They do not like us, South of the border... - Douglas Farah (Miami Herald)

Latin America

Militaries In The Region Tilting Left Against U.S.

By Douglas Farah

Miami Herald, September 19, 2013, p. 13

As concern grows over the declining ability of the United States to influence events in faraway places such as Syria, little attention has been paid to a significant loss of influence much closer to home — South America, where there is a concerted effort by radical populist governments to erase any trace of U.S. military doctrine.

The U.S. influence is being replaced by a lethal doctrine of asymmetrical warfare, inspired by authoritarian governments seeking perpetual power and nurtured by Iran.

The most recent step of the Venezuela-led “Bolivarian” bloc of nations came in Argentina in June. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner carried out a little-noticed but significant purge of the armed forces, forcing out some 30 senior officers and replacing them with loyalists and specialists in internal intelligence.

The Argentine purge is only the latest phase of an historic break with the U.S. military, long an overriding objective of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and a goal that remains dear to his successor and his main allies, primarily Iran and Russia.

The Venezuela-led Bolivarian alliance — including Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Suriname and others — is replacing the U.S. influence with a toxic mix of anti-democratic values, massive corruption and a doctrine that draws on terrorism and totalitarian revolutionary models, including the justification of the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States.

During the Cold War, the United States tolerated human-rights abusers and supported bloody dictatorships across the region. But over the past two decades its military doctrine and training have focused on human-rights training, respect for civilian governance and the rule of law. In the process it helped transform Latin American militaries away from their coup-prone and authoritarian past to national defense institutions. Colombia is a vibrant example of that change.

In the Bolivarian bloc, this progress has been reversed. Special counter-narcotics units have been disbanded, joint training halted, and those with links to the United States forced into retirement. Argentina’s new army chief, Gen. César Milani, is loyal to the most militant and anti-U.S. wing of the president’s party and will remain as head of intelligence.

Rather than building militaries under civilian control and subject to the rule of law, the Bolivarian leaders are building militaries in the Cuban and Iranian molds — as instruments of their increasingly authoritarian revolutions, to be used against any “counterrevolutionary” dissent, including peaceful democratic protests.

Once the military leadership is deemed loyal, they are given large parts of the national economy to profit from. Like Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Venezuela’s Military Industry Company (CAVIM) is now active in economic spheres far outside the military’s normal purview. At the same time, the narco-corruption in the militaries under the sway of the new doctrine is pervasive.

According to its own literature, the new Bolivarian military doctrine rests on the concept of fourth-generation asymmetrical warfare in which a U.S. invasion is the hemisphere’s primary security concern. The doctrine explicitly advocates the use of weapons of mass destruction to defeat or deter such an attack. The model for resistance is Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy operating across Latin America.

Iranian influence is palpable. The Islamist regime is helping fund the new Bolivarian military academy in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where the joint doctrine is being developed. The curriculum draws on the work of Jorge Verstringyne, a Spanish academic who praises al Qaida, Hezbollah and suicide bombings while advocating the use of WMD against the United States; Illich Sánchez Ramirez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, a convicted terrorist serving a life sentence, who converted to Shia Islam in prison and wrote Revolutionary Islam, arguing that the Shia Islamic and Marxist revolutions were natural allies; and Ernesto “Ché” Guevara, the Argentine-Cuban Marxist who fought alongside Fidel Castro.

This little noticed but radical shift of posture of the Bolivarian militaries and their growing ties to Iran and drug corruption pose significant challenges to United States and represents a historic break with traditionally friendly allies. It also presents an enormous obstacle to the return of democratic institutions and the rule of law in Venezuela, Argentina and beyond.

Douglas Farah is the president of IBI Consultants, a national security consulting company and a senior non-resident associate of the CSIS Americas Program. 

To Drone or Not to Drone - Frank G. Hoffman, Evan Kalikow (FPRI)

To Drone or Not to Drone

Frank G. Hoffman, Evan Kalikow

Foreign Policy Research Institute, August 2013

That is the question.  Whether it’s better to stand idly by in the face of egregious violence or to contemplate costly interventions with American ground forces?  What’s a policy maker to do?  Accept the slings and arrows of terrorists with their outrageous terms or attack them with arrows and at a time of our own making?

The answer over the past few years has been to employ strike operations, generally by the use of remotely piloted aerial systems (aka “drones”).  The media has, typically, labeled this as “Drone Warfare” and many critics question the legal and moral justifications of their employment. 

Have we made it too easy for a President to order the killing of others?  The journalist Mark Bowden asks this question in the cover story of the latest issue of The Atlantic.[1]

Targeted killings against terrorist organizations are a generation old controversy, with origins dating back to when this tactic was being employed by Israeli security forces years ago. Dan Byman’s comprehensive evaluation in his investigative book, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism, explored Israel’s debate and the strategic effects it garnered.[2]; Since Gaza was so small, contained, and saturated by intelligence sources, it was hard to think this was a case study that American strategists could generalize from.

We came to understand how strategically important such operations were, not necessarily as decisive engagements that would defeat militant forces.  But they served to keep the level of threat to an acceptable level by compelling the Palestinian resistance to stop their suicide attacks, and by convincing the Israeli populace that the state of Israel could do something in response to these attacks and extract a punishment.  Thus, the political and social dimensions of their strategy were intermixed.  Their adversary was compelled to shift tactics, and further time was acquired.

That brings us to today and Mark Bowden’s critical question.

The employment of strikes by remotely-operated aerial systems has increased markedly over the last decade.  During the G. W. Bush administration, open sources note the use of 50 drone strikes.  But as both the number of available platforms has increased and the intelligence needed to track and target a dispersed insurgency has grown, the Obama Administration has authorized well over 420 strikes.  This had led to advocates and opponents of the approach to describe these operations as “the centerpiece of U.S. counterterrorism strategy.”  Proponents of these attacks can claim, like Daniel Byman, that “drones have done their job remarkably well: by killing key leaders and denying terrorists sanctuaries in Pakistan, Yemen, and, to a lesser degree, Somalia, drones have devastated al Qaeda and associated anti-American militant groups. And they have done so at little financial cost, at no risk to U.S. forces, and with fewer civilian casualties than many alternative methods would have caused.”[3]

Not everyone agrees that a reliance on air strikes and kinetic force is the best way to defeat or degrade long established terrorist groups or dispersed insurgencies. Moreover, some critics argue that tactical expediency and short-term thinking may have crowded out or displaced strategic effectiveness over the long term. There has been a concern for some time that the U.S. was exploiting its technology in an effort to show some action, but without considering the role of drones within a larger strategy. No doubt U.S. officials reject the notion that tactical expediency was being sought over strategic effectiveness.  Tactics should not trump strategy, but the low levels of transparency allotted to the program have continued to hamper any objective appreciation of the program and impeded understanding its role within a larger and more strategic context.

Targeted actions are not new. We’ve used jet aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles in the past and with some volume against both states and terrorist groups. Operationally, we see a number of clear advantages to our current mode of operations, at least the destructive aspect of the U.S. strategy.

• We’re degrading the near term effectiveness of the strategic leadership of these organizations from planning major attacks on us and our allies by negating their ability to plan and communicate easily.
• We’re degrading the competence and organizational coherence of operational elements of jihadist groups by eliminating tactical leaders, planners and skilled technical players, including bomb makers.
• We’re killing more high-value targets and fewer civilians than we would in a traditional ground combat. In his recent article for The Atlantic, Bowden came to the conclusion that “Ground combat almost always kills more civilians than drone strikes do. When you consider the alternatives, you are led, as Obama was, to the logic of the drone.”[4]
• We have taken the initiative away from the adversary in multiple locations, reduced their leverage by deciding when and where WE will strike.  Their attempt to seek sanctuary to plan, rehearse, and train has been denied.  As Mr. Obama noted recently, we’ve made sure “Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us.”[5]
• We’re buying time for other tools, including partner capacity building in government, intelligence, law enforcement and security to catch up and overcome the threat.  In beleaguered states, this takes time and patient effort.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are powerful tools that can be used to augment and strengthen broader strategies; however, they must not be utilized as a replacement for a more grand strategy or, even worse, as a force that dictates strategy. Audrey Kurth Cronin warns against this danger, saying, “The problem for Washington today is that its drone program has taken on a life of its own, to the point where tactics are driving strategy rather than the other way around.”[6]

Letting UAVs drive or replace strategy can also lead to long-term strategic goals being spurned in favor of short-term gains.  Aerial strike operations can successfully eliminate specific targets, but may also be radicalizing a new generation of potential militants. As these operations have increased since 2009, particularly in Pakistan, influential voices like retired Admiral Dennis Blair and retired General James Cartwright have suggested that said strikes have been more effective as a recruitment tool for the Taliban than they have as a way to eliminate threats.[7] The pressure and sense of helplessness that these attacks place on civilian populations may produce a radicalizing effect that could haunt us in the long run. 

Whether or not we gain positive strategic effects from this effort remains to be seen.  In the long term, we could be creating more militants than we’re taking out. A strategic mindset thinks about the longer arc of history and the consequences of near term actions. While our political time clocks often focus on short horizons, American strategists don’t have that luxury.

So there are a number of operational objectives that appear to offer clear positive gains for U.S. security interests.  What we’ve not done is explain in layman’s terms, how the employment of these attacks fits within our larger strategy, which presumably includes more constructive components than lethal force.  Without such explanations, we are left with having to concur with Audrey Cronin.  Her conceptual counter, Dr. Dan Byman of Georgetown, has admitted that “Washington must remain mindful of the built-in limits of low-cost, unmanned interventions, since the very convenience of drone warfare risks dragging the United States into conflicts it could otherwise avoid.”[8]

Part of the pushback on these airborne kinetic operations is the misperception that this is all the United States is capable of or committed to.  Obviously this is an erroneous characterization of U.S. policy and our campaigns.  The President has made it clear in his address this past May at National Defense University that “the use of force must be seen as part of a larger discussion we need to have about a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy – because for all the focus on the use of force, force alone cannot make us safe.  We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the wellspring of extremism, a perpetual war – through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments – will prove self-defeating.”[9]

The U.S. government should build on the President’s speech. This effort should explain the place of drones in our overall strategy while correcting the erroneous notion that these strikes are the centerpiece of the American approach. Additionally, we should consistently explain the application of appropriate international law in armed conflict. Whether a target is a lawful target is a matter of international law.  Whether a target is a prosecutable criminal who should be arrested and brought to trial is a different question.  The notion that conflict with a terrorist organization is simply a matter of law enforcement and that we are bound to capture, detain, counsel and try prisoners in a judicial setting is an illusion that should be examined with some caution if not outright debunked.  One can be, as the United States has been for more than a decade, in an armed conflict with a non-state. The Supreme Court has held that the United States was in a non-international conflict that crossed borders and that the law of non-international armed conflicts governed.  All that really meant was that the United States could identify and target those engaged in directing or carrying out terrorist attacks.  How much into the support structure—training, supplying, protecting, and financing—one could go with attacks is a matter of ongoing debate.[10]

On the practical side, Bowden concluded in his own Atlantic essay that drones may be imperfect but they are less risky to civilian populations than raids with ground forces.  In sum, there is no need to play the troubled Hamlet.  With prudence and strategy, as Shakespeare noted, we can “take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.”

---

[1] Mark Bowden, “The Killing Machines.” The Atlantic, September 2013.http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-about-drones/309434/

[2] Daniel Byman, A High Price: The Triumphs & Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[3] Daniel Byman, “Why Drones Work.” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013, p. 32.

[4] Mark Bowden, “The Killing Machines.” The Atlantic, September 2013.  Accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-about-drones/309434/

[5] Barack Obama. “Remarks by the President at the National Defense University.” National Defense University, May 23, 2013. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university

[6] Audrey Kurth Cronin, “Why Drones Fail.” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013,p. 44.

[7] Doherty, B. (2013). A Weapon Failing to Keep Peace on Any Side. Retrieved Jul 12, 2013, fromwww.smh.com.au/world/a-weapon-failing-to-keep-peace-on-any-side-20130405-2hc6z.html.

[8] Daniel Byman, “Why Drones Work.” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013, p. 33.

[9] Barack Obama. “Remarks by the President at the National Defense University.” National Defense University, Ft. McNair, DC, May 23, 2013. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university

[10] Nicholas Rostow, “The Laws of War and the Killing of Suspected Terrorists, False Starts, Rabbit Holes and Dead Ends, Rutgers Law Review, Vol. 63:4, 2011, 1215–1233.

Both Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Kalikow work at the National Defense University in Washington DC.  These remarks are their own and do not reflect the policies or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

Hispanic imigrants in the USA: the new Italians - David Leonhardt (NYT)

CAPITAL IDEAS

Hispanics, the New Italians

By DAVID LEONHARDT

Published: April 20, 2013

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THE German immigrants of the 19th century were so devoted to their native language that Americans wondered if the new arrivals would ever assimilate. The Irish who followed were said to be too devoted to a foreign pope to embrace American democracy.

Multimedia

Graphic

Comparing Generations

Many Italians not only were Roman Catholic but also returned home for the winter, when construction work here slowed. The Chinese and Jews, skeptics argued, were of an entirely different race than many successful immigrants who came before them.

With the arrival of millions of Latinos in recent decades, there have been multiple reasons to wonder if they would assimilate and thrive — including legitimate economic issues that go well beyond ethnic stereotypes. Unlike previous generations of immigrants, today’s can remain in daily telephone and video contact with their homeland. And unlike those in the past, today’s immigrants face legal obstacles, and their pathway to a middle-class life involves college tuition. A decade ago, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington described the newfound issues with assimilation as simply the “Hispanic challenge.”

Yet as the Senate begins to debate a major immigration bill, we already know a great deal about how Latinos are faring with that challenge: they’re meeting it, by and large. Whatever Washington does in coming months, a wealth of data suggests that Latinos, who make up fully half of the immigration wave of the past century, are already following the classic pattern for American immigrants.

They have arrived in this country in great numbers, most of them poor, ill educated and, in important respects, different from native-born Americans. The children of immigrants, however, become richer and better educated than their parents and overwhelmingly speak English. The grandchildren look ever more American.

“These fears about immigrants have been voiced many times in American history, and they’ve never proven true,” Alan M. Kraut, a history professor at American University, in Washington, told me. “It doesn’t happen immediately, but everything with Latinos points to a very typical pattern of integration in American life in a generation or two.”

Immigrant Latino households have a median income that trails the national median by $24,000 (or more than 40 percent). Among second-generation Latino households, the gap is only $10,000, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. Similarly, only 7 percent of Latino immigrants marry someone of a different ethnicity; a whopping 26 percent of the second generation does. “It’s a very reassuring set of metrics,” said Paul Taylor, the Pew center’s executive vice president.

Even one alarming trend among the children of Latino immigrants highlights their increased American-ness: younger Latinos are having more children outside marriage than their parents did, just as whites and African-Americans are.

If anything, these snapshots of today’s different generations tend to understate immigrants’ progress. Over the last several decades, Mexico and other Latin-American countries sending migrants here, like El Salvador, have also become richer and more educated. As a result, the immigrants of the past — and, by extension, their children and grandchildren — started out even further behind than today’s newcomers.

To gauge the progress of an immigrant group, the ideal comparison is not between the second and third generations in 2013 and the first generation in 2013; it is between the later generations and their actual parents and grandparents. James P. Smith, an economist at the RAND Corporation, has done such complex, longitudinal work and finds that the trajectory of Latinos most closely resembles that of Italians, who also arrived with comparatively little education.

FOR decades, the average Latino immigrant has had slightly more than a junior-high school education. An average child of a Latino immigrant today completes high school and attends almost one year of college. A typical grandchild attends more college, Mr. Smith found. In the last decade alone, according to the Pew study, the number of Latinos graduating from college hasroughly doubled, to more than 250,000.

Latino immigrants, of course, still trail other groups in a number of metrics, including education and income. And there is no guarantee that they or their descendants will close the gaps completely.

They have advantages that previous immigrant waves did not, starting with a national culture less accepting of discrimination than in the past. But they also face new obstacles. Perhaps most important, earlier groups of immigrants were not breaking the law by living in this country.

For the myriad ways that the country accepts illegal immigrants as part of society, their status still brings enormous disadvantages that inhibit climbing the economic ladder. Parents without legal status are less willing to become involved in their children’s schools. They are less willing than legal workers to ask for a raise or to leave one job for another that brings more opportunity. They are less easily able to start a business.

Whether you consider those costs too small or too large for people who enter the country without permission, the bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate last week would clearly reduce them. Long before they won citizenship — which would take years — many of today’s 11 million illegal immigrants would be able to lawfully register as residents.

“The change would be very significant for them, and it would happen immediately after they register,” said Doris M. Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service who is now at the Migration Policy Institute. “They would no longer be clandestine.”

The Senate bill is a long way from becoming law. The most probable outcome seems to be a bill that will help many recent immigrants, either substantially or modestly. No matter what, the overall direction for the modern wave of American immigrants is unlikely to change.

The notion of a unique “Hispanic challenge” is not wrong. But neither was the notion of a unique Italian challenge, Chinese challenge or Jewish challenge.

To be an impoverished immigrant who does not speak English and has few labor-market skills is not easy. Over time, the specific challenges — legal, cultural and educational — have changed. Yet the core parts of the story have not, including its trajectory.

David Leonhardt is the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 21, 2013, on page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: Hispanics, the New Italians.

A crise financeira estudantil do capitalismo americano

Lenin, num de seus trabalhos de copia nao atribuida - neste caso de Hobson e de Rosa Luxemburgo - dizia que o imperialismo era o capitalismo chegado a sua fase madura, etapa superior do capitalismo monopolista, como ele dizia.
Num outro trabalho, ja fruto de sua genialidade politica (mas ele era economicamente estupido), ele dizia que o esquerdismo era a doenca infantil (ou juvenil) do socialismo, mas isso era para consagrar o monopolio da verdade no comite central do PCUS controlado por ele.
Pois bem, parece que chegamos 'a crise juvenil do capitalismo maduro, no proprio coracao do imperio.
A coisa anda feia do lado da bolha financeira estudantil. Nao se alegrem os antiamericanos de carteirinha: o Brasil tambem vai ter uma, dentro de mais algins poucos anos...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Estudantes podem provocar outra crise financeira nos EUA?
Desemprego entre jovens aumenta consideravelmente a dívida estudantil entre recém-formados
Revista Exame, 3 de fevereiro, 2013

Os Estados Unidos estão preocupados com o crescimento da crise dos empréstimos estudantis, operação que movimenta cerca de um trilhão de dólares no país.

Uma pesquisa realizada pela consultoria FICO mostra que estudantes que pegaram empréstimo representam hoje um risco muito maior de inadimplência do que aqueles que pegaram empréstimo há alguns anos. Além disso, o aumento do montante da dívida que os recém-formandos carregam agrava ainda mais a situação.

De acordo com a pesquisa, a taxa de inadimplência de empréstimos estudantis originados entre 2010 e 2012 aumentou em 22% em relação aos empréstimos originados entre 2005 e 2007. O valor médio da dívida dos empréstimos também vem crescendo rapidamente. Em 2005, o valor médio da dívida era de U$ 17. 233. Em sete anos esse valor subiu para U$ 27.253, um aumento de 58%.

A crise dos empréstimos estudantis já representa quase o dobro da crise dos empréstimos imobiliários.

Desemprego entre jovens aumenta a inadimplência

A taxa de desemprego nos Estados Unidos permanece alta, especialmente entre os jovens.

Uma pesquisa feita pela consultoria TransUnion aponta que mais da metade dos empréstimos estudantis estão sendo prorrogados, permitindo aos estudantes realizar o pagamento posteriormente. O problema é que, após o prazo de prorrogação (geralmente três anos), jovens recém-formados se deparam com um mercado de trabalho desanimador.

“As taxas de desemprego e subemprego entre recém formados – pessoas com menos de 25 anos – estão em cerca de 50%, maior patamar em mais de uma década”, diz Ezra Becker, vice-presidente da TransUnion.

Contudo, Becke não acredita que a crise dos empréstimos estudantis leve o país a uma catástrofe econômica, como fez a crise imobiliária. Segundo Becker, a dívida estudantil representa um segmento muito menor da economia do que a dívida hipotecária.

Fontes: Exame-Estudantes americanos podem gerar uma nova crise financeira?

Protectionism, US style - Steven Malanga (The City Journal)

Storm of Protectionism
Steven Malanga
The City Journal, January 20. 2013

It’s time to repeal the Jones Act.

New York–area residents facing gasoline shortages in Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath must have wondered about the federal government’s announcement that it would suspend the Jones Act to ease long lines at the pump. Most of them had probably never heard of one of the most onerous pieces of protectionist legislation of the twentieth century. Still in force nearly 100 years after its passage, it exacts a significant toll on the economy.
Officially known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the Jones Act requires that all goods and people moving by water from one American port to another travel on American-built, American-owned, American-manned ships. The act’s original proponents argued that it was essential to national security, since it helped preserve a maritime fleet that could support the country’s armed forces and supply the nation during wars. Over time, American shipping interests and powerful maritime unions also became fierce defenders of the act, believing that it protected American jobs. Their defense has largely succeeded. Only in emergencies like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy does the federal government occasionally suspend the Jones Act to get goods flowing more quickly and cheaply. Those brief pauses reveal how much better the market would work without the act.
Like most protectionist legislation, the act costs more than it generates in economic activity. In a 1996 article in the Canadian Journal of Economics, four researchers (including two economists at the U.S. International Trade Commission) wrote that the act allowed “domestic shippers to charge rates substantially above comparable world prices,” reducing shipping by water in the United States and increasing the annual cost of goods by about $6 billion (in today’s dollars). Older studies, they recalled, estimated the cost as high as $10 billion (again, in today’s dollars). The act might save 15,000 jobs in the American shipping industry, but at a price that reduced national income by hundreds of thousands of dollars per job saved. The only trade restrictions worse for the American economy, the authors concluded, were limitations on textile and garment imports. Those “multi-fiber agreements,” in effect at the time of the economists’ study, have since expired.
The Jones Act has also long outlived its national-security rationale. In a 1991 article in Regulation, Rob Quartel, a commissioner at the Federal Maritime Commission, described how U.S. armed forces in the Gulf War moved massive amounts of matériel and personnel using their own ships and those controlled by NATO allies. Only six of the 59 ships that the military employed were Jones Act–subsidized vessels. As Quartel noted, the country’s merchant-marine fleet has continued to shrink, largely because the Jones Act has made American shippers globally uncompetitive. With a monopoly at home, why get better?
Growing evidence of the act’s cost and ineffectiveness has led to calls to rescind it. In 2003, Hawaii congressman Ed Case introduced legislation to free his state from the Jones Act, saying that it so limited competition among shippers serving the state that it had produced a “crippling drag on an already-challenged economy and the very quality of life in Hawaii.” The protectionist legislation, Case argued, “is just an anachronism: most of the world’s shipping is by way of an international merchant marine functioning in an open, competitive market. And those few U.S. flag cargo lines that remain have maneuvered the Jones Act to develop virtual monopolies over domestic cargo shipping.” Similarly, in 2010, Arizona senator John McCain introduced legislation to repeal the act, observing that it “hinders free trade and favors labor unions over consumers.”
These efforts have failed, mostly because of the power of maritime unions and shipping interests, which would rather preserve their hold on a narrow but uncompetitive slice of the marketplace than compete more forcefully around the world. Over the years, both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations have pledged their allegiance to the act in return for the support of the shipping cartel that benefits from it. The losers are American consumers and businesses. It shouldn’t take acts of God like Sandy to show us that the Jones Act should go.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book is Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer.

The Permanent Militarization of America - Aaron B. O’Connell

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Permanent Militarization of America

By AARON B. O’CONNELL

The New York Times, November 4, 2012

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Annapolis, Md.

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IN 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhowerleft office warning of the growing power of the military-industrial complex in American life. Most people know the term the president popularized, but few remember his argument.

In his farewell address, Eisenhower called for a better equilibrium between military and domestic affairs in our economy, politics and culture. He worried that the defense industry’s search for profits would warp foreign policy and, conversely, that too much state control of the private sector would cause economic stagnation. He warned that unending preparations for war were incongruous with the nation’s history. He cautioned that war and warmaking took up too large a proportion of national life, with grave ramifications for our spiritual health.

The military-industrial complex has not emerged in quite the way Eisenhower envisioned. The United States spends an enormous sum on defense — over $700 billion last year, about half of all military spending in the world — but in terms of our total economy, it has steadily declined to less than 5 percent of gross domestic product from 14 percent in 1953. Defense-related research has not produced an ossified garrison state; in fact, it has yielded a host of beneficial technologies, from the Internet to civilian nuclear power to GPS navigation. The United States has an enormous armaments industry, but it has not hampered employment and economic growth. In fact, Congress’s favorite argument against reducing defense spending is the job loss such cuts would entail.

Nor has the private sector infected foreign policy in the way that Eisenhower warned. Foreign policy has become increasingly reliant on military solutions since World War II, but we are a long way from the Marines’ repeated occupations of Haiti, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic in the early 20th century, when commercial interests influenced military action. Of all the criticisms of the 2003 Iraq war, the idea that it was done to somehow magically decrease the cost of oil is the least credible. Though it’s true that mercenaries and contractors have exploited the wars of the past decade, hard decisions about the use of military force are made today much as they were in Eisenhower’s day: by the president, advised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council, and then more or less rubber-stamped by Congress. Corporations do not get a vote, at least not yet.

But Eisenhower’s least heeded warning — concerning the spiritual effects of permanent preparations for war — is more important now than ever. Our culture has militarized considerably since Eisenhower’s era, and civilians, not the armed services, have been the principal cause. From lawmakers’ constant use of “support our troops” to justify defense spending, to TV programs and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland” and “Call of Duty,” to NBC’s shameful and unreal reality show “Stars Earn Stripes,” Americans are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political and commercial agendas. Of course, veterans should be thanked for serving their country, as should police officers, emergency workers and teachers. But no institution — particularly one financed by the taxpayers — should be immune from thoughtful criticism.

Like all institutions, the military works to enhance its public image, but this is just one element of militarization. Most of the political discourse on military matters comes from civilians, who are more vocal about “supporting our troops” than the troops themselves. It doesn’t help that there are fewer veterans in Congress today than at any previous point since World War II. Those who have served are less likely to offer unvarnished praise for the military, for it, like all institutions, has its own frustrations and failings. But for non-veterans — including about four-fifths of all members of Congress — there is only unequivocal, unhesitating adulation. The political costs of anything else are just too high.

For proof of this phenomenon, one need look no further than the continuing furor over sequestration — the automatic cuts, evenly divided between Pentagon and nonsecurity spending, that will go into effect in January if a deal on the debt and deficits isn’t reached. As Bob Woodward’s latest book reveals, the Obama administration devised the measure last year to include across-the-board defense cuts because it believed that slashing defense was so unthinkable that it would make compromise inevitable.

But after a grand budget deal collapsed, in large part because of resistance from House Republicans, both parties reframed sequestration as an attack on the troops (even though it has provisions that would protect military pay). The fact that sequestration would also devastate education, health and programs for children has not had the same impact.

Eisenhower understood the trade-offs between guns and butter. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he warned in 1953, early in his presidency. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

He also knew that Congress was a big part of the problem. (In earlier drafts, he referred to the “military-industrial-Congressional” complex, but decided against alienating the legislature in his last days in office.) Today, there are just a select few in public life who are willing to question the military or its spending, and those who do — from the libertarian Ron Paul to the leftist Dennis J. Kucinich — are dismissed as unrealistic.

The fact that both President Obama and Mitt Romney are calling for increases to the defense budget (in the latter case, above what the military has asked for) is further proof that the military is the true “third rail” of American politics. In this strange universe where those without military credentials can’t endorse defense cuts, it took a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, to make the obvious point that the nation’s ballooning debt was the biggest threat to national security.

Uncritical support of all things martial is quickly becoming the new normal for our youth. Hardly any of my students at the Naval Academy remember a time when their nation wasn’t at war. Almost all think it ordinary to hear of drone strikes in Yemen or Taliban attacks in Afghanistan. The recent revelation of counterterrorism bases in Africa elicits no surprise in them, nor do the military ceremonies that are now regular features at sporting events. That which is left unexamined eventually becomes invisible, and as a result, few Americans today are giving sufficient consideration to the full range of violent activities the government undertakes in their names.

Were Eisenhower alive, he’d be aghast at our debt, deficits and still expanding military-industrial complex. And he would certainly be critical of the “insidious penetration of our minds” by video game companies and television networks, the news media and the partisan pundits. With so little knowledge of what Eisenhower called the “lingering sadness of war” and the “certain agony of the battlefield,” they have done as much as anyone to turn the hard work of national security into the crass business of politics and entertainment.

Aaron B. O’Connell, an assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy and a Marine reserve officer, is the author of “Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 5, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Permanent Militarization of America.

Fellowships, Oxford-Princeton, UK-USA

Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowships:

Call for Applications

Applications are now open for for a number of two-year fellowships to work on global governance and the role of developing and emerging countries in the world political economy. Fellowships are open to nationals of non-OECD countries and up to to six such fellowships will be awarded to start in September 2013. Fellows will spend a year in Oxford, where they are based at the Global Economic Governance Programme, University College, followed by a year at Princeton, where they are based at Niehaus Centre for Globalization and Governance, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The fellowship programme is directed by Professor Ngaire Woods and Professor Robert Keohane.

Further details can be found at: http://glf.univ.ox.ac.uk (look on the 'events' page)

The closing date for applications is: 19th November 2012.

Affirmative Action: American Style (rethinking the wole) - The New York Times

CAPITAL IDEAS

Rethinking Affirmative Action

The New York Times, October 13, 2012

THE founding principle of affirmative action was fairness. After years of oppression, it seemed folly to judge blacks by the same measures as whites.

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said in a 1965 speech that laid the groundwork for affirmative action, “and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Given this history, it was striking to watch the 80 minutes of Supreme Court oral arguments about affirmative actionon Wednesday. With the courtroom overflowing, filled with people who have spent their careers fighting for or against affirmative action, only one side talked about fairness. And it was not the side defending affirmative action.

The lawyer for Abigail Fisher, a young white woman rejected by the University of Texas, argued that she had been denied equal treatment. The conservative justices, sympathetic to Ms. Fisher’s case, expressed particular concern that affluent black students were receiving preferential treatment.

Nobody on the other side — not the university’s lawyer, not the Obama administration’s, not the liberal justices — responded by talking about the obstacles that black and Latino students must overcome. The defenders of affirmative action spoke instead about the value of diversity. Without diverse college classes, they argued, students will learn less and society will lack for future leaders.

The decision to emphasize diversity over fairness is one that affirmative-action proponents made long before Wednesday, and it is a big reason they find themselves in such a vulnerable position today.

Americans value diversity. But they value fairness more. Most people oppose a college’s or employer’s rejecting an applicant who appears qualified for the sake of creating a group that demographically resembles the country.

With affirmative action boiled down to a diversity program, it finds itself in retreat. Five of the six states that have held referendums on racial preferences have banned them, including California and Florida. The Supreme Court limited the legal forms of preferences in 2003 and suggested that they had only 25 years left. Based on last week’s oral arguments, and the fact that Justice Anthony Kennedy has never voted to uphold preferences, the court may restrict them further or forbid them.

Yet supporters of affirmative action do not necessarily need to despair. They still have apath open to them, one that remains legal and popular. It involves resurrecting Johnson’s vision of an affirmative action program based on fairness, which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also favored.

The crucial choice that affirmative-action proponents made long ago was to focus the program on race rather than more broadly on disadvantage.

There were some obvious reasons to do so. Americans have never been comfortable talking about class. It reeks of the social order the country rejected at its founding (Britain’s) and of the economic system the country spent decades fighting (communism). But race was an undeniably American problem, from slavery to civil rights to the discrimination that, according to voluminous social-science research, lingers.

By forgoing a broader view of disadvantage, colleges lost the ability to claim that their overriding goal was meritocracy. “That was the key moment, when they forfeited fairness,”Richard D. Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, who has written a book about affirmative action, told me.

Institutions using affirmative action could not claim to be bringing everybody — rich and poor, white and black, native and immigrant — up to the same starting line, in Mr. Johnson’s formulation. They instead were creating a system that depended on racial categories.

From a legal perspective, the decision made the supporters’ task harder. The very laws intended to address the country’s racial history set a high bar for any race-based system. In its first major affirmative-action ruling, the Bakke case of 1978, the Supreme Court rejected the notion that society-wide discrimination justified preferences for individuals. The court reaffirmed that finding in 2003, while also reaffirming that diversity was a legitimate rationale.

It is impossible to know whether affirmative action could have had a more enduring foundation were it based on a broader equal-opportunity approach. Proponents never tried this alternative. Courts, however, have consistently upheld socioeconomic preferences. Had black and Latino students been benefiting from those preferences, as many would, at least some portion of affirmative action might be in less peril.

But the liberals behind the great successes of the civil rights and women’s movements never showed as much interest in economic diversity. On college campuses, administrators have insisted for years that they care about disadvantage, beyond race, but they have done relatively little about it. They have preferred a version of diversity focused on elites from every race.

Black and Latino college applicants, as well as athletes and so-called legacies, receive large preferences — the equivalent of 150 to 300 SAT points. Low-income students, controlling for race, receive either no preference or a modest one, depending on which study you believe. At the country’s 200 most selective colleges, a mere 5 percent of students come from the bottom 25 percent of the income spectrum, according to Anthony P. Carnevale of Georgetown. In court on Wednesday, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. attacked the political underbelly of this system. The University of Texas argued that diversity within racial groups was also important, citing “the African-American or Hispanic child of successful professionals in Dallas.” Skeptically, Justice Alito asked the university’s lawyer, “They deserve a leg up against, let’s say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average?”

Justice Kennedy followed up by telling the lawyer, in one of the most quoted lines of the day, “So what you’re saying is that what counts is race above all.”

Even in California, which has banned racial preferences, race can still dominate the debate. Richard H. Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found some hard-to-explain patterns in U.C.L.A.’s undergraduate admissions. The college has accepted a significantly higher percentage of blacks and Latinos than whites and Asians with the same “holistic score,” a number the admissions office gives to every applicant, based on test scores, grades, extracurricular activities and obstacles overcome. U.C.L.A. officials say that the holistic scores do not fully capture the obstacles some students face.

Back in the 1960s, Dr. King understood the vulnerability of today’s affirmative action. “Many white workers whose economic condition is not too far removed from the economic condition of his black brother will find it difficult to accept,” he wrote in a private letter, “special consideration to the Negro in the context of unemployment, joblessness, etc. and does not take into sufficient account their plight (that of the white worker).”

If the courts and voters continue to restrict racial preferences, supporters will have three options. They can give up, which is unlikely. They can quietly subvert the law, as some critics, like Mr. Sander, believe is happening in California. Or they can attempt an overhaul of affirmative action.

The economic argument for a different version has only become stronger over time. Outright racism certainly exists, and colleges would have a hard time taking it into account if race-based affirmative action became illegal. But simple discrimination seems to have become a relatively smaller obstacle over the last few decades, while socioeconomic disadvantage has become a larger one.

The title of a recent paper by Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard economist, summarizes the trends: “Racial inequality in the 21st century: The declining significance of discrimination.”

Racial gaps remain large enough that colleges would struggle to recruit as many black and Latino students without explicitly taking race into account. But some experts, like Mr. Kahlenberg, think they could come close. To do so, they would need to consider not just income, but also wealth, family structure and neighborhood poverty. Those factors disproportionately afflict black and Latino students — and hold back children from life’s starting line.

Mr. Kahlenberg argues that wealth is especially defensible, because it can capture discrimination’s intergenerational effects. Some universities in states where racial preferences are banned, including California, have begun taking small steps to consider class more fully.

Until the Supreme Court rules, sometime next year, the focus will be on its decision. And its decision matters. Yet the choices that universities make matter, too. You wouldn’t have known it from sitting in the courtroom, but there is a version of affirmative action — legal, generally popular and arguably more meritocratic — that higher education has not yet even tried.

David Leonhardt is the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times.