The Pot Calls The Kettle Black

Barack Obama says David Cameron allowed Libya to become a ‘ hit show'

Unprecedented attack by serving US President claims UK was 'distracted'

• Tim Walker, Nigel Morris 

INDEPENDENT

Barack Obama has sharply criticised David Cameron for the UK’s role in allowing Libya to become a “shit show” after the fall of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in an unprecedented attack on a British leader by a serving US President.  

Mr Obama said that following a successful military intervention to aid rebels during the 2011 Arab Spring revolt, Libya was left to spiral out of control – due largely to the inaction of America’s European allies.

In a candid US magazine interview, Mr Obama said: “When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong… there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.”

Singling out the British Prime Minister, he suggested that Mr Cameron had taken his eye off Libya after being “distracted by a range of other things”.

Mr Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French President, pushed hard for the bombing raids on Colonel Gaddafi’s forces that led to his fall, but since 2011 Libya has sunk further into violence and civil war, and latterly has become a focal point for Isis in North Africa.

Mr Obama went on: “We actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1bn – which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess.”

Referring to that mess in private, Mr Obama reportedly uses the more colourful term, “shit show”.

A Libyan fireman stands in front of an oil storage tank at an oil facility in northern Libya’s Ras Lanouf region in February, after it was set ablaze following attacks launched by Isis jihadists (AP)

The comments will be a severe embarrassment to Mr Cameron, who has often been forced to defend British involvement in Libya on the grounds that Western intervention helped to avert a bloodbath. They will also place strain on the transatlantic alliance as coalition forces target Isis positions in Syria and Iraq.

Mr Cameron’s spokeswoman said he had frequently made clear that he still believed military action in Libya was “absolutely the right thing to do” and stressed that the Government had put support for the country on the agenda when the UK hosted a meeting of G8 leaders in 2013.

She said: “We would share the President’s assessment that there are real challenges in Libya. That’s why we are continuing to work hard with international partners to support a process in Libya that puts in place a government that can bring stability, and why we are talking about how we can support such a government in the future.”

Speaking at length to The Atlantic, Mr Obama revealed that the Prime Minister had risked damaging the countries’ “special relationship” by delaying an increase in defence spending to meet a Nato target of 2 per cent of GDP. Alluding to Mr Cameron’s foot-dragging, Mr Obama said: “Free riders aggravate me.”

Dave Brown on Barack Obama

When the two came face to face at the G7 summit in June 2015, Mr Obama told Mr Cameron: “You have to pay your fair share.” The next month, Chancellor George Osborne’s summer Budget included a defence spending rise.

Mr Obama also said Mr Cameron’s failures had affected his decision not to enforce a “red line” over President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons during the Syrian civil war. The President had planned a strike against Assad’s forces in August 2013, following a deadly sarin gas attack by the regime on civilians in a Damascus suburb. The strike was called off at the 11th hour. One “major factor” in the decision, the President said, “was the failure of Cameron to obtain the consent of his Parliament” for military action. 

During his White House tenure, Mr Obama explained, he has tried to encourage other nations to act in international matters without always waiting for the US to take the lead. 

“It was precisely to prevent the Europeans and the Arab states from holding our coats while we did all the fighting that we, by design, insisted” that they spearhead the Libyan intervention, he said, describing the strategy as “part of the anti-free rider campaign”.

Mr Obama also said Mr Sarkozy, who left office the year after the Libyan intervention, had been keen to “trumpet” France’s involvement. The White House allowed him to take disproportionate credit for the air strikes, thus “[purchasing] France’s involvement in a way that made it less expensive and less risky for us,” Mr Obama said.

• More about:
• David Cameron
• Barack Obama
• Libya
• Colonel Gaddafi
• Africa
• Arab Spring

ON THE OTHER HAND:

‘US-led invasion of Libya opened up massive arsenals to terrorists’ - Chris Hedges

RT

The destruction of Libya, Iraq and Syria as unified states generated Islamist radical groups in the Middle East, which create havoc, said investigative journalist Chris Hedges. This was caused by the invasion of outside forces, he added. 

RT:  How much of a threat does Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) pose in Tunisia?

Chris Hedges: It is probably not an existential threat, but it is a threat, because after the US overthrow of [Muammar] Gaddafi it essentially opened up these massive Libyan arsenals to a series of groups reaching all the way down into Sub-Saharan Africa – countries like Mali. So you have provided one logistical base, because these militants are based just over the border in Libya, along the border with Tunisia; and it has provided weapons by which they can carry out attacks. Of course it has also provided training.

The destruction of Libya as a unified state - like the destruction of Iraq and Syria - has spawned these groups that can create significant havoc inside countries in the region, and that is what we’re seeing.

US generals to lawmakers: Libya a failed state, Iran a long-term threat

RT:  Tunisia has built a new 200 kilometer barrier on the Libyan border to stop ISIL. Will this help?

CH: That is a long border. I don’t know how long it is, but I have been there. It is going to be pretty hard to keep ISIS out; it is a remote, often inaccessible, porous border. So I expect to see more attacks like this one.

RT:Have the US air strikes against ISIL in Libya had any impact?

CH: I think the problem is, as we have seen, with the attacks against IS in Iraq and Syria that unless you can occupy the territory you can certainly damage and to a certain extent cripple these movements. But as long as they control the ground, as long as they are able to operate within vast swaths of territory, air campaigns are not going to be able to stop them. And that has just been proven over and over – the Israelis tried that a few years ago in Southern Lebanon and it didn’t work out very well for them.

RT:  A US commander recently admitted that Libya is turning into a failed state. Could Tunisia go the same way?

CH: No, I think that the failed states are largely created by the destruction of central authority on the part of outside forces. We saw that with the US invasion of Iraq; we saw that with the decision - not only by the US, but by its allies the Saudis, the Qataris and others - to arm and fund the insurgent groups within Syria; we saw that with the overthrow of Gaddafi. I don’t see that happening in Tunisia. However the creation of a failed state on the border of Tunisia is certainly going to create significant problems, because these armed jihadists have the tools and the space to carry out almost unlimited attacks inside Tunisia.

RT:  The US is considering a deeper military involvement in Libya. How could that change the situation in the region?

CH: It’s not just Tunisia. They are moving into all sorts of states around Libya, including in Egypt. You have a significant number of Tunisian jihadists who have already flooded into Iraq and Syria. And if we go back far enough, Afghanistan. So there is a network by which ISIS can draw on in order to attempt to create havoc inside Tunisia.

I wouldn’t say Tunisia is necessarily the next target, I’d say it is one of several targets, and the capacity that ISIS has to disrupt life in Tunisia is significant. I don’t think we can speak about Tunisia becoming an Islamic state – and that is what I mean by saying it is not an existential threat to Tunisia – but it certainly can deeply disrupt life within Tunisia.

"Our Strength Is In Our Diversity."

Isis documents leak: Britons among 22,000 recruits with personal details revealed through terrorist group’s 'registration form'

INDEPENDENT 

• Lizzie Dearden 
• @lizziedearden 

Details of more than a dozen British Isis members are among 22,000 recruits reportedly revealed in a cache of leaked documents from the terrorist group’s stringent “entrance interviews”.

Zaman Al Wasl, a pro-opposition Syrian news website, published a selection of the forms online showing a 23-question survey detailing extremists’ names, birth dates, nationalities, hometowns, nationalities and even blood types.

But a total of 22,000 names, addresses, telephone number and family contacts feature in a similar cache of documents, seen by Sky News, described by a former counter terror boss as a “goldmine".

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary was a rap artist from Maida Vale, west London, before he went to fight in Syria

They include prominent names of figures already known to be members, such as Britons Abdel Bary, Junaid Hussain, Reyaad Khan.

Bary, a former rapper from London, was reported last July to have deserted Isis and be on the run in Turkey. Hussain, from Birmingham, was thought to have been Isis’s head of media before he was killed in a US drone strike in August.

Reyaad Khan, from Penarth, near Cardiff, in an Isis recruitment video

Khan, from Cardiff, previously appeared in high-profile Isis propaganda video, but was killed in an RAF-led drone strike.

The forms show prospective members were asked to choose if they wanted to be used as suicide bombers, soldiers or in another role, and to detail any previous “jihadist experience”.

Zaman Al Wasl’s report claimed the personal details of 1,736 fighters from 40 countries had been revealed, showing that a quarter were Saudis and the rest predominantly Tunisian, Moroccan and Egyptian.

The documents, written in Arabic and stamped with logos used by the so-called Islamic State, allegedly contain details of 16 British fighters.

Most of the European extremists listed were from France, followed by Germany and the UK. Four were said to be from the US and six from Canada.

Timothy Holman, who translated part of the cache into English, said the documents were collected at border crossings into Isis territory between November and December 2013.

The authenticity of the forms could not immediately be verified but the Home Office said it was “aware” of the report, while the leak also matched descriptions of material being investigated by security services in Germany.

Junaid Hussain

The forms reveal members’ names, codenames, birthdays, nationalities, countries visited, employment record and previous jihadist activities.

“Any jihadist who crosses the Islamic State's borders for the first time is made to acknowledge to the Borders Administration everything about himself, even what he wants to be in Isis - a fighter or a suicide bomber,” Zaman Al Wasl reported.

The documents were published on Tuesday, a day after reports emerged in Germany that the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) security service had received more than a thousand Isis documents.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s description of the material matched that given by Zaman Al Wasl, detailing 23-question “entrance interviews” from Isis territories in Syria.

Timeline: The emergence of Isis

“We believe it is very likely that these are real documents,” a spokesperson for the BKA told the newspaper.

Prosecutors in the country are reportedly planning to use them as evidence to prosecute any Isis members attempting to return to Germany.

Speaking about Sky News' documents, former global terrorism operations director at MI6 Richard Barrett told the channel: "It will be an absolute goldmine of information of enormous significance and interest to very many people, particularly the security and intelligence services."

An English translation of the Isis ‘registration form' (Sky News)

A spokesperson for the Home Office told The Independent it was “aware” of the apparent leak but said he could not give any further information for security reasons.

“Individuals who take part in the conflict in Syria or travel to Isis territories are subject to investigation and should expect to be prosecuted on their return,” he added. “Any evidence will be considered.”

At least 700 people from the UK have travelled to support or fight for jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq, according to police, and about half have since returned.

• More about:
• Isis
• Isis files
• Syria
• Islamic State
• Daesh

The Michigan Surprise - Bernie Sanders Burns the Pollsters

Why The Polls Missed Bernie Sanders’s Michigan Upset

Charlie Neibergall / AP

Bernie Sanders greets supporters after speaking at a campaign rally Monday in Dearborn, Michigan.

Charlie Neibergall / AP FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

If Bernie Sanders were to defeat Hillary Clinton in Michigan’s Democratic primary, it would be “among the greatest polling errors in primary history,” our editor in chief, Nate Silver, wrote Tuesday evening when results started to come in. Sanders pulled it off, and now we’re left wondering how it happened. How did Sanders win by 1.5 percentage points when our polling average showed Clinton ahead by 21 points and our forecasts showed that Sanders had less than a 1 percent chance of winning?

With a polling miss this big, no single factor is likely to explain it, so more than one answer could be correct. Also, not every pollster releases detailed data, and it may take some time to fully diagnose what went wrong. “It’s a little bit of everything,” Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray told The Huffington Post.

Here is our initial assessment of some possible explanations, along with comments from some of the pollsters who had reported a big Clinton lead:

Pollsters underestimated youth turnout. Voters under 30 made up 19 percent of Democratic primary voters, nearly as large a share as voters 65 or older, according to exit polls. Mitchell Research and Communications, which showed a 37 percentage point Clinton lead in a poll conducted Sunday, found that people younger than 50 would make up less than a quarter of all voters; they made up more than half instead. Mitchell was one of the only pollsters in the state to poll using only calls to landlines, and most Americans younger than 45 live in households without landlines. But even Monmouth, which dialed cellphones, too, underestimated the turnout among younger voters. Perhaps all the polls showing a big Clinton lead sowed complacency among Clinton supporters, who skew older — though big leads in polls in Southern states didn’t stop her supporters from helping her romp to big victories.

Pollsters underestimated Sanders’s dominance among young voters. Not only did more young voters turn out than expected, but Sanders won 81 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds. A YouGov poll showed him winning 66 percent.¹

Pollsters underestimated the number of independent voters who would participate in the primary. YouGov expected Sanders to beat Clinton by 38 percentage points among independent voters participating in the open Democratic primary. He won those voters by 43 percentage points. But no one expected independents to make up 27 percent of voters; YouGov expected about 12 percent. “There were too many Democrats in the poll,” said Will Jordan, elections editor at YouGov.

Pollsters underestimated Sanders’s support among black voters. Sanders had won less than 20 percent of black voters in most states with large black populations, and Mitchell and YouGov both showed Sanders winning less than 20 percent of them in Michigan. Instead he won 28 percent.

Pollsters missed a late break to Sanders by not polling after Sunday.Clinton and Sanders debated in Flint on Sunday and met in a town hall in Detroit on Monday. No public pollsters contacted voters after either event. Sanders did slightly better among voters who decided in the week before the primary, according to exit polls. An earlier polling miss, in the Iowa Republican caucuses, may have resulted in part from a scarcity of late polls. And there were signs before Sunday that Sanders was closing the gap: In the YouGov poll, 45 percent of Michigan Democrats said their opinion of Sanders was getting better, and just 8 percent said it was getting worse. For Clinton, the numbers were 38 percent and 19 percent.

Some Clinton supporters chose to vote in the Republican primary. We know 7 percent of voters in the Republican primary identified themselves as Democrats to exit pollsters, compared with just 4 percent of voters in the Democratic primary who said they were Republicans. “Those 7 percent of Dems were likely mostly Hillary voters who thought she had an easy win and they could do their part trying to stop [Donald] Trump,” said Bernie Porn of pollster EPIC-MRA. The exit-poll samples are too small, though, to check that.

Pollsters had little recent history to work with. Michigan’s Democratic primary was weird in 2008 (Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot), and the state party held caucuses in 2000 and 2004 that weren’t really competitive. So relying on voter history could lead pollsters astray. “Remember, we haven’t had a real Democratic presidential primary in Michigan lately,” said Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, which showed the tightest race of any late polls, with Clinton leading by 5 percentage points.

This is an outlier, a perfectly rotten combination of bad luck and bad timing. Several pollsters pointed out that they used the same methods in the Michigan Democratic primary as in other primaries — including Michigan’s Republican primary — with relative success.

“Polls on the Republican race, including ours, were generally OK,” said Barbara Carvalho of the Marist Poll. She added that all polls on the Democratic race had Clinton winning. “So, something clearly changed in the closing days.”

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Neocons Beg Catholics for Salvation From Trump

As eccentric billionaire Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump continues to rack up primary victories, the party's establishment is beginning to wonder whether the political outsider can be stopped. Alarmed, neoconservative pundit Anne Applebaum goes so far as to suggest that a Trump presidency would mark "the end of the West as we know it."

Dear Catholics: Stop Trump, says National Review appeal | National Catholic Reporter

Cathy Lynn Grossman   Religion News Service   |  Mar. 8, 2016

 National Catholic Reporter

In an appeal to the faithful, 40 conservative Catholic leaders have denounced GOP frontrunner Donald Trump as a demagogue and danger to the nation and the Republican Party.

The open letter appeared in The National Review on March 7, one day before the Michigan Republican primary, which could give Trump an almost-unbeatable delegate lead in the GOP nominating race if he posts a strong win.

Robert P. George, of Princeton University and George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, headed the charge, and the appeal was also signed by opinion leaders from academia and religious media.

The letter denounces Trump for “vulgarity, oafishness, shocking ignorance, and -- we do not hesitate to use the word -- demagoguery."

Worse, they wrote, he's the opposite of what Catholics should seek in a leader.

George and Weigel wrote of Trump that there is “nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to … the principle of limited constitutional government."

Those causes have been championed by the GOP, the authors wrote, but a Trump nomination would threaten the party's commitment to those issues.

The appeal, in the pages of the magazine founded by conservative icon author William F. Buckley, Jr., comes less than a month after its editors issued a similar denunciation of Trump in its January edition.

On Jan. 21,Trump fired back on Twitter:

"National Review is a failing publication that has lost it's way. It's circulation is way down w its influence being at an all time low. Sad!”

Ahead of Tuesday’s Michigan primary, a new Fox News-funded pre-election poll of likely Republican voters showed the New York billionaire was a popular choice among Catholic voters.

Trump’s recent kerfuffle with Pope Francis (who called the candidate's stance on immigration "not Christian") has not dissuaded Catholics.

According to the poll, Trump, with 52 percent of Catholic voters, leads Sen. Marco Rubio (16 percent) Ohio Gov. John Kasich (14 percent) and Sen. Tex Cruz (11 percent) with Catholics.

The Deep Roots of Middle East Terrorism: Israeli Complicity in Lebanon”s “Treblinka”

Returning to the scene of a war crime: amid the vile slums of Sabra and Shatila, hope glows

As a witness to the massacre of 1982, I went back often to this place of memories and ghosts, to talk to the survivors

• Robert Fisk 
• @indyvoices 
• Sunday 28 February 2016

Sabra and Shatila were the scene of war crimes. In September of 1982, Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies – watched by Israeli troops who had surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps – massacred up to 1,700 civilians. It was a place of horror and, much later, of memorial. The mass grave still lies beneath a tide of mud behind a stand of trees where Syrian refugees sell cheap shirts and DVDs. But the names of Sabra and Shatila are today associated with a shame which no one could have imagined 34 years ago . 

Drug-dealing has now tainted the camps – by the Syrians more than the Palestinians – and there have been murders and, most tragic of all, prostitution. No one in Sabra and Shatila hides their sorrow. The massacre, the survivors’ grief, the years of misery and the siege by Shia Amal militiamen – who killed more Palestinians than the Israelis – did not break the Palestinians, but it doesn’t take long today to understand the depth of their despair.

“What do you expect when a refugee population lives in this poverty and when they have less and less money?” one of the local camp leaders asked as we walked the narrow alleyways – so narrow that your shoulders rub the slum walls on each side. “The Lebanese do not allow Palestinians to work outside the camps, the UN relief money is getting less and less, some have families abroad who send money to them. Others do not.”

The man was right. Where refugees live, the mafia arrives, the people-smugglers; the cruel and the rapacious thrive amid sorrow, just as they did in Bosnia after the war of 1992-95. The Palestinians first arrived in Sabra and Shatila in 1948. It took almost 70 years and the 1982 massacre before the shame of drugs and prostitution touched this place. Nor is it on a scale to attract attention. Only a very few Palestinian women have left the camps – they must leave for the sake of family honour – and moved elsewhere in Lebanon, to Jounieh north of Beirut, according to a political official in the camps.

As a witness to the massacre of 1982, I went back often to this place of memories and ghosts, to talk to the few survivors. Sabra and Shatila are scarcely two miles from my Beirut home. There were five thousand Palestinians in the camps in 1982, perhaps only 3,000 today. But an article in one of the local Beirut papers had caught my attention. A middle-aged Palestinian, it reported, had been shot dead by two Islamists on a motorcycle. Did this mean that the Isis cult had infected even Sabra and Shatila? In which case, Isis was in Beirut.

(HISTORIC NOTE : 13 months after the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, 241 American soldiers were killed at “ The Marine Barracks” in Lebanon on October 23, 1983. The US was seen as being on the side of The Zionists and supporting the IDF)

The moment I arrived, I was told that no, the newspaper story was untrue. The Lebanese government had claimed the murderers were Islamists in order to enhance their own prestige for taking one of the killers into custody. Arab governments line up to tell the world these days that they are fighting Isis – in the hope the West will give their armies more guns. But this story, too, I discovered, was untrue.

Ahmad Hazineh was a good and decent man. No criminal. He did indeed help supply his people with clean water and electricity for a pitifully small sum, but he fell foul of the local mafia who wanted him to collect more cash from the Palestinians. He refused – and so they murdered him. 

But when Suheil Natour of the Democratic Front and I began to prowl these foul-smelling streets, we were faced with anger of the rawest kind. One middle-aged man saw my camera and burst out from his iron door, his face dark and lined. 

“How dare you people take pictures of us?” he screamed, another man beside him, shaking in fury. “How dare you humiliate us? Do you know this place is filled with mice and huge rats and we live in this shit and sewage and stench and there are thieves and drugs and prostitution?” He actually used the word “prostitution”. He understood the shame. He was shouting so loudly now that Suheil tried to restrain him and put his arm on the man’s shoulder. He threw it off.

But Suheil had noticed something else. A poster dedicated to a Palestinian “martyr”, a newly murdered man, Ahmad Hazineh, also known as Abu Wassem, whose home – by extraordinary coincidence – was next to us, just beside the shouting man and his companion. And there stood in the doorway a young woman, listening sadly to this fit of screaming next door.

“People here are very angry,” she said, smiling. “Yes, Ahmad Hazineh was my father. He died on 28 January, just a month ago. He was a good man. He helped everyone. The mafia killed him. Yes, there are drugs and prostitution in the camps. But my father looked after my siblings and myself and he told me every day that I must be educated. He sent me to act in theatre in the UK. I have been to London and Newcastle.” 

And Nirmeen Hazineh, dark-haired and still smiling, talked again of her love for her father, and she saw how the names of “London” and “Newcastle” – where, more than half a century ago, I was a cub reporter on the local paper – touched us. It was as if a beautiful light had suddenly been switched on amid the vile slums of Sabra and Shatila, brighter than any lamp her father could have lit with his electricity supply. 

Nirmeen’s English was impeccable. She talked of her hope for better days. There was still some justice, she said. One of her father’s alleged murderers had been arrested, a man who was now in Roumieh prison north of Beirut. 

Mohamed al-Kassas has been charged with the killing and awaits trial. And of course, I cruelly remembered that not one of the Christian militiamen who, in sight of the Israelis, slaughtered 1,700 of Nirmeen’s fellow Palestinians, was ever charged with any crime. And then I realised that Nirmeen was only 18, that the massacre had occurred well over seven years before she was born. And that, to have maintained their identity and resilience in this wretched place for so long, the Palestinians must survive.

• More about:
• Palestine
• Lebanon
• Refugees

 ISRAEL WAS BUILT ON TERRORISM

"America’s infrastructure was once the envy of the world, but in an era of government-bashing, it has been allowed to crumble.”

The Real Cause of the Flint Crisis

• JACOB S. HACKER AND PAUL PIERSON
 
•  6:01 AM ET ATLANTIC

The shocking crisis in Flint—where state cost-cutting mandates led to lead-tainted water that has poisoned thousands of children—has become a metaphor for American political dysfunction. Yet it should also be a reminder of how much Americans’ health and well-being depend on effective public policies. Rather than see Flint as another case of government failure, reinforcing distrust and cynicism, Americans should instead see it as a call to action. Using the power of government, American society once solved problems like those now plaguing Flint and too many other communities. And it could do so again, if it overcame the widespread amnesia about the enormous benefits of active, responsive government.

It’s easy to forget today, but cleaning up municipal water supplies was the greatest public-health triumph of the 20th century. The economists David Cutler and Grant Miller have estimated that approximately half of the dramatic decline in mortality between 1900 and 1936—a period in which life expectancy increased from less than 50 years to more than 60—was due just to improved municipal water systems. The infant mortality rate fell by more than 80 percent. These public health measures helped lay the cornerstone of a capable system of government that could boost America’s rising economy by tackling problems that markets alone would not.

Between the first and last decades of the 20th century, visionary leaders from both parties—often working with an engaged corporate elite—crafted America’s distinctive and remarkably successful “mixed economy” of public and private initiative. These leaders recognized that private businesses, for all their vital contributions to prosperity, frequently failed to protect health and safety or make the long-term investments in public goods necessary for sustained growth. They recognized that private businesses sometimes produced public “bads”—dangerous and deceptive products, polluted air and water, distorted and captured polices—if doing so would also produce profits. As much as they saw competitive markets as essential, they believed that the strong thumb of government needed to assist and counterbalance the nimble fingers of the market (as the political economist Charles Lindblom would later describe this mixed model). The meteoric improvements in health, education, and living standards that defined “the American century” did not just happen. They were made possible by energetic government.

Reducing the toll of lead was a crucial, if belated, part of this transformation. In the middle of the 20th century, lead in gas and paint were a hidden poison that undermined the potential of millions of Americans. At the time, most American children were routinely exposed to lead levels far higher than those in Flint. Then as now, the worst affected were disproportionately poor and black, because levels were so dangerously high in the congested streets and aging buildings of inner cities.

The meteoric improvements in health, education, and living standards that defined “the American century” were made possible by energetic government.

Fortunately, the scientific community fostered by America’s mixed economy conclusively demonstrated lead’s catastrophic impact on developing brains. This knowledge came along with heightened awareness of the need for the robust use of public authority to combat this threat: from regulations on lead in gasoline and paint to the regular monitoring of toxic chemicals in soil and water.  Starting in the 1970s, a bipartisan coalition that included Republican presidents Nixon and Ford rapidly increased the capacity of government to address these challenges. The federal government forged the path, overcoming powerful lobbies defending business as usual. Over corporate opposition, the EPA began steps to phase out lead in gasoline in 1973. Over corporate opposition, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned lead paint in 1978. Efforts to remove lead from existing buildings and soil intensified. For 40 years, federal, state and local governments worked in tandem to get lead out of the water, air, and soil.

Such quiet efforts typically attract little fanfare. But they had a revolutionary impact on public health. The Center for Disease Control estimates that almost 90 percent of American children aged 1-5 had lead levels above 10 micrograms per deciliter in the late 1970s. Today, less than 1 percent do. The improvements were greatest for poor and minority children (who had by far the highest rates to begin with). This decline translates into markedly higher IQs, increased economic potential, and, quite likely, considerably lower rates of crime and teenage pregnancy. (Lead poisoning reduces impulse control as well as cognitive functioning). It feels callous to reduce the protection of young brains to an economic calculation, but the economic benefits have surely been staggering: By one careful estimate, they add up to $260 billion per year.

Yet progress on this front—and so many others essential to public health—has stalled. The United States once led the world in life expectancy and height. Americans now die younger and are significantly shorter than citizens in most of western and northern Europe. Despite historic progress, lead poisoning remains a scourge. As science continues to evolve, researchers have increasingly concluded that the 10 micrograms per deciliter threshold is too high and that, in fact, levels half that can cause very serious damage. Many cities continue to have elevated levels of lead in their water—in some, considerably higher levels than those in Flint. Evidence suggests that expenditures on lead abatement would provide benefits far in excess of costs: a dollar spent reducing the hazards of lead paint has been estimated to save at least $17 and perhaps much more in the long-run. Yet federal money for such effortsis drying up in the relentless downward push on domestic discretionary spending.

It is tempting to search for a single villain in the Flint crisis: the austerity measures of state Republicans and especially Governor Rick Snyder, the weakness of local protections, the missteps of the EPA. But the reality is that these threats to public health and social well-being are at work across the United States, and they have much deeper roots. Figuring out where responsiveness broke down, punishing those responsible, and fixing systems of accountability are all imperative. But that won’t solve the deeper problem—America’s retreat from an effective mixed economy.

Begin with the plummeting investment in the physical underpinnings of communities, the roads, bridges, water systems, and other public goods that make the places where people live and work safe, livable, and productive. American infrastructure once used to be the envy of the world and a major source of Americans’ improved living standards. But in an era of government-bashing, it has been allowed to crumble, risking health, safety, and economic success. A similar process has played out with federal investment in R&D, so vital to technological progress as well as economic growth, as well as in the kinds of basic health research that promoted lead-abatement, reductions in tobacco use, new drugs and treatments, and other measures that have made lives longer and healthier.

American infrastructure once used to be the envy of the world, but in an era of government-bashing, it has been allowed to crumble.

Meanwhile, federal health and safety rules have eroded. Regulations are ever more outdated, the agencies that enforce them ever more under-manned and cross-pressured by the blandishments of corporate lobbies, with their enticing revolving door. In retrospect, the dying gasp of America’s long, successful tradition of bipartisan problem-solving was the 1990 update of the Clean Air Act—legislation that has, since its inception in the 1970s, added an estimated one to two years to American life expectancy. Yet rather then recognizing these extraordinary achievements of a mixed economy, our conversations typically celebrate markets and denigrate government. Today, conservative politicians relentlessly attack government as a parasitical threat to liberty, while many on the left deride it as corrupt or fail to make a positive case for it at all.

The tragedy of all this is that America needs an effective mixed economy at least as much as it ever has. The threat of climate change and challenges of a complex, interdependent knowledge economy make an effective public sector vital—not just for future economic growth but for the future of our planet. Tearing down the mixed economy may be good for particular businesses (just as failing to regulate lead was good for the gas, auto, and construction industries). But it is bad for the economy overall. It is always hard to get corporations to recognize the need for broad, growth-promoting policies that may not immediately or directly help them. When those corporations and their political allies are denigrating what remains of government’s capacities, the challenge is even harder.

Just as in Flint, no easy solution to this larger governing crisis exists. The path forward will be long and rocky. It will require determined, steady efforts to make government work better, which in turn will require political reforms that reduce the stalemate and government incapacity that so defines our present era. No less important, it will require leaders willing to take the right lesson from Flint: The lead in Flint’s water—and in the bloodstreams of its children— is not a reason to distrust and dismantle government. It’s a reason to rebuild a government that has the capacity and independence needed to safeguard the health and well-being of American citizens.

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“DUMP the HUMP” - A lesson From President Hubert Humphrey

SUNDAY, MAR 6, 2016 12:00 PM EST

Democrats have their history wrong — and are about to make a grievous mistake 

Lesson of 1972 isn't that progressive nominees lose. Dems lose when they are out of step with voters, like Hillary 

KATHY DONOHUE - SALON

This election cycle, Democratic Party leaders are pleading with younger voters to heed the lessons of history. Echoing George Santayana’s famous warning: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” they urge millennials to take a close look at what happened to Democrats in 1972. That was the year, they explain, that the Democratic Party made a monumental blunder at its national convention by empowering young people, women and minorities at the expense of party elites. The result was the nomination of George McGovern, a candidate whose ideas were so radical that they guaranteed a landslide victory for Richard Nixon.

Leaving aside whether such an interpretation of 1972 is accurate, there is a more fundamental issue here.  What if pundits and Democratic Party leaders are focusing on the wrong election?  What if the lessons that history has for us are to be found not in 1972 but in 1968?  What if we are heeding the absolutely wrong warnings?

Much like 2016, the 1968 election was supposed to be a coronation. Lyndon Johnson had won the White House four years earlier with one of the landslide victories of the 20th century.  Few doubted he would be reelected, and no establishment politician even considered challenging Johnson for the nomination.  But also like 2016, a relatively obscure senator felt that there had to be a candidate in the race who would bring up issues that were in real danger of being ignored. In 1968 that senator was Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and the issue was the Vietnam War.

Political pundits dismissed McCarthy as a fringe candidate who had absolutely no chance of winning. But McCarthy’s campaign galvanized young people. An army of volunteers descended upon New Hampshire.  Hippies, who a few weeks earlier had been wearing jeans and long hair, decided to “Get Clean for Gene.” Young men shaved their beards, young women donned dresses and all began going door to door throughout the Granite State.

McCarthy did not win New Hampshire but he took 20 of the 24 delegates, a result that sent shockwaves through the political establishment. Four days later Robert Kennedy, who had earlier declined to run because he assumed the election belonged to Johnson, threw his hat into the ring.  Two weeks after that in an absolutely astounding turnaround of events, the inevitable front-runner Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the race.  Much like 2016, “inevitability” was not quite as inevitable as everyone had initially assumed.

With Johnson’s departure, the Democrats needed an establishment candidate and looked to Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Throughout April and May, as Kennedy and McCarthy battled for votes in the primaries, Humphrey followed a different strategy. Well aware that the majority of delegates in 1968 were not going to be selected by voters but by the party elite in the non-primary states, he focused his efforts on wooing establishment politicians. By doing so Humphrey managed to build a formidable delegate lead much like Hillary Clinton is trying to do by locking in Super Delegates, today’s version of non-elected delegates chosen by party leaders.

When the Democrats met in Chicago late in the summer of 1968, the field had been tragically narrowed two and a half months earlier with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Only two candidates remained, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy. Humphrey had not won a single primary. Indeed, his primary total was a minuscule 161,143 votes. But he controlled the most delegates.  By contrast, McCarthy had received 2,914,933 primary votes, almost 20 times the number that Humphrey could claim.  Yet, by the time the balloons had settled onto the convention floor, a Democratic Party controlled by machine politicians and union leaders had chosen Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic nominee.

As the race for the White House entered its final phase, a war-weary electorate, clearly frustrated by the status quo, had a choice.  They could go with the establishment Democrat, who promised to continue Johnson’s policies, or they could elect a Republican, who had long ago mastered the sorts of campaign strategies that are currently propelling Donald Trump’s campaign. Much like Trump, Richard Nixon offered solutions without providing specifics, telling voters that he had a “secret plan” to “end the war but win the peace” in Vietnam. And while Nixon did not target Mexicans or Muslims, he did promise to restore law and order by cracking down on entitled and unruly young people demonstrating on the nation’s campuses and black people taking to the streets in urban neighborhoods. When the results came in, Nixon had edged past Humphrey in the popular vote and had a comfortable margin in the Electoral College.

Looking at 1968, it would seem the lesson that history has for us is that Democrats need to be really careful about assuming that the establishment candidate is the key to electoral victory. But what about 1972? Isn’t the lesson of that election that Democrats suffer their most devastating losses when they run candidates who speak to the party’s progressive base.

Actually, no. The lesson of 1972 is something quite different. To begin with, McGovern was not a particularly strong candidate. He had secured the nomination with only a quarter of the primary votes.  The unions refused to work for him. And he ran a poor campaign. Even more significant, he was going up against a sitting president, Richard Nixon, who had brought troop levels in Vietnam down from almost half a million to around 30,000, had eased Cold War tensions by going to China and had stabilized the economy, at least temporarily, by implementing wage and price controls. Nixon would have been tough to beat under any circumstances, and McGovern was not the candidate to do it.

But the real lesson that McGovern’s defeat teaches us is not the dangers of progressivism so much as the dangers of being out of step with the electorate. Every few decades, the existing political order is completely overturned and in the upheaval a new order emerges.  This happened in the 1930s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced what has been called the “Republican Ascendancy” with his New Deal Coalition. It happened again in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the rise of the right replaced the liberalism of the New Deal.

We are due for another upheaval and there are indications that we are actually in the middle of one right now. If that is the case, then what the election of 1972 teaches us is not that McGovern was too liberal for voters but that he was too out of step. He was trying to run as a ’60s liberal when the electorate had moved well beyond the ’60s, just as Clinton is running as a ’90s triangulating liberal when voters are hungry for change.

History has some important lessons to teach.  They are just not the one that pundits and establishment politicians are claiming.

Boat Loads of Refugees, Overwhelmingly Military Aged Unaccompanied Men

NATO commander says ISIS spreading like cancer among Syrian refugees

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE OF "REFUGEES”? 

WASHINGTON TIMES

Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operations, General Philip Breedlove, says ISIS is using the Syrian refugee crisis to ‘mask the movement’ of terrorists infiltrating Europe and the United States. While testifying to the Senate armed services community, the four star general said the Islamic State was ‘spreading like cancer’ amongst the flow of migrants from the Middle East. The group’s members are “taking advantage of paths of least resistance, threatening European nations and our own”, he added, reported The Guardian.

Breedlove also had harsh words for Russia, saying their indiscriminate bombing of civilians is intended to ‘get them on the road’ to Europe, where they can weaken the European Union and NATO with violence and division. The general said Russia is ‘weaponizing’ the Syrian refugees.

Breedlove says at least 1500 ISIS fighters have returned to Europe. “I’m not going to talk to you about intelligence,” he said at a news conference, adding that “many [countries] are saying they see planning happening” for a terrorist attack.

The Obama administration has said that Syrian refugees entering the United States are no threat as they are vetted over a long process. Republican president candidates have repeated over and over that this stance is incompetent and dangerous for Americans. Donald Trump has created a firestorm saying that Muslims should be temporarily banned until the vetting process can be verified and law enforcement can be sure that no terrorists are entering the country.

General Breedlove’s statements appear to support Donald Trump’s position. Intelligence professionals have stated that the ability to vet Syrian refugees, where there is no controlling legal authority to identify these refugees, is an impossible task.

National security has become a significant issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. As the general election draws closer, the issue will be front and center in the debates and media.