EFTA01197370.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bce: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 04/20/2014 Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 07:38:13 +0000 Attachments: Facts &_Figures 2014.docx; Everything_You Don't ICnow_About Tipping_Huff_Post_04 08 2014.docx; The Changing_Demographics of —America Joel iotkin Smithsonian Artga 2010.docx; This Is Us, Portrait of a Changing America ALEXIS- C. MADRI6AL_The_Atlantic_0 4 14 14.docx; CIOL Obamacare Will Cost Less Than Projected,_Cover 12 Million_Uninsured_People This Year_Huff iost 14.Lcx; CARLOS SANTARA:bio.docx; eAREOS ANTANA:bio—(1)Tdocx I ill ine-I mages: image.png; image(I).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(13).png; image(14).png; image(15).png; image(16).png; image(17).png DEAR FRIEND FDR and the Four Freedoms Speech FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, 1941 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS ("THE FOUR FREEDOMS") (6 January 1941) Franklin Roosevelt was elected president for an unprecedented third term in 1940 because at the time the world faced unprecedented danger, instability, and uncertainty. Much of Europe had fallen to the advancing German Army and Great Britain was barely holding its own. A great number of Americans remained committed to isolationism and the belief that the United States should continue to stay out of the war, but President Roosevelt understood Britain's need for American support and attempted to convince the American people of the gravity of the situation. EFTA01197370 In his Annual Message to Congress (State of the Union Address) on January 6, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt presented his reasons for American involvement, making the case for continued aid to Great Britain and greater production of war industries at home. In helping Britain, President Roosevelt stated, the United States was fighting for the universal freedoms that all people possessed. As America entered the war these "Four Freedoms" -- the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear - symbolized America's war aims and gave hope in the following years to a war-wearied people because they knew they were fighting for freedom. Sam Rosenman quote Roosevelt's preparation of the Four Freedoms Speech was typical of the process that he went through on major policy addresses. To assist him, he charged his close advisers Harry L. Hopkins, Samuel I. Rosenman, and Robert Sherwood with preparing initial drafts. Adolf A. Berle, Jr., and Benjamin V. Cohen of the State Department also provided input. But as with all his speeches, FDR edited, rearranged, and added extensively until the speech was his creation. In the end, the speech went through seven drafts before final delivery. The famous Four Freedoms paragraphs did not appear in the speech until the fourth draft. One night as Hopkins, Rosenman, and Sherwood met with the President in his White House study, FDR announced that he had an idea for a peroration (the closing section of a speech). As recounted by Rosenman: "We waited as he leanedfar back in his swivel chair with his gaze on the ceiling. It was a long pause—so long that it began to become uncomfortable. Then he leanedforward again in his chair"and dictated the Four Freedoms. "He dictated the words so slowly that on the yellow pad I had in my lap I was able to take them down myself in longhand as he spoke." The ideas enunciated in the Roosevelt's Four Freedoms were the foundational principles that evolved into the Atlantic Charter declared by Winston Churchill and FDR in August 1941; the United Nations Declaration of January 1, 1942; President Roosevelt's vision for an international organization that became the United Nations after his death; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 through the work of Eleanor Roosevelt. Although I was born years after FDR's death, as long as I could remember, my mother, my father, all of my relatives, as well as everyone in the church that we attended and almost everyone around me including my teachers and the parents of my white friends and classmates all paid homage to Franklin Roosevelt. Look at what Roosevelt's New Deal built across the country — hospitals, schools, libraries, parks, paved roads, sewage plants and the extension of the electric grid, as well as the safety net for the poor and elderly, the very things that we take for granted today. And it was Roosevelt who challenged the young and old from every ethnic group and region to mobilize to make to make these things happen in the 1930s. He showed America that if workers, women, minorities, students, intellectuals all mobilized for the betterment of the common good the country would prosper. And the result was, "the Greatest Generation"and unprecedented prosperity for the next 3o years. FDR's ideas were radical and like Abraham Lincoln many of his methods were unorthodox to say the least. In addition to this he used the power of rhetoric and empathy to mobilize the country (both the private and public sector) to work together which most conservatives today, who see big government as the problem, as impossible. Big government run well works, just like big business run well works EFTA01197371 with the difference is that government's job is to serve the greater common good and businesses' goal is about generating wealth and often for a very few and after more than thirty years of trickle-down economics this trend has created the greatest economic inequality since the gilded age a hundred years ago. We need to redeem the meaning of democracy and freedom in America. Fighting for democracy abroad while suppressing voter access at home is not the America that our Founding Fathers, as well as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt envisioned. As a result, we should do everything that we can to fight for our Four Freedoms - the freedom of speech and religion and the freedom from want and fear — and that those basic freedoms be extended to every American. These freedoms are not ideals as they have to be continually defended to sustain and secure democracy. That's what Roosevelt knew. That's what Jefferson knew. And no one seems to remember that today. I invite you to read the full text of this wonderful speech. Also please take a look at a recent interview by Bill Moyers with historian Harvey J. Kaye about why FDR's "Four Freedoms" - freedom from fear and want and freedom of speech and religion — are more important now than ever. Web Link: Vla12 -41419,. eiTtia• 2410'154POt /0/67JOMAMA ECONOMIC I N#QUALITY ai .evita Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet there is little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality. "Inequality matters," Bill Moyers said in a recent essay. "You will hear people say it doesn't, but they are usually so high up the ladder they can't even see those at the bottom." The distance between the first and the least in America is indeed vast and growing — proven by shocking statistics and tens of thousands personal stories of challenge and hardship, made even harder by policies and political collusion that reward the wealthy at the cost of everyone else. Whatever your politics — I urge everyone to learn more about the class gap, how it happened, what's making it worse and what "you" and the collective "we" can do about it. ****** The Changing Demographics of America EFTA01197372 Estimates of the United states population at the middle of the 21st century vary, from the .'s 404 million to the U.S. Census Bureau's 422 to 458 million. To develop a snapshot of the nation at 2050, particularly its astonishing diversity and youthfulness, roughly too million more than we have today. The United States is also expected to grow somewhat older. The portion of the population that is currently at least 65 years old-13 percent—is expected to reach about 20 percent by 2050. This "graying ofAmerica" has helped convince some commentators of the nation's declining eminence. For example, an essay by international relations expert Parag Khanna envisions a "shrunken America" lucky to eke out a meager existence between a "triumphant China" and a "retooled Europe." Morris Berman, a cultural historian, says America "is running on empty." But even as the baby boomers age, the population of working and young people is also expected to keep rising, in contrast to most other advanced nations. America's relatively high fertility rate—the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime—hit 2.1 in 2006, with 4.3 million total births, the highest levels in 45 years, thanks largely to recent immigrants, who tend to have more children than residents whose families have been in the United States for several generations. Moreover, the nation is on the verge of a baby boomlet, when the children of the original boomers have children of their own. Between 2000 and 2050, census data suggest, the U.S. 15-to-64 age group is expected to grow 42 percent. In contrast, because of falling fertility rates, the number of young and working-age people is expected to decline elsewhere: by 10 percent in China, 25 percent in Europe, 3o percent in South Korea and more than 4o percent in Japan. Within the next four decades most of the developed countries in Europe and East Asia will become veritable old-age homes: a third or more of their populations will be over 65. By then, the United States is likely to have more than 350 million people under 65. The prospect of an additional 100 million Americans by 2050 worries some environmentalists. A few have joined traditionally conservative xenophobes and anti-immigration activists in calling for a national policy to slow population growth by severely limiting immigration. The U.S. fertility rate-5o percent higher than that of Russia, Germany and Japan and well above that of China, Italy, Singapore, South Korea and virtually all the rest of Europe—has also prompted criticism. But even with loo million more people, the United States will be only one-sixth as crowded as Germany is today. Immigration will continue to be a major force in U.S. life. The United Nations estimates that two million people a year will move from poorer to developed nations over the next 4o years, and more EFTA01197373 than half of those will come to the United States, the world's preferred destination for educated, skilled migrants. I n 2000, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an association of 3o democratic, free-market countries, the United States was home to 12.5 million skilled immigrants, equaling the combined total for Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Japan. If recent trends continue, immigrants will play a leading role in our future economy. Between 1990 and 2005, immigrants started one out of four venture-backed public companies. Large American firms are also increasingly led by people with roots in foreign countries, including 15 of the Fortune 100 CEOs in 2007. For all these reasons, the United States of 2050 will look different from that of today: whites will no longer be in the majority. The U.S. minority population, currently 3o percent, is expected to exceed 50 percent before 2050. No other advanced, populous country will see such diversity. In fact, most of America's net population growth will be among its minorities, as well as in a growing mixed- race population. Latino and Asian populations are expected to nearly triple, and the children of immigrants will become more prominent. Today in the United States, 25 percent of children under age 5 are Hispanic; by 2050, that percentage will be almost 4o percent. Growth places the United States in a radically different position from that of Russia, Japan and Europe. Russia's low birth and high mortality rates suggest its overall population will drop by 30 percent by 2050, to less than a third of the United States'. No wonder Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has spoken of "the serious threat of turning into a decaying nation." While China's population will continue to grow for a while, it may begin to experience decline as early as 2035, first in work force and then in actual population, mostly because of the government's one-child mandate, instituted in 1979 and still in effect. By 2050, 31 percent of China's population will be older than 60. More than 41 percent of Japanese will be that old. Political prognosticators say China and India pose the greatest challenges to American predominance. But China, like Russia, lacks the basic environmental protections, reliable legal structures, favorable demographics and social resilience of the United States. India, for its part, still has an overwhelmingly impoverished population and suffers from ethnic, religious and regional divisions. The vast majority of the Indian population remains semiliterate and lives in poor rural villages. The United States still produces far more engineers per capita than India or China. Suburbia will continue to be a mainstay of American life. Despite criticisms that suburbs are culturally barren and energy-inefficient, most U.S. metropolitan population growth has taken place in suburbia, confounding oft-repeated predictions of its decline. Some aspects of suburban life—notably long-distance commuting and heavy reliance on fossil fuels— will have to change. The new suburbia will be far more environmentally friendly—what some sociologists call "greenurbia." The Internet, wireless phones, video conferencing and other communication technologies will allow more people to work from home: at least one in four or five will do so full time or part time, up from roughly one in six or seven today. Also, the greater use of trees for cooling, more sustainable architecture and less wasteful appliances will make the suburban home of the future far less of a danger to ecological health than in the past. Houses may be smaller—lot sizes are already shrinking as a result of land prices—but they will remain, for the most part, single-family dwellings. A new landscape may emerge, one that resembles the network of smaller towns characteristic of 19th-century America. The nation's landmass is large enough—about 3 percent is currently urbanized—to accommodate this growth, while still husbanding critical farmland and open space. EFTA01197374 A more competitive and environmentally sustainable America will rely on technology. Fortunately, no nation has been more prodigious in its ability to apply new methods and techniques to solve fundamental problems; the term "technology" was invented in America in 1829. New energy finds, unconventional fuel sources and advanced technology are likely to ameliorate the long-prophesied energy catastrophe. And technology can ease or even reverse the environmental costs of growth. With a population of 300 million, the United States has cleaner air and water now than 4o years ago, when the population was 200 million. The America of 2050 will most likely remain the one truly transcendent superpower in terms of society, technology and culture. It will rely on what has been called America's "civil religion" - its ability to forge a unique common national culture amid great diversity of people and place. We have no reason to lose faith in the possibilities of the future. As Chris Cillizza points out this week in The Washington Post in an op-ed — The Next America' presents challenges, opportunitiesfor politicians — the America of today bears little resemblance to the country of 5o years ago. It is older. It is less white. And those two demographic trends will only accelerate over the next 5o years. First of all the country is getting less white and within the next thirty years Caucasians will constitute less than 50% of the population. And the second demographic is the graying of our nation. Medical advances and better eating habits are extending our lives to a point unimaginable even as recently as 1960. Back then, average life expectancy was a shade under 7o; in 2011, it was nearly 79. (The gap between men and women has shrunk as well. In 1960, women lived on average seven years longer; in 2011 that advantage was less than five years.) Experts say that we will have almost as many Americans over age 85 as under age 5" by 2060 — changing the usual age pyramid — broad among the young and narrowing significantly as the age ranges rise — will turn into more of an age rectangle over the next five decades. (This phenomenon is not simply a result of people living longer; the birth rate is declining simultaneously.) The other major demographic shift is the declining white population and the surging Hispanic community. The American population was 85 percent white in 1960, but by 2060, it is expected to be 43 percent white. By contrast, Hispanics, who were just 4 percent of the population in 1960, are projected to make up more than 3o percent by 2060. The political implications of these changes are profound and are already being visited on the two major parties. Mitt Romney won the white vote by 20 points in 2012 - the largest margin since Ronald Reagan in his landslide reelection in 1984 — but still lost the election convincingly. That's because whites were just 72 percent of voters, the lowest percentage ever; it was the sixth-straight presidential race in which the white vote declined as a share of the overall electorate. Combine the smaller white vote with Obama's dominance among Hispanics (he won 71 percent of their votes) and African Americans (93 percent), and you see why he won easily among an electorate that simply looked different than it had in years past. Perhaps the most interesting about demographic ethnicity shift, is not the projected growth of the Hispanic community or the shrinking of the white community, but rather the blurring of racial lines. In 1960, just over 2 percent of the population married someone not of their own race. By 2010, that number had surged to 15.5 percent. By 2050, will our racial categories still make much sense? These days our old labels are having trouble keeping up with our new weddings. The broad takeaway is that age and ethnicity are reshaping our country, and even our ways of describing each other, rapidly and meaningfully. Those changes mean that assumptions based on the past are extremely dangerous, in politics and everywhere else. We are entering a new age for America and as my friend from New York University use to say 4o years ago we are entering into the Fourth World (more multi-cultural and age diverse) and both major political parties need to acknowledge that reality and act — and react — EFTA01197375 accordingly and this doesn't mean building higher citizenship walls, suppressing voter turnout or gerrymandering safe congressional districts. ****** This Is Us: Portrait of a Changing America Changing Face of America Percent of total U.S. population by race and ethnicity. 196O2060 10O% 75% 50% 25% 036 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060 All other Asian Hispanic Black White Change is complex and often difficult, particularly at the scale of a nation 300 plus million strong. It doesn't proceed smoothly or at the same rate among all age, racial, or ethnic groups. And yet: some of the movements—like the increase in support of gay marriage or interracial relationships or the decline of religious affiliation—are so clearly defined as to seem inexorable now. Pew Research's new report, The Next America, provides a portrait of these demographic and cultural shifts. It's filled with fascinating details about who Americans are, what we believe, and how both of those things have changed over the last several decades. For more information attached please the other six charts in Alexis Madrigal's article in The Atlantic - This Is Us: Portrait of a Changing America - showing the huge demographic shifts in seven easy graphs. ****** DETROIT CHICAGO CLEVELAND O O - — —4 ttb:- ‘irS <:\ NEW YORK - - "."2/ • Li 50 MILES PITTSBURGH PHILADELPHI 1 Earlier this month I ran across several interesting articles as I was preparing for assembling my weekly readings about a venture — Spread Networks - to dig, from scratch, a superfast fiber-cable route for sending trades between Chicago and New York. It would be nearly as straight as the crow flies and EFTA01197376 create a new critical link for speed-obsessed traders. While several years ago, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, trying to curry favor with the government- and public-transit-hating Republican Base, abruptly canceled America's biggest and arguably most important infrastructure project, a desperately needed new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. But what blew me away was the purpose of this 825 mile underground fiber-optic cable that would shave three milliseconds — three- thousandths of a second - off communication time between the futures markets of Chicago and the stock markets of New York. And the fact that this tunnel was built while the rail tunnel wasn't tells you a lot about what's wrong with America today. Not all trading takes place in New York. By historical accident, derivatives such as futures and options are mostly traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 720 miles away. So a few years ago, a company called Spread Networks began quietly buying up rights-of-way for a route that would lop about 140 miles off the shortest fiber-optic cable distance between the Chicago Merc and the communications hub of Carteret, New Jersey, the primary data center for Nasdaq. Existing networks tend to follow railroad lines and were designed to serve population centers, not to provide a point-to-point link for traders. Instead of dipping south toward Philadelphia, Spread's route heads northwest through central Pennsylvania and then due west to Cleveland and then onto Chicago. Spread's one-inch cable is the latest weapon in the technology arms race among Wall Street houses that use algorithms to make lightning-fast trades. Every day these outfits control bigger stakes of the markets—up to 70% now. "Anybody pinging both markets has to be on this line, or they're dead,"says Jon A. Najarian, cofounder of OptionMonster, which tracks high-frequency trading. Spread's advantage lies in its route, which makes nearly a straight line from a data center in Chicago's South Loop to a building across the street from Nasdaq's servers in Carteret, M. Older routes largely follow railroad rights-of-way through Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. At 825 miles and 13.3 milliseconds, Spread's circuit shaves 10o miles and 3 milliseconds off of the previous route of lowest latency, engineer-talk for length of delay. Again, three milliseconds is three one-thousandths of a second. Does that really matter? 'That's close to an eternity in automated trading,"says Ben Van Vliet, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "This is all about picking gold coins up off thefloor-only the fastest person is going to get the coins." Who cares about three milliseconds? The answer is, high-frequency traders, who make money by buying or selling stock a tiny fraction of a second faster than other players. Not surprisingly, Michael Lewis starts his best-selling new book "Flash Boys," a polemic against high-frequency trading, with the story of the Spread Networks tunnel. Economist Paul Krugman says: The real moral of the tunnel tale is independent of Mr. polemic. Think about it. You may or may not buy Mr. depiction of the high-frequency types as villains and those trying to thwart them as heroes. (If you ask me, there are no good guys in this story.) But either way, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to save three milliseconds looks like a huge waste. And that's part of a much broader picture, in which society is devoting an ever-growing share of its resources to financial wheeling and dealing, while getting little or nothing in return. How much waste are we talking about? A paper by Thomas Philippon of New York University puts it at several hundred billion dollars a year. Mr. Philippon starts with the familiar observation that finance has grown much faster than the economy as a whole. Specifically, the share of . accruing to bankers, traders, and so on has nearly doubled since 1980, when we started dismantling the system of financial regulation created as a response to the Great Depression. What are we getting in return for all that money? Not much, as far as anyone can tell. Mr. Philippon shows that the financial industry has grown much faster than either the flow of savings it channels or the assets it manages. Defenders EFTA01197377 of modem finance like to argue that it does the economy a great service by allocating capital to its most productive uses — but that's a hard argument to sustain after a decade in which Wall Street's crowning achievement involved directing hundreds of billions of dollars into subprime mortgages. Wall Street's friends also used to claim that the proliferation of complex financial instruments was reducing risk and increasing the system's stability, so that financial crises were a thing of the past. No, really. But if our supersized financial sector isn't making us either safer or more productive, what is it doing? One answer is that it's playing small investors for suckers, causing them to waste huge sums in a vain effort to beat the market. Don't take my word for it — that's what the president of the American Finance Association declared in 2008. Another answer is that a lot of money is going to speculative activities that are privately profitable but socially unproductive. And now one of the latest scams is high-frequency trading where complex algorithms and millisecond advantages enable computers to intercept buy and sell orders and execute interim trades between the parties making pennies on each share but totaling billions of dollars without these interlopers contributing any benefits to the buyers or seller and the economy at large. You may object that this can't be right, that the invisible hand of the market ensures that private returns and social returns coincide. Economists have, however, known for a long time that when it comes to speculation, that proposition just isn't true. Back in 1815 Baron Rothschild made a killing because he knew the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo a few hours before everyone else; it's hard to see how that knowledge made Britain as a whole richer. It's even harder to see how the three- millisecond advantage conveyed by the Spread Networks tunnel makes modem America richer; yet that advantage was clearly worth it to the speculators. On another note, in April of 2012, the Canadian research ship Coriolis II set out from Halifax to survey parts of the continental shelf stretching 1,000 miles off the east coast of Nova Scotia. The ship was hired by Hibernia Atlantic, (which changed its name last year to Hibernia Networks), a Summit, New Jersey-based company that operates undersea telecom cables, to map out a new $300 million trans-Atlantic fiber-optic line called Project Express. The cable stretches 3,000 miles beneath the North Atlantic, connecting financial markets in London and New York at record transmission speeds. A small group of U.S. and European high-speed trading firms will pay steep fees to use the cable. The "new" New York—London link intended to shave 311 miles off the usual distance and cut the round-trip message time from 65 milliseconds to just under 60. As a result, Project Express became the fastest cable across the Atlantic, reducing the time it takes data to travel round-trip between New York and London to 59.6 milliseconds from the current top speed of 64.8 milliseconds, according to Hibernia Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek. Those five milliseconds might not seem like a big deal, but to the handful of electronic trading firms that will have exclusive access to the cable, it will be a huge advantage. "That extrafive milliseconds could be worth millions every time they hit the button,"says Joseph Hilt, senior vice president of financial services at Hibernia Networks. In short, we're giving huge sums to the financial industry while receivini,tle or nothing — maybe less than nothing — in return. Mr. Philippon puts the waste at 2 percent of . Yet even that figure, which Paul Krugman says understates the true cost of our bloated financial industry. For there is a dear correlation between the rise of modem finance and America's return to Gilded Age levels of inequality. Never mind the debate about exactly how much damage high-frequency trading does. It's the whole financial industry, not just that piece, that's undermining our economy and our society. And the fact that for political reasons, the building of a greatly needed tunnel that would have carried tens of thousands of people a day was abandoned and a 825 mile fiber optic cable was completed so that financial market traders could make additional billions of dollars without contributing any real value is EFTA01197378 emblematic of a structural and moral deficiency in our society. We have to change our priorities if we would like our country to grow and generate prosperity for all instead of a few speculators and their customers ****** COSTS OF WAR Over 330,000 Killed by Violence, $4 Trillion Spent and Obligated SBILLJONS REPORT/SOURCE ESTIMATED Congressional War Appropriations to Pentagon' 51,406.9 Wheeler and Crawford War related Additions to the Pentagon Base Budget 743.1 Crawford DOLLAR Wanrelated International Assistance (State Department/USAIM 103.5 Oancs and Crawford COSTS OF Veteran's Medical and Disability 134.7 8 limes Additions to Homeland Security Spending 455.2 Dancs and Crawford WARS, in Cumulative Interest Payments on Pentagon War and State/USAID 259.4 Edwards Appropriations through FY2013 by 2013 $BILLIONS SUBTOTAL FEDERAL OUTLAYS FY2001-FY2013 3.102.85 THESE US. TOTALS DO NOT INCLUDE: Projected Iraq, Afghanistan and ONE spending. FY 2014' 6S Crawford Medicare costs for injured veterans Projected Increase In Pentagon Base, FY2014 65 Crawford after aim 65; Ispensesfor veterans Future Obligations for Veterans Medical and Disability through 2053' 754.4 811mes paid for by state and local government budgets or the social cost of veterans SUBTOTAL FUTURE SPENDING AND OBLIGATIONS 884.4 cam Ad:Shona' MIC/Ot<0.1CfriK conuquences of war spear:Ws, TOTAL COSTS OF WARS FROM FY2001 INCLUDING FUTURE includang infrastructure and gobs. On 3,987.25 SPENDING AND OBLIGATIONS macroeconomic consequences seer Edwards, Heintz. and Corlet-Ptilitt. Additional Cumulative interest on Past Pentagon and State/USAID 5.7.000 Edwards War Appropriations FY2001-2013 by 2053' TWeb Link: The official tally of all of the war's recorded dead — including soldiers, militants, police, contractors, journalists, humanitarian workers and civilians — shows that over 330,000 people have died due to direct war violence, many more indirectly. Indirect deaths from the wars, including those related to malnutrition, damaged health infrastructure, and environmental degradation are not represented in the aforementioned number. In previous wars, these deaths have far outnumbered deaths from combat and that is likely the case here as well. EFTA01197379  HumanKarim. us " ism US COlltriCtO11. WetIon 375 cau 6407 Inflillittt. 3 it _ Mind Mammy ad 2440S Oabet MIMI. 1308 01,0811100 Feta% *MOO Ovals NUNS 330,000 Direct War Deaths, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, 2001-February 2013• • Does not Include Indirect deaths which may total many hundreds of thousands more 200,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parries to the conflict, and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as the violence continues. But most observers acknowledge that the number of civilians killed has been undercounted. The true number of civilian dead may be much larger when an adequate assessment is made. While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (over 6,600), what is startling is what we don't know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with over 75%mo disability claims already approved. Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified. Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living in grossly inadequate conditions. The number of war refugees and displaced persons --7.4 million-- is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Oregon fleeing their homes. Despite the US military withdrawal, Iraq's health, infrastructure, and education systems remain war-devastated. The armed conflict in Pakistan, which the US helps the Pakistani military fight by funding, equipping and training them, is in many ways more intense than in Afghanistan although it receives less coverage in the US news. The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties at home and human rights violations abroad. Furthermore, the human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades, some costs not peaking until mid-century. The US federal price tag for the Iraq war — including an estimate for veterans' medical and disability costs into the future — is about $2.2 trillion dollars. The cost for both Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan is going to be close to $4 trillion, not including future interest costs on borrowing for the wars. Many of the wars' costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed. For example, while most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars' budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that, and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet. As with former US wars, the costs of paying for veterans' care into the future will be a sizable portion of the full costs of the war. The ripple effects on the US economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects have been underappreciated. EFTA01197380 While it was promised that the US invasions would bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, both continue to rank low in global rankings of political freedom, with warlords continuing to hold power in Afghanistan with US support, and Iraqi communities are more segregated today than before by gender and ethnicity as a result of the war. Women in both countries are essentially closed out of political power and high rates of female unemployment and widowhood have further eroded their condition. During the US troop withdrawal from Iraq, President Obama said that the United States military was leaving behind a "sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq." This was not only an inaccurate account of Iraq's situation at that time, but the country has since become less secure and politically stable. Although violence in Iraq has declined since its peak, there has been a steady increase in the number of attacks over the last year. And to be honest the statement was a farce. Serious and compelling alternatives to war were scarcely considered in the aftermath of 9/it or in the discussion about war against Iraq. Some of those alternatives are still available to the US. There are many costs of these wars that we have not yet been able to quantify and assess. With our limited resources, we focused on the human toll in the major war zones, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan and on US spending, as well as on assessing the claims made for enhanced security, democracy, and women's condition. There is still much more to know and understand about how all those affected by the wars have had their health, economies, and communities altered by the decade of war, and what solutions exist for the problems they face as a result of the wars' destruction. EFTA01197381  More than 70% of deaths from direct war violence have been civilians. This does not include indirect deaths from disease and injury suffered in conditions degraded by war. It is imperative that we understand how much the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost the people in America, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The cost is staggering, the present cost, the future cost, the human cost with its financial cost and their social cost. We have borrowed virtually all of the money that we use to finance the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, adding at least one and a half trillion dollars to a national debt. Millions of people have been displaced. Many more have suffered and died due to the lack of access to clean drinking water, because they are malnourished, and because they can't get the health care. There has been a major war going on in Pakistan that few Americans realize. In Pakistan there have been tens of thousands of people killed in several million refugees created. In Iraq at least 125,000 civilians have been killed. And in Pakistan at least 35,000 people have died as a result of the Afghan war. The cost of taking care of our veterans over the next 20 to 30 or 4o years alone is estimated to add at least several billion dollars. Many of the cost of these two wars are under-counted, uncounted and even suppressed which makes it imperative that we try to get a full sense of what these wars have cost. Many Americans know that 6,000 men and women have died in uniform in these wars. But very few people know that the scale of human death and wounding has been much higher both in the military and in the civilian sectors. Because the cost has been borne unevenly, as military families, contractor families, the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have borne a tremendous cost that often gone unseen. As it is hard to convey the cost of these wars beyond lives because; the psychological toll and the physical toll of the survivors who have lost limbs, whose growth has been stunted by malnourishment and who have suffered diseases that they otherwise might not have gotten. This is very tough to talk about but we have to. When the battles have been fought what kind of destruction is left behind? What are the refugee flows? The destruction of housing? What kind of new family structures I set up when women a widowed? What kind of poverty often ensues for these families? Someone has to take responsibility for this. And what the true cost because someone made the decision to go to war. We need to acknowledge and understand the overall cost of taking two million young people, injecting of them into the line of fire and conflicts that really had no front lines, causing a very large number of injuries relative to fatalities. The cost of these wars of choice is borne by many different groups in our society, as the cost of wars are never over when the wars are over. Because many costs go on for decades and some of the peak costs may not be incurred 4o years after, as veterans age into some of the most difficult years of dealing with their disabilities and injuries from the war. Some of the big questions that should be asked about the decision to invade Iraq in particularly. Did starting a second war extend the war in Afghanistan? Would oil prices be what they are now if we hadn't invaded Iraq? Would the national debt be as high? Would the financial crisis have been as severe? And arguably the answer to all for those questions is no. One of the things we also have to understand is what the trade-offs were. What kinds of job creations were loss as a result of our focus on these wars? What was the cost to our infrastructure at home? What kind of greening to our economy that could have occurred with all of the funds, human labor and other resources if our country's focus had not gone into waging the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is an immense and urgent requirement to learn from the experiences of the past decade and try to ensure that we don't make the same mistakes all over again. Wars cost and every time one is waged, the human toll is far more destructive than ever envisioned or promised. These were wars of choice. We were told that they would be easy. And they wouldn't cost a lot. We were also told that we would create stable friendly democracies. We were told that these countries were behind 9/11. They weren't. There were no Weapons of Mass Destructions. WMDs.... We were manipulated and lied to by our leaders who to this day are unapologetic or remorseful. It is easy to believe that EFTA01197382 because no one has been made to pay a penalty America will make this same mistake again. And this is my rant of the week WEEK's READINGS One of the biggest outrages with wage inequality that has little to do the Top i% or Wall Street is back in 1991, the National Restaurant Association passed around enough campaign contributions to persuade Congress to set the federal minimum wage for waiters, busboys and bartenders at only $2.13 an hour. And it has never gone up. There has been a wave of recent protests calling on fast food chains like McDonald's and Burger King to raise wages for their employees, who are forced to live on next to nothing. But did you know that many workers in sit-down restaurants may be faring even worse? These sit down restaurants claim that tips are additional income that make up the difference. But tips are random and often meager. So much so that restaurant workers are twice as likely as other Americans to be on public assistance. In other words, the people who run the system expect taxpayers to subsidize profits with welfare for their poorly-paid employees. There are to million restaurant workers in American who are desperately in need for better wages and working conditions. This is a women's issue as well, because millions of young women start their work life working in restaurants, and some continue to work in the industry when they get older. They suffer from three times the poverty rate of the rest of the US workforce, and they use food stamps at double the rate of the rest of the US workforce. So we're talking about poverty-wage workers, including their tips. In any other context, when an employer practically doesn't pay their workers, full-time workers, it's called slavery. But the big question is how is it that a major industry has basically convinced America, convinced Congress, that they practically shouldn't have to pay their workers at all. It's purely money and power. And their control over our legislators. Worse of all, the industry does everything that is can fight changes in health and safety regulations, the minimum wage and organized labor. How is it that a major industry has basically convinced America, convinced Congress, that they practically shouldn't have to pay their workers at all? It's purely money and power. And their control over our legislators. And when people are living completely off their tips, it means that we as customers are paying their wages, not the employer. And the National Restaurant Association ultimately does not want people to know that they've gotten away with this immense boondoggle. Furthermore most people assume that when they leave a tip the person waiting on them and maybe the bus-person are going to get it. But the truth is that at many establishments, your server has to share the tip with probably 20 or 30 other people in the restaurant. Often management illegally takes a portion of the tips. So that $3 or $5 and the $to tip that you left, your server might only see 25 cents to a dollar of that tip. No customer in America believes when they leave a tip that they are leaving a wage for a worker. Nobody believes that they're paying a wage. People think they're paying a tip on top of a wage. We don't think about this in any other context except restaurants. We believe somehow that because they're getting tips, they shouldn't get a wage. It's not true in any other context. And that is because of the power of this industry.