Strange Alliances

As the United States continues to negotiate with Iran over the latter’s nuclear program as part of a six nation coalition, the Likud/Republican coalition is equally pressing against reaching a deal. Just about anything that the Obama administration proposes is likely to be rejected by the GOP-led Congress… because his administration proposed it. But right now, as my March 19^th blog (Arrogant Isolationism) clearly documents, Israel is among the world’s least popular countries and the fact that the anti-Iran-treaty effort in the United States has been heavily fomented by Israel itself, clearly places the United States on the wrong side of the vast majority of global sentiments.

There are some interesting signs that the Iranians are actually taking this process seriously. “A coterie of Iran’s hard-line Shiite Muslim clerics and Revolutionary Guards commanders is usually vocal on the subject of the Iranian nuclear program, loudly proclaiming the country’s right to pursue its interests and angrily denouncing the United States… But as the United States and Iran prepare to restart nuclear talks this week, the hard-liners have been keeping a low profile.

“‘They have been remarkably quiet,’ said Nader Karimi Joni, a former member of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary group… Their silence is a result of state policies intended by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to seriously try to find a solution through negotiations. Ayatollah Khamenei has largely supported the nuclear talks and the Iranian negotiators, whom he has called ‘good and caring people, who work for the country.’” New York Times, March 23^rd. Meanwhile, the “other side” of the table is raising the stakes.

France is playing hardball with the Iranian negotiators, to Israel’s delight, but the talks may actually be moving into “close mode.” If the treaty becomes real, the Obama administration is likely to sign as well and adhere to the executed treaty. The Republicans can scream like stuck pigs, try to extend the sanctions and pledge “when we win in 2016,” we will deny the treaty (a threat they made in writing as 47 GOP Senators director wrote Iran’s religious leadership), but that’s 2016 or ???. Israel’s re-powered Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has failed to provide any viable solutions. After decade of no movement from Iran under severe sanctions, Netanyahu claims that sanctions continue to be the right track, threatening under his breath that Israel will do anything (military threat) to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

So let’s say that the treaty is signed, and the sanctions dropped by 5 out of the 6 treaty signatories in the coalition. But the United States refuses to sign or follows the GOP lead and shuts down our involvement. China, Russia and the European negotiators cold easily end the sanctions, even if the U.S. does not. Iran would shrug, since the mass of the negotiator-nations are supplying her with all the imports she needs. You can play with the variables, but if the world endorses the end of sanctions, and the United States accepts the pressure from Israel and refuses to go along (now or in the future), we only increase our own isolation from the global political scene and fall even lower in overall stature and effective power.

Meanwhile back at the ranch… Syria and Iraq… where Iraqi troops have been unable to thwart the ISIS threat without the rather significant intervention of Iranian regulars, military commanders, supply support and, most of all, Iran’s infamous militias on their side. Effectively, Iran and the United States are on the same side of a battle to expunge murderous ISIS from the region. But there a big gooey fly in the ointment well beyond the discomfort factor of two enemies working on the same side.

Between drought from global warming (which has destroyed Sunni farms and the lives of farmers in huge numbers) and the persecution of Sunnis by the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government as well as the minority-Shiite Assad government in Syria, there is hateful ambivalence among a whole host of Sunnis currently in ISIS territory. ISIS brutal wrath has focused on almost every religious group except fundamentalist Sunnis, their core constituency. And those Sunnis fear living under a Shiite thumb far more than they do under their Sunni “protectors.”

So as the United States looks to Iraq as the major source of the boots on the ground Americans refuse to supply, to so many Sunnis living under ISIS, the last “rescuers” they want to see are Shiites, their hated enemy. As Iraq, with strong and very direct Iranian support, closes in on ISIS-held lands, contrary to most American’s beliefs, a vast horde of people living under ISIS rule don’t look at such efforts as positive or liberating.

The closest Sunni power, Turkey, has not done much to contain ISIS, particularly because ISIS is battling Kurdish forces. Kurdish separatists have been fighting, on and off, for their own state carved in part out of Turkey’s hide. While the local Sunnis remember that it was the United States that imposed majority (read: Shiite) rule in Iraq that led rather directly to their persecution (one of ISIS’ justifications for their very existence), they would prefer Western intervention to the hated Shiites hell bent on “liberation” sitting on their doorstep. But because the United States appears to be the enabler of Israel’s policies including more settlements on the Palestinian West Bank – a strong sign that Israel will never accept a two state partition (reinforced by Netanyahu’s pre-election speech, which he has tried to withdraw) – the level of distrust that is directed at us is still incalculable.

What you have is rather profound regional instability. Deep polarization between Shiite and Sunni factions. Increasing mistrust of Americans and American policies, opening the door to “other” global powers to build a new power-base further to reduce American influence. A right wing Israeli government that has painted itself into an unsustainable corner. What you have is an ignorant Congressional majority that is further exacerbating regional instability, with an added failure of most Americans to understand the exploding schisms in the Middle East, many of which were old, nearly-healed wounds, that American intervention reopened with disastrous consequences. We have the largest military in the world, led by inexperienced, legislative representatives long on opinions but woefully short on facts. Their Congressional “handlers” are playing them like violins. When will facts become popular with our elected representatives? Ever?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if only our elected representatives could actually live and operate in the world as it really is, what a difference that could contribute to our long-term growth and prosperity.

“Coal Me, Irresponsible”

King coal is the number one generator of electrical power on earth. And the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with producers from Pennsylvania to West Virginia chunking, tunneling and digging away to make sure the U.S. continues to have enough electricity for all of its business and residential needs. Burning coal even powers a lot of Teslas, Volts, and a whole host of plug-in electric cars.

We are pretty dependent on the stuff, and researchers have been trying to design cleaner coal-fired plants to replace the mega-polluting behemoths of old. But that research has only taken the clean-up effort so far; the myth of “clean coal” is exactly that… a myth. The solution has been to pump the effluents from the coal-burning power-generating process deep into the earth… pollutants for future generations to deal with. This “sweeping under the rug” scenario will come back to haunt us sooner rather than later.

Basically, there really isn’t a viable scientist out there who has a commercially viable process to produce truly clean coal, and while a new such coal plant is being built every week or two in China to keep up with massive power needs, the air quality in urban centers in the People’s Republic speaks for itself. Bottom line: nobody really believes that coal is the long-term solution to sustainable power generation. No one except coal barons and their investors, and the well-paid politicians who support their cause, deny man-impacted climate change and get reelected with full campaign coffers, year after year.

So let’s scrape the surface of the mercenary evaluators who bet – with their own cash – on the economic prospects for any company, technology or industry. On March 16^th, “the Sierra Club and CoalSwarm, keeper of the global coal plant tracker database, released a comprehensive report on the global coal pipeline -- and the news is big. The global boom in coal-fired power plant construction is going bust.

“Since 2010, for every coal plant completed worldwide, two proposed coal plants have been shelved or cancelled. We have known for a while that the coal industry was facing serious headwinds -- even banks like Citi and Goldman Sachs have been warning of coal's impending decline -- but the scale of project failure should be a wake-up call to anyone who still thinks the coal industry's salvation lies in a 21st century global coal boom.

“Globally, in 2014, for the first time ever, carbon emissions were flat as the world economy grew, largely due to reduced coal use and the expansion of clean energy. Even as coal use continues its rapid decline in the United States with 187 coal plants announced for retirement since 2010, thanks in large part to widespread grassroots pressure from communities demanding an end to deadly pollution, the U.S. coal industry was counting on a booming exports business to keep it afloat. But today's report shows this is simply not going to happen.

“According to this new report, coal use in China declined for the first time in 2014 while the economy simultaneously grew at 7.3 percent, proving that coal is not synonymous with growth. The picture in India is even more dismal for coal companies looking to the subcontinent for salvation. There, for every one project that was completed, six were shelved or cancelled. And that coal renaissance that was supposedly going to take place in Europe? In the EU, retired coal capacity outpaced new capacity by 22 percent. Nowhere is the European shift away from coal more apparent than in the UK [also a big coal producer], where the leaders of the three main political parties recently made a joint commitment to accelerate the shift to a low carbon economy and end the use of unabated coal for electricity.”Huffington Post, March 16^th.

This doesn’t mean that air quality is going to improve anytime soon, and as you can see in the comparison of the above NASA photos (1980 and 2003; it’s much worse today) of the northern polar ice cap, we face a whole lot more damage from climate change than any near-term change in coal usage can contain. And there are still lots of folks who think coal is still coming back. “While larger trends are turning against coal, there are still over 1,000 gigawatts of new coal-fired generation proposed worldwide. This may not be enough to revive the coal industry in the face of accelerating coal plant retirements, but it is enough to devastate the climate and public health. To avoid catastrophic climate disruption and the global instability and human suffering that will result, we must continue building on the progress found in the report to phase out coal plants and replace them with clean energy.” Huffington Post.

It‘s time to reprioritize our national fuel policies so that we stop killing ourselves. Wall Street sees the writing on the wall. Folks who build coal plants are getting the message. King coal must abdicate. Now!

I’m Peter Dekom, and living in the real world just seems to threaten too many incumbents, their “bought and paid for” politicians, and the fools who buy into their intentionally false messages and vote against their own best interests.

Is Nonviolent Protest Remotely Effective?

Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are the poster-champions for nonviolent protest in modern times. Gandhi’s efforts gave rise to the end of the British Raj and birth to modern India. Dr. King’s legendary efforts supported a seeming tsunami of change against America’s segregation laws and practices, generating anti-discrimination statutes – including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as amended in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006 (recently eviscerated by an activist right wing faction majority in the U.S. Supreme Court). The anti-Vietnam War rallies in the 1960s and 70s ripped the nation apart, but after a tumultuous few years and prolonged Paris peace discussions with North Vietnam, the last U.S. forces withdrew in a dramatic helicopter exit on April 29, 1975.

We’ve seen violent protests over the centuries, including our own Revolutionary War, which forced our independence from England. Insurgencies, civil wars and “wars of liberation” have resulted in overthrows of incumbencies repeated over history, most recently reflected in the some of the regime changes following the recent revolts under the Arab Spring. Non-violent protests have often evolved into violence or provoked violent retaliation from incumbents. Picture the tear gas, police in riot gear marching towards protestors, and the occasional lethal flurry of bullets from Kent State to Tiananmen Square and the Intifada, to name a few.  

So the question remains. Exactly how effective is peaceful protest as an agent of change? As researchers began to examine the statistical realities, they began with a struggle of exactly what the right terminology they should use to generate accurate results. “‘I never use the term peaceful, by the way,’ says Maria Stephan, a senior policy fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

“Stephan and her colleague, Erica Chenoweth, are scholars of nonviolent action and civil resistance, both terms are their preferred alternatives to the more passively-perceived idea of ‘peace.’ The pair met in 2006, and that same year were assigned as roommates at a conference sponsored by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

“At the time, however, Chenoweth studied political violence and was quietly skeptical throughout the workshop of how much power a nonviolent movement could, in fact, wield compared to armed struggles. The two would debate at night in their room: Was armed insurrection—war, guns, and bombs—the most effective method for a movement that wanted to, say, overthrow a dictator or gain independence? Or could nonviolent acts of resistance, such as marches, boycotts, occupations, and hunger strikes, truly hold more power, even against very brutal regimes? Beyond anecdotes and a small number of case studies, it dawned on them that there was no quantitative way to compare…

“One man, Gene Sharp, essentially invented the field of nonviolent studies in the 1970s, developing formal theories about why, when, and how they succeed. Only last year did a university even start an initiative entirely dedicated to nonviolent action and civil resistance. (Its head, Stellan Vinthagen at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is also launching the field’s first journal this year.)

“And so Stephan and Chenoweth set out to bring empirical rigor to a subject that needed it badly. Rather than look at the hugely broad world of protest causes, they decided to focus on only movements with the most difficult goals to achieve—overthrowing a regime, kicking out an occupying force, or territorial self-determination—in order to really test the question they were asking. Their initial dataset in 2011 cataloged the outcomes of all such mass movements they could find from 1900 to 2006—adding to 323 nonviolent and violent movements in all, from Gandhi’s movement in 1919 to the coup that removed Thailand’s prime minister from power in 2006.

“Their most striking finding: Nonviolent campaigns were successful against government repression 46% of the time, more than twice the success rate (20%) of their violent counterparts. Not only that, they found the success rate of violent insurgencies has actually been declining in recent decades, and that nonviolent resistance campaigns have a stronger tendency to lead to democratic governments and lasting peace later on.” FastCompany.com, March 19^th.

Aside from simply raising public awareness, nonviolent protests have always catered to those most oppressed and to the rebellious craving for relevance among the young. The fact that change often emanates from younger generations with changing and evolving attitudes should not come as a surprise. The overall global population has more young people than ever before (according to the United Nations, there are 1.8 billion people between 10 and 24, out of about 7 billion total, particularly in developing nations) – even with large segments of graying citizens living longer. So massive changes are inevitable, some good and some bloodbaths seemingly without end.

I’m Peter Dekom, and change is simply a part of everyone’s experience, but when it comes to seismic attitudinal and political shifts, it is very interesting on how we really do get “there.”

Broken and Unfixable?

There is one huge philosophical theme that the Republican Party and their Tea Party faction embrace that resonates with practically everybody, myself included. The federal government is wildly inefficient, bloated and in too many ways, simply doesn’t work. While Democrats may agree at some level, the often vote to introduce new programs without extinguishing or repairing older programs that are failure personified. The question, of course, is all about priorities. If you take away the labels and the agencies, it’s pretty clear what government has to do.

We need to be safe (at every level), our laws need to be fair and non-discriminatory, opportunity needs a level playing field, our ability to trade with the world needs to be maximized, our workers need to be paid and treated fairly, people need commercially viable access to healthcare (debate remains here, but really, let millions suffer and die to support tax breaks?), retirement needs to be managed and supported, we need a functioning infrastructure, we need planning and design to cope with present and obviously future issues (water availability, power generation, etc.), research both for problem-solving and opportunity creating values, and we need a citizenry that is competitively and affordably educated to sustain a productive and comfortable future.

The battle within our Congress is what the priorities/timing for the above must be, how to pay for it while managing massive interest payments on an existing budget deficit (gaining on $19 trillion), and what needs to be deferred or eliminated. We also don’t seem to be able to ask the tough questions, like was creating a mega-new bureaucracy – Homeland Security – worth it (or did we already have enough agencies to deal with security threats)? Is our policy of substituting very expensive contractors in the place of significantly-lower cost federal employees the modern version of three-card-Monte? What exactly are we supposed to do with a military that consumes almost half of the entire world’s aggregate military budget? Why do we have a criminal justice system that incarcerates a quarter of the world’s prisoners when we only have one-twentieth of the earth’s people? And so on and so on…

Since all federal appropriations bills are constitutionally required to originate in the House of Representatives, budget focus has to start there. Both houses of Congress are dominated by the GOP, with the latter heavily focused on deficit reduction and keeping the tax rates at the top of the food chain low. If you are remotely dependent on the federal government, for access to healthcare, or because of disability or age, the GOP doesn’t think you are worth supporting at past levels, that the country can no longer afford you. You are disposable. Government can make those decisions, and they are valid policy considerations, whether you agree with them or not. Kindness is not a constitutional right. Hmmmm.

As we hit up against our deficit borrowing cap – which could send us into international default if we cannot back up our borrowing needs with supporting Congressional permission – and as the new federal budget comes up for consideration, the battle between the White House and the Republican Congress augurs badly for going-forward fiscal stability. Even within the GOP, there is a struggle between defense-spending and deficit reduction… but social programs are the sacrificial lamb across both factions. “House Republicans released a proposal [March 17^th] that would balance the budget in a decade by revamping Medicare and Medicaid, repealing the Affordable Care Act and making cuts in domestic programs.

“The plan, which pares more than $5 trillion from the federal budget, will instantly renew long-running hostilities with the White House and Democrats regarding spending and debt. But the biggest clash is likely to be between GOP budget hawks determined to reduce spending and defense hawks who want to bolster the Pentagon in the face of rising threats from the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.

“While budget resolutions do not have the force of law, the proposal has greater significance now because Republicans control both chambers of Congress. The budget season allows the two parties to lay out their competing visions, framing a likely fiscal showdown this fall that could resemble those of previous years between President Obama and Republicans on Capitol Hill.” Washington Post, March 17^th.

For those who scream that we need to allow the free market to determine our future, there are a few harsh realities. First, there is no free market here or in most places on earth. A tax rate scheme that favors some forms of making money over others, allowing companies to inflict measurable environmental damage but forcing taxpayers to bear that economic burden, farm insurance subsidies, tilting the playing field in favor of big business and affording them tax loopholes and access to capital denied to mid and small-business, allowing trading firms super instant access to financial information not accessible to the vast majority of us, etc., etc., etc. all suggest that the market is anything but free. Government created or allows those anomalies, but there is almost no appetite in the current Congress to deal with any of this, setting the stage for another bubble and another international financial downfall.

So there is nothing on the horizon that will deal with the reality of bloated unfairness of our federal government. Neither party is facing the fact of our own slow demise of political and economic power. We are treading water, ignoring our future and kicking the can down the road, at which time it may be too late to stem the decline. If you care, raise your voice. Write your elected representatives. Talk to those who live in denial… or sit back for a really horrific tragedy we call the “decline of Western Civilization.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and we really need to return to the real world, not the mythical world in which our Congress seems to want to live.

Arrogant Isolationism

Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest and most reliable ally in the Middle East. Likewise, through billions and billions dollars of aid packages, mostly military, our Security Council veto power at the United Nations and the support of Congress and the American people – despite the fact that only 2% of our population is Jewish – we have reciprocated in spades. Israel has garnered strong additional support from the American Evangelical community, for reasons that still make me shudder. According to these Evangelicals, to foment a Biblical promise of a second coming of Christ, a war to end all wars (Armageddon) must emanate in the Middle East between Israel and her neighbors that decimates the earth. A strong and nuclear-armed Israel is the cornerstone of that prophecy.

The official U.S. policy towards peace in the Middle East embraces reasoned accord between Israel and a Palestinian state, eventually resulting in some negotiated form of Palestinian autonomy. We have attempted, without much success of late, to mediate such a solution, but as time passes, the credibility of the United States as a middleman is all but gone. America’s wars in Afghanistan (Middle East adjacent, but Islamic nonetheless) and Iraq have caused us to be viewed as a regional colonizer among most average regional Muslim citizens. To many, they have the mistaken view that Israel is a de facto U.S. colony. We tend to forget that the victims of Islamic extremism are overwhelmingly other Muslims, notwithstanding a very hostile anti-Western litany of hate-mongering from these demonic groups.

Palestinians are themselves torn between the violent change-advocates of Hamas (mostly in Gaza) and the more moderate Fatah faction concentrated on the West Bank in Israel. But as Israel authorizes many more Jewish “settlements” on the West Bank, as her government has dug in its heels against Palestinian aspirations, it seems increasingly clear that the last six years of leadership by Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu – as leader of ultra-conservative Likud – have pushed back hard, and most recently resulted in his eleventh hour campaign pledge never to allow an independent Palestine and to increase the growth of those West Bank Jewish settlements.

As Netanyahu’s rather obvious recent political pre-election move suggests – he responded to a GOP invitation to speak before Congress opposed by Dems as “political during an active foreign campaign” and as a usurpation of the foreign policy power of the president – there is now a very real political alliance between his Likud and the U.S. Republican Party. This American intrusion into the Israeli political process is indeed unfortunate. Picking sides in an election, particularly selecting a leader whose drop in his own local polls has been consistently downwards with each election, would seem to limit American options, demonstrates open hostility to center and left-of-center Israeli parties.

Israeli politics is a bit strange. “No party has ever won an outright majority under Israel's proportional representation voting system, and neither [party got] more than a quarter of the votes in Tuesday's election [March 17^th].” BBC.com, March 17^th. In that Israeli election, Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union Party and Netanyahu’s Likud were in a dead heat… until the last moment. The results of that eleventh hour surge: 30 seats for Likud, 24 for Zionist Union in the 120-seat Knesset. Netanyahu will now generate a coalition totaling at least 61 votes, while Israel is more polarized than it has been for years.

“The Likud activists were dancing and singing within minutes of the TV stations’ broadcasting their exit polls quite simply because they can see a relatively simple pathway towards the formation of another right-wing coalition… It would involve Mr Netanyahu teaming up with the secularists of Yisraeli Beitenu and Kulanu, and adding the religious nationalists of Jewish Home and the parties that represent ultra-orthodox Jews like Shas.” BBC.com, March 17^th. If Netanyahu’s existing right of center coalition was fragile, his going-forward assemblage will be even less cohesive. American Republicans are cheering; Democrats are looking at a hostile government leading Israel for the next few years.

Aside from Netanyahu’s insertion of himself as a pro-Republican force in American politics, making a ton of unnecessary enemies on the other side of the aisle along the way, his hardline tactics are now the bullet points in Palestine’s end-around move to further isolate Israel as an alleged rogue state, a human rights violator (Hamas is hardly innocent!) and an impediment to freedom and Middle Eastern stability. Citing Israeli intransigence, Palestine has mounted a global effort to achieve official recognition as a separate and independent state. Israel is on the wrong side of the vast majority of global sympathies.

“On Thursday, 29 November 2012, in a 138–9 vote (with 41 abstaining) General Assembly resolution 67/19 passed, upgrading Palestine to ‘non-member observer state’ status in the United Nations. The new status equates Palestine's with that of the Holy See. The change in status was described by The Independentas ‘de facto recognition of the sovereign state of Palestine.’ Voting ‘no’ were Canada, the Czech Republic, Israel, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Panama and the United States of America.” Wikipedia. Not a lot of support for the Israeli position, and even that minimal support is dwindling by the minute. Regardless of Hamas’ violent excess, it is Israel that is globally perceived as the big bad bully, crushing the Palestinian state and continuing the disenfranchisement of its people

“On Wednesday [December 17^th], European parliamentarians endorsed Palestinian statehood. Symbolically. In principle. A compromise motion. .. Carrying overwhelmingly – 498 to 88 with 111 abstentions…  An estimated 134 nations recognize Palestinian statehood. Sweden the latest to join ranks with others. The first EU country to do so… Britain, France, Spain and Portugal extended unofficial/symbolic parliamentary recognition. So did Ireland.” GlobalResearch.ca, December 18^th.

While hope for a negotiated solution is now unlikely if not impossible, Netanyahu’s rhetoric is sure to isolate Israel even more, should he be able to manage his new coalition “his way.” “[His] new stance would further fray Mr. Netanyahu’s ruinous relationship with the Obama administration and heighten tension with European countries already frustrated with the stalled peace process.

“‘I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel,’ he said in a video interview published on NRG, an Israeli news site that leans to the right. ‘There is a real threat here that a left-wing government will join the international community and follow its orders.’…

“Mr. Netanyahu’s chief challenger, Isaac Herzog of the center-left Zionist Union, backs the two-state solution and has promised to try to restart talks with the Palestinians, though he has warned an agreement may not be possible. He has, however, made Mr. Netanyahu’s alienation of allies, especially Washington, a prime campaign point, and said Israel’s international isolation is itself a security threat.” New York Times, March 16^th. Indeed, as Netanyahu’s extreme hardline approach has isolated Israel in most of the world, so has lock-step American support for the Jewish state added a touch of that isolation to us. But for now, Herzog and his Zionist Union have been muzzled.

Nevertheless, U.S. grassroots support for Israel, outside of the Evangelical community, is beginning to erode, and anti-Semitism is beginning to rear its ugly head here in the U.S. and so much more virulently in Europe. If it weren’t for the massive distractions of murderous regimes like ISIS and Boko Haram, Palestinian aspirations probably would have advanced rapidly in this increasingly anti-Israeli world. Netanyahu keeps painting Israel into an increasingly untenable international corner; he’s got nowhere else to go in his Palestinian quandary except more violence. He quickly realized how alienating his pre-election pledge never to recognize a separate Palestine was, so he back-tracked two days after the vote and suggested he never veered from his willingness to accept a two-state solution. Right. His lips were just moving.

Israel cannot persist in the belief that it can go it alone in an ultra-hardline approach, that it can expand its West Bank settlements without limit and thus doom any negotiated peace process and still generate the kinds of international sympathies it needs to survive. We need Israel, and Israel needs us, but they also need to start taking political positions that we can defend and support, butt out of American politics as we should butt out of theirs, start taking positions that encourage peace and not long-standing wars of attrition that no one can continue to afford… and provide realistic paths to regional (Iranian) nuclear disarmament.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time to begin rebuilding our very necessary relationship with Israel that has now reached its lowest point since formation of that Jewish state.

Slowly Sapping Our Strength

Death by a thousand cuts… the slow, slice-by-slice ancient Chinese torture-to-death inflicted on enemies of the emperor… is bad enough when it is imposed by a tyrant from the outside. But how bad can it be when the victim imposes that slow destruction onto himself? Self-destruction emanates from societies grappling with change that seems torrential and unmanageable. Human sacrifices to the gods, bizarre ancient rituals, reliance on shamans and soothsayers have been the fallback for ancient civilizations on the brink for all of recorded history. All societies that practice such desperate measures have actually gone over that brink. ALL. Whether they disband, wither way, migrate, are conquered in their weakened state, fractured or just disappear… they all wind up on the dung-heap of history.

It can happen as a society matures, refuses to deal with the constant need to reinvigorate and get its own citizens will to work to reconstruct the fallen aspects of their world (think Rome or the Southern Soong Dynasty that fell to vicious conquerors), overextends themselves in military expenditures (Sparta, and more than one Chinese dynasty, the Soviet Union) or as natural resources as destroyed or dissipated beyond replenishment (Easter Island, too many ancient native American civilizations, etc.). What was it like living though such change? What ran through the minds of the average citizens? Their leadership? What could they have done to save themselves that they didn’t choose to do? Were such falls even stoppable?

Most of us are aware, consciously or subconsciously, that Western civilization is slowly fading, replaced, inch-by-inch, by the super-tigers of growth in Asia or by the modern Visigoths of extremist and barbaric tribal religious extremists, under-educated, over-“inspired” by religious zeal as the justified incredible destructive efforts. In the Islamic world, the most flagrant example of such violent religiosity, there are rather significant pockets of such extremists, where most of their attacks are on their own people with occasional blossoming out “into the evil western world.”

There are real new differences in the twenty-first century. Thermonuclear war can decimate the entire planet, and we have fears that there are “martyrs” out there hoping to share that devastation globally. Virtually all of the world’s life-sustainable land is already occupied… there’re no great expanses of verdant potential that are not already occupied. No place to escape to. And the king of destruction – global climate change – is completely reconfiguring where food can grow, where disease-carrying insects must migrate to in order to survive, what lands are going to remain habitable and those that will simply dry up and blow away (or sink into a watery abyss) and, most importantly, where potable and irrigation-necessary water will be in sufficient quantities to sustain a Malthusian-over-populated planet.

There is a linkage between the above variables. Too much of that religious extremism is born of utter hopelessness as once productive farmland has ceded its potential to an expanding desertification, unleashing massive poverty and desperation, where unscrupulous leaders have offered false and violent religiosity as a plausible and “necessary” path of salvation. Lebensraum – expanding your country by conquest to capture resources, access to the sea, and land for your over-growing population – is back. World War II showed us all how devastating this philosophy can be in the modern era, but as Russia fights to pull in Ukraine or Saddam Hussein attempted to glom on to Kuwaiti oil, the concept just refuses to die.

Here in the United States, there is a massive backlash against scientific fact, often resulting in an utter rejection of obvious and required pragmatic solutions, replaced instead by false prophets, ineffective slogan-driven solutions, and the rich and powerful circling their wagons against the rest of society as they purchase what they believe (wrongfully if history is a teacher) are political and economic policies that can insulate them from economic and political chaos as all those around them watch their standards of living deteriorate.

We’d rather build prisons than schools. As budgets are slashed for uplifting educational programs, the United States continues to expand its prison infrastructure to sustain the fact that while we are only 5% of the world’s population, we have a quarter of the planet’s incarcerated prisoners. We can expect one in three African-American males to have spent time in the prison system, as the Ferguson-like-cities and towns (and there a whole lot of them) continue to be designed to ignore education and focus on finding and convicting black (and Latino) citizens. To what end? Does that really help build for a prosperous future or insure that the racially-driven criminal justice system will never change?

We’d rather keep taxes and regulations low for the rich – incorrectly believing they will pay us back by creating good jobs (we’re still waiting!) – rather than use money from this segment for investment in ourselves in my mantra of the three growth drivers that government should be fomenting: education, infrastructure and research. We’d rather fund a massive military, costing well-beyond our ability to afford such expenditures, which has, by swatting at wasp-nests all over the world, exacerbated, funded and empowered radical factions that have destabilized the world. Oh, and slammed our deficit to the wall. Our wars have sapped our will, our economy, but now we face what we have wrought.

We’ve spent hundreds of billions (trillions?) of dollars finding new fossil fuels or introducing environmentally toxic fracking practices to extract more from once too-difficult-to-access pockets of such raw materials… but still resist the investment necessary to migrate into alternative energy systems. As our addiction to burning for energy continues unabated, global warming has richly rewarded us with agriculturally-devastating droughts and raging forest fires, short-term mega-freezes as the Gulf Stream has uncharacteristically slanted south bringing Arctic cold, floods in northern plains, hurricanes and storm surges that suck away at our coastlines… well the list is long. Nature really doesn’t seem to care what we do, really, since we are effective ridding the planet of man… through our massive self-inflicted death of a thousand cuts. Isn’t it time for a groundswell fostering massive pragmatic solutions to it all?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I still wonder if it is still possible to effect a meaningful wake-up call to begin to create a world we really can live and thrive in?

Sex & Education

The prestigious Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) has supported its global educational analysis and testing Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Through tests of young people in many countries around the world, PISA has produced results that are beyond intriguing, numbers that tell us where attitudes and policies have gone wrong, assumptions we have made that need to be reexamined and how training and education can be redesigned to better serve both students and society.

Today, I’d like to focus on the test score differentials between boys and girls, then drill down on why and what the relevant consequences might be. The bottom line is that while boys score better in math, pretty much in every other category, girls seriously outperform boys and have many fewer issues during their educational process. Are females less able than males to embrace math and math-related subjects or is there a gender-consciousness/attitude that forces these results? And if male educational failures are so pervasive, does that generate insecurities and instabilities that infect global tensions and solutions?

The just-released PISA report, The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence, provides a detailed analysis of the test and other statistic information, focusing particularly on 15-year-olds. The March 5^th OECD Digest summarizes some of the most salient results. “[In] 2012, 14% of boys and 9% of girls did not attain the PISA baseline level of proficiency in any of the three core subjects measured in PISA – reading, mathematics and science. Why are boys more likely to be among the lowest achievers in school? The report finds that gender differences in school performance are linked to gender differences in student behaviour, both in and outside of school. For example, boys spend one hour less per week on homework than girls – and each hour of homework per week translates into a 4-point higher score in the PISA reading, mathematics and science tests. Outside of school, boys spend more time playing video games than girls and less time reading for enjoyment, particularly complex texts, like fiction. Reading proficiency is the foundation upon which all other learning is built; when boys don’t read well, their performance in other school subjects suffers too…

“Some 43% of girls and 37% of boys reported that they had not mastered the skills needed to perform well at a job interview; and almost one in three boys and girls reported that they had not acquired the skills needed to write a CV or a summary of their qualifications.” And remember, these kids are those who are in the relevant educational systems of their nations, not illiterate segments outside of the educational systems.

What about those math skills? “[The] report, released [March 5^th], finds that less than 5% of 15-year-old girls in OECD countries contemplate pursuing a career in engineering or computing, while 20% of boys do. What accounts for this gender difference in career expectations? PISA finds that girls – even high-achieving girls – have less confidence in their abilities in mathematics and science, and are more anxious towards mathematics, than boys. On average across OECD countries, the difference in mathematics performance between high-achieving girls and boys is 19 PISA score points, the equivalent of around half a year of school. But when comparing boys and girls who reported similar levels of self-confidence in mathematics and of anxiety towards mathematics, the gender gap in performance disappears. If girls don’t believe in their aptitude for certain subjects, why would they continue to study those subjects when they are no longer required to?

“The study also finds that, when required to ‘think like scientists’ at school, girls underperform considerably compared to boys. For example, girls tend to underachieve compared to boys when they are asked to formulate situations mathematically. On average across OECD countries, boys outperform girls in this skill by around 16 PISA score points – the equivalent of nearly five months of school. Boys also outperform girls – by 15 score points – in the ability to apply their knowledge of science to a given situation. This gender difference in the ability to think like a scientist may be related to students’ self-confidence. When students are more self-confident, they give themselves the freedom to fail, to engage in the trial-and-error processes that are fundamental to acquiring knowledge in mathematics and science.”

The issue, it seems, is purely attitudinal; societies with positive expectations of girls in math produce clear evidence that there is no difference in male vs. female math test scores. This was the test result in several hot Asian economies: Singapore, Taipei, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

But boys have their own sets of problems that help explain the performance gap. At 15, they are more likely than girls to feel alienated from the educational system, feeling that school is a “waste of time,” and they are more likely to face school disciplinary measures than girls. Where there are career aspirations, strangely, boys tend to expect less than girls at that age. They are less likely to read for fun.

In the end, a society is no better than the abilities, hopes and aspirations of its people. In the United States, most of those measures are currently going in the wrong direction. If nothing else, an nation’s attitudes about education and its willingness to prioritize learning above all else will determine its future in a highly competitive global universe. Looking at the numbers, the United States isn’t looking so good… and the ability to implement the necessary and very possible fix is being decimated in the slashing public school budgets while arguing why lower taxes on the rich is the only true solution to job growth. I guess that’s the kind of thinking from folks who went through that inferior public school system.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our economic and political position in the world is simply ours to lose.