Dr. Annika E. Nilsson is Senior Research Fellow at Stockholm Environment Institute and Affiliated Faculty in Environmental Politics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Her work focuses on the politics of Arctic change, with research on environmental governance, communication at the science-policy interface, the role of media messaging for Arctic governance, and the relationship between resource extraction and sustainable Arctic communities. She has participated in several scientific assessments under the auspices of the Arctic Council. Nilsson received her PhD in environmental science in 2007 following on a 20-year career as a science journalist.
Dr. Miyase Christensen is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Stockholm University and Guest Professor at the Division of Philosophy and History of Technology, Science and Environment — Department of Philosophy and History, KTH the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. Christensen is Director of the Leading Research Environment in Global Media Studies and Politics of Mediated Communication, Stockholm University. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture; and, Associate Editor of the Annals of the International Communication. Christensen’s research is interdisciplinary in nature and comprises interlinked areas such as social theory perspectives on globalization processes and social change; environment and the media; and politics of popular communication.
Last year was the deadliest in history to be an environmental activist, according to a new report that found, on average, nearly four people were killed per week.
“Conflicts over the control of land and natural resources were an underlying factor in almost every killing in 2016.” –Global Witness report
Defenders of the Earth, released by U.K.-based human rights group Global Witness, lists the names and locations of 200 environmental advocates who were killed around the world. While the report found Brazil, Colombia, and the Philippines were the nations with the most murdered environmentalists in 2016, Honduras has been the deadliest country for environmental activists over the last decade.
Last year, Nicaragua was the most dangerous country per capita, where at least 11 environmental activists were killed—all but one were indigenous. In 2013, the Nicaraguan government agreed to allow a Chinese company to build a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; the canal will also force up to 120,000 indigenous people to relocate, according to the report.
“We have carried out 87 marches, demanding that they respect our rights and we have had no response. The only response we have had is the bullet,” Nicaraguan activist Francisca Ramírez said of her government’s response to protests. “They sell the image that we are against development. We are not against development, we are against injustice,” added Ramírez, who has been threatened, assaulted, and arrested for protesting the canal.
“Governments, companies, and investors have a duty to guarantee that communities are consulted about the projects that affect them, that activists are protected from violence, and that perpetrators are brought to justice,” Global Witness campaigner Ben Leather said in statement. “States are breaking their own laws and failing their citizens in the worst possible way. Brave activists are being murdered, attacked and criminalized by the very people who are supposed to protect them.”
Key findings from the report include:
- “The phenomenon isn’t just growing, it’s spreading.” In addition to a nearly 10% increase from deaths documented in 2015, Global Witness reported murders in 24 countries, eight more than those documented the previous year.
- Among those killed, 60% lived in Latin America, and 40% of all victims were indigenous.
- “Conflicts over the control of land and natural resources were an underlying factor in almost every killing in 2016.” The most dangerous sectors to protest are logging, agribusiness, and mining, with at least 33 activists killed for organizing against mining and oil projects.
John Knox, UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, said to the Guardian:
“There is now an overwhelming incentive to wreck the environment for economic reasons. The people most at risk are people who are already marginalized and excluded from politics and judicial redress, and are dependent on the environment. The countries do not respect the rule of law. Everywhere in the world, defenders are facing threats.
“There is an epidemic now, a culture of impunity, a sense that anyone can kill environmental defenders without repercussions, eliminate anyone who stands in the way. It [comes from] mining, agribusiness, illegal logging and dam building.”
James Savage of The Fund for Global Human Rights responded to the findings on Twitter:
Since 2010, Global Witness has recorded nearly 1,000 murders of environmental activists, “with many more facing threats, attacks, harassment, stigmatization, surveillance and arrest.”
Though the group did not document any murders of environmental activists in the United States in 2016, U.S. environmentalists across the country encountered violence. Notably, as Common Dreams reported, North Dakota police, clad in riot gear, responded to Indigenous-led protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) with rubber bullets, water cannons, and teargas grenades. Though the DAPL protests carried on for several months, in a single night last November, 26 unarmed protesters were hospitalized and more than 300 were injured following a confrontation with law enforcement.
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Since this New York Magazine article (“The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells) is getting so much play since it was published on Sunday, I figured I should comment on it, especially as I was interviewed by the author (though not quoted or mentioned).
“The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.”
I have to say that I am not a fan of this sort of doomist framing. It is important to be up front about the risks of unmitigated climate change, and I frequently criticize those who understate the risks. But there is also a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness.
The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.
The article paints an overly bleak picture by overstating some of the science. It exaggerates for example, the near-term threat of climate “feedbacks” involving the release of frozen methane (the science on this is much more nuanced and doesn’t support the notion of a game-changing, planet-melting methane bomb. It remains unclear how much of this frozen methane can be readily mobilized by projected warming.
Also, I was struck by erroneous statements like this one referencing “satellite data showing the globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had thought.”
That’s just not true. The study in question simply showed that one particular satellite temperature dataset that had tended to show *less* warming that the other datasets, has now been brought in line with the other temperature data after some problems with that dataset were dealt with.
Ironically, I am a co-author of a recent article in the journal Nature Geoscience (explored in this piece for The Guardian), using that very same new, corrected, satellite dataset, that shows that past climate model simulations slightly “over-predicted” the actual warming during the first decade of the 21st century, likely because of a mis-specification of natural factors like solar variations and volcanic eruptions. Once these are accounted for, the models and observations are pretty much in line—the warming of the globe is pretty much progressing as models predicted. And that is plenty bad enough.
The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.
I’m afraid this latest article does that. That’s too bad. The journalist is clearly a talented one, and this is somewhat of a lost opportunity to objectively inform the discourse over human-caused climate change.
A version of this was originally posted to Facebook but appears here with permission of the author.
Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University. He was recognized with other Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change authors for their contribution to the IPCC’s 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Follow him @MichaelEMann
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It’s time to find a path to end the 67-year-long Korean war. As the threat of military conflict looms, the American public is largely unaware of the sobering facts about America’s longest unresolved war and one of the world’s bloodiest. The 1953 armistice agreement engineered by President Eisenhower—halting a three-year-long “police action” that resulted in two million to four million military and civilian deaths—is long forgotten. Struck by military leaders of North Korea, the United States, South Korea, and their United Nations allies to halt fighting, the armistice was never followed up by a formal peace agreement to end this conflict of the early Cold War.
A State Department official reminded me of this unsettled state of affairs before I traveled to the Youngbyon nuclear site in November 1994 to help secure plutonium-bearing spent reactor fuel as part of the Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea. I had suggested that we take space heaters to the spent fuel pool storage area, to provide warmth for the North Koreans who would be working during winter to place highly radioactive spent fuel rods in containers, where they could be subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. The State Department official became upset. Even 40 years after the end of hostilities, we were forbidden to provide any comfort to the enemy, regardless of the bitter cold interfering with their—and our—task.
How the Agreed Framework collapsed. In the spring and summer of 1994, the United States was on a collision course with North Korea over its efforts to produce the plutonium to fuel its first nuclear weapons. Thanks in large part to the diplomacy of former President Jimmy Carter, who met face-to-face with Kim Il Sung, the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the world pulled away from the brink. Out of this effort sprang the general outlines of the Agreed Framework, signed on October 12, 1994. It remains the only government-to-government accord ever made between the United States and North Korea.
The Agreed Framework was a bilateral non-proliferation pact that opened the door to a possible end of the Korean war. North Korea agreed to freeze its plutonium production program in exchange for heavy fuel oil, economic cooperation, and the construction of two modern light-water nuclear power plants. Eventually, North Korea’s existing nuclear facilities were to be dismantled and the spent reactor fuel taken out of the country. South Korea played an active role in helping prepare for the construction of the two reactors. During its second term in office, the Clinton administration was moving towards establishing a more normalized relationship with the North. Presidential advisor Wendy Sherman described an agreement with North Korea to eliminate its medium and long-range missiles as “tantalizingly close” before negotiations were overtaken by the 2000 presidential election.
But the framework was bitterly opposed by many Republicans, and when the GOP took control of Congress in 1995, it threw roadblocks in the way, interfering with fuel oil shipments to North Korea and the securing of the plutonium-bearing material located there. After George W. Bush was elected president, the Clinton administration’s efforts were replaced with an explicit policy of regime change. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, Bush declared North Korea a charter member of the “axis of evil.” In September, Bush expressly mentioned North Korea in a national security policy that called for preemptive attacks against countries developing weapons of mass destruction.
This set the stage for a bilateral meeting in October 2002, during which Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly demanded that North Korea cease a “secret” uranium enrichment program or face severe consequences. Although the Bush Administration asserted the enrichment program had not been disclosed, it was public knowledge—in the Congress and in the news media—by 1999. North Korea had strictly complied with the Agreed Framework, freezing plutonium production for eight years. Safeguards over uranium enrichment had been deferred in the agreement until sufficient progress was made in the development of the light water reactors; but if that delay was seen as dangerous, the agreement could have been amended. Shortly after Sullivan’s ultimatum, North Korea ended the safeguards program for its spent nuclear fuel and began to separate plutonium and produce nuclear weapons—igniting a full-blown crisis, just as the Bush administration was poised to invade Iraq.
In the end, the Bush administration’s efforts to resolve the impasse on North Korea’s nuclear program—aka the Six-Party Talks—failed, largely because of the United States’ adamant support for regime change in North Korea and persistent “all or nothing” demands for a complete dismantlement of the North’s nuclear program before serious negotiations could take place. Also, with the US presidential election nearing, the North Koreans had to have remembered how abruptly the plug had been pulled on the Agreed Framework after the 2000 election.
By the time President Obama took office, North Korea was well on its way to becoming a nuclear weapons state and was reaching the threshold of testing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Described as “strategic patience,” Obama’s policy was to a large extent influenced by the pace of nuclear and missile development, particularly as Kim Jong-un, the founder’s grandson, ascended to power. Under the Obama administration, economic sanctions and increased-duration joint military exercises were met with intensified North Korean provocations. Now, under the Trump administration, the joint military exercises by the United States, South Korea and Japan—intended to demonstrate the “fire and fury” that could destroy the DPRK regime—appear to have only accelerated the pace at which North Korea has stepped up its long-range missile testing and detonation of more powerful nuclear weapons.
Dealing with the nuclear weapons state of North Korea. The seeds for a nuclear-armed DPRK were planted when the United States shredded the 1953 Armistice Agreement. Beginning in 1957, the US violated a key provision of the agreement (paragraph 13d), which barred the introduction of more destructive armaments to the Korean peninsula, by ultimately deploying thousands of tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, including atomic artillery shells, missile-launched warheads and gravity bombs, atomic “bazooka” rounds and demolition munitions (20 kiloton “back-pack” nukes). In 1991, then-President George H.W. Bush withdrew all the tactical nukes. In the 34 intervening years, however, the United States unleashed a nuclear arms race—among the branches of its own its own military on the Korean Peninsula! This massive nuclear buildup in the South provided a major impetus for North Korea to forward-deploy a massive conventional artillery force that can destroy Seoul.
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Now, some South Korean military leaders are calling for the redeployment of US tactical nuclear weapons in the country, which would do nothing but exacerbate the problem of dealing with a nuclear North Korea. The presence of US nuclear weapons did not deter a surge in aggression by North Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, an era known as the “Second Korean War,” during which more than 1,000 South Korean and 75 American soldiers were killed. Among other actions, North Korean forces attacked and seized the Pueblo, a US Naval intelligence vessel, in 1968, killing a crew member and capturing 82 others. The ship was never returned.
North Korea has long pushed for bilateral talks that would lead to a non-aggression pact with the United States. The US government has routinely spurned its requests for a peace agreement because they are perceived as tricks designed to reduce the US military presence in South Korea, allowing for even more aggression by the North. The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl echoed this sentiment recently, asserting that North Korea is not really interested in a peaceful resolution. While citing a statement by North Korean Deputy UN Ambassador Kim In Ryong that his country “will never place its self-defensive nuclear deterrence on the negotiating table,” Diehl conveniently omitted Ryong’s important caveat: “as long as the US continues to threaten it.”
Over the past 15 years, military exercises in preparation for war with North Korea have increased in extent and duration. Recently, Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central’s much-watched The Daily Show, asked Christopher Hill, chief US negotiator for the Six-Party talks during the George W. Bush years, about the military exercises; Hill declared that “we never have planned to attack” North Korea. Hill was either ill-informed or dissembling. The Washington Post reported that a military exercise in March 2016 was based on a plan, agreed to by the United States and South Korea, that included “preemptive military operations” and “‘decapitation raids’ by special forces targeting the North’s leadership.” In the Washington Post article, a US military expert did not dispute the plan’s existence but said it has a very low probability of being implemented.
Regardless of how likely they are to ever be implemented, these annual wartime planning exercises help perpetuate and perhaps even strengthen the brutal coercion by the North Korean leadership of its people, who live in constant fear of an imminent war. During our visits to North Korea, we observed how the regime inundated its citizens with reminders about the carnage caused by napalm that US aircraft had dropped during the war. By 1953, US bombing had destroyed nearly all structures in North Korea. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, said several years later that bombs were dropped on “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” Over the years, the North Korean regime has developed a vast system of underground tunnels used in frequent civil defense drills.
It’s probably too late to expect the DPRK to relinquish its nuclear arms. That bridge was destroyed when the Agreed Framework was discarded in the failed pursuit of regime change, a pursuit that not only provided a powerful incentive but also plenty of time for the DPRK to amass a nuclear arsenal. Secretary of State Tillerson recently stated that “we do not seek a regime change, we do not seek collapse of the regime.” Unfortunately, Tillerson has been drowned out by coverage of belligerent tweets by President Trump and sabre-rattling by former military and intelligence officials.
In the end, a peaceful resolution to the North Korean nuclear situation will involve direct negotiations and gestures of good faith by both sides, such as a reduction or a halt of military exercises by the United States, South Korea, and Japan, and a reciprocal moratorium on nuclear weapon and ballistic missile testing by the DPRK. Such steps will generate a great deal of opposition from US defense officials who believe that military might and sanctions are the only forms of leverage that will work against the North Korean regime. But the Agreed Framework and its collapse provide an important lesson about the pitfalls of the pursuit of regime change. Now, a nuclear arms control agreement may be the only way to bring this over-long chapter of the Cold War to a peaceful close. It’s difficult to persuade someone to make a deal, if he is certain you’re planning to kill him, no matter what he does.
Robert Alvarez, an Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar, served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999.
As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in “bigly” in his first year in office. They raked in tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, while posting sharp stock price increases and healthy profits driven by the continuation and expansion of Washington’s post-9/11 wars. But last year’s bonanza is likely to be no more than a down payment on even better days to come for the military-industrial complex.
President Trump moved boldly in his first budget, seeking an additional $54 billion in Pentagon funding for fiscal year 2018. That figure, by the way, equals the entire military budgets of allies like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Then, in a bipartisan stampede, Congress egged on Trump to go even higher, putting forward a defense authorization bill that would raise the Pentagon’s budget by an astonishing $85 billion. (And don’t forget that, last spring, the president and Congress had already tacked an extra $15 billion onto the 2017 Pentagon budget.) The authorization bill for 2018 is essentially just a suggestion, however — the final figure for this year will be determined later this month, if Congress can come to an agreement on how to boost the caps on domestic and defense spending imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. The final number is likely to go far higher than the staggering figure Trump requested last spring.
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And that’s only the beginning of the good news for the big weapons companies. Industry officials and Beltway defense analysts aren’t expecting the real increase in Pentagon spending to come until the 2019 budget. It’s a subject sure to make it into the mid-term elections. Dangling potential infusions of Pentagon funds in swing states and swing districts is a tried and true way to influence voters in tight races and so will tempt candidates in both parties.
President Trump has long emphasized job creation above much else, but if he has an actual jobs program, it mainly seems to involve pumping more money into the Pentagon and increasing overseas arms sales. That such spending is one of the least effective ways to create new jobs evidently matters little. It is, after all, an easy and popular way for a president to give himself the look of stimulating economic activity, especially in an era of steep tax cuts favoring the plutocratic class and attacks on domestic spending.
Trump’s much-touted $1 trillion infrastructure plan may never materialize, but the Pentagon is already on course to spend $6 trillion to $7 trillion of your taxes over the next decade. As it happens though, a surprising percentage of those dollars won’t even go into the military equivalent of infrastructure. Based on what we know of Pentagon expenditures in 2016, up to half of such funds are likely to go directly into the coffers of defense contractors rather than to the troops or to basic military tasks like training and maintenance.
While the full impact of Trump’s proposed Pentagon spending increases won’t be felt until later this year and in 2019, he did make a significant impact last year in his role as arms-dealer-in-chief. Early estimates for 2017 suggest that arms sales approvals in the first year of his administration exceeded the Obama administration’s record in its last year in office — no mean feat given that President Obama set a record for overseas arms deals during his eight-year tenure.
You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that President Trump greatly exaggerated the size of his administration’s arms deals. Typically enough, he touted “$110 billion” in proposed sales to Saudi Arabia, a figure that included deals already struck under Obama and highly speculative offers that may never come to fruition. While visiting Japan in November, he similarly took credit for sales of the staggeringly expensive, highly overrated F-35 combat aircraft, a deal that was actually concluded in 2012. To add insult to injury, those F-35s that the U.S. is selling Japan will be assembled there, not in the good old U.S.A. (So much for the jobs benefits of global weapons trading.)
Nonetheless, when you peel away the layers of Trumpian bombast and exaggeration, his administration still posted one of the highest arms sales figures of the last decade and there’s clearly much more to come. In all of this, the president may not have done major favors for America’s workers, but he’s been a genuine godsend for the country’s arms manufacturers. After all, such firms extract significantly greater profits on foreign deals than on sales to the Pentagon. When selling to other countries, they normally charge higher prices for weapons systems, while including costly follow-on agreements for maintenance, training, and things like additional bombs, missiles, or ammunition that can continue for decades.
In fact, Trump’s biggest challenge in accelerating U.S. arms exports may not be foreign competition, but the fact that the Obama administration made so many high-value arms deals. Some countries are still busy trying to integrate the weapons systems or other merchandise they’ve already purchased and may not be ready to conclude new arms agreements.
The Good News for Arms Makers: More War
There are, however, a number of reasons to think that the major weapons makers will do even better in the coming years than they did in the banner year of 2017.
Start with America’s wars. As defense expert Micah Zenko of Chatham Houseexplained recently at Foreign Policy, President Trump has been doubling down on many of the wars he inherited from Obama. The moves of his administration (peopled, of course, by generals from those very wars) include the increasing use of Special Operations forces, a dramatic rise in air strikes, and an increase in troop levels in conflicts ranging from Afghanistan and Yemen to Syria and Somalia. It remains to be seen whether the president’s favorite Middle Eastern ally, Saudi Arabia, will be successful in goading his administration — replete with Iranophobes, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo — into taking military action against Tehran. Such calculations have been complicated by recent anti-government protests there, which the president and his inner circle hope will lead to regime change from within. (Trump’s crowing about unrest in Iran has, however, been decidedly unhelpful to genuine advocates of democracy in that country, given the low esteem in which he’s held throughout Iranian society.)
Such far-flung military operations will naturally cost money. Lots of it. Minimally, tens of billions of dollars; hundreds of billions if one or more of those wars escalates in an unexpected way — as happened in Afghanistan and Iraq in the Bush years. As a study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute recently noted, our post-9/11 wars have already cost at least $5.6 trillion when one takes into account both direct budgetary commitments and long-term obligations, including lifetime care for the hundreds of thousands of American veterans who suffered severe physical and psychological damage in those conflicts. It’s important to remember that such immense costs emerged from what was supposed to be a quick, triumphant war in Afghanistan and what top Bush administration officials were convinced would be a relatively inexpensive regime change operation in Iraq and the garrisoning of that country. (That invasion and occupation was then projected to cost just a cut-rate $50 billion to $200 billion.)
Don’t be surprised if the conflicts that Trump has inherited and is now escalating follow a similar pattern in which actual costs far outstrip initial estimates, even if not at the stratospheric levels of the Afghan and Iraq wars, which involved the commitment of hundreds of thousands of “boots on the ground.” All of this spending will again be good financial news for the producers of combat aircraft, munitions, armored vehicles, drones, and attack helicopters, among other goods and services needed to sustain a policy of endless war across significant parts of the planet.
Beyond the hot wars that have involved U.S. troops and air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, there are scores of other places where this country’s Special Operations forces are on the ground training local militaries and in many cases accompanying them on missions that could quickly turn deadly, as happened to four Green Berets operating in Niger in October 2017. With Special Ops personnel engaged in a staggering 149 countries last year and a pledge to step up U.S. activities yet more in Africa — there are already 6,000 U.S. troops and scores of “train and equip” missions on that continent — spending is essentially guaranteed to go up, whatever the specifics of any given conflict. There are already calls by leading members of Congress to increase the size of U.S. Special Operations forces, which, as TomDispatch’s Nick Turse notes, already number nearly 70,000 personnel.
Boondoggles, Inc.
Rest assured, however, that so far we’ve only taken a dip in the shallow end of the deep, deep pool of military spending. Equally important to the bottom lines of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and their cohorts is the Trump administration’s commitment to continue funding weapons systems the Pentagon doesn’t need at prices we can’t afford. Take the F-35 combat plane, a Rube Goldberg contraption once designed to carry out multiple missions and now capable of doing none of them well.
In fact, as the Project on Government Oversight has pointed out, it’s an aircraft that may never be fully ready for combat. To add insult to injury, billions more will be spent to fix defects in planes that were rushed through production before they had been fully tested. The cost of this “too big to fail” program is currently projected at $1.5 trillion over the lifetimes of the 2,400-plus aircraft currently planned for. This means it is likely to become the most expensive weapons program in the history of Pentagon procurement.
Unfortunately, the F-35 is hardly the only boondoggle that will continue to pad the coffers of defense contractors while offering little in the way of defense (no less the usual offense). A recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, for example, suggests that a projected three-decade Pentagon plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines, initiated under President Obama and close to the heart of Donald Trump, will cost up to $1.7 trillion dollars. This stunning figure includes spending on new nuclear warheads under development at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, one of many channels for military spending that are outside the Pentagon’s already bloated budget. And given the history of such weapons systems and the cost overruns that regularly accompany them, keep in mind that $1.7 trillion will probably prove a gross underestimate. The Government Accountability Office, for instance, has released a report suggesting that the program to build a new generation of ballistic missile submarines, now priced at $128 billion, is going to blow past that figure.
In recent years, hawks in Congress have been pressing for more funding for missile defense and Donald Trump (with the help of “Little Rocket Man”) is their guy. David Willman of the Los Angeles Times reports that the Trump administration wants to spend more than $10 billion over the next five years beefing up a deeply flawed project for placing ground-based missile interceptors in Alaska and California. This is just one of a number of missile defense initiatives under way.
In 2018, Lockheed, Boeing, and General Atomics are also scheduled to test drones that will reportedly use lasers to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles like those being developed by North Korea. It’s a program that will undoubtedly garner tens of billions of dollars more in taxpayer funding in the years to come. And Congress isn’t waiting until a final Pentagon budget for 2018 is wrapped up to lavish more money on missile defense contractors. A stopgap spending bill passed in late December 2017 kept most programs at current levels, but offered a special gift of nearly $5 billion extra for anti-missile initiatives.
In addition, a congressionally financed study of the best place to base an East Coast missile defense system — a favorite hobbyhorse of Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee that even the Pentagon has little interest in pursuing — is scheduled to be released later this year. The Congressional Budget Office already suggests that the price tag for that proposed system would be at least $3.6 billion in its first five years of development. Yet deploying it, as the Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out, would have little or no value when it comes to protecting the United States from a missile attack. If the project moves ahead, it won’t be the first time Congress has launched a costly, unnecessary spending program that the Pentagon didn’t even request.
Cybersecurity has been another expanding focus of concern — and funding — in recent years, as groups ranging from the Democratic National Committee to the National Security Agency have been hit by determined hackers. The concern may be justified, but the solution — throwing billions at the Pentagon and starting a new Cyber Command to press for yet more funding — is misguided at best. One of the biggest bottlenecks to crafting effective cyber defenses is the lack of personnel with useful and appropriate skills, a long-term problem that short-term infusions of cash will not resolve. In any case, some of the most vulnerable places — from the power grid to the banking system — will have to be dealt with by private firms that should be prodded by stricter government regulations, a concept to which Donald Trump seems to be allergic. As it happens, though, creating enforceable government standards turns out to be one of the most important ways of addressing cybersecurity challenges.
Despite the likely spending spree to come, don’t expect the Pentagon, the arms makers, their lobbyists, or their allies in Congress, to stop crying out for more. There’s always a new weapons scheme or a new threat to hype or another ill-conceived proposal for a military “solution” to a complicated security problem. Trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives later, the primary lesson from the perpetual wars and profligate weapons spending of this century should be that throwing more money at the Pentagon isn’t making us any safer. But translating that lesson into a change in Washington’s spending patterns would take major public pushback at a level that has yet to materialize.
Genuine opposition to runaway Pentagon spending may yet emerge, if, as expected, President Trump, Paul Ryan, and the Republican Congress follow up their trillion-dollar tax giveaway with an assault on Medicare and Social Security. At that point, the devastating domestic costs of overspending on the Pentagon should become far more difficult to ignore.
This year will undoubtedly be a banner year for arms companies. The only question is: Might it also mark the beginning of a future movement to roll back unconstrained weapons expenditures?
William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011). He is the co-editor of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008).
O Canada, our great Justin Trudeau-bearing sister to the North.
The neighboring country has given us much to celebrate throughout history: smoldering Ryans (of the Gosling and Reynolds variety), a sexy prime minister (see above), kick-ass maple syrup, a North American locale where we can practice our high school French, and practically everything else that is good in this world.
One of culture’s greatest Canadian gains is Margaret Atwood, author of dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Not only is Atwood herself a Canadian native, but the wildly popular Hulu original series based on her work is shot abroad in Toronto. You could say Atwood is a bit of a Canadian hero.
During an interview with fellow novelist Junot Díaz, Atwood’s Canadian “superstar” status was broached. But despite her seat of international power, there’s one fellow Canadian breakout whose path she’s yet to cross: Drake.
Getty, Hulu
“I haven’t met Drake, but I have of course met people who have met Drake,” the author, 77, explained. “But you have to realize how O-L-D I am. I’m not likely to go to the same parties. Or many parties at all, to be frank.”
“O-L-D” or not, Atwood is full of brilliant, culturally relevant ideas: “Wouldn’t it be fun for [Drake] to have a cameo in season two of The Handmaid’s Tale?” she suggested (mostly) of her own accord. “I’ll drop that notion into the ear of Bruce Miller, the showrunner and see what he can do with that,” she said. “Maybe Drake could help smuggle someone?”
RELATED: Your Handmaid’s Tale Study Guide Before You Start Watching the Show on Hulu
Praise be, Margaret. From your mouth to Hulu’s ears.
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Remember when Taylor Swift and Lorde documented their budding BFF relationship on Instagram, with adorable moments like, walks on the beach in Malibu and cooking lessons? For us, it feels like just yesterday. But, in Hollywood, most relationships are fleeting—and it looks like Lorde and Tay Tay may be the latest pair to fall victim to the pattern.
On Friday, the “Green Light” singer sat down with Sunrise co-host David Koch to talk about her new album, Melodrama, and, during the interview, she revealed what it’s like running in so-called celebrity squads. “The second you think too hard about it, you just start to go insane,” she said. “So it’s best to just be like, ‘We’re in Wonderland,’ and that’s just what happens around here. Like, also, I don’t hang out with these people at all.”
The interviewer was dumbfounded and replied: “But hang on, you’re part of Taylor’s squad, all the magazines tell us.”
“You know, you make friends in different places, but I think for the most part I’m not like, calling my idols for advice necessarily,” she said with a groan.
Though, she doesn’t count Swift out as a friend specifically in the interview, her response comes just weeks after her comments that compared a friendship with the pop star to an autoimmune disease.
In a separate interview with Today host, Richard Wilkins, the New Zealander explained that being a part of these famous circles is a “drag,” the Daily Mail reports. After her huge Grammy success in 2014, Lorde admits that moment was a turning point for her and her Hollywood relationships. “I really withdrew myself from being a public person and went home,” she said.
RELATED: Lorde Admits She Runs an Instagram Account All About Onion Rings
We haven’t completely lost hope, though. Maybe Lorde and her celebrity flock will rekindle their relationships at this year’s Grammy Awards? Fingers crossed!
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