Former Maryland Congressman John Delaney argued during Tuesday night’s Democratic primary debate in Detroit that his opponents’ support for Medicare-for-All “isn’t about health care, this is an anti-private sector strategy.”
Insofar as some of his opponents support eradicating private health insurance, he’s not wrong. Sen. Bernie Sanders (D–Vt.), who has defended eliminating private health insurance in the past, did not push back on CNN moderator Jake Tapper’s statement that Medicare-for-All would “take private health insurance away from over 150 million Americans.” Instead, Sanders used the fact that the healthcare industry makes “tens of billions in profit” as evidence that the current system is dysfunctional, even though corporate profits are relatively small in the context of the entire U.S. healthcare system. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who also supports eliminating private insurance, described the business model of private health insurance companies as “taking as much money as you can in premiums and pay out as little as possible in health care coverage.”
In response, Delaney criticized Medicare-for-All. While the former congressman didn’t focus on the roughly$32 trillion cost of the program, he did argue that it would restrict choice. He told the Detroit debate audience that he didn’t want the Democratic Party to “be the party of subtraction, and telling half the country, who has private health insurance, that their health insurance is illegal.”
Instead, Delaney favorsuniversal catastrophic coverage, which means the government would provide a certain type of insurance to everyone under the age of 65. This insurance would cover major, unexpected medical ailments. For other procedures, people can use supplemental private insurance, pay out of pocket, or if they are below a certain income threshold, qualify for additional government assistance. This form of health insurance is the model Singapore uses, a country with the lowest government healthcare spending per capita in the developed world. Under this system, workers could opt out and remain on their more comprehensive employer-sponsored insurance, although Delaney has proposed eliminating the tax exclusion for employer health plans.
Delaney’s plan would rein in some perceived excesses of the current private health insurance system by moving away from health insurance as the main way to pay for healthcare and instead make it a way to manage the risk of high-cost medical ailments. That said, the option of private insurance would still be there for patients.
The critical rhetoric from Sanders and Warren about profit in the health-care system suggests they are not interested just in achieving universal health care, because, as Delaney demonstrated Tuesday, there are other ways to achieve it.
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Millennials who have delayed marriage, children, and homeownership, have been spending their money not just on servicing their student loans but also on fun adventures throughout Southeast Asia.
Some of these youngsters have been backpacking in countries like Hong Kong and Thailand without money, forced onto the streets to beg for money to fund the remainder of their trip, reported The Guardian.
Locals have called western backpackers: “begpackers,” and government officials in several countries have had enough with these pesky white youngsters asking for money from people who are significantly poorer than they’re.
To counter begpackers panhandling on the street, Hong Kong implemented new busking laws, banning all street performances due to noise complaints.
Thailand has started asking tourist at airports to provide financial information that shows they’ve enough funds to travel.
Bali, an Indonesian island known for its beaches, is so furious with begpackers that if caught by the police, they will be sent to their respective countries’ embassies.
“We tend to report these cases to the relevant embassies so that they can oversee their citizens who are on holiday,” authorities from Bali said.
Begpacking is not limited to countries in Soth East Asia. The trend has recently extended into South Korea, where a video has surfaced online showed a Korean man verbally blasting a begpacker who was begging for money, telling him that he needs to go back to his own country.
Sometimes millennials use tricks to deceive locals into guilt who are more impoverished than them, often use the excuse that they lost their wallet or passport. Some even sell art, photographs, and trinkets on city streets, asking for tips to fund their travels. In those cases, it’s more difficult for authorities to catch someone for begpacking.
For f*ck’s sake, the white #begpackers are getting their desperate “act” together for the night. As usual in Seoul’s Jongno 3-ga, in front of not-so-well-off elderly people, who generously donate their cash, believing these shameless scums are actually poor. #베그패커 추방해라! pic.twitter.com/jtGlYSwiH1
So Korea’s YTN news channel has finally reported on the sudden rise in #begpackers flooding the streets in Seoul/Korea. My photos and footage also included 😉 The conclusion: crackdown is difficult, but experts say gov needs to come up with measures. https://t.co/3oz05hz6CVpic.twitter.com/SruEwegUgH
The #begpackers move in gangs to their next spot. Organised crime. To fleece some more elderly poor people from their generosity and hard earned cash. Yet authorities say nothing. pic.twitter.com/xayRKQly9u
Just f*ck off already! Yet another begging white #begpacker scumbag in Seoul’s Jongno 3-ga, as usual in front of elderly and poor people who cannot comprehend how the mighty white man is in need, so share their pennies.
Foreign policy got all of about 15 minutes of attention during Tuesday night’s two-and-a-half hour Democratic Primary debate in Detroit. Fortunately, the few Democratic presidential candidates who spoke on the topic made it clear that they favored bringing American troops home and ending our current wars.
When asked about the two soldiers killed in Afghanistan on Monday, both South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and then Beto O’Rourke promised that they would bring all troops home from Afghanistan by the end of their first year in office.
“We will withdraw,” Buttigieg said bluntly. “Congress has been asleep at the switch” when it comes to its role in overseeing the authorizations for the president and military to engage in war, he added. Buttigieg proposed that all future Congressional Authorizations for the Use of Military Force come with an automatic three-year sunset, meaning that Congress would have to actually vote to allow military interventions to continue and potentially be held accountable by voters for their decisions.
“We’ve satisfied the reasons for our involvement in Afghanistan in the first place,” O’Rourke said, promising to withdraw troops not just from Afghanistan, but Iraq, Yemen, and any other country where troops were engaged in military activity under the current authorization.
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper was the odd man out, insisting that pulling all troops out of Afghanistan would create a humanitarian disaster, inexplicably adding, “Look at all the progress that has happened in Afghanistan.” In reality, Afghanistan has descended even further into corruption and tribal conflict. The two soldiers who were killed Monday were apparently victims of an “insider attack,” meaning they were shot by one of the very Afghan soldiers the U.S. military was training.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) added that the military’s role is supposed to be limited: “We should not be asking the military to take on jobs that do not have a military solution.” Warren has been making her propensity for planning a central part of her campaign (“I have a plan for that”) and said that America should have a plan to eventually withdraw troops whenever it sends troops into military action in other countries.
In all, the foreign policy discussion was thin and superficial given that we still have troops in harm’s way overseas. A brief discussion of using more diplomacy and less military intervention descended into complaints about President Donald Trump cozying up to foreign dictators. And there was a brief, weird, and completely irrelevant exchange between Warren and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who seemed to object to Warren’s position that the U.S. should never use nuclear weapons to strike first. And that was about it for foreign policy.
Should we believe them? Both Barack Obama and Trump campaigned on getting troops out of Afghanistan, and yet there our troops remain.
Shoddy work is not uncommon for government commissions. But with its awkwardly-titled new report — “Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities” — the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights goes beyond shoddy. Its unsupported claims threaten teachers’ ability to keep control of their classrooms.
No one disputes that African-American, Native American and Pacific Islander students get disciplined at school at higher rates than white students. Similarly, white students are disciplined at higher rates than Asian-American students, and boys are disciplined more often than girls. Not surprisingly, students with behavioral disabilities get in more trouble than those without.
Sometimes the differences are substantial. Suspension rates, for example, have been about three times higher for African-Americans than for whites in recent years.
The commission purports to find, however, that “students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers.” According to the commission, they are simply punished more. Readers are left to imagine our schools are not just occasionally unfair, but rather astonishingly unfair on matters of discipline.
The report provides no evidence to support its sweeping assertion and, sadly, there is abundant evidence to the contrary. For example, the National Center for Education Statistics surveys high school students biennially. Since 1993, it has asked students whether they have been in a fight on school property over the past 12 months. The results have been consistent. In 2015, 12.6 percent of African-American students reported being in such a fight, while only 5.6 percent of white students did.
A different study of school misbehavior shows that among 10th-grade boys, 7.9 percent of African-Americans, 7.4 of Native Americans and 3.0 percent of whites admit to having possessed a gun at school. A third study found similar racial disproportionalities in self-reported gang membership.
There is a wealth of data and analysis out there. Some of it suggests that discrimination by teachers may play a small role in disciplinary rates. Some of it suggests that discrimination may play no role at all. But I know of nothing that supports the commission‘s claim that there are no racial differences actual misbehavior.
I wish racial disparities of this kind did not exist. And there is very little I wouldn’t give to make them disappear — the sooner the better. But the evidence shows they do exist, and pretending otherwise doesn’t benefit anyone (with the unfortunate exception of identity politics activists). It certainly does not benefit minority children.
To the contrary, because minority students disproportionately go to school with other minority students, when teachers fail to keep order out of fear that they will be accused of racism, it is these minority students — stuck in disorderly classrooms — who suffer most.
What accounts for the differing misbehavior rates? The best anybody can say is, “We don’t know entirely.” But differing poverty rates, differing fatherless household rates, differing parental education, differing achievement in school, and histories of policy failures and injustices likely each play a part. Whatever the genesis of these disparities, they need to be dealt with realistically. We don’t live in a make-believe world.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg reiterated his vision to let gig economy workers unionize during the second round of Democratic primary debates on Tuesday night in Detroit.
“There are people in the gig economy who go through more jobs in a week than my parents went through in their lifetime,” said Buttigieg to a round of applause. “It’s why I’ve proposed that we allow gig workers to unionize because a gig is a job and a worker is a worker.”
The remark reflects one of his recent proposals, which centers around “empowering workers in a changing economy” by increasing workplace protections, particularly for those who choose to work in the gig economy. As it stands, Buttigieg sees their status as too precarious.
But in order to successfully execute that plan, the presidential hopeful would need to ensure those workers are reclassified as fully-fledged employees, as opposed to independent contractors. That may be a tough sell: The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) already ruled that Uber drivers cannot unionize because they are independent contractors, and the Department of Labor similarly declined to classify gig economy participants as employees. Both agencies said that those individuals are free to work when they please, can set their own hours when it best suits them, and are permitted to work for competing companies. Those criteria, and several others, make them contractors.
Changing their employment status would be fairly devastating to the gig economy business model that makes that work possible and those services accessible and affordable. Mandating employee status for all workers would allow them to unionize, yes, but it would also require those app companies to provide benefits and supply workers with a minimum wage.
Buttigieg says that would be a good thing. But such a move would send labor costs through the roof, catalyzing a significant spikes in prices—something that will disproportionately affect low-income individuals, who benefit immensely from access to these services. Higher praises would reduce demand and make such jobs less available. In New York City, 90 percent of app-based drivers are first-generation immigrants, a testament to the opportunity such apps give the disadvantaged. With Buttigieg’s plan, those opportunities would surely shrink.
And as Reason‘s Nick Gillespie points out, private sector union participation is small, a trend that’s unlikely to reverse itself. As the country continues to move away from industrialized labor, so, too, have workers moved away from unionization.
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Foreign policy got all of about 15 minutes of attention during Tuesday night’s two-and-a-half hour Democratic Primary debate in Detroit. Fortunately, the few Democratic presidential candidates who spoke on the topic made it clear that they favored bringing American troops home and ending our current wars.
When asked about the two soldiers killed in Afghanistan on Monday, both South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and then Beto O’Rourke promised that they would bring all troops home from Afghanistan by the end of their first year in office.
“We will withdraw,” Buttigieg said bluntly. “Congress has been asleep at the switch” when it comes to its role in overseeing the authorizations for the president and military to engage in war, he added. Buttigieg proposed that all future Congressional Authorizations for the Use of Military Force come with an automatic three-year sunset, meaning that Congress would have to actually vote to allow military interventions to continue and potentially be held accountable by voters for their decisions.
“We’ve satisfied the reasons for our involvement in Afghanistan in the first place,” O’Rourke said, promising to withdraw troops not just from Afghanistan, but Iraq, Yemen, and any other country where troops were engaged in military activity under the current authorization.
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper was the odd man out, insisting that pulling all troops out of Afghanistan would create a humanitarian disaster, inexplicably adding, “Look at all the progress that has happened in Afghanistan.” In reality, Afghanistan has descended even further into corruption and tribal conflict. The two soldiers who were killed Monday were apparently victims of an “insider attack,” meaning they were shot by one of the very Afghan soldiers the U.S. military was training.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) added that the military’s role is supposed to be limited: “We should not be asking the military to take on jobs that do not have a military solution.” Warren has been making her propensity for planning a central part of her campaign (“I have a plan for that”) and said that America should have a plan to eventually withdraw troops whenever it sends troops into military action in other countries.
In all, the foreign policy discussion was thin and superficial given that we still have troops in harm’s way overseas. A brief discussion of using more diplomacy and less military intervention descended into complaints about President Donald Trump cozying up to foreign dictators. And there was a brief, weird, and completely irrelevant exchange between Warren and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who seemed to object to Warren’s position that the U.S. should never use nuclear weapons to strike first. And that was about it for foreign policy.
Should we believe them? Both Barack Obama and Trump campaigned on getting troops out of Afghanistan, and yet there our troops remain.
Shoddy work is not uncommon for government commissions. But with its awkwardly-titled new report — “Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities” — the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights goes beyond shoddy. Its unsupported claims threaten teachers’ ability to keep control of their classrooms.
No one disputes that African-American, Native American and Pacific Islander students get disciplined at school at higher rates than white students. Similarly, white students are disciplined at higher rates than Asian-American students, and boys are disciplined more often than girls. Not surprisingly, students with behavioral disabilities get in more trouble than those without.
Sometimes the differences are substantial. Suspension rates, for example, have been about three times higher for African-Americans than for whites in recent years.
The commission purports to find, however, that “students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers.” According to the commission, they are simply punished more. Readers are left to imagine our schools are not just occasionally unfair, but rather astonishingly unfair on matters of discipline.
The report provides no evidence to support its sweeping assertion and, sadly, there is abundant evidence to the contrary. For example, the National Center for Education Statistics surveys high school students biennially. Since 1993, it has asked students whether they have been in a fight on school property over the past 12 months. The results have been consistent. In 2015, 12.6 percent of African-American students reported being in such a fight, while only 5.6 percent of white students did.
A different study of school misbehavior shows that among 10th-grade boys, 7.9 percent of African-Americans, 7.4 of Native Americans and 3.0 percent of whites admit to having possessed a gun at school. A third study found similar racial disproportionalities in self-reported gang membership.
There is a wealth of data and analysis out there. Some of it suggests that discrimination by teachers may play a small role in disciplinary rates. Some of it suggests that discrimination may play no role at all. But I know of nothing that supports the commission‘s claim that there are no racial differences actual misbehavior.
I wish racial disparities of this kind did not exist. And there is very little I wouldn’t give to make them disappear — the sooner the better. But the evidence shows they do exist, and pretending otherwise doesn’t benefit anyone (with the unfortunate exception of identity politics activists). It certainly does not benefit minority children.
To the contrary, because minority students disproportionately go to school with other minority students, when teachers fail to keep order out of fear that they will be accused of racism, it is these minority students — stuck in disorderly classrooms — who suffer most.
What accounts for the differing misbehavior rates? The best anybody can say is, “We don’t know entirely.” But differing poverty rates, differing fatherless household rates, differing parental education, differing achievement in school, and histories of policy failures and injustices likely each play a part. Whatever the genesis of these disparities, they need to be dealt with realistically. We don’t live in a make-believe world.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg reiterated his vision to let gig economy workers unionize during the second round of Democratic primary debates on Tuesday night in Detroit.
“There are people in the gig economy who go through more jobs in a week than my parents went through in their lifetime,” said Buttigieg to a round of applause. “It’s why I’ve proposed that we allow gig workers to unionize because a gig is a job and a worker is a worker.”
The remark reflects one of his recent proposals, which centers around “empowering workers in a changing economy” by increasing workplace protections, particularly for those who choose to work in the gig economy. As it stands, Buttigieg sees their status as too precarious.
But in order to successfully execute that plan, the presidential hopeful would need to ensure those workers are reclassified as fully-fledged employees, as opposed to independent contractors. That may be a tough sell: The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) already ruled that Uber drivers cannot unionize because they are independent contractors, and the Department of Labor similarly declined to classify gig economy participants as employees. Both agencies said that those individuals are free to work when they please, can set their own hours when it best suits them, and are permitted to work for competing companies. Those criteria, and several others, make them contractors.
Changing their employment status would be fairly devastating to the gig economy business model that makes that work possible and those services accessible and affordable. Mandating employee status for all workers would allow them to unionize, yes, but it would also require those app companies to provide benefits and supply workers with a minimum wage.
Buttigieg says that would be a good thing. But such a move would send labor costs through the roof, catalyzing a significant spikes in prices—something that will disproportionately affect low-income individuals, who benefit immensely from access to these services. Higher praises would reduce demand and make such jobs less available. In New York City, 90 percent of app-based drivers are first-generation immigrants, a testament to the opportunity such apps give the disadvantaged. With Buttigieg’s plan, those opportunities would surely shrink.
And as Reason‘s Nick Gillespie points out, private sector union participation is small, a trend that’s unlikely to reverse itself. As the country continues to move away from industrialized labor, so, too, have workers moved away from unionization.
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Could Donald Trump end the Afghan war someday? I don’t know if such a possibility has been on your mind, but it’s certainly been on the mind of this retired U.S. Army major who fought in that land so long ago. And here’s the context in which I’ve been thinking about that very possibility.
Back in the previous century, it used to be said that “only Nixon could go to China.” In other words, only a longtime cold warrior and red-baiter like President Richard Nixon had the necessary tough-guy credentials to break with a tradition more than two decades old in February 1972. It was then that he and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger traveled to Beijing and met with Communist leader Mao Zedong. In that way, they began a process of reestablishing relations with China (now again being impairedby Donald Trump) broken when the Communists won a civil war against the American-backed nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek and came to power in 1949.
By the same token, perhaps no one but Nixon could have eventually — after hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and Americans died — extracted the United States from what was then (but is no longer) America’s longest war, the one in Vietnam. After all, in 1973, it was hard to imagine just about any Democrat agreeing to the sort of unseemly concessions at the negotiating table in Paris that resulted in an actual peace accord with a crew of Communists. But Nixon did so.
After those “peace” talks and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that land, the corrupt, battered U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government barely held on for another two gruesome years before a massive Communist offensive finally took Saigon, the capital of the American-backed half of that country in April 1975. Images of U.S. military helicopters hastily evacuating American diplomats and others from Saigon would prove embarrassing indeed. Yet, in the end, little could have altered the ultimate outcome of that war.
Nixon, a cynic’s cynic, evidently sensed just that. Yes, he would prolong the war to the tune of more than 20,000 additional U.S. troop deaths and seek to create a politically palatable pause between the withdrawal of American troops and the unavoidable Communist victory to come (at the cost of god knows how many more dead Vietnamese). It was what he called “breathing space.” In the end, in other words, in the bloodiest way imaginable, he finally accepted both his presidential, and Washington’s, limitations in what was, after all, a Vietnamese civil war.
Fellow TomDispatchregular Andrew Bacevich has referred to such realities as “the limits of power.” As a longtime military man who once carried water for the American empire in both Afghanistan and Iraq, let me assure you that, almost two decades into the twenty-first century, those limits still couldn’t be more real.
Recently, I got to thinking about Vietnam and Bacevich — himself a veteran of that war — while following the strange pace of the Trump administration’s peace talks with the Taliban. It struck me that the president, his negotiators, and his loyally “deplorable” backers might (gulp!) just be America’s best hope for striking a deal, 18 years late, to conclude the U.S. military’s role in Afghanistan. If so, he would end the war that replaced Vietnam as this country’s longest — and that’s without even counting the first Afghan War Washington fought there against the Red Army of the now-defunct Soviet Union from 1979 to 1989.
An Unwinnable War
For someone like me who long ago turned his back on America’s never-ending wars on terror, it’s discomfiting to imagine the process that might finally lead to a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, especially one negotiated by The Donald and his strange team of hawks. Of one thing, rest assured: bad things will happen afterward. Afghans whom Americans are sympathetic to, especially women, will suffer under the heel of the kind of extreme Islamism that will be in command in significant parts of the country. And getting there could be no less grim. After all, President Trump, that self-proclaimed “deal-maker,” has so far shown himself to be anything but impressive in striking deals. Nevertheless, he has, at least, regularly criticized the ill-advised Afghan War for years and his instincts, when it comes to that conflict, though unsophisticated and ill-informed, seem sound.
In a sense, the situation isn’t complicated: the U.S. war in Afghanistan cannot be won. The Kabul-based government’s gross domestic product can’t even support its own military budget, leaving it endlessly reliant on aid from Washington and its allies. Its security forces have been taking what, last December, the American general about to become the head of U.S. Central Command termed “unsustainable” casualties — 45,000 battle deaths since 2014. Those security forces simply can’t recruit enough new members to replace such massive losses.
Today, the U.S.-backed regime controls less of Afghanistan than at any point in the nearly two-decade-long war, despite all the American bombs dropped and troops deployed these past 18 years. Rather than grapple with that inconvenient fact, the U.S. military simply stopped counting how much of the country the Taliban now contests or controls. For these and a plethora of other reasons, that military and its Afghan proxies won’t be able to change the ultimate outcome of the Taliban’s war in Afghanistan. Forgive me, then, for placing some hope in President Trump and his negotiators.
The disconcerting truth is that the brutal, venal, medieval Taliban movement is popular in the ethnic-Pashtun-dominated south and the mountainous east of Afghanistan. In 2011-2012, as a lowly company commander in a sub-district of Kandahar, the province that birthed the Taliban, I saw firsthand just how much sympathy villagers seemed to have for that Islamist cause. Sure, many — so, at least, they said — were opposed to that movement’s violent campaign to control the province and the country, but culturally and religiously in some fashion many of them seemed to agree with the group’s basic agenda and worldview.
Most of the Taliban foot soldiers I faced were little more than impoverished farm boys with guns drawn to the movement as much by patriotic opposition to the American military occupation of their country as by any desire for the application of sharia law. In addition, many in the region were making at least modest sums off Afghanistan’s record-breaking opium trade, something the U.S. was never truly capable of controlling or suppressing. The bottom line: the American war in Afghanistan was essentially over then. It’s over now, a defeat that neither politicians in Washington nor Pentagon officials have been able to accept to date.
A Brief Litany of Messy Wars and Their Endings Since 1945
The certainty of imperial failure in anticolonial and counterinsurgency conflicts has defined the era of war making since at least 1945. So it shall be in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering some of those oft-forgotten conflicts.
In the favored American version of war, endings involve unconditional surrender by a defeated enemy, whether Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865 or imperial Japanese officials on the deck of the USSMissouri in 1945. But such moments, historically speaking, couldn’t be more rare in “the American century.” After World War II, as the last colonial wars of the European powers ended in defeat or the withdrawal of imperial forces, the U.S. military went to war globally with Third World “Communism” — and victory became a thoroughly outmoded word. In the Korean War (1950-1953), which never officially ended, the U.S. finally settled for a status quo truce with its North Korean and Chinese opponents. Tens of thousands of American troops and millions of Koreans died in what essentially amounted to a negotiated draw. Vietnam, as noted, ended in the negotiated version of an outright defeat.
Meanwhile, the French, already booted out of Vietnam in the First Indochina War (1954-1962), tried to torture and kill their way to victory in colonial Algeria before accepting defeat there, too. (A coup attempt by disgruntled right-wing military officers during that counterinsurgency almost cost France its democracy.) Nor could a declining Great Britain kill its way out of the last of its colonial wars, the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland (1969-1998). That 30-year war with the quasi-socialist, nationalist Irish Republican Army (IRA) only ended when London demonstrated a willingness to negotiate with that group and draw it into electoral politics. Not only was there no military victory to be had, but Britons had to swallow the embarrassing spectacle of former IRA bombers being released from prison and onetime IRA commanders entering parliament at Westminster.
In smaller conflicts and interventions, the American military withdrew from Lebanon in 1983 after some 220 Marines (and 20 other service personnel) were killed in a suicide bombing and the until-then hawkish President Ronald Reagan realized he’d stepped into an unwinnable morass. In 1994, President Bill Clinton did the same in Somalia after 18 U.S. troops were killed in a chaotic shootout the previous year with a warlord militia in a local civil war. (Twenty-five years later, however, U.S. drones and special operators are still battling it out in that chronically war-ravaged society.)
One lesson to draw from such an abbreviated version of American and allied morasses and military defeats at the hands of nationalist militants, left and right, is that suppressing people’s movements has historically proven difficult indeed. Most of the insurgencies of the long Cold War era were led by vaguely Marxist or, at least, leftist groups. In this century, however, similar insurgencies are led by right-wing Islamist groups. Either way the results have generally been the same. The insurgents, not the governments the U.S. imposed and/or backed, are almost invariably seen by local populations as the more popular, legitimate fighting forces.
Marxism (and its Soviet communist variant) ran its course in local societies as the Cold War wound to its conclusion, but such movements were never truly defeated by the U.S. military and its brutal right-wing proxies, even in the Americas (as in Nicaragua in the 1980s). Islamist theocracy is undoubtedly abhorrent, but it, too, must run its course and (hopefully) sooner or later be defeated by forces within the societies where it’s now conducting its terror wars. Just as in Vietnam, the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan in this century has only served as an accelerant for what might be thought of as political and military arson.
A Messy End
Predictions are tricky when it comes to war, but here’s a safe enough bet: in the wake of any Trump administration “peace” deal with the Taliban, like the South Vietnamese government of the Nixon era, a corrupt, scarcely legitimate U.S.-backed Afghan government and its badly battered security forces will, sooner or later, find themselves back at war. And they will be fighting an ever more confident Taliban. The Kabul-based regime could perhaps hold onto the biggest cities (except possibly Kandahar) and significant parts of the country’s north and west where there are Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara minority enclaves long opposed to the Islamist insurgents. The Taliban would then dominate much of the south and east, leaving Afghanistan divided and still violent indeed until, perhaps, like the South Vietnamese government, the one in Kabul collapsed.
Still, it’s unlikely the Taliban will ever again risk harboring large numbers of transnational terrorists or stand by as a bin Laden-style attack is planned in Afghanistan’s mountains or valleys. After all, its goals have always been Afghan-centric, not global. What’s more, it appears that its negotiators have tacitly promised not to protect or ally with al-Qaeda or its newer offshoot, the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan (which, in any case, is anything but a prospective ally of theirs).
Of course, transnational terrorists have never needed Afghanistan to hatch attacks on the West. Much of the planning and logistics for the actual 9/11 attacks occurred in Germany and even in the United States itself. In addition, partially thanks to America’s never-ending war on terror, there are increasing numbers of ungoverned spaces and tumultuous regions in dozens of countries in a band stretching from West Africa to Central Asia. Should the U.S. military really station tens of thousands of troops in all those locales? Of course not. Among other things, leaving aside the expense of it to the American taxpayer, U.S. soldiers would only inflame local passions and empower local terror outfits.
So here we are knowing there is little the U.S. can do to change the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan. The only question of consequence is: Could Donald Trump be the twenty-first century’s Richard Nixon? Could he do what no one in his position over the last 18 years has had the political courage to do and end — his phrase — a “stupid” war that has come to seem eternal? If “only Nixon could go to China,” is it possible that only Trump can extract the U.S. military from Afghanistan? God help us, but that seems conceivable.
Now, some in the foreign policy establishment will balk at any eventual Trumpian peace agreement. Army General Mark Milley, the president’s nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for instance, recently bucked his boss during confirmation hearings. He told senators that withdrawing from Afghanistan “too soon,” according to the New York Times, would be a “strategic mistake.” Likewise, Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, a typical Washington foreign policy pundit, has already complained that the current U.S. peace talks with the Taliban in Doha will only lead to a Vietnam-style denouement where U.S. negotiators use a negotiated agreement as a fig leaf to save face, declaring “victory,” while essentially accepting future defeat. And, in this case, O’Hanlon is probably right on the mark, even if wrong to reject such an approach.
Count on this: the end of the American military mission in Afghanistan will be unfulfilling and likely tragic. Still — and here’s where O’Hanlon and his ilk couldn’t be more off the mark — like Vietnam before it, the Afghan war should never have been fought for these last almost 18 years, never could have been won, never will be won, and should be ended in some fashion, even a Trumpian one, as soon as possible.
New findings from the Imperial College London estimate that air pollution causes heart attacks, strokes, and lung disease that kill over 30,000 Americans each year, which is about the same number of deaths from car accidents each year.
The study, published last week in the journal PLOS Medicine, found a connection between cardio-respiratory and excess particulate matter pollution, known as PM2.5, is about 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair — comes from automotive, power generation, and industrial engines.
Millions of Americans are inhaling PM2.5 daily, which build up in small blood vessels in the lungs, and over an extended period, can cause lung disease. These dangerous particles also are absorbed into the bloodstream that can increase the risk of heart disease, the researchers suggested.
Researchers noted that PM2.5 levels have dropped in the last two decades, but in some areas around the country – the levels remain seriously high.
Los Angeles remained one of the worst cities for PM2.5 along with several regions in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama.
Inner cities deemed low-income areas across the US also had dangerous levels of PM2.5.
Researchers said this “inequality in mortality burden” occurred because of the low-income population was already prone to higher rates of preexisting medical conditions.
“I think the big conclusion is that lowering the limits of air pollution could delay in the US, all together, tens of thousands of deaths each year,” Majid Ezzati, the study’s lead author and a professor of global environmental health told CNN.
Air quality data between 1999 and 2015 at over 750 monitoring stations across the US were cross-referenced with death records for cardiovascular-related diseases to determine the dangers of PM2.5, the researchers noted.
The governments acceptable PM2.5 level is 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air (ug/m3).
In 1999, Fresno County, California, recorded 22.1 ug/m3; by 2015, the level was at 13.2 ug/m3 for Tulare County, a region 20 miles from Fresno.
In the last several years, the Trump administration has rolled back a wide variety of regulations that protect the air we breathe.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Zncgy3 Tyler Durden
