At an event of recognition by the associations of Colombian citizens for eliminating the visa requirement to enter the Schengen Area, Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy expressed his satisfaction over the unemployment decrease in November and the annulment by the Constitutional Court of the pro-independence resolution passed by the Regional Parliament of Catalonia.

In his speech, Mariano Rajoy highlighted the fact that this is the first time that the associations of Colombian citizens have been received at Moncloa Palace. They thanked him for his work at the European Union so that, as from Thursday, no citizen of Colombia will need a visa to travel around the Schengen Area.

“I do so in the best way possible, with their President and my good friend, Juan Manuel Santos, and I do so at a time when we can celebrate two pieces of news in Spain that will please every Spanish citizen”, he said.

Rajoy explained that, first of all, Wednesday was witness to “the best unemployment decrease figure for any month of November in the history of our country”, which should serve as “encouragement” to keep working hard on the “main national objective” – namely reducing unemployment.

Secondly, Rajoy referred to the decision by the Constitutional Court to declare void the resolution from the Regional Parliament of Catalonia to launch an independence process. Mariano Rajoy stressed that this annulment was passed unanimously and, furthermore, affects all aspects of the resolution “in their entirety”. This ruling, he said, “is greatly welcomed by the vast majority of Spaniards who believe in Spain, in national sovereignty and in equality among Spanish citizens”.

Colombian immigration stands as a fine and enviable example

Rajoy stressed that, as from Thursday, December 3, more than 48 million citizens of Colombia will no longer need a visa to enter the 26 European countries that form the Schengen Area. “This is a historic achievement because it directly benefits a great number of Colombian citizens in Spain. For the first time in fifteen years, they will be able to gather for Christmas – in Spain and in Europe – with their loved ones from Colombia”, he said.

Rajoy added that, in his four years in government, he has been committed to Colombia “with conviction and passion, supporting their great desire for peace and working for Colombians in Spain and Europe”.

Rajoy said he believes it is only fair to recognize that the immigration represented by the people of Colombia stands as “a fine and enviable example”. “The extensive and plural Latin American community in Spain forms an inseparable part of our social fabric, our life and our nation. They all deserve to be recognized and defended,” he said.

In this regard, he is confident that the visa exemption for the Schengen Area will also come into effect for the citizens of Peru in January.

Rajoy dedicated the event to the five Colombian citizens killed while forming part of the peacekeeping missions undertaken by the Spanish Armed Forces in Lebanon and Afghanistan. “They are the finest representatives of Colombian citizens in Spain. Honest, self-sacrificing, committed people with a sense of duty”.

Furthermore, Rajoy stressed that the people of Colombia “share our common life project” and we enjoy their talent and entrepreneurial spirit. He finished by saying that “you are part of our history, our future and Spain would not be the same without you”.

US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) applauded Congressional leaders for targeting high school graduation rates in Oregon and across the country as part of a larger K-12 education bill that last night passed the House of Representatives.

The bill, which would replace the No Child Left Behind law from 2001, includes a provision to help more students earn their diplomas by requiring states to identify high schools with low graduation rates and ensure those schools receive the support they need to improve. The proposal is similar to a Wyden-authored provision that passed the Senate in July as part of the Every Child Achieves Act.

“As a parent, I know that moms and dads want their kids to be able to climb the economic ladder throughout their lives, and that begins with a top-flight education,” Wyden said. “I’m glad Congress has taken meaningful action today to expand opportunity to every student in Oregon and across the country by helping more students graduate from high school.”

The bill that passed the House last night was agreed upon by a conference committee made up of House and Senate leaders to reform the Elementary and Secondary Education Act covering K-12 education.

The top Senate Democrat on the conference committee, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said the Wyden-authored provision in the Senate bill drove negotiators to focus on high school graduation rates in the bill.

“Senator Wyden and I share a deep commitment to helping more students earn their high school diploma, so they will be prepared to compete and lead in the 21st century economy, and this legislation will help move us toward that goal,” Murray said. “He fought hard to make raising graduation rates a priority, and I look forward to finishing our bipartisan work and making sure this legislation can get to work for students, parents, teachers, and communities in our neighboring states and across the country.”

The bill, the Every Student Succeeds Act, would give states more flexibility in setting standards for schools and monitor how federal dollars are allocated to school districts.

The Oregon Education Association (OEA) today praised Wyden for his work to get states and schools much-needed resources to help students succeed through graduation day.

“OEA is proud to have worked with Senator Wyden to ensure the Every Student Succeeds Act creates greater opportunities for all Oregon students, no matter their zip code,” said Hanna Vaandering, an elementary physical education teacher from Beaverton and President of OEA. “This bill will allow those who work with our students every day to have a voice in creating quality learning environments that inspire students, and an assessment system which focuses on student learning instead of high stakes testing. Senator Wyden’s commitment to improving graduation rates by lifting up student, parent, and educator voices has helped shape a federal education bill that will truly help Oregon students succeed.”

Higher graduation rates have been linked to lower unemployment and better earnings.

The conference committee bill also contains a provision Wyden pushed for that would focus on helping foster children and children experiencing homelessness graduate from high school. Wyden urged conference leaders to include reporting requirements for states and school districts to track the progress of those students and identify new ways to provide them with more support.

The Senate is expected to vote on the bill next week.

By Hans A. von Spakovsky and Elizabeth Slattery*

This term, the U.S. Supreme Court is reconsidering whether it is constitutional for the University of Texas at Austin to use race in its undergraduate admissions decisions, to the detriment of some students and the benefit of others. In Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Abigail Fisher argues that the school’s policy of giving racial preferences to preferred minorities is discriminatory and violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In this case’s prior appearance before the justices in 2013, the Supreme Court held that the lower courts gave too much deference to the university when examining whether its racial preference program was constitutional. The Supreme Court ruled that schools must prove their use of race is narrowly tailored to further compelling governmental interests and that courts must look at actual evidence and not rely on schools’ assurances of their good intentions. On remand, the lower court found that the university’s newly asserted interest in enrolling more minority students from majority-white high schools (“qualitative diversity”) justified its use of racial preferences. The Supreme Court should rule in favor of Abigail Fisher and hold that this rationale does not survive strict scrutiny and that discriminating on the basis of race in college admissions for any reason is a violation of equal protection.

A Brief History of Racial Preferences Jurisprudence

In 1978, the Supreme Court—in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke—reviewed the discriminatory admissions program used by the University of California–Davis Medical School (UC–Davis). At that time, the school used a two-track system for admissions, with 84 out of 100 seats filled based on the applicant’s merit and 16 set aside for “preferred” minorities. As described in another Heritage paper:

[Allan] Bakke just missed making the cut. The remaining 16 seats were reserved for the disadvantaged, but in practice, “disadvantaged” always meant members of racial minorities. Bakke could have been the fatherless son of an illiterate washerwoman and it would not have mattered: Because he was white, he did not qualify.

It is worth pointing out that at UC–Davis Medical School, race was no mere tiebreaker in otherwise close cases. Bakke had a college grade point average (GPA) of 3.46 and an undergraduate science GPA of 3.44 … as well as a commendable record of volunteer emergency room service at a local hospital, where he frequently worked late into the night with victims of car accidents and street fights. By contrast, the average “disadvantaged track” admittee in 1973 had a college GPA of 2.88 and an undergraduate science GPA of 2.62.[1]

In a fractured decision, the Supreme Court ruled against UC–Davis’s program while allowing schools to continue using racial preferences—as long as they were intended to promote the “educational benefits that flow from an ethnically diverse student body.”[2] Four members of the Court would have held that racially discriminatory admissions policies are unconstitutional. Another four would have allowed the school to continue using racial preferences in order to “remedy[ ] past societal discrimination,” warning against “let[ting] color blindness become myopia which masks the reality that many ‘created equal’ have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.”[3]

The controlling opinion, written by Justice Lewis Powell, unfortunately left the door open to the continued use of racial preferences. He wrote that a “state has a substantial interest that legitimately may be served by a properly devised admissions program involving the competitive consideration of race and ethnic origin.”[4] For years, legal scholars debated what a “properly devised” affirmative-action program entailed while these programs grew on campuses across the country. The Court subsequently determined that all racial classifications are subject to strict scrutiny, which means that they must be narrowly tailored to meet a compelling governmental interest.[5]

It was not until 2003 that the Supreme Court revisited the issue of racial preferences in college admissions in a pair of cases from the University of Michigan challenging the institution’s law school and undergraduate admissions policies. In Grutter v. Bollinger, challenging the law school’s purported use of racial quotas, the school claimed its goal was reaching a “critical mass” of diversity on campus.[6] The admissions data showed that the school maintained separate admissions criteria based on race and admitted preferred minorities “in proportion to their statistical representation in the applicant pool.”[7] In an opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Court ruled in favor of the law school, deferring to the school officials’ “educational judgment” that a diverse student body is “essential to its educational mission.”[8] It found that the school’s “critical mass” goal was not an impermissible race-based quota.[9] In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas disagreed, pointing out that:

The Constitution abhors classifications based on race, not only because those classifications can harm favored races or are based on illegitimate motives, but also because every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all.[10]

In Gratz v. Bollinger, the Court held that the university’s undergraduate admissions policy, which included automatically giving “one-fifth of the points needed to guarantee admission…to every single ‘underrepresented minority’ applicant,” was not narrowly tailored because it “ha[d] the effect of making the factor of race decisive for virtually every minimally qualified underrepresented minority applicant.”[11] The school’s failure to provide individualized review of applicants and heavy reliance on an applicant’s race could not be squared with strict scrutiny review.

Thus, these two decisions underscore that the Court was not issuing a blanket endorsement of race-based admissions; any consideration of race must be carefully and narrowly crafted and executed. One of the central tenets of Grutter requires that, before putting a thumb on the race scales, a school must pursue a “serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives that will achieve the diversity the university seeks.”[12] Though schools do not need to exhaust “every conceivable race-neutral alternative,” they must “remain flexible enough to ensure that each applicant is evaluated as an individual and not in a way that makes an applicant’s race or ethnicity the defining feature of his or her application.”[13] Gratz teaches that race may be considered only on the margin; it may not be the decisive factor in admissions.

In the real world, however, few competitive universities have ever implemented race-neutral programs to replace racial preferences. Moreover, universities are anything but transparent about their admission process. Some universities, including Yale, have even been destroying their admissions records to avoid having to disclose the criteria such as race and other standards they use to determine admissions.[14]

Texas College Admissions: The Top 10 Percent Law

Before Grutter was decided by the Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reviewed the race-based admissions policy at Texas’s state law school. In the 1996 case Hopwood v. Texas, the court ruled that the law school’s overt use of race was constitutionally impermissible.[15] The school’s admissions policy involved sorting applicants into three categories (“presumptive admit,” “presumptive deny,” and “discretionary”) based on scores combining the applicants’ GPA and LSAT scores (“TI score”).

The minimum TI score for each category varied depending on the applicant’s race or ethnicity. For example, black and Mexican-American applicants needed a composite score of 189 to be presumptively admitted, whereas white and non-preferred minorities needed a 199 TI score.[16] As the court detailed in its opinion:

[B]ecause the presumptive denial score for whites was a TI of 192 or lower, and the presumptive admit TI for minorities was 189 or higher, a minority candidate with a TI of 189 or above almost certainly would be admitted, even though his score was considerably below the level at which a white candidate almost certainly would be rejected. Out of the pool of resident applicants who fell within this range [189-192], 100% of blacks and 90% of Mexican Americans, but only 6% of whites, were offered admission.[17]

The school’s administrators justified lowering standards for preferred minorities by arguing this was necessary to achieve a diverse student body, to lessen the perception that the school was a “hostile environment” for minorities, and to address present effects of past discrimination.[18] The school had a special subcommittee that reviewed only preferred minorities’ applications, and it maintained waiting lists for admission that were segregated by race.

Four white applicants who were denied admission sued the law school. The Fifth Circuit ruled in their favor, concluding that “[d]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.”[19] Further, the court noted, “preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake.”[20] None of Texas’s justifications satisfied strict scrutiny review—that the use of race was narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest—so state-funded universities in Texas were no longer permitted to use race as a factor in admissions decisions.

Following this decision, the Texas legislature passed the Top 10 Percent Law in 1997. Students who graduated in the top 10 percent of Texas high schools would be automatically admitted to state-funded colleges and universities.[21] This boosted minority enrollment, as well as enrollment from rural areas. In fact, enrollment of African Americans and Hispanics surged, surpassing minority enrollment levels achieved with race-based admissions. Larry Faulkner, the president of UT-Austin at the time, wrote that “the Top 10 Percent Law has enabled us to diversify enrollment at UT Austin with talented students who succeed.”[22] Faulkner added that by 1999, enrollment levels for blacks and Hispanics had returned to the levels before the Hopwood decision; further, minority students were earning higher grade-point averages and had better retention rates than students who had previously been admitted through the old race-based admissions program.[23]

Despite these gains, the day the Supreme Court released its Grutter decision, Faulkner announced that the university would reintroduce race-based admissions. Thus, for spots not filled by Top 10 Percent students, the university began subjecting applicants to a “holistic review” that allowed administrators to consider race as a “plus factor” for certain preferred minorities. The university defended its decision by arguing that while minority enrollment was up because of the Top 10 Percent Plan, it did not mirror the overall demographics of Texas.

Fisher’s First Trip to the Supreme Court

Abigail Fisher, a white Texas resident, did not graduate in the top 10 percent of her high school class, so her application for admission to UT–Austin was in competition with candidates who received racial preferences. After she was denied admission, she sued the university for discriminating against her based on race. Her case went to the Supreme Court, which held that UT–Austin must prove its use of racial preferences meets the narrow tailoring standard that had been set in 2003 in the Grutter decision.

In an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court determined that the lower courts gave too much deference to UT–Austin officials when examining whether their use of race was narrowly tailored. The Court said that university officials are entitled to “no deference” because it is “for the courts, not for university administrators” to ensure that the means used by the university pass strict scrutiny review.[24] Under narrow tailoring, the school’s use of race must have been “necessary…to achieve the educational benefits of diversity.”[25] In other words, there must be “no workable race-neutral alternative” that would produce such benefits.[26]

The first Fisher opinion stressed that courts must look at actual evidence and not “simple…assurances of good intention” from the university.[27] In a concurring opinion, Justice Thomas argued that “only a social emergency rising to the level of imminent danger to life and limb” might be a compelling enough interest to justify racial discrimination.[28] He further noted that even though it may be “cloaked in good intentions, the university’s racial tinkering harms the very people it claims to be helping.”[29]

Thus, Abigail Fisher’s case returned to the Fifth Circuit so that court could examine the evidence supporting the university’s justification for its racially discriminatory admissions policy. On remand, a three-judge panel upheld the school’s plan once again. Two of the judges on the panel claimed that there were “no workable race-neutral alternatives” since Texas had unsuccessfully tried various alternatives to increase diversity in the past. The Top 10 Percent Plan produced too many students from majority-minority schools, which allegedly did not advance the school’s interest in “qualitative” diversity.

Judge Emilio Garza dissented, questioning the sufficiency of the evidence provided by UT–Austin. He concluded that the university’s “bare submission” of proof that its admissions plan passed strict scrutiny “begs for the deference that is irreconcilable with ‘meaningful’ judicial review.”[30] Based on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Fisher, the burden was on the university to demonstrate that its use of racial and ethnic preferences advanced its compelling interest in obtaining a “critical mass” of campus diversity. But as Judge Garza pointed out,

[S]urprisingly, [the university had] failed to define this term in any objective manner. Accordingly, it is impossible to determine whether the University’s use of racial classifications in its admissions process is narrowly tailored to its stated goal—essentially, its ends remain unknown.”[31]

Garza faulted the majority for continuing “to defer impermissibly to the University’s claims” in defiance of the “the central lesson of Fisher.”[32] In fact, the lack of evidence produced by the university to justify its discriminatory admissions policy “compels the conclusion” that it “does not survive strict scrutiny.”[33] Fisher asked the full Fifth Circuit to rehear the case. But in a brief order that provided no explanation for its decision, the court announced that the judges voted 10 to 5 not to rehear the case.

Admissions Scandal at the University of Texas

Since the Fifth Circuit issued its decision, a scandal at the University of Texas has revealed that university officials had another, secret admissions process that they never revealed to the courts, raising a serious ethical issue about the university’s lack of candor and honesty to the tribunal. The Board of Regents of the University of Texas system commissioned an outside investigation by Kroll, Inc., an international investigative consulting firm, which issued a devastating and highly critical report in February 2015 on the undisclosed admissions process.[34]

The investigation revealed that university officials regularly overrode the “holistic review” to allow politically connected individuals, such as state legislators and members of the university’s Board of Regents, to get family members and other friends admitted. Kroll found that many of these students were admitted “despite grades and test scores substantially below the median for admitted students.”[35]

In fact, the admission rate for applicants under this secret review was 72 percent, while the admission rate for students through the “holistic review” was only 16 percent. In 29 percent of the cases Kroll reviewed, “the files suggest that ethnic, racial, and state geographical diversity may have been an important consideration,” making race and ethnicity an even more important factor in these “secret” admissions than in the holistic administration process.[36] Kroll concluded that the files confirmed that particular applicants were “admitted at the request of the President [of UT–Austin] over the assessment of the Admissions Office.”[37]

Thus, the bad faith of UT–Austin administrators in failing to tell the truth about the admissions policy the first time around could be an unexpected factor in the Supreme Court’s reconsideration of the issue.

Fisher Returns to the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court agreed to rehear the case in its 2015–2016 term and oral arguments are scheduled for December 9, 2015. Fisher argues that even though the university has the burden of demonstrating why it needs to use race in making admissions decisions, it has never done so. More than 80 percent of minority enrollees for the 2008 freshman class (the class for which Abigail Fisher applied) were admitted through the Top 10 Percent Plan, which suggests the use of racial preferences in the “holistic review” is unnecessary.[38]

Furthermore, in 2010, UT–Austin reported that its entering freshman class included more minority students than white students for the first time in its history.[39] Fisher maintains that the university’s newly asserted interest in “qualitative” diversity cannot survive strict scrutiny review. She further contends that the school has failed to produce evidence demonstrating why its use of race is “compelling,” despite being required to articulate the reason for its use of race “at the time it ma[de] the decision to use racial preferences—not nine years after the policy change and four years into litigation.”[40] Though Fisher is not asking the Supreme Court to completely ban the use of racial preferences, she is asking the Court to hold UT–Austin to the constitutional standard of strict scrutiny, which should not be “strict in theory but feeble in fact.”[41]

While there has been a lot of media attention focused on Fisher’s case, the impact of the Court’s decision—however it rules—on schools across the country may be limited given Texas’s unique Top 10 Percent Plan. On the other hand, a finding against UT–Austin that it failed to produce evidence that justified its racial preference policy and that the policy was narrowly tailored will put schools on notice that they cannot simply claim such a program is needed without providing proof—the days when courts simply deferred to the judgment of school administrators will be over. Such a result could be of great importance since there are lawsuits already pending in federal district courts that challenge the racially discriminatory admissions policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC).[42]

The Harvard suit was brought by Asian-American applicants who claim they were denied admission because the university has put limits on the number of Asian Americans it will admit, similar to the racist quotas and caps that Ivy League schools put on the number of Jewish students they would admit in the 1920s.[43] The plaintiffs in the case against UNC point out that the university did a study that showed that if the school dropped its racial preference policy and switched to a top 10 percent plan like Texas, the number of minorities would actually increase. The advocacy group involved in bringing these lawsuits is also interviewing students who claim they were rejected due to the discriminatory admissions policies of the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Tennessee for potential lawsuits.[44]

The Sad Consequences of Racial Preferences

In addition to the constitutional problem (and fundamental fairness issue) with allowing racially discriminatory admissions by colleges and universities, there is a practical problem: growing evidence that such policies actually harm minority students. As Gail Heriot, a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, summarizes:

Mounting empirical research shows that race-preferential admissions policies are doing more harm than good. Instead of increasing the numbers of African Americans entering high-status careers, these policies reduce those numbers relative to what we would have had if colleges and universities had followed race-neutral policies. We have fewer African-American scientists, physicians, and engineers and likely fewer lawyers and college professors.[45]

When schools “relax their admissions policies in order to admit more underrepresented minority students,” those students end up “concentrated at the bottom of the distribution of entering academic credentials at most selective college and universities.”[46] Any student, regardless of his or her race, “whose entering academic credentials are well below those of the average student in a particular school will likely earn grades to match.”[47]

These students are far less likely to succeed in school, making it far less likely that they will pursue careers in their chosen profession and far more likely that they will switch to an easier major, or worse, drop or flunk out of school. This is a particular problem in the hard sciences, where the students “who fail to attain their goal of a science or engineering degree are disproportionately students whose entering academic credentials put them toward the bottom of their college class.”[48] Furthermore, this perverse acceptance of racially discriminatory admissions policies has also led to individuals faking one race or another to gain admission at certain schools.[49]

Thus, the Supreme Court should revisit its past decisions allowing the use of racial preferences in college admissions.[50] A majority of the Supreme Court justices have questioned the continued legitimacy of racial preferences, and 12 years ago, in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice O’Connor wrote: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary….”[51] Justice O’Connor was wrong 12 years ago when she sanctioned their use, albeit under supposedly limited circumstances and for a possibly limited amount of time. Such preferences are nothing more than a euphemism for government-sanctioned discrimination, and cannot be reconciled with the principle of equal protection embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment.

As Chief Justice John Roberts said, “Racial balancing is not transformed from ‘patently unconstitutional’ to a compelling state interest simply by relabeling it ‘racial diversity.’… The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”[52]

It is time for the Supreme Court to finally put that principle in place by banning racial preferences and other discriminatory practices in college admissions.

*About the authors:
Hans A. von Spakovsky is Manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and Senior Legal Fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Elizabeth H. Slattery is a Legal Fellow in the Meese Center.

Source:
This article was published by The Heritage Foundation.

Notes:
[1] Gail Heriot, A “Dubious Expediency”: How Race-Preferential Admissions Policies on Campus Hurt Minority Students, Heritage Foundation Special Report No. 167 at 3–4 (2015), http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/08/a-dubious-expediency-how-race-preferential-admissions-policies-on-campus-hurt-minority-students#_ftnref3.

[2] Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 306 (1978).

[3] Id. at 327–28 (Justices, Brennan, White, Marshall, Blackmun, JJ., concurring in part and dissenting in part).

[4] Id. at 320.

[5] See, e.g., Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200 (1995).

[6] 539 U.S. 306 (2003).

[7] Id. at 386 (Rehnquist, C.J., dissenting).

[8] Id. at 328.

[9] Id.

[10] Id. at 353 (Thomas, J., dissenting).

[11] 539 U.S. 244, 271–72 (2003) (internal citations omitted).

[12] Grutter, 539 U.S. at 339.

[13] Id. at 337–39.

[14] Plaintiff in Harvard University Admissions Lawsuit Objects to Destruction of Student Records at Yale Law School, PR Newswire (March 19, 2015), http://www.bizjournals.com/prnewswire/press_releases/2015/03/19/DC59476; Joseph Pomianowski, Yale Law School Is Deleting Its Admissions Records, and There’s Nothing Students Can Do About It, New Republic (March 16, 2015), http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121297/yale-law-deletes-admissions-records-congress-must-fix-ferpa.

[15] 78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996).

[16] Id. at 936.

[17] Id. at 937.

[18] Id. at 952.

[19] Id. at 940 (internal citations omitted).

[20] Id. (internal citations omitted).

[21] Tex. Educ. Code Ann § 51.803 (West 2009).

[22] Larry Faulkner, The ‘Top 10 Percent Law’ Is Working for Texas (Oct. 19, 2000), available at https://www.utexas.edu/student/admissions/research/faulknerstatement.html.

[23] Id.

[24] Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, 133 S. Ct. 2411, 2420-21 (2013).

[25] Id. at 2420.

[26] Id.

[27] Id. at 2421.

[28] Id. at 2424 (Thomas, J., concurring).

[29] Id. at 2432 (Thomas, J., concurring).

[30] Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, 758 F.3d 633, 673 (2014) (Garza, J., dissenting).

[31] Id. at 661–662.

[32] Id. at 662.

[33] Id.

[34] Kroll, University of Texas at Austin – Investigation of Admissions Practices and Allegations of Undue Influence, Final Report to the Office of the Chancellor of The University of Texas System (Feb. 6, 2015), http://content.utsystem.edu/sites/utsfiles/news/assets/kroll-investigation-admissions-practices.pdf.

[35] Id. at 60.

[36] Id. at 62.

[37] Id. at 62–63.

[38] Brief for Petitioner at 10, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, No. 14-981.

[39] Class of First-Time Freshmen Not a White Majority This Fall Semester at The University of Texas at Austin, UTNews (Sept. 14, 2010), https://news.utexas.edu/2010/09/14/student_enrollment2010.

[40] Brief for Petitioner at 21.

[41] Fisher, 133 S. Ct. at 2421.

[42] Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, Harvard, UNC Sued Over Race-Based Admissions Policies, Wash. Times (Nov. 18, 2014), http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/18/harvard-unc-sued-over-race-based-admission-policie/.

[43] Malcolm Gladwell, Getting In – The Social Logic of Ivy League Admissions, New Yorker (Oct. 10, 2005), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in.

[44] Shapiro, supra note 42.

[45] Heriot, supra note 1, at 1.

[46] Id. at 5.

[47] Id.

[48] Id. at 6 (citing Rogers Elliott et al., The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions, 37 Res. Higher Educ. 681, 700 (1996)).

[49] See Vijay Chokal-Ingam, Why I Faked Being Black for Med School, N.Y. Post (April 12, 2015), http://nypost.com/2015/04/12/mindy-kalings-brother-explains-why-he-pretended-to-be-black/.

[50] There also are options for Congress and the states to eliminate racial preferences, or at least require schools to disclose whether or how race and ethnicity factor into admission decisions. See Roger Clegg, Hans von Spakovsky, and Elizabeth Slattery, What Congress Can Do to Stop Racial Discrimination, Heritage Foundation Legal Memorandum No. 120 (April 7, 2014), http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/04/what-congress-can-do-to-stop-racial-discrimination; Roger Clegg and Hans von Spakovsky, What States Can Do to Stop Racial Discrimination, Heritage Foundation Legal Memorandum No. 113 (Feb. 11, 2014), http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/02/what-states-can-do-to-stop-racial-discrimination.

[51] Grutter, 539 U.S. at 343.

[52] Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701, 732, 748 (2007).

Oil prices have dropped by over 60% since June 2014, and natural gas and coal have also seen price declines that look to be similarly long-lived. This column argues that action to restore appropriate price incentives, notably through corrective carbon pricing, is urgently needed to lower the risk of irreversible and potentially devastating effects of climate change. The hope is that the success of COP21 opens the door to future international agreement on carbon prices.

By Rabah Arezki and Maurice Obstfeld*

The human influence on the climate system is clear and is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system. — Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fifth Assessment Report¹

Fossil fuel prices are likely to stay ‘low for long’. Notwithstanding important recent progress in developing renewable fuel sources, low fossil fuel prices could discourage further innovation in and adoption of cleaner energy technologies. The result would be higher emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases

Policymakers should not allow low energy prices to derail the clean energy transition. Action to restore appropriate price incentives, notably through corrective carbon pricing, is urgently needed to lower the risk of irreversible and potentially devastating effects of climate change (Stern 2015). That approach also offers fiscal benefits.

Low for long

Oil prices have dropped by over 60% since June 2014. A commonly held view in the oil industry is that “the best cure for low oil prices is low oil prices”. The reasoning behind this adage is that low oil prices discourage investment in new production capacity, eventually shifting the oil supply curve backward and bringing prices back up as existing oil fields – which can be tapped at relatively low marginal cost – are depleted. In fact, in line with past experience, capital expenditure in the oil sector has dropped sharply in many producing countries, including the US (IMF 2015). The dynamic adjustment to low oil prices may, however, be different this time around.

Oil prices are expected to remain lower for longer. The advent of shale oil production, made possible by hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) and horizontal drilling technologies, has added about 4.2 million barrels per day to the crude oil market, contributing to a global supply glut. Shale oil will lead to shorter and more limited oil-price cycles. Indeed, shale requires a lower level of sunk costs than conventional oil, and the lag between first investment and production is much shorter. Furthermore, shale is still at a relatively early stage of its industry life cycle, where the scope for learning is substantial, as shown by production levels that have proven resilient thanks to phenomenal efficiency gains forced by the big drop in oil prices.

In addition, other factors (Arezki and Blanchard 2014) are putting downward pressure on oil prices: changes in the strategic behaviour of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the projected increase in Iranian exports, the scaling down of global demand (especially from emerging markets), the secular drop in petroleum consumption (Cox et al. 2015) in the US, and some displacement of oil by substitutes. These likely persistent forces, like the growth of shale, point to a ‘low for long’ scenario, even after the supply legacy left by the high-price era of the 2000s has dissipated. Futures markets, which show only a modest recovery of prices to around $60 a barrel by 2019, support this view.

Figure 1. Energy price indices: Jan 2011 = 100 Source: IMF, Primary Commodity Price System , and staff calculation.
1/ Natural Gas, simple average of US Henry Hub Gas, Natural Gas EU, and LNG Asia.

Natural gas and coal – also fossil fuels – have similarly seen price declines that look to be long-lived. Coal and natural gas are mainly inputs to electricity generation, whereas oil is used mostly to power transportation, yet the prices of all these energy sources are linked, including through oil-indexed contract prices.

The North American shale gas boom has resulted in record low prices there. The recent discovery of the giant Zohr gas field off the Egyptian coast will eventually have repercussions on pricing in the Mediterranean region and Europe, and there is significant development potential in many other locales, notably Argentina. Coal prices also are low, owing to oversupply and the scaling down of demand, especially from China, which burns half of the world’s coal.

Table 1. Share of primary energy consumption in 2014
Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2015, and IMF staff calculation.

Renewables at risk

Technological innovations have unleashed the power of renewables such as wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal. Even Africa and the Middle East, home to economies that are heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports have enormous potential to develop renewable (U.S. Department of Energy 2015). For example, the United Arab Emirates has endorsed an ambitious target to draw 24% of its primary energy consumption from renewable sources by 2021.

Progress in the development of renewables could be fragile, however, if fossil fuel prices remain low for long. Renewables account for only a small share of global primary energy consumption, which is still dominated by fossil fuels – 30% each for coal and oil, 25% for natural gas. But renewable energy will have to displace fossil fuels to a much greater extent in the future to avoid unacceptable climate risks. Unfortunately, the current low prices for oil, gas, and coal may provide scant incentive for research to find even cheaper substitutes for those fuels. There is strong evidence that both innovation (Aghion et al. 2012) and adoption (Busse et al. 2013) of cleaner technology are strongly encouraged by higher fossil fuel prices. The same is true for new technologies for mitigating fossil fuel emissions.

Figure 2. Ratio of clean vs dirty patents
Source: Aghion, Dechezlepretre, Hemous, Martin and Van Reenen (2012), calculations based on the PATSTAT database.

The current low fossil-fuel price environment will thus certainly delay the energy transition. That transition – from fossil fuel to clean energy sources – is not the first one. Earlier transitions were those from wood/biomass to coal in the 18th and 19th centuries and from coal to petroleum in the 19th and 20^th centuries. One important lesson is that these transitions take a long time to complete. But this time we cannot wait.

We owe to electric lighting the fact that there are still whales in the sea. Unless renewables become cheap enough that substantial carbon deposits are left underground for a very long time, if not forever, the planet will likely be exposed to potentially catastrophic climate risks.

Some climate impacts may already be discernible. For example, the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates² that some 11 million children in eastern and southern Africa face hunger, disease, and water shortages as a result of the strongest El Niño weather phenomenon in decades. Many scientists believe that El Niño events, caused by warming in the Pacific, are becoming more intense as a result of climate change.

Getting the price of carbon right

Nations from around the world have gathered in Paris for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP21, with the goal of a universal and potentially legally binding agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We need very broad participation to address fully the global ‘tragedy of the commons’ that results when countries fail to take into account the negative impact of their carbon emissions on the rest of the world. Moreover, free riding by non-participants, if sufficiently widespread, can undermine the political will to action of participating countries.

The nations participating at COP21 are focusing on quantitative emissions-reduction commitments (the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs).³ Economic reasoning shows that the least expensive way for each country to implement its INDC is to put a price on carbon emissions. The reason is that when carbon is priced, those emissions reductions that are least costly to implement will happen first. The IMF calculates that countries can generate substantial fiscal revenues – revenues that would allow lower distorting taxes and new investments in the economy – by eliminating fossil fuel subsidies and levying carbon charges that capture the domestic damages caused by emissions (Coady et al. 2015). A tax on upstream carbon sources is one easy way to put a price on carbon emissions, although some countries may wish to use other methods, such as an emissions trading scheme.

Countries that implement their INDCs through a domestic carbon price will reach their goals at lowest cost to themselves, but without global coordination on carbon prices, the cost to the world economy of whatever aggregate emissions reduction is achieved will be unnecessarily high. In order to maximise global welfare, every country’s carbon pricing should reflect not only the purely domestic damages from emissions (for example, health effects of the particulates associated with burning coal; see Coady et al. 2015), but also the damages to foreign countries (Nordhaus 2015).

Setting the right carbon price will therefore efficiently align the costs paid by carbon users with the true social opportunity cost of using carbon (Cottarelli 2009). By raising relative demand for clean energy sources, a carbon price would also help to align the market return to clean-energy innovation with its social return, spurring the refinement of existing technologies and the development of new ones. And it would raise the demand for mitigation technologies such as carbon capture and storage, spurring their further development. If not corrected by the appropriate carbon price, low fossil fuel prices are not accurately signalling to markets the true social profitability of clean energy. While alternative estimates of the damages from carbon emissions differ, and it is especially hard to reckon the likely costs of possible catastrophic climate events, most estimates suggest substantial negative effects.

Direct subsidies to R&D have been adopted by some governments but are a poor substitute for a carbon price: they do only part of the job, leaving in place market incentives to over-use fossil fuels and thereby add to the stock of atmospheric greenhouse gases without regard to the collateral costs.

Politically, low oil prices may provide an opportune moment to eliminate subsidies and introduce carbon prices that could gradually rise over time toward efficient levels.  However, it is probably unrealistic to aim for the full optimal price in one go. Global carbon pricing will have important redistributive implications, both across and within countries, and these call for gradual implementation, complemented by mitigating and adaptive measures that shield the most vulnerable.

The hope is that the success of the Paris conference opens the door to future international agreement on carbon prices. Agreement on an international carbon-price floor would be a good starting point in that process. Failure to address comprehensively the problem of greenhouse gas emissions, however, exposes all generations, present and future, to incalculable risks.

Editor’s Note: A blog version of this Vox column can be found on IMFDirect.

*About the authors:
Rabah Arezki, Chief of the Commodities Unit in the Research Department, IMF

Maurice Obstfeld, Economic Counsellor and Director of Research, IMF

References:
Aghion, P., A. Dechezleprêtre, D. Hemous, R. Martin and J. Van Reenen (2012), “Carbon Taxes, Path Dependency and Directed Technical Change: Evidence from the Auto Industry”, NBER Working Paper No. 18596.

Arezki, R. and O. Blanchard (2014), “Seven Questions about the Recent Oil Price Slump”, IMFdirect Blog, 22 December.

Busse, M., C. Knittel and F. Zettelmeyer (2013), “Are Consumers Myopic? Evidence from New and Used Car Purchases”, American Economic Review 103(1), 220-56.

Coady, D., I. Parry, L. Sears and B. Shang (2015), “Energy Subsidies in Latin America and the Caribbean: Stocktaking and Policy Challenges”, IMF Working Paper No. 15/105.

Cottarelli, C. (2009), “Climate Change—Some Simple (and Quite Convenient) Truths”, IMFdirect Blog, 23 November.

Cox, L., J. Furman, J. Linn and M. Obstfeld (2015), “The surprising decline in US petroleum consumption”, VoxEU.org, 9 July.

IMF (2015), World Economic Outlook: Adjusting to Lower Commodity Prices, Washington, DC, April.

Nordhaus, W. (2015), “Climate Clubs: Overcoming Free-Riding in International Climate Policy”, American Economic Review 105(4), 1339-70.

Stern, N. (2015), Why Are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency, and Promise of Tackling Climate Change, The MIT Press.

U.S. Department of Energy (2015), Quadrennial Technology Review, Washington, DC, September.

Footnotes:

The US has formally asked the Honduran government to extradite the country’s former president, Rafael Callejas, over his alleged ties to FIFA schemes. The accusation, which Callejas has refuted, comes as the US continues to press on with its corruption probe.

Honduras said on Thursday it had received a formal written request from the American government in connection with an indictment over suspected multimillion-dollar marketing and broadcasting bribery schemes.

Callejas is a key figure in international soccer, as he has served as head of the Honduran soccer federation.

In responding to the extradition request, Callejas told a news conference that he was not guilty of any allegations and that he is prepared to defend himself.

The American allegations come just after reports that Swiss police are to arrest more than a dozen people in connection with corruption in international soccer at the US’ request.

The authorities are detaining current and former soccer officials on charges including racketeering, money laundering and fraud, the report said. South and Central American sporting leaders are the focus of the new spree of arrests.

In the meantime, the FIFA Executive Committee is meeting in Zurich this week to approve reforms that would address the concerns of soccer sponsors and ease pressure from law enforcement. The international soccer body is scheduled to elect a replacement for Blatter, who is currently under suspension, in February 2016.

The ongoing FIFA corruption scandal has been a controversial issue, particularly because of the way US justice officials have claimed jurisdiction over crimes allegedly committed overseas. In numerous cases, American law has been brought to bear on foreign citizens when links to the US have been slim at best, such as the use of US banks in alleged corruption schemes that are the subject of the FIFA investigation.

I recently received an email from an octogenarian correspondent who told me that he had been speaking with another octogenarian (age was his emphasis) and they had agreed that (and here’s where I come in) it was time for me to “make a comeback.”

I obviously cannot write about every email that pops in one of my inboxes, but with all the destruction being wrought by the Empire lately and with all the pre-POTUS election hype, I thought this one was interesting.

First of all, my immediate response was: “A: how can I make a ‘comeback’ when I have never gone anywhere? And; B: suggestions? Plans? Resources?” Nope, I was just supposed to somehow magically appear back on the TV set doing something to try and end the wars…again.

I recognized from the very beginning of the electoral resurgence of the Democrats (in an understandable, but reactionary response to the stain of Bush/Cheney) that not only would the wars not end, but the expansion of Empire and violence would continue with very little outcry from the anti-Bush reactionaries. This was back in 2007, and I have not been proven wrong in any way.

I inaugurated the podcast Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox a few weeks before Obama started his first term as the Face of Empire and a major theme over these past seven years is the hypocrisy of Empire and the complicity of Democrats in oppression and war. Again, with my principled and articulate guests, the Soapbox has been an oasis of truth and radicalism in the desert of partisan hackery that has allowed the stain of the Obama regime to essentially get away with mass murder.

In the summer of 2009, I traveled with a handful of others concerned about drone warfare, spying, war, torture, etc “Under New Management” to Martha’s Vineyard where the Obama’s were taking their extravagant first vacation as First Family™. Many activities were organized and opportunities for press interviews, but there was little attention paid to this righteous action in the first year of the Reign of Obama. Since then, I have organized two antiwar camps in Washington, DC; a cross-country bike ride for peace (Tour de Peace); two political campaigns, and I have published five books. “Comeback?” From where? Corporate media obscurity, for sure, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Now, while people are waving the colonial French Flag and obsessing over doomed political campaigns (the 1% choose US presidents, not your 100 millionth of a vote), the dire reality is that it seems the global 1% and its lackeys are edging the world backwards into World War (Fill in the Blank).

Yes, I look at the “socialist” candidate (Democrat) who is making all kinds of “pie-crust promises” (easily made, easily broken) of wonderful social programs with whipped cream and a cherry on top, but he is also in favor of drone-bombing and imperial wars.

I am open for suggestions for organizing an end to World War Forever, but I believe the only way the Empire and its many wars, occupations, bombings, and other crimes will end is when the people awaken and rise up against political partisanship and dive all in for peace with justice and recognize that while one person is suffering under the hobnailed boot-heel of the US war machine, we who live here are not safe.

Nor should we be.

By Magnus Norell*

“Broadly speaking, the struggle within Islam is between Muslims who embrace the values of the modern world in terms of freedom, indi­vidual rights, gender equality and democracy on the one side and Muslims opposing these values and insisting on a [radical] Sharia-based legal system on the other. Any Muslim who even questions this version of Islam they refer to as a heretic or, worse, an apostate to be killed”.

The words above are by Salim Mansour, a Palestinian researcher who wrote an article in September 2014, shortly after the bombing campaign against the Islamic State (IS) had begun. It sums up what the stakes are in the struggle against the very harsh and literal interpretation of Islam that the Islamic State is representing. It also sums up the internal Islamic debate that took on extra urgency after the establishment of the Islamic State last summer. It was a debate that had been going on for a number of years, but driven primarily by Islamic scholars, journalists and researchers based in the US or Europe. After the rise of the Islamic State and the birth of the new Caliphate however, this discussion migrated back to the Middle East and is now firmly established throughout the region. Granted, it is still a minority that advocates an agenda of a reformed Islam and the need to re-interpret the basic Islamic texts, but nevertheless, a clear reformist trend is visible.

The urgency of this internal Islamic debate has been underlined, yet again, by another terrorist attack on European soil perpetrated by Islamists, this time in addition with ties to the Islamic State. The horrible attacks in Paris on Friday, 13 November, was a well-coordinated operation by several terrorists attacking at least six different locations more or less simultaneously. In the counter-terrorist response following the atrocities in central Paris, it appeared that this was a terrorist operation with ties stretching into other European countries (including Germany and Belgium) and that the present threat level within the EU remains high. Of special concern was the fact that at least one of the terrorists had entered Europe from Turkey to Greece amid the large influx of migrants pouring into Europe. False Turkish passports among some of the dead terrorists also point to a potentially volatile situation whereby the Islamic State is making good on its pledge to hide operatives among the many migrants entering Europe.

Thus, the struggle alluded to by Mr. Mansour is particularly relevant for Europeans as well as for Muslims in the Middle East facing the very real threats from the Islamic State. The importance of the matter has not only triggered a renewed and re-invigorated discussion among researchers, scholars, diplomats and journalists in the region. As a result of this process of challenging the Islamists, on security and theological levels, the King of Morocco, Mohammad IV, who called President Hollande to pledge support (the first Arab head of state to do so) and – a few days after the attacks – ensured that key intelligence from the Moroccan External Security Service reached their French counterparts, which ultimately led to the successful operation in Saint-Denis on Wednesday, 18 November.

The King has ordered the Moroccan “Superior Ulema Council” (Le Conseil Supérieur des Ouléma) to weigh in on the meaning of jihad, a powerful concept at the core of Islamist belief. In ruling that a better and truer definition of jihad should reflect areas other than armed struggle, the Moroccans have taken on a very difficult and loaded concept within Islam. There is no telling how far this will go, but what Morocco is doing, by taking the theological battle to the Islamists themselves is pushing back against the religious underpinnings of Islamist violence. This is highly relevant as well as a courageous and important step in the internal debate necessary to free Islam from some of its more unsavory basic tenets. And, more importantly, the notion that in order to counter effectively Islamists – militant and non-militant – Islam needs to question some of the hard-core religious beliefs enshrined in the religious texts. There is a basis for this in Islam as well, namely the idea of ijtihad and by using such an old and established concept (although rarely used in this way), Morocco is ahead of the curve, showing a way forward that has the potential to change the way Islam is discussed in more places than in Morocco.

*Magnus Norell, Senior Policy Advisor European Foundation for Democracy.

Libya’s economic conditions could turn sharply for the worse, as rival authorities vie to control rapidly shrinking national wealth. The struggle affects oil fields, pipelines and export terminals, as well as the boardrooms of national financial institutions. Combined with runaway spending due to corruption and dwindling revenue because of falling exports and energy prices, the financial situation – and with it citizen welfare – faces collapse in the context of a deep political crisis, militia battles and the spread of radical groups, including the Islamic State (IS). If living conditions plunge and militia members’ government salaries are not paid, the two governments competing for legitimacy will both lose support, and mutiny, mob rule and chaos will take over. Rather than wait for creation of a unity government, political and military actors, backed by internationals supporting a political solution, must urgently tackle economic governance in the UN-led talks.

Since the Qadhafi regime fell in 2011, Libya has been beset by attacks on, labour strikes at and armed takeovers of oil and gas facilities, mostly by militias seeking rents from the fledging central government. Initially brief and usually resolved by government concessions, the incidents gradually took on a life of their own, in an alarming sign of the fragmentation of political, economic and military power. They show the power accrued by militias during and since the 2011 uprising and the failure of efforts to integrate them into the national security sector. The dysfunctional security system for oil and gas infrastructure presents a tempting target for IS militants, as attacks in 2015 have shown.

One aspect of the hydrocarbon dispute is a challenge to the centralised model of political and economic governance developed around oil and gas resources that was crucial to the old regime’s power. But corruption that greased patronage networks was at that model’s centre, and corrupt energy sector practices have increased. A federalist movement some consider secessionist controls a number of the most important crude-oil export terminals. It exploits the situation by pursuing its own sale channels, adding to the centrifugal forces tearing Libya apart.

This complicates efforts to resolve a political conflict that in July 2014 triggered a split between rival parliaments, governments and military coalitions – one based in the capital, Tripoli, the other in the east, and both with support from competing regional players. Convinced of its legitimacy, each fights to control key institutions. As the most important, the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) and the National Oil Company (NOC), are under Tripoli’s control, the internationally recognised parliament in Tobruk and its government in al-Bayda are trying to set up parallel institutions. The sides also contest the assets of the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA, the sovereign wealth fund), in international courts. In anticipation of a unity government, most regional and all other international actors with a stake remain committed to the established CBL, NOC and LIA. They understand that these institutions jointly represent upwards of $130 billion and have senior technocratic expertise critical to rebuilding the state.

The longer negotiations stall, however, the greater the risk the Tobruk/Bayda authorities (which consider the Tripoli-based CBL and NOC biased against them) will be able to create rival institutions or weaken the existing ones. At the same time, Libya’s once-significant wealth (derived almost entirely from oil and gas sales) is haemorrhaging, due to corruption and mismanagement. Combined with reduced crude-oil exports because of damage to production and export sites, pipeline and other infrastructure blockades and the sharp decline in international oil prices, this makes remedial action urgent. Poor economic management already causes some shortages of fuel and basic goods; a wider economic crisis like a sudden, uncontrolled devaluation of the dinar, would severely harm millions. This would likely cause new security crises, encouraging more predatory behaviour by militias whose salaries the state pays, increasing the importance of the parallel economy (notably smuggling) and spurring new refugee flows.

Even as UN-led negotiations for a Government of National Accord (GNA) continue, several steps should be taken, including at a minimum:

• reiterating international determination that there can be only one CBL, NOC and LIA, with a GNA to appoint their senior managers; and oil sales or related contracts outside official channels will not be tolerated;
• prioritising economic governance in the UN-led talks so as to secure agreement on short-term economic policy and interim management of key institutions. This should be done in a separate negotiating track, including representatives of both authorities and with the support of international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank;
• brokering of local ceasefires in the UN-led talks’ security track, or other channels where relevant, to increase revenues in the short term by allowing reopening of blockaded oil fields, pipelines and export facilities. Security arrangements for repair and reopening of damaged facilities should be negotiated in the longer term; and
• making the question of the armed groups guarding oil facilities another priority security-track topic. Some of these have considerable arsenals and allies across Libya and are largely autonomous, so cannot be ignored. Including these armed groups could also help improve the protection of oil and gas infrastructure against attacks by IS affiliates.

The slow progress of the UN-led talks on political questions should dissuade neither the belligerents nor the internationals from encouraging such interim steps. That Libya has kept, against all odds, a minimum level of economic governance and even briefly increased oil exports shows that interim economic arrangements are possible; they could even deliver political gains by building confidence and demonstrating that compromise can be mutually beneficial. But this needs a push from outside, the resolve of both local and international actors – notably regional powers that have oscillated between backing a political solution and supporting one side or another – to maintain the integrity of the financial institutions and perseverance from negotiators. Above all, it entails convincing the two sides they are fighting over a rapidly diminishing prize and would be better off agreeing to these steps so as to share a bigger pot.

For the full report, click here.

The military intervention launched by Russia in Syria in September 2015 has altered the character of this protracted civil war and – quite remarkably – has both advanced and jeopardised Russia’s positions in the Middle East.

By Pavel K. Baev*

The Middle East is the only area where Russia can try to prove that it is not just a regional post-Soviet power with a revisionist agenda, but a global actor able to make a difference in managing crucial conflicts. A key reference point for President Vladimir Putin in this regard is the success of his September 2013 initiative to dismantle the Syrian chemical arsenal and prevent U.S. missile strikes against government targets.

Syria has also become a central battleground in the ideological struggle against the threat of revolutions, which Putin elucidated in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 28th 2015.

Several shifts in the Middle Eastern political landscape during 2015 propelled Putin toward a direct use of force. The conclusion of the difficult negotiations on the Iranian nuclear programme in the P5+1 format has produced the prospect of Western sanctions being lifted and the Iranian economy being opened for international business, which could reduce the usefulness of Russia’s special relations with Iran. The Russian strategic partnership with Turkey, which was shaped by the personal rapport between Putin and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had been significantly eroded, so Moscow was less restrained by the risk of upsetting this relationship. The forces of the Asad regime in Syria had suffered several defeats in the summer battles with opposition groups of various persuasions, so that Latakia province (the home base of the Asad clan) had come under threat – and Moscow saw an urgent need to strengthen the grip on power of this key ally in the struggle against revolutions.

The intervention

The ceasefire in Eastern Ukraine has only been in place since the start of September 2015, and by orchestrating this pause in hostilities, Moscow has created for itself an opportunity to execute a limited intervention elsewhere, even if its army’s most combat-capable battalions are tied up inside or near the Donbass war zone. The character of operations in this “hybrid war” has been such that the Russian air force was not engaged, so several squadrons of tactical aircraft were available for deployment in Syria.

The decision to establish an air base in the reasonably safe vicinity of Latakia was taken in early September (perhaps immediately after Putin’s return from a military parade in Beijing). The working assumption was that the capacity of the naval facility at Tartus was sufficient for delivering supplies and that the road connection (about 75 km) between the port and the base was quite secure, so the bulk of weapons, equipment and supplies for making the airbase serviceable were shipped in the following three to four weeks.

The active phase of the intervention started on the last day of September and was justified in Russian statements as part of the implementation of Putin’s initiative to build a broad international coalition against the Islamic State (IS). In fact, however, Russian air and missile strikes have been primarily targeting the forces of other opposition groupings (ranging from the al-Nusra Front to the Free Syrian Army), which were surprised but not badly hurt by these attacks. Bombing other “terrorists” was the only way for Russia to make a difference against the background of the relentless (if not that successful) air campaign of the U.S.-led coalition. The composition of the Russian air regiment in Syria (including a squadron of Su-25SM light fighter-bombers and a squadron of Mi-24 attack helicopters) indicates that it is best suited for close air support. This high-risk mission can only be performed in support of an offensive by government forces aimed at securing Latakia province from attacks from the north, where the al-Nusra Front had been gaining ground. Several attempts at launching such an offensive were indeed made, but the results were miniscule.

A key condition for any serious offensive is for the situation around Damascus to be stablised – the capital city remains the centre of gravity in the deadlocked civil war. Govern- ment forces are only able to control this battleground with the help of Hizbullah troops, but Russian squadrons dare not fly missions there while Israel continues to carry out airstrikes on Hizbullah targets.

Regional responses

During summer 2015 President Putin engaged in unprecedented high-level networking in the Middle East in an attempt to promote his initiative to organise a broad anti-IS coalition that would include the Asad regime. The meetings with King Abdullah II of Jordan and Saudi defence minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed that there was broad support for an active Russian role in the region – but also that nobody (with the obvious exception of Iran) was ready to make Asad a part of any solution for the Syrian disaster. Putin was aware that his address to the UN General Assembly would not change this attitude, but had reason to believe that a forceful intervention would compel regional leaders to take the Russian initiative seriously. The most important of these reasons was the obvious failure of international efforts to manage the Syrian crisis, which produced a major threat to global security in the form of IS – and a major spillover in the form of the wave of refugees arriving in Europe.

While the confusion is profound indeed, Putin has seriously misconstrued this opportunity. Russia has become a party to the Syrian calamity, but hardly a contributor to a solution. Russia’s hard-gained rapport with Arab leaders has been lost as a result of their feeling misled by Putin and upset by his disregard for their opinions. They are dismayed by Russia’s choice of closer cooperation with Iran in Syria and tend to agree with U.S. president Barack Obama that the

intervention is a “recipe for disaster” (Bloomberg, 2015). Israel – which has cultivated its own dialogue with Moscow – is particularly concerned that large amounts of modern weapons could fall into the hands of Hizbullah, which to all intents and purposes has become Russia’s military ally. Turkey found itself exposed to new security risks when Russian aircraft deliberately violated its airspace, so President Erdogan initiated a joint statement with Qatar and Saudi Arabia (as well as Western coalition partners) condemning Russian airstrikes on Syrian opposition forces.1

Erdogan was so offended by Putin’s betrayal of trust in their special relationship that he threatened to cut gas imports from Russia and cancel Rosatom’s contract to build the Akkuyu nuclear power plant.2 Public opinion on Russia in the region, which showed high levels of disapproval at the start of 2015 – 80% expressed unfavourable views in Jordan, 74% in Israel and 64% in Turkey (Stokes, 2015) – might turn even more aggressively negative.

Prospects and consequences

Sustaining the air campaign at an intensity of 30-50 sorties a day is difficult, given the low preparedness of the Hmeymim base and stretched lines of sea/air communications. Setbacks of various sorts, from technical accidents – the Russian air force has a dismal record of crashes (Baev, 2015) – to terrorist attacks on the perimeter of the base, are certain to happen. It is possible that the arrival of Russian forces will promote cooperation among feuding opposition groupings that could combine to defeat the “infidels”. Expanded support to the Free Syrian Army by the U.S. and Turkey and the overstretch of Syrian government forces, which have to defend several major cities, primarily Damascus, could lead to a rebel victory in Aleppo and advances in the north of Latakia province, which Russian airstrikes will not be able to check.

Such developments would push Russia into the “mission- creep” trap typical of many ill-conceived interventions. Keeping the air war going means wasting the initial effect of the initiative and waiting for troubles sooner rather than later; expanding the intervention by deploying two or three tactical battalion groups (of about 1,000 troops each) to Latakia would stretch Russian strategic mobility capabili- ties to the limit and increase domestic concerns; and a withdrawal would mean a humiliating loss of face. One way of escaping from this trap could be created by the recently opened Vienna talks.

Moscow seeks to present the expanded format of these talks – and in particular the engagement of Iran – as a major diplomatic victory on its part. In fact, however, the gathering of 19 delegations has little in common with Putin’s “broad coalition”, firstly because there is no place for Asad around the table, while even Iran is more interested in ending its long isolation than rescuing the dicta- tor-in-distress. The Vienna talks could constitute a step toward shaping a more coherent U.S. and EU policy, but this would reduce Moscow’s opportunities to play on the confusion inherent in the Syrian situation.

Regional stakeholders in the Syrian crisis were perhaps impressed by Russia’s boldness in launching an interven- tion with minimal coordination, but after six weeks of bombing they have made reasonably good assessments of the limits of this projection of power. Russia’s attempt to expand the scope of its air campaign in response to the IS-planted bomb that destroyed Metroject Flight 9268 over the Sinai on October 31st 2015 by using its strategic bombers to launch cruise missiles has not changes these assessment in any significant way. Initial reactions were mixed, but as the air war has reached its capacity, the balance of opinion has shifted to the negative, not least because of Moscow’s total disregard of civilian casualties in the targeting of air strikes. Some voices (particularly in Egypt) are still arguing for the further integration of Russia into the joint work on stabilising and reconstructing the Syria-Iraq war zone, and Moscow has indicated readiness to contribute to a negotiated solution. The only real contribution it could make to such a solution would be to help peacefully dismantle the Asad regime, which would hardly signify a strengthening of Russia’s authority and influence in the wider Middle East.

By intervening militarily in Syria the Russian leadership has abandoned its policy of cautious opportunistic manoeuvring in the Middle East and engaged in a risky gamble with a short-term horizon. Arab leaders (as well as Israel) are increasingly inclined to agree with U.S. conclusions on the lack of strategy in President Putin’s enterprise (Schleifer & Scott, 2015) and recognise that he is far more interested in scoring geopolitical points than in solving the Syrian problem and has a propensity to covering one mistake with another blunder. Whatever the fate of this Russian intervention, however, it has succeeded in increasing the pressure on Western stakeholders to stop temporising and produce a feasible plan for rebuilding Syria.

About the author:
*Pavel K. Baev, PhD, is the research director and a professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He is also a senior non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC and a senior associate research fellow at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales in Paris. He has published extensively in international journals and has a weekly column in the Eurasia Daily Monitor. His current research interests include Russian energy and military policy, conflict transformation in the Caucasus, and Russian policy in the Arctic.

Source:
This article was published by NOREF as Policy Brief November 27, 2015 (PDF)

References
Baev, P. K. 2015. “Russian air power is too brittle for brinkmanship.” PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo. November. <http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/russian-air-power- too-brittle-brinksmanship>
Bloomberg. 2015. “Obama: Putin’s Syria strategy is ‘recipe for disaster’.” October 2nd. <http://www.bloomberg.com/ news/videos/2015-10-02/obama-putin-s-strategy-in-syria- is-a-recipe-for-disaster->
Schleifer, T. & E. Scott. 2015. “James Clapper: Vladimir Putin in Syria is ‘winging this’.” CNN, October 30th. <http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/29/politics/james-clap- per-russia-syria-winging-it/>
Stokes, B. 2015. “Russia, Putin held in low regard around the world: Russia’s image trails U.S. across all regions.” Pew Research Center, August 5th. <http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/08/05/russia-putin-held- in-low-regard-around-the-world/>

Notes:
1 Erdogan requested and obtained a statement of support from NATO in this regard; see <http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/06/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey-russia-id USKCN0RZ0FT20151006#xRDegr0BItJLrW8m.97>. For the Saudi and Qatari warning to Russia, see <http://saudigazette.com.sa/saudi-arabia/kingdom-turkey-warn-russia-over- big-syria-mistake/>.
2 See <http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/10/08/uk-mideast-crisis-turkey-russia-idUKKCN0S20JA20151008> in this regard

By N Sathiya Moorthy*

For a megapolis, Chennai is possibly among the few cities the world over to have evolved on its own and otherwise, without a substantive source of water. With the historicity of the city’s Madras/Chennai twin-names from less than 400 years borrowing from only folklore, the accidental evolution of ‘Madras’ factory on the one hand and Madras Presidency on the other, were both historic accidents. With the result, when the city and suburbs, lying in a rain-shadow region, to say, gets flooded with an occasional heavy rains, explanations and excuses are sought from elsewhere, without anyone wanting to address the core issues that are at best political, not profitable.

It may thus be timely and fashionable to blame this year’s unprecedented rains and floods in Chennai to ‘climate change’, coinciding as it does with the Paris climate conference. Historically again, the north-east monsoon, that quenches the city’s thirst and also those of the outlying northern districts of Tamil Nadu, is possibly more irregular than the south-west monsoon, which covers much of the rest of the nation. Worse still, this time, the Bay depressions that feed Chennai’s rain clouds, did not develop into a cyclonic storm, and with that take away death and destruction even more to Andhra Pradesh or Orissa, West Bengal or Bangladesh, as used to be the case mostly. Even the first course that hit coastal Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry was not a cyclonic storm in the traditional sense of the term, as the locals had experienced in the past – and may do so in the future, as well.

Chennai and suburbs have suffered from at least one major rain every decade – and around the same time, mostly – before the stormy winds moved up north as a cyclone. This year, the rain clouds remained near-static, and so did the State administration. For reasons yet to be explained, no pre-monsoon preparations were known to have been made. Over the past couple of years, the local media too had seemingly shied away from reporting monsoon time weather forecasts with the seriousness they deserved – until the worst took over them all. Less said about the national media the better. They did not move until the Centre and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had moved – satisfying their near-complete coverage ‘exclusively’ of the latter’s overseas NRI tamashas and/ or the ‘Sheena Bora crime-thriller’ and worse.

Too much, and too late

Tamil Nadu had been under water almost for a month before the nation woke up one morning and wanted to know more. State authorities at the district-level upwards were keen to have the marooned people, particularly in the villages and city slums, back home and have children back on the slushy and water-covered premises, if only to prove a (political) point or two. Whatever the administrative reason or politico-constitutional justification, the Centre that had announced Rs 940-crore interim relief for the State and also despatched an official team to evaluate the damage a week and more earlier — after both became an internal political issue in the sensitive south Indian State facing Assembly polls in May next year — did not take ‘charge’ until after it had become too late.

While the services of the NDMF and the three arms of the armed forces did a commendable job without exception, even there inherent lacuna showed. Given their own weather prediction facilities and expected coordination with the Met authorities, the Services and the NDMF could have readied themselves for any anticipated eventuality of the kind that they were later tasked to address. Thus it was not until after the Chennai rains and floods had made national news, that too on the third or fourth day, the Railways generously offered one-lakh bottled drinking water to the flood-affected (when the armed forces had rushed similar help to neighbouring Maldives, where capital Male faced an unprecedented drinking water crisis in early December last, within hours).

To the extreme patience of the flood-affected should go the credit for still queuing up before toll-gates in the only motorable (?) road into the city for hours on end and from Bengaluru side without breaking the law and the toll-gates. The Union Transport Ministry’s belated decision to waive toll-collections only till 11 December is as unimaginative as the district administration’s decisions on early school reopening and the like. It’s another matter that affected populations in various parts of north Chennai and elsewhere in the State had targeted officials, and more so ministers and legislators, when flood relief (in kind and/or in cash) was either very/too late in coming, or did not at all come.

North-South divide

The current floods comes with its own baggage of North-South, elite-non-elite and urban-rural divide. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee raised a bogey when PM Modi allotted two tranche of interim relief to Tamil Nadu – the latest when he made a helicopter-survey of the affected areas — after her demand for some for her State, that too at a personal meeting with Modi as early as August. A parliamentarian of her TMC left a bad taste by appealing to the authorities in the House for ‘rescuing’ six of his relatives stranded in Chennai Airport, where thousands were caught unawares as the rest of the State and its populace. The elite-non-elite divide became prominent to the affected people in real terms when Air India and the rest thought it wise to evacuate the marooned airport passengers to safety across the country without bothering in equal measure to the plight of those holed up in railway stations, bus stations, marooned villages and colonies across the State.

That way, districts like Cuddalore and Kancheepuram, and much of the rest of the State, barring the western districts (Coimbatore, Salem, etc) had suffered worse rains through three weeks before the TN floods hit the nation’s conscience. Within Chennai, the northern parts and suburbs had been marooned for days and weeks – as has been the case for years and decades now — before the floods, caused by (repeated) unannounced opening of sluice gates of lakes emptying water into the Adayar river flowing through much of the elite, urbanised southern parts of the city, made it all ‘national’ news with international, investment ramifications. Even when the earlier rains marooned the city’s famed IT corridor and tenements of their highly-paid staff, apart from the usually rain-hit industrial suburbs, the world did not know – or, did not take as much notice.

Preparing for the future

Specific reasons can be assigned to the current floods. Avoiding recurrence may not be difficult, thus. The unplanned urbanisation, and not just of Chennai, in what is the fastest-urbanising State in the country, has meant callous violation of building rules and construction with politico-administrative collusion, maybe the main culprit. Successive State Governments have been found wanting in sincerity and application to implement a succession of Supreme Court and Madras High Court orders, on urban building law violations, particularly in Chennai’s commercial areas, for years now. Whether a court-induced probe into land-use violations, on the lines of the HC-appointed Sahayam Committee (possibly the first to be headed by a serving IAS officer), would be of help thus remains to be seen.

A constant complaint of the affected people this time, as always, was the non-availability of official alert, information and help even hours and days after the event. The first possibly owed to an overwhelming desire not to tell the people and the politicos alike, what they did not want to hear, or happen. The second flowed from the first, as policemen and fire men, electricity and water supply staff, apart from civic scavengers with their equipment and vehicles, had neither been organised or alerted in the first place, for them to be readily available for despatch, whenever and wherever required. If they too were stuck in their marooned homes, the absence of early and continual alerts meant that the ultimately affected populace could not shore up their stocks and/or energies for eventualities.

The third is the poor and improper maintenance of the State-owned road transport fleet and electricity sub-stations and supply-lines over the past several years, again in the name of poor-funding but mainly due to high corruption at all levels, leading to otherwise anticipated break-downs at the wrong time and in wrong places. Though yet to the be studied, the possibilities of staff not wanting to take risk with their career and the people’s life at the same time might have discouraged some of them from going ahead with what they were expected to do otherwise.

To this should be added an earlier Government’s order barring local communities from undertaking de-silting of neighbourhood lakes, tanks and canals, in the name of preventing caste and other forms of group clashes. The alternative official mechanisms to date have proved ineffectual and corrupt, with the result, there is no proper accounting or accountability for the kind of work that had been allotted and undertaken under the Centre’s 100-day-work programme, similar to the ‘food-for-work’ programme of the erstwhile ‘socialist’ regime. Scratching off the scheme would not help, proper implementation would, instead.

Concurrently in Chennai city, the sewage blocks owe to poor rains for years together and poor water supply even otherwise — with the result the discharge lines are clogged for months on end, to be able to come alive when the population require. An earlier attempt to wash the city drainage system by pumping in sea water throughout had to be reportedly abandoned, fearing salt-water seepage into sub-soil strata of whatever drinking water sources that remain. No alternatives are known to have been studied or thought of, thus far.

Last but not the least may be the GenNext’s trusting of plastic money too much than the real currency, with the results when ATMs are inundated, they do not have money to pay for a packet of milk, or candles and matches, or to pay the exorbitant charges that a risk-taking auto-driver is likely to charge. Even a star-hotel that’s round the corner is miles away when you do not have a boat to travel the roads – and a boat-ride does not come cheap, considering that the fisherfolk that own them have paid for a truck to ship them out there!

Today, reconstruction of broken lives is going to cost as much as it takes to repair broken roads, rail-lines and power stations. Tens of thousands of daily wage-earners have lost everything that they have, and may not have jobs and incomes for additional weeks and months together. Land prices can go up or down, depending on how speculators behave and politicians collude with them, and with that the fortunes of individuals and corporate alike. The FDIs, or whatever was promised and/or expected after the much-publicised TN Global Investor Meet (GIM) earlier this year may be delayed, pending the May polls on the one hand and the pace and space of post-floods reconstruction. It is unlikely that IT majors and other industries now in the State might wind up and go, but their work-pace and profitability would suffer – so would their employees’ earnings and spending capacities, and thus possible additional revenues to the Governments, both in the State (more) and of the Centre (relatively, less).

Yet, massive investments in civic, agriculture and industry infrastructure(s) across the State, supportive of one another or independent, either by the Governments, or through joint ventures with big-time domestic and/or foreign investors, could create more demand and jobs all across. But then there is a price to pay, all across. Whether political and business leaderships, would want to take the attendant risks ahead of the upcoming elections is another question for which there are no ready answers, either.

*The writer is a Senior Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter

The FBI is officially investigating Wednesday’s massacre by a married couple at a California social services office as an act of terrorism.

The assistant chief of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, David Bowdich, said Friday a number of pieces of evidence have turned up to make it a terrorist act, including signs the massacre was extensively planned.

Bowdich would not talk about the specific evidence, but he did say it includes crushed cell phones found in a garbage can near the site of the killings. He said there were “telephonic connections” between the suspects and others, and that the phones could reveal “potential golden nuggets.”

Bowdich would not confirm media reports that the wife involved in the massacre, Pakistani Tashfeen Malik, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a Facebook message apparently posted when the shooting started.

FBI Director James Comey said there is no indication the couple was part of a terrorist cell or network. He also said much of the evidence in the case “does not add up.”

Social media pledges

Pledges of loyalty to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Badhdadi have been reportedly found in social media posts by others who carried out mass killings. Some Islamic State supporters posted messages on Arabic social media hailing the massacre and congratulating the killers. Some of them promise more attacks in the the United States.

Two attorneys representing the Farook family criticized the media for what they say is a rush to judgement that this was a terrorist attack simply because the suspects were Muslim.

Lawyers David Chesley and Mohammad Abuershaid said they and their clients met with the FBI for four hours and say the family is totally shocked because the couple never showed extremist or aggressive behavior and never mentioned Islamic State.

Chesley said the FBI has no “clear smoking gun” evidence pointing to terrorism and that agents appeared to be “frustrated” that all they could find were Facebook accounts set up under different names.

The FBI’s Bowdich said it is unknown at this time if anyone else in the United States or overseas was involved. He also said it is possible that a second attack may have in the planning stages but made it clear to the public and reporters hungry for information that this will be a very long and complex investigation.

Friday, news crews were given a tour of the couple’s apartment by the building’s landlord. Reporters peered into closets and rifled through documents.

Malik and her husband, Farook, killed 14 people and wounded 21 Wednesday in a conference venue being used by the local government agency Farook worked for in San Bernardino, about an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles.

Witnesses say Farook was at the party, left, and returned with his wife. Both were heavily armed with rifles and handguns and dressed in military-style clothing. They left behind a pipe bomb that failed to explode before fleeing in a black SUV.

Police spotted the car in a nearby residential neighborhood and the couple was killed in a shootout with officers that left the car full of bullet holes and the windows shattered. Two officers were wounded, but not seriously.

Police later discovered 12 pipe bombs, bomb-making materials, and thousands of rounds of ammunition in the couple’s apartment.

Friends baffled

Friends, family, and co-workers say they have no clues what sparked the couple to carry out their massacre. Neither had a criminal record and were not on any government watch list.

The Chicago-born Farook was a local government health inspector in San Bernardino. Friends say he was religious and dedicated to Islam, but cordial, liberal-minded, and well-liked.

He met the Pakistani-born Malik through an online dating site and the two physically met in Saudi Arabia and then married. She came to the United States on a fiancee visa. The couple were parents of a six month-old. Some of Farook’s friends say he returned from Saudi Arabia a changed person.

The massacre stunned the U.S. Muslim community, whose leaders say they are as heartbroken and as horrified as everyone else.

“There’s a lot of anxiety among American Muslims because we have seen it in the past,” said Nihad Awad, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “We’ve seen what jumping to conclusions means and how it impacted our lives.”

Wednesday’s mass shooting was the worst in the U.S. since a mentally ill man gunned down 26 children and teachers in a Connecticut elementary school in 2012. It also was the 353th time this year that four people or more were killed or injured in a single mass shooting incident, and has added more fuel to the debate over gun control.

The weapons used in San Bernardino were bought legally. President Barack Obama said it is just too easy” for people to buy guns in the United States. He said what happened Wednesday should spur lawmakers in Washington “to take basic steps to make it harder, not impossible, to get weapons.”

Many Republicans in Congress resist tighter gun laws and point out that the right to own firearms is protected by the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Also Friday, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said the day before the shooting, a man questioned a movie theater security guard about showtimes, while another person he described as a “Middle Eastern looking” man took pictures of the theater from a car. The suspicious guard called police. Burguan says there is no evidence so far connecting the theater incident with the shootings.

The US Labor Department reported that the economy added 211,000 jobs in November. With modest upward revisions to the gains reported for the prior two months, the average growth over the last three months has been a strong 218,000. The unemployment rate remained at 5.0 percent. There was also no change in the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP), which remains far below its pre-recession level.

Construction accounted for 46,000 of the new jobs, likely helped by unusually warm weather in the Northeast and Midwest. Restaurants added 31,500 jobs in November, almost exactly in line with its average for the last year. Retail added 30,700, a bit more than its 24,000 average over the last year. Professional and technical services added 28,400. Job growth in the health care sector was relatively weak at 23,800, down from an average of 39,000 over the last year.

Temporary employment fell by 12,300, partly reversing an increase of 28,100 reported for October. Employment growth in the sector has been weak over the last year, averaging just over 6,000 a month. This clearly has not been a good indicator of future employment growth over this period. Manufacturing employment edged down by 1,000 in November, it is now down by 27,000 from the employment hit in July. Mining has seen by far the sharpest job loss in recent months due to the plunge in oil prices. Employment fell by 11,300 in November and is down by 123,000 (14.3 percent) from its peak last December.

There has been a modest uptick in wage growth in recent months, with the average hourly wage rising at a 2.8 percent annual rate in the last three months compared to the prior three. This compares to a 2.3 percent rate over the last year. On the other hand, average weekly hours edged downward in November, leading to a 0.1 percentage point decline in the index of aggregate hours.

Apart from the relatively low unemployment rate, most of the data in the household survey is consistent with a weak labor market. The number of involuntary part-time workers jumped by 319,000 in November, after large declines in the prior two months. There was no change in the average duration of unemployment spells, with the median duration edging downward slightly to 10.8 weeks. The percentage of unemployment due to voluntary job leavers edged up slightly to 10.0 percent. This is still a number consistent with a recession labor market, as are the duration measures and the share of involuntary part-time workers.

Older workers continue to account for a disproportionate show of employment growth. Workers over age 55 accounted for 89,000 of the 244,000 jobs added in November. Over the last year older workers have accounted for 51.6 percent of employment growth. Interestingly, college educated workers have not been faring especially well in the recovery. Their employment rate edged down by 0.1 percentage points in November and is 0.2 percentage points below its year-ago level. The November employment rate for college grads is 5.1 percentage points below its pre-recession peak.

One piece of good news in the household survey was a reported drop in the black teen unemployment rate to 23.7 percent. This is the first time it has been below 24.0 percent since 2005. Unfortunately, this is likely an anomaly. The monthly figure is highly erratic and employment rates for black teens remain far below their pre-recession level.

“You can pay me now or pay me later” is an American expression that means that you can either deal with a particular problem immediately at minimal expense or wait until the problem gets really bad and the costs go through the roof. This is the message that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been trying to get across to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for more than a week. In fact, the whole smear campaign connecting Erdogan to the ISIS oil smuggling racket was designed to shame Erdogan into “doing the right thing” and apologizing for the downing of its Su-24 warplane. What Putin wants, is quite simple. He wants Erdogan to admit that what he did was wrong and take the necessary steps to make amends.

What Putin is doing is no different than what any parent would do if their son was throwing sand in the face of some other child on the playground He would take little Johnny by the arm, tell him to stop what he was doing, and make him apologize to the person he hurt. This basic learning experience provides the moral foundation for broader human interaction. If people are allowed to simply run roughshod over others– even to the point where they are willing to kill them to achieve their political objectives– then none of us are ever going to be safe. So Erdogan needs to face the music, apologize, and take his medicine like a man.

But, of course, an apology doesn’t change the fact that a man is dead. And not only a man, but a Russian soldier. That means something. That puts the onus on Putin to seek justice for a hero who died while fighting for his country. Americans don’t understand this because America is always at war. In fact, American history is one long 240-year carnage-generating bloodbath from Bunker Hill to Baghdad, from Wounded Knee to Haditha. As a result, America has to conceal its casualties from public view to the extent that even photographing the flag-draped coffins delivered to Dover Airbase has been banned. That’s how Sparta prevents the people from seeing the enormous costs of its so called interventions.

Russia is different. Russians don’t like war, and war is not a permanent feature in Russian life. So when a pilot is killed in action, the entire country grieves which is exactly what happened when the remains of Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Peshkov were returned from Syria to Moscow. It was a day of national mourning.

Now the ball is in Putin’s court. Now it is incumbent on him, as a responsible and moral leader, to seek justice for Peshkov, which means that, first of all, he must persuade Erdogan must acknowledge his mistake and apologize. Secondly, there has to be some tangible effort to make amends. It’s Putin’s responsibility to demand accountability, not revenge. And that’s what he’s doing. Putin has already stated in blunt terms that he is NOT going to let this thing slide. There will be payback, that much is certain.

In order to understand how strongly Putin feels about the matter and, also, how strongly he feels about Russia’s mission in Syria, here’s an excerpt from the State of the State speech he gave just this week:

“Russia has demonstrated immense responsibility and leadership in the fight against terrorism. Russian people have supported these resolute actions. The firm stance taken by our people stems from a thorough understanding of the absolute danger of terrorism, from patriotism, high moral qualities and their firm belief that we must defend our national interests, history, traditions and values.

The international community should have learned from the past lessons. The historical parallels in this case are undeniable. Unwillingness to join forces against Nazism in the 20th century cost us millions of lives in the bloodiest world war in human history.

Today we have again come face to face with a destructive and barbarous ideology, and we must not allow these modern-day dark forces to attain their goals.” (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Annual Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, St George Hall, Moscow)

Does that sound like a man who is waffling about his commitment in Syria? Does that sound like a man who has any reservations at all about the moral righteousness of his cause?

Again, Russia is not America. The war on terror is not a scam to enhance presidential powers, to curtail civil liberties, to perpetuate America’s wars around the planet, and to reduce the public to quivering, malleable, propagandized imbeciles wailing for the protection of the all-powerful state. Russia’s approach to terrorism is entirely different. It’s constructive and, more important, it’s rational. Putin doesn’t divide terrorists into good terrorists and bad terrorists, moderate terrorist’s and radical terrorists. If they’re terrorists, they’re terrorists regardless of their pedigree and regardless of whether they serve the geopolitical objectives the state or not. They’re enemy and they’re going to be killed. End of story. Here’s how Putin summed it up:

“The terrorists must not be given refuge anywhere. There must be no double standards. No contacts with terrorist organizations. No attempts to use them for self-seeking goals. No criminal business with terrorists.

We know who are stuffing pockets in Turkey and letting terrorists prosper from the sale of oil they stole in Syria. The terrorists are using these receipts to recruit mercenaries, buy weapons and plan inhuman terrorist attacks against Russian citizens and against people in France, Lebanon, Mali and other states. We remember that the militants who operated in the North Caucasus in the 1990s and 2000s found refuge and received moral and material assistance in Turkey. We still find them there.” (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Annual Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, St George Hall, Moscow)

So Putin has known all along that Erdogan’s group of fanatical Islamic zealots were overseeing a vast criminal enterprise, but he kept his mouth shut.

Why?

Well, because Putin is discreet. He doesn’t believe that publicly humiliating other world leaders is a positive way to conduct business. Keep in mind, that even though the Russian military has produced tons of evidence connecting Turkey to the illicit sale of stolen oil produced by ISIS, they haven’t once mentioned that Israel has been on the receiving end of many of these transactions. In other words, Putin doesn’t blow the whistle on people unless they force him to do so. Erdogan forced him to do so. Erdogan crossed the line. Erdogan “stabbed him in the back.” Just listen:

“The Turkish people are kind, hardworking and talented. We have many good and reliable friends in Turkey. Allow me to emphasize that they should know that we do not equate them with the certain part of the current ruling establishment that is directly responsible for the deaths of our servicemen in Syria.

We will never forget their collusion with terrorists. We have always deemed betrayal the worst and most shameful thing to do, and that will never change. I would like them to remember this – those in Turkey who shot our pilots in the back, those hypocrites who tried to justify their actions and cover up for terrorists.” (“Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Annual Presidential Address”)

Erdogan is going to pay for what he did, but that doesn’t mean that Putin is going to be irrational about it. The man is not a loose cannon and, besides, this isn’t about revenge, it’s about justice for Peshkov. Here’s Putin again:

“Our actions will always be guided primarily by responsibility – to ourselves, to our country, to our people. We are not going to rattle the sabre. But, if someone thinks they can commit a heinous war crime, kill our people and get away with it, suffering nothing but a ban on tomato imports, or a few restrictions in construction or other industries, they’re delusional. We’ll remind them of what they did, more than once. They’ll regret it. We know what to do.” (“Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Annual Presidential Address”)

Isn’t this how leaders are supposed to behave? Shouldn’t we expect that our leaders place the security of their people and military personnel above everything else? Shouldn’t that be their highest priority?

Of course, it should be. It goes without saying. What Putin is saying is that no one is going to kill a Russian citizen without being held accountable. Period. You have to admire that.

Now compare Putin’s reaction to the killing of Peshkov to 9-11 where the US government prevented an official investigation for more than a year and then packed the investigative committee with cronies, sycophants and ideologues who could be trusted to spin a sanitized version of events that only a moron would believe. The whole manner in which the investigation was conducted tells us everything we need to know about the contempt the USG has for American people, their safety and security don’t make a damn bit of difference to the people in Washington. It’s a big joke.

Things are different in Russia, at least under Putin they are. And this explains why Putin’s public approval ratings are in the stratosphere, well above 80 percent even though the economy is still in the dumps.

But how can that be when all the brainiacs in the western media said his numbers would tank for standing up to the US in Ukraine?

It’s because the Russian people know he’s a straightshooter who puts the interests of his people above his own. It’s also because they understand that they are in a generation-long struggle with the US to maintain their sovereign independence and to create a multipolar world where one center of power does not dictate to others what they can and can’t do. They seem to grasp that the war on terror is really a war for global domination. They “get it”. Here’s Putin again:

“Terrorism is a growing threat today. The Afghanistan problem has not been resolved. The situation there is alarming and gives us no optimism, while some of the yet recently stable and rather well-doing countries in the Middle East and North Africa – Iraq, Libya and Syria – have now plunged into chaos and anarchy that pose a threat to the whole world.

We all know why that happened. We know who decided to oust the unwanted regimes and brutally impose their own rules. Where has this led them? They stirred up trouble, destroyed the country’s statehood, set people against each other, and then “washed their hands”, as we say in Russia, thus opening the way to radical activists, extremists and terrorists.” (“Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Annual Presidential Address”)

You see, this isn’t just about Turkey or Erdogan or even the downing of the Su-24. This is a full-blown war between Russia and the Terrorist States of America, the petri dish from whence this lethal virus has emerged and spread from North Africa, across the Middle East and deep into Central Asia. Putin, at great risk to himself and his country, has reluctantly taken on the task of fighting this noxious menace before it infects the entire world, and now others are following his lead.

Putin again: “The militants in Syria pose a particularly high threat for Russia. Many of them are citizens of Russia and the CIS countries. They get money and weapons and build up their strength. If they get sufficiently strong to win there, they will return to their home countries to sow fear and hatred, to blow up, kill and torture people. We must fight and eliminate them there, away from home.”

This isn’t a war Putin wants to fight. He was perfectly content selling gas and oil to the Europeans; raking in tons of money, rebuilding his country, beefing up Russian GDP, and watching while standards of living steadily improved. But what choice did he have? Washington decided that Putin’s dream of a free trade zone from Lisbon to Vladivostok –with oil and gas denominated in euros instead of the almighty dollar– was a threat to US dominance so they decided to put an end to it. They toppled the Moscow-friendly government in Ukraine and replaced it with a US-backed stooge, tried to torpedo Russia’s gas trade with the EU, and then spread the war to Syria by recruiting, arming, training, and funding fanatical mercenaries whose assignment was to topple Bashar al Assad and leave the state in Dresden-type ruination. Isn’t that Washington’s basic blueprint for success, destroy everything that can’t be used to increase its own stranglehold on power?

This is what makes Erdogan’s betrayal so bitter; it’s because Erdogan knows what Putin is doing in Syria. He’s not trying to recreate the Russian Empire. That’s baloney. He’s involved in an existential struggle for Russia’s survival. Erdogan knows that but, even so, he has thus aligned himself with Washington and entrusted his country’s future to an organization that is nothing more than a Mafia protection racket, NATO. Is it any wonder why Putin is pissed?

Here’s what needs to happen now: Erdogan needs to see that his dependence on the US and NATO is going to come at a very high cost for himself and his country, after all, Washington knows that they have Erdogan over a barrel and they will certainly exploit that in every way possible. For one thing, Erdogan will be expected to take orders from Washington just like all the other US puppets. He’s not going to like that.

Second, Turkey is not going to be the EU’s gas hub now that Putin has put the kibosh on Turkstream. The hostility between Turkey and Russia will likely impact Iran’s decision to use Turkey as a transit site for Iranian gas too. In other words, by refusing to apologize, Erdogan has compromised not only its country’s independence, but damaged its long-term economic prospects that are part-and-parcel of its advantageous strategic location which puts Turkey at the epicenter of the world, the de facto landbridge between Europe and Asia. Erdogan has sacrificed all that to preserve his felonious ISIS oil smuggling operation and to continue to support his loser-terrorist buddies that are decimating Syria.

All this could be reversed with a simple apology and by meeting Putin’s reasonable demands for making amends.

And what would Putin’s demands be?

Most likely, Putin would insist that Erdogan stop all support for anti-regime forces now operating in Syria. That’s number one.

Number two: Erdogan would be asked to actively and sincerely encourage leaders of the anti-regime militias to accept the terms of an immediate ceasefire and to participate in negotiations for a political settlement to the four and a half year-long war.

Putin has never lost sight of his primary goals which are to prevent regime change, to maintain the sovereign integrity of the state, and to kill or capture all terrorists operating in Syria. If Erdogan agreed to these terms, Putin will have achieved all of his objectives; displaced Syrians will be able to return home, life will gradually return to normal, and Peshkov will have gotten the justice he deserves.

As the crazy protracted carnival of the presidential election rolls forward with ever more outrageous rhetoric, spin, downright lies, and “gotcha” moments, it bears remembering what’s on television usually has little to do with reality. For example, despite the blanket television coverage of the killing 129 Parisians by Islamist terrorists, the average American’s chances of ever getting killed by an international terrorist is lower than getting struck by lightning. In fact, Americans statistically have a greater chance of getting killed by disgruntled domestic reactionaries (for example, the shooter at Planned Parenthood) than they do by radical Islamists.

The U.S. political campaign is likewise filled with made-for-TV illusions. Journalists, believing optimistically that political campaigns, and their distorted coverage of them, do matter, focus excessively on the horse race of who’s coming on and who’s fading rather than on the issues or the underlying forces driving an election. Experts on campaigns in universities focus on these underlying forces.

It is certainly not out of the realm of possibility that the Republicans could win the presidency in 2016, although the last odds in Las Vegas that I saw on the election (a surprisingly good predictor of past elections) had the Democratic candidate 57-43 edge to win.

That is because changing demographics have transferred the intrinsic Electoral College advantage from the Republicans to the Democrats. Also, the Democrats have won the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections. This advantage will only increase in the future, as white males continue to shrink as a portion of the population. Also, Donald Trump seems to be hastening the Republican Party’s demise by highlighting the immigration issue, which the party’s establishment wanted to bury to avoid alienating the fastest growing minority in the country.

With birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, if Republicans wanted to do something to stifle illegal immigration—or immigration period—they should have done so a couple of generations back. Hispanics have become a growing political force in the voting booth. In other words, regardless of the merits of the immigration issue, politically Republicans seemed to be fighting a battle that has already been lost—and shooting themselves in the head while doing so.

In Congress and the states, a trend opposite that of presidential elections has occurred; the Republicans control both house of Congress and more and more state governments. However, unfortunately for Republicans and the intentions of the nation’s founders, over time, power in the United States has shifted away from the states to the federal government and, within the federal government, from the Congress to the president. Thus, nowadays, we essentially elect an imperial president but then term limit him or her to eight years.

A president’s term can be effectively extended if he or she can get his chosen successor elected (Ronald Reagan was the last to do so in 1988; Bill Clinton almost pulled it off in 2000, except the real state-by-state electoral college election reminded Americans that we don’t have a national presidential election). This reality conforms to the election expert’s conclusion that the presidential election is not usually between two candidates but is instead a referendum on the performance of the administration in currently in power. So voters really will be voting on Obama’s record, not the Democratic and Republican candidates running in 2016.

What is that record? Both progressives and conservatives will be in denial when the policy record is examined, and it is found that the progressive Obama’s record on major policy issues is similar to another recent president—the allegedly conservative George W. Bush. Obama was supposed to end Bush’s quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq. U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan, with the potential of re-escalation when the Taliban begins to again overrun the country (as it already has begun to do). U.S. re-escalation has already begun to occur in Iraq—after the Bush-created ISIS began to overrun that country and neighboring Syria. The president has begun attacking Syria and is under Republican pressure to escalate there as well. Obama, not learning anything from Bush’s idiotic toppling of Saddam Hussein, overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in Libya—again predictably bringing chaos, mayhem, and terrorist sanctuaries—and is unbelievably is still campaigning for the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Obama not only continued Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional drone wars in several countries outside of Afghanistan, but escalated them, creating yet more terrorist enemies for the U.S. to fight. Also, despite his determination to be a civil liberties president in the wake of Bush’s expansion of the illegal surveillance state, torture, and abuse of constitutional rights, Obama continued many of the same policies, except for ending torture.

In budgetary matters, Bush spent more domestically than any president since Lyndon Johnson, and Obama continued the spending binge with his giant pork-barrel stimulus program to attempt to trick the country out of its Bush-induced Great Recession. During that recession, Bush bailed out “too-big-to fail” banks, socialized the AIG insurance giant, and finished socializing the failing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage lenders. Obama followed Bush’s bailing out of sick U.S. auto makers with a round of his own socialism—with government take overs of Chrysler and General Motors. Combined with his massive domestic and war spending increases, Bush initiated huge tax cuts during a war, thus exploding federal budget deficits to record levels; Obama continued most of Bush’s tax cuts but has gradually reduced the budget deficit.

Although during post-World War II presidencies, the American economy has performed much better during the Democratic administrations, perhaps the reason is counterintuitive. Contrary to politicians’ rhetoric and popular perception, Democratic presidents have generally had more conservative spending policies that actually slowed government spending growth as a percentage of GDP more than did Republicans and have had lower budget deficits than their Republican counterparts. Obama’s lame economic recovery might have been better had he followed the more fiscally conservative policies of his Democratic predecessors.

To cover a greater percentage of the American population with health care insurance, long a gleam in the eye of Democrats, Obama did so inefficiently by creating the Obamacare monstrosity that created a government guaranteed market for insurance companies’ products by requiring near-poor people to buy such health insurance but not subsidizing the full cost of the coverage. Even if adding people to the health insurance rolls was a government responsibility, more efficient and less costly ways of doing it were available. But Bush didn’t do much better in health care, creating the first new entitlement program since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society by adding a costly prescription drug coverage benefit to a Medicare system that was already in deep financial trouble—all this to get political points with seniors, the wealthiest age group in the American population.

Bush continued the federalization of education, traditionally the responsibility of state and local governments, with his “No Child Left Behind” policy that rewarded schools for doing well on federally standardized tests. Obama continued this ill-advised federalization process.

So despite the political theater of overheated rhetoric by both political parties on the campaign trail and in Washington, when governing, both parties come up with similar policies—mostly detrimental to the country. Unsurprisingly, in a two-party system, the parties behave as do two giant companies when they are the only competitors in an industry (called a duopoly)—they pretend to compete but collude under the table. This phenomenon happens behind-the-scenes frequently in Washington and will continue no matter who wins the presidency in 2016—with voters becoming justifiably angrier and angrier. However, without systematic reforms that would require amendments to the Constitution, the voters will get more of the same.

This article was published at The Huffington Post and reprinted with permission.

Recent actions by the United Kingdom and Germany are reflective of coalition nations’ shared commitment to defeat and destroy the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorist group, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in a statement.

Carter said in a statement the “vote by the United Kingdom to participate in strikes on ISIL targets in Syria is further evidence of the strength of our coalition, and the enduring importance of the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.”  He also commended Germany for expanding its contributions to the counter-ISIL effort, including a commitment of up to 1,200 troops as well as additional support for the air campaign.

The secretary called the United Kingdom “a strong member of the counter-ISIL coalition since it began in September 2014” and noted the country’s contributions to air operations, including airstrikes against ISIL targets in Iraq and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions in both Iraq and Syria.

“They have also supported the coalition partners on the ground through the advise and assist mission in Iraq and the Syria train and equip program,” Carter said in the statement. He specifically praised British Prime Minister David Cameron and Secretary of State for Defense Michael Fallon for the “leadership they have shown in the fight against ISIL, as well as the commitment they have shown to our common defense by deciding that the United Kingdom will continue to meet the pledge that all NATO allies made in Wales to invest at least two percent of GDP in defense.”

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) agreed at its 168th meeting to increase the cap on oil production to 31.5 million barrels a day.

The announcement caused oil prices to slide further on world markets.

Reuters reported on Friday December 4 that the OPEC announcement drove down the price of Brent Crude nearly two dollars a barrel to about $43.

At the last OPEC meeting, the cap was set at 30 million barrels a day, and analysts had speculated that the current meeting would bring no change or even a decrease.

With the lifting of international sanctions, Iran has been looking to increase its oil exports so it welcomes the increase in the OPEC cap.

The oil-producing countries that comprise OPEC are Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Algeria, the United Arabic Emirates, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Ecuador, Angola and Venezuela.

By Paulo Gorjão*

When the Turkish Air Force shot down a Russian warplane in Syrian territory, after violating its airspace, on November 24, Turkey’s President could not have imagined the repercussions that would follow this military incident. The Russian President’s response was to sign a decree imposing a package of economic sanctions on Turkey. Subsequently, on the margins of the Paris Climate Summit, Vladimir Putin adopted an even more intransigent stance and snubbed any meeting with Recep Tayyip Erdogan aimed at easing diplomatic tensions. Considering the course of events over the last few days, it seems clear that Putin wants to teach Erdogan an unforgettable lesson.

A week after the incident, Putin reasserted he has “every reason to think that the decision to shoot down our plane was dictated by the desire to protect the oil supply lines to Turkish territory, right to the ports where it is loaded onto tankers”. The Russian President added that he has “received additional information which unfortunately confirms that this oil, produced in areas controlled by the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations, is transported on an industrial scale to Turkey”. In response, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “if you allege something you should prove it”.1

Meanwhile, Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov followed suit and said that Moscow has evidence showing that Erdogan and his family are involved in illegal oil trade with the Islamic State and personally benefit from it.2 The Turkish President vehemently denied those allegations and said that the opposite was true.

As such, bilateral relations between Russia and Turkey continue to deteriorate, and, at least for now, the prospects for improvement in the future are not bright. Naturally, regardless of whether Erdogan is involved or not in illegal oil trade with the Islamic State, that, however, is not a negligible and unimportant detail. Irrespective of his involvement, it is an open secret that the bulk of Islamic State’s oil extracted in Iraq and Syria is exported through Turkey. In other words, it is an incontrovertible fact that Turkey is not doing everything in its power — quite the contrary — to disrupt oil transportation routes from ISIS-controlled Syrian and Iraqi oilfields.

It is true that, with the exception of the anonymous population, there are no innocent angels in the Syrian conflict. Turkey and Russia have their own national interests and strategic agendas, as the European states, the United States and Middle Eastern countries also have. That being said, the build-up in political and military tensions between Ankara and Moscow is not necessarily bad news from the European point of view in particular, even though it carries considerable risks for the Atlantic Alliance.

At the very least, Turkey will have to relinquish its diplomatic ambiguity. Russia’s intense diplomatic pressure deprives Erdogan of strategic autonomy and will require, at least in theory, a certain degree of diplomatic clarification. Instead of a paramount and nearly exclusive concern with the Kurdish component of the conflict, one of the indirect consequences of political tensions with Moscow is exactly that it will force Ankara to have a greater commitment in the fight against the Islamic State, including its funding mechanisms, with a particular focus on its oil transportation networks.

By shooting down a Russia warplane, Turkey may have bitten more than it can chew. Although we know how the diplomatic crisis between Ankara and Moscow began, we are still far from knowing how and when it will end. Meanwhile, European states should get the most out of this window of opportunity and exert pressure on Erdogan so as to boost Turkey’s contribution, in a more efficient and substantive way, in the fight against the Islamic State. There are no free lunches.

About the author:
*Paulo Gorjão, researcher at Portuguese Institute of International Relations and Security (IPRIS).

Source:
This article was published by IPRIS as IPRIS Viewpoints 190 (PDF)

Notes:
1 Vince Chadwick, “Russia: Turkey shot down plane to protect ISIL oil trade” (Politico, 1 December 2015).
2 Maria Tsvetkova e Lidia Kelly, “Russia says it has proof Turkey involved in Islamic State oil trade” (Reuters, 2 December 2015).

Lately, it feels like every other week we hear about a tragic and random mass shooting in America. Sadly, this seems to have become such a common occurrence that the post-tragedy outpouring of sympathy has become rote, while our outrage seems to have dissipated into resignation. This should be frightening to everyone, irrespective of where they stand on the issue of guns rights. It is as if both sides have resigned themselves to the fact that these tragedies will continue to occur because lawmakers have neither the political will to take on the NRA, nor the backbone to stand on principle and find a common-sense solution to protect young lives.

The second amendment, written by James Madison in 1787 and ratified by the House of Representative in 1791, made imminent sense. At the time, standing armies had been used by the British and European monarchies for centuries as tools of oppression against the people. Apart from fighting wars, armed state militias were used to help protect people from bandits, American Indians and militias from other states (source: Wikipedia). However, that was more than 200 years ago and arguably today there is no threat to America or its fifty states from bandits, American Indians or the British. Iranian or North Korean long-range missiles and home grown terrorists are something to consider, but none of these threats can be countered by the right for individuals to bear arms. There is also now a formal US army and National Guard structure comprising of the old ‘State’ militia, after the Militia Act of 1903 organized the various state militias into the present National Guard system (source: Wikipedia). It is for this reason that the rest of the world does not understand America’s continued obsession with guns in the face of the growing rash of violence.

There is no quick and easy answer to this problem, but I do believe the time has come for all of us to act – it would be unconscionable not to do so. That said, I am optimistic that we can find a solution that will satisfy people on both sides of the amendment. However, before we can get to a practical and workable solution, both sides need to listen to each other and take into consideration the other’s legitimate concerns and constitutional right.

Let’s start with the pro-gun advocates – other than it being their constitutional right, and a hobby, many people also own guns for sport. I don’t think anyone will have an issue with people wanting to own guns for hunting (other than animal rights activists), provided hunters are properly trained to use their weapon, take care to avoid accidents, and do not trophy hunt endangered species. For the most part, this is true of all hunters, other than Dick Cheney. And, yes, accidents do happen, but that is not sufficient reason to revoke a gun license for those who like to and want to hunt.

The second area involves having a gun to protect oneself. This is the more complex part of the gun rights debate and the more contentious one. Here I want to point to an important difference between being a city dweller and a suburbanite. One can make a pretty persuasive argument that in large cities it is hard to justify the need for a person to have a gun at home, leave alone to carry a concealed weapon. For the most part we live in apartment buildings, where there are always other people around. In the event of a crime or burglary, help can be there within minutes.

There is also a difference in psychology that is worth considering. I find that people in big cities tend to be more aggressive, impatient and rude, compared to our brethren in smaller cities and towns everywhere in the world. I imagine that the constant dog-eat-dog competitiveness and daily rat race can cause us city-dwellers to lose our patience and tolerance over the years. So, given the access to police and help from strangers, who are more often than not at scream’s length, and with people generally more angry, aggressive, and pissed-off – why would we want to put a gun in their hands?

If someone in a city pulls a gun, during a crime, common sense tells me that the odds of getting out alive or unharmed would go down dramatically if the victim were to pull out a weapon of their own. So, I have a hard time justifying the need to own a gun in big cities like New York, Bombay or Shanghai.

Now let’s for a moment leave the madness, hustle-bustle and bright lights of big cities and travel to a home in a small town in America. We exit the highway and find ourselves on a smaller road. We suddenly start to see the scenery change. There are no more McDonald’s or concrete structures; instead we are surrounded by lush green fields and gently meandering hills. There are no buildings here, and often the only views on the horizon, where the fields end, are a thick brush of trees that form the beginnings of a forest. The homes are not clustered together. One can drive seconds and then minutes between each one. There are no hospitals, police or fire stations. Even the GPS screen, which normally shows surrounding areas by highlighting roads, bridges, rest stops, fuel stations and various different aspects of civilization, goes completely black, until there is just darkness all around. Suddenly, even the sparse and dispersed homes start to disappear and one is surrounded by green, brown and the sounds of nature. You can no longer tell where the homes are because each has a long winding driveway off the little country road and are completely hidden from view. In what seems like an age since one left the highway, we come to the type of navigational point we were told to look for – a large green mailbox. This destination is officially in the middle of nowhere, and this is life outside the big cities and city suburbs of America.

The reason for that long and detailed picture is a simple but important one. If you live in a place so isolated, cut-off, and miles away from the nearest hospital – a place where in a crisis, police and emergency response times can be upwards of thirty minutes, and the sound of your loudest gut-wrenching screams are drowned out by the trees barely after exiting your lungs – would you not want a weapon to protect your wife, sister, daughter, son or yourself in the event of a threat? I know I would. I would go even further and argue that in such surroundings, knowing that people own and carry guns actually serves as a deterrent to would-be robbers and criminals.

Now that we have viewed both sides of the argument, I think it would be fair to say that we can see why it is larger numbers of non-city folk who tend to support the 2nd amendment while big city types tend to oppose it. Rather than changing the 2nd amendment or attempting to create a complex set of laws that try to factor in where you live, I believe we can agree to something simpler that will satisfy both advocates and opponents.

I often hear gun rights advocates refute the notion that it is harder to get a driving license than buy a gun, saying that the former is a privilege while the latter is a right. Well, then I would add that while the latter may be a right, protected by the US constitution, it is also a great personal responsibility. If we can agree on this, then let’s make sure that only responsible people are able to buy and carry guns; and that we are also able to create a system that holds them responsible. I am not suggesting we turn this into a driving test, but that we take virtually the same model and create a system for gun purchase and ownership akin to the one we have for the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

My suggestion is to create a Gun Registration Office (GRO), as extension to the DMV in each state. Here is a starting outline of the GRO’s main functions, beginning with strict background checks that a majority of Americans already agree on:

Anyone buying a gun, no matter where they purchase it, would be required to:

a. Pass a criminal background check
b. Not have any history of mental illness (national database will need to be created and fines imposed for not keeping it updated)
c. Complete a gun safety training course at a GRO accredited local range
d. Register weapons and acquire a gun license for each weapon

The GRO would be the sole issuer of gun licenses and would be funded by gun license fees.

a. License costs would be based on gun type, with additional costs for conceal permits and for certain types of assault or semi-automatic weapons; similar to car insurance)
b. Licenses would need to be renewed annually
c. Owners would need to pass gun safety training, once every three years
d. Only law enforcement will be able to access the GRO database, with a court order
e. Owners would get points and fines for minor offenses (similar to traffic violations)
f. When a licensee dies their family will have 90 days to transfer the license to another family member, surrender or legally sell their guns through a GRO accredited dealer
g. Owners could lose their license for major lapses like:

Failing to report a lost or stolen firearm, accidentally discharging their weapon publicly (whether injury occurs or not).
Failing to keep weapon out of reach of a child, being convicted of a serious crime e.g. assault with a deadly weapon or domestic abuse

Such a system will shut down the ability to legally sell guns without background checks (at gun shows, etc.) and stop people with mental illnesses from purchasing weapons. Of course, this will not to stop every madman from getting a gun and killing if he is intent on it; nothing will prevent that. However, such a system will go a long way in preventing irresponsible gun owners from owning guns; i.e. people who allow their small kids access to their loaded guns (Source: Washington Post), brandish their weapons in a bar fight, fail to report a stolen or lost firearm, or have a history of domestic violence, etc.

I hope both sides can agree that it is the best way to add transparency and accountability, without limiting the right of individuals. It also serves to protect responsible gun hobbyists and owners, and does so in a way that will allay the fears of gun-right opponents. Such a system would not require banning any type of firearm.

All the gun owners I know are responsible, law abiding citizens, so should have no objection to making this constitutional right more secure and transparent, while being held accountable for abusing it.

When it comes to reports about prisoners released from Guantánamo, there has, since President Obama took office, been an aggressive black propaganda policy — firstly from within the Pentagon and latterly from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — painting a false picture of the alleged rate of “recidivism” amongst former prisoners, a trend that has also been echoed in the mainstream media, which has repeatedly published whatever nonsense it has been told without questioning it, or asking for anything resembling proof from those government departments that are responsible. For some background, see my articles here, here, here and here – and my appearance on Democracy Now! in January 2010.

The three outstanding problems with the supposed recidivism rate — beyond the lamentable truth that no information backing up the claims has been made publicly available since 2009, and that the media should therefore have been very wary of it — are, firstly, that lazy or cynical media outlets regular add up the numbers of former prisoners described as “confirmed” and “suspected” recidivists to reach an alarming grand total, which, in recent years, is over 25% of those released, when the numbers of those “suspected” of recidivism are based on unverified, single source reporting, and may very well be unreliable. Back in March 2012, for example, as I explained in my article, “Guantánamo and Recidivism: The Media’s Ongoing Failure to Question Official Statistics,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said, “Someone on the ‘suspected’ list could very possibly not be engaged in activities that are counter to our national security interests.” (emphasis added).

The second huge problem with the reports is that even the “confirmed” rate is, very evidently, exaggerated, as it is, to be blunt, inconceivable that as many former prisoners as alleged can have been engaged in military or terrorist activities against the US. In the latest DNI report, for example, made available in September 2015, it is claimed that 117 former prisoners (17.9% of those released) are “Confirmed of Reengaging,” but no indication is given of how that can be possible. Claims can certainly be made for a few dozen “recidivists” — primarily in Afghanistan, and amongst those few former Gulf prisoners who apparently set up an Al-Qaeda offshoot in Yemen — but the figure of 117 is simply implausible.

A third important reason for disputing the claims, as noted by the Constitution Project, is that the overwhelming majority of those allegedly “Confirmed of Reengaging” — 111 of the 117 — were released under President Bush, and only six men released by President Obama — just 4.9% of those released on his watch — are regarded as being recidivists; in other words, the current threat is just 4.9%, and as a result, as the Constitution Project explained, “95.1% of detainees transferred during the Obama presidency have not reengaged.”

In the New York Times at the weekend, another more positive take on the reporting about former prisoners took place with the publication of an article about Haji Ghalib (aka Hajji Ghalib), an Afghan former prisoner, who, since his release in 2007, has become a formidable opponent not just of the Taliban, but also of efforts by Isis fighters to make inroads into Afghanistan.

Ghalib, it should be noted, is one of several dozen Afghan prisoners I identified in my research for my book The Guantánamo Files as having worked with US forces, but who ended up at Guantánamo because of rivalries with other Afghans, who took advantage of the Americans’ generally woeful intelligence, and their inability or unwillingness to cross-reference information about prisoners, to get their rivals banished to the US prison in Cuba. See the front-page story I wrote for the New York Times with Carlotta Gall, in February 2008, about Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, a heroic opponent of the Taliban, whose appeals for verification of his story were repeatedly ignored. Hekmati died of cancer at Guantánamo in December 2007, but the Bush administration never acknowledged its mistake.

In The Guantánamo Files, I wrote about Haji Ghalib as follows:

40-year old Haji Ghalib, the chief of police for a district in Jalalabad, and one of his officers, 32-year Kako Kandahari, were captured together, after US and Afghan forces searched their compound and identified weapons and explosives that they thought were going to be used against them. Both men pointed out, however, that they fought with the Americans in Tora Bora. “I captured a lot of al-Qaeda and Arabs that were turned over to the Americans,” Ghalib said, “and I see those people here that I helped capture in Afghanistan.” He explained that he thought he may have been betrayed by one of the commanders in Tora Bora, because he “let about 40 [al-Qaeda] escape so I got on the phone and cussed at him and that is why I am here.”

In 2008, Ghalib also told Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers (as later reported here) that he was detained “in a basement at an airstrip in Jalalabad during March 2003” by Special Forces troops, and added, “At night they would strap me down on a cot, and put a bucket of water on the floor, in front of my head. And then they would tip the cot forward and dunk my head in the bucket … They would leave my head underwater and then jerk it out by my hair. I sometimes lost consciousness.”

In 2012, the BBC World Service found him unemployed, “living in a cold damp apartment in Kabul,” but since then he has been at the forefront of resistance to the Taliban — although at great personal cost. 19 of his relatives, including both of his wives, his daughters, a sister and a grandchild, have been killed by the Taliban — almost all as a result of a bomb planted in a coffin — and Haji Ghalib’s descriptions of his life reveal how much he has suffered. “I don’t have good memories of life, to be honest,” he says, adding, “Everything has been fighting and killing.”

Ironically, those who falsely imprisoned him for five years now occasionally help him out. As the Times article notes, “the American military sometimes supports his men with airstrikes — although Mr. Ghalib complains that there are too few bombers and drones for his taste.”

Another sad note in the article concerns an Afghan poet and gemstone dealer named Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, with whom Haji Ghalib was friends in Guantánamo, but who “now leads the Islamic State fighters whom Mr. Ghalib’s forces are trying to drive out of eastern Afghanistan.” As the Times put it, “Mr. Dost, a dour but quick-witted man who was known for the poetry he etched into the side of coffee cups for lack of better writing materials, was adamant that there was only one course of action after their release: Go to Pakistan and start waging jihad. He spoke of uniting the whole Muslim world.”

What I find sad about this is that, although Muslim Dost undoubtedly features in the DNI list of recidivists, it seems obvious that his profoundly negative experiences in Guantánamo must have played some part in radicalizing him. See this article from 2006, the year after his release, when he was calling on the US to return his poems, and preparing to publish a book about his experiences. Also see my profile of him here, which mentions his clashes with, and imprisonment by the Pakistani authorities following his release, and which also makes clear that it may be factors that have nothing to do with the US that have played the most significant role in turning him into an Isis soldier.

I hope you have time to read the article about Haji Ghalib, and to reflect on his bravery — and on how Guantánamo ruined his life, and led, in part, to the loss of his family, as everyone released from Guantánamo becomes a target for those opposed to the US, and often face retaliation if they don’t cooperate.

Once in Guantánamo, Afghan Now Leads War Against Taliban and ISIS
By Joseph Goldstein, New York Times, November 27, 2015

Hajji Ghalib did just what the American military feared he would after his release from the Guantánamo Bay prison camp: He returned to the Afghan battlefield.

But rather than worrying about Mr. Ghalib, the Americans might have considered encouraging him. Lean and weather-beaten, he is now leading the fight against the Taliban and the Islamic State across a stretch of eastern Afghanistan.

His effectiveness has led to appointments as the Afghan government’s senior representative in some of the country’s most war-ravaged districts. Afghan and American officials alike describe him as a fiercely effective fighter against the insurgency, and the American military sometimes supports his men with airstrikes — although Mr. Ghalib complains that there are too few bombers and drones for his taste.

Accounts of former Guantánamo detainees who went on to fight alongside the Taliban or Islamic State have become familiar. So are those of innocents swept up in the American dragnet and dumped in the prison camp without recourse or appeal. But this is a new one: the story of a man wrongly branded an enemy combatant and imprisoned in Guantánamo for four years, only to emerge as a steadfast American ally on the battlefield.

At 54, Mr. Ghalib’s face is creased, and his eyes are both exhausted and watchful, as though all they really expect to see is the next bad turn that will befall his life. There have been many, including the death of both wives, his daughters, a sister and a grandchild at the hands of the Taliban.

“I don’t have good memories of life, to be honest,” Mr. Ghalib said.

In a recent interview in Kabul, he cataloged the enemies he has fought during a life of struggle — first the Soviets, during the jihad of the 1980s; then the Taliban over the next three decades; and now the Islamic State.

More slowly, he recounted the long list of relatives he lost over these decades of calamity, from a brother who died in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s to his 70-year-old brother-in-law, who was beheaded this month. The Taliban killed more than 19 relatives in all.

“Everything has been fighting and killing,” he lamented.

Now, his latest fight has even pitted him against a man he once considered a close friend: a poet named Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, whom he lived alongside in Guantánamo.

While Mr. Ghalib chose to reject bitterness and fight on behalf of the American-backed government, his former friend Mr. Dost now leads the Islamic State fighters whom Mr. Ghalib’s forces are trying to drive out of eastern Afghanistan.

But years ago, stuck in the same camp at Guantánamo, they would spend their days debating politics and religion.

Mr. Dost, a dour but quick-witted man who was known for the poetry he etched into the side of coffee cups for lack of better writing materials, was adamant that there was only one course of action after their release: Go to Pakistan and start waging jihad. He spoke of uniting the whole Muslim world.

Mr. Ghalib had other plans. “I used to argue with them that we are Afghans and we must support Afghanistan,” he said, meaning the current, American-backed government that replaced the Taliban. It was the minority view, but he did not worry about sharing it with Mr. Dost or any of his jailed countrymen. “We were friends with each other despite our views,” he said.

How Mr. Ghalib ended up in American captivity is its own bewildering story. After building a reputation as an effective commander against the Soviets and the Taliban, he became a police chief for the new Afghan government after the Taliban’s ouster in 2001. But in 2003, he was arrested after United States soldiers found explosive devices adjacent to the government compound where he worked. That was apparently close enough. There were also several letters that linked him to Taliban figures, although American officials conceded the letters might have been forged.

One of the military officers weighing the evidence against him explained that he did not “put much credibility to any of these letters,” according to a transcript of the tribunal.

That left Mr. Ghalib flummoxed. “So why are you detaining me?”

At Guantánamo, Mr. Ghalib often explained to his captors that he had been fighting the Taliban for years and had even aided American forces at Tora Bora against Al Qaeda. He recited the names of major anti-Taliban commanders who would vouch for him.

American investigators eventually concluded that the “detainee is not assessed as being a member of Al Qaeda or the Taliban,” according to a military document outlining the evidence. Yet the military nonetheless described Mr. Ghalib as “a medium risk,” noting that he could possibly become a formidable enemy given his years of experience as a combat commander — albeit on the government’s side before his detainment.

Finally, in 2007, Mr. Ghalib was released.

He left Guantánamo angry not only over the “psychological torture” the American military put him through, but also at the Afghan government for never pushing for his release, he recalled. Yet he was determined not to let the hardship of the past four years alter the course of his life.

Mr. Ghalib decided that he would be guided by “the overall pain that my people and my country are going through — that is the most important thing.”

But his own sorrows would only grow in the coming years.

“My dream was to go back and live peacefully at home,” Mr. Ghalib said. “But nobody let me do that.”

It began with a road, or at least the idea of a road, that his tribe, the Shinwari, wanted built in Mr. Ghalib’s home district in Nangarhar Province. As a tribal elder, Mr. Ghalib took a leading role in the internationally financed project.

Almost immediately, the Taliban began to threaten him for working with the foreigners, and soon the insurgents began assassinating his relatives.

Among the first to die was Mr. Ghalib’s brother, caught on his way home from a mosque. After the Ramadan holiday in 2013, the extended family gathered at the gravesite to mourn. But the Taliban had dug up the gravesite and buried a bomb there to punish the family further.

“Eighteen members of my family were killed in that attack,” Mr. Ghalib recounted — almost all women and children.

“My family is finished,” Mr. Ghalib told The Associated Press that afternoon, calling the Taliban “inhuman.”

Back then, Mr. Ghalib had been on a local peace commission, one of many tribal elders seeking to encourage reconciliation with the insurgents. But President Hamid Karzai offered him a chance for revenge. He had little family to look after, and the Taliban would keep coming after him, Mr. Ghalib recalled the president telling him. The president got him a job as governor of Bati Kot, a Taliban-infested district straddling a highway to Pakistan. He quickly organized a local police force and began going after the Taliban.

“When I got into the government, I started to destroy them,” Mr. Ghalib recalled. The Taliban tried to placate him, he said, recalling an unusual phone call he received: The insurgent commander on the line offered to find whoever had planted the bomb at his brother’s grave and hang him.

Mr. Ghalib rejected the terms. “I told them that our enmity has just started.”

This summer, his Shinwari tribesman requested that he be transferred two districts south, to rescue a benighted region called Achin, where a belt of villages had fallen to a new threat: Islamic State fighters under the command of Mr. Dost, his old friend from Guantánamo. The militants had pushed 10 tribal elders into an explosives-lined trench and videotaped the blast that killed them.

When Mr. Ghalib arrived as the new district governor, he placed on his desk a photograph of his 2-year old grandson, killed in the cemetery bombing. “Each time I look at it, it makes my heart burst and that motivates me,” he said. “That’s why I carry on all the operations myself.”

In one battle this summer, Mr. Ghalib described how he and his son led a force of police officers and soldiers against Islamic State fighters who were threatening to overrun Achin’s small district center. After being hit by multiple roadside bomb explosions, most of the forces fell back, leaving Mr. Ghalib and his son alone to face some 15 Islamic State fighters.

“We were able to shoot many,” he said.

At such times, Mr. Ghalib said, he would not be surprised to find Mr. Dost among the jihadists shooting back at him — the rumor is that Mr. Dost is usually on the front lines.

But Mr. Ghalib said that he would have little to say to Mr. Dost at this point: “He slaughters civilians, innocent people and children.”

“We will not spare him if I face him on the battlefield,” Mr. Ghalib said matter-of-factly. And given the chance, he said, “he will also not leave me alive.”

The two last saw each other a decade ago, in 2005, in Guantánamo. The Americans had concluded that Mr. Dost was no longer a threat and sent him home.

“It is very ironic that Muslim Dost got released before me,” Mr. Ghalib said. He himself had two more years to go before the Americans finally released him, too.

Al Qaeda in the Islaic Maghreb (AQMI) claimed the November 20 attack at the Radisson Hotel of Bamako, which left over 20 dead. In an audio statement, Abdelmalek Droukdel, leader of the Jihadist group, confirms that his militants carried out the attack with the Al-Mourabitoun organization.

Al-Mourabitoun had already claimed the attack just hours later, also citing the AQMI. Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta has however dismissed the claim, instead indicating the responsibility of another armed group, the Front de Liberation du Macina. The group in fact had claimed the attack as a response to the French military operation Barkhane in the Sahel.

Both AQMI and Al-Mourabitoun have repeatedly reaffimed that they are part of the al Qaeda network, though some branches have recently split from the groups: some factions have in fact sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.