12 WORLD VIEW
Thursday, 10 March, 2016
Will the oligarchs kill trump? CREATORS.COM
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Patrick J. Buchanan
arrow victories in the Kentucky caucuses and the Louisiana primary, the largest states decided on Saturday, have moved Donald Trump one step nearer to the nomination. Primaries in Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho and in Florida, ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina may prove decisive. If Marco rubio does not win his home state of Florida, he is cooked, as is Gov. John Kasich if he does not win ohio. Ted Cruz already looks to be the last man between Trump and a GoP nomination that has gone, in the last seven elections, to George H. w. Bush, Bob Dole, George w. Bush, John McCain and Mitt romney. all five of those nominees since 1988 seem appalled by Trump's triumphs, and only slightly less so by the Cruz alternative. Not in memory has the leadership of a party been so out of touch. The republican rank and file are in revolt, not only against the failures of their fathers but the policies of their present rulers. Some among the GoP elites, who have waited patiently through the obama era to recapture control of U.S. foreign policy, are now beside themselves with despair over Trump's success. Fully 116 members of the GoP's national security community, many of them veterans of Bush administrations, have signed an open letter threatening that, if Trump is nominated, they will all desert, and some will defect -- to Hillary Clinton!
"Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin," says Eliot Cohen of the Bush II State Department. according to Politico's Michael Crowley, Cohen helped line up neocons to sign the "Dump-Trump" manifesto.another signer, robert Kagan, wailed in The washington Post, "The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton." Are they serious? Victory for Clinton would mean her remaking the Supreme Court, killing all chances that roe v. wade could be overturned, or that we could get another justice like antonin Scalia before 2021. WhAt Are these renegAdes And turncoAts so Anguished About? Trump calls the Iraq war many of them championed an historic blunder. Trump says that, while a supporter of Israel, he would be a "neutral" honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians in peace negotiations, as was Jimmy Carter at Camp David. Trump says he would "get along very well" with Vladimir Putin, as richard Nixon got along with Leonid Brezhnev and Mao Zedong. Trump would launch no new crusades for democracy. He would not oppose russia bombing ISIS. He would build that wall on the border. He would transfer from U.S. taxpayers to rich allies more of the cost of defending themselves. do not most AmericAns Agree With much of this? Yet this neocon ultimatum about deserting should the voters nominate Trump testifies eloquently to their loyalty.
with every ex-president and ex-nominee repudiating Trump, and foreign policy elites going rogue, the GoP hierarchy is saying: we will cut Trump dead, just as the rockefeller-romney crowd cut Barry Goldwater dead. This is pure my-way-or-the-highway politics. but it rAises AneW the question: cAn the estAblishment stop trump? answer: It is possible, and we shall know by midnight, March 15. If Trump loses Florida and ohio, winner-take-all primaries, he would likely fall short of the 1,237
The Pentagon's secret foreign aid budget POliTiCO LOra LuMPE and JErEMY raVinSkY
Last month, the obama administration released its 2017 budget proposal, including thousands of pages on the nearly $600 billion request for the Pentagon. That money is earmarked for a wide array of projects—$1.8 billion in procurement of equipment for the Special operations Command, for instance, and $1.2 billion for the chemical and biological weapons defense program. In each case, the administration carefully explains the rationale and purpose for the budget request. But what isn’t included in that massive budget is a comprehensive country-level breakdown of the $10 billion or so in foreign military aid the Pentagon administers every year, euphemistically referred to as Building Partner Capacity. This makes it impossible to calculate the cost of individual aid programs, much less to determine whether the BPC programs are effective. That’s a concern, because BPC sometimes causes more problems than it solves. on wednesday, the Senate armed Services Committee will hold a hearing to examine these programs. This oversight is overdue. Congress needs to do a better job of holding the Pentagon publicly accountable for how it administers BPC programs—before they inadvertently cause more damage to U.S. interests around the globe. Congress began authorizing the Defense Department to provide direct assistance to foreign militaries in the 1990s in response to heightened fears about drug use in america. The Pentagon started training and equipping western hemisphere militaries and police to take on drug cartels. This represented a significant new authority for DoD. Previously, the State Department budget accounted for nearly all U.S. military assistance. Since 9/11, these programs have surged in both size and number. according to the raND Corporation, the Pentagon now has at least 70 different authorities under which it provides BPC to confront myriad challenges around the world, including insurgency in the Philippines, gang violence in El Salvador, terrorism in the Niger Delta, Chinese dominance in the South China Sea, and drug trafficking in Tajikistan. In total, the DoD has spent at least $122 billion arming and training foreign partners in the past 15 years. what do we have to show for it? That’s unclear. The Pentagon is the only government agency providing foreign assistance that is not re-
quired to submit an annual budget justification to Congress, so the public does not how much the DoD is spending in a given country and why. without this baseline data, it’s difficult to evaluate whether these programs are succeeding, much less whether they are an efficient use of resources. This year, the Pentagon’s comptroller released more foreign aid budget materials than ever before, providing details on five aid programs—including the $1 billion Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund. That’s an improvement over past practices. But there are 66 other DoD-administered aid programs for which no country-level budget details were furnished. admittedly, many of these programs are small. But together they amount to billions of dollars in aid. Nowhere are all of these programs lined up side by side for a given country so that oversight staff—or interested taxpayers—can see how these investments fit together and what they are intended to achieve. Internal oversight bodies are also left in the dark with the BPC programs. Last December, the Congressional research Service—which has full access to Pentagon documents and files—assessed whether the Pentagon’s BPC programs were achieving their stated goals. CrS found little evidence suggesting that these programs help end wars, stop violence or manage regional instability. “Despite the increasing emphasis on, and centrality of, BPC in national security strategy and military operations,” CrS researchers wrote, “the assumption that building foreign security forces will have tangible U.S. national security benefits remains a relatively untested proposition.” Moreover, CrS could not evaluate cost-effectiveness of BPC programming because of an absence of accounting within the Pentagon. “Identifying how much money DoD actually spends on BPC activities is nearly impossible at present,” it said. The most comprehensive and specific public information on the Pentagon’s military aid spending currently available is from the Security assistance Monitor, a shoestring operation that laboriously combs through Pentagon reports to the congressional oversight committees for information on military aid, country-bycountry, and compiles the data online. (Disclosure: the Security assistance Monitor is a grantee of the open Society Foundations.) Its data show a jump from $1 billion in Pentagon-funded assistance in 2002 to $10.8 billion in 2015. In addition to questions about fiscal responsibility,
BPC programming appears to undermine U.S. national security. recent research from Saferworld, a London-based open Society grantee, on counterterrorism efforts in afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen suggests that U.S. military assistance programs have created substantial blowback by exacerbating the central forces fueling insurgency and violence, thereby strengthening the enemies they are intended to combat. In Yemen, for example, the U.S. spent more than half a billion dollars from 2010 to 2014 to beef up the Yemeni government’s security forces. But by strengthening an already corrupt and repressive regime, the United States helped drive ordinary citizens into the arms of sectarian groups like the Houthi rebels and extremists like al Qaeda in the arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State. In Somalia, the United States has spent more than $1 billion since 2007 to support regional allies in efforts to fight al Shabaab militants. But U.S. partners’ abusive or discriminatory practices have led many people in the region to support Shabaab extremists. Meanwhile, U.S. support has strengthened the hand of authoritarian leaders in Uganda and Burundi, where recent mass killings of protesters have led to accusations of genocide. The Pentagon’s opaque foreign aid budget also undermines our partner governments’ capacity to govern. In many nascent or fragile democracies, governments struggle to provide civilian oversight of their militaries. Congress only weakens its counterparts by supplying local forces with undisclosed amounts of money, weapons and training. as Transparency International and Carnegie Endowment have pointed out, nontransparent aid is particularly susceptible to theft, as corrupt local officials pay “ghost soldiers” or otherwise siphon off U.S. funds. Congressional action to correct this basic information deficit is long overdue. In this year’s National Defense authorization act, Congress should require that the Pentagon provide an annual, detailed, country-by-country budget of all its foreign aid programming. a budget will not fix everything, but it would better allow Congress and foreign parliaments to understand the overall impact of U.S funding of foreign security forces. without it, taxpayers and citizens of partner nations will continue to be left in the dark. Lora Lumpe is a senior policy analyst at the open Society Foundations focusing on U.S. foreign military assistance and governance issues. Jeremy ravinsky is a policy associate at the open Society Foundations.
delegates needed for nomination on the first ballot. How could the anti-Trump forces defeat him in ohio, Florida and Illinois? with the same tactics used to shrink Trump's victory margins in Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky to well below what polls had predicted. In every primary upcoming, Trump is under a ceaseless barrage of attack ads on radio, TV, cable and social media, paid for by super PaCs with hoards of cash funneled in by oligarchs. But Trump, who is self-funding his campaign, has spent next to nothing on ads answering these attacks, or promoting him-
self or his issues. He has relied almost exclusively on free media. Yet no amount of free media can match the shellfire falling on him every hour of every day in every primary state. our Principles PaC, backed by Nebraska's billionaire ricketts family, has poured millions into trashing Trump. american Future Fund is dumping $1.75 million in Florida this week; Club for Growth $1.5 million. Hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer is backing the Conservative Solutions PaC, which has dumped millions into antiTrump ads and plans to spend more than $7 million between March 1 and 15, with $4 million of that going into Florida. The super PaC pile-on is unprecedented. How well Trump fares in Michigan and Mississippi, measured against how well he was doing in polls last week, will reveal just how successful super PaC savagery has been in changing hearts and minds. Can millionaires and billionaires who back open borders, mass immigration, globalization and the disappearance of nation states into transnational collectives overwhelm with their millions spent in ads the patriotic movements that arose this year to the wonderment of america and the world? Has that proud 18th century boast of americans, "Here, sir, the people rule!" given way to the rule of the oligarchs? Pat Buchanan is a founding editor of The american Conservative magazine, and the author of many books including State of Emergency: The Third world Invasion and Conquest of america .
hoW about a three-day WeekeNd? AgE WarWick SMith
a report published this week by the Centre for Independent Studies claims age pensions are set to become unaffordable and that we will have to reduce future pension rates and raise the pension access age. access to the pension is being lifted from the age of 65 to 67 and the government and the centre want to raise it to 70 . Is this really necessary? Should we let it happen without a reduction in the hours we work during the rest of our working lives? For a long time now, commentators – from Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes and the Jetsons – have been predicting that increasing productivity will allow us to work less and have more leisure time. while computers and robots do more, we will be able to do less. So far things haven't panned out that way. Labour productivity has been steadily increasing, while working hours in australia have stayed pretty constant over the past 30 years. During the same period, workforce participation has increased dramatically, particularly among women. Meanwhile, wage growth has stagnated. why haven't all the computers and other technological innovations that improve productivity translated into more leisure time for us? well, in actual fact, they have. However, this change has mostly slipped under the radar. we're working less and having more leisure time, because we're living longer. The extra leisure time kicks in when we're over 65. In a recent speech, Productivity Commission chairman Peter Harris said that "in 1909, the original age pension recipients generally had spent near enough to 75 per cent of their life after the age of 15 in full-time work; for the Baby Boomers, that figure has fallen to about 60 per cent; and for the generation today in high school, that figure will fall to about 50 per cent, mostly based on significant health gains, including in retirement." That's a substantial dividend paid in leisure hours after retirement. But look out, the government is coming after that dividend. The justification for increasing the retirement age is the impact our ageing population will have on government budgets and the remaining workforce. we're told we won't be able to afford the blowouts in pension, healthcare and aged care costs that will come with the increasing proportion of australians who are over 65. The trouble with that argument is that its only true if you make particular assumptions. The economic modelling included in the federal government's 2015 intergenerational report makes it clear there will be huge government deficits for many years – but, and this is a big but, these deficits assume regular income tax cuts. In the absence of these cuts, the government would be flooded with cash. That's right; those long-range forecasts assume regular income tax cuts without which we wouldn't have a budget problem and we'd still have dramatically higher material standard of living than we do today. we are a relatively low-taxing country. There are comparable oECD countries with much higher tax to GDP ratios than ours that also have thriving economies, first-rate health and education systems and very high standards of living. So, we have a choice. we can either work longer and surrender our share of the productivity growth dividend in service of small-government ideology; or we can pay a little more tax (not necessarily income tax; there are better options for extra revenue). This choice is currently being made for us and being painted as an inevitable result of demographic and economic realities. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many Baby Boomers are not ready to retire at 65, at least not completely, but that doesn't mean we should force them all to keep working. Easy for us desk jockeys to say that everyone should work longer, but if you've already been laying bricks every day for 45 years, the prospect of doing so for another five years is unlikely to be a happy one. Instead of deferring access to the pension, the focus should be on job creation and flexible working arrangements (that suit older employees). If we make working longer easier to do and more flexible, then many will come to the party. alternatively, if we're to contemplate increasing the pension access age to 70 and beyond, we should ask for something in return. all australians could benefit from a standard working week of 30 to 32 hours, not just the older workers. Most of us would be happy to work a few years longer if it meant shorter work days or a shorter working week. It's a good trade-off isn't it? we keep our productivity dividend, but get to have some of it while we're young and when we're raising kids. Three day-weekends every week? Yes, please. warwick Smith is a research fellow at progressive think tank Per Capita.