Bulldozing Democracy

Election 2014: Deep-Pocket Dark Money Bulldozing Democracy

'The 2014 midterms may well mark the election cycle in which the small donor got left behind,' analyst predicts

by Deirdre Fulton

In the final days of the midterm campaign, shadowy outside groups that wield heavy influence but don't disclose their donors are spending tens of millions of dollars on attack ads, mailers, and negative automated telephone calls aimed at tipping the balance in tight races across the nation.

Overall ad spending has broken $1 billion in federal elections and state governors’ races, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), which also predicted last week that the 2014 election cycle will cost at least $3.67 billion—slightly more than the 2010 election, which tallied $3.63 billion. In the same analysis, CRP noted that "[t]he 2014 midterms may well mark the election cycle in which the small donor got left behind," and that outside money has played an "outsized role" in this year's campaigns.

"As the post-Citizens United campaign finance system matures, we’re seeing evidence that the traditional campaign apparatus has been overtaken by shadow counterparts," said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. "These unaccountable actors give lie to the notion that they are independent of the candidates, and the negative nature of their participation will likely further suppress turnout that is already expected to be low."

This backs up findings released Monday by the Brennan Center for Justice, which documented record spending in 11 key U.S. Senate races, dominated by record-breaking outside spending, 58 percent of it spent by so-called dark money groups that do not have to disclose their donors. Such groups have spent at least $200 million nationally this election cycle, much of it in places with close races like North Carolina, which boasts the largest dollar amount of dark money as of October 29: $36 million.

According to CRP: "Overall, 38 percent of the ads bought by outside interest groups were bought by 'dark money' organizations that do not disclose their donors to the voters they seek to influence. In the heated battle for control of the Senate, nearly half—48.6 percent—of the ads were bought by such groups, most of them conservative. In fact, 48 percent of pro-Republican interest group ads in 2014 came from dark money groups, compared to 23 percent of pro-Democratic groups’ ads."

What's more, as the New York Times revealed on Sunday, "[m]uch of the advertising is being timed to ensure that no voter will know who is paying for it until after the election on Tuesday."
The Times reported:

Some of the groups are "super PACs" that did not exist before Labor Day but have since spent heavily on political advertising, adding to the volatility of close Senate and House races. 

Others formed earlier in the year but remained dormant until recently, reporting few or no contributions in recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, only to unleash six- and seven-figure advertising campaigns as Election Day draws near. Yet more spending is coming from nonprofit organizations with bland names that have popped up in recent weeks but appear to have no life beyond being a conduit for the ads. 

The groups’ last-minute fusillade of attacks helped push outside spending in races around the country to an average of at least $20 million a day last week. Total spending on Senate races reached $200 million in October alone, significantly more than in the same period before the 2010 midterms. 

...The onslaught shows how fast and aggressive strategists and donors in both parties have become about using the array of tools now available for pouring a lot of late cash into races. The efforts are a byproduct of court rulings like Citizens United and lax enforcement by the election commission and the Internal Revenue Service.

It's not only in congressional and gubernatorial races that groups are dropping major cash. The Brennan Center and the non-profit Justice at Stake revealed last week that with less than a week until Election Day, special interest groups had dramatically increased TV ad spending to influence state Supreme Court races in Illinois, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, and Ohio. Outside groups have spent nearly $2.1 million on TV ad buys in these states for the November general election, the groups' analysis showed, with nearly $1 million spent over the last week.

"Special interest groups have realized that it doesn’t take much money to reshape an entire state court compared to high-cost elections for statewide political offices," said Brennan Center attorney Alicia Bannon. "At the same time, judges are forced to keep pace with deep-pocketed out of state groups instead of ruling on cases. It’s a lose-lose for judges and voters alike."

With Tuesday's elections on track to be the most expensive midterms in history, it's worth considering the magnitude of money spent and how it could be put to different use, investigative correspondent Chris Frates wrote for CNN on Monday.

"Four billion bucks is a boatload of cash," Frates said, rounding up CRP's estimate of $3.67 billion. "It's 10 times more than the government has committed to fighting Ebola in West Africa and would be enough to build 100 treatment centers and run them for years. That kind of money could also buy 25 F-18 fighter jets, pay for more than 12,000 students' K-12 education and have enough left over to produce a summer blockbuster."

At the Huffington Post on Monday, the Brennan Center's Lawrence Norden and Wendy Weiser note how recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have changed the Election Day landscape to favor monied interests: "When the Court dismantled our laws regulating money in politics and gutted core voting rights protections, we knew those decisions would have consequences," they write. "But only now are we seeing the full scope of their impact: a return to pre-Watergate, pre-Civil Rights era practices. Cash from unknown sources is flooding the most important races, while state politicians have instituted new barriers to the ballot box for millions of Americans. Regardless of who wins, the integrity of our elections has been undermined."

John Oliver

John Oliver Takes on ALEC

by Michael Winship

One of the joys of this year in television has been HBO’s Last Week with John Oliver, the satirical take on the news that has generated a new genre some have dubbed “investigative comedy.”

Oliver and his talented team of writers and producers have given viewers some of the most cogent and pointed commentary on America anywhere in the media. They have tackled at length such difficult subjects as drone warfare, Net neutrality and civil forfeiture, among others, and have done so with a mix of wit and creativity that can make the most brain-numbing yet important issues understandable — and funny.

Last night’s penultimate show for the year took on two topics close to the heart of Moyers & Company: the power of state legislatures (“Increasingly, they’re the places where most legislation is actually taking place”) and the pernicious influence of the American Legislative Exchange Council – ALEC. That’s the “conservative bill mill,” in Oliver’s words, funded by corporations and such wealthy individuals as the Koch brothers to generate right-wing, pro-business laws in statehouses all across the country.

On Last Week, Oliver said, “All those conspiracy theories about a shadow government are actually true. Only it’s not a group of billionaires meeting in a mountain lair in Zurich, it’s a bunch of pasty bureaucrats meeting in a windowless committee room in Lansing, Michigan.” See for yourself – but be aware that as usual, some of the language is NSFW.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIMgfBZrrZ8

War on Want

A Bold New Drive to Recast the War on Want

by Sam Pizzigati

So what do we do about inequality?

Many prominent opinion-shapers in America today consider this the wrong question to ask. Inequality — the grand divide between the few and the many, the rising concentration of income and wealth — doesn’t much bother these movers and shakers. Poverty, they claim, does.

The question we ask ought to be, says Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, a top adviser to both George W. Bush and Mitt Romney: “How do we help people at the bottom, rather than thwart people at the top?”

Mankiw’s take resonates far beyond Republican ranks. We should be focusing on helping society’s poorest, not hammering on the richest, former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alan Blinder agreed this past summer. Blinder used to advise Bill Clinton and John Kerry. For the poor, he argues, “the fantastic earnings of people that make $100 million a year are completely irrelevant.”

This hands-off-the-rich stance even gets support from elite influentials who say they worry about inequality.

“Reducing inequality is good,” opined Larry Summers, President Obama’s first National Economic Council director, earlier this year, “but it’s fifty times better to do it by lifting those up who are low than by tearing down those who are high.”

Plenty of other influentials in politics, the media, and the charity world share this mainstream consensus. Any serious focus on wealth at the top, this perspective holds, only serves to distract us from reducing poverty at the bottom.

Professionals in anti-poverty groups have by and large internalized this worldview. Foundations and lawmakers, they’ve learned over the years, do not look kindly on anti-poverty groups open to challenging privilege and power.

But cracks in this don’t-worry-about-privilege united front have been growing — as that privilege has become steadily more pronounced.

One particularly loud crack came two years ago when one of America’s most respected poverty-fighters, former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services assistant secretary Peter Edelman, released his book So Rich, So Poor.

“I used to believe,” Edelman wrote, “that the debate over wealth distribution should be conducted separately from the poverty debate, in order to minimize the attacks on antipoverty advocates for engaging in ‘class warfare.’ But now we literally cannot afford to separate the two issues.”

The “economic and political power of those at the top,” Edelman continued, is “making it virtually impossible to find the resources to do more at the bottom.”

Another loud crack came this past January, just before the annual gathering of the global glitterati at the Swiss mountain resort of Davos. The world’s 85 richest billionaires, the respected anti-poverty charity Oxfam pointed out, now hold as much wealth as the 3.5 billion people in humanity’s poorer half.

That shocking stat quickly went viral worldwide. Last week, Oxfam came back with more — but not just more stats. The charity unveiled a landmark new campaign that aims at nothing less than reframing the entire global political discourse around poverty and wealth.

The stakes in this bid could hardly be higher. If Oxfam’s new Even It Up campaign succeeds, no one who wants to get taken seriously in global public policy circles will ever again get away with dismissing the danger that concentrated wealth poses to the poor — or anyone else.

Oxfam has launched this new campaign with a 136-page report that explores that danger, with everything from dramatic new numbers — the combined wealth of the world’s top 85 billionaires is increasing at the rate of a half million dollars a minute — to moving personal narratives.

The report, just as importantly, offers a wide-ranging guide to the sorts of steps that could, if put in play, leave the world a much more decent place.

“Oxfam’s decades of experience in the world’s poorest communities have taught us that poverty and inequality are not inevitable or accidental, but the result of deliberate policy choices,” the report notes. “Inequality can be reversed.”

Oxfam’s broad global footprint has the potential to make these words much more than mere noble rhetoric. The 72-year-old organization has spread far beyond its original UK base and now has affiliates worldwide. Oxfam staff and volunteers work side by side with thousands of local charities in nearly 100 countries.

The new Even It Up campaign, Oxfam officials explained last week, will initially unfold in 25 different nations, with each national effort working to build coalitions behind action recommendations in the new Even It Up report.

Some of these recommendations urge support for initiatives already moving onto the global political center stage. The Even It Up campaign launch report, for instance, calls on governments to start taxing financial transactions and clamp down on tax havens that service grand fortunes.

In other areas — taxing wealth, for instance — Oxfam is recommending ideas just beginning to pick up political momentum. One example: A 1.5 percent tax on individual wealth above $1 billion, Oxfam calculates, would raise $74 billion yearly, “enough money to fill the annual gaps in funding needed to get every child into school and to deliver health services in the world’s poorest countries.”

Oxfam’s recommendations also target the engine of inequality that the modern multinational corporation has become. Even It Up urges governments to steer procurement contracts to companies that pay their top executives no more than 20 times the pay that goes to their typical workers.

The Oxfam Even It Up report comes accompanied by supporting commentary from an array of distinguished experts and world leaders.

Ample evidence tells us, Bank of England chief economist Andrew Haldane notes in his contribution, that inequality “slows development of the human, social and physical capital necessary for raising living standards and improving wellbeing.”

“That penny,” Haldane observes, “is starting to drop among policymakers and politicians.”

With the new Even It Up campaign, Oxfam isn’t just pitching pennies. It’s hoping to help nurture a citizen’s movement strong enough to challenge the world’s grandest fortunes and the myths that keep them growing.

Oxfam, explains the group’s executive director Winnie Byanyima, “is standing in solidarity with people everywhere who are demanding a more equal world and an end to extreme inequality.”

“Governments around the world have been guilty of a naive faith that wealth going to those at the top will automatically benefit everyone,” adds Oxfam UK chief Mark Goldring. “That’s not true.”

They got it, You don't...

Infuriating Facts About Our Disappearing Middle-Class Wealth

by Paul Buchheit

A recent posting detailed how upper middle class Americans are rapidly losing ground to the one-percenters who averaged $5 million in wealth gains over just three years. It also noted that the global 1 percent has increased their wealth from $100 trillion to $127 trillion in just three years.

The information came from the Credit Suisse 2014 Global Wealth Databook (GWD), which goes on to reveal much more about the disappearing middle class.

1. Each Year Since the Recession, America’s Richest 1 percent Have Made More Than the Cost of All US Social Programs

In effect, a reverse transfer from the poor to the rich. Even as conservatives blame Social Security for being too costly.

Much of the 1 percent wealth just sits there, accumulating more wealth. The numbers are nearly unfathomable. Depending on the estimate, the 1 percent took in anywhere from $2.3 trillion to $5.7 trillion per year.

Even the smaller estimate of $2.3 trillion per year is more than the budget for Social Security ($860 billion), Medicare ($524 billion), Medicaid ($304 billion), and the entire safety net ($286 billion for SNAP, WIC [Women, Infants, Children], Child Nutrition, Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Housing).

2. Almost None of the New 1 percent Wealth Led To Innovation and Jobs

In 2005, for every $1 of financial wealth there was 66 cents of non-financial (home) wealth. Ten years later, for every $1 of financial wealth there was just 43 cents of non-financial (home) wealth.
What happens to all this financial wealth?

Over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in low-risk investments (bonds and cash), the stock market and real estate. Business startup costs made up less than 1 percent of the investments of high net worth individuals in North America in 2011. A recent study found that less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs came from very rich or very poor backgrounds. They come from the middle class.

On the corporate side, stock buybacks are employed to enrich executives rather than to invest in new technologies. In 1981, major corporations were spending less than 3 percent of their combined net income on buybacks, but in recent years they’ve been spending up to 95 percent of their profits on buybacks and dividends.

3. Just 47 Wealthy Americans Own More Than Half of the US Population

Oxfam reported that just 85 people own as much as half the world. Here in the US, with nearly a third of the world’s wealth, just 47 individuals own more than all 160 million people (about 60 million households) below the median wealth level of about $53,000.

4. The Upper Middle Class of America Owns a Smaller Percentage of Wealth Than the Corresponding Groups in All Major Nations Except Russia and Indonesia

The upper middle class in the US, defined as everyone in the top half below the richest 20 percent, owns 11.9 percent of the wealth. Indonesia at 10.5 percent and Russia at 7.5 percent are worse off, but in all other nations the corresponding upper middle classes own 12 to 27 percent of the wealth.
America’s bottom half compares even less favorably to the world: dead last, with just 1.3 percent of national wealth. Only Russia comes close to that dismal share, at 1.9 percent. The bottom half in all other nations own 2.6 to 10.2 percent of the wealth.

5. Ten Percent of the World’s Total Wealth Was Taken by the Global 1 percent in the Past Three Years

As in the US, the middle class is disappearing at the global level. An incredible one of every ten dollars of global wealth was transferred to the elite 1 percent in just three years. A level of inequality deemed unsustainable three years ago has gotten even worse.

Solution: A Financial Transaction Tax (FTT)
More appropriately called a Financial Speculation Tax, it would help to limit the speculative trading that contributed to the financial meltdown in 2008.

The FTT has extraordinary revenue-generating potential, on a global scale. The Bank for International Settlements reported in 2008 that annual trading in derivatives had surpassed $1.14 quadrillion. Just one-tenth of 1 percent of that is a trillion dollars.

It’s also a fair tax. While average Americans pay up to a 10 percent sales tax on shoes for the kids, millionaire investors pay a zero sales tax on financial purchases. They pay just a .00002 percent SEC fee (2 cents for every thousand dollars) for a financial instrument.

In addition, the FTT is easy to administer and difficult to evade. Clearing houses already review all trades, and serve as collection agencies for transaction fees.

And as evidence of its suitability, three of the top five countries on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom are Singapore, Hong Kong and Switzerland, all of whom have FTTs.

People in the US and around the world are being rapidly divided into two classes, the well-to-do and the lower-income majority. This severing of society will change only when progressive thinkers (and doers) agree on a single, manageable solution that will stop the easy flow of wealth to the privileged few.

Huge waste of money....

Navy's newest fighter makes first carrier landing

By Brad Lendon

A combination of old and new hooked up off the coast of San Diego Monday to give the U.S. Navy a glimpse into its future.

The moment was the first arrested landing aboard an aircraft carrier for the military's new Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35C Lightning II. An arrested landing means the jet was brought to a stop using a tailhook grabbing a wire stretched across the carrier's deck. The wire is attached to a gear system that brings the plane to a stop.

"This will be one landing out of thousands more that will happen over the next few decades," Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, executive officer of the Pentagon's F-35 program, said in a statement. Monday's landing came aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, the oldest active carrier in the Navy's fleet.

"I'm very excited to see America's newest aircraft on the flight deck of her oldest aircraft carrier," said Navy Cmdr. Tony Wilson, the test pilot who landed the F-35C aboard the Nimitz.

Tests of the F-35C aboard the carrier will continue for a few weeks, the Navy said. It is expected to be operational in the Navy's carrier air fleet in 2018, joining F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft, E-2D Hawkeye control aircraft, MH-60R/S helicopters and Carrier Onboard Delivery logistics aircraft, according to a Navy statement.

The F-35C is just one version of the aircraft that the Pentagon has developed for use by the Marines and Air Force as well.

The F-35B, the Marine Corps version, is equipped with short take-off and vertical landing capability and began testing aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp in 2011.

The F-35 was developed at a cost of nearly $400 billion so far and beset for years by cost overruns and delays. The plane's primary contractor, Lockheed Martin, puts the cost of each F-35C -- the most expensive of the three versions -- at $116 million, not including the engine. The company says on its website that the price has dropped 55% since the initial planes were contracted.

Engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney said last month it has been awarded a contract worth just over $1 billion for a batch of 48 engines for the F-35.

The Pentagon ultimately wants more than 2,400 of the fighter jets, while hundreds more are expected over time to go to allies such as South Korea, Japan and Australia. More than 100 planes have been built so far, most for testing, but the program is still in its development and training phases.

The jets were temporarily grounded earlier this year following a fire on the runway at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. No one was hurt. The military says the stealth fighter will be "the most affordable, lethal, supportable and survivable aircraft ever to be used" by so many services worldwide.

Someone sure got screwed....

One Day in an Elevator With Obama, Then Out of a Job

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

Kenneth Tate toiled for years as a construction worker and corrections officer, and he has no doubt that his last job — working as a $42,000-a-year private security guard at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — was the best he ever had.

The high point was an afternoon seven weeks ago when he was assigned to accompany President Obama, who was visiting the agency’s headquarters here for a briefing on the Ebola epidemic. It was not only that Mr. Tate’s bosses had entrusted him with staying close to such an important dignitary. It was that, as an African-American born in Chicago, he was going to meet the nation’s first black president, a man he deeply admired.

But by the time Mr. Obama’s visit was over, Mr. Tate was on the way to losing his job.

As Mr. Obama’s motorcade was preparing to leave the C.D.C., Mr. Tate tried to take a picture on his cellphone as a memento. Angry Secret Service agents told him that he had gotten too close to the Beast, as the presidential limousine is known. When the agents relayed to Mr. Tate’s bosses what had happened, they reacted angrily.

“This was unjust and has been a nightmare,” Mr. Tate, 47, said in an interview last week. “I’ve tried to rationalize it. It won’t go away.”

But it took several weeks before the full consequences of the incident became clear. An investigation conducted shortly after Mr. Obama’s visit revealed that Mr. Tate was carrying a C.D.C.-issued firearm, a violation of Secret Service protocols — and a security lapse that the agency’s director at the time, Julia Pierson, never mentioned to the White House.

Then, on the same day that Ms. Pierson testified at a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill about how a fence jumper with a knife had gained entry to the White House, The Washington Examiner revealed that Mr. Obama had been on an elevator with a C.D.C. security guard who was carrying a gun in violation of Secret Service protocols.

The story added to a growing debate over whether the Secret Service was failing in its most basic duties. Some news media organizations, as well as Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, said — erroneously — that the security guard had been convicted of felonies. Mr. Tate had been arrested several times, including on charges of robbery and assault, but never convicted.

The next day, Ms. Pierson resigned. But in Mr. Tate’s view, he is the real victim.

“From the reports, I was some stranger that entered the elevator,” he said in an interview here at the office of his lawyer, Christopher Chestnut. “I mean, I was appointed.”

The Secret Service and the C.D.C. have not released a chronology of what occurred that day, making it difficult to assess the accuracy of Mr. Tate’s account. A Secret Service official, who was given a summary of Mr. Tate’s account, said it was largely consistent with what an agency investigation had found. He said the inspector general’s office of the Department of Homeland Security was investigating the incident.

But William R. Banks, the president of Professional Security Corporation, the private security firm that was Mr. Tate’s employer, said in an email that Mr. Tate’s description of the day’s events “are not correct,” though he declined to say what was inaccurate. He confirmed that Mr. Tate “did not have any felony or misdemeanor convictions.” The C.D.C. declined to comment.

According to Mr. Tate, the day Mr. Obama traveled to the C.D.C. started the way every workday did, with being issued a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun and two magazine clips. Mr. Tate said he had holstered the weapon on his belt under his suit jacket.

His supervisors then told him that he was going to operate the service elevator Mr. Obama was going to use. Everything appeared to be going right for Mr. Tate. The previous day he had taken off for his birthday and won $800 playing his birthday digits in the lottery.

Around 2:25 p.m., the presidential motorcade arrived at the back entrance of the C.D.C. On the elevator ride, Mr. Tate said, the president struck up a conversation.

“He acknowledged me, said, ‘How you are doing?’ He said, ‘What’s your name?’ I told him my name, and he extended his hand, shook my hand, and I said it’s a pleasure to meet him. And I proceeded to escort him upstairs.”

“I was just proud,” Mr. Tate said. “That was a big accomplishment to me.” He said one of the Secret Service agents had told him that it was remarkable that Mr. Obama had talked to him, considering it had taken the president two years to acknowledge the agent.

Also on the elevator, Mr. Tate said, was “one of the little ladies who is always speaking on the news.” The president’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, was with him that day.

After Mr. Obama’s meetings, Mr. Tate took him back down to where the limousine was waiting. 

After the president got in, Mr. Tate tried to take a picture. He said he had thought nothing of it because he had taken photos of other dignitaries before — including one with Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.

When a Secret Service agent officer waved at him to get back, Mr. Tate said, he headed into the building.

An agent he passed on his way inside said someone was probably going to lose his job because no one was allowed so close to the limousine. Mr. Tate said he had no idea why the agents were so concerned since he did not believe he had disobeyed any of their instructions.

A few minutes later, he said, his bosses angrily pulled him aside. Secret Service agents then took him into a conference room to question him.

“I was upset. I’m nervous because I’m like, I don’t understand what’s going on,” he said. Mr. Tate said the images he had taken on his smartphone were of the limousine and the agents around it — similar to ones that news crews often take. He said the Secret Service had ordered him to delete them; he complied. After the Secret Service interview was completed, Mr. Tate’s bosses took away his C.D.C. badge. The next week he was given his letter of termination.

Mr. Tate said the C.D.C. and the contractor still had not provided him with an explanation about why he was fired. Making matters worse, his 27-year-old son — who had worked at the C.D.C. as a contractor for seven years — was unexpectedly dismissed two weeks after the incident for “downsizing” reasons, Mr. Tate said.

Now unemployed, he looks back with sadness on the day he met the president.

“It was something to tell my mom — if I meet him everything will be complete,” he said. “I didn’t know it was going to be my job.”

Halfhearted

A halfhearted U.S. war effort in the Middle East

By Andrew J. Bacevich

Acommon thread connects U.S. military operations of the last 20 or more years: We've persistently tried to fight them on the cheap. In gauging the requirements of a prospective campaign, “What do we need to win?” has repeatedly taken a back seat to “What's the minimum we can get by with?”
The Pentagon calls the result Operation Inherent Resolve. A more accurate name would be Operation Halfhearted Effort.-

The ongoing air campaign against Islamic State illustrates the point. Having declared that this new threat must be destroyed, the Obama administration refuses to provide the forces needed to do just that. Hence, Washington's unseemly scramble to recruit proxies willing and able to do what the United States won't do: put “boots on the ground.” The Pentagon calls the result Operation Inherent Resolve. A more accurate name would be Operation Halfhearted Effort.

When marketing a new product or running for political office, cheapness seldom offers a recipe for success. In war, that truism applies in spades. There, the urge to economize invites greater long-term costs without anything remotely resembling victory at the far end.

From 2002 to 2003, American generals thought invading Iraq would require half a million troops or so. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld knew — or claimed to know — better and allocated only 148,000. Sufficient to get to Baghdad, that number proved woefully inadequate to control the country. The George W. Bush administration had expected Operation Iraqi Freedom to yield a quick, tidy win. Instead, the Iraq war became the second-longest and just about the most expensive in U.S. history.

The longest is the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, never adequately resourced by Bush or his successor. U.S. troops provided to pacify a country slightly larger than Texas and with a present-day population of 30 million reached a peak just above 100,000. Sure, North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies pitched in, but never in sufficient numbers to make a difference. So 13 years after arriving in Afghanistan, U.S. troops are now withdrawing, not victoriously, but with fingers crossed that the place won't fall apart. We've seen what a similar hope in Iraq produced.

These campaigns, and others, are part of a broader enterprise that from the outset suffered from this problem of under-resourcing. Over the course of several decades, U.S. forces have invaded, occupied, bombed and raided places throughout the greater Middle East. We have killed considerable numbers of people. We have overthrown governments and installed others in their place. We have put the hurt on some very nasty militant groups (only to see others almost immediately appear).

What larger goal these actions are meant to achieve is not entirely clear. Proffered explanations have ranged from securing the world's oil supply to eliminating terrorism to spreading the blessings of freedom and democracy.

Regardless of actual purpose, the overall undertaking qualifies as hugely ambitious. Through its military exertions in the Islamic world, the United States is clearly trying to achieve something very big. And whatever that something might be, it seems plain that the job is nowhere near to being finished. If nothing else, the rise of Islamic State affirms that “Mission Accomplished” is still nowhere in sight.

Yet from the outset, Americans have refused to acknowledge what employing military means to do big things entails. On this point, the lessons of history are quite clear. Business as usual won't do. Put simply, doing big things militarily necessitates reconfiguring national priorities, with peacetime pursuits taking a back seat to wartime imperatives.

The old-fashioned word for this is mobilization, which implies changing just about everything: tax rates, patterns of consumption, social relationships, educational priorities, the prerogatives exercised by the state and, of course, the size of the armed forces. In simplest terms, mobilization implies collective effort that involves collective sacrifice, without which wars fought to achieve big things are doomed to fail.

Vaguely inclined to “support the troops” as long as they themselves remain personally unaffected and uninvolved, Americans willfully ignore this essential truth: If you will the end, you must will the means. Meanwhile, in Washington, where dereliction of duty is a way of life, no one in a position of influence has mustered the gumption to state the obvious: For the United States to achieve “victory” in the greater Middle East will require exertions that exceed those made thus far by orders of magnitude.

Is victory, however defined, worth a vastly greater expenditure of lives and treasure? If the answer is yes, then it's time to let out the stops. If the answer is no, then continuing on our present course is foolish, immoral and constitutes a betrayal of those sent to fight a war that we have no hope of actually winning. If we're not willing to go all in, then we should go home.

Mountaintop Removal

Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining Industry Continues to Poison Appalachia

By Mary Anne Hitt

There has been some shocking news out of Appalachia in recent days. First, a game-changing new study demonstrated, for the first time, a direct link between the dust from mountaintop removal coal mines and lung cancer. Then Ken Ward, Jr. of the Charleston Gazette reported on a West Virginia lab worker who pled guilty to falsifying water test results because of pressure from the coal industry.

And on top of all that came another report, this time out of Kentucky, showing that mountaintop removal is straining the ecosystems needed to support wildlife and critical stream habitats.

The results of the West Virginia University health study are jaw-dropping. Researchers exposed human lung tissue to mountaintop removal dust in the lab, and they found the dust exposure promoted development of lung cancer is the first study that has demonstrated such a direct link between mountaintop removal pollution and these serious health consequences.

I think someday we’ll look back on the publication of this study as a watershed moment in the long mountaintop removal struggle. Health problems have been long documented in mountaintop removal country, including in dozens of peer reviewed studies, but the coal industry has always tried to shift the blame to other causes. As Dr. Michael Hendryx told the Charleston Gazette:

“The larger implication is that we have evidence of environmental conditions in mining communities that promote human lung cancer. Previous studies … have been criticized for being only correlational studies of illness in mining communities, and with this study we have solid evidence that mining dust collected from residential communities causes cancerous human lung cell changes.”

Meanwhile, the plot thickens in the case of the lab that diluted, substituted and otherwise tampered with water samples from coal mining sites across the state. These self-reported water samples are a key part of oversight of coal mining pollution. Just yesterday came further news from West Virginia that despite the state Department of Environmental Protection revoking certification for the lab where the falsified tests happened, the state board of environmental quality issued a stay on the revocation pending a full hearing to be held in December.

My colleague Bill Price, a fellow West Virginian and long-time advocate for Appalachian communities, is as baffled as I am. “The decision to not immediately implement the certificate revocation shows a total disregard for the safety of local residents,” he said. “If you can’t do it right, you don’t deserve to be a certified water testing company. Period.”

Bill, like me and so many others, hopes that federal and state investigators will dig much deeper, and faster. We have a right to know if the coal industry is pressuring other labs to falsify water tests, and guilty parties should be held responsible.

Meanwhile, the study out of Kentucky shows that reclamation of mined sites does not lead to recovery of the ecosystem, and that’s because of fundamental, long term damage to waterways caused by surface and mountaintop removal mining activities. You can’t blow off the top of the mountain, shove all the debris into a nearby valley, then replant some trees and expect everything to go back to normal. Among other reasons, this is because the science is making it increasingly clear that coal mining waste continues to pollute streams decades after mining ends.

As residents in West Virginia, Kentucky and other Appalachian states call for an end to mountaintop removal and all the harms it causes, they are also calling on their leaders to chart a safe, healthy, prosperous path forward for the region. In West Virginia and Kentucky, legislators have assembled task forces to begin tackling the question of how to diversify coalfield economies—the SCORE program in West Virginia and the SOAR project in Kentucky. It remains to be seen whether these efforts will really grapple with moving beyond a boom and bust fossil fuel economy, but it’s a start. Meanwhile, grassroots organizations in both states are doing sophisticated, important work on economic transition.

As Appalachia charts its future, one thing is clear—it’s long past time to end mountaintop removal. The U.S. EPA can act to rein in the worst abuses of the coal industry. Congress can pass the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency (ACHE) Act and the Clean Water Protection Act. There is no time to waste—with each passing day, lives hang in the balance.

Global Warming? Still here..

U.N. Panel Issues Its Starkest Warning Yet on Global Warming

By JUSTIN GILLIS

The gathering risks of climate change are so profound that they could stall or even reverse generations of progress against poverty and hunger if greenhouse emissions continue at a runaway pace, according to a major new United Nations report.

Despite growing efforts in many countries to tackle the problem, the global situation is becoming more acute as developing countries join the West in burning huge amounts of fossil fuels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said here on Sunday.

Failure to reduce emissions, the group of scientists and other experts found, could threaten society with food shortages, refugee crises, the flooding of major cities and entire island nations, mass extinction of plants and animals, and a climate so drastically altered it might become dangerous for people to work or play outside during the hottest times of the year.

“Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems,” the report found.

In the starkest language it has ever used, the expert panel made clear how far society remains from having any serious policy to limit global warming.

Doing so would require leaving the vast majority of the world’s reserves of fossil fuels in the ground or, alternatively, developing methods to capture and bury the emissions resulting from their use, the group said.

If governments are to meet their own stated goal of limiting the warming of the planet to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level, they must restrict emissions from additional fossil-fuel burning to about 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide, the panel said. 

At current growth rates, that budget is likely to be exhausted in something like 30 years, possibly less.

Yet energy companies have booked coal and petroleum reserves equal to several times that amount, and they are spending some $600 billion a year to find more. Utilities and oil companies continue to build coal-fired power plants and refineries, and governments are spending another $600 billion or so directly subsidizing the consumption of fossil fuels.

By contrast, the report found, less than $400 billion a year is being spent around the world to reduce emissions or otherwise cope with climate change. That is a small fraction of the revenue spent on fossil fuels — it is less, for example, than the revenue of a single American oil company, Exxon Mobil.

The new report comes just a month before international delegates convene in Lima, Peru, to devise a new global agreement to limit emissions, and it makes clear the urgency of their task.

Appearing Sunday morning at a news conference in Copenhagen to unveil the report, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, appealed for strong action in Lima.

“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message,” Mr. Ban said. “Leaders must act. Time is not on our side.”

Yet there has been no sign that national leaders are willing to discuss allocating the trillion-ton emissions budget among countries, an approach that would confront the problem head-on, but also raise deep questions of fairness. To the contrary, they are moving toward a relatively weak agreement that would essentially let each country decide for itself how much effort to put into limiting global warming, and even that document would not take effect until 2020.

“If they choose not to talk about the carbon budget, they’re choosing not to address the problem of climate change,” said Myles R. Allen, a climate scientist at Oxford University in Britain who helped write the new report. “They might as well not bother to turn up for these meetings.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a scientific body appointed by the world’s governments to advise them on the causes and effects of global warming, and potential solutions. The group, along with Al Gore, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its efforts to call attention to the climate crisis.

The new report is a 175-page synopsis of a much longer series of reports that the panel has issued over the past year. It is the final step in a five-year effort by the body to analyze a vast archive of published climate research.

It is the fifth such report from the group since 1990, each finding greater certainty that the climate is warming and that human activities are the primary cause.

“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, and in global mean sea-level rise; and it is extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the report said.

A core finding of the new report is that climate change is no longer a distant threat, but is being felt all over the world. “It’s here and now,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, said in an interview. “It’s not something in the future.”

The group cited mass die-offs of forests, such as those killed by heat-loving beetles in the American West; the melting of land ice virtually everywhere in the world; an accelerating rise of the seas that is leading to increased coastal flooding; and heat waves that have devastated crops and killed tens of thousands of people.

The report contained the group’s most explicit warning yet about the food supply, saying that climate change had already become a small drag on overall global production, and could become a far larger one if emissions continued unchecked.

A related finding is that climate change poses serious risks to basic human progress, in areas such as alleviating poverty. Under the worst-case scenarios, factors like high food prices and intensified weather disasters would most likely leave poor people worse off. In fact, the report said, that has already happened to a degree.

In Washington, the Obama administration welcomed the report, with the president’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, calling it “yet another wake-up call to the global community that we must act together swiftly and aggressively in order to stem climate change and avoid its worst impacts.”

The administration is pushing for new limits on emissions from American power plants, but faces stiff resistance in Congress and some states.

Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University and a principal author of the new report, said that a continuation of the political paralysis on emissions would leave society depending largely on luck.

If the level of greenhouse gases were to continue rising at a rapid pace over the coming decades, severe effects would be avoided only if the climate turned out to be far less sensitive to those gases than most scientists think likely, he said.

“We’ve seen many governments delay and delay and delay on implementing comprehensive emissions cuts,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “So the need for a lot of luck looms larger and larger. 

Personally, I think it’s a slim reed to lean on for the fate of the planet.”

Suppress the Black Vote in North Carolina. It's Not Working.

Republicans Tried to Suppress the Black Vote in North Carolina. It's Not Working.

Thousands more African-Americans have already turned out to vote this year than in 2010. Here's how Democrats are doing it.

By Erika Eichelberger

"The first question I ask my customers is: Are you registered?" Jolanda Smith says.

Smith runs a hair salon on the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her hair is dyed lavender and her arms are covered in heart and shooting-star tattoos. In the lead-up to the midterms, she's lending her storefront to Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan's reelection campaign. Smith passes out sample ballots and flyers and tells customers how to register and where their polling location is. Last Saturday morning, she was talking God and voting as she straightened a customer's hair.

"It's: Are you gonna vote, yes or no?" she says, sectioning off a lock and pulling it through the iron. "God gave us a choice, and the choices are always yes or no. It's not maybe. It's not, 'Let me think about it,' 'cause those are excuses…On down from choosing Christ to voting. You gonna vote? Yes or no?"

IN 2013, North Carolina Republicans, led by Hagan's opponent, state house speaker Thom Tillis, passed a far-reaching voting law that curtails early voting and eliminates same-day registration. The Justice Department sued North Carolina over the law, charging it was discriminatory and would depress minority turnout.

Hagan's campaign knows that black voter turnout could decide her fate—and, by extension, determine which party controls the Senate for the final two years of President Barack Obama's term. If African-Americans manage to turn out at presidential-year levels—if they're at least 21 percent of the electorate—Hagan will probably win, says Tom Jensen, director of the North Carolina-based polling firm Public Policy Polling.

That's why the Hagan campaign, and its coordinated get-out-the-vote organization Forward North Carolina—along with the NAACP, state Democrats, and get-out-the-vote outfits—launched unprecedented efforts this year to mobilize black voters.

Those efforts are paying off. On the first day of early voting last week, 76-year-old Ruben Betts was sitting on the curb in a shopping center parking lot wearing an "I just voted" sticker on his sweater. The president reminded him to vote this year, he says: "Obama sent me a letter." As of Thursday, 24 percent of early voters in North Carolina were African-American, according to records from the state board of elections. That's up from just 17 percent at the same point during the last midterm elections in 2010.

The Hagan field operation, which has 40 offices, 100 staffers, and 10,000 volunteers, is the largest that North Carolina has ever seen in a Senate race. By comparison, the get-out-the-vote campaign for North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall's failed Senate bid in 2010 was almost entirely run by volunteers. "We had no money, I mean no money," says Thomas Mills, a Democratic political consultant who helped coordinate Marshall's field operation. "And maybe five paid staffers. The difference in what they've got now—it's just not even same thing. There's no comparison."

Democrats have spent $1 million on ads aired on black radio stations. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee partnered with the Congressional Black Caucus this month to send black lawmakers on a bus tour through North Carolina and five other battleground states. And Hagan's campaign is collaborating extensively with black clergy across the state and roughly 150 black small business owners like Smith who are helping turn out voters this year.

Smith says the main issue that convinces her customers to go to the polls is health insurance. (North Carolina didn't expand Medicaid, so about 500,000 poor North Carolinians are still without insurance.) Jobs top the list, too. Smith's shop sits on Murchison Road, one of the main drags leading out of Fayetteville. The further you drive from the town center, the less money there is—the storefronts become more faded, the sidewalks get weedier, the landscape grayer. "It's hard to get a job even if you have a degree," she says.

Smith adds that anger over the August shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, will also bring people in her community out on Tuesday. "It was more than just him," she notes, referring to the police brutality she witnesses regularly in her community. "You have some in the system that say, 'I'm gonna hide behind this badge and use it for injustice instead of justice'…To us it feels like it's racist."

Those efforts are paying off. On the first day of early voting last week, 76-year-old Ruben Betts was sitting on the curb in a shopping center parking lot wearing an "I just voted" sticker on his sweater. The president reminded him to vote this year, he says: "Obama sent me a letter." As of Thursday, 24 percent of early voters in North Carolina were African-American, according to records from the state board of elections. That's up from just 17 percent at the same point during the last midterm elections in 2010.

The Hagan field operation, which has 40 offices, 100 staffers, and 10,000 volunteers, is the largest that North Carolina has ever seen in a Senate race. By comparison, the get-out-the-vote campaign for North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall's failed Senate bid in 2010 was almost entirely run by volunteers. "We had no money, I mean no money," says Thomas Mills, a Democratic political consultant who helped coordinate Marshall's field operation. "And maybe five paid staffers. The difference in what they've got now—it's just not even same thing. There's no comparison."

Democrats have spent $1 million on ads aired on black radio stations. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee partnered with the Congressional Black Caucus this month to send black lawmakers on a bus tour through North Carolina and five other battleground states. And Hagan's campaign is collaborating extensively with black clergy across the state and roughly 150 black small business owners like Smith who are helping turn out voters this year.

Smith says the main issue that convinces her customers to go to the polls is health insurance. (North Carolina didn't expand Medicaid, so about 500,000 poor North Carolinians are still without insurance.) Jobs top the list, too. Smith's shop sits on Murchison Road, one of the main drags leading out of Fayetteville. The further you drive from the town center, the less money there is—the storefronts become more faded, the sidewalks get weedier, the landscape grayer. "It's hard to get a job even if you have a degree," she says.

Smith adds that anger over the August shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, will also bring people in her community out on Tuesday. "It was more than just him," she notes, referring to the police brutality she witnesses regularly in her community. "You have some in the system that say, 'I'm gonna hide behind this badge and use it for injustice instead of justice'…To us it feels like it's racist."