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U.S. Foreign Policy from the Founders' Perspective - a Stratfor think piece. (See 1 below)
Obama's foreign policy has not changed from his first term no matter what Ms Rice says. It simply is one of more appeasement because iran, Syria, Russia and the Palestinians have hung tough and Obama is caving like the lemming he is as he dreams on and on. (See 1a and 1b below.)
Another version of Palestinian demands. (See 1c below.)
An article by my friend Jonathan Schanzer (See 1d below.)
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Israel at its best - helping and working with other nations . (See 2 below.)
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Carney is upset with insurance companies for abiding with the laws regarding 'Obamascare.'
Just keep enforcing the law and that should get people riled enough to revolt! (See 3 below.)
Sowell on throwing the rascals out part 2! (See 3a below.)
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Dick
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1) U.S. Foreign Policy from the Founders' Perspective
By David D. Judson
Just last week, the question came again. It is a common one, sometimes from a former colleague in newspaperdom, sometimes from a current colleague here at Stratfor and often from a reader. It is always to the effect of, "Why is Stratfor so often out of sync with the news media?" All of us at Stratfor encounter questions regarding the difference between geopolitical intelligence and political journalism. One useful reply to ponder is that in conventional journalism, the person providing information is presumed to know more about the subject matter than the reader. At Stratfor, the case is frequently the opposite: Our readers typically are expert in the topics we study and write about, and our task is to provide the already well-informed with further insights. But the question is larger than that.
For as the camp of those who make their living selling -- or trying to sell -- words and images grows exponentially via the Internet, the placement of one's electronically tethered tent takes on a new importance. This campsite has its own ecology, something scholars have taken to calling the "media ecosystem." We co-exist in this ecosystem, but geopolitical intelligence is scarcely part of the journalistic flora and fauna. Our uniqueness creates unique challenges, and these are worth some discussion in this space that is generally devoted to more specific geopolitical themes.
For the moment, let's skip how we approach subjects such as Syria's civil war, a protest by Colombian farmers or the tweet by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani after a chat with U.S. President Barack Obama in comparison to our colleagues in the conventional news business. Instead, let's go to the core dynamic of the media in our age and work back outward through the various layers to what we do in the same virtual space, namely, intelligence.
This requires some indulgence, so first, open a new tab in your browser window and go to the search engine Google. No cheating; you must do so before you continue this column. Now, type the following search terms: "David," "Goliath" and "mergers and acquisitions." Hit enter.
What you will see -- and please test us on this -- is essentially a survey of all the small companies of late that have purchased larger ones, along with strategies for small companies to target bigger rivals and maybe an essay or two on various sectoral consolidations. You could get the same information with a week's sorting of SEC filings. But instead, you have just circumvented that laborious process by going straight to just one of the "meta-narratives" that form the superstructure of journalism.
Meta-Narratives at Journalism's Core
Welcome to the news media's inner core. For the fundamental truth of news reporting is that it is constructed atop pre-existing narratives comprising a subject the reader already knows or expects, a description using familiar symbolism often of a moral nature, and a narrative that builds through implicit metaphor from the stories already embedded in our culture and collective consciousness. No writer can, and no writer should, resist these communicative tools. What better way to explain a small Italian tech company's challenge to Microsoft's purchase of Skype than to cast the effort as a "David vs. Goliath battle"? The currency of language really is the collection of what might be called the "meta-stories." Pick up any daily newspaper and you're sure to find Horatio Alger on the business page, Don Quixote in sports, Homer's Odyssey in the education news and a Shakespeare tragedy or two in the style section. They usually won't be clearly identified as such but you can find them. "David and Goliath" is just an unusually good example because it's irresistible to any scribe writing about a clash of Main Street and Wal-Mart. Storytellers proceed out of their own cultural canon, and Western journalists write from the Western canon.
There's nothing wrong with this. For the art of storytelling -- journalism, that is -- is essentially unchanged from the tale-telling of Neolithic shamans millennia ago up through and including today's New York Times. Cultural anthropologists will explain that our brains are wired for this. So be it.
Still working outward from this core reality comes a related phenomenon, the mirroring journalists engage in of one another's stories. How "group think" enters the picture is really a topic for another day. But imagine a crowded orchestra hall with all the concertgoers clapping in unison for an encore. How do 10,000 strangers suddenly, quickly and spontaneously calibrate their clapping into a unified tempo without formal guidance? Such random synchronization is a topic of significant scientific study. Let's skip the details, but the emergence of the familiar contours of the media -- whether they be around the "New South" or the "Arab Spring" or the "East Asian Miracle" -- is pretty much the same phenomenon. We at Stratfor may not "sync up." Journalists certainly do.
Meta-Narratives Meet Meta-Data
There is nothing new in this; it is a process almost as old as the printing press itself. But where it gets particularly new and interesting is with my penultimate layer of difference, the place where meta-narratives meet meta-data.
"Meta-data," as the technologists call it, is more simply understood as "data about data." When a reader of a web page enables a "cookie," this is really an exchange of meta-data that enables the provider to "customize your experience" -- i.e., to try to sell you something in most cases. Backstage at a website like the one I run, we spend a great deal of time "tagging" our analyses with terms we judge a reader likely to use: "Syria" or "chemical weapons" or "Assad," for example. This is how in the exercise above you found all the stories on small and large companies thanks to the many Internet tacticians who had the presence of mind to "tag" David and Goliath.
Where the online battle for eyeballs becomes truly epic, however, (Google "the definition of epic" for yet another storyteller's meta-story) is when these series of tags are organized into a form of meta-data called a "taxonomy." These are really just electronic breadcrumbs to lead to a particular website. The more precisely a webmaster places the bread crumbs relative to the migrating birds -- in this case, readers -- the fuller the cyber-hunter's knapsack of "hits" at the end of the day. Some web designers actually call these forms of meta-data "canonical taxonomies," a serendipitous term that supports the argument here.
And thus we arrive at the outermost layer of the media's skin in our emerging and interconnected age. This invisible skin over it all comes in the form of a new term of art, "search engine optimization," or in the trade just "SEO." This is the grand global competition involving thousands of bits of electronic birdseed at millions of websites whose owners all hope their electronic nets will snare the migratory reader-fowl amid billions of searches each and every day.
With journalists already predisposed by centuries of convention to converge on stories knitted from a common canon, the marriage of meta-narrative and meta-data simply accelerates to the speed of light the calibration of topic and theme. The "news" you consume is now commoditized and delivered per spec according to your TV preferences, your zip code and probably your shoe size. It is as if the 10,000 strangers in a concert hall who take a minute or so to calibrate their claps in hope of an encore suddenly have pulsating strobe lights helping set their tempo. It would no longer take a minute for them to sync up; they could be clapping in unison in less than 10 seconds. In the case of SEO, the concert hall is global, the "claps" are news bits, sound bites and tweets, and the order of magnitude is millions of times greater.
If a bit simplified, these layers add up to become the connective tissue in a media-centric and media-driven age. Which leads me back to the original question of why Stratfor so often "fails to sync up with the media."
An actual debate we had in the office helps explain. It was Sept. 5, and the world was on edge over the prospect of an imminent U.S. attack on Syria. This was the story in the mainstream media, and our dozens of stories on Syria were delivering a huge spike in much-appreciated traffic to Stratfor's online magazine. But our fundamental value proposition, the reason Stratfor exists, is that we do not always play the media's game.
That we were virtually alone among online publishers when we turned our gaze to farmer-led protests in Colombia that threatened to spread and involve other sectors, disrupting the economy and perhaps upending a pending trade treaty proved problematic because there was no wave of a meta-narrative for us to catch. For by the doctrines of the Internet's new commercial religion, a move disrupting the click stream was -- and is -- pure heresy. But our readers still need to know about Colombia, just as they need our unique perspectives on Syria.
Applying the Scientific Method to Journalism
Yes, we exist in the same media ecology -- the Internet -- as our journalist brethren. In that sense we compete, even while not being rivals. For while we do appear much like journalism at first glance, another way to consider the difference is to describe intelligence as "journalism with the scientific method."
Every forecast and article we do is essentially a lab experiment, in which we put the claims of politicians, the reports on unemployment statistics, the significance of a raid or a bombing to the test of geopolitics. We spend much more time studying the constraints on political actors -- what they simply cannot do economically, militarily or geographically -- than we do examining what they claim they will do. Our narratives are not derived from any canon, but materialize from careful examination of what could feasibly transpire rather than what someone says will occur.
This is abstract. In fact, we deal with many abstractions. The Oxford English Dictionary says of the scientific method, perhaps the key differentiator of journalism and intelligence: "A method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses."
The key characteristic to ponder here is that such methodology -- intelligence, in this case -- seeks to enable the acquisition of knowledge by allowing reality to speak for itself. Journalism, however, creates a reality atop many random assumptions through the means described. It is not a plot, a liberal conspiracy or a secret conservative agenda at work, as so many media critics will charge. It is simply the way the media ecosystem functions.
And so the intelligence company is the outlier in this media ecosystem. Yes, we live in it, but no we are not an organic part of it. We operate with a different rulebook, one at odds with our fellow inhabitants in this ecosystem.
Thus, we cannot sync up with the mainstream media, as convenient as that might be. We play on the margins of meta-data, tagging, taxonomies and search engine optimization. But we can't play very well because of who we are and how we do our jobs.
Journalism, in our age more than ever before, tells you what you want to know. Stratfor tells you what you need to know. We cannot build a taxonomy to automatically guide us. In a world of search engine Davids and Goliaths, Stratfor aims for a role more akin to that of Samuel, the seer credited with giving us the stories of both. Samuel represents the recorder of the significance of events, the one who saw it as his task to point out just where those events might lead. This is an ambition we share.
Editor's Note: Writing in George Friedman's stead this week is David D. Judson, editor-in-chief of Stratfor
1a)
Obama's “Modest Strategy” Good For Putin
By Jonathan S. Tobin
For those seeking an explanation for the puzzling turn that American foreign policy has taken during Barack Obama’s second term, the New York Times has one today. In a front-page feature in their Sunday edition, the Times’s Mark Landler provides National Security Advisor Susan Rice with the kind of puff piece the paper’s readers have come to expect when such analyses of administration policy are provided. Rice’s “blueprint” for a change from the president’s more ambitious goals of his first term was, we are told, formed at a series of Saturday morning bull sessions where those involved decided that they wanted to “avoid having events in the Middle East swallow [Obama’s] foreign policy agenda, as it had those of presidents before him.” So they chucked the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush that Obama had tentatively embraced at the time of the outbreak of the Arab Spring protests as well as any interest in Egypt. As the Times reported:
At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.
In theory, that might make sense. But given that the Iranians only use diplomacy to buy themselves more time to build their nuclear program; the Israeli-Palestinian talks are widely believed to be a fool’s errand (and were included in the agenda only because Secretary of State John Kerry had already committed the U.S. to another round of diplomacy with all of its risks and dangers regardless of what Rice or anyone else wanted to do); and the administration has already punted on Syria, this is not a promising agenda. Indeed, it looks to be even more of a disaster than the more wide-ranging to-do-list of the president’s first term that no one is claiming was exactly a great success.
But unfortunately for Rice and her boss, their “modest strategy”—as the headline of the Times feature puts it—just got a little shakier today. Earlier this month, I was one of many administration critics who warned that the president’s decision to cut aid to Egypt could open the door for Russia to step back into the alliance that Anwar Sadat trashed back in the 1970s as he strove to make peace with Israel. It appears Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to do that. At the same time that Rice was using the Times to send a message to Egypt that it is no longer a U.S. priority, reports are circulating that the Russian autocrat is planning a visit to Cairo where he will attempt to revive the military alliance that existed between Russia and Egypt. If he succeeds in getting the Russian fleet back into Egypt’s Mediterranean ports, he should send a thank you note to Rice and the president. But, of course, he already owes them one for the administration’s retreat on Syria.
This is a potential disaster for U.S. foreign policy.
The Egyptian military seems to have succeeded in not only ousting the Muslim Brotherhood government that threatened to turn the most populous Arab nation into an Islamist regime but in keeping the group from organizing a rebellion. Though the process by which they have done so is not easy to defend, they at least understood something the president and Rice seem not to have learned: that the struggle with the Brotherhood is a zero-sum game. By taking out the Brotherhood, clamping down on terror in the Sinai, and squeezing Hamas in Gaza, the military has made the region safer. But they’ve gotten no thanks for this from Washington. Not only has Obama distanced the U.S. from Cairo and cut aid, Rice has now announced, via the front page of the Sunday New York Times, that what happens in Egypt isn’t all that important anyway.
While the Egyptian military will be loath to swap up-to-date U.S. hardware for Russian knockoffs, who can blame them for shopping around for new friends after the snubs they’ve received from President Obama?
Though his staff wants to save the president from being swamped by events in the Middle East, by putting all their chips on the slim hopes of an acceptable nuclear deal with Iran and the virtually non-existent chances of an Israeli-Palestinian accord, they have only set him up for more failure. Worse than that, by granting Putin a victory in Syria—where Russian and Iranian ally Bashar Assad looks more secure than ever thanks to Obama’s backing away from striking at his chemical-weapons stockpile—and setting him up to win back Egypt, President Obama has made the Middle East much less stable for U.S. allies like Israel and Arab nations like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. That’s a formula for exactly the kind of blow-up Rice and her buddies had hoped to spare the president.
1b)
Foreign policy based on fantasy
By Jackson Diehl
“One is forced to wonder whether disarmament or arms control issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problem instead of the disease itself.”
Barack Obama wrote those words in 1983 , when he was a student at Columbia University. He was describing the nuclear freeze movement and how its focus on warhead numbers left the larger social justice issues of the Cold War era unaddressed. But he could just as well have been describing his own policies in the Middle East 30 years later — and why they have driven a wedge between the United States and some of its closest allies.
In his zeal to extract his administration from what he sees as a regional quagmire, Obama, like the old freeze movement, has adopted a narrow and high-altitude approach to a complex and sprawling set of conflicts. Rising above the carnage in Syria — or “somebody else’s civil war,” as he called it in his recent speech at the United Nations — he has adopted a priority of destroying the country’s chemical weapons arsenal. He seeks to put stronger safeguards on Iran’s nuclear program while sidestepping its larger effort to use terrorism and proxy wars to become a regional hegemon.
From a certain Washington point of view, Obama’s aims look worthy and, better yet, plausibly achievable — unlike, say, establishing democracy in Iraq. The problem with the approach is that it assumes that the Syrian civil war and other conflicts across the region pose no serious threat to what Obama calls “core U.S. interests,” and that they can be safely relegated to the nebulous realm of U.N. diplomacy and Geneva conferences, where Secretary of State John Kerry lives.
Let’s suppose for the moment that al-Qaeda’s new base in eastern Syria, Hezbollah’s deployment of tens of thousands of missiles in Lebanon and the crumbling of the U.S.-fostered Iraqi political system pose no particular threat to America. That still leaves U.S. allies in the region — Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey — marooned in a scary new world where their vital interests are no longer under U.S. protection.
Israel and Saudi Arabia worry that Obama will strike a deal with Iran that frees it from sanctions without entirely extirpating its capacity to enrich uranium — leaving it with the potential to produce nuclear weapons. But more fundamentally, they and their neighbors are dismayed that the United States appears to have opted out of the regional power struggle between Iran and its proxies and Israel and the Arab states aligned with the United States. It is the prospect of waging this regional version of the Cold War without significant U.S. support that has prompted Saudi leaders to hint at a rupture with Washington — and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to talk more publicly than ever about Israel’s willingness to act alone.
Obama’s defenders have some answers to this: There’s no reason, they say, for the United States to be sucked down the rabbit hole of every Middle East conflict. The motives and interests of Saudi Arabia and Israel aren’t always worth encouraging. The former is driven by the atavistic sectarian enmity between Sunni and Shia; the latter sees no chance of co-existence with an Islamic Republic. Anyway, the Obamites say, the administration is trying to address the region’s larger problems through the pursuit of a political settlement in Syria as well as an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Here lies another problem. Virtually no one outside the State Department — including the nominal parties to the talks — takes seriously the possibility that Kerry’s plan for a Geneva conference to settle the Syrian war can work in the foreseeable future, or that Israelis and Palestinians can agree on a two-state settlement. They play along with the process to please Washington, or Moscow, while complaining to journalists like me that Kerry’s diplomacy is based on fantasy. Who can imagine Syrian President Bashar al-Assad placidly agreeing to step down? Or Netanyahu ceding East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley to the Palestinians and their security forces?
Diplomatic breakthroughs, like arms control agreements, don’t happen in a vacuum; they happen because political, economic and security conditions make them possible. The nuclear freeze movement failed in the early 1980s because the Soviet Union still presented a tangible and inescapable threat to the West. A Syrian peace conference could not succeed now because the Assad regime is in no immediate danger of losing on the battlefield.
For Obama, succeeding in even the limited objectives he has set for the Middle East would require reshaping conditions on the ground: weakening Assad, degrading Iranian strength, bolstering Israeli and Saudi confidence. That work could be done without deploying U.S. troops, but it would be hard, expensive and require a lot of presidential attention. It would mean, as a bright young student once put it, focusing on “the disease itself.”
1c)Palestinians make stiff land demands for peace deal
By Ilan Ben Zion
The Palestinian Authority demands that any land swap with Israel as part of a peace deal not exceed 1.9 percent of the West Bank, less than half of the land necessary to incorporate the lion’s share of settlers, according to details leaked to Channel 2 by a disgruntled Palestinian official on Sunday.
According to the report, the Palestinians are also insisting that they gain control over water, and control at their sides of the Dead Sea and border crossings; that a Palestinian state be able to sign agreements with other states without Israeli intervention; that Israel release all Palestinian prisoners it holds; and that all Palestinian refugees and their descendants be granted the right to choose to live in Israel or the Palestinian territories as part of a final agreement.
The report made no mention of Israel’s position on these issues, but the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been wary of a Palestinian state exercising full sovereign powers that might threaten Israeli security, and all Israeli governments have rejected the possibility of anything other than a token influx of Palestinian refugees, for fear of remaking the demographic balance of the Jewish state.
Israel, for its part, according to the TV report, has demanded that any peace deal provide Israel with territorial contiguity, that there be an IDF presence in the Jordan Valley for a prescribed period of time, and that, in addition to border adjustments covered by the land swaps, further land be annexed by Israel to cover the major settlement blocs in return for financial compensation to the Palestinians.
In previous rounds of negotiations, the Palestinians agreed in principle to swap some West Bank land for Israeli territory, in order to allow Israel to annex some settled areas adjacent to its border. Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin has estimated that annexation of 4% of the West Bank would be necessary to incorporate 80% of the settler population in a final agreement.
The US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority reportedly reached an impasse last month due to the Israeli refusal to discuss land-swap and border issues. Sunday’s report would appear to indicate that the sides have broached the subject.
Israeli and Palestinian officials agreed ahead of the renewal of talks in July not to speak to the press about the progress of negotiations, but Justice Minister and chief negotiator Tzipi Livni on Sunday remarked in an interview with Channel 2 that the sides had yet to reach an agreement. Asked whether, now that nearly one-third of the nine-month time-frame — set by US Secretary of State John Kerry for the talks — has elapsed, negotiations were one-third completed, Livni tersely replied, “It doesn’t work like that.”
Earlier on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet approved the release of 26 Palestinian prisoners, the second phase of a four-stage release aimed at building confidence with the Palestinians.
A government statement said 21 of the inmates to be released were from the West Bank and five were from the Gaza Strip. “A list of the prisoners is to be published Sunday night on the website of the Israel Prisons Service, after the bereaved families have been informed,” the statement said.
All of the prisoners committed their crimes before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.
The releases were expected to be accompanied by the announcement of new plans for West Bank settlement construction, a senior Israeli official said.
The religious, nationalist Jewish Home party has bitterly attacked the planned prisoner releases in recent days. On Sunday, the party proposed legislation to prevent future releases. Opposed by Netanyahu, the bill was rejected by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation in an 8-5 vote.
Ilan Ben Zion is a news editor at The Times of Israel. He holds a Masters degree in Diplomacy from Tel Aviv University and an Honors Bachelors degree from the University of Toronto in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, Jewish Studies, and English.
1d)
1d)
For Palestinians, the other enemy is their own leadership
Jonathan Schanzer
After few quiet meetings in 2011 with Palestinians in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, I noticed a common theme. While Palestinians are universally and often justifiably frustrated with Israel’s policies, they are also frustrated by their own poor leadership.
Intrigued, I began to write articles about the Palestinian leadership deficit, as well as the chronic abuses of power and mismanagement that are all too common across the Arab world. I soon realized that the story of failed Palestinian governance and persistent mismanagement is one that a great many observers of the region implicitly accept as truth, but few have ever documented.
The story, as I document in my book State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State, begins with the inception of the Fatah faction in Kuwait in the 1950s. Under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, Fatah was a secretive terrorist organization on the receiving end of vast petro-dollars. The faction’s coffers ballooned after the 1967 Six-Day War and when Mr. Arafat took over the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO’s headquarters moved from Jordan to Lebanon to Tunisia in the decades that followed. All the while, its coffers continued to grow.
By the time the international community called upon Mr. Arafat in 1994 to create the Palestinian Authority, the PLO had a decades-long track record of operating as a secretive terrorist umbrella organization that was accountable to nobody.
Despite his organization’s history of violence, mismanagement, and secrecy, Mr. Arafat was urged to flip the switch and somehow transform the PLO into a functioning mini-state. Not surprisingly, what followed was a decade of scandal. Amidst the fits and starts of diplomacy with Israel, allegations of waste, abuse of power, nepotism, and corruption piled up.
Looking back, U.S. and Palestinian officials involved in the process admit that an opportunity was missed. As negotiator Aaron David Miller recalled, the hope was that if Washington could “get to an agreement, which was a transactional act, that would produce transformation.”
But there was no transaction. Nor was there transformation. The peace process collapsed with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000. Amidst the violence, however, there was a remarkable awakening among Palestinians that went unnoticed: The Palestinians were demanding reform.
Even amidst the ongoing war with Israel (2000-2005), Palestinians made an effort to clean house. They worked to centralize Mr. Arafat’s many bank accounts, even removing officials who had benefited from the system. And the PA’s then-Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, hailed for his common sense reforms and institution-building, steadily gained the confidence of the West.
After Mr. Arafat died in November 2004, the Palestinians elected a new president, Mahmoud Abbas. Mr. Abbas was widely billed as the anti-Arafat. But within a few short years, it became clear that Mahmoud Abbas was, in many respects, Yasser Arafat with a tie.
Admittedly, Mr. Abbas’ Palestinian Authority functions better as a bureaucracy, but the reports of mismanagement and abuses of power will not subside. A recent European Union audit, for example, revealed that the PA may have “misspent” $3.13 billion in financial aid between 2008 and 2012. Mr. Abbas is now four years past the end of his legal presidential term, with no sign of elections in sight. Meanwhile, his regime has forcefully quashed protests in the West Bank, and made criticism of the president – in mainstream media and social media alike – an offence that could lead to imprisonment.
It is worth remembering that the perception of corruption and authoritarianism within the Abbas regime was key to giving the terrorist group Hamas, which ran on a platform of clean governance, the boost it needed to win the Palestinian elections in 2006. The political stalemate that followed ultimately led to a civil war in 2007 whereby Hamas conquered the Gaza Strip by force, yielding an unsustainable split between the West Bank and Gaza that persists today.
Remarkably, even after Hamas’s resounding victory, world leaders elected to ignore the abuses within the PA. Today, the international community, led by the United States, is yet again pushing the Palestinians and Israelis toward a two-state solution. And Washington still has not learned its lessons. The State Department continues to give short shrift to the internal challenges dogging the PA, which is widely seen by the Palestinian street as a seal of approval for the ongoing abuses. This is a dynamic that will continue to push the Palestinians into the hands of Hamas.
This is hardly a blueprint for peace. Nor is it a blueprint for successful statehood. If anything, the current course, if uncorrected, will put the Palestinians on track for a different state: a state of failure.
Jonathan Schanzer is vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies and author of State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State (Palgrave Macmillan 2013).
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2)
| ISRAELI INNOVATION & JAPAN: ANOTHER BREAKTHROUGH | |
Due to the high level of agricultural technology expertise in both countries, Israel and Japan will establish a shared fund for research and development, Agriculture Minister Yair Shamir announced on Monday.
“The breakthrough between Israel and Japan in agriculture, as we did in the field of hi-tech, will be made possible by establishing a common agricultural research and development fund,” the minister said.
Shamir made the announcement following a meeting in Tokyo with his Japanese counterpart, Agriculture, Fisheries and Forests Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi. Japan, he stressed, is a natural partner to Israel in forging forward with agricultural research and development due to the ingenuity that takes place in both countries. The current volume of agricultural trade occurring between the two nations is still limited relative to its potential, at only about $80 million, according to data from the ministry.
During his trip to Japan, Shamir spent time with Hayashi touring fishing areas, seeing greenhouse development, examining the use of treated wastewater and looking at the dairy industry’s growth – all of which may be potential topics for future research and development cooperation, the ministry explained.
The two ministers also discussed the possibility of opening up the Japanese market to fresh agricultural produce from Israel – particularly crops such as peppers, spices, carrots and amaryllis bulbs. Due to Japan’s stringent regulations on crop protection, such exports had not been possible for a long time, the Agriculture Ministry said. However, due to Israel’s existing export agreements with the United States and the European Union, Japan has expressed greater willingness to promote the proceedings necessary to grant approval to the import of Israeli crops.
An additional goal of Shamir’s visit to Japan was to promote a conference of the International Dairy Federation that will be held next October in Israel, which should draw more than 2,000 participants from 54 countries and represent about 90 percent of the world’s dairy market, the ministry said.
“I was impressed that there is a great appreciation for the scientific and technological capabilities of the State of Israel in the field of agriculture,” Shamir said after the visit. “The Japanese government wants to increase the involvement of Israeli companies in the country’s fields of agriculture and water and I believe that this joint research and development fund is a most effective platform toward achieving this goal.”
Three years ago, Israel established a similar such fund with Italy and last year added $500,000 to each of its existing funds with Germany and China, according to the ministry.
Emphasizing that Japan successfully maintains the third biggest economy in the world, Shamir also praised the country for increasing its openness to partners across the globe.
“Japan’s efforts to upgrade its agricultural sector with exposure to competition and to bring back young people to engage in the field – by means of the import and implementation of new technologies, among other things – beckon Israel to an opportunity in the agriculture industry,” Shamir said.
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3)
Speaking to reporters Tuesday White House Press Secretary Jay Carney blamed loss of healthcare coverage for millions of Americans on insurance companies complying with the Affordable Care Act.
3)
Jay Carney Berates Insurance Companies For Complying With Obamacare
Speaking to reporters Tuesday White House Press Secretary Jay Carney blamed loss of healthcare coverage for millions of Americans on insurance companies complying with the Affordable Care Act.
"Insurers pulled those plans away from them," Carney said. "The law [Obamacare] could not order insurers not to cancel that plan."
Millions of health insurance plans are no longer available because they do not meet Obamacare standards and regulations. Carney's comments come less than 24 hours after information surfaced showing President Obama knew millions of Americans would be losing their health insurance plans under Obamacare despite promising, "If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what."
When pressed on the issue of millions losing individual insurance plans they wanted to keep, Carney said it is five percent of the population being affected by insurance loss. That five percent adds up to 14 million people.
"We're talking about 5% of the country," Carney said after justifying losses and referring to the individual marketplace as a "wild west" that needed more regulation.
Now that the Obama administration is taking heat from all sides on the loss of insurance, the White House is pivoting back to blaming insurance companies for the loss of those plans, not Obamacare itself, which makes millions of plans illegal.
3a)
Throw the Rascals Out?: Part II
By mas Sowell
The public's opinion of politicians of both parties seems to have reached a new low. But no matter how much the voters detest Congress -- or how justifiably -- that does not mean that there will be radical changes at the next election.
For one thing, "Congress" is not on the ballot. Only individual members of Congress are. Most voters like their own Senator or Representative, often because of special favors that these incumbents have done for their own constituency -- at the taxpayers' expense.
Add to this the so-called "campaign reform" laws that restrict the raising of money that challengers need, in order to counter the millions of dollars' worth of free advertising that incumbents get through ordinary media coverage, enhanced by the incumbents' sponsoring of ever more legislation, expanding the role of government.
The very longevity of incumbents in Congress makes it expedient for them to treat each other as "facts of life" -- people with whom you have to "go along to get along." One of their common interests as incumbents is reelection. This can lead to all sorts of bipartisan log-rolling legislation to hand out the taxpayers' money in ways that benefit incumbents of both parties.
In short, longevity in office can create more longevity in office. Moreover, this longevity can attract campaign contributions from special interests who expect something in return -- if only a lightening up on government restrictions and red tape.
Many among the intelligentsia prefer to think of special interests as corrupting our dedicated public servants with campaign contributions. But Peter Schweizer's new book, "Extortion," shows what happens as the extorting of tribute by politicians in a position to do a lot of harm to businesses that do not pay them protection money.
Campaign contributions are just one of the things that can be extorted. The number of spouses, children or other relatives or favorites of Congressional incumbents who get high-paying jobs in private businesses regulated by government can hardly be coincidental.
When Al Gore was Vice President during the Clinton administration, he simply phoned various special interests and told them how much he wanted them to contribute. He did not have to spell out the reasons why they should -- or why they had better. They already knew from experience how the game is played.
If we are serious about countering this and other political games, at the country's expense in both money and confidence in our government, we have to oppose the creation of a permanent class of long-serving politicians in Washington.
A one-term limit would simultaneously limit how long special interests could expect a pay-off from their campaign contributions. It would also limit, indeed eliminate, the need for millions of dollars of campaign contributions to stay in office.
Congressional reform should also include expanding the range of people likely to serve in Congress. Today, a successful engineer, surgeon, business executive, or even a full professor of economics at a leading university, would have to take a pay cut to serve in Congress.
We need people in government who know something besides politics, and who have experienced what it is like to live under the kinds of laws that politicians pass. We are unlikely to get many of them if we insist that they sacrifice their families' standard of living in order to go to Washington.
How much would it cost to make Congressional salaries high enough to let successful professionals serve in Congress without financial sacrifice?
If we paid every member of Congress a million dollars a year -- for an entire century -- that would add up to less than the cost of running the Department of Agriculture for one year.
To pay less than required to get people of the caliber needed in Congress is the ultimate in being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Without a financial sacrifice being required to serve a term in Congress, and no need for campaign contributions to get reelected, such a Congress might well get rid of the Department of Agriculture, among other counterproductive government agencies, repaying their own Congressional salaries many times over.
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