By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, Jun 2 2015 (IPS)

The euphoria that spread though the world after the Iran nuclear agreement reached in Lausanne in April this year with the United States, Russia, China, France, United Kingdom and Germany, plus the European Union, is  proving short-lived.

Republicans in the U.S. Congress have made it clear that they will spare no effort to block it.  Hilary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presidential hopeful, is keeping her options open. Whispers are escaping from European chancelleries that the sanctions on Iran will only be lifted in stages. Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani have responded by insisting that they must be lifted “at once”.

Prem Shankar Jha

But the agreement’s most inveterate enemy is Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel. In the week that followed the Lausanne agreement, he warned the American public in three successive speeches that the agreement would “threaten the survival of Israel” and increase the risk of a “horrific war”. This is a brazen attempt to whip up fear and war hysteria on the basis of a spider’s web of misinformation.

Netanyahu is not new to this game. At the U.N. General Assembly in 2012, he unveiled a large cartoon of a bomb and drew a red line across it, just below the neck. This was how close Iran was to making a nuclear bomb, he said. It could get there in a year. Only much later did the world learn that Mossad, Netanyahu’s own intelligence service, had told him that Iran was very far from being able to build a bomb.

Mossad probably knew what a U.S. Congress Research Service (CRS) report revealed two months later:  that although Iran already had enough five percent, or low-enriched,  uranium in August 2012 to build  five to seven bombs, it had not enriched enough of it to the intermediate level of  20 percent to meet the requirement for even one  bomb. The CRS had concluded from this and other evidence that this was because  Iran had made no effort to revive its nuclear weapons programme after stopping it ‘abruptly’ in 2003.“[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is following a two-pronged strategy: first to get the U.S. Congress to insert clauses in the nuclear treaty draft that Iran will be forced to reject, and second to take advantage of the spike in paranoia that will follow to push the West into an attack on Iran”

Another of Netanyahu’s deceptions is that he only wants to punish Iran with sanctions until it gives up trying to acquire not only nuclear weapons but any nuclear technology that could even remotely facilitate this in the future. However, he knows that no government in Iran can agree to this, so what he is really trying to steer the world towards is the alternative – a military attack on Iran.

What is more, because he also knows that destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities will not destroy its capacity to rebuild these in the future, he does not want the attack to end until it has destroyed Iran’s infrastructure (as Israel destroyed southern Lebanon’s in 2006), its industry, its research facilities and its science universities.

He knows that Israel cannot undertake such a vast operation without the United States. But there is one stumbling block – President Barack Obama – who has learned from his recent experience that, to put it mildly, U.S. interests do not always tally with those of its allies in the Middle East.

So Netanyahu is following a two-pronged strategy: first to get the U.S. Congress to insert clauses in the nuclear treaty draft that Iran will be forced to reject, and second to take advantage of  the spike in paranoia that will follow to push the West into an attack on Iran.

He has been joined in this endeavour by another steadfast friend of the United States – Saudi Arabia. At the end of February, Saudi Arabia quietly signed an agreement with Israel that will allow its warplanes to overfly Saudi Arabia on their way to bombing Iran. This has halved the distance they will need to fly. Then, four weeks later, on Mar. 26,  it declared war on the Houthis in Yemen, whom it has been relentlessly portraying as a tiny minority bent upon taking Yemen over through sheer terror, with the backing of  Iran.

This is a substantial oversimplification, and therefore distortion, of a complicated relationship.

Iran may well be helping the Houthis, but not because they are Shias.  The Houthis, who make up 30 percent of Yemen’s population, are Zaidis, a very different branch of Shi’a-ism than the one practised in Iran, Pakistan and India. They inhabit a region that stretches across Saada, the northernmost district of Yemen, and three adjoining principalities, Jizan, Najran and Asir, that Saudi Arabia annexed in 1934.

The internecine wars that Yemeni Houthis have fought since the 1960s have not been sectarian, or even against the Saudis specifically, but in quest of independence and, more recently, a federal state. This is a goal that several other tribes share.  

The timing of Saudi Arabia’s attack, four weeks after its overflight agreement with Israel, and its incessant portrayal of the Houthis as proxies of Iran, hints at a deeper understanding between it and Israel. The Houthis’ attacked Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, in September last year. So why did Saudi Arabia wait until March this year before sending its bombers in?

Iran has kept out of the conflict in Yemen so far, but the manifestly one-sided resolution passed by the U.N. Security Council and the immediate resignation of the U.N. special envoy for Yemen, Jamal Benomar, who had been struggling to bring about a non-sectarian resolution of the conflict in Yemen and been boycotted by the country’s president Abed Rabo Mansour Hadi for his pains, cannot have failed to raise misgivings in Tehran.

Iraqi President Haydar Abadi’s sharp criticism of the Saudi attack in Washington on the same day reflects his awareness of how these developments are darkening the prospect for Iran’s rehabilitation, and therefore Iraq’s future.

To stop this drift Obama needs to tell his people precisely how far, under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel’s interests have diverged from those of the United States, and how single-mindedly Israel has used its special relationship with the United States to push it into actions that have imperilled its own security in the Middle East.

Instead of dwelling on how the nuclear treaty will make it practically impossible for Iran to clandestinely enrich uranium or produce plutonium, he needs to remind Americans of what Netanyahu has been carefully neglecting to mention: that a nuclear device is not a bomb, and that to convert it into one Iran will need not only to master the physics of bomb-making and reduce its weight to what a missile can carry, but conduct at least one test explosion to make sure the bomb works. That will make escaping detection pretty well impossible.

Finally, the White House needs to remind Americans that Iranians also know the price they will pay if they are caught trying to build a bomb after signing the agreement. Not only will this bring back all and more of the sanctions they are under,  but it will vindicate Netanyahu’s apocalyptic predictions and make a pre-emptive military strike virtually unavoidable.

Should a  military strike, whether deserved or undeserved,  destroy Iran’s economy, it will add tens of thousands of Shi’a Jihadis to the Sunni Jihadis already spawned in Libya, Somalia, Chechnya and  the other failed states and regions of the world. The security that Netanyahu claims it will bring will turn out to be a chimera.

Edited by Phil Harris

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Representatives from Iran and the P5+1 pose for photos after talks concluded in Lausanne, Switzerland on April 2, 2015. Credit: US State Dept/public domain

By Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON, May 26 2015 (IPS)

Internationally supported sanctions against Iran could begin to crumble if talks over Iran’s nuclear programme fail to produce a final deal, according to Germany’s envoy to the United States.

“The alternatives to the diplomatic approach are not very attractive,” said Ambassador Peter Wittig Tuesday.“The alternatives to the diplomatic approach are not very attractive." -- German Ambassador Peter Wittig.

“If diplomacy fails, the sanctions regime might unravel…and we would probably see Iran enriching once again as it has done before the negotiations started,” said the diplomat during a panel discussion in Washington at the Atlantic Council.

The sanctions that have ravaged the Iranian economy face far less risk, however, if Tehran were seen as responsible for the failure, according to the United Kingdom’s envoy to the U.S.

“If there is not a deal because the Iranians simply will not live up to [their obligations] or [fail to] implement…then I think we carry on with the sanctions regime and in certain areas it may be right to try to raise the level of those sanctions,” said Ambassador Peter Westmacott.

But Westmacott agreed with his German counterpart that if Iran were not to blame, the sanctions regime could fall apart.

“At the same time, if we were to walk away or if the [U.S.] Congress was to make it impossible for the agreement to be implemented…then I think the international community would be pretty reluctant, frankly, to contemplate a ratcheting up further of the sanctions against Iran,” he said.

“A number of countries” already “don’t respect” sanctions and are buying Iranian oil, he added.

Looming Deadline

Ahead of the June 30 deadline for reaching a final deal, Iran will resume the negotiations with representatives from the P5+1 or E3+3 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) Wednesday in the Austrian capital of Vienna.

Talks with Iran over its controversial nuclear program have been ongoing since 2003, when France, Germany and the United Kingdom (the E3) began to engage Iran in an attempt to limit its nuclear programme.

Iran contends its programme has always been peaceful. The United States intelligence community has assessed that Iran was previously working towards mastering the nuclear fuel cycle, but has not restarted a nuclear weapons program.

“It’s a political decision for them. Not that they don’t have the technical wherewithal, the technical competence, because they do,” said the U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper March 2 on PBS’ “Charlie Rose” show.

Although Iran and its negotiating partners have made several historic diplomatic strides since an interim nuclear agreement was reached 2013 in Geneva—notably the ongoing high-level direct contact between previously hostile Tehran and Washington—the talks have yet to produce a final deal.

It’s unclear how much progress has actually been made in the complex private negotiations since a preliminary framework agreement was declared on April 2, but the parties are currently in the drafting phase.

The French ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud, wasn’t optimistic here Tuesday.

“It’s very likely that we won’t have an agreement before the end of June or even (right) after,” he said.

“Even if we get the best deal … afterwards, you will have to translate it into the technical annexes, so it may be … we could have a sort of fuzzy end to the negotiation,” he added.

High Stakes

While domestic politics in the key capitals of Tehran and Washington could ultimately prove to be the greatest barriers to a final deal, all sides seem to be waiting until after the deadline to make more moves.

But patience is running thin among key Iranian and American lawmakers, who have made no secret of their opposition to the talks. If no deal is reached by Jun. 30, the door to a wave of domestic criticism in both capitals will once again be wide open.

Peter Jenkins, who previously served as the U.K.’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations, told IPS that even if Iran were blamed for the breakdown of the talks, it wouldn’t end up totally isolated.

“I doubt the non-Western world will be ready to believe that the blame for a break-down lies solely with Iran,” said Jenkins.

“They will suspect that some of the blame should be ascribed to the U.S. and E.U. for making demands that go well beyond the requirements of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. So those of them that have been applying sanctions may break away,” he said.

“In the West, however, most countries will believe what the U.S. instructs them to believe and will continue to apply sanctions if required to do so by the U.S.,” he added.

As for an impending blame-game, Jenkins said the stakes are too high for everyone to submit to a complete breakdown at this point: “I think it much more likely that they will make a herculean effort to cobble together an agreement over the ensuing weeks.”

“Both sides have so much to gain from an agreement and so much to lose if they squander all that they have achieved to date,” he said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 21 2015 (IPS)

The “surprise” re-election of incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Mar. 17 elections has been met with a flood of media comment on the implications for the region and the rest of the world.

However, one of the reasons for Netanyahu’s victory has dramatically slipped the attention of most – the support he received from young Israelis.

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, 200,000 last-minute voters decided to switch their vote to Netanyahu’s Likud party due to the “fear factor” and most of these were voters under the age of 35.

Roberto Savio

Perhaps the “fear factor” was actually an expression of the “Masada factor”. Masada is a strong element in Israeli history and collective imagination. The inhabitants of the mountain fortress of Masada, besieged by Roman legions at the time of Emperor Tito’s conquest of the Israeli state, preferred collective suicide to surrender.

Israelis today feel besieged by hostile neighbouring countries (first of all Iran), the continuous onslaught by the Caliphate and the Islamic State, overwhelming negative international opinion and growing abandonment by the United States.

Netanyahu played a number of cards to bring about his last-minute election success, including his speech to the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress on Mar. 3, which was seen by many Israelis as an act of defiance and dignity, not a weakening of fundamental relations with the United States.

His support for Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, his denial of the creation of a Palestinian state and his show of contempt for an international community unable to understand Israel’s fears led Netanyahu’s Likud party to victory.

In Israel, being left-wing mean accepting a Palestinian state, being right-wing means denying it. In the end, the Mar. 17 vote was the result of fear.“Taking refuge in parties that preach a return to a country’s ‘glorious’ past, blocking immigrants who are stealing jobs and Muslims who are challenging the traditional homogeneity of society, country … is an easy way out”

Israeli’s young people are not alone in moving to the right as a reaction to fear. It is interesting to note that all right-wing parties which have become relevant in Europe are based on fear.

Growing social inequality, the unprecedented phenomenon of youth unemployment, cuts in public services such as education and health, corruption which has become a cancer with daily scandals, and the general feeling of a lack of clear response from the political institutions to the problems opened up by a globalisation based on markets and not on citizens are all phenomena which are affecting young people.

“When you were like us at university, you knew you would find a job – we know we will not find one,” was how one student put it at a conference of the Society for International Development that I attended.

“The United Nations has lost the ability to be a place of governance, the financial system is without checks and corporations have a power which goes over national governments,” the student continued. “So, you see, the world of today is very different one from the one in which you grew up.”

As Josep Ramoneda wrote in El Pais of Mar. 18: “We expected that governments would submit markets to democracy and it turns out that what they do is adapt democracy to markets, that is, empty it little by little.

This is why many of those of who vote for right-wing parties in Europe are young people – be it for the National Front in France, the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain, the Lega Nord (North League) in Italy, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) in Germany and Golden Dawn in Greece, among others.

Taking refuge in parties that preach a return to a country’s “glorious” past, blocking immigrants who are stealing jobs and Muslims who are challenging the traditional homogeneity of society, country, and bringing back to the nation space and functions which have been delegated to an obtuse and arrogant bureaucracy in Brussels which has not been elected and is not therefore accountable to citizens, is an easy way out.

This is a major – but ignored – epochal change. It was long held that an historic function of youth was to act as a factor for change … now it is fast becoming a factor for the status quo. The traditional political system no longer has youth movements and its poor performance in front of the global challenges that countries face today makes young people distrustful and distant.

It is an easy illusion to flock to parties which want to fight against changes which look ominous, even negative. It also partially explains why some young Europeans are running to the Islamic State which promise a change to restore the dignity of Muslims dignity and whose agenda is to destroy dictators and sheiks who are in cohort with the international system and are all corrupt and intent on enriching themselves, instead of taking care of their youth.

What can young people think of President Erdogan of Turkey building a presidential palace with 1,000 rooms or the European Central Bank inaugurating headquarters which cost 1,200 million euro, just to give two examples? And what of the fact that the 10 richest men in the world increased their wealth in 2013 alone by an amount equivalent to the combined budgets of Brazil and Canada?

This generational change should be a transversal concern for all parties but what is happening instead is that the welfare state is continuing to suffer cuts. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), young people in the 18-23 age group will retire with an average pension of 650 euro. What kind of society will that be?

Without the safety net now being provided by parents and grandparents, how can young people in such a society avoid feeling left out?

We always thought young people would fight for social change, but what if they are now doing so from the right?

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 16 2015 (IPS)

It is now clear that we are not going to reach the goal of controlling climate change.

It is worth recalling that the goal of not exceeding a 2 degree centigrade rise in global warming before 2020 was adopted at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009 as a formula for consensus. Many in the scientific community had been clamouring for immediate action – and at most for a 1 degree rise – but bowed to political realism, and accepted an easier target.

Roberto Savio

The agreement was to block the rise in global temperature before 2020, and start a process for gradually reverting the climate to safe levels, to be concluded before 2050.

Well, in the last four years, we have already witnessed an increase in temperature by 1 degree, and there is only another 1 degree left before 2020.

The European Environment Agency (EEA), which publishes a report every five years, states that Europe needs “much more ambitious goals” if it wants to reach its declared targets and for 2050, European Union leaders have endorsed the objective of reducing Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95 percent compared with 1990 levels.

However, Germany increased its carbon emissions by 20 million tons in 2012-13, instead of reducing them. This means that, in order to reach its targets, Germany should now reduce emissions by 3.5 percent a year over the next six years, which is a difficult, if not impossible, target to achieve.

It will increase energy costs and probably lead to a reaction to block measures which can hurt the economy. By the way, this is the official position of the Republicans in the U.S. Congress, who will fight any climate proposal.Climate change dissenters are clearly unconcerned that the very future of our planet is at stake or, like the governmental system, have fallen prey to the ‘ostrich syndrome’

By now, the effects of climate change have become visible, and not just to the climatologists. Last year the total number of people displaced by climatic disasters (such as hurricanes, landslides, drought, floods and forest fires) reached the staggering figure of 11 million people.

Last month, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a think-tank based in New Delhi, issued a study report citing data compiled by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, which maintains a global database of natural disasters dating back over 100 years.

The study found a 10-fold increase to 525 natural disasters in 2002 from around 50 in 1975.

By 2011, the cost of natural disasters had ballooned to 350 billion dollars. In the 110 years between 1900 and 2009, hydro-meteorological disasters increased from 25 to 3,526. Together, extreme hydro-meteorological, geological and biological events increased from 72 to 11,571 during that same period.

There is no doubt that the activities of man are having a dramatic impact on the climate and the planet, affecting people’s lives, but – as usual – the world is moving on two levels, which are unrelated and opposed.

One of the main issues among countries at climate negotiations has been how much to invest in combating climate change but here the signs are very discouraging, to say the least. Take the Green Climate Fund, for example, which was intended to be the centrepiece of efforts to raise  100 billion dollars a year by 2020 but, as of December last year, only 10 billion dollars had been pledged to the fund.

This is the track for reducing fossil emissions. Let us now look to the other track: what the rich countries are spending to keep them.

According to a report from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Oil Change International (OCI), G20 governments are actually subsidising fossil fuel exploration with 88 billion dollars every year.

The report notes that “with rising costs for hard-to-reach reserves, and falling coal and oil prices, generous public subsidies are propping up fossil fuel exploration which would otherwise be deemed uneconomic.” In fact, G20 governments spend more than twice what the top 20 private companies are spending on finding new reserves of oil, gas and coal, and are doing so with public money.

So, on one hand, the system makes the right declarations of principle and, on the other, does the very opposite.

Meanwhile, there are some signs that the campaign against the need for doing something about climate change is losing credibility.

It is known that some members of the Republican Party in the United States are financed by energy giants, and it goes without saying that they will do whatever they can to boycott any deal on climate change that U.S. President Barack Obama may try to agree to at the next climate conference in Paris in December.

It is also known that a number of scientists dissent from the thinking of the more than 2,000 scientists whose work has contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in presenting the link between human activity and deterioration of the climate. Of course, the dissenting voices have received a disproportionate echo in conservative media.

However, last month, the Washington Post reported that one of the leading dissenters and guru of climate change deniers, Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, had been receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry.

The report cited documents that Greenpeace obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act showing that Soon had been receiving funding from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company and the American Petroleum Institute, among others.

Climate change dissenters are clearly unconcerned that the very future of our planet is at stake or, like the governmental system, have fallen prey to the ‘ostrich syndrome’. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Risto Isomaki
HELSINKI, Nov 21 2014 (IPS)

At the height of the Cold War the world’s total arsenal of nuclear weapons, counted as explosive potential, may have amounted to three million Hiroshima bombs.  The United States alone possessed 1.6 million Hiroshimas’ worth of destructive capacity.

Since then, much of this arsenal has been dismantled and the uranium in thousands of nuclear bombs has been converted to nuclear power plant fuel.

Risto Isomäki

Future historians are likely to offer some stingy comments on how 20th century governments first used thousands of billions of dollars to laboriously enrich natural uranium to weapons grade uranium with gas centrifuges, and then reversed the process, diluting their weapons grade uranium with natural uranium.

This declining trend has led many people and governments to believe that nuclear disarmament is no longer an important issue.

It is true that the probability of a nuclear war is currently immensely smaller than during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 or during the other hair-raisingly dangerous moments of the Cold War.

In spite of this, it could be a grave mistake to assume that the danger is now over, forever.

We have not really been able to push the evil genie back into the bottle, yet. The remaining U.S. and Russian inventories might still amount to 80,000 Hiroshima bombs. This is approximately forty times less than at the height of Cold War’s nuclear armament race, but still much more than enough to destroy the world as we know it.“The remaining U.S. and Russian [nuclear] inventories might still amount to 80,000 Hiroshima bombs. This is approximately forty times less than at the height of Cold War’s nuclear armament race, but still much more than enough to destroy the world as we know it”

While the world’s nuclear arsenal has become smaller, the remaining nuclear weapons are more accurate and on average smaller than before.  This might, some day, lower the threshold for using them.

Besides, it now seems that we have seriously underestimated the destructive capacity of all kinds of nuclear weapons.

In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear bombs ignited large firestorms that burned all the people caught inside the fire perimeter to death.  However, U.S. military scientists regarded fire damage as so unpredictable that for fifty years they concentrated only on analysing the impact of the blasts.

The story has been beautifully documented by Lynn Eden, a researcher at Stanford University, in an important book important book entitled Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge & Nuclear Weapons Devastation.

When, in 2002, the United States was afraid of a nuclear war between Pakistan and India, it warned their governments that a nuclear war in South Asia might kill twelve million people.

The figure was absurdly low because it only took the impact of the nuclear blasts into consideration. According to recent research, the fire damage radii of nuclear detonations are from two to five times longer than those determined by the blast effects.  In practice, this means that the area destroyed by the fire is typically 4 to 25 times larger than the area shattered by the blast.

The Second World War firestorms in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg and Dresden caused very strong rising air currents and hurricane-speed winds blowing towards the fire from the edges of the fire perimeter.

Nuclear detonations in modern cities created even fiercer firestorms because they contain very large quantities of hydrocarbons in the form of asphalt, plastic, oil, gasoline and gas.

According to one study, the firestorm ignited by even a small, Hiroshima-size explosion in Manhattan would produce incredibly strong super-hurricane winds blowing towards the fire at the speed of 600 kilometres per hour. Most skyscrapers have been designed to withstand wind speeds amounting to 230 or 250 kilometres per hour.

The worst-case scenario is a nuclear detonation happening far above the ground.  According to the so-called ‘Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack’ – or EMP Commission for short – of the U.S. Congress, between 70 and 90 percent of the country’s population might die within one year if somebody detonated a megaton-sized nuclear weapon at the height of 160 kilometres above the continental United States.

A nuclear explosion always produces a very strong electromagnetic pulse ­ or, to be more precise, three different electromagnetic pulses, which can fry all unprotected electronic equipment within a line of sight.  From the height of 160 kilometres, everything in the continental United States is within a line of sight. Everything works with electricity and practically nothing has been protected against an EMP.

In other words, a single nuclear weapon could wipe out health care, water supplies, waste-water treatment facilities, agricultural production and the factories and laboratories making pharmaceuticals, vaccines and fertilisers – among many others.

Europe is equally vulnerable and most other countries, including India and China, are doing their utmost to become as vulnerable as the old industrialised countries already are. 

According to the EMP Commission, the cost of electronic equipment would only rise by 3-10 percent if it were hardened against an electromagnetic pulse, and protecting the key 10 percent of everything with electronics would be enough to secure the crucial functions of an organised society. However, in practice, nothing like this has been done, in any country.

We should not forget nuclear disarmament, because it could still be the most important thing there is.

It would probably be wise to utilise the periods of relative calm as efficiently as possible for further reducing our nuclear weapons arsenals and for developing better alternatives for nuclear electricity. Otherwise, tensions between declining and rising great powers may one day again create new nuclear armament races, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The spread of nuclear reactors increases the risks. Every country that acquires the ability to construct a nuclear reactor also acquires the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Nuclear reactors were originally developed for making better raw material for nuclear weapons, and all our reactors are still making plutonium, every second they operate.

The weapons grade uranium used in nuclear bombs is enriched by the same gas centrifuges that produce the fuel for our power-producing nuclear stations.

The stakes will rise higher if we also begin to construct fourth-generation nuclear power plants or breeder reactors.  Breeders need, in one or more parts of the reactor, nuclear fuel in which the percentage of the easily fissile isotopes has been enriched to 15, 20 or 60 percent, or to even higher levels. This kind of fuel can already be used for making crude nuclear weapons, without any further enrichment.

It is often said that when a technology has been developed it can no longer be forced back into the Pandora’s box from which it came.  However, when it comes to nuclear technologies, we just have to try. The long-term survival of our species may depend on this choice. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 21 2014 (IPS)

Less than a week after everybody celebrated the historical agreement on Nov. 17 between the United States and China on reduction of CO₂ emissions, a very cold shower has come from India.

Indian Power Minister Piyush Goyal has declared: “India’s development imperatives cannot be sacrificed at the altar of potential climate change many years in the future. The West will have to recognise we have the needs of the poor”.

This is also a blow to the Asia policy of U.S. President Barack Obama, who came back home from signing the CO₂ emissions agreement in Beijing, touting his success on establishing U.S. policy in the region.

Roberto Savio

But, more importantly, will give plenty of ammunition to the Republican Congress, which has been fighting climate control on the grounds that the United States cannot engage on climate control unless other major polluters make similar commitments. This was always directed to China, which had refuse to make any such commitment until President Xi, to the surprise of everybody, did so by signing an agreement with Obama.

India is a major polluter, not at the level of China, which has now reached 9,900 metric tons of CO₂, against the 6,826 of the United States. But India is coming up fast. “The incestuous relations between energy corporations and governments are out of the public's eye. It is yet further proof that, even when nothing less than survival is at stake for islands and coastlines, agriculture and the poor, governments are unable – or unwilling – to see beyond their immediate existence”

Goyal has promised that India’s use of domestic coal will rise from 565 million tons last year to more than a billion tons by 2019, and he is selling licences for coal mining at a great speed. The country has increased its coal-fired plants by 73 percent in just the last five years. In addition, Indian coal is of poor quality, polluting twice as much as coal in the West.

Nevertheless, newly-elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced that he will embark on a major programme of renewable sources of energy, and there is an apparent paradox in the fact that many of the climate scientists who form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) are from India. Its Director-General is an Indian, Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, who is also chief executive of the Energy Resources Institute in New Delhi.

The IPCC’s last report was much more dramatic than previous ones, stating conclusively that climate change is due to the action of man, and providing an extensive review of the damage that the agricultural sector is bound to face, especially in poor countries like India. At least 37 million people would be displaced by rising seas.

Indian towns are by far the most polluted in the world, surpassing several times each year the worst polluted day in China.

But what is more worrying is that governments are reacting too slowly. It would take a very major effort, which is not now on the cards, to keep temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Centigrade, and therefore to start to reduce emissions by 2020. Emissions in 2014 are expected to be the highest ever, at 40 billion tonnes, compared with 32 billion in 2010.

The consensus is that to limit warming of the planet to no more 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels, governments would have to restrict emissions from additional fossil fuel burning to about 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide.

But, according to the IPCC report, energy companies have booked coal and petroleum reserves equal to several times that amount, and they are spending some 600 billion dollars a year to find more. In other words, governments are directly subsidising the consumption of fossil fuel.

By contrast, less than 400 billion dollars a year are spent to reduce emissions, a figure that is smaller than the revenue of one just one U.S. oil company, ExxonMobil.

The last meeting of the G20 in Brisbane earlier this month gave unexpected attention to climate, but the G20 alone is spending 88 billion dollars a year in subsidies for fossil fuel exploration, which is double that which the top 20 private companies are spending to look for new oil, gas and coal.

The G20 spends 101 billion dollars to support clean energy in a clear attempt to make everybody happy but, according to the International Energy Agency, if G20 governments directed half of their subsidies, or 49 billion dollars a year, to investment for redistributing energy from new sources, we could achieve universal energy access as soon as 2030.

Another good example of the total lack of coherence from Western governments is that they have pledged an amount of 10 billion dollars for a Green Climate Fund, whose task is to support developing countries in mitigating and adapting to climate change. That amount is two-thirds of what those countries have been asking for and, since its creation in 1999, the fund has still to become operational.

And it was only after the last G20 meeting that the United States pledged three billion dollars and Japan 1.5 billion, bringing the total so far to 7 billion dollars – one-third is still missing.

And now we have the upcoming Climate Conference in Lima, in December, where opinion is that governments will once again fail to reach a comprehensive agreement on climate change – and the amount of time left for the planet will reduce even further.

Besides the fight to be expected from the Republican Congress in the United States, there will be also be opposition from countries that depend on fossil fuels, such as Russia, Australia, India, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries.

So, governments show a total lack of consensus and responsibility. If a referendum could be held asking citizens if they would prefer to pay 800 billion dollars less in taxes to avoid subsidising pollution, there are few doubts what the result would be. And there would be same result if they were asked if they would prefer to invest those 800 billion dollars in clean energy or continue to pollute.

But the incestuous relations between energy corporations and governments are out of the public’s eye. It is yet further proof that, even when nothing less than survival is at stake for islands and coastlines, agriculture and the poor, governments are unable – or unwilling – to see beyond their immediate existence. We are direly in need of global governance for this kind of globalisation. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Oct 6 2014 (IPS)

If ever there was a need to prove that we are faced with a total lack of global governance, the U.N. Climate Summit, extraordinarily called by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sep. 23, makes a very good case.

The convocation of the climate summit – albeit just for one day – appeared to indicate that it had finally dawned on political leaders that there is a problem, in fact an urgent problem, about the impact that climate change is having on our planet.

And yet, the array of leaders gathered together in New York, although full of general platitudes, gave another impressive display of failure to come up with a concrete answer. While acknowledging the problem, many leaders found a way to duck their responsibility, indicating domestic constraints.

Roberto Savio. Credit: IPS

Thus U.S. President Barack Obama made it clear that the U.S. Congress would not be ready to ratify an international climate treaty. Of course, this line of reasoning applies to the U.S. approach in general – Congress does not accept binding the United States to any international treaty because of its exceptional destiny, which cannot be brought under scrutiny or control by those who are not U.S. citizens.

Furthermore, the United States has become a dysfunctional country, where the judicial, legislative and executive powers cannot cooperate, even on crucial issues.“The array of leaders gathered together in New York [for the Sep. 23 Climate Summit], although full of general platitudes, gave another impressive display of failure to come up with a concrete answer. While acknowledging the problem, many leaders found a way to duck their responsibility”

Anant Geete, India’s new Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises, stated that growth in his country has priority over anything else, and therefore India will continue on its path towards industrialisation and energy fully based on coal, while other renewable energies will be brought in progressively, even if this will eventually make India the world’s biggest polluter.

The European Union could not make any commitment, because a new Commission was due to take over the following month (i.e. October) and the person earmarked for the post of Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy was Spanish Conservative Miguel Arias Canete,  who was a major shareholder in two Spanish oil companies – Petrolifera Ducal and Petrologis Canarias – until he sold his shares to garner support for his nomination

No problem, say his critics, Canete’s wife, son and brother-in-law did not follow suit and remain shareholders or even occupy positions on the boards of the companies.

In line with this same political sensibility, the new and more conservative European Commission has brought in a well-known City lobbyist, Lord Jonathan Hill, to the portfolio of Financial Services.

Such a system of political compromises is like bringing Count Dracula in to run a blood bank – hardly a system that is likely to appeal to blood donors!

What is sad is that there was no lack of background papers for the U.N. Climate Summit.

Beside one prepared by the Intergovernmental Council on Climate Change, bringing together 3.200 scientists from all over the world, there was, for example, a report prepared by the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture (clearly not part of a leftist government), based on a detailed study of Spanish coastal areas which found that by 2050 the level of the Mediterranean Sea will increase by a minimum of 30 centimetres (if climate control measures are taken now) up to a maximum of 60 centimetres (if no action is taken).

That means that the coastline will recede by between 20 to 40 metres, with an obvious impact on tourism, ports and costal settlements. One hundred years ago, only 12 percent of the coast was used, rising to 20 percent in 1950, 35 percent in 1988 and 75 percent in 2006. In Spain, 15 million people now live in area which will be affected by the climate change.

Obviously, France, Greece , Italy, Tunisia and all other Mediterranean countries  will share that same destiny.

Another more global study conducted by Climate Central, a U.S. research group, based on more detailed sea-level data than has previously been available, reports that about 1 person in every 40 in the world lives in an area which will be susceptible to flooding in the next 100 years – about 177 million people.

Even if immediate measures were taken for climate control, 1.9 percent of the population of coastal countries would be affected. At worst, the figure would be 3.1 percent. To give a concrete example, four percent of the Chinese population, 50 million people, would be affected. Eight of the 10 large countries most at risk are in Asia.

The voice of Abdulla Yameen, President of the Maldives, who reminded leaders at the Climate Summit that small island countries – which would be the first to suffer from any rise in sea levels – have formed a federation to defend their right to exist, went largely unheeded.

An entire new generation has been born since the debate over climate change started but there are no signs that the situation is improving.

In the decade up to 2012, global emissions of CO₂ rose by an average of 2.7 percent. In 2013, emissions were the highest in the last 30 years. And yet, the energy sector is mounting a strong campaign to deny that there is any climate change.

If anything, say the deniers of climate change, what is happening is part of a normal historical cycle, not the result of human activity. All data demonstrating the contrary are being ignored, and the upshot of this campaign is that many people believe that debate on the issue is still open.

Perhaps what happened a few days ago between Google and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is symptomatic of this “normal historical cycle”?

On Sep. 22, Google chairman Eric Schmidt announced that the high-tech company was withdrawing from ALEC, saying: “Everyone understands climate change is occurring and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people – they’re  just, they’re just literally lying.”

ALEC is a conservative organisation that has urged repeal of state renewable power standards and other pro-renewable policies. It drafts proposals for regulations that it submits to politicians, asking them to make just the effort of passing them into law.

Reacting to Google’s decision, Lisa B. Nelson, CEO of ALEC, said: “It is unfortunate to learn Google has ended its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council as a result of public pressure from left-leaning individuals and organizations who intentionally confuse free market policy perspectives for climate change denial.”

So, if you are worried about climate change, you are left-wing and against the market!.

The fact is that executives from many large corporations are well ahead of political leaders. They can take decisions unencumbered by political constraint , and they have found out that working in the direction of climate controls makes sense not only in terms of public relations but also economically.

For example, forty major companies, including l’Oreal and Nestlè, issued a declaration on Sep. 23 pledging to help cut tropical deforestation in half by 2020, and stop it entirely by 2030. Some of these companies work with palm oil, profitable production which is at the expense of tropical forests, especially in Indonesia.

In fact, it was only corporations that made any concrete pledges at the New York Summit.

Apple CEO Timothy Cook said that his company was committing itself to focusing on the emissions of its main suppliers, which account for around 70 percent of the greenhouse gases that come from production and use of the company’s products.

Cook rejected the idea that society must choose between economic growth and environment protection, giving as an example a huge solar farm that his company built in North Carolina to help power a data centre there. ”People told us this couldn’t happen, it could not be done, but we did it. It is great for the environment, and by the way it is also good for economics.”

Not to be outdone, Cargill, the huge U.S. commodity processor, pledged to go even further with an existing no-deforestation commitment on palm oil and extend it to cover all its agricultural products. And, together with other companies processing Indonesian palm oil, Cargill called on the Indonesian government to get tougher on deforestation.

In the meantime, it is not that voices worldwide have been silent on the issue. Safeguarding the environment has long been a rallying banner for a large part of civil society worldwide, and a major cause for concern among the younger generations.

The hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets throughout the world ahead of the New York Summit in solidarity with the need to do something about climate were no mere figment of the media’s imagination. So why were they clearly invisible to the planet’s decision-makers?

The next important date for the climate on their agenda is the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP21) to be held in Paris in 2015. Will our political leaders again waste the chance to do something concrete – will they continue to stand by and watch as time runs out for the planet, and for humankind?

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

Sen. Feinstein accused the CIA of trying to intimidate Committee staffers by asking the Justice Department to carry out a criminal investigation into how the staffers obtained an internal CIA report on the “enhanced interrogation” programme which U.S. and international human rights groups say amounted to torture. Credit: Sen. Rockefeller/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 12 2014 (IPS)

An ongoing battle between the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over reports about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” practices during the George W. Bush administration has escalated sharply.

The widely respected Committee chair, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, took to the Senate floor here Tuesday to accuse the CIA of violating U.S. law and the Constitution by secretly removing documents from computers used by the Committee to investigate the agency’s torture and abuse of detainees during Bush’s “global war on terror.”"This is truly a defining moment, not only for congressional oversight of the intelligence community, but also for President Obama’s legacy on torture." -- Virginia Sloan

She also accused the agency of trying to intimidate Committee staffers by asking the Justice Department to carry out a criminal investigation into how the staffers obtained an internal CIA report on the “enhanced interrogation” programme which U.S. and international human rights groups say amounted to torture.

“(T)here is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime,” Feinstein declared in a lengthy recounting of her committee’s efforts to investigate the programme and declassify its 6,300-page report to make it available to the public.

“I view the [CIA’s] acting counsel general’s referral [to the Justice Department] as a potential effort to intimidate this staff, and I am not taking this lightly,” she said, noting that the counsel general, whom she did not name, had served as the chief lawyer in the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre which oversaw the controversial interrogation programme until its termination by incoming President Barack Obama in January 2009.

Speaking at a forum at the Council on Foreign Relations, CIA Director John Brennan strongly denied Feinstein’s allegations, insisting that “We wouldn’t do that. I mean it’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.”

But a number of groups that have themselves investigated the interrogation programme said they had no reason to doubt Feinstein’s account, particularly given the CIA’s past efforts to impede external investigations and the publication of the Senate committee’s report which Feinstein said she hoped to release by the end of the month.

“We are outraged by Sen. Feinstein’s description of repeated efforts by the CIA to thwart critical and legitimate congressional oversight through delays, attacks, intimidation and attempts to conceal,” said Virginia Sloan, president of the bipartisan legal watchdog group, the Constitution Project, which last year issued its own damning review of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation practices.

“This is not a partisan issue. This is truly a defining moment, not only for congressional oversight of the intelligence community, but also for President Obama’s legacy on torture. The White House cannot allow the CIA to drive this process any longer,” she said, adding that the president should not only declassify the Senate report “to the fullest extent possible”, but also release the internal CIA report, which is said to confirm the Senate committee’s reportedly harsh conclusions about both the cruelty and ineffectiveness of the interrogation programme.

“Senators who have seen the Intelligence Committee report say it not only documents serious abuses by the CIA but also the agency’s false reporting about the programme’s value,” added Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch. “If the CIA manages to block even a public accounting of these abuses, it suggests either that the Obama administration can’t control its own intelligence agency, or that it doesn’t want to.”

The Senate committee report, which was approved in December 2012 on a mainly party-line vote, took five years and more than 40 million dollars to complete.

While it remains classified, it includes a detailed chronology of the formulation and implementation of the “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including water-boarding, and other practices used to extract information from “high-value” terrorist suspects who were often subject to “rendition” and held for incommunicado at secret “black sites” in various countries around the world.

Sen. John McCain, one of the handful of Republicans who had campaigned against those techniques, said the report “confirms for me what I have always believed and insisted to be true – that the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.”

Feinstein called the CIA’s programme “terrible mistakes.”

Seven months later, the CIA completed its own classified rebuttal, insisting that the Committee’s methodology was flawed. But the rebuttal reportedly contradicted not only the Committee’s conclusions, but also the findings of another secret internal review that was conducted by then-CIA director Leon Panetta, drafts of which had been obtained by the Committee staff in 2010.

“Unlike the official response [by the CIA], these Panetta review documents were in agreement with the committee’s findings,” Feinstein, who insisted that the documents had been lawfully obtained, stressed Tuesday.

The Panetta documents lie at the heart of the current dispute. Published reports over the past week indicated that the CIA had gained access the Committee’s computer system in order to determine how the documents were obtained and removed other documents pertinent to the investigation.

Feinstein charged that, in so doing, the CIA, which is part of the executive branch of government, was essentially spying on the committee in violation of the Constitution’s doctrine of “separation of powers” doctrine, several federal laws, and a presidential order that bans the CIA from conducting domestic surveillance.

The CIA’s inspector general last week asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the agency had acted unlawfully.

But the Justice Department has also been asked by the CIA’s general counsel to open a criminal investigation into how the Panetta documents were obtained – a move that Feinstein and her supporters charged was aimed at intimidating the Committee staff.

While Obama ended the detention programme on taking office, he has repeatedly rebuffed demands by human rights groups to prosecute the Bush administration officials responsible for authorising the interrogation policies or for carrying them out.

Brennan, a career CIA officer who became Obama’s most influential counter-terrorism adviser until his appointment as the agency’s chief one year ago, also served in a top CIA post during the Bush administration but denied he played any role in the interrogation programme.

While during his confirmation hearings he expressed surprise by the findings of the Senate Committee and denounced the use of torture, he later personally delivered the CIA’s rebuttal of its report.

An 11-member Constitution Project task force, which included a number of prominent Republicans and former policy-makers from both parties, issued its own review of the interrogation and detention programme last April.

Among other findings, it concluded that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” for which there was “no justification” and “no firm or persuasive evidence” that the information obtained by the programme could not have been gained through other means.

Feinstein’s denunciation of the CIA’s action was particularly remarkable because she has long been criticised by rights advocates for being too protective of the intelligence community.

But she was praised by those same groups Tuesday. “After so many years of congress being unable or unwilling to assert its authority over the CIA, Sen. Feinstein today began to reclaim the authority of Congress as a check on the Executive Branch,” said Christopher Anders, senior counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Public release of the Senate torture [report] will be the next step reining in a CIA that has tortured, destroyed evidence, spied on Congress, and lied to the American people,” he said.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Advocates say that public opinion, both domestically and internationally, is already in the midst of broad changes regarding dirtier forms of energy production. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 14 2014 (IPS)

Environmentalists and some lawmakers are decrying a surprise move by conservative members of Congress to roll back landmark “clean energy” policies guiding U.S. investments in overseas power projects.

Two federal agencies have new guidance in place largely barring government investment in power-generation projects that fail to adequately cut carbon emissions. The rules, by the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), which facilitate U.S. private investments into foreign projects, would essentially discontinue U.S. funding for overseas coal-fired power generation."Industry and the politicians that represent them are panicking." -- Janet Redman

Yet a surprise addendum to a massive U.S. government spending bill would disallow the Export-Import Bank from implementing its new rule, which was unveiled in December. The provision, made public Monday evening, also guts a court-ordered greenhouse gas cap put in place in 2009 to force OPIC to set limits on the carbon emissions of its investments.

“In our view, this is a direct attack on one of the key achievements of the president’s Climate Action Plan,” Justin Guay, a Washington representative for the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“This was the coal industry striking back symbolically at what it saw as a very serious set of political headwinds, as the overseas markets represent their lone opportunity to remain a relevant industry.”

According to media reports, the new provision was offered by Hal Rogers, the top Republican lawmaker in charge of crafting the massive appropriations bill, which allocates funding for nearly all parts of the federal government. On Tuesday, Rogers touted the passage of “A provision to prohibit the Export-Import Bank and OPIC from blocking coal and other power-generation projects, which will increase exports of U.S. goods or services.”

Rogers is a representative from the state of Kentucky, where the coal industry has traditionally been particularly strong.

An OPIC spokesperson told IPS that, for fiscal year 2014, the new legislation “permits OPIC to consider power projects in poor countries that would otherwise be subject to its [greenhouse gas] portfolio reduction goals, while preserving other pre-existing environmental, labour, human rights and credit criteria.”

Ex-Im model

The second half of last year saw a flurry of high-level activity on environment issues here, following a major climate-related speech given by President Barack Obama. One element of this was the administration’s move to severely curtail U.S. funding streams, both public and private, for coal projects abroad.

Following on new regulatory proposals for future power plants here, the Export-Import Bank in December announced that it would only finance overseas power projects if they put in place “carbon capture and sequestration” technologies, to store emissions underground.

“The Export-Import Bank was the world’s first export credit agency to have announced restrictions of this type,” Guay says.

“They really went out on a limb to put these guidelines in place, but then also worked with governments around the world to replicate those policies. The subsequent successes we’ve seen are almost entirely due to the leadership and pressure from the Obama administration.”

Seven countries and four international financial institutions have now passed some form of the Export-Import Bank’s guidelines on energy-related funding. Guay says this is seen as an important success for the Obama administration – and an indication that the president is taking on stronger international leadership on the issue.

For now, however, this victory appears to have been snatched away. While U.S. legislative proposals are typically open to debate and changes, the new appropriations bill will likely not see such a process.

The bill not only covers a huge swath of issues, but is also seen as an important – and uncommon – result of negotiations between the two political parties. On Tuesday, the White House indicated that it supported passage of the bill in its current form.

Yet nearly all lawmakers over the past day have noted that there is much to dislike in the proposal, with some specifically highlighting the new OPIC and Export-Import provisions.

“There are also some things I wish were not in here, particularly a House provision that would weaken limits on carbon emissions from projects financed by the Export-Import Bank and Overseas Private Investment Corporation,” Senator Patrick Leahy said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. “We should be using public funds to support exports of clean, renewable technology, not to fund power projects that worsen global warming.”

Altruistic appearances

Still, advocates say that public opinion, both domestically and internationally, is already in the midst of broad changes regarding dirtier forms of energy production. This is particularly the case with coal, which many analysts see as a dying industry in the United States.

“In a sense, industry and the politicians that represent them are panicking,” Janet Redman, director of the Climate Policy Programme at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, told IPS. “Because of this, we’ve seen an overall attack on the ongoing shift away from fossil fuel. Part of this is industry players pushing new ideas like ‘clean coal’ or natural gas as a ‘bridge’ fuel.”

Redman draws a link between these new, ostensibly more progressive, campaigns and a tactic she says is part of the push against the OPIC and Export-Import guidelines.

“We’re seeing some folks say that the idea here is about development goals and reducing poverty,” Redman says. “But I’m concerned that fossil fuels interests are hiding behind what looks like an altruistic motive as a way to build up the industry.”

In mid-December, two Republican lawmakers, including another representative from Kentucky, decried the restrictive new U.S. policies on overseas energy investment.

“The actions raise questions … [about] the practical impact of U.S. international humanitarian goals, trade policies, and foreign commerce,” the lawmakers, Fred Upton and Ed Whitfield, stated in a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew.

“Requiring [carbon capture and sequestration] would constitute a de facto ban on construction of state-of-the-art new coal-fired power plants – projects that some of the countries in greatest need of reliable and affordable electricity seek today.”

Such warnings notwithstanding, the Sierra Club’s Guay says the new provisions appear to have caught by surprise many proponents of cleaner overseas energy investments.

“We weren’t expecting such a problematic set of language around these provisions – it seems to have been kind of snuck in during the dead of the night,” he says.

“The [Obama] administration is not going to be happy. But one silver lining could be that this attack will have woken up both the administration and the activist community to how important this [provision] was and how much defence it will require going forward.”

The threat of Congressional action has receded amidst the consolidation of a consensus that the deal negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry is a good one. Credit: US Mission/Eric Bridiers

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 5 2013 (IPS)

Ten days after the signing in Geneva of a groundbreaking deal on Iran’s nuclear programme, the agreement appears safe from any serious attack by the strongly pro-Israel U.S. Congress, at least for the balance of 2013.

Despite continuing grumblings about the first-phase agreement between Tehran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China, and Britain) by Republicans and a couple of key Democrats, the chances that lawmakers will enact new sanctions against Iran before the year’s end – as had been strongly urged by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters here – seem to have evaporated.

Tehran has made clear that any new sanctions legislation – even if its implementation would take effect only after the expiration of the six-month deal — would not only violate the terms of the agreement, but almost certainly derail the most promising diplomatic efforts in a decade to ensure that Iran’s nuclear programme does not result in its acquisition of a weapon.

“If we pass sanctions now, even with a deferred trigger which has been discussed, the Iranians, and likely our international partners, will see us as having negotiated in bad faith,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Tuesday.

The threat of Congressional action has receded amidst the consolidation of a virtual consensus among the foreign policy elite that the deal negotiated by, among others, Secretary of State John Kerry, is a good one, as well as its endorsement by several key Democrats, notably the chairs of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, Carl Levin and Dianne Feinstein, respectively.

In addition, a series of polls conducted both just before and after the Nov. 24 deal was concluded has shown strong public support for the diplomatic route, particularly if the most likely alternative was military action.

In the run-up to the last negotiation, majorities of 64 and 56 percent of respondents told CNN and Washington Post polls, respectively, that they would support an agreement in which some economic sanctions against Iran would be lifted in exchange for curbs on Tehran’s nuclear programme that would make it harder to build a bomb. Just after the accord was reached, a Reuters/IPSOS poll found that respondents favoured the deal by a two-to-one margin (44-22 percent).

A far more detailed survey released here Tuesday by Americans United for Change and conducted by a highly regarded political polling firm, Hart Research Associates, also found strong backing (57 percent) among likely voters who had heard at least a little about the deal.

When respondents were informed about the accord’s basic terms – including the neutralisation of Iran’s stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium, curbs on its 3.5 percent stockpile, and enhanced international inspections in exchange for the easing of some sanctions — support rose to 63 percent overall.

Moreover, that support crossed partisan and ideological lines: pluralities approaching 50 percent of self-described Republicans, “conservatives”, and “very strong supporters of Israel” (who constituted nearly a third of the sample), said they favoured the terms as depicted in the survey.

More than two-thirds (68 percent) agreed with the proposition that Congress should not take any action that would block the accord or jeopardise negotiations for a permanent settlement, while only 21 percent favoured additional sanctions legislation now even if it would break the agreement or jeopardise the negotiations.

“Underlying much of this is Americans’ desire to avoid getting involved in another war in the Middle East,” noted Geoffrey Garin, Hart’s president and a top Democratic pollster. “There’s great scepticism about using military force against Iran.”

Despite Netanyahu’s continuing denunciations of the Nov. 24 accord as a “bad agreement” and “historic mistake”, results such as these appear to have persuaded mainstream institutions of the Israel lobby, which have been avidly courted by the White House, not to go all-out for the immediate enactment of new sanctions legislation.

As noted by ‘The Forward’, the nation’s largest-circulation Jewish newspaper that endorsed the deal “as a risk well worth taking,” even the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appears more focused now on the terms of a final agreement, even as its echoes Netanyahu’s critique and urges Congress to enact “prospective sanctions” as soon as possible..

“AIPAC is now defining its red line as insisting that the United States ‘deny Tehran a nuclear weapons capability’ – a vague term that falls short of Israel’s demand for ‘zero enrichment’ of uranium by Iran for its nuclear production,” according to the newspaper’s well-connected diplomatic correspondent, Nathan Guttman.

Indeed, even as Netanyahu continued to assail the agreement, he quietly sent a delegation headed by his national security adviser here last week for meetings with the Obama administration focused on what specific limits can be placed on Iran’s nuclear programme in upcoming negotiations. Officially, Israel has insisted that virtually the entire programme, including and especially Iran’s uranium enrichment, be completely dismantled – a goal which Washington believes cannot be achieved.

Meanwhile, the elite consensus in favour of the current deal and the negotiation process appears to be consolidating.

An informal poll of more than 100 “National Security Insiders” published by the influential ‘National Journal’ found that more than 75 percent considered it a “good deal”, although only 58 percent expressed confidence that the negotiations would end with a favourable settlement.

On Tuesday, nine former top-ranking foreign-service officers, including six ambassadors to Israel, released a letter sent to members of key national-security committees in Congress praising the Geneva accord.

“More than any other option, a diplomatic breakthrough on this issue will help ensure Israel’s security and remove the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to the region generally and Israel specifically,” the group, which included four former undersecretaries who served in Republican administrations, wrote.

The letter followed another signed by former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski and subsequently endorsed by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright on the eve of the Geneva talks opposing additional sanctions.

Two Republican heavyweights, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, also published an op-ed in the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal this week which, while negative and sceptical in tone, did not urge new sanctions or an end to negotiations. It called instead for the administration to insisting as part of any final accord on “Iran dismantling or mothballing a strategically significant portion of its nuclear infrastructure.”

“We should be open to the possibility of purs(u)ing an agenda of long-term cooperation” with Tehran, it also noted.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The administration of President Barack Obama appears to have succeeded in preventing Congress from enacting new sanctions against Iran before the next round of nuclear-related talks between the U.S. and other great powers and Tehran scheduled for Geneva Nov. 20.

As a result, optimism that at least an interim deal may soon be achieved between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) appears once again on the rise here, amidst rumours circulating late Friday that Secretary of State John Kerry himself may lead the U.S. delegation.“The purpose of sanctions was to bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they have succeeded in doing so." -- Senator Dianne Feinstein

While some senators may still try to attach sanctions amendments to pending legislation – notably the 2014 defence authorisation bill (NDAA) to be taken up next week – most observers on Capitol Hill believe they will be highly unlikely to be voted on before Congress’s two-week Thanksgiving recess, pushing any possible new legislative action against Iran into December.

The administration had been concerned that new sanctions would strengthen hard-liners in Tehran, who would use it as evidence that Obama was either unable or unwilling to strike a deal that would not cross Iran’s “red line” – a refusal to recognise the Islamic Republic’s “right” to enrich uranium within certain limits under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Any strengthening of the hard-liners, it was feared, would force President Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, to toughen their terms for a deal, making an agreement with the P5+1 much more difficult to achieve.

Defying pressure from the powerful Israel lobby, several key senators this week indicated they backed delaying action on new or pending sanctions legislation and giving the administration a chance to conclude at least an interim deal that could pave the way to a comprehensive accord on Iran’s nuclear programme within six months to a year.

“I strongly oppose any attempt to increase sanctions against Iran while P5+1 negotiations are ongoing,” said Dianne Feinstein, the influential chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a statement issued Friday.

“The purpose of sanctions was to bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they have succeeded in doing so. Tacking new sanctions onto the defence authorisation bill or any other legislation would not lead to a better deal,” she said, echoing several other colleagues, including the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin. “It would lead to no deal at all.”

The administration had hoped to conclude an interim deal last week in Geneva and negotiated a draft agreement in intensive talks between Kerry, the European Union’s (EU) foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and Zarif, according to well-informed sources.

But the last-minute intervention by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who reportedly objected to language regarding Iran’s claims to a right to enrichment, as well as the disposition of its yet-to-be-completed Arak heavy-water reactor, resulted in changes in the draft that Zarif was unable to accept without further consultations in Tehran.

Whether Fabius’s objections – which have been variously attributed to pressure from Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is home to France’s only military base in the Gulf, as well as inadequate consultation by Washington in its talks with Tehran – have been overcome remains unclear.

Preventing the Senate from approving new sanctions before next week’s negotiations, however, assumed top priority in its Iran diplomacy this past week.

Faced with an all-out campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to depict virtually any interim deal that fell short of completely dismantling Iran’s nuclear programme as a “historic mistake”, the administration held a series of high-level meetings with senators this week.

The goal was to persuade them that the pending  accord would not only halt Tehran’s nuclear advances, but would actually roll back some of its key elements, effectively lengthening the time it would take Iran to actually build a weapon if it chose to do so.

Obama himself entered the fray Thursday, insisting during a press conference that any easing of existing sanctions as part of an interim deal would be “very modest” and easily reversible if Iran failed to comply with its end of the bargain.

“…(W)hat I’ve said to members of Congress is that if, in fact, we’re serious about trying to resolve this diplomatically — because no matter how good our military is, military options are always messy, they’re always difficult, always have unintended consequences, and in this situation are never complete in terms of making us certain that they don’t then go out and pursue even more vigorously nuclear weapons in the future — if we’re serious about pursuing diplomacy, then there’s no need for us to add new sanctions on top of the sanctions that are already very effective and that brought them to the table in the first place,” Obama said.

Even as Obama was speaking, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), with which Tehran had concluded an enhanced inspection plan earlier in the week, released a new report that found that Iran had slowed its nuclear progress since Rouhani took office in June.

Among other things, IAEA inspectors reported that Iran had not installed any new, highly efficient centrifuges at its Natanz and Fordow enrichment facilities; that its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium – considered closest to bomb grade – had increased by only five percent over the past four months; and that work on its Arak reactor had slowed significantly.

While the administration did not react officially to the report, it appeared to further confirm to officials and some on Capitol Hill that, contrary to Netanyahu’s increasingly frequent – and sometimes apocalyptic – warnings, Tehran was indeed serious about reaching an agreement that would significantly curb its nuclear programme.

On Friday, pro-Israel hawks lost a major champion when Republican Sen. John McCain told a BBC interviewer that, though he was sceptical about prospects for a satisfactory agreement, he was “willing to give the administration a couple of months” to reach an accord.

An interim agreement, according to Daryl Kimball, executive director of the well-respected Arms Control Association, is likely to include Iran’s agreement to halt all uranium enrichment to 20 percent levels and convert its existing 20 percent stockpile to oxide or lower enrichment levels.

It would also include a freeze on the introduction or operation of additional centrifuges; measures to reduce the proliferation potential of the Arak reactor, such a freeze on the manufacture of fuel assemblies; and acceptance (although not yet ratification) of a stricter IAEA inspection regime.

In exchange for these measures, the P5+1, he told IPS, may ease the current sanctions regime by releasing some Iranian oil sales-related assets that are frozen in other countries; and waiving certain sanctions on trade in gold or precious metals that were put into effect in July and/or on its auto and aircraft industries.

A final agreement, according to Kimball, would likely require Iran to roll back its overall enrichment capacity and ratify the NPT’s Additional Protocol that provides for enhanced IAEA inspections of actual and suspected nuclear facilities in exchange for the P5+1’s recognition in some form that Iran can conduct limited enrichment and a substantial scaling back of oil and financial sanctions.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Secretary of State John Kerry addresses media in Geneva, Switzerland at the conclusion of the P5+1 talks on Iran's nuclear programme. Credit: U.S. Mission/Eric Bridiers

By Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON, Nov 13 2013 (IPS)

The anticipated agreement over Iran’s controversial nuclear programme that seemed to slip away in the last stage of talks in Geneva last week is now being hotly debated on Capitol Hill.

“Right now Congress is looking at the deal that wasn’t and trying to figure out if it could be good enough to support,” Joel Rubin, who  heads policy and government affairs at the Ploughshares Fund, told IPS.

“Congress doesn’t sit on its hands and in this case they want to get involved on sanctions and whether or not to go forward with them, and this puts pressure on the [Barack] Obama administration,” he said.

Testifying Wednesday before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry – whose unexpected participation in the talks fueled speculation that a deal was in the works – said he hoped Congress would temporarily hold off on passing more sanctions because they could impede progress.

“We put these sanctions in place in order to be able to put us in the strongest position possible to be able to negotiate,” Kerry told reporters.

“We now are negotiating and the risk is that if Congress were to unilaterally move to raise sanctions, it could break faith with those negotiations and actually stop them and break them apart,” he said.

Some key members of Congress are expressing a different view.

“Tougher sanctions will serve as an incentive for Iran to verifiably dismantle its nuclear weapons program,” wrote Committee member Sen. Robert Menendez in a USA Today op-ed Wednesday.

“When Iran complies, sanctions can be unwound and economic relief will follow,” said the Democratic senator, who cosponsored a bipartisan letter to the president in August that pushed for more sanctions and a credible reinforcement of the “military force” option until Iran “slowed down” its nuclear activities.

While stating earlier this week that they would await Kerry’s testimony before deciding on legislation that further reduces Iran’s oil exports, several key players said they were still undecided after the hearing Wednesday.

Other senators have meanwhile said they hope to add amendments involving Iran sanctions to the National Defence Authorisation Bill.

But a former congressional aide and diplomat told IPS “nothing will be passed into law between now and next Geneva round.”

According to Rubin, “I think we were very close to a deal and I think we got pushback and everyone is talking to their capitals now about what can now be achieved and that’s a good thing.

“To expect a breakthrough after 30-plus years of almost no direct contact and a breakthrough within 30 hours is too high of a bar,” he added.

Diplomatic finger-pointing

Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif were initially unified in Geneva in resisting claims that France was responsible for the lack of a signed accord over Iran’s nuclear programme on Nov. 9.

But after Kerry said the next day in Abu Dhabi that Iran had not agreed to the final draft on the table, Zarif took to Twitter to shift blame away from Iran.

“Mr. Secretary, was it Iran that gutted over half of US draft Thursday night? and publicly commented against it Friday morning?” he tweeted.

Stating that he is interested in an agreement that is “serious and credible”, French Foreign Minister Fabius Laurent argued that the “initial text made progress but not enough” during an interview with France Inter radio on the morning of Nov. 9 in Geneva.

France was the first to announce that no deal had been reached in the early morning hours of Nov. 9 after a marathon round of meetings between Iran and the six world powers known as the P5+1.

Speaking on the dangers of Iran’s nuclear programme on the Senate floor Wednesday, the hawkish Senator John McCain repeated thanks to the French for their role in opposing a deal in Geneva.

“We owe our French allies a great deal of credit for preventing the major powers in the negotiations, the so-called P5-plus one, from making a bad, bad, bad interim deal with Iran, a deal that could have allowed Iran to continue making progress on key aspects of its nuclear programme, and in return it would receive an easing of billions of dollars in sanctions,” he said.

Debating how to deal with Iran

Earlier Wednesday, Senator Lindsey Graham, who shares the position of pressure-advocates Menendez, McCain and other Senate hawks on Iran, forcefully argued against Iranian uranium enrichment, something which Iran has long insisted is an inherent right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to which it is a signatory.

“If the Iranians insist upon enriching, I think that is a non-starter, that is incredibly dangerous and you’ll wake up one day with a North Korea in the Mideast,” said Graham on the Senate floor.

But while conceding that the United States certainly prefers zero enrichment on Iranian soil, one expert argued such maximalist positions will stand in the way of a mutually agreed upon settlement.

“[I]n reality, the quest for an optimal deal that requires a permanent end to Iranian enrichment at any level would likely doom diplomacy, making the far worse outcomes of unconstrained nuclearisation or a military showdown over Tehran’s nuclear program much more likely,” Colin Kahl, the top Middle East policy official at the Defence Department for most of Obama’s first term, said in prepared remarks Wednesday at a House Foreign Affairs hearing.

Questioning the effectiveness of increasing pressure on Iran at this time, Kahl recommended significant constraints on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for “meaningful sanctions relief.”

While noting that Congress should be ready to increase pressure on Iran if no agreement is reached before the end of the year, Kahl also testified that it would be “counterproductive” to impose new sanctions on Iran at this time.

“[D]oing so risks convincing the supreme leader that Rouhani’s experiment with moderation is a fool’s errand, empowering Iranian hardliners and aggravating tensions within the P5+1 and the wider international coalition currently isolating Tehran,” he said.

Hopeful statements emerging from this week’s talks between Iran and the great powers have clearly set back foes of any détente between Washington and Tehran, but they are far from giving up the fight.

Arizona Rep. Trent Franks and more than a dozen of his colleagues in the House introduced a resolution calling not only for more sanctions, but also an Authorisation of Military Force (AUMF) against Iran. Credit: Gage Skidmore/cc by 3.0

Iran hawks here are pushing hard for Congress, where they enjoy the greatest influence, to approve a new set of extra-territorial sanctions – albeit with some tactical adjustments to take account of the newly hopeful mood coming out of Geneva – before the next round of talks between Tehran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) scheduled for Nov. 7-8 in the Swiss city.

Much will depend on how hard the administration of President Barack Obama presses sceptical Democrats – particularly those most closely associated with the powerful Israel lobby here – on putting off pending legislation at least until after the next round, and the persuasiveness of the chief U.S. negotiator, Undersecretary of State for Policy Wendy Sherman, in briefing lawmakers about the past week’s talks during which she also held a rare one-hour bilateral meeting with her Iranian counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi.

Diplomats involved in the talks have so far been remarkably tight-lipped about the details of the proposals put forward by Araqchi and his boss, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif – a fact which is seen as a sign of the seriousness with which the proposals are being considered in western capitals. Sherman’s briefings will be held behind closed doors.

Before this week’s talks, the hawks, who have generally taken their cues from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, were hoping for swift passage by the Senate of new sanctions legislation that was approved last by the House of Representatives by a 400-20 margin last July, shortly after the election of the most moderate of Iran’s presidential candidates, Hassan Rouhani.

Among other provisions, it aims to effectively embargo Iran’s oil exports by penalising foreign companies or countries that buy them. It would also freeze the cash reserves Iran is holding in foreign escrow accounts by sanctioning banks that allow Tehran access to them and target other foreign companies that do business with Iran’s shipping and automotive sectors.

The legislation’s main designers include the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which has been heavily funded by wealthy U.S. businessmen close to Netanyahu’s Likud Party, such as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, and Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus.

They have made little secret of their desire to wage what its Canadian executive director, Mark Dubowitz, has called “economic warfare” against Tehran that will either force it to completely abandon its nuclear programme, including giving up any uranium enrichment on its territory, or face “regime change” through the total collapse of its economy.

Even as the P5+1 convened their meeting with Zarif on the banks of Lake Geneva, Republican hawks in Congress pressed the case. Florida senator (and likely presidential hopeful) Marco Rubio introduced a resolution that not only endorsed additional sanctions, but also demanded that the president not provide any sanctions relief sought by Iran until it had verifiably dismantled its entire nuclear programme.

At the same time, Sen. Mark Kirk, a top beneficiary of campaign cash from political action committees associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), warned British Prime Minister David Cameron that any compromise that would leave Iran with the ability to enrich uranium, even at very low levels, would be comparable to Neville Chamberlain’s “appeasement” policy toward Adolf Hitler in 1938.

Some Republican zealots went even further, with Arizona Rep. Trent Franks and more than a dozen of his colleagues introducing a resolution calling not only for more sanctions, but also an Authorisation of Military Force (AUMF) against Iran which he said would “strengthen the president’s hand” in the talks, a position which Sen. Lindsay Graham, a leading hawk, has also pushed in recent months.

To most Iran experts, however, these legislative initiatives appear designed more to scuttle the negotiations than to further the prospects for success, which is broadly defined here as an accord that includes verifiable guarantees that Tehran will not be able to reach “breakout capability” to quickly build a nuclear weapon in exchange for dismantling the bilateral and multilateral sanctions regimes that have been erected against it.

“The imposition of still more sanctions, and the rattling of more sabers through legislation that refers to military force, are the sorts of Congressional actions that would be a slap in the face of a new Iranian administration that has just placed a constructive proposal on the negotiating table, would feed already understandable Iranian suspicions that the United States is interested only in regime change and not in an agreement, and thereby would weaken the Iranian incentive to make still more concessions,” wrote Paul Pillar, a retired CIA veteran who headed the U.S. intelligence community’s Middle East and South Asia analysis from 2000 to 2005, on his blog on nationalinterest.com Thursday.

That proposa is believed to have featured Iran’s willingness to place verifiable limits on all aspects and facilities that make up its nuclear programme, including its enrichment of uranium, within one year. It was apparently sufficiently serious and comprehensive to prompt an unprecedented joint statement by Zarif and the P5+1 top negotiating official, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, that described the talks as “substantive and forward looking” and will now be the subject of talks between P5+1 and Iranian technical experts in the run-up to the Nov. 7-8 meeting.

It also appears to have put the hawks, who are particularly worried that Obama could soon begin easing existing sanctions in exchange for Iranian concessions as part of a confidence-building process, on the back foot.

On Friday, for example, the normally hawkish Washington Post editorial board, while noting that a final deal “would require far greater concessions than the regime appears to be contemplating,” nonetheless wrote that “it is worth exploring a settlement that permits a token amount of enrichment while locking down the program to minimise the chance of an undetected breakout.”

More surprising perhaps were remarks by Gary Samore, the Obama administration’s top proliferation hawk during his first term who now heads United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a pro-sanctions group closely allied with FDD and AIPAC, to the Financial Times.

Adding new sanctions now, he warned “would look to much of the rest of the world as if the U.S. was blowing up the negotiations. It would play into Iran’s hands, giving them an excuse to accelerate their programme,” he said, noting that Obama’s position vis-à-vis key Democrats in Congress has strengthened as a result of his clear victory this week over Republicans on the government shutdown.

Finally, one key Democratic hawk who had strongly favoured quickly adding new sanctions before this week’s talks, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez, also appears to be having second thoughts, telling Congressional Quarterly Thursday that he had not made a decision as to when sanctions should move forward.

In light of these events, sanctions proponents appear to be modifying their approach. While Samore appears to agree with the administration that the present moment to seek new legislation is not the most opportune, Dubowitz is actively promoting quick Senate passage on the pending bill subject to an amendment that would allow Obama to unfreeze Tehran’s cash reserves in foreign escrow accounts in exchange for Iranian concessions on the nuclear programme without weakening or risk unravelling the existing sanctions regime.

Such a scheme, however, would also give Congress the power to put a “hold” on Obama’s decision to permit Iran’s access to its funds, a provision that may well appeal to lawmakers sceptical of all the optimism coming out of Geneva, but that is unlikely to be viewed favourably by the White House, which resents legislative interference in its diplomacy.

And Tehran would no doubt see any new sanctions legislation – no matter how it is billed — as the latest attempt by the Israel lobby to derail negotiations before they can get up a real head of steam.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

President Barack Obama meets with Members of Congress to discuss Syria in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Sep. 3, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 12 2013 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s decision to put off a vote by Congress on the use of military force against Syria in order to pursue a Russian proposal to place Damascus’ chemical-weapons arsenal under international control has evoked both cheers and jeers from across the political spectrum here Wednesday.

While Obama’s supporters defended his decision – which he announced in a much-anticipated address to the nation Tuesday night – as both politically and diplomatically astute, hawks denounced it as what they see as yet another abdication of U.S. leadership in global affairs.

“The move may rescue Mr. Obama and Congress from the political agony of a vote on a resolution to authorize a military strike on Syria,” the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal wrote in its lead editorial Wednesday. “But the diplomatic souk is now open, and Mr. Obama has turned himself into one of the junior camel traders.

“A weak and inconstant U.S. President has been maneuvered by America’s enemies into claiming that a defeat for his Syria policy is really a triumph,” it declared, adding that Obama’s opting for delay and diplomacy could make an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities more likely.

On the other hand, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, one of the few Democrats who came out in strong support of Obama’s request for authorisation to take military action, praised his decision.

“Pres. Obama’s leadership brought diplomatic solutions back to the table, shows his willingness to exhaust every remedy before use of force,” she tweeted immediately after Obama concluded his speech.

The 15-minute address had originally been intended as the capstone of an intense week-long lobbying effort to persuade reluctant lawmakers to approve his request for an Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to punish Damascus for its alleged use of chemical weapons. It came less than 48 hours after Russia, Syria’s most important ally, unexpectedly tabled its proposal to bring Syria’s chemical arsenal under international control.

The proposal was immediately welcomed by Syria’s foreign minister, who subsequently declared his government’s willingness to join the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and open its sites for international inspection.

“It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed, and any agreement must verify that the [Syrian President Bashar Al-] Assad regime keeps its commitments. But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force,” Obama said, adding that he had ordered the military “to maintain our current posture and to be in a position to respond if diplomacy fails.”

He also announced that he was sending Secretary of State John Kerry to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva Thursday to begin negotiations on how the proposal will be implemented and in what time frame.

Those questions were uppermost in the minds of most analysts here who voiced varying degrees of scepticism about whether Assad was indeed prepared to give up his chemical arsenal, which is believed to be one of the world’s largest, and how feasible it would be, given the ongoing civil war and resulting lack of security in Syria.

Some hawks argued that Obama should have rejected the Russian proposal outright and launched missile strikes as he originally said he would several days after the alleged chemical attack Aug. 21 that, according to the White House, killed more than 1,400 people.

However, most observers agree that he had little choice once he asked Congress – in the wake of the British Parliament’s rejection of the UK’s participation in any military action – for the AUMF.

Initially, the administration thought that a combination of loyal Democrats and hawkish Republicans would give it the majorities it needed to pass some form of authorisation for one or two days of missile strikes that was narrowly aimed at deterring Damascus from using chemical weapons again.

But it soon became clear that public opinion strongly opposed any action that could involve the U.S. in yet another civil war in the Middle East. And, as the administration tried to appease Republican hawks like Senator John McCain, who favoured broader strikes designed to weaken Assad’s military machine, popular opposition to any military action grew.

“The administration’s best chance to get public support was to stick to the normative argument [that it was necessary to uphold the international norm against chemical weapons] and not to get involved in affecting the course of the civil war,” Stephen Kull, director of worldpublicopinion.org, told IPS.

“But the normative argument got muddied by more talk about trying to affect the outcome of the war and that – combined with the fact that there was no U.N. Security Council approval – clearly bothered people.”

Thus, despite intensive lobbying by the administration, which also enlisted the active and uncharacteristically public support of the powerful Israel lobby, opposition to military action surged from about 50 percent 10 days ago to around 70 percent of respondents, according to a flurry of polls taken over the past weekend.

By Monday, several senators who had been thought to be with the administration deserted it, casting the outcome in the Democratic-led upper chambre into doubt and forcing Majority Leader Harry Reid to put off a test vote scheduled for Wednesday. In the Republican-led House, which had always been considered an uphill climb, the chances of approval were considered close to nil.

Thus, when Moscow unexpectedly put forward its proposal, the White House, after some initial confusion, grabbed it as a way to avoid what was turning out to be a political – if not a diplomatic – catastrophe.

It also brought some considerable relief to lawmakers on Capitol Hill who clearly were uncomfortable with the unfamiliar position in which Obama had placed them – sharing responsibility for committing an act of war.

Even McCain, who found himself unable to rally most of his Republican Senate colleagues behind him but who blamed the administration’s incompetence in presenting the case for military action, said Washington had to test Russia’s proposal.

“The fact is you can’t pass up this opportunity if it is one,” he told CNN. “But you’ve got to right away determine whether it’s real or not.”

The big question now is whether Kerry and Lavrov, who will also meet with the U.N.’s Special Envoy on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, can agree on a plan to begin implementing the Russian proposal within a short period of time.

A bipartisan group of mainly hawkish senators, including McCain, are working with the administration on a revised AUMF that would authorise strikes if implementation has not begun within a fixed period of time– reportedly from 45 to 90 days – or if chemical weapons are believed to have been used again.

Whether such an AUMF would have a better chance of gaining approval in light of the events of the past two weeks, however, is the source of considerable debate.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

President Barack Obama meets with his National Security Staff to discuss the situation in Syria, in the Situation Room of the White House, Aug. 30, 2013. From left at the table: National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice; Attorney General Eric Holder; Secretary of State John Kerry; and Vice President Joe Biden. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 4 2013 (IPS)

In an important boost for President Barack Obama, two key Republicans and the Israel’s lobby’s two most influential groups Tuesday announced their support for a proposed Congressional resolution authorising limited military strikes against Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons.

“I believe that my colleagues should support this call for action,” said Rep. John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, after emerging from a White House meeting with Obama. The Republican majority leader, Eric Cantor, who also took part in the meeting, echoed his endorsement.

Several hours later, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which advertises itself as “the most influential foreign policy lobbying organisation on Capitol Hill”, came out with its own endorsement, implicitly linking military action to past pledges by Obama to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons, by military means if necessary.

“This is a critical moment when America must …send a message of resolve to Iran and Hezbollah – both of whom have provided direct and extensive military support to [Syrian President Bashar Al-] Assad. The Syrian regime and its Iranian ally have repeatedly demonstrated that they will not respect civilized norms,” the group said.

“That is why America must act, and why we must prevent further proliferation of unconventional weapons in this region,” it added.

A key Jewish group, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, also came out in favour of military action based on much the same argument.

Referring to the Assad regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons against an opposition stronghold outside Damascus that the administration has said killed more than 1,400 people, the group declared, “Those who perpetuate such acts of wanton murder must know that they can not do with impunity.

“Those who possess or seek weapons of mass destruction, particularly Iran and Hezbollah, must see that there is accountability,” according to the Conference. “Failing to take action would damage the credibility of the U.S. and negative impact the effort to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capacity.”

The endorsements came on the second day of what some administration officials called a “full-court press” to persuade lawmakers to back the resolution when Congress officially returns from its August recess next week. They do not guarantee its passage, but are seen as key milestones along the way.

They marked the latest developments following Obama’s surprise decision this past weekend to seek authorisation to carry out limited strikes against Syria – an action which most observers had expected would have taken place by now – from Congress.

That decision was bitterly denounced by neo-conservatives and other hawks, such as Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham, as an abdication of leadership and the latest in what they regard as a disastrous series of moves by Obama to extricate the U.S. from the Middle East.

It followed the unexpected defeat in the British House of Commons last Thursday of a preliminary motion by Prime Minister David Cameron to authorise military action against Syria.

The vote, which effectively deprived Washington of its most loyal military ally, stunned the administration. With many lawmakers from both sides of the aisle here also pressing for a vote, Obama, who had seemed increasingly determined in the preceding days to carry out cruise-missile strikes from warships in the eastern Mediterranean as early as last weekend, apparently decided to yield to their demands.

Still, the White House has said Obama retains the authority as commander-in-chief to go ahead without Congress’ approval.

Obama announced his decision in a televised address Saturday and subsequently submitted a draft Authorisation to Use Military Force (AUMF) which will serve as the basis for the Congressional debate.

If approved in its present form, it would give Obama the authority to use the military “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in connection with the use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in the conflict in Syria” in order to “prevent or deter” their “use or proliferation” and “protect the United States and its allies and partners against the threat posed by such weapons.”

Hawks, the most visible of whom have been McCain and Graham, initially said they could not support the resolution because it was too limited in purpose and did not appear to be “part of an overall strategy that can change the momentum on the battlefield, achieve the President’s stated goal of Assad’s removal from power, and bring an end to this conflict.”

After meeting with Obama at the White House Monday, however, the two men came out in support of the resolution both because, in McCain’s words, a no vote would be “catastrophic” for Washington’s international credibility and because of their understanding that the president was committed to “very serious’ strikes against Syria beyond the “shot across the bow” that he had spoken of earlier in the week.

In addition, they suggested that Obama had assured them that Washington will step up military aid to Syrian rebels, something which he has long been reluctant to do.

But appeasing the hawks may make it more difficult to overcome the concerns of the anti-war faction in his own party, as well as the embryonic coalition of libertarians, neo-isolationists, and fiscal conservatives among Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives whose members are traditionally more sceptical of foreign entanglements than the Senate where Obama should have an easier ride.

While the top two House Democrats have endorsed the proposed resolution, others have said they will support it only if it is drawn more narrowly, such as explicitly excluding the use of ground troops and setting limits on its duration in time and its geographical scope to within Syria’s borders. Of course, if Obama agrees to such limits, he risks losing support from the hawks.

As for the Republicans, Boehner and Cantor are considered relatively weak leaders who have repeatedly failed to keep their caucus in line on many issues. Newer members, many of whom associate themselves with the “Tea Party” movement and are reflexively anti-Obama, been particularly unruly.

Moreover, with public opinion among both Democrats and Republicans – although Republicans are somewhat more evenly split – running against military action, Obama could face a difficult climb in getting the House behind him. A Pew Research Centre poll conducted over the weekend found 48 percent of respondents opposed to airstrikes on Syria, while 29 percent approved.

While only 33 percent of respondents said they thought such strikes would be effective in deterring the use of chemical weapons, 74 percent said they thought a regional backlash against the U.S. was likely to occur if the attacks took place, and 61 percent said strikes would likely lead to a long-term military commitment.

Still, active lobbying by AIPAC and the Israel lobby which, until Tuesday, had publicly maintained a discreet silence about how Washington should react to the alleged chemical attacks, could prove decisive to the outcome in Congress.

The New York Times this weekend called AIPAC “the 800-pound gorilla in the room” whose unquestioned influence was needed by the administration to prevail. (Significantly, the Times omitted the quote in updated online versions of the story.)

While the group argued in a reference to the alleged chemical-weapons attack that “barbarism on a mass scale must not be given a free pass,” it suggested that Iran and its nuclear programme – which successive Israeli governments have denounced as the number one threat – loomed as large or larger in considering how to respond.

For the first time in many months, supporters of intensified diplomatic engagement with Iran appear to be gaining strength here.

Following last month’s surprise election of Hassan Rouhani – widely considered the most moderate of a field of six candidates – as the Islamic Republic’s next president, the possibility of a deal over Iran’s nuclear programme has become more widely accepted.“There’s clearly an understanding forming in Congress about the stakes involved in these negotiations.” -- Joel Rubin of the Ploughshares Fund

That was reflected most dramatically this week by the fact that 131 members of the hawkish, Republican-led House of Representatives – including a majority of House Democrats – signed a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to “reinvigorat(e) U.S. efforts to secure a negotiated nuclear agreement”.

The letter, whose signatories included 17 Republicans, suggested that Washington should be prepared to relax bilateral and multilateral sanctions against Iran in exchange for “significant and verifiable concessions” at the negotiating table. It also implicitly warned against adding new sanctions at such a sensitive moment.

“We must also be careful not to pre-empt this potential opportunity by engaging in actions that delegitimize the newly elected president and weaken his standing relative to hardliners within the regime who oppose his professed ‘policy of reconciliation and peace’,” the letter stated.

Remarkably, most of the signatories – who together made up nearly a third of the House’s 435 members – signed on to the letter after a particularly bellicose appearance by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a widely-viewed public-affairs television programme last Sunday in which he urged Washington to increase pressure, including threats of military action, against Tehran and called Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful vanguard of the Israel lobby in Washington, took no public position on the letter. However, the group, which generally promotes the policies of the Israeli government, made clear that they would prefer that lawmakers not sign it, according to knowledgeable sources.

“This is critical because it shows that there is a strong and bipartisan constituency even in the U.S. Congress, which has been one of the most inflexible elements in the U.S. government, that understands there is a historic opportunity before us and wishes to ensure that we do our utmost to explore it,” Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told IPS.

“Letters of this kind almost never get more than 30 signatures, and this one got well over that number, including some senior members and important Republicans, as well. It tells us that things are changing,” he added.

Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network (NSN), echoed that assessment. “The willingness of 131 members to sign this letter reflects a bipartisan expert consensus that’s been emerging over the last eight months or so that negotiations need space and focus to succeed,” she said. “That consensus has been strengthened by the election results in Iran.”

The latest developments came as senior U.S. officials met their counterparts in the so-called P5+1 (U.S., France, Britain, Russia, China plus Germany) in Brussels in anticipation of a new round of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme that is likely to take place in September, at least one month after Rouhani takes office Aug. 4.

Created in 2006, the P5+1’s last meeting with Tehran took place in April in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The group reportedly tabled an offer to ease sanctions on Iran’s trade in gold and other precious metals and its petrochemical exports as a confidence-building measure (CBM) in exchange for Tehran’s suspending its 20-percent enrichment of uranium and transferring its existing stockpile out of the country.

U.S. officials have told reporters that Iran has not yet formally responded to the offer and that therefore Washington is not yet prepared to modify the package. At the same time, the officials said Tehran should not see it as a “take-it-or-leave-it” proposal and that if it wanted a more comprehensive deal, the P5+1 would be prepared to discuss it.

Earlier this week, 29 former senior U.S. experts and foreign diplomats, including some with experience in negotiating with Iran, sent their own letter to Obama.

It urged him to show greater flexibility, a point on which three of the signatories, former U.S. Ambs. Thomas Pickering and William Luers, as well as a top nuclear-arms expert, Jim Walsh of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, elaborated in an essay in this week’s New York Review of Books.

“The United States is the dominant world power and, ‘negotiating from strength,’ should take the initiative and communicate directly with the new (Iranian) leadership,” said the essay, which included a detailed, step-by-step plan for reciprocal concessions leading to a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme.

Among other recommendations, it called for Obama to send a brief, private message of congratulations to Rouhani on the latter’s inauguration; suggest, via friendly states, that the two meet personally, “perhaps as early as during the September UN General Assembly,” and, parallel to those steps, establish “regular, even routine, bilateral discussions” on regional issues, “perhaps beginning with Iraq and Afghanistan (and even Syria).”

The latest developments appear to substantially reduce the chances that Congress will enact new unilateral sanctions against Iran before the end of the summer, and possibly the end of the year, according to sources on Capitol Hill.

Until this week, it was considered a foregone conclusion that the House would pass a tough new package designed to tighten existing sanctions and impose a de facto oil embargo against Iran before its August recess. The leadership in the Democratic-led Senate has indicated it has no plans to act before September, if then.

The widely respected Capitol Hill CQ Roll Call newspaper reported Friday that new economic penalties against Tehran are unlikely until the end of the year “at the earliest” and that “the slowdown …is starting to worry hawks on Capitol Hill and in Israel.”

“There’s clearly an understanding forming in Congress about the stakes involved in these negotiations,” said Joel Rubin, director of policy and government affairs at the Ploughshares Fund, a California-based global-security foundation.

“What this means is that for bills to go forward, there will need to be clarity about whether the negotiation track has serious potential, and those discussions will intensify in the fall, so there will be hesitation by many in Congress to get too far ahead of the administration,” he added.

Moreover, the fact that 131 House members signed the just-released letter could persuade the House Republican leadership to put off a vote on the pending package, according to sources on Capitol Hill.

They said the leadership, which works closely with AIPAC on Iran-related legislation, prefers to win by overwhelming margins – often approaching unanimity — on such bills, and that the possibility of substantial division suggested by the letter may act as a deterrent.

“Public support in Congress for engaging Iran at the negotiating table has grown markedly since Rouhani’s election,” according to Dylan Williams, director of government affairs for J Street, a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group.

“This letter sends a clear signal – both here and overseas – that there exists a politically viable path to resolving concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme through diplomacy,” he added, noting that among the signers were 22 members of the foreign affairs and armed services committees.

Earlier this month, all but one of the 46 members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee signed a letter to Obama urging him to increase pressure on Iran through enhanced sanctions despite Rouhani’s election.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Workers arrive early in the morning at the One World Apparel factory in Port-au-Prince to assemble garments for export from Haiti. The current preferences list excludes several major sectors, including clothing. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 18 2013 (IPS)

A broad spectrum of interests are urging U.S. lawmakers to extend a law offering trade preferences to developing countries, slated to expire at the end of the month.

U.S. business lobbyists as well as development experts are stepping up calls to re-authorise the agreement, known as the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP), ahead of a Jul. 31 deadline. Failure to do so, advocates warn, would cost U.S. companies some two million dollars per day and likely lead businesses to shift contracts away from some of the least-developed countries covered by the GSP agreement.“If you raise tariff levels for products coming from these countries, you will see business agreements shifting to other countries where the economics are more stable.” -- Daniel Anthony of the Coalition for GSP

While a bill to extend this system was finally introduced on Wednesday in a House of Representatives committee, those pushing for an extension are warning that these consequences will still come to pass if Congress chooses to act after the deadline, as lawmakers have done repeatedly in the past.

“We are so happy that the renewal process has taken this very important step,” Laura Baughman, executive director of the Coalition for GSP, a Washington advocacy group representing U.S. businesses, told IPS in a statement.

“[But] the clock is ticking more loudly as the days advance toward July 31. Not only will expiration adversely affect more than a hundred developing countries who use GSP, but it will hurt their U.S. customers and workers who use products imported under GSP to make other products in the United States.”

In the United States (other developed countries have similar agreements), GSP has been in effect since the mid-1970s, aimed in part at strengthening developing economies. Today, it eliminates tariffs on goods imported to the United States from some 127 developing countries, with additional coverage for 43 countries dubbed “least developed”.

The set-up provides for lower prices for imported products used by U.S.-based manufacturers or retailers. Foreign-made car parts, for instance, are an important item under GSP, which last year impacted on around 20 billion dollars’ worth of U.S.-imported products.

“Through GSP, some of the poorest countries in the world get a shot at sharing in the benefits of international trade,” Charles Rangel, a member of the House of Representatives and a co-sponsor of the re-authorisation bill, said Wednesday.

“It is vital to our commitment to promote economic development, democracy, worker rights, rule of law, and other fundamental values in the world. This is a programme that has received broad, bipartisan support virtually every time it has come up for renewal. We need to move on it now.”

Advocates worry that if Congress fails to re-authorise GSP by the Jul. 31 deadline, the resulting price hikes for imported products will severely impact on small and medium-sized businesses in the United States. In turn, this lack of pricing stability could lead companies to find more stable sourcing contracts elsewhere.

“If you raise tariff levels for products coming from these countries, you will see business agreements shifting to other countries where the economics are more stable,” Daniel Anthony, director of research and government relations at the Coalition for GSP, told IPS at a briefing last week.

“But unfortunately there’s no way to know the full effects of those decisions, given the vast number of factors involved.”

During each previous period after which GSP expired and awaited retroactive re-authorisation by Congress, the value of GSP imports fell precipitously. In 2010, for instance, the re-authorisation process took nearly a full year, and the value of those contracts fell by nearly five billion dollars.

Unlike the vast majority of legislation moving sluggishly through the U.S. Congress today, GSP has historically enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Yet despite this support, the Congress has repeatedly re-authorised the system for just a few years at a time, thus leading to the current situation in which an already dysfunctional Congress is overloaded with work.

In terms of trade discussions alone, the U.S. is currently engaged in massive negotiations towards two huge free trade agreements, while several other trade bills are pending. On Wednesday, one of the primary authors of the re-authorisation bill, Congressman Dave Camp, stated that he hoped to get the GSP legislation done by the end of the year.

Least-developed focus

It is difficult to gauge the impact of the U.S. GSP on developing countries, partly because the United States has several other trade preference programmes. According to a report released in January by the official Congressional Research Service, total U.S. imports from all GSP countries has grown substantially in recent years, a trend that the report cautiously suggests could have helped create “some export-driven growth in developing countries”.

Yet the report also concludes: “for individual industries in developing countries, the positive impact of the GSP could be seen as quite significant.”

Very few are currently calling for GSP to be ended outright. But development advocates and some economists have been pushing for alternative trade preference schemes that could potentially have a far greater impact on the world’s least-developed economies.

The top five countries exporting goods to the United States under GSP, after all, are India, Thailand, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa, nearly all currently considered “middle income”. Indeed, this is a fact that some members of Congress have increasingly pointed out amidst calls for reforms.

In addition, the current preferences list excludes several major sectors, including clothing, where relatively cheap labour in developing economies could offer a major advantage.

Indeed, the recent high-profile decision by the United States to rescind GSP preferences to Bangladesh in the wake of a series of incidents highlighting poor – even lethal – working conditions in that country’s massive garments sector was undermined by the fact that garments, which constitute some 90 percent of Bangladesh’s exports to the United States, were not actually covered under GSP.

“The administration should seek congressional approval for duty-free, quota-free market access for all least developed countries, with a safeguard for existing African clothing exports,” Kimberly Elliott, a trade and globalisation scholar at the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank, wrote in a June letter to the new U.S. trade representative (USTR), Michael Froman.

“The aim should be to limit the benefits for already competitive exporters only as much as necessary to shield African exports.”

Thus far, there has reportedly been no substantive response to this suggestion from Froman’s office.

Elliott notes in a follow-up blog: “Since U.S. movement on duty-free, quota-free market access would also be a big contribution to making the meeting of trade ministers in Bali in December a success, I’m puzzled by USTR’s resistance to this.”

The U.S. Congress is on the brink of making billions of dollars in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, which provides direct benefits to individuals and families in poverty.

SNAP benefits are already set to decrease in November 2013, when increased benefits that were included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or federal stimulus package, expire.

A selection of foods available on a food stamp budget. Credit: Miss Karen/cc by 2.0

Benefits – which currently represent a “bare bones diet” prepared by the federal government – will already decrease between eight and 25 dollars per month, depending on household size. The average benefit is already as low as one dollar and 46 cents per person per meal.

But that is not enough for the current Congress, which is seeking to squeeze even more money out of the emergency food programme.

Groups like the Progressive Democrats of America have been circulating an online petition to oppose the cuts.

“There is a push to end entitlements, and if you‘ve got a push to end entitlements, no matter what formula they use, people will be hurting,” Dr. Joyce Dorsey, first vice chair for the National Community Action Partnership, told IPS.

“Food is a major issue for people who really just can’t afford groceries. What we realise is the average low-income person is on minimum wage or a fixed income. Most poor people do work. They may not work full-time jobs,” Dorsey said.

“There are no other income sources to turn to – the jobs are still hard to find, or jobs are not paying wages that allow a person to live at the standard level in their region, then naturally they’re going to need their assistance.”

Today, a record 47.5 million U.S. citizens receive emergency food assistance through the SNAP programme, according to the most recent data from the Department of Agriculture, making up more than 15 percent of all U.S. residents.

The debate is centring around the Agriculture, Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2013 – commonly known as the Farm Bill – which Congress typically reenacts every five years to set national policies for agriculture, nutrition, conservation, and forestry.

On May 15, the Republican-led House Agriculture Committee voted to approve nearly 21 billion dollars in cuts to SNAP. The cuts would represent a loss of benefits to nearly two million people, including children, by changing the eligibility requirements.

These are people who are currently eligible to receive food stamps because they have disposable incomes below the poverty line, even if they have assets or gross incomes that push them above the SNAP eligibility threshold.

Currently, federal law allows these people to be deemed eligible for SNAP if they are deemed eligible for another state-run programme under the Temporary Aid for Needy Families block grant.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), many low-income U.S. households that own a modest car would be impacted. It may also include working families with high childcare costs, or seniors with high medical bills.

The House bill also would eliminate SNAP incentive payments to states that have improved payment accuracy and service delivery; would cut nutrition education funding; and would curtail an option that allows states to approve families for SNAP benefits if they already qualify for low income heating assistance – something the Senate version of the Farm Bill also does.

On May 14, the Democratic-led Senate Agriculture Committee voted during a hearing to approve 4.1 billion dollars in cuts to SNAP.

“It stops overpayments to a small number of individuals in the programme… A small number can claim a heating bill they don’t have, on food assistance, to get additional benefits above and beyond,” Cullin Schwarz, a spokesman for the Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat from Michigan who chairs the Committee, told IPS.

Schwarz claims states are using administrative tactics – qualifying people for separate energy assistance payments of under 10 dollars per year – purportedly for the sole purpose of increasing their food stamp eligibility.

“Fifteen states are providing a very small amount of home heating assistance, as little as one dollar or 10 cents per year. There are some folks who don’t have a heating bill, it’s included in their rent. That [dollar] doesn’t really help someone pay heating – what it does, they can claim both rent and a heating bill they don’t have on their application,” he said.

If enacted, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 500,000 people will receive on average 90 dollars less under the Senate bill.

But Stabenow’s office insists this is not a cut to the benefit structure. “They’re going to get exactly what they’re supposed to get on the programme based on their real expenses,” Schwarz said.

When asked what would likely come out of House and Senate negotiations, Schwarz said, “If Republicans can up with additional ways to reduce spending that does not reduce standard benefits or harm truly needy families… we’re open to discussing those.”

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, offered an amendment to strike the SNAP cuts from the Farm Bill, and to offset the costs by limiting crop insurance reimbursements to providers.

Congress is encouraging farmers to purchase crop insurance, and Congress is subsidising the crop insurance companies, as it is also ending a longstanding policy of direct payments to farmers. This switch saves 16.5 billion dollars from the federal budget.

Gillibrand contends the reimbursements, however, are corporate welfare, in some cases for overseas companies.

“Families who are living in poverty, our children, our veterans, our seniors, some of our active duty personnel are going to suffer if we cut food stamps. I believe we should not be balancing the debt or the deficit on the backs of these hardworking Americans who are just hungry,” Gillibrand said during the hearing.

“And I think it is a moral statement, and obviously I will fight against any cuts to the food stamp programme and I want people to think about what they’re actually doing when they offer, the nature of these amendments,” Gillibrand said.

Gillibrand brought the amendment to the Senate floor debate on the Farm Bill.

The amendment failed in a vote of 26 to 70, with more than half of the Democratic caucus joining nearly all Republicans in voting no.

However, an amendment by Senator David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, to end SNAP eligibility for convicted violent rapists, pedophiles, and murderers, passed by unanimous consent.

High-quality pre-school programmeshave been shown to improve early literacy, language and math skills by almost 50 percent. Credit: Cathy Stanley-Erickson/cc by 2.0

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, May 30 2013 (IPS)

Over 300 business, civil society and academic groups here are urging U.S. lawmakers to support early childhood education, months after President Barack Obama hinted that his administration would be pushing for a change in U.S. policy to support universal preschool.

Organisations supporting an open letter sent Wednesday include Macy’s, a national department store chain, the Committee for Economic Development and the University of Miami.“The bigger challenge for me is most politicians, regardless of party, are wired to think short term and for the next election." -- Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

“The letter is specifically about getting the business community, both organisationally and individually, to demonstrate that there are groups outside of the typical parent organisations that care about this issue,” Colleen Wilber, vice-president of media relations at America’s Promise Alliance, the U.S.’s largest partnership dedicated to improving the lives of children, told IPS.

In February, during his annual State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined his administration’s plans for overhauling early childhood education. In the United States, only around 30 percent of four-year-olds are currently thought to be enrolled in high-quality programmes.

“Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for private preschool,” President Obama stated. “And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives.”

According to the PEW Center for States, a research group here, children from disadvantaged homes can start kindergarten as far as 18 months behind, after which point it has been found to be extremely difficult for them to catch up. High-quality pre-school programmes, on the other hand, have been shown to improve early literacy, language and math skills by almost 50 percent.

Those groups involved in Wednesday’s open letter are now pushing for pre-school education for prenatal to five year olds, as well as home visits for families considered “at risk” starting at pregnancy, better teacher training and smaller teacher-to-student ratios.

“Many of us compete in the global marketplace. We see other countries investing in their young children both for the long-term benefits of a stronger workforce and the current benefits that come from enhancing the productivity of parents. To compete, we have to do the same,” stated the ReadyNation open letter.

Though there is still work to be done, Sarah Watson, director of ReadyNation, a part of America’s Promise Alliance aimed at emphasising business leaders’ support of early childhood development, which organised the new letter, says President Obama’s proposed reforms would constitute the largest expansion of the country’s early childhood development programme in a decade.

“It would be an enormous leap forward for the country,” she told IPS.

“It’s important to note that even if the entire plan were enacted, children would still have other needs. But the important point is that this is a very ambitious proposal, and if we enact even a significant proportion of it, it would make a huge difference.”

Need to coordinate

ReadyNation’s initiative is placing a significant focus on business perspectives. This move has allowed the group to compare the returns on investment in education to other expenditures.

Watson says that being able to offer such hard economic data made a huge difference in bringing together the business community and other constituencies. Studies have shown a return of seven dollars for every dollar spent on early education and development.

According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, speaking on Wednesday, many in the U.S. have yet to realise these economics.

“The United States badly lags behind other nations supporting early learning development,” Duncan said at a panel discussion here. “That’s an embarrassment and a missed opportunity for a huge return on investment.”

The Preschool Initiative, a large expansion to early childhood education programmes and home visits proposed by President Obama, though available to all U.S. children, is specifically aimed at struggling single parents and teenage parents.

Yet early education has been found to improve high school graduation rates by up to 16 percent, and college attendance by more than 50 percent, according to the PEW Center for States study.

According to Nancy Johnson, a former member of Congress, taking an inventory of successful early education and kindergarten programmes would now allow both state and the federal government to better understand what needs to be done to achieve this goal.

“What I worry about is that little rural school, and that [Preschool Initiative money] isn’t making it down to those schools,” Johnson said Wednesday, speaking alongside Duncan. “Both parties talk about smart government, but nobody does anything about it.”

Despite this new momentum, legislative progress for Obama’s plan still looks very complicated. Immediately after the president floated the reforms proposal in February, Republican members of Congress rejected it out of hand due to its expense.

Many Republicans expressed interest in fixing already existing initiatives, as opposed to created new ones that will cost an estimated 90 billion dollars. Several Republicans could not spot the difference between this new proposal and Head Start, a programme that has failed in the eyes of many. Obama appears to have a bit of an uphill battle in pushing this proposal through Congress.

“The bigger challenge for me is most politicians, regardless of party, are wired to think short term and for the next election,” Duncan said. “And this is the ultimate long-term investment.”

President Obama with Sen. Tom Harkin at the door of the Oval Office. Harkin introduced the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, which currently has 29 co-sponsors. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, May 29 2013 (IPS)

During his State of the Union address earlier this year, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke about the need to increase the federal minimum wage, which Congress has not voted to raise since 2007.

But while several legislative proposals have been introduced to raise the federal minimum wage, they have not gone anywhere."Inequality in the U.S. has been growing for decades and those at the very top are getting most of the rewards for growing productivity in this economy." -- Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America’s Future

In the U.S. Senate, where federal minimum wage increase legislation is more likely to pass because it is majority Democratic, one committee hearing has been held but no vote as of yet.

The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, introduced by retiring Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, has 29 co-sponsors.  Its House counterpart, introduced by Rep. George Miller, a Democrat from California, has 140 co-sponsors.

On Mar. 15, the House considered the legislation indirectly, when a motion was made to add the federal minimum wage increase to unrelated workforce development legislation. That motion failed 184 to 233, with not a single Republican voting yes, and a few Democrats joining nearly all Republicans in voting no.

“We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages.  But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns 14,500 dollars a year.  Even with the tax relief we put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line.  That’s wrong,” Obama said during his Feb. 12 remarks to the nation.

“Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to nine dollars an hour.  We should be able to get that done,” he said.

“When I heard that, I nearly jumped through the TV and kissed him,” Rev. Harriet Bradley, co-chair of the Atlanta chapter of 9to5, an advocacy organisation that promotes the policy concerns of working class women, told IPS. “He was telling the truth.”

The current federal minimum wage is seven dollars and 25 cents per hour.  This is what Rev. Bradley makes in her full-time job as a caregiver.  She provides home-based health care for people who qualify under Medicare.

Bradley also receives a two-dollar per hour mileage reimbursement, but no healthcare or any other benefit from her job. She lives in an extended stay hotel – where she pays rent by the week, rather than by the month – because she finds it to be more economical than an efficiency apartment.

When asked how she survives on such a wage, she cites “the Lord.  Jesus Christ does this every day.”

The most recent minimum wage increase was in 2009, the last increase implemented pursuant to Congress’s 2007 vote.

The federal minimum wage today is worth 31 percent less than what it was at its peak in 1968, even as productivity has increased.  If the federal minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since 1960, today it would be more than 10 dollars per hour.  If it had actually kept pace with the increased productivity of U.S. workers, it would be 22 dollars per hour.

Because the federal minimum wage is below the poverty line, many workers are forced to rely on safety net programmes such as public or subsidised housing, food stamps, and the like.

On Mar. 14, the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) Committee held a hearing regarding increasing the federal minimum wage, and, for what would be the first time in U.S. history, requiring future increases to be tied to inflation.

Only three senators attended the hearing: Sen. Harkin; Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee; and Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts.

A strong advocate for working class people, Harkin is retiring at the end of this term. However, passing the federal minimum wage increase before then is a top priority for him.

At the hearing, Warren was very critical and aggressive in her questioning of two small business owners who claimed that forcing them to raise their wages would also force them to lay off workers.

Nineteen of the 50 U.S. states have state minimum wages that are higher than the federal minimum wage, meaning that people who live in those states earn those higher wages; and 10 of them have minimum wages that are indexed to inflation.

At the hearing, Dr. Arindrajit Dube, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, testified that in states that had raised the minimum wage at the state level, there had been few or no job losses as a result.

Raising the federal minimum wage is “important because inequality in the U.S. has been growing for decades and those at the very top are getting most of the rewards for growing productivity in this economy,” Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, told IPS.

“An increase in the minimum wage, which hasn’t happened in many years, would not only be good for those families that are trying to put bread on the table… It would be good for economic growth if more low-wage people had a wage increase,” he said.

“You would suddenly have more demand in the economy for the goods and services that corporations produce and we’d have more growth, and therefore, more jobs, so it’s a win, win, win. I think generally it’s accepted that will be acted upon after the immigration bill is debated and hopefully passed. ..If Republicans stall or defeat a vote in the House, it will certainly become an election year issue.”

The U.S. Congress moved closer here Wednesday to imposing a full trade embargo against Iran and pledged its support to Israel if it felt compelled to attack Tehran’s nuclear programme in self-defence.

The Senate voted 99-0 to adopt a resolution that urged President Barack Obama to fully enforce existing economic sanctions against Iran and to “provide diplomatic, military and economic support” to Israel “in its defense of its territory, people and existence”.“Attacking the president's waiver authority is a cynical attempt to weaken his hand at the negotiating table and sabotage diplomatic efforts." -- NIAC's Jamal Abdi

Washington, it said, should support Israel “in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force” if Israel “is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

The measure also re-affirmed the official policy of the administration of President Barack Obama that it would take whatever action necessary to “prevent” Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

At the same time, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Republican-led House of Representatives unanimously approved new sanctions legislation that, if passed into law, would blacklist foreign countries or companies that fail to reduce their oil imports from Iran to virtually nil within 180 days.

The same bill would expand the current blacklisting of companies that do business with Iran’s financial sector to include those engaged in the country’s automotive and mining sectors, as well.

In perhaps its most controversial section, the bill also eliminates President Obama’s ability to waive most sanctions for national-interest or national-security reasons.

Such waiver authority, which has been routinely included in existing sanctions legislation, has been used by Obama to ensure that countries that have historically enjoyed important trade and financial relations with Tehran continue cooperating with Western-led international efforts to pressure Iran to curb its nuclear programme.

The president’s waiver authority is also considered critical to prospects for a negotiated agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia plus Germany) by which such curbs would be accepted by Tehran in return for easing sanctions.

Both moves come as the Senate Republicans unveiled yet another bill even more far-reaching than that approved by the House Foreign Affairs Committee by blacklisting companies that do any trade with Iran and deprive the president of all waiver authority. Under the draft legislation, which so far lacks any Democratic co-sponsors, sanctions could be eased or lifted only by an act of Congress.

Approval of both the Senate resolution and the House bill were hailed by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the premier group of the Israel lobby here.

“The passage of this resolution is an extremely significant and timely state of solidarity with Israel and a restatement of America’s determination to thwart Iran’s nuclear quest – which endangers America, Israeli, and international security,” it said about the Senate action.

The House bill, it noted with approval, would impose a de facto commercial embargo against Iran and would “maximise the effectiveness of American economic and diplomatic efforts as Iran nears a nuclear weapons capability.”

But other observers said the latest Congressional moves marked a dangerous escalation in tensions at a critical moment.

“Congress should abstain from any more reckless threats or sanctions that push us closer to the brink of war with Iran,” Jamal Abdi of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said of the Senate action.

“Attacking the president’s waiver authority is a cynical attempt to weaken his hand at the negotiating table and sabotage diplomatic efforts,” he added about the House bill. “If the president can’t lift sanctions in exchange for concessions, the Iranians will have little incentive to cooperate.”

The latest Congressional moves came as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released its latest quarterly report on Iran’s nuclear programme detailing the installation of more advanced centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium, a buildup of stockpiles of 3.5-percent and 20-percent enriched uranium, and advances in the construction of its heavy-water reactor at Arak.

While a number of senators made much of the latest report, suggesting that Tehran was on the verge of building a nuclear weapon, experts here said that the report offered no major surprises and that Iran’s 20-percent enriched stockpile – which could most easily be further enriched to bomb grade – remained substantially below what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last September defined as Israel’s “red line”.

“The report findings underscore the urgent need to intensify negotiations with Tehran to resolve the political questions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program and to resolve the outstanding questions regarding the potential military dimensions of the program,” according to an analysis by the Arms Control Association (ACA) here.

“But, at the same time, the findings reinforce earlier assessments that Iran remains years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

Iran has repeatedly denied that its nuclear programme is designed to develop a weapon, and, since 2007, the U.S. intelligence community has insisted that the country’s leadership has not yet decided to build one. But the progress Iran has made in building and mastering the technology would shorten the time it would need to construct a bomb if such a decision were made, according to nuclear experts.

On the diplomatic front, meanwhile, progress has been more or less frozen since the latest P5+1 meeting with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan in early April when Tehran rejected a Western offer to ease sanctions on gold and precious-metal trade and some Iranian exports in exchange for suspending 20-percent enrichment and transferring its existing 20-percent stockpile out of the country.

Most observers believe the new talks are unlikely until after Iran’s elections next month and the inauguration of a new president, despite the fact that decisions on nuclear issues are ultimately made by the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Among the favoured candidates approved this week by the Guardian Council is Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, who is considered by veteran Iran watchers a hard-liner who has often frustrated his P5+1 interlocutors.

Some had hoped that former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who entered the race at the last minute and has occasionally urged better relations with the West, would offer a major challenge, but his candidacy was rejected by the Council.

Another approved candidate in the race, Hasan Rowhani, served as former president Mohammed Khatami’s chief nuclear negotiator. In that post, he struck a deal to suspend enrichment with the so-called EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany). But his lack of prominence makes him an underdog in a race dominated by conservatives closely associated with Khamenei.

Whether the flurry of new threats and sanctions by Congress will affect the election – or the calculations of Khamenei himself – remains to be seen.

Even the strongest supporters of sanctions have conceded that the economic pressure they’ve exerted on the regime to date has not produced the desired result and may even have strengthened regime hardliners who are convinced that Washington’s ultimate aim is “regime change” – a conviction that is likely to be strengthened by a review of Wednesday’s Senate debate.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Under CISPA, anybody whose computer became targeted by a virus - meaning most, if not all, computers - would be subject to having their information released. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Apr 30 2013 (IPS)

For the second year in a row, activists have successfully defeated a proposal to allow Internet companies to provide customers’ private information to government agencies and each other without risking violation of privacy laws and agreements.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), HR 624, passed the U.S. House on Apr. 18 in a 288-127 vote. Most Republicans and just under half of Democrats supported the measure."While the bill’s sponsors talk about China hacking in or a terrorist organisation taking down the grid, they’re writing legislation that’s much broader." -- ACLU's Michelle Richardson

CISPA had been referred to the Senate Intelligence Committee, but the Senate was unable to support the House version and had yet to come up with its own proposal.

CISPA is not expected to resurface again as a single comprehensive bill on cybersecurity, but will likely be taken up as multiple pieces of legislation dealing with different aspects of cybersecurity.

President Barack Obama announced his opposition to, and threatened to veto, CISPA, both before the House Committee vote and again after it.

“The Administration still seeks additional improvements and if the bill, as currently crafted, were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill,” the White House wrote in a policy statement dated Apr. 16.

“Importantly, the Committee removed the broad national security exemption, which significantly weakened the restrictions on how this information could be used by the government,” the White House wrote.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that is one of several improvements – although, in the group’s opinion, still inadequate – that were made to the bill in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

As for the purposes for which the information could be released or used, “They had this catch-all, for national security purposes, that wasn’t defined. Based on how the government has defined national security in the past, with the Patriot Act, we thought that was a very big loophole, so they sort of struck that out altogether,” Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU, told IPS.

The White House echoed many of the same concerns raised by such advocacy groups as the ACLU, the Campaign for Liberty, Demand Progress, Democrats.com, a progressive organisation not affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as the Libertarian Party of the U.S.

Demand Progress sent out a petition to its 1.5 million members and around 200,000 signed a petition opposing CISPA, co-founder David Segal told IPS. Demand Progress is a civil liberties advocacy group co-founded in 2010 by Segal and the late Aaron Swartz.

Swartz is an Internet activist who committed suicide in January 2013 after being threatened with federal prison time for releasing copywrite-protected academic journal articles from the website JSTOR to the public for free.

Demand Progress first began organising in 2010 around the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), two other bills dealing with government regulation of online freedom that were defeated in January 2012.

However, Segal says there has been a crucial difference between the organising efforts around SOPA and PIPA, which had to do with the government’s ability to block certain websites, and CISPA, which has to do with the government’s ability to obtain private information.

“The opposition to SOPA was so severe, we haven’t had to worry for the last year. This one [CISPA], the military-industrial complex, corporations, including web platforms that were against SOPA, are for CISPA, explicitly or tacitly,” Segal said, referring to companies like Amazon.com and Google.

“Those platforms, for the most part, are not opposing CISPA, or are supporting it. It gives them greater immunity from users if they share users’ information with the government,” he said.

The ACLU noted additional improvements were made to the bill in House committee, but still called it “scary”.

“They did say that the government does need to promulgate minimisation procedures, the idea that there would be an overarching set of rules to limit the sharing and use of personal data,” Richardson said.

“It’s also fixed to say as far as private is concerned, if you receive information from another company, you can only use it for cybersecurity purposes. They could have used it for marketing, or sold it to data-brokers,” she said.

Even with the changes, the CISPA proposal was “really scary because cybersecurity truly does affect us all. While the bill’s sponsors talk about China hacking in or a terrorist organisation taking down the grid, they’re writing legislation that’s much broader and encompassing bad acts on the Internet, phishing scams, and malware,” she said.

Anybody whose computer became targeted by a virus – meaning most, if not all, computers – would be subject to having their information released.

“I have started those Viagra [spam] emails, I keep getting through my work account. You could get a Nigerian Prince [scam] email. You’re on Facebook and there’s those viruses that say, ‘Oh my God, you have to watch these videos.’ All of these are everyday, just basic crimes, all of those things also implicated by this bill,” she said.

Richardson said that because the proposed law did not mandate that private companies turn over the information – and instead only provided legal protections for companies that would choose to voluntarily do so – the bill was an attempt to circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the constitution, which protects U.S. citizens from warrantless searches and seizures.

The ACLU further outlines their concerns regarding CISPA in a series of blog posts.

Segal also has raised concerns about the recent bombing in Boston, Massachusetts, being used by some as a backdrop to rush CISPA through Congress with little or no public debate.

“Some number of people who supported the legislation were invoking the bombings. It was up for a vote anyway, it was pre-scheduled. Some people were swayed to vote for it, because of the atmospherics of the bombing and they were called by other people in Congress,” Segal said.

An immigration reform rally in Long Beach, California, Mar. 29, 2013. Credit: a_auzanneau/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Apr 18 2013 (IPS)

A long-awaited legislative proposal to reform the United States’ immigration system is sparking frustration on both the left and right here, but is widely being seen as a centrist compromise bill that will now energise all sides as debate in Congress begins Friday.

The massive overhaul plan, released Wednesday by a bipartisan group of eight senators, offers nearly 900 pages of changes. If it passes what is sure to be contentious negotiations over the coming months, any final legislation would be the first major immigration reforms in the United States since the 1980s.“A change like this would set up a comparison between a scientist and a sister, and that’s a big concern.” -- Center for Community Change's Kica Matos

Yet nestled among the new proposal is a fundamental realignment of U.S. visa policy away from a longstanding priority on family reunification and towards, instead, a model that more closely fulfils the needs of business.

Indeed, the proposal would stop offering siblings or adult children of U.S. citizens the chance to apply for family visas, though it does ease travel to the United States by other relatives. For decades, Washington has made available some 65,000 family-related visas every year, an ideological cornerstone of its immigration programme.

Under the proposed changes, on the other hand, visas for agricultural workers and high-skilled workers would be greatly increased, a key concession to the business community.

“This draft clearly damages the family-based immigration system and the longstanding principle of family unity,” Kica Matos, the director of Immigrant Rights and Racial Justice at the Center for Community Change, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS.

“A change like this would set up a comparison between a scientist and a sister, and that’s a big concern.”

In addition to immigration rights proponents, the AFL-CIO, one of the country’s largest unions and a kingmaker in the current debate, has come out strongly against the family visa changes.

In addition, the diversity visa programme – historically one of the most popular ways of emigrating to the United States, offering around 55,000 visas through an annual lottery system – is being replaced with twice as many “merit-based” visas. Eventually, this programme is aimed at rising to around 250,000 visas per year.

Some analysts suggest that such changes could have a significant effect on the demographic impact of the U.S. immigration system, perhaps greatly increasing the number of Asian immigrants into the country to the detriment of others.

“The diversity visa was historically of particular importance for people of colour, especially those from Africa,” Matos says.

“The switch away from family visas and the elimination of the diversity visa is a step in the wrong direction, introducing a far more mercantile approach. Doing so leaves these important decisions up to big corporations, rather than preserving longstanding U.S. commitments to immigration and keeping intact family unity.”

Matos is quick to note, however, that the new proposal still constitutes a “historic step towards humane policy reform”, including reforms that advocates have been emphasising for nearly two decades.

11 million

Despite widely differing approaches, the United States’ immigration system has long been seen by all sides as “broken”, due in part to its complexity, cost and contradictory aims.

Yet particularly following the recent national elections, in which the growing Hispanic community largely turned against Republicans, a broad coalition of business, labour, law enforcement and religious communities is viewing 2013 as the year that comprehensive reforms could be possible.

And they’re almost unanimous in stating that the current bill is a strong starting point.

“On the whole, we think this is a good bill, and does a really good job of including all core elements you need for a reform bill like this,” Mark Falzone, the deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“People on the right and left are going to be critical of certain aspects of this proposal, but that’s the nature of compromise. We haven’t had meaningful immigration reform in this country in recent memory, but this time is clearly different, with both Democrats and Republics pushing hard.”

Still, one of the most contentious issues remains the presence in the United States of around 11 million undocumented immigrants. These migrants tend to be seen as critical labour by the business community, as lawbreakers by conservatives, and as victims of an inhumane system by liberals.

Thus, the centrepiece of the new bill includes a highly controversial route to citizenship for the undocumented. The plan would normalise their status after they pay fees and taxes, and pass a criminal background check and other requirements, and allow them to progress towards citizenship.

This has been a baseline demand by liberals, but the proposition is already leading to the most explosive responses from conservatives worried about “rewarding” lawbreakers. (In fact, Mexican migration into the United States has almost completely stopped in recent years, due to both demographic and economic changes in Mexico.)

At the same time, the new legislation would continue to step up security along the U.S.-Mexico border, presumably increasing fencing and personnel while potentially adding unmanned surveillance drones to the mix.

“We have included a lengthy path to citizenship … contingent on doing everything possible to make the borders secure,” Senator John McCain, one of the architects of the new bill and a Republican who in the past has faced stiff resistance for deal-making on immigration, told reporters Thursday.

“Republicans have got to compete for the Hispanic vote. Passage of this legislation wouldn’t gain a single vote from the Hispanic community but it would put us on a level where we could compete in the battle of ideas. Right now, we’re not competitive.”

13-year wait

Still, the new proposal would not make the citizenship programme effective immediately. Rather, as McCain notes, it would be conditional on the creation of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) strategy to achieve a specified border security “effectiveness” rate.

If DHS were to be unable to do so within six months, the bill would require the creation of a commission led by border states.

Yet even if that strategy were to be deemed acceptable, those hoping to get “provisional” status en route to citizenship would end up waiting years to decades. Under the new proposal, the minimum wait time would be 13 years, which some immigration advocates are saying is unjustly long.

Further, a proposed cut-off date for eligibility for the “provisional” status is currently December 2011, barring those who arrived thereafter. Yet this would leave a few hundred thousand people who automatically wouldn’t qualify – putting them permanently in the position that the new legislation is trying to ameliorate once and for all.

Colorado's Jared Polis became the first “out” gay man in Congress when he was elected in 2008. Credit: Jeffrey Beall/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Mar 26 2013 (IPS)

Even as the issue of gay marriage continues to make waves in the U.S., change is inexorably arriving in the halls of power, with a record seven openly homosexual or bisexual members of the new U.S. Congress.

While still small, the number represents a significant gain since the previous congress, which had only four.To be clear, our Congress has never looked like America.

“In 2012, we nearly doubled the number of members in congress who were LGBT, including the first U.S. senator, so 2012 was a really important moment for the normalisation of having LGBT people in the federal legislature,” Denis Dison, vice president of communications for the Victory Fund, an organisation that raises funds for “out” or openly LGBT candidates, told IPS.

The four from the previous Congress were Reps. Barney Frank from Massachusetts, Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin, Jared Polis from Colorado, and David Cicilline from Rhode Island.

Things were looking bleak last year when Frank, a progressive in Congress who had served since 1980, decided to retire, and Baldwin decided to run for the U.S. Senate. This could have left Polis and Cicilline as the only gay voices in the House of Representatives.

However, voters in House districts across the country elected three new openly homosexual members – Sean Patrick Maloney from New York, Mark Pocan from Wisconsin, and Mark Takano from California – as well as Kyrsten Sinema, Congress’s first openly bisexual representative, from Arizona.

The current seven are Cicilline, Maloney, Pocan, Polis, Sinema and Takano in the House, and Baldwin in the Senate.

“I’m very excited this Congress [House] has six LGBT members, which is a record. While it doesn’t represent parity with the general population, at least it’s movement in the right direction,” Polis told IPS.

Asked what parity might be, Polis said that about five percent of the U.S. population is part of the LGBT community.

“You’d be talking about 20 to 30 members from the LGBT community,” out of the 435 members of Congress, Polis said.

“We also don’t have parity of representation of women. We’re also making progress but not yet there with other democratic minority groups,” he added.

“To be clear, our Congress has never looked like America,” Dison said. “Women have never been [adequately] represented, neither have people of colour. Parity would be an achievement for a minority population.

“White, straight [heterosexual] men are absolutely over-represented in politics and have been for many, many years,” he said.

The first openly homosexual member of congress, Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, was essentially forced to come out in 1983 due to an ongoing scandal involving his relationship with a 17-year-old male Congressional page.

When Barney Frank was first elected in 1980, it would be seven more years before he came out publicly. Yet times have changed. Baldwin became the first “out” elected Congressperson, when she was elected to the House in 1998. Polis became the first “out” gay man in Congress when was elected in 2008. He came out to his parents at the age of 21 and they were not only supportive, but enthusiastically supportive, he told the Metro Weekly magazine in 2009.

Polis served as an out gay businessman who helped start several charter schools in Colorado before running for congress. He and his partner, Marlon Reis, have a son, Caspian Julius, who was born in 2011. They have declined to comment on whether their child was adopted or born from a surrogate pregnancy.

Polis tells IPS that since he went to congress he has experienced no open discrimination or homophobia there from other members.

“No, I don’t think so. They all come from different backgrounds. There’s never been any issues. Everyone understands everyone is duly elected,” Polis said. “The issue is, we still don’t have benefits for our spouses. That’s a great frustration.”

Indeed, the government still does not recognise same-sex partners for any federal employees. Baldwin introduced legislation in the last session to extend federal benefits to partners of federal employees, including members of vongress, but the legislation stalled in the House.

But that may change.

“Having six members enables members of our community to be present in many different committees. It’s a different discussion when there’s an LGBT person in the room,” Polis said.

Asked whether his sexual orientation shapes his perspective, Polis replied, “Every member brings a unique perspective informed by their life experiences.

“Our body is best when we’re represented by America as a whole, the types of jobs people have, the types of families they have, in terms of their ethnic background and faith,” Polis said.

“You do see LGBT members of congress interested in other issues of discrimination, whether racial discrimination or sex discrimination, and see them part of coalitions as well, that is part of a shared experience of being in a minority,” Dison said.

Currently, there are no LGBT members of congress who are Republicans. They are all Democrats.

However, in the past, there have been two Republican members, who both came out while serving their terms – Jim Kolbe of Arizona and Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin.

And the LGBT caucus in Congress is beginning to become more diverse politically, at least within the spectrum of ideas represented by the Democratic Party. Two of the newly elected members, Takano and Sinema, were both elected in swing districts that are not solidly progressive districts, and Maloney unseated a Republican.

“I would characterise most of the caucus as progressive, I’m not sure they would characterise themselves that way right now,” Dison said. “They would probably say they’re speaking for the mainstream concerns of constituents.”

The changes in U.S. culture with respect to sexual orientation are perhaps best captured by the recent campaign speech of Mazie Hirono, a progressive congresswoman from Hawaii, who was elected to the Senate in November 2012.

“I bring quadruple diversity to the Senate,” Hirono said at a rally. “I’m a woman. I’ll be the first Asian woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate. I am an immigrant. I am a Buddhist. When I said this at one of my gatherings, they said, ‘Yes, but are you gay?’ and I said, ‘Nobody’s perfect.'”

VDay 2011 community campaign in Bakersfield, California to End Violence Against Women. Credit: Julie Jordan Scott/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 1 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday ended more than a year of stonewalling a piece of legislation that for two decades has offered legal protections for women against sexual violence, harassment and abuse.

The move will close gaps in related funding and safeguards that have opened since the legislation, known as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), lapsed in September 2011. It will also offer renewed protections for Native American women and immigrants, regardless of their legal status, and, for the first time, will extend similar guarantees to sexual minorities.

“Today’s victory marks a rare occasion when Republicans and Democrats came together to ensure explicit protections in the federal code for ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’,” the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group here, said Thursday. “It is also the first time that any federal non-discrimination provisions include the LGBT community.”The Republican objections were clearly part of an attempt to strip away the things that have made VAWA more inclusive and less racist.

The Democratic-held Senate had previously passed a well-received version of the bill, prompting some 1,300 advocacy and professional groups in mid-February to call for its passage. But inaction on the part of House Republicans has continued to stymie movement.

Finally, a last-minute attempt by House Republicans to offer up a weaker alternative failed Thursday morning, and the chastened Republican leadership allowed a straight vote on the Senate version. That resulted in a 286-138 vote that included 87 Republicans supporting the measure, which will now be sent to President Barack Obama for authorisation.

“Over more than two decades, this law has saved countless lives and transformed the way we treat victims of abuse,” President Obama said Thursday, lauding the vote. “Renewing this bill is an important step towards making sure no one in America is forced to live in fear.”

Advocates from across civil society have praised both the passage of the bill and its strengthened form.

“This has been a very difficult process, but we’re glad that in the end all victims were protected and no groups were left out,” Mony Ruiz-Velasco, legal director for the National Immigrant Justice Center, told IPS.

“One of the most important points from our perspective is that the new bill clarifies provisions in the law that will allow children of victims of crimes to apply for visas to remain with their families. It also extends the application of the Prison Rape Elimination Act to immigration detention facilities.”

Immigrant women have historically experienced relatively higher levels of domestic abuse but have had fewer mechanisms for judicial recourse, particularly if they were in the United States illegally.

Potentially an even more egregious situation has afflicted Native American women, who have long had no way to seek justice if they were sexually assaulted on tribal land by a non-tribal assailant. While most civil laws on Native American lands are enforced by tribal judicial systems, these courts have never had jurisdiction to prosecute non-tribal members.

Nonetheless, according to statistics provided by Amnesty International, a watchdog group, a third of Native American women will be raped in their lifetimes, and 86 percent of the time the assailant will be a non-Native American man.

“Today the drum of justice beats loud in Indian Country in celebration of the re-authorisation of VAWA,” Juana Majel Dixon, first vice-president of the National Congress of American Indians, said Thursday.

But, she added, “500-plus days is too long to not have a bill for all women in America. For an unimaginable length of time, those who have terrorised our women … have gone unprosecuted.”

Targeting the most vulnerable

Lawmakers originally passed VAWA, widely considered a landmark piece of legislation, in 1994, requiring its re-authorisation every five years. And in past years, the law has always received broad, near unanimous, bipartisan support.

By contrast, the past year of intense politicisation on the issue has been blamed on a new crop of hardline conservatives, who expressed reservations over the expansion of legal protections to include undocumented immigrants and sexual minorities. Many were also sceptical of the new powers vested in tribal authorities

On Thursday, the House Republicans’ alternative VAWA bill would have stripped out language on sexual minorities while weakening the provisions on Native American women. These measures also reportedly held up further movement last year.

“The politicisation of this re-authorisation is, plain and simple, part of the war on women,” Lisa Brush, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, told IPS.

“The Republican objections were clearly part of an attempt to strip away the things that have made VAWA more inclusive and less racist. These groups, together with LGBTQ people, are among the most vulnerable to gender-based violence, and the Republicans’ political stance is basically saying the law-and-order state is not going to protect them.”

Brush, the author of a book called “Poverty, Battered Women, and Work in U.S. Public Policy”, suggests that the fight against VAWA is indicative of a broader attempt on the part of Republicans to strengthen the “police state” while gutting the “welfare state”. Yet she also implies that VAWA too plays into this dynamic.

“What would really help reduce violence against women would be to make sure that women have the capacity to form autonomous households, to control when and how many children they have and how they raise them, and to form and unform relationships with whomever they want,” she says.

“For that, we would need equal pay for work of comparable value, and to completely change the way that we organise work, family and personal responsibility for earning and caring. That is what would really make a difference – not just better policing. But better policing is what we get.”

In the same week that talks between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) concluded in Kazakhstan with rare positive Iranian feedback, a joint resolution declaring U.S. support for Israel in the event of an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear programme was brought before Congress.

The resolution, introduced by Senators Lindsey Graham and Robert Menendez and publicised in a press conference Thursday on Capitol Hill, will reportedly be a focus of the widely attended American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual conference in Washington next week.

According to a copy obtained by IPS, the “sense of the Congress” resolution “Urges that, if Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense, the United States should stand with Israel and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support to our ally in defense of its territory, people, and existence.”If the Senate moves forward with this, they risk sending the signal to the Iranians that, no matter what was said at Almaty, the U.S. does not have its own house in order to make a deal and is not serious about resolving the nuclear dispute peacefully.

“The resolution reiterates strong support for Israel and concern with Iran’s nuclear research – two sentiments no one would argue,” Heather Hurlburt, director of the National Security Network, told IPS.

“Those who vote on it will understand that it is hortatory and doesn’t have any effect on U.S. national security decision-making, but that may not be so clear to observers overseas,” continued Hurlburt, a former staffer in Madeleine Albright’s State Department under President Bill Clinton.

“It’s critical that the U.S. be seen to retain decision-making flexibility as negotiations seem to be moving toward a more sensitive phase,” she said.

This week in Almaty the P5+1 softened their “stop, shut and ship” offer presented last spring by asking Iran to “suspend” enrichment of uranium to 20 percent while using its existing stockpile for nuclear fuel and modifying equipment at its Fordow facility rather than permanently closing it.

This, in addition to increased IAEA monitoring, would result in slight sanctions relief that will not impact existing oil or financial sanctions, a U.S. diplomat told Al-Monitor.

Iran’s chief negotiator Saeed Jalili called the talks “a positive step” in a statement published on Mehr News.

“Some of the points raised in their respond [sic] were more realistic comparing to what they said in the past…which we believe is positive, despite the fact that we have a long way to reach to the optimum point,” said Jalili.

“There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about outcome of the Almaty talks,” Kelsey Davenport, a nonproliferation analyst at the Arms Control Association, told IPS.

“If press accounts are accurate, I think that the revised proposal reflects a move toward a more balanced interim step that addresses the most urgent concerns on both sides; namely sanctions relief for Iran and for the P5+1, it would limit the size of Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent,” she said.

But the non-binding resolution presented Thursday is unlikely to go unnoticed by the Iranians, who will reportedly present a response to the P5+1’s revised offer during another meeting set for Mar. 16 in Istanbul, Turkey.

“If the Senate moves forward with this, they risk sending the signal to the Iranians that, no matter what was said at Almaty, the U.S. does not have its own house in order to make a deal and is not serious about resolving the nuclear dispute peacefully,” Jamal Abdi, policy director of the National Iranian American Council, told IPS.

“The same senators and organisations sponsoring this resolution would make this exact argument to halt further negotiations were Tehran to take such a provocative step in the midst of talks,” he said.

The resolution follows a bipartisan bill presented on Wednesday that seeks to make it the policy of the U.S. to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons capability — contrasting with President Obama’s previous declarations that the U.S. will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon – and to broaden and tighten existing sanctions on Iran.

Introduced by Representatives Ed Royce and Eliot Engel, the Nuclear Iran Prevention Act aims to restrict Iran’s access to hard currency by targeting its foreign exchange reserves, impose tougher restrictions on commercial trade with Iran and designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organisation.

“It is usually overlooked, but each time the United States imposes a new coercive restriction on Iran, Iran responds by upping the ante on its nuclear programme,” Gary Sick, a Columbia University professor who served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, told IPS.

“A new round of sanctions at this moment, when serious talks seem to be getting underway for the first time in eight months, risks sabotaging the limited progress that has been made,” he said.

While there may have been cautious optimism over the results of Almaty, a variety of factors will influence the ongoing diplomatic process.

“Nothing can really happen before the Iranian elections, other than ‘marking time,’” Robert E. Hunter, who served on the National Security Council staff throughout the Carter administration, told IPS.

“Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu will almost surely press the President to take a strong stand on Iran and to reaffirm his commitment to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons [during Obama’s visit to Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan],” said Hunter, who was U.S. ambassador to NATO from 1993-98.

“The issue is not just nuclear weapons or the lack thereof. Deep and long-lasting regional competitions for influence are at the heart of the matter…And in the last three administrations, we have been unwilling to put on the table a negotiating position that has a chance to succeed, by recognising that the security interests of the U.S., Israel, and Iran must all be considered,” Hunter told IPS.

“No country can negotiate seriously when it is under military threat, facing sanctions that only help to strengthen the regime domestically, and with no serious proposals on the ‘plus’ side,” he said.

“Sanctions may be most useful after a strike against Iran’s nuclear-weapons facilities,” Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based group that strongly advocates sanctions on Iran, wrote Thursday in an op-ed.

“If such an agreement [where “Iran’s rulers verifiably end the nuclear-weapons program, halt terrorism sponsorship, and ease domestic oppression”] cannot be reached, continuing and even tightening sanctions will make it more difficult for Iran to replace facilities destroyed after a military option has been exercised,” said May.

To date, no U.S. official assessment has concluded that Iran currently has an active weapons of mass destruction programme.

In August 2012, the Obama administration reiterated the assessment made by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in January 2012 that “Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons … should it choose to do so.”

“We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” said Clapper.