Will future generations look back at Governor Pence with gratitude for defending the Hoosier way of life — or with dismay for entrenching Indiana on the wrong side of environmental and economic history? The corporate world is changing its attitudes on energy and climate; the religious world more so.

Governor Pence’s announcement came just a few days after Pope Francis issued an Encyclical on climate change. The Pope writes: “Our freedom fades when it is handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, of self-interest, and of violence.” “What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up?” In this profound document, the Pope challenges us to understand the climate crisis as an issue of justice between generations, and he reminds us to care for the poor, who will be left homeless and hungry in a climate catastrophe.

Governor Pence would do well to heed the Pope’s admonition.

Sources:

https://indianapublicmedia.org/news/pence-obama-indiana-comply-epa-rules-84002/

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29239194

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions

https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.pdf

In October of the same year, 2009, President Obama received the Nobel Peace prize, in part for his vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons. (2)

However, the United States armed forces are now considering nuclear upgrades and modernizations as much as 40 or 50 years into the future, with expenditures of up to one trillion dollars. (1) It is true that Obama has not yet approved these expenditures, but he has not disavowed them either.

A conference will be held in Vienna, Austria, in December on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. (1) President Obama should attend this conference and make clear his continued support for a goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Despite American differences with Russia over the Ukraine, the United States should resume negotiations with Russia for a large mutual reduction of their nuclear arsenals. A deep reduction, coupled with the example it would set for other nations, would go a long way toward achieving President Obama’s goal of a world without nuclear weapons.

Sources:

(1) Democracy Now, Friday, Oct. 24, 2014
(2)  Nobel Peace prize

Obama is right to condemn the Islamic State’s brutality. But ISIS doesn’t have a monopoly on savagery. Thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks, the United States’ brutal, costly, and counter-productive “war on terror” has enveloped the entire Middle East. Doubling down on his predecessor’s war crimes, Obama’s drone campaign has exacted hundreds of civilian casualties. Taking the lives of innocents by remote control doesn’t make killing any less barbaric.

Adding insult to injury, Obama invoked the names of James Foley and Steven Sotloff – the two American journalists beheaded by ISIS – in a cynical effort to promote perpetual war. Obama’s sympathy for the slain journalists belies his administration’s habitual abuse of the Espionage Act to intimidate whistleblowers and wage war on journalists. So much for Obama’s “principled” defense of journalists and press freedom.

Most galling of all, Obama concluded his speech by quoting a civilian, recently “trapped on a distant mountain,” who praised America’s so-called humanitarian intervention in Northern Iraq. Would that Obama, the war hawks in Washington, and the mainstream media actually listened to civilians – from Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan and Afghanistan – who routinely denounce American exceptionalism, and the brutality that so often accompanies it.

For Speak Your Mind, this is Kevin Howley.

Sources:

Downie, L. Jr. & Rafsky, S. (2013, October 10). Leak investigations and surveillance in post-9/11 America. Committee to Protect Journalists.

Ridley, Y. (2012, May 12). Bush convicted of war crimes in absentia. Foreign Policy Journal.

Serle, J. (2014, March 12). Countries must investigate civilian drone death claims, says UN investigator Ben Emmerson. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Solomon, N. (2014, August 4). Journalism groups rally around petition supporting James Risen. Columbia Journalism Review.

Thousands protest US drone war in Pakistan. (2013, November 25). Democracy Now!

Now, in 2014, President Barack Obama has been quietly nurturing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade deal supported by corporate interests that Noam Chomsky states would “further erode the security of workers and the middle class, irrevocably harm the environment and undercut important financial, medical and food safety regulations.”

There is a growing problem of income inequality in the U.S., striking a blow to the functioning of a healthy democracy. With TPP, the richest 5 to 10 per cent of American households would get richer, while the bottom 90 per cent of Americans suffer a loss of income.

President Obama has tried to keep TPP secret.Thanks to WikiLeaks parts of the text were made public. A public outcry against TPP was expressed to Congress. Senator Harry Reid, Majority Leader, refused to fast-track TPP legislation, which has temporarily blocked approval from Congress.

FlushtheTPP.Org sums it up very well. “The TPP is about much more than trade. It is a global corporate coup.” We must stay vigilant.

References

“NAFTA, Twenty Years After: A Disaster” (Economic Policy Institute)

Effect of TPP on richest 5 to 10 percent and poorest 90 percent is by Ruth Conniff in The Progressive, March, 2014, page 6.

Chomsky is quoted in The Nation, March 10, 2014, page 11.

The TPP and a related trade and investment partnership with our European friends can add at least $200 billion a year to our economy and double that to them, according to reasonable estimates. Freer trade in services could mean cheaper banking, health, and educational services for us, just as free trade has already meant cheaper import (clothing, electronics, etc.) for all consumers. Indiana has an interest, for example, in exporting more food grains to Japan, just as we export auto parts to our NAFTA partners. Free export of energy to Europe would make sense, too.

These likely results would be one way to address the rising inequality that has marked the US and most other developed economies in recent years. NAFTA is thus not the main cause of lost manufacturing jobs; worldwide technological change is. Progressives have rightly pointed to the stagnation of incomes of the middle-class, but protectionism is not the right answer. Since better jobs increasingly require more skills, we need to invest more in education by improving internet access and providing extra help and hours for literacy and math, without cutting out the arts and humanities. We are now a multicultural and internationalized society, and the outlook of all our citizens must adapt to that reality. That means our interests will forever be tied to those across the oceans.

Research and development should be restored to give rise to new industrial jobs, too. Reduced military spending, much of which has been wasted this last decade on failed wars, will make room for these investments, as will paring tax benefits for small groups of the rich and outsourced profits.

National Intelligence director, James Clapper, testified last month that in his 50-year career in intelligence, he had not “experienced a time when we’ve been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.”

Yet, in its new budget, the Obama Administration is proposing deep cuts in defense spending. Not since before World War 2 will the Army be as small. The number of Navy ships will drop to World War 1 levels. The Air Force is slated to lose several aircraft, including the famous spy plane, the U-2.

Congress is unlikely to approve all these proposals. But with the world in such a mess, why are they even being considered?

The across-the-board spending cuts Congress enacted in 2012, when it could not agree on how to trim the Federal budget, are one reason. While many worried about their impact on social programs and public services, defense programs were targeted for half the reductions. The results are now evident.

In addition, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates notes in his memoir, Duty, the military itself has long resisted modernizing its forces. The President and his staff, he also writes, have little background or interest in defense policy. Other than as a source of money for their districts, neither do many members of Congress. The result: sharp cutbacks.

Nonetheless, the world is still a dangerous place. And if the United States is not prepared to respond to crises, who will be?

Sources

“Worldwide Threat Assessment to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence” (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)

“Winners, Losers in Pentagon’s New Budget” (NBC News)

Gates, Robert M. Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War. (Knopf, 2014)

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama warned: “The sanctions that we put in place helped make this opportunity possible. But let me be clear: If this Congress sends me a new sanctions bill now that threatens to derail these talks, I will veto it.”

Yet Indiana’s Senators, Joe Donnelly and Dan Coats, are sponsoring just such a bill, the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act (S.1881). It demands that Iran totally give up enriching uranium—a requirement that most arms control experts consider unnecessary and that Iranians reject as violating Iran’s right to civilian nuclear energy under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The bill also says that if Israel attacks Iran, the United States should provide military support, in effect delegating to a foreign leader the decision to take the U.S. to war.

Senators Donnelly and Coats received five-figure campaign contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other hawkish groups. But J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace organization, strongly opposes this bill.

With a common adversary in al Qaeda, the United States and Iran need not be eternal enemies.

As President Obama said, “We must give diplomacy a chance to resolve one of the leading security challenges of our time without the risks of war.”

Sources

“A Step, if Modest, Toward Slowing Iran’s Weapons Capability” (NYT)

“Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address: Full text” (CBS News)

“Analysis of Faults in the Menendez-Kirk Iran Sanctions Bill (S. 1881)” (The Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation)

“Revealing Money’s Influence On Politics: Pro-Israel” (MapLight)