EFTA01187946.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 01/13/13 Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2013 21:49:36 +0000 Attachments: Are2grand_bargainst still_possible_C =?WINDOWS-1252?Q? hris Cillizza=5FTWP:5FJanuary_6,21)12.pdf?=; Book review,2Theinsurgente_by_Fred_Kaplan_and .My_Share_of_the_Taskiby_Stan ley2C. McChrystal_Gregiaffe_TWP Januaty_5,_2013.pdf; 2012 liottest_Year_On_Record_Forf.ower_48_States_Andrew_Freedman_Huff_Post_Gre en_0T 08-13.pdf; Rescua_by_a_Bailout,A.I.G. May_Sue_Its_Savior Ben_Protess NYT January_7,_2013. pdf; Why_Hagel_Was_Picked David Brooks_NYT ranuary_7,2513.pcli; If_we_can't_kill_farm_subsidies,_wcat_can_we_kilr_Robert_Samuelson_NYT_Januaty_6,_ 2013.pdf; The Market and_Mother Nature_Thomas_Friedman_NYT_January_8,_2013.pdf; Signs of a_rtift_in_Briti i_Coalition_Over_European_Union_Stephen_Castle_January_l 0, _2013.pdf; Europe's_Debt_Crisis,_No_Relief on the_Horizon Suzanne_Daley_January_10,_2013.pdf; Tracking_Europe Debt Crisis_Nctianuary_10,_1013.pdf; Heat,flood or icy_Cad,_Extreme_Weather_Rages_Worldwide_Sarah_Lyall_NYT_Januar Shimon Peres_on_Obamairan_and_the_Path_to_Peace_Ronen_Bergman_NYT_Januaty_ 11,20 O.pdf; The_Conservative_'ParttDominates_Amirai Etzioni_Huff_Post_01_11_13.pdf; Bill_Moyers_Paul_Krugman,_Explains_The_R.eys_To_Our_Recovery_January_11,_2013.p df Dear Friends.... In the month of going over the "Fiscal Cliff," debt negotiations, gun violence that has the NRA advocating arming teacher and a potential government shutdown so that Republican conservatives can say that the President Obama is a weak leader to assuage their beat-down in the 2012 November Presidential election.... little has changed for the elderly, poor and young. One of the reasons is the immense amount of special interest money that has clouded the issues and facts to the point that few people care about anything that doesn't affect them personally. As a result, since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the top one percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by 275 percent. But after accounting for inflation, the typical hourly wage for a worker has increased just $1.23 cents. I was taught to believe that America had a level playing field.... For the past 32 years this has not been true... We need to get back to believing that we are our brother's keeper....And in the richest country in the world, there shouldn't be any children going to bed hungry or old people having to choose being buying meds or dinner. Finally.... lets make jobs the country's #1priority, as we can't grow the economy without expanding employment. To think that the big banks and corporations who are sifting on more than $2 trillion in cash, can be induced to invest this money with additional tax breaks/incentives, that will stimulate the country's economy is naive.... This is the government's job.... Hopefully our Politicians will allow the government to do its job And protecting a\America, should start within the borders (food, lodging, healthcare, education, environment, personal security, infrastructure), before Nation Building in Afghanistan or Iraq.... Lets make protecting of our elders, children, our poor and EFTA01187946 our environment our priorities.... And ask our politicians how come someone who is on the no-fly list can buy as many guns as they want in WalMart, when they can't buy a CD that has gun in the lyrics of the songs Last week in an Wall Street Journal editorial, Crony Capitalist Blowout - In praising Congress's huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that "millionaires and billionaires" will finally "pay their fair share." That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to get their taxes reduced in Congress's New Year celebration. There's plenty to lament about the capital and income tax hikes, but the bill's seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White House want everyone to ignore this corporate-welfare blowout, so allow us to shine a light on the merriment. The biggest joke is that Washington pretends to want to pass "comprehensive tax reform," when each year it adds more and more tax giveaways that distorts the tax code and suggest that tax rates are higher than they need to be. Even as he praised the bill full of this stuff, President Obama called Tuesday night for "further reforms to our tax code so that the wealthiest corporations and individuals can't take advantage of loopholes and deductions that aren't available to most Americans." While Lloyd Blankfein, CEO and Chairman of the global investment giant Goldman Sachs, when asked by CBS News' Scott Pelley about how he would reduce the federal deficit, his response: "You're going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people's expectations the entitlements and what people think that they're going to get, because it's not going to they're not going to get it." At the same time Goldman makes sure their entitlements aren't touched. Example: After 9/11Congress created tax-exempt Liberty Zone bonds to help small businesses rebuild near Ground Zero. Turns out Goldman's friends in high places consider it a small business, too, although it made $5.6 billion dollars in profits last year. As the fiscal cliff fiasco was playing out over New Year's Eve, faster than the ball dropped in Times Square, a deal was struck in Washington that will extend the subsidies for Goldman's fancy new headquarters in lower Manhattan. In their 43 stories of glass and steel, and a footprint two city blocks long, Goldman Sachs reigns supreme, thanks to a system rigged by and for the powerful rich. And then this. Just hours before the fiscal cliff deal's with higher individual tax rates kicking in, Goldman handed Lloyd Blankfein and his top lieutenants "a total of $65 million in restricted stock," bonuses awarded a month earlier than usual so they could all beat the coming tax hike and the company was also spared another 10 lucrative years with an extension designed for small businesses. It should not surprise you that "corporations announced more special dividends last month than in any other December since at least 1955." And doing everything they can to avoid helping pay off the debt their CEOs have been urging Congress to cut. Let's look at Pete Peterson, Nixon's Secretary of the Commerce, billionaire several times over who has set up this "Fix the Debt" campaign and is said to be putting half a billion dollars into trying to influence the public. And it's not just Fix the Debt, that's just the latest incarnation. There's also the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, there's the newspaper "The Fiscal Times," there's several others. It's a whole portfolio. They all are Peterson Foundation money at the roots, but they're all out there. And yeah, serious attempts to influence public debate are not, by and large, a very lavishly funded enterprise. So when you've got a half a billion dollars, $500 million of spending with one agenda is going to have a huge impact. And policy intellectuals, by and large come cheap, a few hundred thousand in consulting contracts could do a lot there. How are we going to achieve income equality and for all Americans when special interest money can make public opinion believe that the debt ceiling is more important than feeding the country's poor and that arming teachers can prevent a disturbed individual from shooting a classroom full of kids, after he killed his mother who was a gun enthusiast and bought the weapons that were used to kill her legally. Lost in this discussion was EFTA01187947 a shooting in Taft High School in California where an armed teenager who shot several fellow student (and it wasn't an arm guard that stopped this tragedy from spiraling out of control), it was a personally committed heroic teacher (Ryan Heber), armed only with compassion and the skills to engage a deeply disturbed 16 year old student to lay down his weapons We need to stop this craziness.... One ofmy favorite shows and the gold standard on television is WGBH/PBS, FRONTLINE, which spent months following three young girls (and their siblings) who are growing up against the backdrop of their families' struggles against financial ruin. At a time when one in five American kids lives below the poverty line, "Poor Kids" is an is an intimate portrait of the economic crisis as it's rarely seen, through the eyes of children. In Frontline's latest documentary, Poor Kids, children are all too aware of their family's financial situation. With millions of children living below the poverty line, Poor Kids explores daily life of living hand to mouth and not having enough, through the eyes of children. The film's writer, producer and director,is Jezza Neumann. In American today child poverty has reach record levels, with more than 16 million children now affected. One in thirteen Americans in now unemployed and many children are growing up with little hope for their future. Food banks struggle to keep up with demand and homeless shelter have long waiting list, as even Middle Class families sometimes lose their homes with just a few days notice. In this week's show FRONTLINE follows these children living in poverty for a glimpse at what life is like for a child in need. There is the near-constant hunger, the stress that comes from watching a parent struggle, and oftentimes, days and weeks spent living in a shelter or bouncing from motel to motel. And these same challenges face almost all children living in poverty to one degree or another. The twelve year old girl whose mother is pregnant, "I think that it would be difficultfor the baby to grow up here because we don't have allot of money.... We don't have the moneyfor us to buy diapersfor it andfood for it.... But the good pan is that my mom is happy, myfamily is happy.... I don't really care if I am happy or not I just care if myfamily Li happy." "I think that the thing that I miss the most after having this all happen is the Internet Because people don't realize what they have until it is gone." He sighs, "I am having serious WarCraft withdrawals, man.... Cause in World WarCraft, I an: awesome, I am a level 85 Paladin, tank and healer and in real life a fourteen year old boy with nothing going..." Nearly half of all kids in single-parent households, live in poverty. In the richest country in the world shouldn't everybody in America have food and housing... the poorest families.... a place to live and food to eat.... And it is not that way... "All that I want is to playfootball, but football is expensive... I can name a few items that I need and wantfor my sports but /got to wait on until the next time that momma can afford it. I am fourteen... my life is almost over ... until I'm a grown man because if I don't have the opportunity to show somebody that I can play football, football won't exist in four years you know.... and if I don't get to play on a team this year that dream is going to slowly startfade away.... That's what happen to so many dreams of kids..." EFTA01187948 Talking about her new baby sister another twelve year old, "the baby's future is really going to be messed up because there are hardly going to be any jobs in the future or any money and rich people are going to be poor..." The other twelve year old girl, "we are back in this motel again because we got kicked out of the duplex, my mother didn't pay rent and then we went to Motel 6, then we went to this Twin Bridges Hotel and then we went to here..... Oh God we went to so many places that even talking about it makes me dizzy" Because they have been moving around so much the Mother hasn't been able to sign her children in any schools. As such, this girl again asks her mother, "why can Igo to school." To which the Mother tells her daughter that she will put her in school in a couple of weeks when they move into another trailer. The young girl responds "If I keep missing school.... I see myfuture on a stool in a bar askingfor money everywhere, everybody and stealing stufffrom stores... and I don't want to steal stuff I don't want to do any of that stuff I want to get an education and a good job I believe that I can get a perfect job that I like and I want to do People can't stop you from believing in your own dreams...." It was heartbreaking The figures below underscore many of the challenges facing all of the children living in poverty. $23,050 The federal poverty guideline for a family of four is $23,050, up from $20.650 before the start of the recession. Today's poverty guidelines compare with a median household income in the U.S. of $50,054. Between 13.4 and 16.5 million Determining the exact number of children living in poverty can depend on what Census calculation you go by. More than 16 million children, or roughly one in five, were living in poverty in 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's official poverty measure. That is higher than any other age group. Among 18- to 64-year-olds, the poverty rate was 13.7 percent, while among seniors the rate was 8.7 percent. The Census Bureau's official figures fail to paint a complete picture, though. The formula the government uses to calculate the poverty rate was designed in the 1960s, and does not account for expenses that are necessary to even hold a job — such as transportation costs and child care. Nor does the formula account for government programs for the needy, such as food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit. When the Census Bureau factors in those types of variables in a new experimental formula the number of children found to be living in poverty falls to 13.4 million. - $5 billion Despite the safety net's record of lifting children out of poverty, the amount of federal spending on children in 2011dropped from $450 billion to $445 billion, according to an analysis from The Urban Institute. The study accounted for spending on programs such as Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, and tax expenditures like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax EFTA01187949 Credit. In all, the decline marked the first time that spending on children fell since the 1980s, and came in a year when total federal spending rose to $3.6 trillion from $3.52 trillion. 47.6 percent The nation's poorest kids primarily live in households headed by a single female. Nearly half of all children with a single mother — 47.6 percent — live in poverty. Indeed, the children of single mothers experience poverty at a rate that is more than four times higher than kids in married-couple families. 38.2 percent Black children are more likely to live in poverty than children of any other race. The poverty rate among black children is 38.2 percent, more than twice as high as the rate among whites. The poverty rate for Hispanic children is 32.3 percent. 24 Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have poverty rates higher than the national average of 15 percent, with the majority of the nation's poor situated in the south. With a rate of 22.6 percent, Mississippi had the highest proportion of residents below the poverty line. At 8.8 percent, New Hampshire had the lowest. In Iowa and Illinois, where Poor Kids was filmed, the poverty rate is 12.8 percent and 15 percent, respectively. 45 percent The longer a child lives in poverty, the tougher it can be for them to climb out later in life. According to an analysis by Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty, 45 percent of people who spent at least half of their childhood in poverty were poor at age 35. Among those who spent less than half of their childhood in poverty, just 8 percent were poor at age 35. 3 Only three other countries in the developed world have a higher child poverty rate than the U.S., according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Mexico leads all nations with a rate of 25.79, followed by Chile (23.95), Turkey (23.46), and the U.S. (21.63). THIS WEEKEND'S READING This week in The Washington Post, Chris Cillizza wrote this op-ed — Are 'grand bargains' stillpossible? — or any sort of large, legislative measures requiring significant bipartisan compromise. Lets be real, because wiithout grand bargains, all that politicians do is kick cans down the road, with little being accomplished, if any. EFTA01187950 For much of the last decade in politics, the idea of our government coming together to solve debt and spending issues, the immigration conundrum or that most forgotten of issues, a comprehensive energy solution, has always seemed within sight but slightly out of reach. And in the last 18 months, attempts to address the country's uncertain financial future in some grand way have failed twice: First in the summer of 2011 when discussions between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R) on the debt ceiling collapsed amid anger and finger-pointing and then late last year when discussions between Obama and Boehner collapsed amid anger and finger-pointing. Those two failures have set up what amounts to the granddaddy of them all in late February/early March when three things will happen: the debt ceiling will (again) need to be raised, the government will run out of money and need to be re-funded, and the package of automatic, across-the-board cuts in military and domestic spending — a.k.a. sequestration — will kick in. There's plenty of reason to believe that the idea that the government can, will — or even wants to — rise to the occasion (as both Boehner and Obama have advocated in recent days) is a total fallacy. Consider, aside from the failure of the two most recent tries to cut a grand bargain, the following facts: • Of the 234 House Republicans elected on Nov. 6, 2012, just 39 — or 16.6 percent — were reelected with 55 percent of the vote or less, the traditional benchmark for vulnerability in future general elections. Of that same group, only 15 of the 234 — 6 percent — represent districts that Obama won in the 2012 election. (Ninety-six percent of Democrats represent districts Obama won.) Those numbers make a clear political case that the only danger for most GOP members of the House is in a primary, not a general election. And, the best way to avoid a primary is to hold the ideological line on any and everything. Compromise with Democrats is the quickest and best way to shorten a career. The best example of that new political reality? The fact that Boehner couldn't even get his plan that would have raised taxes on those making $1million and more to the floor of the House late last year. • Polarization in the country is at an all-time high. In Pew polling conducted since 1987 that tests Democrats and Republicans on four dozen values questions, there is an 18-point gap in how the two sides respond — the largest ever measured. That includes a 41 percent difference in how Democrats and Republicans view the "social safety net" (it was a 23-point margin in 1987) and a 39 percent chasm on the environment. The vast majority of the increased polarization has come in the past decade — during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. According to the Pew study: "Both parties have become smaller and more ideologically homogeneous...[thej values gap between Republicans and Democrats is now greater than gender, age, race or class divides." • Republicans lack a clear — or even fuzzy — leader. Democrats might have celebrated the collapse of Boehner's bargaining power in the fiscal cliff negotiations but, in truth, a powerless (or, at the least, a less powerful) Boehner is a bad thing for a grand bargain down the line. While Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) stepped into the void left by Boehner to cut a deal with the White House, it's important to remember that McConnell represents the Senate minority while Boehner represents the House majority. Any grand bargain will have to make it through the House and it's hard to see Boehner doing that unless a large number (a majority?) of his members are supportive of it. And it's not clear at the moment that Boehner can ensure that they could (or will) be. The rest of the Republican party leadership roster — former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — all seem to be holding off at the moment, keeping an eye on how it all plays out before weighing in politically. All that means that there's no person on Obama's political level who he can negotiate with at the moment. That's a major problem for deal-lovers. As such, Cillizza says that all signs point to the fact that if the grand bargain isn't dead, it's darn close. Miraculous comebacks happen in politics, which makes it worth watching, but they are the exception not the rule. Given that, it may EFTA01187951 be time to accept the idea of Washington doing big things in a bipartisan way is a thing of the past — perhaps never to be recovered. If Washington is unable to do grand bargains, it can't competently govern and the country will suffer. And the only way that this will change is by both the press and public focusing on the solution instead of the conflict, because who wins or loses is unimportant when little or nothing is accomplished — because the country and its citizens loses and the politicians, media and the public have a mutual responsibility to enact laws that benefit the country as a whole. In reviewing the books — 'The Insurgents' by Fred Kaplan and 'My Share of the Task' by Stanley A. McChrystal — in The Washington Post by Greg Jaffe — he chronicles the strategies, histories and contributions of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Gen. David H. Petraeus, pertaining to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. As I mentioned last week, one of my father's favorite sayings was "history is always re-written by the winners." McChrystal is now being re-framed as an reluctant assassin. And until the sex scandal recently forced him to step down as CIA director, the soldier-scholar able to outrun troops half his age (Petraeus), and the ascetic warrior (McChrystal) became the most influential generals of their generations, mythologized in the media. Their counterinsurgency doctrine — a product of intensive study and relentless marketing — formed the foundation of Petraeus's strategy in Iraq in 2007. The Army manual was downloaded more than 1.5 million times in its first month and landed a lengthy review in the New York Times. By 2009 it was being celebrated as the answer to America's mounting woes in Afghanistan as well. Both set out to remake their Army and change the American way of war. And both succeeded, though not always in the way they intended. The counterinsurgency revolution that Petraeus and McChrystal championed also has largely run its course, killed off by budget cuts and America's exhaustion with the two wars. Kaplan's and McChrystal's accounts converge in Afghanistan, where McChrystal, a new four-star commander, faced a war that was deteriorating rapidly. He singled out the corrupt and predatory Afghan government as the driving force behind the Taliban's resergence. He asked for 40,000 more soldiers and Marines, who were to live with Afghan army forces, protect villagers from Taliban attacks and rebuild the Afghan government. His approach was classic counterinsurgency. The most prominent attack on the strategy came from the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, a retired three-star general who had been the commander of U.S. forces several years earlier. Eikenberry argued that McChrystal's strategy was sure to fail as long as Hamid Karzai was Afghanistan's president. "It strains credulity to expect Karzai to change fundamentally this late in his life and in our relationship," he wrote in a classified cable to Washington. At the time, McChrystal saw the Eikenberry cable as a betrayal. In his memoir, though, he devotes only a few paragraphs to it. "There was little of Karl's analysis that I disagreed with," he writes. "But based on my understanding of the mission the President had given us, I concluded that we had few options, and none of them were easy or enticing." The Eikenberry cable, however, points to a fundamental problem with Petraeus's and McChrystal's counterinsurgency doctrine, which seeks to bolster the local government's legitimacy in order to win over the populace and sap the guerillas' strength. If a country's ruling elite do not share America's interests or are unwilling to change their corrupt ways, even the most sophisticated counter-insurgents are doomed to fail, Kaplan concludes. To that end, he derides McChrystal for foolishly "kowtowing" to Karzai in the hope that he might be able to change the Afghan president. The brief counterinsurgency renaissance that Petraeus and McChrystal inspired is finished. The Obama administration sealed its demise last year when it ordered the Army to stop using the doctrine in its planning EFTA01187952 for future conflicts, and announced this past week jointly with President Karzai of an accelerated troop withdrawal. Meanwhile, the President has ramp-up the lethal targeting machine that McChrystal built in Iraq. Today, McChrystal's commandos are fighting an endless and secret war in far-flung locales such as Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia. This is the new American way of war. McChrystal will be remembered as the general who reluctantly created it. And now using another favorite saying of my father, their biographers, "are trying to make the truth sound good." Whether or not you believe that global warming is one of the by-products of climate change as Andrew Freedman wrote in The Huffington Post this week — 2012 Hottest Year On Record For Lower 48 States, NOAA Confirms. And the numbers are in: the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States. The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit. And 34,008 new daily high records were set at weather stations across the country, compared with only 6,664 new record lows, according to a count maintained by the Weather Channetmeteorologist Guy Walton, using federal temperature records. That ratio, which was roughly in balance as recently as the 1970s, has been out of whack for decades as the country has warmed, but never by as much as it was last year. As I wrote in last week's Weekend Readings, two major scientific reports recently concluded that unless we slow the release of global emissions from fossil fuels, slow it enough to keep the planet's temperature from rising by two degrees Celsius, (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the earth's polar ice sheets will melt away -- with catastrophic consequences, such as Hurricane Sandy and the other extreme weather of the past two years, is just the beginning. Again four, five degrees, may not sound like very much as we see the temperature change more from night to day, but if you think about it as how the human body responds to temperature changes. Your body is usually at, 98.6 degrees. If your temperature rises by one degree you feel a little off, but you can still go to work. You're fine. When it rises by two degrees and you're now feeling sick, you're probably going to take the day off because you definitely don't feel good. And in fact, you're getting everything from hot flashes to cold chills, okay. At three you're starting to get really sick. And at four degrees and five degrees your brain is actually slipping into a coma, as you are dose to death. Obviously there is a no correlation between human body and the planet's temperature, but like the human body the planet is a finely tuned organism and climate change caysed by temperature change causes radical consequences. If the country's climate temperature can raise a full degree Fahrenheit in one year, this is a serious troubling sign, as experts are saying that when we go through the two-degree mark, we may be at the tipping point and on the way towards three degrees, four degrees and perhaps even six degrees Fahrenheit. Although the 2102 record temperature was framed in Fahrenheit it is more than half of a degree Celsius and should be a serious warning. Scientist and others point out that natural variability almost certainly played a role in last year's extreme heat and drought. But many of them expressed doubt that such a striking new record would have been set without the backdrop of global warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. And they warned that 2012 was likely a foretaste of things to come, as continuing warming makes heat extremes more likely. And the last year's record for the United States is not expected to translate into a global temperature record when figures are released in coming weeks. The year featured a La Nina weather pattern, which tends to cool the global climate over all, and scientists expect it to be the world's eighth or ninth warmest year on record. Assuming that prediction holds up, it will mean that them warmest years on record all fell within the past 15 years, a measure ofhow much the planet has warmed. Nobody who is under 28 has lived through a month of global temperatures that fell below the 20th-century average, because the last such month was February 1985. Last year's weather in the United States began with an unusually warm winter, with EFTA01187953 relatively little snow across much of the country, followed by a March that was so hot that trees burst into bloom and swimming pools opened early. The soil dried out in the March heat, helping to set the stage for a drought that peaked during the warmest July on record. The drought engulfed 61 percent of the nation, killed corn and soybean crops and sent prices spiraling. Although it was not comparable to a severe drought in the 193os that created the legendary Dust Bowl, it si comparable to the big droughts in the 195os, Mr. Extensive records covering the lower 48 states go back to 1895; Alaska and Hawaii have shorter records and are generally not included in long-term climate comparisons for that reason. Mr. Crouch pointed out that until last year, the coldest year in the historical record for the lower 48 states, 1917, was separated from the warmest year, 1998, by only 4.2 degrees Fahrenheit. That is why the 2012 record, and its one degree increase over 1998, strikes climatologists as so unusual. In addition to being the nation's warmest year, 2012 turned out to be the second-worst on a measure called the Climate Extremes Index, surpassed only by 1998. Experts are still counting, but so far 11 disasters in 2012 have exceeded a threshold of $1 billion in damages, including several tornado outbreaks; Hurricane Isaac, which hit the Gulf Coast in August; and, late in the year, Hurricane Sandy, which caused damage likely to exceed $6o billion in nearly half the states, primarily in the mid-Atlantic region. Among those big disasters was one bearing a label many people had never heard before: the derecho, a line of severe, fast- moving thunderstorms that struck central and eastern parts of the country starting on June 29, killing more than 20 people, toppling trees and knocking out power for millions of households. For people who escaped both the derecho and Hurricane Sandy relatively unscathed, the year may be remembered most for the sheer breadth and oppressiveness of the summer heat wave. By the calculations of the climatic data center, a third of the nation's population experienced ro or more days of summer temperatures exceeding roo degrees Fahrenheit. Among the cities that set temperature records in 2012 were Nashville; Athens, Ga.; and Cairo, Ill., all of which hit 109 degrees on June 29; Greenville, S.C., which hit 107 degrees on July 1; and Lamar, Colo., which hit 112 degrees on June 27. And at the beginning of January, 61 percent of the country was still in moderate to severe drought conditions. Echoing my earlier my earlier offerings on global warming this week in the New York Times article - Heat, Flood or Icy Cold, Extreme Weather Rages Worldwide - by Sarah Lyall, she points out that people may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace. Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk. Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began. Although every year we experience extreme weather, but it's unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once. The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it's already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity. Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency and a sign that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds. In Britain, people are used to thinking of rain as the wallpaper on life's computer screen — an omnipresent, almost comforting background presence. But even the hardiest citizen was rattled by the near-biblical fierceness of the rains that bucketed down, and the floods that followed, three different times in 2012. Rescuers plucked people by boat from their swamped homes in St. Asaph, North Wales. Whole areas of the country were cut off when roads and train tracks were inundated at Christmas. In Megavissey, Cornwall, a pub owner closed his business for good after it flooded 11 times in two months. It was no anomaly: the floods of 2012 followed the floods of 2007 and also the floods of 2009, which all told have resulted in nearly $6.5 billion in insurance payouts. The Met Office, Britain's weather service, declared 2012 the wettest year in England, and the second-wettest in Britain as a whole, since records began more than 100 years ago. Four of the five wettest years in the last century have come in the past decade (the fifth was in 1954). The biggest change, said Charles Powell, a spokesman for the Met Office, is the frequency in Britain of "extreme weather events" — defined as rainfall reaching the top 1 percent of the average amount for that time of year. Fifty years ago, such episodes used to happen every too days; now they happen every 70 days, he said. EFTA01187954 The same thing is true in Australia, where bush fires are raging across Tasmania and the current heat wave has come after two of the country's wettest years ever. On Tuesday, Sydney experienced its fifth-hottest day since records began in 1910, with the temperature climbing to 108.1 degrees. The first eight days of 2013 were among the 20 hottest on record. Every decade since the 1950s has been hotter in Australia than the one before, said Mark Stafford Smith, science director of the Climate Adaptation Flagship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. To the north, the extremes have swung the other way, with a band of cold settling across Russia and Northern Europe, bringing thick snow and howling winds to Stockholm, Helsinki and Moscow. (Incongruously, there were also severe snowstorms in Sicily and southern Italy for the first time since World War in December, tornadoes and waterspouts struck the Italian coast.) In Siberia, thousands of people were left without heat when natural gas liquefied in its pipes and water mains burst. Officials canceled bus transportation between cities for fear that roadside breakdowns could lead to deaths from exposure, and motorists were advised not to venture far afield except in columns of two or three cars. In Altai, to the east, traffic officials warned drivers not to use poor-quality diesel, saying that it could become viscous in the cold and clog fuel lines. Meanwhile, China is enduring its worst winter in recent memory, with frigid temperatures recorded in Harbin, in the northeast. In the western region of Xinjiang, more than 1,000 houses collapsed under a relentless onslaught of snow, while in Inner Mongolia, 180,000 livestock froze to death. The cold has wreaked havoc with crops, sending the price of vegetables soaring. Way down in South America, energy analysts say that Brazil may face electricity rationing for the first time since 2002, as a heat wave and a lack of rain deplete the reservoirs for hydroelectric plants. The summer has been punishingly hot The temperature in Rio de Janeiro climbed to 109.8 degrees on Dec. 26, the city's highest temperature since official records began in 1915. At the same time, in the Middle East, Jordan is battling a storm packing torrential rain, snow, hail and floods that are cascading through tunnels, sweeping away cars and spreading misery in Syrian refugee camps. Amman has been virtually paralyzed, with cars abandoned, roads impassable and government offices closed. Israel and the Palestinian territories are grappling with similar conditions, after a week of intense rain and cold winds ushered in a snowstorm that dumped eight inches in Jerusalem alone. In Britain, where changes to the positioning of the jet stream — a ribbon of air high up in the atmosphere that helps steer weather systems — may be contributing to the topsy-turvy weather, people are still recovering from the December floods. In Worcester last week, the river Severn remained flooded after three weeks, with playing fields buried under water. Climate change is real. It is here. And it is everywhere. And if man-made carbon emissions is adding to it, we may be closer to the tipping point of no return then ever imagined. **** You really have to have some cojones when your reckless fraudulent practices brought the world's economy to the brink of collapse, causing the US government to provide $182 billion in taxpayer's money for to bail you out, and then have the gall to consider suing the government who saved you from losing everything, in addition to lawsuits and potential jail sentences. See article in the New York Times by Ben Protess and Michael J. de la Merced - Rescued by a Bailout, May Sue Its Savior and the New York Times editorial — A Mind-Boggling Claim. While the American International Group has been running a nationwide advertising campaign with the tagline "Thank you America," behind the scenes, the restored insurance company is weighing whether to tell the government agencies that rescued it during the financial crisis: thanks, but you cheated our shareholders. The board of A.I.G. met on Wednesday to consider joining a $25 billion shareholder lawsuit against the government, court records show. The lawsuit does not argue that government help was not needed. It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue - the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal's high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer's Wall Street clients - deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for "public use, without just compensation." Maurice R. Greenberg, A.I.G.'s former chief executive, who remains a major investor in the company, filed the lawsuit in 2011 on behalf of fellow shareholders. He has since urged A.I.G. to join the case, a move that could nudge the government into settlement talks. Mr. Greenberg is an 87 -year-old former CEO of A.I.G. He was handpicked by its founder Cornelius Vander Starr in 1968 as his successor and held the position until 2005, when he stepped down amid a major leadership scandal and was replaced by Martin J. Sullivan. He was subsequently the subject of New York State accounting fraud and other civil charges which are still unresolved. Starr argued that the actions violated the Fifth Amendment. "The government is not empowered to trample shareholder and property rights even in the midst of a financial emergency," the Starr EFTA01187955 complaint says. The Treasury Department declined to comment. A spokesman for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Jack Gutt, said, "There is no merit to these allegations." He noted that "A.I.G.'s board of directors had an alternative choice to borrowing from the Federal Reserve, and that choice was bankruptcy." A federal judge in Manhattan agreed, dismissing the case in November. In an 89-page opinion, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer wrote that while Starr's complaint "paints a portrait of government treachery worthy of an Oliver Stone movie," the company "voluntarily accepted the hard terms offered by the one and only rescuer that stood between it and imminent bankruptcy." The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently agreed to review the case on an expedited timeline. The judge in the United States Court of Federal Claims in Washington, meanwhile, has declined to dismiss the case and continues to await A.I.G.'s decision. Some government officials are already upset with the company for even seriously entertaining the lawsuit, people briefed on the matter said. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noted that without the bailout, A.I.G. shareholders would have fared far worse in bankruptcy. "On the one hand, from a corporate governance perspective, it appears they're being extra cautious and careful," said Frank Partnoy, a former banker who is now a professor of law and finance at the University of San Diego School of Law. "On the other hand, it's a slap in the face to the taxpayer and the government." This is why the MG executives should have been criminally prosecuted. The allegations ignore the fact that in September 2008 when the government stepped in to help A.I.G., no private investors were willing to finance the company, which many feared had been made insolvent by its enormous bets on mortgage-related investments. In fact, just four months before the bailout, Mr. Greenberg himself described the situation at the company as a "crisis." Had the Treasury and Federal Reserve not stepped in, A.I.G. would have filed for bankruptcy protection, wiping out its shareholders and institutions that it did business with. If Mr. Greenberg and A.I.G. are truly interested in holding someone to account for the losses that the company's shareholders have suffered, they should look within. Why not sue the executives who pushed the company into making toxic investments or the board members who did a poor job supervising management? They are far more responsible for the losses the shareholders suffered than the government, which cleaned up the mess at a substantial risk to taxpayers. The Treasury recently sold its remaining stake in the company for more than it invested, but it could very well have suffered huge losses had the Obama administration and Congress not taken steps to stabilize the economy and the housing market. A.I.G. should be praising, not suing, the government. And, in fact, the company has been running TV ads thanking the country for coming to its rescue . A.I.G.'s directors should keep those ads and the history of the bailout in mind and so should the government and US taxpayers. Thank God that AIG's board of directors decide against joining Greenberg's lawsuit, as this would have given black eyes to MG, the government and the American taxpayers. As David Brooks wrote in the New York Times this week in his article — Why Hagel Was Picked, although Americans don't particularly like government, they definitely want government to subsidize their health care. And they believe that health care spending improves their lives more than any other public good. Medicare spending is set to nearly double over the next decade. This is the crucial element driving all federal spending over the next few decades and pushing federal debt to about 25o percent of G.D.P. in 3o years. As such there are no conceivable tax increases that can keep up with this spending rise and the Democrats had their best chance in a generation to raise revenue EFTA01187956 just now, and all they got was a measly $600 billion over 10 years. This is barely a wiggle on the revenue line and does nothing to change the overall fiscal picture. As a result, health care spending, which people really appreciate, is squeezing out all other spending, which they value far less. Spending on domestic programs — for education, science, infrastructure and poverty relief — has already faced the squeeze and will take a huge hit in the years ahead. President Obama excoriated Paul Ryan for offering a budget that would cut spending on domestic programs from its historical norm of 3 or 4 percent of G.D.P. all the way back to 1.8 percent. But the Obama budget is the Ryan budget. According to the Office of Management and Budget, Obama will cut domestic discretionary spending back to 1.8 percent of G.D.P. in six years. Advocates for children, education and the poor don't even try to defend their programs by lobbying for cutbacks in Medicare. They know that given the choice, voters and politicians care more about middle- class seniors than about poor children. So far, defense budgets have not been squeezed by the Medicare vice. But that is about to change. Oswald Spengler didn't get much right, but he was certainly correct when he told European leaders that they could either be global military powers or pay for their welfare states, but they couldn't do both. Europeans, who are ahead of us in confronting that decision, have chosen welfare over global power. European nations can no longer perform many elemental tasks of moving troops and fighting. As late as the 199os, Europeans were still spending 2.5 percent of G.D.P. on defense. Now that spending is closer to 1.5 percent, and, amid European malaise, it is bound to sink further. The United States will undergo a similar process. The current budget calls for a steep but possibly appropriate decline in defense spending, from 4.3 percent of G.D.P. to 3 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. As Brooks points out, defense planners are notoriously bad at estimating how fast postwar military cuts actually come. After Vietnam, the cold war and the 1991 gulf war, they vastly underestimated the size of the cuts that eventually materialized. And those cuts weren't forced by the Medicare vice. As the federal government becomes more of a health care state, there will have to be a generation of defense cuts that overwhelm anything in recent history, with Medicare being the last to be cut. Brooks opt-ed suggest that cutting military funding is the country's biggest security threat. And that Republican and highly decorated Chuck Hagel, provides a Democrat President political cover to cut defense funding to European levels. Brooks blames voters for any American military decline. I see it differently. Our military budget is larger than the next 17 countries combined and we are no safer than any of our allies. Hence this is a waste of money and at least an inefficient use of taxpayers' money. And the fact that Hagel is not a neocon looking for the next enemy/war, allows the country to recalibrate its defense strategy and hopefully will keep us out of unne