs that have recently been lost within the US economy are arguably as much or possibly more due to automation than to the effects of foreign trade or out-sourcing abroad. The degree to which this new US trade doctrine of “America First” will be neo-protectionist in orientation remains to be seen, but the president has previously indicated that the US could potentially impose unilateral trade tariffs on partners that in its view are not playing fair with the US. This includes signatories to past and future trade agreements with the US who subsequently, in US perception, do not correctly fulfil their obligations under the agreement. According to the president, the US could cancel any trade agreement after a 30-day grace period during which the US would seek compliance by their trade partner. During his first few days in office, president Trump used executive powers to order US withdrawal from the Transpacific Trade Partnership agreement (TTP), to the consternation of several key trade partners, including Japan and Australia, who have been supporting the multilateral agreement. Trade protectionism via tariffs or complicated arrangements of taxation are not the only forms of potential beggar-thy-neighbour policies, of course. Attempts to enhance external competitiveness by means of internal devaluation or tax competition can be equally harmful, albeit in a different way. A number of countries, and the EU as a whole, are keen to increase their competitiveness. The idea is to increase demand for national goods and services in the world markets – at the expense of other countries. World imports and exports cancel out. Although it is not impossible for all countries to simultaneously increase the value of their exports and imports, their overall sum is always zero. The same holds true for investments. There is no aggregate level historical evidence that corporate tax cuts would have increased the overall pool of investments. Rather the opposite seems to be true: investment rates have been declining, at least in the OECD world (if not in expanding economies such as China and India). If corporate tax cuts have a positive effect on the level of real investments in one given country, it will likely do so at the expense of other countries. Combined with measures of austerity (that may appear desirable to budget-balancers in part because of budgetary effects of the tax cuts), these kinds of downward spirals tend to reduce total effective demand regionally and, to a degree, globally. Overt protectionism would come on top of these other measures and strengthen their already significant effects. In his first presidential address to the joint session of the US Congress, on 28 February, 2017, president Trump outlined the main elements of his administration’s new economic policy goals, revealing aspects of his budget proposals for Congressional debate and approval. The main elements of the new economic policy include: a one trillion dollar infrastructural programme (including a 25 billion dollar project to construct the Wall on the border with Mexico); tax reductions for the middle classes (but also for US corporations, and the very wealthy); a big increase in military spending (estimated at 54 billion dollars in the first year; to “rebuild” the US military, and purchase advanced weapons systems); the repeal of Obamacare (with the stated aim of reducing the costs of health insurance); and some general aims to improve childcare provision, women’s health, and promote clean air and water. (Politico Magazine 01-03-2017) Whether and to what extent any of the very ambitious spending proposals entailed in this programme will eventually attain full Congressional approval and legislative authorisation remains doubtful, given the fiscal conservatism amongst many Republicans, and scepticism and resistance amongst many Democrats in both houses of Congress. The Trump administration is also proposing potentially far-reaching financial deregulation, accompanied by major tax cuts for corporations and the richest 1 percent of income earners (one estimate predicts that under Trump’s probable tax reform measures, the income of the top 1% of income earners would see their annual income increase by 13.5%, while average earners income would increase by only 1.8% (Navidi, 2017) Financial deregulation would annul the corrective measures and learning concerning reregulation of the financial sector (Mackintosh, 2016) that took place in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-9. US financial deregulation enacted now may have the further effect of impeding future global cooperation in this area.12 On 2 February 2017, president Trump, by executive order, instructed a review of the Dodd-Frank Act, which was enacted during the Obama era to ensure that there would never be another 2008-style financial sector meltdown. The stated aim is to make US financial companies more competitive – but in all likelihood at the expense of global financial stability. The periodic crises since the late 1970s have been part of a larger boom-bust process. The underlying super-bubble based on credit expansion and financial multiplication has grown in potential for three decades. It has continued to grow after the weak recovery from the global crisis of 2008-9; and it has been gradually assembling conditions for an even bigger crash probably in the late 2010s, at the latest in the early 2020s (an expectation outlined in Patomäki, 2010, pp. 79-80). The Trump administration’s financial deregulation policy seems determined to speed up this process, making an early large-scale financial bust more likely. The effects of financial deregulation, combined with other aspects affecting the future stability of respect for the rule of law within the US, may also have the unintended consequence of decreasing the attractiveness of the US economy as an economic “safe haven” globally. Tax cuts for the rich may also be accompanied by a lax policy toward global tax havens that help firms and companies to avoid taxation, although the economic nationalist side of the Trump administration would also at the same time logically have an interest that companies really do pay tax in the US on their worldwide profits. Be that as it may, financialization and the growing financial super-bubble have contributed to growing inequalities across the world (by increasing 𝑟 and decreasing 𝑔 in Piketty’s 𝑟 > 𝑔), while the growing inequalities have added to the volume of speculation (because the rich tend to consume only a small part of their extra income). For the same reason, tax cuts to the rich have also the lowest fiscal multiplier and weakest stimulating effect on the economy, thus probably aggravating the deficit of the US federal budget. The Fed can of course print more money, but not endlessly without spelling trouble. In terms of trade policy, only (D) in Table 1 would take the world directly to a situation reminiscent of the early 1930s, while also B and C are steps in the same direction. Moreover, there is another path that may lead to the same outcome as (D). A new major global financial crash during Trump’s first term could easily trigger a further worldwide round of growing economic nationalism. It is worth stressing that “the relatively benign international political environment in 2007-2008 compared with the intense security dilemma of the inter-war years were also essential in not making a bad situation worse” (Kirshner, 2014, p. 47). Next time the international political environment will be less benign."
HEG,"But the chaos of Trump’s foreign policy might well be an opportunity for the rest of the world. We’re far removed from Nazism and Stalinism, when the U.S. provided a clear-cut leadership role that no other nation could. Many of today’s international problems require regional cooperation, which could easily be taken up by local alliances without America’s aid. In January, after Trump called NATO “obsolete,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “We Europeans have our fate in our own hands.” Trump’s isolationism, and the United Kingdom’s impending exit from the European Union, is proving Merkel’s words true. “U.S. allies are resigning themselves to the likelihood that Trump’s administration will remain unpredictable and often incoherent, if not downright hostile, in its foreign policy,” noted the Foreign Policy report. “And they are beginning to draw up contingency plans to protect their interests on trade and security, as they adapt to a world where strong American leadership is no longer assured.” Trump’s unreliability is likely to increase the ongoing push for European military integration, which would create a formidable force that could work independently of the U.S. to face challenges like Russian aggression. A more independent Europe could also take a stronger role in the Middle East—not just taking in refugees, as it does now, but using military and diplomatic force to solve the region’s problems. A more active European involvement in the Israel/Palestine negotiations could be a boon, since the Europeans, seen as more sympathetic to the Palestinians, could provide a counterweight to America’s pro-Israel policy. This might help break a stalemate that has lasted decades. At worst, it can’t be less productive than the status quo. The same logic applies in other regions of the world, where promising new alliances are emerging as a response to Trump’s foreign policy. Earlier this month, in an implicit rebuke of Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric, the finance ministers of China, South Korea, and Japan signed a statement stating, “We will resist all forms of protectionism.” Historically, these three countries have been rivals, but here we see the seeds of a new alliance system. South Korea has been the victim of both Chinese and Japanese colonialism in the past, but in the new era they might find their Asian neighbors more trustworthy in dealing with North Korea than Trump’s America. Japan, for its part, now has an incentive to overcome its own isolationism, rooted in its defeat in World War II, and become a regional power. A more isolationist America could also be a boon to Africa. The presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama brought a regrettable militarization of American policy towards Africa, with the creation of the United States Africa Command in 2008. Under the sway of AFRICOM, the continent has become the newest theater for America’s counterterrorism policy, to the determent of development aid. If African nations learn to distrust U.S. intervention under Trump, they won’t become dependent on American military spending via AFRICOM and end up with the top-heavy armies found in other U.S. satrapies. Latin America offers a model for what a post-American world might look like. “After 9/11, Washington effectively lost interest in Latin America,” the journal Foreign Affairs lamented in 2006. “Since then, the attention the United States has paid to the region has been sporadic and narrowly targeted at particularly troubling or urgent situations. Throughout the region, support for Washington’s policies has diminished. Few Latin Americans, in or out of government, consider the United States to be a dependable partner.” But considering America’s long history of supporting coups and death squads in Latin America, this recent disinterest qualifies as benign neglect. Central and South America have enjoyed an era of often tumultuous and contentious politics—the winding down of a guerrilla war in Colombia, the botched socialist experiment in Venezuela, a presidential impeachment in Brazil—all taking place within a broadly democratic framework. It hasn’t been a perfect era, as Venezuela descends into authoritarian chaos, but it has experienced far less violence than earlier periods. Free from American interference, Latin Americans have proven they can tackle their own problems better than the U.S can. What Latin America has learned this century, the rest of the planet could discover in the Trump era: The world doesn’t need America, and can work to solve its own problems free from the shadow of American hegemony."
HEG,"Trump’s victory, consequently, was seen as potentially the end of America’s indispensability. In a post-election Financial Times column titled “Trump marks the end of America as world’s ‘indispensable nation,’” historian Robert Kagan feared “a return to national solipsism, with a much narrower definition of American interests and a reluctance to act in the world except to protect those narrow interests. To put it another way, America may once again start behaving like a normal nation.” That prediction loses credence by the day, as Trump’s diplomatic moves as president have been anything but normal. And yet, Kagan’s headline remains no less accurate because Trump’s bizarro foreign policy is accomplishing what many thought his isolationist platform would do: make America dispensable again. “The Syria strike, that Strangelovian bomb in Afghanistan almost no one even knew the Pentagon had, a flashpoint in Northeast Asia, and, as of late Wednesday, Secretary of State Tillerson’s uninhibited attack on Iran and the accord governing its nuclear program: This is not a collection of one-offs. This is not the indispensable nation rushing to put out the world’s flash fires,” Patrick Lawrence wrote last month at The Nation. “This is the ever-less-welcome nation lighting them, fair to say.” Other writers have gone so far as to anoint new “indispensable” nations, such as Germany and China. Trump has ushered in a new era of American hegemony, one in which the hegemon is adrift, mercurial, and utterly irresponsible. Without a firm American hand at the wheel, the liberal international order will crumble and the world will descend into regional conflict—and, eventually, a global one. Or so says the “indispensable nation” theory. But what if a diminished America is a positive development for the world? What might countries accomplish when they can’t rely on anyone else? Some argue that America was never an indispensable nation, that the concept itself is a myth. “If you consider everything encompassing global affairs—from state-to-state diplomatic relations, to growing cross-border flows of goods, money, people, and data—there are actually very few activities where America’s role is truly indispensable,” Micah Zenko wrote in Foreign Policy in 2014. He cited myriad foreign policy failures, from the persistent atrocities in Syria to the Nigerian schoolgirls still held by Boko Haram, before eventually concluding: The reason that the United States is not the indispensable nation is simple: the human and financial costs, the tremendous risks, and degree of political commitment required to do so are thankfully lacking in Washington. Moreover, the structure and dynamics of the international system would reject or resist it, as it does in so many ways that frustrate the United States from achieving its foreign policy objectives. The United States can be truly indispensable in a few discrete domains, such as for military operations, which as pointed out above has proven disastrous recently. But overall there is no indispensable nation now, nor has there been in modern history. The appeal of the “indispensable nation” theory to American politicians is easy to understand. It neatly—and arrogantly—encapsulates the core belief that elites of both parties have shared ever since the attack on Pearl Harbor: that America is the cornerstone for global capitalism, the linchpin holding together every nation committed to free trade, collective security, and international law."
EDU,"The new administration will champion controversial school choice policy and potentially undermine the teaching of evolution and climate change On the campaign trail, education often took a backseat to issues like trade and immigration for Donald Trump. He offered few concrete details about his plans, which were often vague and even at odds with what any president has the power to do. Yet the tone of his campaign—and his rhetoric on issues ranging from minorities to climate change—has many educators and academics worried about the future of liberal arts and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. “Donald Trump has shown a contempt for science, a willingness to play fast and loose with the very idea of truth and an absence of intellectual curiosity,” says Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. “This leaves me with the sinking feeling that he will have a terribly destructive impact on the entire project of making excellent education broadly available.” The President-elect’s clearest stance may be his support of school choice, the view that families—not the government—should decide where their children go to school and be allowed to use public education funds for public or private education. Opponents of school choice argue there is no evidence that it improves academic performance, and that it threatens the divide between church and state by channeling government funds into private religious schooling. Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Republican philanthropist Betsy DeVos, is chairman for the American Federation for Children, a nonprofit organization that advocates for public funding to allow families to send their children to private and charter schools. “She has been heavily involved, if not the main architect of the educational system that is in place in Detroit, where charter schools are among the worst in the country,” says Douglas Harris, a professor of economics at Tulane University. “Her general preference on these things is for as little government as possible.” Vice President–elect Mike Pence has also championed the cause of school choice; as governor of Indiana, he oversaw a tenfold increase in the number of students receiving vouchers—public funds used to cover private school costs—over the past four years. Trump has pledged $20 billion in federal funds in support of school choice for families living in poverty; whether this money would come from U.S. Department of Education funds remains unclear. He will ask states to chip in another $110 billion, according to his Web site. Much of Pres. Barack Obama’s work on education could be undone soon after he leaves office. He relied heavily on executive orders, legally binding directives that interpret existing laws related many issues, including education. “Obama’s legacy stands on clay feet,” says Jonathan Turley, professor of law at The George Washington University Law School. “It would be relatively easy to obliterate it.” Trump has promised to use his executive powers to “cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by Pres. Obama.” If the President-elect follows through, Obama’s federal task force investigating sexual assault on university campuses—opposed by Turley and other law professors concerned about due process—could be dismantled. His order allowing transgendered students to use the bathroom of their choice in public schools—challenged by a federal court in Texas—might disappear. Department of Education inquiries into for-profit educational institutions—which led to the closure of ITT Technical Institute—could cease. Regulations that give the federal government a greater oversight over programs that prepare new teachers—issued only recently—will die. But there are limits to presidential power. Trump said in an interview in 2015 that he might “cut” the U.S. Department of Education. Such a move would require Congress, and that body has consistently increased funding to the department since Pres. Jimmy Carter elevated it to cabinet-level status in 1979. The new administration will also have no official say over what is taught in the classroom. Consider Trump’s oft-repeated pledge to “end” the Common Core, a set of standards for math and English developed by state leaders (not by the federal government, as is often believed). The U.S. Constitution does not grant the president—nor Congress—the ability to set education standards. Each state makes its own decision. Recent legislation, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), further restricts the federal government from even trying to influence a state’s decision—as Obama did with his $4.35-billion Race to the Top Fund, which favored Common Core states when awarding federal grants. ESSA shields state adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards from federal meddling; released in 2013 by a coalition of states and scientific organizations, these research-based standards have so far been adopted by 17 states. If the Trump administration has any influence on curricula, it could well be via the antiscience rhetoric of its inner circle. Pence has publicly supported the teaching of creationism. Myron Ebell, head of transitioning the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and director of the Center of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is a vocal climate change skeptic. So is Trump, who tweeted in 2012 “the concept of climate change was created by and for the Chinese.” (The Chinese have corrected him.) Science education advocates warn the legitimization of such nonscientific views at the highest levels of government could trickle down to local policies. Education boards in several states, such as Louisiana and Texas, have already been battling over how evolution and climate change should be taught, as have state legislatures considering bills that would allow teachers to treat these subjects as controversial. Nearly all of this legislation has emerged in states that were won by Trump. “We see 10 to 12 of the bills every year, and their intent is clearly to give teachers cover to teach nonscience in science classrooms,” says Ann Reid, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). “None have passed recently, but there’s a danger that the people introducing these bills and school boards trying to change standards will be emboldened.” According to Reid, NCSE surveys suggest that many teachers avoid teaching evolution and climate change, concerned that parents will complain. She predicts community pressure around these issues will only increase. Just as White House rhetoric could influence what is taught in classrooms, silence on STEM or other education issues like diversity could also have an impact, cautions Quincy Brown, program director for STEM Education Research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She highlighted Obama’s 2011 State of the Union call to train 100,000 new STEM teachers; the coalition of public, private and nonprofit organizations that formed in response, 100Kin10, reported that 30,000 new teachers have been trained to date. “These kinds of initiatives motivate the educational community,” Brown says. “If messages like that are not coming from the top, I wonder whether there will be a shift in priorities.”"
EDU,"This week the United States Senate confirmed Betsy Devos as the new secretary of education. Despite a shaky performance during her committee hearings, where she seemed to suggest guns belonged in schools to defend against grizzly bear attacks, DeVos managed to clear all the necessary hurdles to become part of Trump's cabinet. But it wasn't easy: Vice President Mike Pence had to be summoned to the Senate floor to break a 50-50 tie, after two senators from his own Republican party opposed her nomination. DeVos will be responsible for advising Trump on federal policies and programs related to the education sector, which includes having an impact on public school standards and the curriculums being developed. She'll also direct, supervise and coordinate all activities of the US Department of Education, whose mission is to ""ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence"" across the country. In other words, DeVos is set to lead a government agency designed to shape the nation's future. Democrats have been outspoken against DeVos since Trump announced her nomination. They believe she's not fit for the role because she never attended public school, nor did her billionaire husband Dick DeVos or any of their four children. Not being a product of the public school system isn't a dealbreaker, though. Bigger concerns focus on the fact that DeVos has spent her career in Michigan as an advocator for using taxpayer dollars to fund voucher programs for families to spend on private and religious schools. While DeVos has not specified how she plans to handle STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education on a federal level, there's enough evidence to suggest religion may influence her decisions. In an interview from 2001, when asked about Christian schools relying on philanthropy, DeVos said, ""There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education ... Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's kingdom."" If she takes that same approach in her new position, DeVos could create an environment where accepted scientific theories such as evolution could be taught alongside faith-based pseudoscience such as intelligent design. You also have to wonder if she'll continue Obama's efforts to teach kids how to code and other tech-forward skills. During his presidency, Obama created the Computer Science for All initiative, which included a $4 billion fund for states to develop K-12 curriculums with a hands-on approach to new technologies. President Trump, meanwhile, is planning to repurpose $20 billion from the federal education budget to expand voucher programs. Even though low-income families could benefit from this ""school choice"" proposal, the institutions on the receiving end would be private or affiliated with a religion. The proposal will likely hit some roadblocks, though, since it has to get approved by Congress and it's not certain that states are going to be interested in such grants. Still, there could be major consequences if it does go through. David E. Kirkland, an English and Urban Education professor at New York University, says DeVos and Trump could promote educational policies that support ""alternative facts"" and ""fund programs aimed at discrediting longstanding scientific knowledge and traditions."" The situation is magnified when you consider Trump also recently tapped Jerry Falwell Jr. to lead a task force that will suggest higher education reforms. He's the president of Liberty University, one of the country's most vocal Christians and a young Earth creationist. According to The Washington Post, faculty members at Liberty University take pride ""in teaching evolution alongside biblical creationism."" Sure, that doesn't mean DeVos and Falwell Jr. will enforce these views under the new administration, but it could raise their profile and reignite the debate over how things like intelligent design are presented. Kirkland says that if DeVos sees STEM education as promoting a liberal agenda, she (along with Falwell Jr.) could use the Department of Education to defund programs designed to educate students about topics such as global warming, climate change and pollution. Despite the influence of religion on her political views, though, a member of Trump's transition team recently told Mother Jones that DeVos does believe ""in the legal doctrine of the separation of church and state."" Senators like Al Franken, who voted against DeVos, will try their best to ensure that this separation indeed exists and STEM education remains a priority for Trump's team. ""I've written legislation into law to strengthen STEM education and have continuously worked to ensure that our students are prepared for 21st century jobs,"" he told Engadget. ""Secretary DeVos, on the other hand, has a long history of dangerously anti-science views and has deep connections with anti-science organizations."" Franken said he plans to hold DeVos accountable during her tenure, not only in her STEM efforts but also other areas. DeVos said during her first speech as secretary of education that she believes people should be more open to views other than their own, advice that Democrats hope she follows herself. ""We believe students deserve learning environments that foster innovation and curiosity, and are also free from harm,"" she said."
EDU,"According to the latest federal data, the U.S. science and engineering (S&E) enterprise still leads the world. The United States invests the most in research and development (R&D), produces the most advanced degrees in science and engineering and high-impact scientific publications, and remains the largest provider of information, financial, and business services. However, Southeast, South, and East Asia continue to rapidly ascend in many aspects of S&E. The region now accounts for 40 percent of global R&D, with China as the stand-out as it continues to strengthen its global S&E capacity. These and other data on the domestic and global S&E landscape can be found in the National Science Board's (NSB) Science and Engineering Indicators 2016 (Indicators) report, released today. ""Indicators is a rich source of information on a wide range of measures that let us know how the United States is performing in science and technology,"" said NSF Director France Córdova. ""It gives us crucial information on how we compare to other nations in the areas of research and development, STEM education, and the development of our workforce. The report also provides state-level comparisons, insights into the representation of women and minorities in science and engineering, and insight into what the public thinks about science."" China dominates Asian advances The 2016 edition of Indicators highlights that China, South Korea and India are investing heavily in R&D and in developing a well-educated workforce skilled in science and engineering. Indicators 2016 makes it clear that while the United States continues to lead in a variety of metrics, it exists in an increasingly multi-polar world for S&E that revolves around the creation and use of knowledge and technology. According to Indicators 2016, China is now the second-largest performer of R&D, accounting for 20 percent of global R&D as compared to the United States, which accounts for 27 percent. Between 2003 and 2013, China ramped up its R&D investments at an average of 19.5 percent annually, greatly exceeding that of the U.S. China made its increases despite the Great Recession. Developing economies that start at a lower base tend to grow much more rapidly than those that are already functioning at a high level; nonetheless, China's growth rate in this arena has been remarkable. China is also playing an increasingly prominent role in knowledge and technology-intensive industries, including high-tech manufacturing and knowledge-intensive services. These industries account for 29 percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and for nearly 40 percent of U.S. GDP. China ranks second in high-tech manufacturing, where the U.S. maintains a slim lead with a global share of 29 percent to China's 27 percent. While China plays a smaller role in commercial knowledge-intensive services (business, financial, and information), it has now surpassed Japan to move into third place behind the United States and the European Union. China has also made significant strides in S&E education, which is critical to supporting R&D as well as knowledge and technology-intensive industries. China is the world's number-one producer of undergraduates with degrees in science and engineering. These fields account for 49 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded in China, compared to 33 percent of all bachelor's degrees the U.S. awards. In 2012, students in China earned about 23 percent of the world's 6 million first university degrees in S&E. Students in the European Union earned about 12 percent and those in the U.S. accounted for about 9 percent of these degrees. University degree production in China has grown faster than in major developed nations and regions, rising more than 300 percent between 2000 and 2012; during the same period, the number of non-S&E degrees conferred in China also rose by 1,000 percent, suggesting that China is building capacity in all areas, not just S&E. The number of S&E graduate degrees awarded in China is also increasing. However, the U.S. continues to award the largest number of S&E doctorates and remains the destination of choice for internationally mobile students. ""Other countries see how U.S. investments in R&D and higher education have paid off for our country and are working intensively to build their own scientific capabilities. They understand that scientific discovery and human capital fuel knowledge- and technology-intensive industries and a nation's economic health,"" said Dan Arvizu, NSB chair. Federal commitment wavering At the same time that China and South Korea have continued to increase their R&D investments, the United States' longstanding commitment to federal government-funded R&D is wavering. In 2013, government funded R&D accounted for 27 percent of total U.S. R&D and was the largest supporter (47 percent) of all U.S. basic research. Indicators shows that Federal investment in both academic and business sector R&D has declined in recent years, reflecting the effects of the end of the investments of ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), the advent of the Budget Control Act, and increased pressure on the discretionary portion of the federal budget. Since the Great Recession, substantial, real R&D growth annually -- ahead of the pace of U.S. GDP -- has not returned. Inflation-adjusted growth in total U.S. R&D averaged only 0.8 percent annually over the 2008-13 period, behind the 1.2 percent annual average for U.S. GDP. ""Decreased federal investment is negatively impacting our nation's research universities,"" said Kelvin Droegemeier, NSB vice chair and vice president for research at the University of Oklahoma. ""Our universities conduct 51 percent of the nation's basic research and train the next generation of STEM-capable workers. Federal support is essential to developing the new knowledge and human capital that allows the U.S. to innovate and be at the forefront of S&T."
ECON,"Americans have reached a critical point. The federal government has grown to an unprecedented size, has expanded its scope to virtually every part of the economy, and is on a dangerous fiscal trajectory. Taxpayers pay enormous amounts of money to the government, and the government borrows huge sums beyond the amount it takes from taxpayers. The government uses taxes and borrows money to pay for excessive spending, including many programs that benefit the well-connected or lock people into low incomes by penalizing work. As of March 2017, the national debt is approaching $20 trillion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if the government remains on its currently planned trajectory, it will spend at least another $10 trillion more than it will collect over the 2017 to 2027 period, piling on even more debt. Annual debt-service payments are expected to double within five years, and more than triple over the next 10 years, increasing from $241 billion in 2016 to $768 billion in 2027. That $768 billion in interest that the government must pay in 2027 represents 52 percent of the entire amount of the discretionary spending projected for the government in that year. The country cannot and should not sustain the current course of excessive spending and borrowing. While Congress cannot solve everything at once, it can and must take the opportunities available in the annual budget and appropriations processes to make a down payment on putting the government’s finances in order. Congress can do this by immediately reducing discretionary spending and taking meaningful steps to reduce mandatory spending by reforming mandatory spending programs."
ECON,"Americans have reached a critical point. The federal government has grown to an unprecedented size, has expanded its scope to virtually every part of the economy, and is on a dangerous fiscal trajectory. Taxpayers pay enormous amounts of money to the government, and the government borrows huge sums beyond the amount it takes from taxpayers. The government uses taxes and borrows money to pay for excessive spending, including many programs that benefit the well-connected or lock people into low incomes by penalizing work. As of March 2017, the national debt is approaching $20 trillion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if the government remains on its currently planned trajectory, it will spend at least another $10 trillion more than it will collect over the 2017 to 2027 period, piling on even more debt. Annual debt-service payments are expected to double within five years, and more than triple over the next 10 years, increasing from $241 billion in 2016 to $768 billion in 2027. That $768 billion in interest that the government must pay in 2027 represents 52 percent of the entire amount of the discretionary spending projected for the government in that year. The country cannot and should not sustain the current course of excessive spending and borrowing. While Congress cannot solve everything at once, it can and must take the opportunities available in the annual budget and appropriations processes to make a down payment on putting the government’s finances in order. Congress can do this by immediately reducing discretionary spending and taking meaningful steps to reduce mandatory spending by reforming mandatory spending programs."
ECON,"3. Crowding Out Private Investment. Economic growth, especially increasing per capita income, depends on the proper functioning of prices to signal and markets to respond, but it also depends fundamentally on increas ing the amount and quality of productive capital available to the workforce. The amount of capital employed in the economy needs to increase at least to keep pace with the growth in the labor force to maintain current living stan dards, and must grow even faster—to increase the amount of capital per worker—to raise worker productivity and thus wages and salaries. Government deficit spending and its associated debt subtracts from the amount of private saving available for private investment, leading to slower economic growth. Unlike what staunch believers of government spend ing for economic stimulus claim, government stimulus spending does the opposite of growing the economy. Less economic growth caused by high government spending and debt results in fewer available jobs, lower wages and salaries, and fewer opportunities for career advancement. Prolonged debt overhang in the United States, even at low interest rates, would be a massive drag on economic growth leading to signficantly reduced prosperity for Americans. In the words of Reinhart, Reinhart, and Rogoff: “This debt-without-drama scenario is reminis- cent for us of T.S. Eliot’s (1925) lines in The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”"
ECON,"3. Crowding Out Private Investment. Economic growth, especially increasing per capita income, depends on the proper functioning of prices to signal and markets to respond, but it also depends fundamentally on increas ing the amount and quality of productive capital available to the workforce. The amount of capital employed in the economy needs to increase at least to keep pace with the growth in the labor force to maintain current living stan dards, and must grow even faster—to increase the amount of capital per worker—to raise worker productivity and thus wages and salaries. Government deficit spending and its associated debt subtracts from the amount of private saving available for private investment, leading to slower economic growth. Unlike what staunch believers of government spend ing for economic stimulus claim, government stimulus spending does the opposite of growing the economy. Less economic growth caused by high government spending and debt results in fewer available jobs, lower wages and salaries, and fewer opportunities for career advancement. Prolonged debt overhang in the United States, even at low interest rates, would be a massive drag on economic growth leading to signficantly reduced prosperity for Americans. In the words of Reinhart, Reinhart, and Rogoff: “This debt-without-drama scenario is reminis- cent for us of T.S. Eliot’s (1925) lines in The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”"
ECON,"The federal deficit is a problem that matters. Most of the time, when we hear ""the deficit is a problem,"" it comes without supporting facts. We simply apply the same rationale as we would with our household expenditures. Namely, that if we spend too much, we're going to have a problem. We'll have to pay back our overspend with interest, and correspondingly we'll have less money to spend on things we need in the future. To some degree, the household example bears similarity to the fiscal considerations of national deficit and debt. It's just much more serious at the national level. Where we, as individuals, can make prudent financial choices to mitigate our personal debts, uncontrolled government deficits affect all of us. Here's why the national deficit matters for Americans. First off, there's the interest rate issue. On paper, because U.S. interest rates are historically low, this would seem to be a good time for government to borrow money for investments. President Trump often makes that case. And even at the lower end of projections, medium term U.S. economic growth significantly exceeds the cost of borrowing. That means current interest rates should be easily offset by future economic growth. Correspondingly, current government borrowing should pay for itself. But there's a catch: That argument assumes government borrowed money will be spent boosting the economic potential of the nation. It's a big assumption. After all, government is manifestly less productive than the private sector. It wastes a lot of money on things that do not boost economic productivity. Moreover, interest rates are not static, and as long as the government runs deficits, anything borrowed at today's rates will be refinanced at tomorrow's. The Federal Reserve believes its quantitative easing has lowered long term borrowing interest rates by about 1 percent. But as the Federal Reserve unwinds that borrowing, interest rates will rise. The Congressional Budget Office gives some context as to why this matters. Last summer, the CBO projected that if current spending plans hold firm, net interest payments on the debt will more than quadruple in relation to the economy, from 1.4 percent of GDP today to 5.8 percent of GDP in 2046. As I've noted, ""To put that in perspective, had the U.S. spent an extra 4.4 percent GDP on debt service in 2015, it would have added $790 billion to the federal budget deficit."" By 2026, just nine years from now, the CBO projects government interest rate payments will double as a percentage of GDP. That amounts to hundreds of billions of additional dollars spent simply on paying off debt interest. That's money that cannot be spent on education, highways, the military, or any other government priority. And that's just the start. Another problem is that as deficits and interest payments rise, national saving declines. And that decline means reduced private investment opportunity. If we accept, as the vast majority of economists do, that effective investment is the key to boosting productivity and thus wages and living standards, the debt's role in crowding out investment is a big problem. Then there's the issue of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. At present, foreign entities hold around 40 percent of all publicly held Federal debt (that is, not counting the IOUs held in Social Security and other entitlement program trust funds). But as the deficit grows and we avoid resolving its cost drivers (an aging population joined to unaffordable entitlements), American debt will become more risky to hold. This week we got more bad news in this regard. We found out that the nation's birth rate is also declining. That means fewer workers to pay for more elderly citizens. As the prospect of a default grows — even if it remains remote — foreign investors will abandon the dollar. And the consequence will be an immediate and serious decline in the wealth of American families. Don't believe me? Consider what Brexit has done to the British pound. Just before Brexit, one British pound was worth $1.49. Today, one British pound is worth just $1.30. In dollar terms, Britons are now 13 percent less wealthy than prior to Brexit. How would you feel if you were 13 perent poorer? The deficit and the debt matter. If we wish to leave a better nation to our children, we need to get a grip and reduce long-term spending."
TOP,"Narrower and Broader Meaning of Education Education in the Narrower Sense In its narrow sense, school instruction is called education. In this process, the elders of society strive to attain predetermined aims during a specified time by providing pre-structured knowledge to children through set methods of teaching. The purpose is to achieve mental development of children entering school. To make of narrow meaning of education more clear, the following opinions of some other educationists are being given- · The culture which each generation purposefully gives to those who are to be its successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising the level of improvement which has been attained. John Stuart Mill · In narrow sense, education may be taken to mean any consciously directed effort to develop and cultivate our powers. S. S. Mackenzie · Education is a process in which and by which knowledge, character and behaviour of the young are shaped and moulded. Prof. Drever · The influence of the environment of the individual with a view to producing a permanent change in his habits of behaviour, or thought and attitude. G. H. Thompson Education, in the narrower sense, is regarded as equivalent to instruction. It consists of the “specific influences” consciously designed in a school or in a college or in an institution to bring in the development and growth of the child.  The word school includes the whole machinery of education from Kindergarten to the University. The education of the child begins with his admission in the school and ends with his departure from the University. The amount of education received by the child is measured in terms of degrees and diplomas awarded to him. The school represents formal education as it imparts education directly and systematically. There is deliberate effort on the part of the educator to inculcate certain habits, skills, attitudes or influences in the learner, which are considered to be essential and useful to him. According to John Dewey: “The school exists to provide a special environment for the formative period of human life. School is a consciously designed institution, the sole concern of which is to educate the child. This special environment is essential to explain our complex society and civilization”. The influences or modes of influences in the school are deliberately planned, chosen and employed by the community for the welfare of the members of the rising generation. The purpose of these influences is to modify the behaviour of the child in such a way that he may become different from what he would have been without education. It makes possible a better adjustment of human nature to surroundings. According to Mackenzie, education, in the narrower sense, is conscious effort to develop and cultivate our innate powers. Education, in the narrow sense, is also regarded as acquisition of knowledge. According to it education is a process by which knowledge or information on a subject is acquired. But many sensible educationists have criticized this view. They argue that emphasis on the knowledge is likely to reduce all schools to mere knowledge-shops. The acquisition of knowledge is not the only or supreme aim of education, yet it is one of the important aims of education. Education in the Broader Sense In its wider sense, education is the  total development of the personality. In this sense. Education consists of all those experiences, which affect the individual from birth till death. Thus, education is that process by which an individual freely develops his self according to his nature in a free and uncontrolled environment. In this way, education is a life long process of growth environment."
TOP,"Schooling In 1828, Noah Webster defined schooling as “instruction in school.” School is a place where instruction occurs. Even more instructive is the etymology of the word “school.” The OED listing looks as follows: SCHOOL, n. [L. schola; Gr. leisure, vacation from business, lucubration at leisure, a place where leisure is enjoyed, a school. The adverb signifies at ease, leisurely, slowly, hardly, with labor or difficulty. I think, must have been derived from the Latin. This word seems originally to have denoted leisure, freedom from business, a time given to sports, games or exercises, and afterwards time given to literary studies. …] The school is place where “leisure is enjoyed,” a place free from work. Literary studies take place after schooling. The idea of “‘students attending a school’ is attested from c. 1300; sense of ‘school building’ is first recorded 1590s.” Education While “school” denotes a building, “education” means the formation of a life. In 1828, Noah Webster defined education as follows: n. [L. educatio. ] The bringing up, as of a child, instruction; formation of manners. Education comprehends all that series of instruction and discipline which is intended to enlighten the understanding, correct the temper, and form the manners and habits of youth, and fit them for usefulness in their future stations. Note that education is comprehensive. It deals with both the gaining of knowledge and the development of character – virtue. And the combination of virtue and knowledge leads to wisdom. School vs. EducationThe OED dates the word education to 1530 and defines its use as “childrearing.” This comes “directly from Latin educationem (nominative educatio), from past participle stem of educare.” From 1610 the word was used “of education in social codes and manners; meaning ‘systematic schooling and training for work.’” The words schooling and education have very different meanings. The former relates to a place – a building, a place of leisure separated from work itself and from the preparation of a person for work. The latter is a process of instruction that prepares the mind with knowledge and understanding, the heart with virtue, and the will with wisdom. It prepares people for life and work. School vs. education: the modern word has lost this distinction. Don’t let your schooling stand in the way of your education."
TOP,"Today, this once-powerful force is in considerable disarray. A ProPublica examination shows that officials in scores of school districts do not know the status of their desegregation orders, have never read them, or erroneously believe that orders have been ended. In many cases, orders have gone unmonitored, sometimes for decades, by the federal agencies charged with enforcing them. At the height of the country's integration efforts, there were some 750 school districts across the country known to be under desegregation orders. Today, court orders remain active in more than 300 districts. In some cases, that's because judges have determined that schools have not met their mandate to eliminate segregation. But some federal courts don't even know how many desegregation orders still exist on their dockets. With increasing frequency, federal judges are releasing districts from court oversight even where segregation prevails, at times taking the lack of action in cases as evidence that the problems have been resolved. Desegregation orders were meant to guarantee black and Latino children the right to an equal education. They addressed a range of issues, including the diversity of teaching staff, racial balance in schools, curriculum, discipline and facilities. The orders uniquely empower parents to fight actions by school districts that might lead to greater segregation or inequality. In districts under court order — having been found in violation of the constitutional rights of black children — parents do not have to prove intent, only that black students could be harmed. Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has sharply curtailed the power of parents to challenge racial inequities in schools. Districts not under court orders are largely prohibited from considering race to balance schools. And parents in these districts must show that school officials are intentionally discriminating when they make decisions that adversely affect black and Latino students. And so, as desegregation orders are ignored, forgotten, or lifted, black parents are losing the ability to effectively challenge school inequality."
TOP,"DISCUSSION Whether the study and training of yoga should be considered ""educational"" raises a novel question for [**652] this commonwealth. Section 601.5(a) of the Lower Pottsgrove Township Zoning Ordinance does not define the term ""educational"" for purposes of granting a special exception. In the seminal case of Gilden Appeal, 406 Pa. 484, 178 A.2d 562 (1962), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that in the absence of a stated definition, the word ""education"" is to be taken in its broadest sense:HN3Go to this Headnote in the case. ""The word [education] taken in its full sense, is a broad, comprehensive term and may be particularly directed to either mental, moral or physical faculties, but in its broadest sense it embraces them all, and includes [*3] not merely the instruction received at the school, college or university, but the whole course of training -- moral, intellectual and physical."" Gilden Appeal, 406 Pa. 484, 492, 178 A.2d 562, 566 (1962). Applying this broad definition, Pennsylvania courts have held the following constitute educational uses: college dormitories, Dale v. Zoning Hearing Board of Tredyffrin Township, 91 Pa. Commw. 220, 496 A.2d 1321 (1985); a center for instruction in the culture, history, traditions and customs of the Ukranian Catholic Church, St. Sophia Religious Association of Ukranian Catholics Inc. v. Cheltenham Township, 27 Pa. Commw. 237, 365 A.2d 1389 (1976); an equestrian training center, Burgoon v. Zoning Hearing Board of Charlestown Township, 2 Pa. Commw. 238, 277 A.2d 837 (1971); and, a Little League baseball field, Kirk Zoning Appeal, 12 Chester L. Rep. 229 (1964). The obvious import of these aforementioned cases is that the term ""educational"" may encompass more than reading, writing and arithmetic classes taught in traditional schools, colleges or universities. Indeed, the word ""educational"" has been associated with [*4] any type of training which promotes [**653] moral, intellectual or physical well-being. Burgoon v. Zoning Hearing Board of Charlestown Township, supra; Kirk Zoning Appeal, supra. The record here reveals uncontradicted testimony from several of appellant's witnesses who testified at the board hearing as to the educational nature of yoga. Dr. William Newman, chairman of the Psychology Department at Lehigh University, testified that aspects of yoga are taught in some of the psychology courses at Lehigh and through the physical education classes. He testified that yoga is also taught at Cabrini College in Radnor. Newman opined that yoga is educational in as much as it helps people to develop and realize themselves. Similarly, Dr. Glenn Alexander, a professor of economics at Villanova University, told the board that he has been a student of yoga for approximately 23 years, that yoga ""enables the individual to become a better person"" and that yoga was ""absolutely"" educational. Alexander explained that he has previously taken yoga classes taught by Prana Yoga, that he paid a tuition, and that books were available for use in the yoga class. Finally, Richard McKinney, [*5] formerly the director of Lion's Technical Institute in Upper Darby, testified that he has practiced yoga for many years and that yoga ""relaxes him and provides a level of stress reduction."" He testified that in his belief, yoga has educational benefits. This court has reviewed the testimony presented at the public hearings and finds that yoga may have some educational value. It is undisputed that yoga is taught in institutions of higher education. Additionally, the Prana Yoga Centre conducts yoga classes at a neighborhood YMCA, and for an adult night school program. Appellants' proposed use will allow persons in the community to receive supervised instruction in the methods and techniques of yoga. [**654] Students will be taught by yoga instructors who are not only familiar with the practice of yoga, but also with general literature and the philosophy behind yoga. Yoga techniques that will be taught include learning how to stretch, loosen and relax your body. In defining ""educational,"" Pennsylvania case law has gone beyond traditional academics. In a broad, positive sense, ""education"" operates to develop the individual, enabling that person to better himself, his family and the [*6] society in which he lives. Surely yoga benefits individuals by developing the mind, teaching people how to concentrate, how to relieve stress and how to function more effectively. To imply, as the board stated in its written opinion, that yoga fails to be ""educational"" because the training is ""not part of the university curriculum"" or that the training is ""more in the physical education of the student rather than the intellectual education of the student,"" is nothing short of absurd.HN4"
FED,"The current administration has vowed to leave education matters up to the states, continuing a movement started with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which dramatically limited the federal government’s role in school accountability. While greater local control certainly has some benefits, it risks exacerbating the massive disparities in educational performance across states that already exists."
EDU,"Anne Ryland and Lindsey Burke (Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation). “School Rules: Lessons from the ESSA Regulatory Process.” Backgrounder. February 1st, 2017. http://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2017-02/BG3189.pdf"
EDU,"Anne Ryland and Lindsey Burke (Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation). “School Rules: Lessons from the ESSA Regulatory Process.” Backgrounder. February 1st, 2017. http://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2017-02/BG3189.pdf"
FED,"Frederick Hess (director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute) and Andrew Kelly (resident scholar and director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute). “More Than a Slogan.” U.S. News & World Report. September 15th, 2015. https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/09/15/5-reasons-federalism-in-education-matters"
CAP,"How Do We Build the Really Open University? So, how do we build this new kind of open and ephemeral institution? We think it is important to open up spaces in which we can both experiment with, and critically reflect upon, radical pedagogical practices. The crisis of the university is a crisis that throws up new openings and possibilities for what a university could be. These spaces can work toward pushing the boundaries of the academy by concretely asking, “what can a university do?” in praxis. We need to engage in a discussion about how we can go forward as critical radical researchers inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy. Is there any place for us within the institution as it is? Or as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2004) suggest, is the “only possible with the relationship to the university today . . . a criminal one”? This opens up the question/possibility of what Virno terms “exodus,” but which might also be described as “desertion.” This is not a territorial exodus, or a fleeing from, but rather a desertion of one’s assigned role, in this case of the “critical” yet docile body (Foucault, 2004) of the academic. As Harney and Moten (2004) put it, “to be in but not of is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” In part, the Really Open University is an experiment in just this. The creation of spaces in which we can begin to interrogate the role of the university and of the academic, not just as theoretical exercise, but within an implicitly antagonistic, yet not wholly reactive, space of political engagement. This is a messy space that avoids any pure politics, or identitarian overcoding, neither overtly anarchist, nor Marxist, nor simply an “anticuts” group, yet neither a purely utopian reimagining. This is necessarily a “cramped space,” of (im)possibility, as Deleuze (2005) states, “creation takes place in bottlenecks.” Many elements of the education struggle will ultimately want to close down the categories again, in order to give more weight to their ideological underpinnings, trying to make the moment fit their politics, rather than seizing the moment in all its wealth of potentiality. The ROU views ‘crisis as possibility’ arguing that it is “up to us to decide [the universities] future.”17 But through what concrete actions might we actually develop a “really open university”? One way to begin may be through the occupation of the spaces where we work, play and consume, and the reappropriation of this time and space for our own (common) ends. This may help to promote new lines of questioning and open up new connectivities. One way to discuss this occupation and reappropriation, might be the literal forced reclamation of space, though direct action. This has, of course, been a tried and tested method across history, and we have seen the tactic of occupation has begun to some extent become popular again, with the recent occupations at universities across the UK, but to a much larger extent across Europe and the United States. We think there is an interesting dynamic, however, between defensive and offensive uses of occupation. We do not wish to set up a binary, but rather are interested in the qualitative shifts and activities that can occur within the occupied space itself, rather than simply the obstructive element of occupation. This problematic has been explored in the U.S. occupations movement through the often heated debate about the utility of political demands, versus occupation without demands. For example, “Occupation mandates the inversion of the standard dimensions of space. Space in an occupation is not merely the container of our bodies, it is a plane of potentiality that has been frozen by the logic of the commodity” (Inoperative Committee, 2009). Another way to discuss the occupation and reappropriation of time and space might be through the creation of new spaces that prefigure the new forms we may wish a reimagined university to take. A concrete example of this is the model of the autonomous social center, or “infoshop,” found within anarchist and autonomous activist practices (Atton, 1999). Social centers are place-based, self-managed spaces. They can be squatted, rented or cooperatively owned (Pusey, 2010). A particularly rich history of social centers can be found in Italy, but they exist all across Europe. In the United States the closest approximation to the autonomous social centers seems to be the network of radical bookstores and “infoshops” such as Red Emma’s in Baltimore and Bluestockings in New York City (Kanuga, 2010). Some academics at the University of Lincoln are attempting to develop a cooperatively run “social science center” that utilizes a social center type autonomous space, where they can practice radical pedagogical methods (Winn, 2010). The idea is that students will be able to enroll for free and staff will still be paid. We can imagine, based on our experiences and research within social centers in the UK, that this would be controversial within anarchist circles, both for its relationship with the institution of the university, and also because of its payment of academic staff. Payment for some roles performed within some spaces has been a source of much debate and contention within social centers within the UK (Chatterton, 2008). These spaces generally rely on the good will and free time of volunteers. However, many spaces cite burnout and lack of participation as major issues within social centers (UK Social Centres Network, 2008). The “dole autonomy” (Aufheben, 1999), which helped facilitate earlier cycles of struggle, has been very much weakened with successive government attacks on the welfare state, and students increasingly forced to take employment while studying means that there are far fewer people around with the “free time” to help enable projects such as these. It is, perhaps, through the establishment of self-organized alternative educational practices, and open and ephemeral institutions that we can start to value ideas for their own merit, rather than capitalist value—to create spaces and places where we can discard the price tags of commodified knowledge and instrumental learning, and instead appreciate the value of ideas and concepts themselves, while rediscovering the subversiveness of teaching."
HEG,"Many foreign-policy experts seem to believe that retaining American primacy is largely a matter of will -- of how America chooses to exert its power abroad. Even President Obama, more often accused of being a prophet of decline than a booster of America's future, recently asserted that the United States ""has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world."" The question, he continued, is ""not whether America will lead, but how we will lead."" But will is unavailing without strength. If the United States wants the international system to continue to reflect its interests and values -- a system, for example, in which the global commons are protected, trade is broad-based and extensive, and armed conflicts among great nations are curtailed -- it needs to sustain not just resolve, but relative power. That, in turn, will require acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that global power and wealth are shifting at an unprecedented pace, with profound implications. Moreover, many of the challenges America faces are exacerbated by vulnerabilities that are largely self-created, chief among them fiscal policy. Much more quickly and comprehensively than is understood, those vulnerabilities are reducing America's freedom of action and its ability to influence others. Preserving America's international position will require it to restore its economic vitality and make policy choices now that pay dividends for decades to come. America has to prioritize and to act. Fortunately, the United States still enjoys greater freedom to determine its future than any other major power, in part because many of its problems are within its ability to address. But this process of renewal must begin with analyzing America's competitive position and understanding the gravity of the situation Americans face."
EDU,"The school-lunch reauthorization bill enacted by Congress last year contained a host of measures to improve nutrition, such as encouraging the Department of Agriculture to make more fresh fruits and vegetables available to local schools, creating an initiative to encourage partnerships between schools and local produce farms, and increasing the availability of whole grains in school meals. Of course, Congress and school administrators must face the fact that students will not necessarily make the food choices that are best for their health. Children will choose a salad over a juicy cheeseburger about as often as they choose educational TV over MTV. It is hard to argue with any of these good food initiatives, but expectations about how much school food programs can contribute to increasing the consumption of nutritious foods and reducing the national problem with childhood obesity should be modest. There are after all, around 120,000 elementary and secondary schools in the United States, and more than 90 percent of them participate in the school-lunch program. Trying to move all these facilities in the same direction is a huge undertaking. What’s more, even if school food met every guideline for fat, saturated fat, and sugar, the impact on children’s weight would probably be modest because children’s consumption of food at home and in fast-food pens would continue unabated. By the time they reach middle and late childhood, students seem determined to maximize consumption of their two favorite food groups: fat and sugar. Children’s preference for foods that are bound to make them fatter is established outside the school system. Unless we are prepared to remove all unhealthy foods from the schools–to minimize consumption of sugars and fats–there are obvious limits to the strategy of giving kids food choices. Schools can and should fight to improve the consumption of nutritious foods, and even to change students’ eating habits, but unless the nation’s food culture, food advertising, and patterns of food consumption at home and in fast-food restaurants undergo massive change, the schools will be waging little more than a rear-guard action. Even so, given the level of federal spending on the school food programs, it is reasonable to expect both Congress and the Department of Agriculture to put pressure on schools to aggressively implement wellness policies that minimize the consumption of fat and sugar on school property. To do so, schools may well be forced to reduce some food choices that have minimal nutritional value. Expect school lunch to continue moving inexorably along its well-traveled path of slow change and modest improvement while relying on its friends inside and outside Congress to fight off big shocks and spending cuts. At this very moment, as in 1981 and 1995, Washington is gearing up to make serious cuts in social programs to balance the budget. Will school lunch, and that 20 cents per meal middle-class subsidy, be on the menu? Fat chance."
ANB,"Here’s the deal: in a nutshell, every other group lives in a context of violence which has what I would call a sort of psychological grounding wire, which means that they can write a sentence about why they are experiencing that violence. Native Americans can write a sentence that says ‘I’m experiencing violence because this is an ongoing tactic within a strategy of colonization’.White feminists can say the same, that ‘this is an ongoing tactic within a strategy of patriarchy’.  For a Black person to try and emulate that kind of interpretive lens, the problem becomes a lot bigger. For us this is the ongoing tactic of a strategy for human renewal. The violence against us becomes a tactic within a strategy to secure Humanity’s place. It’s not a tactic in an ongoing strategy to take our land away, or to take our rights away. We never had any rights. The other thing is that our psyche does not obey the objective laws of the structure. The simple way of putting that would be to say that we exist in an external superviolence and we exist in an internal soup which has self-hatred as one of its main components. One of the things that Marriot and Fanon each say is that, generically speaking, the structure by which human beings are recognized by other human beings and incorporated into a community of human beings, is anti-slave. And slaveness is something that has consumed Blackness and Africanness, making it impossible to divide slavery from Blackness. Even if I say to myself, “I am not a Slave”, we don’t make our own way in the world. So we know every day, before walking out of the house—and I think the American Black knows it quicker, like say at age 3, the Caribbean and African Black might know it a little bit later on in life, like Fanon says, ‘I was 18 when I learned it’—that we cannot enter into a structure of recognition as a being, an incorporation into a community of beings, without recognition and incorporation being completely destroyed. We know that we are the antithesis of recognition and incorporation. And sometimes we build to a point that we can’t even call it political because it’s bigger than politics, a point of mobilization and organization and theorization that is in some way informed by this, and we just set it off, and I think that Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and the Black Liberation Army are episodes of that. But the response to these moments, where we recognize that we cannot be recognized and we move on that, the response is so overwhelmingly violent it seeks to crush us to the point that nobody ever gets that idea in their head again."
ANB,"Slavery is the great leveler of the Black subject's positionality. The Black American subject does not generate Historical categories of Entitlement, Sovereignty, and Immigration for the record. We are ""off the map"" with respect to the cartography that charts civil society’s semiotics: we have a past, but not a heritage, as Orlando Patterson points out in Slavery and Social Death. To the data generating demands of the Historical axis we present a virtual blank, much like the KhoiSan's virtual blank presented to the data generating demands of the Anthropological axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position, a position outside of the articulations of hegemony; but it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because and this is key our presence works back upon the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject -- even the most massacred subjects, Indians are required to h ave analogs within the nation's structuring narrative, and one subject, the subject upon which the nation's order of wealth is built, is a subject whose experience is without analog then, by that subject's very presence all other analogs are destabilized. The Black body in the U.S. is that constant reminder that not only can work not be reformed, b t it cannot be transformed, to accommodate all subject’s: work is a White category. The fact that millions upon millions of Black people work misses the point. The point is we were never meant to be workers; in other words, capital/white supremacy's dream did not envision us incorporated, or incorporative. From the very beginning, we were meant to slave and die. Work (i.e. the French shipbuilding industry and bourgeois civil society which finally extended its progressive hegemony to workers and peasants to topple the aristocracy) was what grew up all around us -- 20 to 60 million seeds plan ted at the bottom of the Atlantic, 5 million seeds planted in Dixie. And today, at the end of the 20th century, we are still not meant to be workers. We are meant to be warehoused and die. Work (i.e. the prison industrial complex and the shot in the arm it gives to faltering White, communities -- its positive reterritorialization of White Space and its simultaneous deterritorialization of B lack Space) is what grows up around our dead bodies once again. The chief difference today, compared to several hundred years ago, is that today our bodies are desired, but not our labor. And again, the chief constant to the dream is that our labor power was never for sale. Civil society is not a terrain intended for the Black subject. It is coded as waged and wages are White. Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped. And the invitation to participate in hegemony's gestures of influence, leadership, and consent is not extended to the unwaged. We live in the world, but exist outside of civil society. This structurally impossible position is a paradox, because the Black subject, the slave, is vital to political economy: s/he kick-starts capital at its genesis and rescues it from its over-accumulation crisis at its end. But Marxism has no account of this phenomenal birth and life-saving role played by the Black subject: from Marx and Gramsci we have consistent silence. In taking Foucault to task for assuming a universal subject in revolt against discipline, in the same spirit in which I have taken Gramsci to task for assuming a universal subject, the subject of civil society in revolt against capital, Joy James writes :The U.S. carceral network kills, however, and in its prisons, it kills more blacks than any other ethnic group. American prisons constitute an ""outside"" in U.S. political life. In fact, our society displays waves of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from bourgeois self-policing. The state routinely polices the unassimilable in the hell of lockdown, deprivation tanks , control units , and holes for political prisoners (Resisting State Violence 1996: 34 ) But this peculiar preoccupation is not Gramsci's bailiwick. His concern is with White folks; or with folks in a White (ned) enough subject position that they are confronted by, or threatened by the removal of, a wag e -- be it monetary or social. But Black subjectivity itself disarticulates the Gramscian dream as a ubiquitous emancipatory strategy, because Gramsci, like most White activists, and radical American movements like the prison abolition movement, has no theory of the unwaged, no solidarity with the slave If we are to take Fanon at his word when he writes, Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder (37) then we must accept the fact that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those other bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of History, no data for the categories of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is an experience without analog a past, without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary for whoever says rape says Black, (Fanon) , whoever says prison says Black, and whoever says AIDS says Black (Sexton) the Negro is a phobogenic object (Fanon). Indeed &a phobogenic object &a past without a heritage &the map of gratuitous violence &a program of complete disorder. But whereas this realization is, and should be cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition."
ANB,"In short, the selective recognition of humanity that undergirded the relations of chattel slavery had not considered them men deserving of rights or freedom. Thus in taking up the language of humanism, they seized upon that which had been used against and denied them. However, suppose that the recognition of humanity held out the promise not of liberating the flesh or redeeming one’s suffering but rather of intensifying it? Or what if this acknowledgment was little more than a pretext for punishment, dissimulation of the violence of chattel slavery and the sanction given it by the law and the state, and an instantiation of racial hierarchy? What if the presumed endowments of man— conscience, sentiment, and reason— rather than assuring liberty or negating slavery acted to yoke slavery and freedom? .Or what if the heart, the soul, and the mind were simply the inroads of discipline rather than that which confirmed-the crime of slavery and proved that blacks were men and brothers, as Charlie Moses had hoped! Here I am interested in the ways that the recognition of humanity and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress. For instance, although the captive’s bifurcated existence as both an object of property and a person (whether understood as a legal subject formally endowed with limited rights and protections, a submissive, culpable or criminal agent, or one possessing restricted capacities for self-fashioning) has been recognized as one of the striking contradictions of chattel slavery, the constitution of this humanity remains to be considered. In other words, the law’s recognition of slave humanity has been dismissed as ineffectual and as a volte-face of an imperiled institution. Or, worse yet, it has been lauded as evidence of the hegemony of paternalism and the integral relations between masters and slaves. Similarly, the failure of Reconstruction generally has been thought of as a failure of implementation— that is, the state’s indifference toward blacks and unwillingness to en­ sure basic rights and entitlements sufficed to explain the racist retrenchment of the postwar period. I approach these issues from a slightly different vantage point and thus consider the outrages of slavery not only in terms of the object status of the enslaved as beasts of burden and chattel but also as they involve notions of slave humanity. Rather than declare paternalism an ideology, understood in the orthodox sense as a false and distorted representation o f social relations, I am concerned with the savage encroachments of power that take place through notions of reform, consent, and protection. As I will argue later, rather than bespeaking the mutuality o f social relations O f the expressive and affective capacities o f the subject, sentiment, enjoyment, affinity, will, and desire facilitated subjugation, domination, and terror precisely by preying upon the flesh, the heart, and the soul. It was often the case that benevolent correctives and declarations of slave humanity intensified the brutal exercise of power upon the captive body rather than ameliorating the chattel condition."
ANB,"Hammonds argues that black women's practices of going unmarked in the realm of sexuality and bodily politics reinforce the taboo of black female sexuality and hegemonic ideologies that encode their bodies with racialized and gendered meaning. Yet she cautions against an uncomplicated embrace of visibility to counter the damage of silence done to the black female body and black sexualities and argues, “visibility in and of itself does not erase a history of silence nor does it challenge the structure of power and domination, symbolic and material, that determines what can and cannot be seen. The goal should be to develop a ‘politics of articulation.’”31 Embracing both Phelan's and Hammonds' skepticism of visibility as a political strategy while acknowledging the enforced invisibility placed on racialized subjects, I argue that understanding systems of visuality as necessarily troubling structures makes viable a different set of questions about black visibility. The question becomes how do the terms of engagement change in performative practices that are rooted in the trouble of visibility? Excess flesh as an enactment, while not necessarily resistant, can be productive in conceiving of an identificatory possibility for black female subjects that refuses the aberrant representations of the black female subject in dominant visual culture. Excess flesh offers the possibility of particularizing (p.123) the spectragraphia that Maurice Wallace argues frames the black masculine figure in the public sphere, and I would add intensifies the gaze upon the black female subject. By spectragraphia, Wallace refers to a cultural vision that frames black men “through the spectral and the spectacular in racialist representations.”32 I would maintain that, with different gendered implications, “spectragraphia” also captures the black female body as ontologically aberrant. In Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, identification is the process by which the subject comes into being through a recognition and alienation of self, facilitated by the reflection of an idealized image. Silverman have revealed in their writings that the process of identification for all subjects is not facilitated by an ideal ego. Equally important for my purpose here is how their writings—with respect to their distinctively different projects—demonstrate the significance of the imago in the process of subject formation as enunciated by Lacan. About this, Silverman writes, “Lacan sharply differentiates the gaze from the subject's look, conferring visual authority not on the look but on the gaze. He thereby suggests that what is determinative for each of us is not how we see or would like to see ourselves, but how we are perceived by the cultural gaze.”35 It is to be understood without explication that “the cultural gaze” stands in for white male positionality in looking relations. This is abetted by a symbolic order that structures white men with perception and authority. Moreover, in much of the scholarship on visual culture and race, including my own work, the cultural gaze so defined is the psychic and symbolic impetus for 33 Psychoanalytic theorists from Frantz Fanon to David Eng and Kaja divergent art practices that redress its subjugation of others as curious objects of scopophiliac play."
ANB,"‘Baucom and Spillers’s theorizations of time as accumulation and capture have profound implications for how we understand the future. Traditionally, the future is a space and time we do not know, a place of possibility and hope. The emptiness of the future is imagined as a space of seamless progress: a myth of Marxist teleology; a capitalist dream; a fantasy of nationalism and colonialism. When we imagine the future as the outcome of the passage of time, the past falls away and the present disappears so that the future becomes relief from the devastating weight of everything that has come before. For example, José Esteban Muñoz argues that the way out of the crushing weight of today is to hold on to the future because now is not enough. According to Muñoz, the future is the domain of queerness, a “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” that allows us to think “then and there” when here and now is not enough (2009, 1). For Muñoz, the call for no future is only available to those who have a future to deny. He worries that abandoning the future to a heteronormative white world will only lead to the deaths of more queer people of color. Yet, if time does not pass but accumulates, then the future is not the triumph of a tendency inscribed in the present. It is not the dissolution of the past or the undoing of the present. If time does not pass but accumulates, then the future is not liberated from the constraints of yesterday, but, rather, is the place where the wreckage of then and now lives on. When we think of time against the temporal regimes of the state, heteronormativity, the nation, and capital, time drags, reverses, compresses, and accumulates. Engaging queerness as a force that distorts and undermines normative logics of sequence is to know that the conditions of possibility for the atrocities of the past have not faded, but, rather, have intensified (Freeman 2010, 27). It is to deploy what Jasbir Puar calls an “antecedent temporality” where one can see, feel, and engage the ghosts that are not yet here, but will be tomorrow and the next day and the next (Puar 2007, xx). Muñoz writes that the past tells us something about the present: “It tells us that something is missing, or something is not yet here” (2009, 86). Baucom and Spillers extend this assertion by arguing that past forms of racial terror are a lesson about the present, but also a vision of what is to come. If time does not pass but accumulates, then the past is where the future is anticipated, recollected, and demonstrated (Baucom 2005, 213). If there is no progress, but instead repetition, modification, intensification, reversals, and suspensions, then we know what the future will be. The future will be what was before."
ANB,"Yet, for Wilderson, there is a qualitative difference, an ontological one, between the inferiorization or dehumanization of the masses of people ‘in Asia … in America and the islands of the sea’, including the colonization of their land and resources, the exploitation of their labor and even their extermination in whole or in part, and the singular commodification of human being pursued under racial slavery, that structure of gratuitous violence in which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated and exchanged. 7On this score, we should note that ‘the absolute submission mandated by law was not simply that of slave to his or her owner, but the submission of the enslaved before all whites’ (Hartman 1997: 83). The latter group is perhaps better termed all non-blacks (or the unequally arrayed category of non-blackness), because it is racial blackness as a necessary condition for enslavement that matters most, rather than whiteness as a sufficient condition for freedom. The structural position of the Indian slaveholder – or, for that matter, the smattering of free black slaveholders in the USA or the slaveholding mulatto elite in the Caribbean – is a case in point (Blackburn 1997; Koger 2006; Miles and Holland 2006). Freedom from the rule of slave law requires only that one be considered non-black, whether that non-black racial designation be ‘white’ or ‘Indian’ or, in the rare case, ‘Oriental’ – this despite the fact that each of these groups have at one point or another labored in conditions similar to or contiguous with enslaved African-derived groups. In other words, it is not labor relations, but property relations that are constitutive of slavery. To repeat: not all free persons are white (nor are they equal or equally free), but slaves are paradigmatically black. Because blackness serves as the basis of enslavement in the logic of a transnational political and legal culture, it permanently destabilizes the position of any nominally free black population. Stuart Hall might call this the articulation of elements of a discourse, the production of a ‘non-necessary correspondence’ between the signifiers of blackness and slavery (Hall 1996). But it is the historical materialization of the logic of a transnational political and legal culture such that the contingency of its articulation is generally lost to the infrastructure of the Atlantic world that provides Wilderson a basis for the concept of a political ontology of race that locates the color line vis-a-vis slavery: black/non-black rather than white/non-white. The USA provides the point of focus here, but the dynamics under examination are not restricted to its bounds. Political ontology is not a metaphysical notion, because it is the explicit outcome of a politics and thereby available to historic challenge through collective struggle. But it is not simply a description of a political status either, even an oppressed or subjugated political status, because it functions as if it were a metaphysical property across the longue durée of the pre-modern, modern and now postmodern eras. That is to say, borrowing a distinction from Jürgen Habermas, the application of the law of racial slavery is pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its operation across the better part of a millennium (Habermas 1985). 8 In Wilderson’s terms, the libidinal economy of anti-blackness is pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its political economy. 9 In fact, the application of slave law among the free (i.e. the disposition that ‘with respect to the African shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies into sentient flesh’) has outlived in the post-emancipation world a certain form of its prior operation – the property relations specific to the institution of chattel and the plantation-based agrarian economy in which it was sustained. As noted, Hartman describes this in her memoir as the afterlife of slavery: ‘a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone … a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago’ (Hartman 2007: 6). On that score, it is not inappropriate to say that the continuing application of slave law facilitated the reconfiguration of its operation with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, rather than its abolition (on the conventional reading) or even its circumscription ‘as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted’ (on the progressive reading of contemporary critics of the prisonindustrial complex). It is one of the great values of Wacquant’s work, especially in Wilderson’s hands, that it provides an historical schema for tracking such reconfigurations ‘from slavery to mass incarceration’ without losing track of the structural dimension. 10 The challenge for all subsequent scholarship in the overlapping fields of the sociology of race and ethnic and racial studies is to orient itself within this theoretical horizon if it is to attain what is most essential."
ANB,"In a characteristic article, published in 1976, the sociologist Ralph Turner found evidence that “recent decades have witnessed a shift in the locus of the self….” 1 He characterized the movement in self-anchorage—in the feelings and actions that we identify as expressions of our “real self”—as movement along a continuum from “institution” to “impulse.” At the institutional pole, one recognizes the real self in the pursuit of institutionalized goals. Self-control, volition, and exacting standards within institutional frameworks are paramount. At the impulse pole, by contrast, “institutional motivations are external, artificial constraints and superimpositions that bridle manifestations of the real self.” 2 At this end of the continuum, the real self consists of “deep, unsocialized, inner impulses” waiting to be discovered and spontaneously expressed. 3 Though few people occupy the extremes, Turner emphasized, the personal relevance of institutions seemed to be declining and personal reality increasingly indexed to impulse. Turner’s observations were not unique. Earlier, Nathan Adler had suggested that an “antinomian personality,” a character type who rejects conventional morality, was emerging for whom the expression of impulse and desire is central. 4 Similarly, Christopher Lasch, in his best-seller The Culture of Narcissism, saw the spread of a “therapeutic outlook” in American society that seeks peace of mind in the “overthrow of inhibitions and the immediate gratification of every impulse.” 5 in a more empirical vein, joseph Veroff and his colleagues, comparing the result of national surveys they conducted in 1957 and 1976, found a significant shift in the way that people structure their self-definition and sense of well-being. They characterized this change as one from a “socially integrated” paradigm to a more “personal or individualized” paradigm and identified it in three aspects: “(1) the diminution of role standards as the basis for defining adjustment; (2) increased focus on self-expressiveness and self-direction in social life, [and] (3) a shift in concern from social organizational integration to interpersonal intimacy.” 6 Along with others, including Daniel Bell, Robert Bellah, and Daniel Yankelovich, these scholars saw the sixties and seventies as giving rise to a new emphasis on the exploration of personal desires and immediate experience, on distancing oneself from institutional (i.e., external) norms and goals, on finding one’s unique inner voice, and on freely expressing one’s intimate feelings.7 None of these sentiments were new, of course; all reflect an old Romantic sensibility. Yet the evidence suggested that they resonated as an ideal and as terms of self-expression with a much wider swath of the public. On the way to the seventies, many Americans had, in effect, internalized the harsh fifties’ critique of the “organization man.” The Commodification of Real Selves Consumerism and the commodification process were among the key forces that social critics such as Lasch and Bell identified as leading to the attenuation of social identities (e.g., mother, deliveryman, member of the Elks Club) in self-definitions and the destabilizing of the older institutions of identity formation (family, school, church, and so on). These developments created a vacuum of normative expectations and bonds. The very terms of the new self-definitions did so as well. The nonconformist appeal of “individuated paradigms” and “unsocialized, inner impulses” required that they lack social definition and normative structure. The “real self,” in this view, has its own criteria. Each person works out his or her own self-definition in relative isolation from others. The need for socially-derived identity criteria and the social recognition of others is in principle denied. The very market forces that helped create the vacuum now rushed in to fill it. New “scripts,” to use Louis Zurcher’s apt term, were written to channel those inner impulses into intentional consumer choices.8 Branding, for instance, the powerful marketing strategy used by companies to sell mass-produced goods and services, was transformed in the mid-to-late 1980s. Companies, some with no manufacturing facilities of their own (e.g., Tommy Hilfiger), began to emphasize that what they produced was not primarily things but images.9 A brand became a carefully crafted image, a succinct encapsulation of a product’s pitch. But a successful brand is also more than that. According to branding expert Scott Bedbury, in an interview with the business magazine Fast Company, a “great brand” is “an emotional connection point that transcends the product.” Myth-like, it is an evolving “metaphorical story,” that creates “the emotional context people need to locate themselves in a larger experience.”10 Inspiring passion and dreams of gratification, the theory goes, successful brands impel people to buy. The new marketing scripts incorporate the language of self-determination and transformation, and build on the knowledge that being true to our unique inner selves is a powerful moral ideal. Indeed, authenticity has been so thoroughly appropriated and packaged in the metaphorical stories of the mass marketers that we barely notice anymore. Advertisements rail against the conventional demands of society and sell products as instruments of liberation. Brands of jeans signify rebellion and rule breaking, fruit drinks and sneakers have countercultural themes, and cars let us escape and find ourselves. In the person of the bourgeois bohemians or “Bobos,” as journalist David Brooks portrays them, we have a social type that lives on precisely this model of “selfdetermination,” merging an ethic of nonconformism and impulse with a vigorous consumerism.11 Theirs, to use Thomas Frank’s term, is a “hip consumerism.”12 Even such ostensibly intimate concerns as sexual expression, self-development, and spiritual growth are now the subject of expert advice and prepackaged programs. Self-actualization, as Louis Zurcher once wrote, has become a “product marketed by awareness-training organizations that are subsidiaries of dog food and tobacco companies. Are you only a ‘three’ on our self-actualization scale? Too bad! We can make you a ‘ten’ during one of our weekend seminars in Anaheim, minutes away from Disneyland, for only a few thousand dollars.”13 By purchasing the right workbook, following the right steps, or getting the right makeover, we can change the quality of our inner experience, enhance our psychological well-being, and finally achieve true self-fulfillment. The marketing scripts have power because they are points of personal identification. The marketers recognize that an inwardly generated self is a fiction. We are selves in dialogue, both internalized and in direct conversation, with others. People need to “locate themselves in a larger experience,” and they need social recognition for their identity projects. To the degree that social identities are attenuated as the mooring of self-identification (and this, of course, is widely variable), companies can position their goods and images (and ever more precisely with niche marketing) not simply as fulfilling desires but as meeting a felt need for connection, recognition, and values to live by. At the same time, consumers can feel liberated, seeing their consumption choices as facilitating an expressive self and the articulation of personal style without the constraints of tradition or convention. Social identities remain but as one is turned into a consumer, they are increasingly shaped and conditioned by patterns of consumption. We identify our real selves by the choices we make from the images, fashions, and lifestyles available in the market, and these in turn become the vehicles by which we perceive others and they us. In this way, as Robert Dunn has written, self-formation is in fact exteriorized, since the locus is not on an inner self but on “an outer world of objects and images valorized by commodity culture.”14 There is more than a little irony here, but the mediation of our relation to self and others by acts of consumption also has significant implications. These implications overlap with another form of self-commodification and to that I turn."
FED,"The Supreme Court has developed a framework for evaluating to what extend student speech should be protected. In the landmark case of Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court stated that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. In Tinker, the Court held students’ First Amendment rights were violated by a school policy forbidding the wearing of black armbands in an effort to protest the Vietnam War. This decision reinforced the principle that First Amendment protection is not only provided to popularly supported speech, but also to unfavorable speech, which perhaps needs the greatest protection. In addition, the Court pointed out that an “undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression.” Nevertheless, a student’s freedom of expression was limited to the extent that could not “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school” or could “impinge upon the rights of other students,” Thus, the case does leave the door open for schools to place some restrictions on a student’s freedom of expression."
EDU,"Schools first implemented zero tolerance drug policies in the 1980s. These policies often ban the possession of prescription and over-the- counter medication, thereby including medical contraceptives such as birth control pills, hormonal patches, and the ""morning after"" pill. Many of these policies allow students to bring legally prescribed or over-the-counter medication to school only if the student's parent or guardian first approves the student's possession of the medication. A student who violates such a zero tolerance policy is subject to mandatory, predetermined, and often severe consequences' A minor's right of privacy regarding contraceptive choices is a fundamental right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.' State interference with this right is constitutional only where it advances a significant state interest in regulating the behavior of minors that is not present in the case of adults.' I In addition, a state regulation requiring parental consent or notification of a minor's procreative choices is unconstitutional unless it grants the minor access to an alternative procedure whereby she may avoid parental involvement.12 Moreover, where a minor's private choices involve the decision ""whether to bear or beget a child, certain safeguards must be in place to protect the confidentiality of the minor's decision-making. This Comment argues that a school may not threaten to or actually discipline students for possession of medical contraceptives in a manner that violates a student's constitutional right of privacy. As such, a school may not require mandatory parental consent in order for a student to ""legally"" possess medical contraceptives at school. Further, a school may not effectively force a student to notify her parents of her contraceptive choices in order for the student to ""legally"" possess medical contraceptives at school. Finally, a school may not discipline a student for possession of medical contraception in such a way that violates the student's constitutional privacy right. part I of this Comment discusses the Fourteenth Amendment's protection of privacy surrounding a minor's contraceptive choices. Part Il examines parental consent and notification requirements in regards to private procreative choices. Part Ill discusses the Fourteenth Amendment's protection of one's private affairs from state dissemination to the public, including the constitutional requirement that proceedings impacting a minor's contraceptive choices be confidential. Part IV describes zero tolerance policies and their impact on students who have been disciplined for possessing otherwise legal medication, and sets forth the rationale that proponents Of zero tolerance have offered to justify such policies. Finally, Part V argues that when zero tolerance policies are applied to minors in possession of contraceptives in a manner that effectively results in mandatory parental consent or notification, or that disseminates information about the minor's private affairs to the public, they violate the constitutional protections afforded to minors by the Fourteenth Amendment."
ECON,"MEP and Ex-Im are among the tools that the president has available to complement state and local economic-development strategies. MEP is a public-private partnership with centers in all 50 states, dedicated to increasing the technical and innovation capacity of America’s small- to medium-sized (SME) manufacturers.11 In 2016, MEP centers interacted with 25,445 manufacturers, leading to $9.3 billion in sales, $1.4 billion in cost savings, and $3.5 billion in new client investments; and helped create and retain more than 86,602 jobs. 12 Unfortunately, MEP’s budget limits its reach; it has barely grown since President Reagan established it in 1988. Japan invests 30 times as much in a similar program to help its SMEs, Germany 20 times as much, and Canada 10 times as much. 13 Even Britain, which reduced the budget of its Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS) in 2015, reversed course less than a year later. 14 Eliminating MEP would be one facet of Heritage’s plan for unilateral disarmament and would harm U.S. industrial competitiveness and mean fewer U.S. manufacturing jobs."
EDU,"The need for competency in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills is not only increasingly important for success in the workforce but also to navigate the modern world and to make decisions that will inform public policy. In response to this need and to maintain the United States’ global competitiveness, the federal government as well as private philanthropies and corporations are increasingly investing in a variety of STEM education initiatives. Informal learning settings, such as afterschool programs1 , provide excellent opportunities to get children and youth engaged and interested in STEM activities. High quality afterschool programs provide an environment for hands-on, inquiry-based learning where students can experiment with science and technology under the guidance of a supportive adult. Afterschool program evaluations have shown that participating in STEM-focused afterschool programs leads to increased interest, knowledge and skill, and in some cases improved high school graduation rates and pursuit of STEM careers among participants2 . Research has also shown that an early interest in STEM careers is a strong predictor of who will go on to actually pursue STEM careers3 . Studies have also shown that increased access to STEM education opportunities results in a higher likelihood of success in STEM fields4 . Afterschool programs are an ideal vehicle to realize these outcomes. Even though the research is clear on the benefits of exposing students to STEM activities, both within and out of school, funding can be challenging in the current fiscal environment. There are a number of possible public and private funding streams available for afterschool STEM activities, but these funding streams are often targeted to certain populations or specific activities and can be highly competitive. This guide is a tool for afterschool program leaders to navigate various funding streams and consider effective strategies to acquire funding for afterschool STEM programs."
EX,"It's frightening but true: Our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals — the sixth wave of extinctions in the past half-billion years. We're currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we're now losing species at up to 1,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day [1]. It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century [2]."
EX,"Globally, 21 percent of the total evaluated reptiles in the world are deemed endangered or vulnerable to extinction by the IUCN — 594 species — while in the United States, 32 reptile species are at risk, about 9 percent of the total. Island reptile species have been dealt the hardest blow, with at least 28 island reptiles having died out since 1600. But scientists say that island-style extinctions are creeping onto the mainlands because human activities fragment continental habitats, creating “virtual islands” as they isolate species from one another, preventing interbreeding and hindering populations' health. The main threats to reptiles are habitat destruction and the invasion of nonnative species, which prey on reptiles and compete with them for habitat and food."
ANB,"The dominant narrative would say that immediately calling the police is a practice of just precaution. We should make sure that our communities are safe and so calling the cops on a “suspicious person” is protecting the whole of the community. However, this dominant narrative does not take into consideration the anti-Blackness in our communities. Taking into account counter narratives means understanding the stories of Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, and Renisha McBride. They were all innocent brown and black lives that were suspected as deviant, dangerous, and a threat to the larger community. We may think our college campuses are immune to what happens out in the real world. Yet, our black and POC (people of color) students are still affected by the racism that impacts our society as a whole."ENV,"In the Americas, more than 95% of high-grass prairies have been transformed into farms, along with 72% of dry forests and 88% of the Atlantic forests, notes the report. The Amazon rainforest is still mostly intact, but it is rapidly diminishing and degrading along with an even faster disappearing cerrado (tropical savannah). Between 2003 to 2013, the area under cultivation in Brazil’s northeast agricultural frontier more than doubled to 2.5m hectares, according to the report."
ENV,"The rate of decline is moreover accelerating. In the Americas – which has about 40% of the world’s remaining biodiversity – the regional population is gobbling up resources at twice the rate of the global average. Despite having 13% of the people on the planet, it is using a quarter of the resources, said Jake Rice, a co-chair of the Americas assessment."
ORI,"How has postcolonial scholarship engaged with the problem of weapons? What are the possibilities and limitations of a postcolonial engagement with acute problems of weapons control? It is impossible for a subaltern scholar to address these broader questions without taking note of the scant existing postcolonial literature on arms control and disarmament (Abraham, 1998; Biswas, 2014; Beier, 2002; Hecht, 2012; Mathur, 2014). This intellectual amnesia is noted by scholars especially with regard to the contributions of the Global South in addressing the problems of weapons control. This sense of erasure is reinforced by scholars perturbed by the decline in understanding of the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Taylor & Jacobs, 2015). On the contrary, there exists a growing circulation of civilizational discourses positing a dangerous dynamic of difference between ‘the “West and the Rest” as a civilizational mantra in arms control and disarmament’ (Mathur, 2014, pp. 332–335). It is in this context that this paper makes an effort to problematize and juxtapose a spiraling ‘dynamic of denial’ and a persistent ‘dynamic of difference’ in the field of International Relations and weapons control. It tries to demonstrate the power of these discourses with reference to the memory and representation of Hiroshima. This paper introduces the concept of ‘techno-racism’ to bring attention to the complex interplay of racial and technological considerations in the everyday practices of arms control and disarmament. In developing the concept of ‘techno racism’ this paper draws upon the writings of scholars such as Michael Adas (1989), Gabrielle Hecht (2012), Roh, Huang, and Niu (2015). The concept of techno-racism has to be historically grounded to encourage careful deliberation on practices of racial reductionism and technological determinism with regard to weapons. The deployment of technoracial discourses for political purposes can be traced from the late nineteenth century to the present with regard to weapons. The differences in weapons technology between different cultures is often reinforced with practices of racial reductionism constituting a contested hierarchy in the international order. The power of these technoracial discourses emphasizing and de-emphasizing racial reductionism and technological determinism subject to political considerations respectively has an effect on the outcome of intersecting dynamics of difference and dynamic of denial in practices of arms control and disarmament. A growing intensity of racial reductionism and technological determinism in discourses on difference and denial can generate destructive violence. It is therefore pertinent to pay attention to the growing circulation of these powerful discourses in contemporary practices of security. Thus empowered with this succinct understanding of the concept of techno-racism, this paper begins by first exploring the ‘dynamic of difference’ with help of other scholars in International Relations with particular emphasis on consideration of technology as a significant ‘criteria for comparison’ between the Orient and the Occident (Adas, 1989). This is followed by an exploration of the circulating ‘dynamic of denial’ of the Global South’s contribution towards weapons regulation and prohibition and the responsibility of the West to meet its obligations under the existing Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). These intersecting dynamics of difference and dynamic of denial then help set the stage for remembering Hiroshima as the ‘techno-racial line’ between the West and the Rest. This helps produce critical reflections on the possibilities and limits of nuclear exceptionalism and nuclear allergy in addressing the problem of weapons and the need for more alternative humanitarian discourses inclusive of the practices of Global South in weapons regulation and prohibition."
ORI,"First Phase: Colonial Racism in Practices of Arms Control and Disarmament It is argued that from the late 18th century, the ideology of laissez faire in arms gov- erned Western powers. According to this ideology,  ... trade is seen as the source of wealth and power and the engine of growth for sustained and enhanced productive capacity; this would logically result in fewer direct restrictions on arms transfers. A shift to indirect political interven- tion in the market also follows from this, and objections to the trade in technol- ogy may even diminish, as long as the wellsprings of technological innovation are not directly threatened.58 One might very well question how this sense of threat emerged among the Western powers. The possession of colonies among the Western powers represented a source of wealth and power. This very possession generated a sense of vulnerability. The colonies provided the raw materials necessary for the production of weapons and sol- diers to fight imperial wars. Thus, there was a sense of fear that transfer of arms to the colonies might result in their use against the colonial masters. A serious sense of threat governed all imperial decisions, including transfer of arms, with regard to maintaining control over the colonies. Thus, the argument on ‘free trade’ in arms did not extend to the colonies lacking freedom.  To further protect the ‘well springs of technological innovation’ education, fun- damental research in sciences or development of indigenous scientific capabilities were deliberately discouraged in the colonies.59 This, according to Albert Memmi, can be attributed to ‘colonial racism’.60 The practices of colonial racism deliberately emphasize and exploit the differences between the colonized and the colonizers. They further seek to sustain these differences, transforming them into irrefutable standards of fact that correspond with concrete realities to the benefit of the colonial powers. It was these explicit practices of colonial racism that made it impossible for the colo- nized to cultivate any taste for ‘mechanized civilization and a feeling for machin- ery’.61 A sense of ‘technical inadequacy’ was deliberately cultivated as ‘the colonizer pushed the colonized out of the historical and social, cultural and technical current’.62 It was under these circumstances of a deliberately created sense of tech- nical inadequacy that: [w]hile it is pardonable for the colonizer to have his little arsenals, the discov- ery of even a rusty weapon among the colonized is cause for immediate punish- ment ... and nostalgia for arms is always present, and is part of all ceremonies in Africa, from north to south. The lack of implements of war appears pro- portional to the size of the colonialist forces; the most isolated tribes are still the first to pick up these weapons. This is not a proof of savagery, but only evi- dence that the conditioning is not sufficiently maintained."
ORI,"But Orientalism, as a symbolic revolt, was not just about the critique, deconstruction and exposure of ideological and epistemological Eurocentric frameworks that monopolised the realm of discursive production. Appropriating Michel Foucault’s postulation that power is everywhere and that it is diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and “regimes of truth”, Said presents the second mode of critique; namely, Orientalism as the ontological nature, structure and a priori condition of power. In this sense, knowledge or the historical materialisation of specific Nietzschean truths were a form of power and power could only be deciphered through critiquing its manufactured meta-narrative and mapping out the transmutation and movement of its anthropomorphisms, metaphors and metonymies. Said demonstrates this through examining Sylvester de Sacy’s role in the Dacier Report (1802). Conducted for examining the state of Orientalist learning, the report was commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte. Said writes: The importance of the Tableau historique for an understanding of Orientalism’s inaugural phase is that it exteriorizes the form of Orientalist knowledge and its features, as it also describes the Orientalist’s relationship to his subject matter. In Sacy’s pages on Orientalism … he speaks of his own work as having uncovered, brought to light, rescued a vast amount of obscure matter. Why? In order to place it before the student. For like all his learned contemporaries Sacy considered a learned work a positive addition to an edifice that all scholars erected together. Knowledge was essentially the making visible of material, and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of Benthamite panopticon. Scholarly discipline was therefore a specific technology of power …(1978, 127).3 Elsewhere in his analysis of Arthur James Balfour’s speech in the House of Commons on the 13 June 1910, Said declares: England knows Egypt; Egypt is what England knows; England knows that Egypt cannot have self-government; England confirms that by occupying Egypt; for the Egyptians, Egypt is what England has occupied and now governs; foreign occupation therefore becomes “the very basis” of contemporary Egyptian civilization; Egypt requires, indeed, insists upon British occupation (1978, 34). In other words, Said postulated that Orientalism exuded epistemic violence through its inherent relation with European colonial power. And, in turn, European colonial power could only dominate the region through Orientalism functioning as a technique and instrument of power. Here then Said’s third definition of Orientalism, drawing from the two previous epistemological definitions, demonstrates the intrinsically dialectical relation between knowledge and power. Said posits Orientalism is also: (3) The corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient Collectively Said conceptualises Orientalism as epistemological (both as a corpus of scholarly writings and a historical system of thought) and ontological (as in the nature of being, the structure and condition of power). Read critically, for Said the synthesis of Western power and knowledge had a singular ontological and teleological purpose; namely, the thingification or subjectivation of the colonized Oriental subject. This point is best demonstrated by William D. Hart’s analysis of Orientalism: In his description of discourse, Said appropriates Foucault’s ideas of discipline and power/knowledge. By discipline, Foucault [and by default Said] means those methods of modern punitive power that establishes meticulous control over the body, assuring its constant subjection by imposing a relation of “docility-utility”. Discipline, that is, makes human bodies docile and useful [thingifies], and advertises their availability for political, economic,"
ORI,"As will quickly become evident, by “Sinology” and the “Sinological” I refer to more than the original China-centered field within the older orientalism (going back at least to the early 1700s), and more than the specialized area studies instituted across the U.S.-West after the revolution of 1949. Note, however, that there is no such thing as “China studies” within China. This is part of my point in seeing the production of knowledge about China, even today, as being awfully similar to the older, more obviously orientalist mode. While specialized work, particularly within the social sciences and politics, occupies much of my attention, I also use texts from film studies, literature, journalism, and current “theory.” In doing so I mean to follow Adorno: his oft-stated desire to write books that are constellations that make unlike things alike. But I also rely on Foucault’s idea that the things that make up a discourse are dispersed across the social field, yet combine to form a common unit that has regularized “statements” and effects of power. This combination is Foucault’s inescapable gesture to the totality or interdisciplinarity. The China field is in this sense an expanded and expansive one. In the texts I examine in this book there emerges a common statement: China is becoming-the-same as the liberal and modern West (howsoever haltingly), or it must and should and will do so; this is the chief statement of the new orientalism. This can, in turn, be seen as emerging from other, related discursive themes: that China is becoming democratic, normal, civil, creative– artistic (avant-garde), liberal, and so on; that it still lacks something (often the same items); that its Maoist, revolutionary past is something either in the dustbin of history or must still be overcome. But “statement” here should be understood in the Foucaultian sense: it is at times more or less explicit (as in a speech act), but more often implied or signified indirectly and even non-linguistically. We must emphasize the rhetorical, discursive function of the statement – less the exact words, more its status as authorized “knowledge.”13 These are things that can be signified as easily by the newscaster as by the specialist, and likewise for the more popular “China Watching” cultural producer and citizen. This last aspect speaks to more than just the fact that area specialists and journalists often overlap and write cross-over – or identical – texts. (The journalistic quality of much China studies can indeed be striking to observers of the discipline.) It speaks to the fact that, as one Chinese Marxist might have put it, correct and incorrect ideas come from multiple places; this is what makes them the ruling discourses and difficult to change. The idea and knowledges of China we have do not stem only from specialists and the rarefied realms of Truth. This is why the critique of Sinological discourse has to engage demography as much as film studies, creative texts as much as “scientific” ones. Much of what I am saying here about how the China field cannot be delimited in the traditional, gate-keeping way has been better said by Aziz Al-Azmeh, whose critiques of orientalism should be much more widely known. Pointing to shared conceptions of Islam in specialized and popular texts alike, he states: We are not talking of two separate types and domains of knowledge about Islam, one for the scholarly elect and another for the rude masses, but of the coexistence within orientalism of two substantially concordant registers, one of which – the scholarly – has greater access to observation .. . and which looks all the more abject for this... . Regardless of access to real or specious facts, facts are always constructed and their construction is invariably culture-specific. Orientalist scholarship is a cultural mood born of mythological classificatory lore, a visceral, savage division of the world, much like such partisanship as animates support for football clubs. (Islams 127–8) Certainly I do not quite mean"
ORI,"There are two things to note from the above discussion. First, that the forms of colonial dispossession, conquest and discovery through which Europe variously annexed its territorial colonies, were in fact enabled by Orientalising ways of seeing the non-west. In other words, cultural representations of the non-west, the Orient, were never far from power. It was precisely the ability of the west to authoritatively represent the peoples and places of the east as at one and the same time passive, exotic, undeveloped, barbaric and alluring, that laid the foundation for contact, dispossession and colonial rule by imperial powers. Just as there is a vast tradition of 18thand 19th-century European Orientalist painters (Figure 1), novelists and mapmakers, it is significant that there is no similar South Asian, African or Middle Eastern artistic or literary tradition of representing Europe. With Orientalism, power flows one way. Second, Said’s whole thesis is profoundly geographical, and for geography educators the opening pages of Orientalism should be of especial interest. As Said wrote: We must take seriously [the] … great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities – to say nothing of historical entities – such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are man-made. (Said, 1978, pp. 4–5) To use Orientalism to begin to think postcolonially, therefore, is to begin to think geographically (Blunt and McEwan, 2002). Despite its birth in literary studies, postcolonialism is an inherently geographical mode of thought. It encourages us to consider the ways we think about distant and different elsewheres, the connections familiar from globalisation, immigration or cultural hybridity, and the western and imperial origins of the spaces and places we take for granted. Thinking postcolonially is to critically probe our own geographical imaginations (Gregory, 1994)."
ORI,"Primitivization of knowledge in U.S. think tanks and the cor- •poratization of American universities are both coterminous with this development that I identify as epistemic endosmosis, in the sense that when we see a book written by someone like Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, while employed at the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, or another by Ray Takeyh, while a professor of national security studies at the National War College, or a professor and director of studies at the Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, or else a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, then the knowledge that these gentlemen and their respective books and articles (they have recently started in fact writing joint articles) produce about Shi'ism or Iran, while both employed by the U.S. military, through a process of endosmosis flows through the membrane of their PR firms and mass media access into the currents of public at large and helps in the social construction of reality about Islam, Iran, ""the Middle East,"" and if need be about Somalia, North Korea, Venezuela—anywhere that the U.S. military may need to engage in psychological operations at both the home front and on the battle zones. What we have witnessed in the famous case when the U.S. military commissioned a series of articles favorable to the U.S. military occupation of Iraq written by a PR firm in Washington DC, then translated into Arabic and placed in newspapers in Iraq9 is only a slightly exaggerated case of what Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and Ray Takeyh are doing in the United States. The epistemic endosmosis that I suggest as the most recent phase of knowledge production about the Middle East is not limited to the bizarre condition in which the U.S. military (through Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and Ray Takeyh) produces knowledge and disseminates it as psych-op for general public consumption—effectively changing the critical discourse away from the U.S. responsibility for the mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq and blaming it on medieval sectarian hostilities among the natives. In this phase we have entered a mode of knowledge production that is no longer predicated on a particular manner of subject-formation (the study of ""the Orient"" cross-generated ""the West"" as the sovereign and knowing subject of history). Here such diverse figures as Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Fouad Ajami, Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie, Pope Benedict VI, Prime Minister Tony Blair, President George W. Bush, Michael Ignatieff and the entire discourse of human rights, Allan Dershowitz and the Zionist propaganda machinery, Azar Nafisi and her brand of women's rights, the Danish cartoonist of Jyllands-Posten, the comic books of Frank Miller and the cinema of Zach Snyder, the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and the expansive Islamophobia she represented are all integral to an amorphous manner of public knowledge production about Islam and ""the Middle East"" through a miasmatic spectrum that is not integral to any paradigmatic or epistemic formation. These modes of knowledge production about Islam or ""the Middle East"" are infinitely more popular, politically more potent, and socially far more formative of opinions, judgments, and even votes in democratic contexts than libraries full of detailed research conducted by qualified and responsible scholars. The thing that holds these people together is neither an epistemic cohesion, nor a paradigmatic modality, and certainly not a conspiracy to deceive and misinform. There is indeed a grain of truth in much of what people like Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji or Ibn Warraq or Azar Nafisi say—a grain of truth wrapped inside insidious falsities at the service of mass deception—or a ""noble lie"" as Leo Strauss's version of Plato would say. These creatures of media and PR firms are competing with each other to grab a larger share of the public attention via a mode of knowledge production that is categorically miasmatic in its sentiments, spontaneous in its marketability, and "
ORI,"Twenty-five years after Orientalism was published, questions remain about whether modern imperialism ever ended or whether it has continued in the Orient since Napoleon’s entry into Egypt two centuries ago. Arabs and Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the depreda- tions of empire is only a way of evading responsibility in the present. You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modern Orientalist. This of course is also V. S. Naipaul’s contribution to literature, that the victims of empire wail on while their country goes to the dogs. But what a shallow calculation of the imperial intrusion that is, how summarily it scants the immense distortion introduced by the empire into the lives of ‘lesser’ peoples and ‘subject races’ generation after generation, how little it wishes to face the long succession of years through which empire continues to work its way in the lives say of Palestinians or Congolese or Algerians or Iraqis. We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do? Think of the line that starts with Napoleon, continues with the rise of Oriental studies and the take over of North Africa, and goes on in similar undertakings in Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and, during the entire twentieth century in the struggle over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Then think contrapuntally of the rise of anti- colonial nationalism, through the short period of liberal independence, the era of military coups, of insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, irrational struggle and uncompromising brutality against the latest bunch of ‘natives’. Each of these phases and eras produces its own distorted knowledge of the other, each its own reductive images, its own disputatious polemics. My intellectual approach has been to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent collective identity rather than understanding and intellectual exchange. I have called what I try to do ‘humanism’, a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake’s mind-forged manacles so as to be able to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. Moreover humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist. This is to say that every domain is linked to every other one, and that nothing that goes on in our world has ever been isolated and pure of any outside influence. The disheartening part is that the more the critical study of culture shows us that that is the case, the less influence such a view seems to have, and the more territory reductive polarizations like ‘Islam vs. the West’ seem to conquer. For those of us who by force of circumstance actually live the pluri- cultural life as it entails Islam and the West, I have long felt that a special intellectual and moral responsibility attaches to what we do as scholars and intellectuals. Certainly I think it is incumbent upon us to complicate and/or dismantle the reductive formulae and the abstract but potent kind of thought that leads the mind away from concrete human history and experi- ence and into the realms of ideological fiction, metaphysical confrontation, and collective passion. This is not to say that we cannot speak about issues of injustice and suffering, but that we need to do so always within a context that is amply situated in history, culture, and socio-economic reality. Our role is to widen the field of discu"
ORI,"Yet, Orientalism isvery much tied to the tumultuous dynamics of con- temporary history. I emphasize in it accordingly that neither the term Orient nor theconcept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort,partly affirmation,partly identification of the Other. That these supreme fictions lend themselves easily to manipulationand the organization of collective passion has never been more evident than in our time,whenthe mobilization of fear, hatred, disgust andresurgent self-pride and arrogance— much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side, ‘we’ Westerners on the other— arevery large-scale enterprises.Orientalism’s first page opens with a 1975 description of the Lebanese Civil War that ended in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of human blood continues up to this minute. We have had the failure of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak of the second intifada, and the awful suffering of the Palestinians on the reinvaded West Bank and Gaza, with Israeli F-16s and Apache helicopters used routinely on defenceless civilians as part of their collective punishment. The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. As I write these lines, the illegal and unsanctioned imperial occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States proceeds, with resulting physical ravagement and political unrest that is truly awful to contemplate. This is all part of what is supposed to be a clash of civilizations, unending, implacable, irremediable. Nevertheless, I think not. I wish I could say, however, that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn’t.For all kinds of reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be considerably better. In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tighten- ing of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliche ́ , the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and ‘others’ has found a fitting correlative in the looting, pillaging and destruction of Iraq’s libraries and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that ‘we’ might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and else- where speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the ‘Orient’, that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century has been made and re-made countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orient’s nature, and we must deal with it accordingly. In the process the uncountable sediments of his- tory, that include innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad’s libraries and museums. My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that ‘our’ East, ‘our’ Orient becomes ‘ours’ to possess and direct. I should say again that I have no ‘real’ Orient to argue for. I do, however, have a very high regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to be.There has been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim for their backwardness, lack of demo- crac"
QER,"National recognition and inclusion, here signaled as the annexation of homosexual jargon, is contingent upon the segregation and disqualification of racial and sexual others from the national imaginary. At work in this dynamic is a form of sexual exceptionalism—the emergence of national homosexuality, what I term ‘‘homonationalism’’—that corresponds with the coming out of the exceptionalism of American empire. Further, this brand of homosexuality operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual subjects. There is a commitment to the global dominant ascendancy of whiteness that is implicated in the propagation of the United States as empire as well as the alliance between this propagation and this brand of homosexuality. The fleeting sanctioning of a national homosexual subject is possible, not only through the proliferation of sexual-racial subjects who invariably fall out of its narrow terms of acceptability, as others have argued, but more significantly, through the simultaneous engendering and disavowal of populations of sexual-racial others who need not apply. In what follows I explore these three imbricated manifestations—sexual exceptionalism, queer as regulatory, and the ascendancy of whiteness—and their relations to the production of terrorist and citizen bodies. My goal is to present a dexterous portrait, signaling attentiveness to how, why, and where these threads bump into each other and where they weave together, resisting a mechanistic explanatory device that may cover all the bases. In the case of what I term ‘‘U.S. sexual exceptionalism,’’ a narrative claiming the successful management of life in regard to a people, what is noteworthy is that an exceptional form of national heteronormativity is now joined by an exceptional form of national homonormativity, in other words, homonationalism. Collectively, they continue or extend the project of U.S. nationalism and imperial expansion endemic to the war on terror. The terms of degeneracy have shifted such that homosexuality is no longer a priori excluded from nationalist formations. I unearth the forms of regulation im- homonationalism and biopolitics 3 plicit in notions of queer subjects that are transcendent, secular, or otherwise exemplary as resistant, and open up the question of queer re/production and regeneration and its contribution to the project of the optimization of life. The ascendancy of whiteness is a description of biopolitics pro√ered by Rey Chow, who links the violence of liberal deployments of diversity and multiculturalism to the ‘‘valorization of life’’ alibi that then allows for rampant exploitation of the very subjects included in discourses of diversity in the first instance. I elucidate how these three approaches to the study of sexuality, taken together, suggest a trenchant rereading of biopolitics with regard to queerness as well as the intractability of queerness from biopolitical arrangements of life and death"
QER,"Militaries and militarism have discursively and practically been dependent on deploying gendered myths and images – and on a variety of persons inside and outside militaries who accept them and act them out. It thus becomes imperative not only to simply assert a link between (hegemonic) masculinity and war, but also to explore more deeply how ‘masculinity in the context of the military operates as a kind of intersection of hierarchies, in which a dominant hierarchical distinction between masculine and feminine sustains other hierarchies within and between men and women in different categories of military life’ (Hutchings, 2008: 392). This can be observed in descriptions of basic training, where masculinity is bolstered not just by denigrating femininity and female anatomy, but also at the intersection with sexuality, when those who are perceived to deviate from the heterosexual norm are disparaged.9 Melissa Herbert’s (1998) study of the ways in which US servicewomen have to negotiate femininity and masculinity is revealing here: she notes that women who minimize their femininity to become ‘one of the guys’ are just as likely as women who play up their femininity to have both their gender identity and their sexuality questioned. Notably, when traditional femininity is emphasized, this is less threatening to military hierarchies since these servicewomen do not make a claim to authority on the basis of hegemonic masculinities. Importantly, while these intersecting hierarchies are fluid (as we can see after the reversal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the policy that did not allow gay and lesbian service members to serve openly in the US military, where the threat of being labeled lesbian or gay is less costly), ‘the only absolutely fixed element in the concept [hegemonic masculinity] is its signification of superior value in a formal dynamics of valorization’ (Hutchings, 2008: 394).10 The official opening of all military occupational specialties in the US military to women, especially in branches such as the US Marine Corps that have vehemently resisted this move, consequently must also be interpreted as a direct attack on this hegemonic value system. Indeed, reading the resistance of the US Marine Corps as a deeply gendered response to a (perceived) attack on hegemonic masculinity and its attendant privileges allows for a deeper understanding of the length to which its leadership went to defend the status quo, for example by producing a flawed study (Walters, 2015). At the same time, we might also consider evidence from other fully integrated militaries (e.g. Eichler, 2013), which indicates that the integration of women into combat is unlikely to impact the US Marine Corps’ culture without further intervention by the leadership. Hutchings’ claims about shared norms of manliness and warfighting are supported by Aaron Belkin’s (2012) analysis of military masculinity in the US military. He describes military masculinity ‘as a set of beliefs, practices and attributes that enable individuals – men and women – to claim authority on the basis of affirmative relationships with the military or with military ideals’ (Belkin, 2012: 3). Importantly, as Herbert attests also, while ‘military masculinity has been more available to men than to women for sustaining claims to power … women have harnessed it as well’ (Belkin, 2012: 3) – albeit with varying success. In her discussion of post-traumatic stress, Sandra Whitworth (2008: 110) points out that it ‘lays bare the fragile ground on which [white] military masculinity is built’.11 Given that the experience of military masculinity is dependent on gender as well as on race, however, Whitworth finds that ‘whereas white [male] soldiers discover through their emotions that they have not lived up to the norms of the warrior brotherhood, women and marginalized men discover they were never equal partners in the ‘brotherhood’ to begin with’ (Whitworth, 2008: 110–111). In the case of the US military, this is a common theme in recent (auto)biographi"
QER,"Taking cisprivilege seriously draws attention to the fact that even the most inclusive interpretations of security exclude the ambiguous (Munoz, 1999: 2), the cross (McCloskey, 2000: xii; Roen, 2002), the invisible (Bettcher, 2007: 52), the disidentified (Heyes, 2003: 1096) and the 'in' (Shotwell and Sangray, 2009: 59). We argue here that this is neither incidental nor accidental, even if it is not a conscious practice of exclusion, and that these exclusionary practices are forms of violence. Foucault suggested that '[a] relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks, it destroys or it closes off all possibilities' (1983: 340). Violence perverts, inverts or renders unintelligible certain ways of being in the world while endorsing others; in this, violence is perhaps best conceptualised as a specific relation of power that is not necess- arily repressive but productive. A conceptualisation of violence inspired by Foucault can allow for the admission of 'the exclusionary presuppositions and foundations that shore up discursive practices insofar as those foreclose the heterogeneity, gender, class or race of the subject' (Hanssen, 2000: 215) as acts of violence that are simultaneously practices of power. On this view, violence is not reducible to (physical) constraint or repression but rather encompasses regulative idea(l)s and performs ordering functions in our collective cognitive frameworks. If we accept that representing transpeople and queer bodies specifically as in- and hypervisible in war stories and security strategy is a form of violence, and that this violence has its foundation in unexamined and often unconscious privilege enjoyed by cispeople, then we can begin to understand how a nuanced and sophisticated gendered theory of security needs to incorporate corporeality, including trans- corporeality. We can note parallels between transphobic violence (policing and actively (re)producing the boundaries of gender) and transnational violence (policing and actively (re)producing the boundaries of religions, states, ethnicities and/or alliances. Laura Shepherd (2008: 78; see also Shepherd, 2010c) terms these processes 'the violent reproduction of gender' and 'the violent reproduction of the international'). The borders of gender are policed as a part of an active policing of the borders between states, the borders between states and non-states, and the borders between the (safe) self-state and the (dangerous, terrorist) other. Narratives of the international fetishise and Orientalise the exotic 'Other' (be it a colonial other, a trans- other or a terrorist other) to associate Otherness with violence and inspire violence towards the Other. 'Non-violent' resisters of existing (engendered) social orders are often addressed by the dominant (gendered) social order violently, much like non-violent transpeople are often attacked for the very presentation of trans-ness in the face of a social order that excludes their existence both de jure and de facto. We suggest that these are ontopolitical practices; as Michael Dillon explains, 'all political interpretation is simultaneously ontopolitical because it cannot but disclose the ontology sequestered within iť (1999: 112). The ontopolitical (representational) practices of security have thus far been founded on embedded cisprivilege. The ontology of security, even of gendered security theory, has conventionally relied on gender/sex certainty and gender/sex hierarchy. If it is analytically and conceptually productive to see transphobic violence as the violent reproduction of a stable sex/gender system that 'naturally' privileges cisgender performances because such performances are associated with normality and safety and trans- performances are associated with danger and discomfort, it then becomes possible to ask questions about the ways that trans-in(/hyper)visibiIity, cisprivilege and a regulative, exclusionary ontopolitical social order are violently reproduced in inter/transnational relations. In tentative conclusion, we suggest that"
QER,"My intention in Terrorist Assemblages was not only to demonstrate simply a relationality of the instrumentalization of queer bodies by the U.S. state, or only the embracing of nationalist, and often xenophobic and imperialist interests of the United States by queer communities. Homonationalism fundamentally highlights a critique of how lesbian and gay liberal rights discourses produce narratives of progress and modernity that continue to accord some populations access to cultural and legal forms of citizenship at the expense of the partial and full expulsion from those rights of other populations. Simply stated, homonationalism is the concomitant rise in the legal, consumer, and representative recognition of lgbtq subjects and the curtailing of welfare provisions, immigrant rights, and the expansion of state power to surveil, detain, and deport. This process relies on the shoring up of the respectability of homonationalism in trump times 229 homosexual subjects in relation to the performative reiteration of the pathologized perverse (homo- and hetero-) sexuality of racial others, in specific, Muslim others upon whom Orientalist and neo-Orientalist projections are cast. However, in Terrorist Assemblages I looked not only at the proliferation of queerness as a white Christian secular norm, but also at the proliferation of homonationalism in South Asian queer communities in the United States, where forms of Hindu secularism and Indian nationalism often converge. Homonationalism, therefore, is not a synonym for gay racism, a critique of the racial exclusions and whiteness of mainstream lgbt communities, or another way to mark how gay and lesbian identities became available to conservative political imaginaries. The concept of homonationalism has been adapted and redeployed to suit different needs, different strategies, different politics. It has created synergy across and through various political movements and struggles and has generated capacious theoretical paradigms as well as important debates about the fraught relationships between academia and activists, theory and praxis.4 The text and its conceptual apparatus have moved across different disciplinary and geopolitical terrains, crossing the activist-academic species divide many times over and resonating with organizing underway in Northern Europe, the Middle East, India, and the United States. A robust debate about homonationalism is happening in France, where funnily enough the book has been, in some circles, denounced for its queer intersectional thrust. Some interlocutors have interrogated the relation of homonationalism to Israeli pinkwashing. Others take up the theorization of intersectionality and assemblage, noting, correctly, that I do not properly honor the history or precarity of black feminist theories in relation to the institutional centrality of white male canonicity. This is an error and an elision that I attempt to redress in a later article. As someone who has been drawing on the formative work of black feminists and also insisting on and producing intersectional scholarship for two decades now, my interest in rethinking intersectionality was never about a fidelity to assemblage theory, rather a commitment to what Mel Chen calls “feral methodologies.” I myself do not think of homonationalism as an identity, a position, or an accusation—it is not another marker meant to cleave a “good” (progressive / transgressive / politically Left) queer from a “bad” (sold-out / conservative / politically bankrupt) queer. I feel it is especially unhelpful as an accusation, as if some of us are magically exempt from homonationalism (by virtue, most often, through claiming the position of “queer” as one of the political avant-garde or as politically pure, transcendent, or inherently immune to critique) and others of us are intrinsically predisposed to it. The accusation 230 postscript of homonationalism works to disavow our own inevitable and complex complicities with “queer” and with “nation.”5 As an analytic (rather than a descriptor, stanc"
QER,"n their influential texts, Mearsheimer, Hardt and Negri aim to do two things through their arguments: first, they aim to paint a big picture of what international politics is like, how it works, and what is likely to happen to it; and second, they aim to establish the credentials of their particular mode of analysis in relation to other possibilities. I have suggested in both cases that drawing on a logic of masculinity helps accomplish these aims. It is likely that these theorists would argue that the use of masculine language and logic is a matter of rhetorical decoration and does not affect the validity of their substantive inductive or deductive arguments. On this account, these theorists could make the same arguments either without rhetorical decoration altogether or by using another set of rhetorical tropes to make the same case. I would argue, however, that the logic of masculinity provides a powerful incentive against raising questions about the substantive assumptions and inductive and deductive moves made in the arguments of theorists such as Mearsheimer, Hardt and Negri. The framing of contemporary international politics in terms of masculinity logic locks our social scientific imagination into a very familiar world in which we already understand how things ontologically work in terms of value hierarchies. But it also provides a massively efficient short cut for the cognitive tasks of categorization and analysis and for the evaluative tasks of judgement with which Mearsheimer, Hardt and Negri are concerned. Of course, it is the case that the formal characteristics of the logic of masculinity are intertwined with other conceptual schemes grounded in binary oppositions. We have, for instance, seen how the distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ operates to help sustain the logic of contrast and contradiction essential to Mearsheimer, Hardt and Negri’s arguments. Nevertheless, we have also seen, at least in the context of these particular theories of world politics, the logic of masculinity providing a particularly stable reference point for rendering the cognitive operations of contrast and contradiction intelligible, regardless of referential meanings assigned to practising or theorizing international politics.17 Cognitive short cuts 41 Feminist scholars have long pointed out that the logic of masculinity, as a mechanism for framing our understanding of international politics, renders the thinking of the feminine and the feminized impossible other than in terms of lack or absence. Quite rightly, much feminist analysis has been devoted to tracing the practical effects of this logic for the ways in which international politics is practised and understood and as a precursor to challenging masculine hegemony in its many different forms. As this chapter has demonstrated, however, the resilience of masculinity as a mode of making sense of world politics reflects the amount of analytic and normative work that it accomplishes. Therefore, it raises the question of what kind of politics and theory would be possible without the work accomplished by gendered logics. This also suggests that disentangling the operations of thought from the operations of gender is a profoundly difficult task."
COL,"However, focusing only on the operation of prohibitory regulatory norms obscures the way arms trade regulation also constituted a specific colonial form of arms control as governmentality, whereby mechanisms of prohibition and prescription were both put to the service of governing which peoples could legitimately use what kinds of arms. Of course, efforts to manage arms flows to potentially unruly colonial subjects by constantly seeking to balance permission and proscription were neither completely effective nor ever effectively complete. First, efforts at restraint were perennially subject to strategies of evasion undertaken by local actors operating with their own normative and cartographic understandings (Tagliacozzo 2005; Mathew 2016). Second, arms trade regulation was a contested terrain over which advocates of permission and advocates of restraint often clashed. For example, pressures for restraint were offset by pressures to use the provision of arms to secure access to markets and the loyalty or security of allies in a context of intra-European competition to maintain and expand formal and informal empires (Grant 2007; Chew 2012). Policy on the ground, therefore, often appeared contradictory. Nevertheless, proponents of permission and proscription generally agreed on the broad goals of policy—to maintain imperial influence and imperial order. As will be illustrated below, they agreed even more on the broader logics in which arguments for permission and proscription were to be located—those governing sovereignty, free trade, development, and the standard of civilization. For example, the Brussels Act certainly failed to prevent a substantial arms trade into Abyssinia and Somalia where, by 1908, British officials considered the act had “completely broken down”29 largely as a result of French support for a profitable arms trade through French-controlled Djibouti. In this case, colonial norms of sovereignty provided the regulatory space for proliferation. The legal legitimacy of this transit trade was enshrined by Article Ten of the Brussels Act, which, somewhat ironically, had been vigorously promoted by the British. This affirmed the right of inland territories “under the sovereignty or protectorate” of another signatory power to acquire arms via the territory of a coastal power, and Italy had previously announced Abyssinia’s adhesion to the agreement. Compounding the irony, at one point in the negotiations the French had suggested the conference had “no power to impose a right of transit on any Sovereign state.”30 Enforcement of both the arms and slave trade regulations of Brussels was also hampered by French refusal to permit searches of sea vessels flying the French flag. Arms smuggling dhow owners operating in both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf quickly realized the French flag represented “a license to traffic” (Mathew 2016, 35), as it made each dhow an “island of colonial sovereignty” (ibid., 34) and therefore immune to search. This is not to imply sovereignty norms offered an unfettered license to trade. The arms provisions of the Brussels Act were ultimately predicated on the fact that European powers exercised “rights of sovereignty” (Article Nine) in their colonial possessions. Thus, the act and its implementation was suffused with norms of sovereignty that both underpinned restrictions on the arms trade and provided the regulatory spaces permitting their circumvention. Similarly, both the advocates for free trade in arms in the spaces of empire and the advocates of restriction crafted their arguments by reference to the shared ideational frames of free trade, development, and the standard of civilization—each heavily imbricated in the other. In Africa, for example, free trade advocates argued the offer of arms was essential for recruiting African laborers and that arms proliferation would speed the depopulation of local wildlife, thus hastening the day when natives switched from hunting and alcohol to legitimate trade (Storey 2008, 196). Conversely, proponents of restri"
COL,"A type of possession that systematically disavows previous relationships to the land, the pervasive influence of settler colonial geographies, projects of elimination that target indigenous socio-reproductive capacities, the pervasive influence of specifically settler colonial violent attacks against indigenous and exogenous alterities, and an old/new type of capitalist accumulation that ‘indigenises’ colonial subjectivities: this is the settler colonial present. However, as they critically analyse the settler colonial present, these papers also suggest ways out of the settler colonial relation. They identify its specific structures. They recommend that we challenge notions of possession that negate the legitimate claims of prior owners, that sustain indigenous isolation, and that prevent the social reproduction of indigenous communities. They challenge the ongoing power of typically settler colonial narratives, the permanence of specifically settler colonial modes of violence, and ongoing processes of accumulation by dispossession. Collectively, the authors contributing to this collection propose a decolonial strategy. As a way to conclude, I want to very briefly add to this strategy. The decolonisation of settler colonial forms should begin from the appraisal of the settler colonial ‘situation’. A fundamental and unrelenting demand that indigenous people ‘go die’ ultimately envisages a non-relation. Hypothetical settler departure, however, would also constitute a non-relation. A decolonised post-settler colonial relation must be ongoing. If settler colonialism is fundamentally characterised, to use Patrick Wolfe’s terminology and framework, by settlers that ‘come to stay’ and by an unrelenting ‘logic of elimination’, the way out needs to turn the former against the latter. Settlers must renounce and denounce the logic of elimination. For this they need indigenous leadership."
COL,"National security is an ontological and epistemological reality founded on settler colonial logics. Security becomes a state of existence and a way of knowing democracy as predicated on an indefinite sense of insecurity, which in turn authorises a monopoly on legitimate violence to preserve and persevere in the demonstration of citizenship and national belonging to white nation states that are forged in histories of colonial invasion, genocide, theft of land, slavery and the protracted occupation of indigenous territories. What if we observe national security as a collection of stories – as the mythologies of white nation states that are animating the settler colonial logics of imperialist wars? These ‘official mythologies of white nation-states’ are rooted in the settler colonial logics that Sherene Razack (2000 , 128– 129) identifies as ‘ narratives of innocence’ : through dint of hard work, the settler conquered the wilderness; the colonizer civilized the natives. In this era of globalization … whites must now contend with the disorder and chaos wrought by natives left to their own devices after decolonization. The chaos spills over from the lands of the South when migrants and refugees ‘invade’ and ‘color’ the spaces of the white North. Establishing white supremacy as the ideological foundation of North American and European national security, renowned early twentieth-century British-Australian scholar, Gilbert Murray proclaimed (quoted in Sanjek [1994] 1996, 1): There is in the world a hierarchy of races…. [T]hose nations which eat more, claim more, and get higher wages, will direct and rule the others, and the lower work of the world will tend in the long-run to be done by the lower breeds of man. This much we of the ruling colour will no doubt accept as obvious. As ontological and epistemological realities of settler colonial logics, these mythologies of white supremacy inform national security as a state of existence that becomes an inexorable part of a coloniser’ s identity. Ethnographic methodologies invite researchers to grapple with these realities and the consequences of critical inquiry that endeavours to understand national security as a method of perception and participation, a method of knowing and being a settler citizen of colonising state regimes. Ethnographic field methods invite us to witness the politics of knowledge production through an awareness of national security as a state of existence that informs a method of perceiving the experiences of citizenship and national belonging in conjunction with its opposites – indefinite displacement and not belonging through experiences of, for example: racial discrimination, forced migration, extraordinary rendition, torture and incarceration, soldiers’ suicides and suicide bombings, beheadings, drone strikes, and dogs bites exposing the flesh and blood of people exercising their first amendment rights to protest a militarised capitalist enterprise that channels the insatiable desire for fossil fuel to be delivered through the Dakota Access Pipeline, which consequently pollutes the waters of the Missouri River that sustains the lives of thousands of Americans. They call themselves water protectors – hundreds of people, including veteran soldiers of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who joined in solidarity to become and belong to the Standing Rock nation as protectors of ecological sovereignty and security against the militarised expansion of the pipeline. They are perceived as a threat to national security. The state situated the protestors as the enemy against which it was required to wage war by deploying local and national law enforcement officers and private security contractors with attack dogs, water hoses in freezing temperatures, rubber bullets, pepper sprays, tear gas and concussion grenades to provide security for the capitalist project of building the pipeline. These techniques deployed to contain and neutralise the resistance of civilian protests to the Pipeline are examples of the normalised, phenomenological feat"COL,"This special issue on settler colonialism and cultural production seeks to intervene in cultural studies, drawing on Indigenous studies and approaches to analyzing settler colonialism to untangle the cultural and material work of settlement as a foundational solipsism of U.S. and global relations of power and control. Cultural studies’ theorizations of race, space, and colonization have yet to adequately grapple with the politics of settlement on Indigenous land. Critical cultural studies projects are often grounded in assumptions that presume and erase settler colonial epistemologies so that even in our best attempts to challenge systems of exclusion and privilege unwittingly reify the normatively White Enlightenment subject, and the settler colonial grounds on which it is formed. For Chickasaw theorist, Jodi Byrd, the production of critical projects like cultural studies circulates through the erasure of Indigenous genocide and conquest. Byrd’s (2011) careful genealogical critique reveals that “prevailing understandings of race and racialization within U.S. post-colonial, area, and queer studies depend upon an historical aphasia of the conquest of indigenous peoples” (p. 24). The methods culture critics deploy, like genealogy and deconstruction, presume, and participate in the erasure of Indigenous peoples as modern subjects, but rather as “located outside temporality and presence,” which is particularly egregious in the “face of the very present and ongoing colonization of indigenous lands, resources, and lives” (Byrd, 2011, p. 6). Byrd (2011) underscores how “the savage and the ‘Indian’ . . . serves as the ground and pre-condition for structuralism and formalism, as well as their posts” and persists as a “an undeconstructable core within critical theories that attempt to dismantle how knowledge, power, and language function” (p. 10). The figure of the Native as the “undeconstructable core” within the knowledge/power/language formation of cultural studies circulates as an undigested subtext. Our unwitting reproduction of settler logics are foundational to our theorizations of racial, (post)colonial, and material formations as our knowledge production not only erases the identities experience of first nations peoples but also perpetuates and remains complicit with settler projects: the “disappearance” of Native peoples, the theft and privatization of land for profit, and the ongoing genocide of Indigenous people. In part, then, this special issue aims to offer the field of cultural studies host of theoretical resources and methodological approaches to settler colonial studies as a way to deepen our treatment of settler cultural formations to begin the dirty work of deconstructing the rhetorical and material practices of settler colonialism. For instance, Whiteness must be more fully interrogated as a settler project, especially within U.S. contexts; imperialism must be theorized as productive of, but not the same as, settler colonialism; popular cultural studies should be radically rethought through a critical examination of pervasive representations that disappear Indigenous peoples. Works in settler colonial studies may be at their best when they engage Indigenous theorizations of genocide and survivance, especially in conversation with Black theorizations of antiBlackness and futurity. As such, settler colonial studies provides a vibrant examination of power relations in its extensive treatment of such topics as sovereignty, nationalism and nation formation; imperial formations, genocide, removal, colonial legacies; the politics of land, landedness, space and place; intersectionality, queer theory, gender studies; race, racialization, White supremacy; affect studies; futurities, materialities, environmentalism, new materialism; and tourism and travel. New approaches to a variety of the above topics are of urgent importance to cultural studies practitioners. Yet, with the exception of a handful of scholars, treatments of settler colonialism have largely remained undertheorized in "
COL,"The settler colonial curricular project of replacement is invested in settler futurity, or what Andrew Baldwin calls the “permanent virtuality” of the settler on stolen land (2012, p. 173).  When we locate the present of settler colonialism as only the production of the past, we overlook how settler colonialism is configured in relation to a different temporal horizon: the future. To say that something is invested in something else’s futurity is not the same as saying it is invested in something’s future, though the replacement project is invested in both settler future and futurity.  Futurity refers to the ways in which, “the future is rendered knowable through specific practices (i.e. calculation, imagination, and performance) and, in turn, intervenes upon the present through three anticipatory logics (i.e. pre-caution, pre-emption and preparedness)” (p. 173). Considering the significance of futurity for researching whiteness and geography, Baldwin (2012) wonders whether a past-oriented approach reproduces the (false), Teleological assumption that white racism can be modernized away.  Such an assumption privileges an ontology of linear causality in which the past is thought to act on the present and the present is said to be an effect of whatever came before [...] According to this kind of temporality, the future is the terrain upon or through which white racism will get resolved.  It cleaves the future from the present and, thus, gives the future discrete ontological form. (p. 174) Thus, in this historical analysis of the settler colonial curricular project of replacement, we seek to emphasize the ways in which replacement is entirely concerned with settler futurity, which always indivisibly means the continued and complete eradication of the original inhabitants of contested land.  Anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state is fettered to settler futurity.  To be clear, our commitments are to what might be called an Indigenous futurity, which does not foreclose the inhabitation of Indigenous land by nonIndigenous peoples, but does foreclose settler colonialism and settler epistemologies.  That is to say that Indigenous futurity does not require the erasure of now-settlers in the ways that settler futurity requires of Indigenous peoples."
ANB,"Over the past 10 years there has been an increase in institutional recognition of how US universities and their founders directly participated in and benefitted from Black chattel slavery. However, these developments have largely escaped the attention of scholars who take higher education as their object of study. This article offers a conceptual reading of how apology efforts around slavery have unfolded at a single university. Drawing on the intersections of Black Studies and decolonial scholarship, I consider how revised institutional narratives develop through efforts to address and incorporate these violent histories."
MIL,"¶ The Necropolitics of Global Civil War¶ As with other civil wars, global civil war affects society as a whole. It ""tends,"" as Hardt and Negri argue, ""towards the absolute"" (2004, 18) in that it polices civil society through elaborate security and surveillance systems, negates the rule of law, militarizes quotidian space, diminishes civil rights to the degree in which it increases torture, illegal incarceration, disappearances, and emergency regulations, and fosters a culture of fear, intolerance, and violent discrimination. Hardt and Negri, therefore, rightly argue that war itself has become ""a permanent social relation"" and thereby the ""primary organizing principle of society, and politics merely one of its means or guises"" (ibid., 12). What Hardt and Negri suggest is new about today's global civil war is its biopolitical agenda. ""War,"" they write, ""has become a regime of biopower, that is, a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life"" (ibid., 13). For example, the biopolitics of war entails the production of particular economic and cultural subjectivities, ""creating new hearts and minds through the construction of new circuits of communication, new forms of social collaboration, and new modes of interaction"" (ibid., 81). The ambiguity of Hardt and Negri's notion of biopower subtly resides in their adaptation of the language of social and political revolution, for it seems to be the regime of biopower, rather than the multitude, that absorbs and transvalues the revolutionary, that is, anti-colonial, spirit inscribed in the rhetoric of ""new hearts and minds."" At the same time, they argue, that a biopolitical definition of war ""changes war's entire legal framework"" (ibid., 21-22), for ""whereas war previously was regulated through legal structures, war has become regulating by constructing and imposing its own legal framework"" (ibid. 22). If none of this, at least in my mind, is marked by a particular originality of thought, then this may have to do with Hardt and Negri's reluctance to address the historical continuities between earlier wars of decolonization and contemporary global wars, the legacies of imperialism, and the imperative of race in orchestrating imperial, neo-colonial, and today's global civil wars. ¶ In fact, while biopolitical global warfare might be a new phenomenon on the sovereign territory of the United States of America, specifically after 11 September 2001, it is hardly news to ""people in the former colonies, who,"" as Crystal Bartolovich points out, ""have long lived ???at the 'crossroads' of global forces"" (2000, 136), violence, and wars. For example, in Sri Lanka global civil war has been a permanent, everyday reality since the country's Sinhala Only Movement in 1956, and become manifest in the normalization of racialized violence as a means of politics since President Jayawardene's election campaign for a referendum in 1982, which led to the state-endorsed anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983. Similarly, according to Achille Mbembe, biopolitical warfare was intrinsic to the European imperial project in ""Africa,"" where ""war machines emerged"" as early as ""the last quarter of the twentieth century"" (2003, 33). In other words, although Hardt and Negri argue convincingly that it is the ubiquity of global war that restructures social relationships on the global and local level, their concept tends to dehistoricize different genealogies and effects of global civil war. Indeed, not only do Hardt and Negri refrain from reading wars of decolonization as central to the construction of what David Harvey sees as the uneven ""spatial exchange relations"" (2003, 31) necessary for the expansion of capital accumulation and of which global war is an intrinsic feature, but they also dissociate global civil wars from the nation-state's still thriving ability to implement and exercise rigorous regimes of violence and surveillance. As for the term's epistemological formation, global civil war has been sanitized and no longer evokes the conventional associat"
MIL,"Throughout the twentieth century, the Middle East remained as an arena of incessant conflict attracting global attention.  As the recent developments in Israel/Palestine and the US-led war on Iraq have showed, it is difficult to exaggerate the significance of Middle Eastern insecurities for world politics. By adopting a critical approach to re-think security in the Middle East, this study addresses an issue that continues to attract  the attention of students of world politics. Focusing on the constitutive rela-tionship between (inventing) regions, and (conceptions and practices of)security,  the  study  argues  that  the  current  state  of  ‘regional  security’  –often a euphemism for regional insecurities – has its roots in practices thathave throughout history been shaped by its various representations – thegeopolitical inventions of security. In doing this, it lays out the contours o fa framework for thinking differently about regional security in the MiddleEast. Prevailing approaches to regional security have had their origins in thesecurity concerns and interests of Western states, mainly the United States.The  implication  of  this  Western  bias  in  security  thinking  within  theMiddle  Eastern  context  has  been  that  much  of  the  thinking  done  onregional security in the Middle East has been based on Western concep-tions of ‘security’. During the Cold War what was meant by ‘security in theMiddle East’ was maintaining the security of Western (mostly US) interestsin this part of the world and its military defence against other externalactors  (such  as  the  Soviet  Union  that  could  jeopardise  the  regionaland/or global status quo). Western security interests in the Middle Eastduring the Cold War era could be summed up as the unhindered flow ofoil at reasonable prices, the cessation of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the pre-vention of the emergence of any regional hegemon, and the maintenanceof ‘friendly’ regimes that were sensitive to these concerns. This was (andstill  is)  a  top-down  conception  of  security  that  was  military-focused,directed outwards and privileged the maintenance of stability. Let us takea brief look at these characteristics. The Cold War approach to regional security in the Middle East was top-down because threats to security were defined largely from the perspective of external powers rather than regional states or peoples. In the eyes ofBritish and US defence planners, communist infiltration and Soviet inter-vention  constituted  the  greatest  threats  to  security  in  the  Middle  Eastduring the Cold War. The way to enhance regional security, they argued,was for regional states to enter into alliances with the West. Two securityumbrella schemes, the Middle East Defence Organisation (1951) and theBaghdad  Pact  (1955),  were  designed  for  this  purpose.  Although  therewere regional states such as Iraq (until the 1958 coup), Iran (until the1978–79 revolution), Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey that shared this per-ception of security to a certain extent, many Arab policy-makers begged todiffer.Traces of this top-down thinking are still prevalent in the US approachto security in the ‘Middle East’. During the 1990s, in following a policy ofdual containment US policy-makers presented Iran and Iraq as the mainthreats  to  regional  security  largely  due  to  their  military  capabilitiesand the revisionist character of their regimes that were not subservient toUS interests. In the aftermath of the events of September 11 US policy-makers have focused on ‘terrorism’ as a major threat to security in theMiddle East and elsewhere. Yet, US policy so far has been one of ‘con-fronting  the  symptoms  rather  than  the  cause’  (Zunes  2002:  237)  as  ithas focused  on  the  military  dimension  of  security  (to  the  neglect  ofthe socio-economic one) and relied on military tools (as with the war onIraq) in addressing these threats. This is not to underestimate the threatposed by weapons of mass destruction or terrorism to global and regionalse"
MIL,"As a natural consequence of the lack of real knowledge about the area, the ‘“East” has always signified danger and threat’ (ibid., p. 26). It represents an ‘otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries’ (ibid., p. 57) that the West must confront forcefully. Moreover this sense of fear is not restricted to the past: Today, bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples over there (ibid., p. xv). This portrayal of the East as an enigmatic and dangerous counterpoint is a fundamental component of Orientalist literature. However, as well as exaggerating the East’s distinctiveness, the Orientalist canon is committed to proclaiming its inferiority. The second core characteristic of Orientalist literature is its portrayal of the region as a degenerate divergence from Western norms. Specifically, the people are presented as backward or, as Chaim Weizmann put it to Arthur Balfour, ‘the fellah is at least four centuries behind the times’ (quoted in ibid., p. 306). What is more, unlike superior Europeans, [they] Orientals are prone to irrationality, inefficiency, inability to learn from mistakes and a chronic incapacity for self-government (ibid., pp. 36–40, 107, 228, 241). In dealing with them, one must appreciate that ‘power is the only language they understand’ (ibid., p. xv). Furthermore, not content with highlighting this supposed inferiority, Orientalism is committed to rectifying it. The East must therefore be kept ‘in statu pupillari’ (ibid., p. 37) while the West imposes its more advanced socio-political model upon it. The knowledge produced by Orientalism is therefore ‘never raw, unmediated, or simply objective’ (ibid., p. 273) but complicit in a political project with imperialist instincts. For this reason, Said brands Orientalism a trahison des clercs (ibid., p. xxi), suggesting that, even though their participation may be unconscious, ‘the Orientalist could be regarded as the special agent of Western power’ (ibid., p. 223). Having said this, recognition of Orientalism’s close connections to power is not to imply that its analysis is compelling. The third prominent feature of Orientalist discourse is its ‘paper-thin intellectual apparatus’ (ibid., p. 322). Said explains that over time Western writing about the Orient has acquired a narrow set of convictions which now serve as the foundation of all subsequent thinking. Analyses of the region proceed from the basis of this received knowledge and are consequently repetitive and unimaginative. Their purpose is no longer to engage with their subject directly or achieve fresh insight, but to reiterate and reconfirm ‘unshakeable abstract maxims about the “civilization”’ (ibid., p. 52). Every fact is taken to be a reaffirmation of established principles and all phenomena are explained via reduction to the same tired models. This problem is exacerbated by the tendency for Area Studies to be closed off from other disciplines (ibid., p. 70). Some of the specific traits of this orthodoxy are as follows: First is ‘demeaning generalization’ (ibid., p. xiii), whereby ‘innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored’ (ibid., p. xiv). Second is eternality: the Orient is deemed never to change and there is therefore no need to alter one’s intellectual models. Momentous shifts are downplayed and previously unseen phenomena are confi- dently labelled atavism (ibid., pp. 58, 104, 240). Third, Orientalism uses crude one-dimensional models upon which scholars would not countenance relying if their object of study was the West. Prominent examples include a fixation with geographical determinism (ibid., pp. 162, 216) and obsession with the ‘O"
MIL,"As a natural consequence of the lack of real knowledge about the area, the ‘“East” has always signified danger and threat’ (ibid., p. 26). It represents an ‘otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries’ (ibid., p. 57) that the West must confront forcefully. Moreover this sense of fear is not restricted to the past: Today, bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples over there (ibid., p. xv). This portrayal of the East as an enigmatic and dangerous counterpoint is a fundamental component of Orientalist literature. However, as well as exaggerating the East’s distinctiveness, the Orientalist canon is committed to proclaiming its inferiority. The second core characteristic of Orientalist literature is its portrayal of the region as a degenerate divergence from Western norms. Specifically, the people are presented as backward or, as Chaim Weizmann put it to Arthur Balfour, ‘the fellah is at least four centuries behind the times’ (quoted in ibid., p. 306). What is more, unlike superior Europeans, [they] Orientals are prone to irrationality, inefficiency, inability to learn from mistakes and a chronic incapacity for self-government (ibid., pp. 36–40, 107, 228, 241). In dealing with them, one must appreciate that ‘power is the only language they understand’ (ibid., p. xv). Furthermore, not content with highlighting this supposed inferiority, Orientalism is committed to rectifying it. The East must therefore be kept ‘in statu pupillari’ (ibid., p. 37) while the West imposes its more advanced socio-political model upon it. The knowledge produced by Orientalism is therefore ‘never raw, unmediated, or simply objective’ (ibid., p. 273) but complicit in a political project with imperialist instincts. For this reason, Said brands Orientalism a trahison des clercs (ibid., p. xxi), suggesting that, even though their participation may be unconscious, ‘the Orientalist could be regarded as the special agent of Western power’ (ibid., p. 223). Having said this, recognition of Orientalism’s close connections to power is not to imply that its analysis is compelling. The third prominent feature of Orientalist discourse is its ‘paper-thin intellectual apparatus’ (ibid., p. 322). Said explains that over time Western writing about the Orient has acquired a narrow set of convictions which now serve as the foundation of all subsequent thinking. Analyses of the region proceed from the basis of this received knowledge and are consequently repetitive and unimaginative. Their purpose is no longer to engage with their subject directly or achieve fresh insight, but to reiterate and reconfirm ‘unshakeable abstract maxims about the “civilization”’ (ibid., p. 52). Every fact is taken to be a reaffirmation of established principles and all phenomena are explained via reduction to the same tired models. This problem is exacerbated by the tendency for Area Studies to be closed off from other disciplines (ibid., p. 70). Some of the specific traits of this orthodoxy are as follows: First is ‘demeaning generalization’ (ibid., p. xiii), whereby ‘innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored’ (ibid., p. xiv). Second is eternality: the Orient is deemed never to change and there is therefore no need to alter one’s intellectual models. Momentous shifts are downplayed and previously unseen phenomena are confi- dently labelled atavism (ibid., pp. 58, 104, 240). Third, Orientalism uses crude one-dimensional models upon which scholars would not countenance relying if their object of study was the West. Prominent examples include a fixation with geographical determinism (ibid., pp. 162, 216) and obsession with the ‘O"