---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 10:44 AM
Subject: re: Local Turf-Sharing Accord With the Taliban Raises Alarm in Afghanistan
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  Some of us were alarmed when general Petraeus empowered local sectarian militias to take on security tasks in Iraq five years ago.  The same groups he embraced  then are predictably waging civil war there now. But the crisis of the day was American casualties and the victims this year are only Iraqis.  So perhaps through a narrow American exceptionalist lens we can call that progress.

     Now that Afghans are making accommodations with the Taliban, we don't have to like it. But we should be honest enough to acknowledge that they're just doing what we showed them.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/world/asia/a-local-peace-accord-afghanistan.html?hpw&rref=world&_r=0

Local Turf-Sharing Accord With the Taliban Raises Alarm in Afghanistan

By AZAM AHMED and TAIMOOR SHAH

Published: December 18, 2013

Enlarge This ImageKABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan Army commander stationed in the deadliest corner of Helmand Province brokered a cease-fire and turf-sharing deal with local Taliban insurgents there, according to government and police officials, in an example of the sort of ground-level bargaining that some see as increasingly likely once international troops withdraw next year.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

An Afghan Army soldier patrolling in the highly contested area of Sangin in August.

Enlarge This Image

Details of the accord, which took place in the district of Sangin, remain murky. But the issue was fraught enough that the army scrambled to send a delegation there to investigate on Tuesday, officials said. And local residents say that commanders were promising that the deal would halt immediately and never happen again.

The alarm was in part because of what Sangin has come to symbolize. It is one of just a few areas of Afghanistan where the Taliban have never been dislodged, and it was one of the deadliest battlegrounds in the country for American Marines and British troops who waged several offensives there over the years. It was handed over to Afghan security control early this year, and any appearance that the Afghans would be willing to essentially give back hard-won gains to the Taliban would be politically problematic, at best.

According to several people familiar with the details, including the deputy district governor and the local police commander for Sangin, the deal involved a company commander’s ceding at least two checkpoints to the Taliban. It was unclear whether more senior officers in the area condoned the move.

As part of the arrangement, which local officials said excluded the police force and other militias, the commander even drove the insurgents into the district bazaar to introduce them to the people, according to officials and witnesses.

The Afghan Army has vehemently denied the existence of any deal with the insurgents, as have the Taliban themselves. Coalition officials referred all questions about the alleged incident to the Afghans.

At least one official said that the top army commanders in the region reported knowing nothing about the plan and vowed to keep fighting.

“I talked to the brigade commander, and he has promised to recapture the abandoned checkpoints from the Taliban,” said Mohammed Rasol Khan, the deputy governor of Sangin. “There has not been a truce at the battalion or brigade level between the A.N.A. and the Taliban.”

What is said to have happened in Sangin is not a widespread phenomenon, as Afghan forces basically held their own in securing the country this year. But the Afghan forces struggled from the start in Sangin, and a visit by journalists this past summer found them facing an extremely high death toll and very low morale. Soldiers were basically confined to bases as the Taliban enjoyed nearly total freedom of movement.

Still, whispers of such accords have floated in other parts of the country this year. In areas like the Pech Valley, long a trouble spot for American forces, an informal agreement is said to have emerged. The military will not attack the Korengal Valley if the insurgents will leave the main road in and out of the region alone, officials said.

Despite the political sensitivity over such deals, some Afghan commanders and leaders say they may actually be a desirable step toward peace after Western forces withdraw, particularly in highly contested areas like Sangin. Those officials describe the bargaining, in essence, as local successes amid a national effort to disarm and reach political reconciliation with the Taliban that has stalled completely this year after potential peace talks broke down in Qatar.

Local leaders, in particular, say it is time to start talking, as they are fed up with a war that has caught civilians in the middle.

“This sort of cease-fire is essential for both sides, as they are tired of fighting and bombing each other and look to relieve the civilians who are the victims,” said Hajji Shamsullah Sahrai, a tribal elder in Sangin.

The reaction from the international community has been mixed.

While many international officials here say some local dealing in the most hostile areas of Afghanistan might be an improvement, the calculus quickly changes if it threatens security in provincial capitals or other population centers.

It is not the first time that a pact has emerged in Sangin, though. In 2011, members of the Alokozai tribe, long allied with the Taliban, agreed to halt attacks against the Afghan government in exchange for a prisoner, as well as aid and the potential to establish their own enduring security forces. At the time, commanders believed the deal held great potential to change the blistering dynamic in Sangin.

But hope gave way to more fighting, and the district remained among the five deadliest in the country this year, officials said.

“The truce has been made in part because Taliban are extremely powerful in Sangin,” said a member of the district council in Sangin, who declined to comment publicly because of the negotiations. “These Taliban commanders had not been able to visit the bazaar in the last seven years. Afterward, the Afghan Army traveled to places where they had never been over the last six years.”

Local residents and officials described a bizarre scene in the Sangin bazaar, a robust market of groceries, fabrics, electronics and other sundries, a day after the deal was struck. Around midday, the Afghan Army arrived in an armored convoy, bearing Taliban commanders known to the locals. The men walked through the stalls, introducing the men and sharing laughs, witnesses said.

“The A.N.A. commanders told people: ‘Look these are Taliban and they have come over by their own free will. We did not force them to come,’ ” said Mohammed Khan, a shopkeeper in Sangin who saw the scene.

Suliman Khan, the commander for the Afghan Local Police militia in Sangin, expressed worry about exclusive deals. “We were not informed,” he said, “and we have not been asked about this secret deal.”

But even as army officials sought this week to assure locals and the police that such deals would not happen again, many elders said they wished they would.

“We are not against a peace deal or an agreement with Taliban,” said Hajji Mira Jan Aka, a member of the district council and the head of the high committee. “We are against an agreement which is only with army.”

Azam Ahmed reported from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Habib Zahori contributed reporting from Kabul.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 6:52 AM
Subject: re: Saudi Prince Criticizes Obama Administration, Citing Indecision in Mideast
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   If the Saudis had delivered the Arab League's blessing as they promised (in secret, of course) the U.S. would no doubt have launched missiles into Syria. That would have made about 801 groups arrayed against the al-Assad/Hezbollah/Tehran axis. But the Saudis couldn't deliver, and we didn't launch a new war, to set up a model democracy in Damascus as we had failed to set up a model democracy in Baghdad.

  So let the Saudis criticize. Talk is cheap.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/world/middleeast/saudi-prince-accuses-obama-of-indecision-on-middle-east.html

Saudi Prince Criticizes Obama Administration, Citing Indecision in Mideast

By STEVEN ERLANGER

Published: December 15, 2013

Enlarge This ImageMONACO — An influential Saudi prince blasted the Obama administration on Sunday for what he called indecision and a loss of credibility with allies in the Middle East, saying that American efforts to secure a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians would founder without a clear commitment from President Obama.

Mohammed Al-Shaikh/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Prince Turki al-Faisal said that the United States had lost credibility among its Middle Eastern allies.

“We’ve seen several red lines put forward by the president, which went along and became pinkish as time grew, and eventually ended up completely white,” said Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former intelligence chief of Saudi Arabia. “When that kind of assurance comes from a leader of a country like the United States, we expect him to stand by it.” He added, “There is an issue of confidence.”

Mr. Obama has his problems, the prince said, but when a country has strong allies, “you should be able to give them the assurance that what you say is going to be what you do.” The prince no longer has any official position but has lately been providing the public expression of internal Saudi views with clear approval from the Saudi government.

The Saudis have been particularly shaken by Mr. Obama’s refusal to intervene forcefully in the Syrian civil war, especially his recent decision not to punish President Bashar al-Assad of Syria with military strikes even after evidence emerged that Mr. Assad’s government used chemical weapons on its own citizens.

Instead, Mr. Obama chose to seek congressional authorization for a strike, and when that proved difficult to obtain, he cooperated with Russia to get Syria to agree to give up its chemical weapons. Prince Turki and Israeli officials have argued that the agreement merely legitimized Mr. Assad, and on Sunday, the prince called the world’s failure to stop the conflict in Syria “almost a criminal negligence.”

Syria, Iran, nuclear issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were the main focus for Prince Turki, who spoke at the World Policy Conference, a gathering of officials and intellectuals largely drawn from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Saudi unhappiness with Iran’s growing power in the region is no secret, and the Saudis, who themselves engage with Iran, have no problem with the United States trying to do the same, the prince said. But he complained that bilateral talks between Iranian and American officials had been kept secret from American allies, sowing further mistrust.

The prince said Iran must give up its ambitions for a nuclear weapons program — Iran says its nuclear program is only for civilian purposes — and stop using its own troops and those of Shiite allies like the Lebanese organization Hezbollah to fight in neighboring countries, like Syria and Iraq. “The game of hegemony toward the Arab countries is not acceptable,” the prince said. Just as Arabs will not dress as Westerners do, he said, “we won’t accept to wear Iranian clothes, either.”

A prevalent theme at the conference was the waning of American influence in the Middle East. Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said: “Today we live in a zero-polar, or a-polar, world. No one power or group of powers can solve all the problems.”

The United States, Mr. Fabius said, was often criticized for being “overpresent, but now it is being criticized for not being present enough.” While “it is perfectly understandable” that Mr. Obama would refrain from new military engagements in the Middle East, he said, “it creates a certain vacuum” that has allowed Russia “to make a comeback on the world scene” and has encouraged France to intervene in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.

A former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Itamar Rabinovich, said that after Mr. Obama declined to strike Syria, neither Israel nor Iran believed any longer that he might use military force against Iran.

Prince Turki said the Israeli-Palestinian issue remained central to relations between the Muslim world and the West. He praised the negotiating efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry, but warned that Mr. Obama must be willing to force the parties to accept a lasting resolution. “Mr. Kerry is devoting a lot of time and energy,” he said, “but we’ll see how far he gets if the president doesn’t put his full support behind it.”

He compared the United States to a big bear that must push and frighten both Israeli and Palestinian leaders into an agreement, and give them each an excuse for making the necessary, difficult compromises on issues like Jerusalem, refugees, land swaps and security arrangements.

“Unfortunately, the big bear has not proven to be very bearish-like recently,” Prince Turki said. To get the job done, he said, the bear “has to not only bare his teeth, but also extend his claws” when talks reach the crucial point.

Conversely, Prince Turki warned, “if the president retreats from his position on compromise along the 1967 borders, as he did on his red line on use of chemical weapons by Assad, then the whole enterprise of peace between the Arabs and Israel will evaporate.”

In separate remarks here to the Reuters news agency, Prince Turki said that the United States and Britain had done too little to help the more moderate, more secular Syrian rebels, leaving them to fend for themselves against both “Al Assad’s killing machine” and the better-armed radical Islamist rebel groups.

“Why should he stop the killing?” he said of Mr. Assad.

“That to me is why the F.S.A. is not in as prominent position as it should be today,” he said, referring to the Free Syrian Army, “because of the lack of international support for it. The fighting is going to continue, and the killing is going to continue.”

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 10:28 AM
Subject: re: F.D.A. Restricts Antibiotics Use for Livestock
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  The mission of the FDA has grown over time. When it was established in 1906, it was only to certify safety. In 1962, that was expanded to safety and efficacy. Now the concern is broadened again, to preserve the usefulness of our antibiotics against the relentless evolution of resistance in pathogens. But throughout, the FDA has been a regulatory agency.  As long as the new restrictions are voluntary, they are not regulations; they are a cop-out. This is a retreat from the FDA's mission at a time when it needs to be pressing forward.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/health/fda-to-phase-out-use-of-some-antibiotics-in-animals-raised-for-meat.html?hpw&rref=us&_r=0

F.D.A. Restricts Antibiotics Use for Livestock

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Published: December 11, 2013 213 Comments

Enlarge This ImageWASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday put in place a major new policy to phase out the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cows, pigs and chickens raised for meat, a practice that experts say has endangered human health by fueling the growing epidemic of antibiotic resistance.

Brian C. Frank for The New York Times

Pigs on a farm near Ralston, Iowa, where animals received antibiotics in their feed. Dark spots on their backs mean they are ready for market.

This is the agency’s first serious attempt in decades to curb what experts have long regarded as the systematic overuse of antibiotics in healthy farm animals, with the drugs typically added directly into their feed and water. The waning effectiveness of antibiotics — wonder drugs of the 20th century — has become a looming threat to public health. At least two million Americans fall sick every year and about 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infections.

“This is the first significant step in dealing with this important public health concern in 20 years,” said David Kessler, a former F.D.A. commissioner who has been critical of the agency’s track record on antibiotics. “No one should underestimate how big a lift this has been in changing widespread and long entrenched industry practices.”

The change, which is to take effect over the next three years, will effectively make it illegal for farmers and ranchers to use antibiotics to make animals grow bigger. The producers had found that feeding low doses of antibiotics to animals throughout their lives led them to grow plumper and larger. Scientists still debate why. Food producers will also have to get a prescription from a veterinarian to use the drugs to prevent disease in their animals.

Federal officials said the new policy would improve health in the United States by tightening the use of classes of antibiotics that save human lives, including penicillin, azithromycin and tetracycline. Food producers said they would abide by the new rules, but some public health advocates voiced concerns that loopholes could render the new policy toothless.

Health officials have warned since the 1970s that overuse of antibiotics in animals was leading to the development of infections resistant to treatment in humans. For years, modest efforts by federal officials to reduce the use of antibiotics in animals were thwarted by the powerful food industry and its substantial lobbying power in Congress. Pressure for federal action has mounted as the effectiveness of drugs important for human health has declined, and deaths from bugs resistant to antibiotics have soared.

Under the new policy, the agency is asking drug makers to change the labels that detail how a drug can be used so they would bar farmers from using the medicines to promote growth.

The changes, originally proposed in 2012, are voluntary for drug companies. But F.D.A. officials said they believed that the companies would comply, based on discussions during the public comment period. The two drug makers that represent a majority of such antibiotic products — Zoetis and Elanco — have already stated their intent to participate, F.D.A. officials said. Companies will have three months to tell the agency whether they will change the labels, and three years to carry out the new rules.

Additionally, the agency is requiring that licensed veterinarians supervise the use of antibiotics, effectively requiring farmers and ranchers to obtain prescriptions to use the drugs for their animals.

“It’s a big shift from the current situation, in which animal producers can go to a local feed store and buy these medicines over the counter and there is no oversight at all,” said Michael Taylor, the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine.

Some consumer health advocates were skeptical that the new rules would reduce the amount of antibiotics consumed by animals. They say that a loophole will allow animal producers to keep using the same low doses of antibiotics by contending they are needed to keep animals from getting sick, and evading the new ban on use for growth promotion.

More meaningful, said Dr. Keeve Nachman, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, would be to ban the use of antibiotics for the prevention of disease, a step the F.D.A. so far has not taken. That would limit antibiotic uses to treatment of a specific sickness diagnosed by a veterinarian, a much narrower category, he said.

Another skeptic, Representative Louise M. Slaughter, a Democrat from New York, said that when the European Union tried to stop companies from using antibiotics to make farm animals bigger, companies continued to use antibiotics for disease prevention. She said antibiotic use only declined in countries like the Netherlands that instituted limits on total use and fines for noncompliance.

But another longtime critic of the F.D.A. on antibiotics, Dr. Stuart B. Levy, a professor of microbiology at Tufts University and the president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, praised the new rules. He was among the first to identify the problem in the 1970s. “I’m kind of happy,” he said. “For all of us who’ve been struggling with this issue, this is the biggest step that’s been taken in the last 30 years.”

Mr. Taylor, the agency official, said the F.D.A. had detailed what veterinarians needed to consider when they prescribed such drugs. For example, use has to be for animals at risk for developing a specific disease, with no reasonable alternatives to prevent it.

“It’s far from being a just-trust-them system,” he said. “Given the history of the issue, it’s not surprising that there are people who are skeptical.”

He added that some food producers had already curbed antibiotic use.

A spokeswoman for Zoetis, a major drug producer that said it would abide by the new rules, said the new policy was not expected to have a big effect on the revenues of the company because many of its drug products were also approved for therapeutic uses. (Dr. Nachman said that was an indication that overall use might not decline under the new rules.)

The Animal Health Institute, an association of pharmaceutical companies that make drugs for animals, said that it supported the policy and “will continue to work with the F.D.A. on its implementation.”

The National Pork Producers Council was less enthusiastic, saying, “We expect that hog farmers, and the federally inspected feed mills they purchase feed from, will follow the law.”

“It is part of our ethical responsibility to utilize antibiotics responsibly and part of our commitment to public health and animal health,” the council said in a statement.

The National Chicken Council said in a statement that its producers already worked closely with veterinarians, and that much of the antibiotics used in raising chickens were not used in human medicine
.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 9:08 AM
Subject: re: A Rare Middle East Agreement, on Water
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Dumping brine from a desalination plant at Aqaba into the Dead Sea, presents 400meters of hydraulic head. It would be scandalous not to capture that power. Of course, it could be used for hydro-electric to partially defray the energy spend in the desalination at Aqaba. But it makes more sense to use it to do the desalinization itself by reverse-osmosis. Without any expenditure of imported fossil fuel, Israel and Jordan and Palestine could get potable water from such a "Red/Dead" canal. And the same brine would replenish the Dead Sea's falling level. 

   The new accord should be welcomed for showing that Israelis and Palestinians and Jordanians can work together on this crucial matter. But the solution proposed is a shadow of what could be achieved there.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-jordan-and-palestinians-sign-water-project-deal.html

A Rare Middle East Agreement, on Water

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Coral reefs in the Red Sea. Its salt water would be converted to fresh for use in the region.

By ISABEL KERSHNER

Published: December 9, 2013

JERUSALEM — In a rare display of regional cooperation, representatives of Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority signed an agreement on Monday to build a Red Sea-Dead Sea water project that is meant to benefit all three parties.

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The project addresses two problems: the acute shortage of clean fresh water in the region, especially in Jordan, and the rapid contraction of the Dead Sea. A new desalination plant is to be built in Aqaba, Jordan, to convert salt water from the Red Sea into fresh water for use in southern Israel and southern Jordan — each would get eight billion to 13 billion gallons a year. The process produces about the same amount of brine as a waste product; the brine would be piped more than 100 miles to help replenish the already very saline Dead Sea.

Under the agreement, Israel will also provide Amman, the Jordanian capital, with eight billion to 13 billion gallons of fresh water from the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, and the Palestinians expect to be able to buy up to eight billion gallons of additional fresh water from Israel at preferential prices.

The agreement was signed at the Washington headquarters of the World Bank, a sponsor of the project.

The water level in the Dead Sea, an ancient salt lake whose shores are the lowest dry places on the earth’s surface, has been dropping by more than three feet a year, mainly because most of the water in the Jordan River, its main feeder, has been diverted by Israel, Jordan or Syria for domestic use and irrigation; very little now reaches the lake. Potash industries on either side of the lake have also had a detrimental impact. About 25 miles of the Dead Sea’s shoreline lie in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and are claimed by the Palestinians as part of a future state.

Israeli officials said that proposals would soon be solicited internationally from private companies to build and operate a desalination plant in Aqaba, which is meant to operate on a commercial basis, selling the potable water to Jordan and Israel. A brine pipeline to the Dead Sea, estimated to cost at least $240 million, would be financed by donor countries and organizations, with the World Bank providing a bridge loan.

The brine pipeline will run through Jordanian territory, because the planning process in Jordan is quicker and less liable to be slowed by the objections of environmentalists and other opponents, according to Israeli officials. They said that the added brine’s effects on the Dead Sea would be carefully monitored.

The project has been discussed and studied in various forms for 20 years. Speaking on Israeli Army Radio on Monday, Silvan Shalom, the Israeli cabinet minister responsible for water projects and for regional cooperation, called the agreement “historic.” But critics said it was far less ambitious than an earlier proposal for a canal that would also exploit the altitude difference between the Red and Dead Seas to generate hydroelectricity.

Regional tensions also manifested themselves. Shaddad Attili, the head of the Palestinian Water Authority, said the agreement was essentially one between Israel and Jordan, with the Palestinian Authority involved because it shares part of the Dead Sea coastline. “We gave our support to Jordan,” he said.

Speaking by telephone from the United States before the signing ceremony, Mr. Attili said the brine from the plant would have to be taken north to the Dead Sea because draining it back into the Red Sea would upset Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Mr. Attili signed the agreement in Washington on behalf of the authority; Mr. Shalom signed for Israel; and Hazim el-Naser, the Jordanian minister for water and irrigation, signed for Jordan.

Yaakov Garb, an Israeli environmental and social studies expert at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, said that he suspected that the project was mainly motivated by a geopolitical desire to support Jordan, but that it was “wrapped up in ‘Saving the Dead Sea’ clothing” in order to attract international financing. He said it was often difficult to discern the true forces behind such major projects.

Friends of the Earth Middle East, a regional organization, expressed concern over the environmental impact of releasing brine into the Dead Sea. The organization’s Jordanian director, Munqeth Mehyar, said in a statement, “What is being signed today is a conventional desalination project, albeit with a regional perspective.”

Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994, but their relationship has generally remained low profile. Israel and the Palestinians are currently engaged in a round of peace talks, but they are taking place in an atmosphere of rancor and mutual recrimination.

A version of this article appears in print on December 10, 2013, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Rare Middle East Agreement, on Water.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 10:14 AM
Subject: re: The President on Inequality
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  With more than three years yet to go in his office, president Obama's announced focus on a more equitable society is a worthy goal, and one that should engage us all. The United States cannot remain a world leader in any field if it rewards only the heirs of wealth and power with the opportunity for wealth and power in the future.

   But there remain three years and the docket is bulging. Who will prosecute torturers if not president Obama's department of Justice? Who will protect our Fourth Amendment guarantees from unreasonable search if not president Obama's FCC? The president of the United States has a lofty pulpit from which to lead on big generational issues. He also has a job to do, to "take care that these Laws be faithfully executed".

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/opinion/the-president-on-inequality.html?hpw&rref=opinion&_r=0

EDITORIAL

The President on Inequality

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: December 4, 2013 519 Comments

On Wednesday, in one of his strongest economic speeches, President Obama pushed past all the distractions of his opponents and addressed the core of those fears. He will spend the rest of his presidency, he said, on “the defining challenge of our time:” reducing economic inequality and improving upward mobility.The issues that have obsessed Washington for the last few months — the government shutdown, the broken health care website, the unrelentingly bitter tone of a stalemated Congress — mean very little to most Americans. For a broad swath of the country, what matters hasn’t changed since the recession, and it is economic anxiety. Six in 10 workers in a Washington Post poll last week said they were worried about losing their jobs, the highest number in decades. Many of the millions who are unemployed have reached new depths of despair.

“I am convinced that the decisions we make on these issues over the next few years,” he said, “will determine whether or not our children will grow up in an America where opportunity is real.”

An American child born into the lowest 20 percent income level has a less than a 1-in-20 chance of making it to the top, as Mr. Obama pointed out. But one born in the top 20 percent has a 2-in-3 chance of staying there. And the top 10 percent now takes half of the national income, up from a third in 1979. That’s a level of inequality on par with Jamaica and Argentina, and such concentrated wealth leads to more frequent recessions, higher household debt and growing cynicism and despondency.

That cynicism is often expressed in a lack of faith in government’s ability to do anything about the problem. This view ignores how much inequality has been made worse in the past few decades by government decisions. The emphasis on cutting taxes and spending that began in the Reagan years is a direct cause of economic insecurity now. It has led, for example, to education cuts that have harmed children in low-income school districts. Reversing those decisions can still have an enormous impact.

Mr. Obama did not reveal a sheaf of new ideas in his speech. But he did remind listeners of the many good ideas he has proposed about inequality over the years, most of which have been blocked by Republican opposition. A higher minimum wage would have an immediate effect on the buying power of millions of workers, stimulating growth and employment. Greater spending on high-quality preschool, a new emphasis on career and technical education and affordable higher education would all help to lower the barriers to economic mobility. Stronger collective-bargaining laws and nondiscrimination protections would help restore a balance in workplaces now tilted strongly toward employers.

And the Affordable Care Act, as Mr. Obama said forcefully, has enhanced security for millions of people who were previously uninsured or who lived in fear of losing their policies because of illness. “This law is going to work,” he said, “and for the sake of our economic security, it needs to work.” It will reduce personal bankruptcies, he said, cut sick time and keep children healthier and performing better in school.

What he should have added was the need to raise tax revenue, which is crucial to making the kinds of investments big enough to have a real effect on growth. The tax code must be overhauled to eliminate the absurdly generous breaks given to those at the very top — an idea that Mr. Obama has campaigned on but rarely brings up, given the implacable Republican opposition. But the president did issue a clear challenge to his opponents. Where are the Republican ideas for reducing the income gap? Most in the party don’t even recognize it as a problem. “You owe it to the American people to tell us what you are for,” he said, “not just what you’re against.” The silence from Republicans explains why economic inequality is rising.

Kurds’ Oil Deals With Turkey Raise Fears of Fissures in Iraq

      in 1945, the U. S. committed itself to the charter of the United Nations. We, with nations around the world, endorsed "nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples". Since then, the map of the world has changed. Many peoples now enjoy what was promised then. But 19million Kurds still live in hope in vain that they too will enjoy what others claim as a right.
  Opposed to them are the  mighty of the Nations. Spaniards afraid of Basque land claims, Chinese afraid of Tibetan land claims, Israelis afraid of Palestinian land claims, Russians afraid of Chechen land claims, all cling to the current map as if it were immutable.  But it is not our place to freeze the world map for the convenience of the mighty. Self-determination is a right. That right--and not some casually drawn lines at the end of WWI--should determine national borders, for Kurdistan as in the rest of the world.
Barry Haskell Levine


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/world/middleeast/kurds-oil-deals-with-turkey-raise-fears-of-fissures-in-iraq.html

Kurds’ Oil Deals With Turkey Raise Fears of Fissures in Iraq

Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times
A Kurdish shepherd passing a flare from an oil well in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region.
By TIM ARANGO and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: December 2, 2013 69 Comments
ISTANBUL — The sharp, dry mountains that run between Turkey and Iraq have long marked a front line in the battle between the Turkish government and Kurdish separatists where cross-border attacks took many lives on both sides.


Khaled Hasan for The New York Times

Though a rapprochement has calmed the border, the United States fears stability may now be in even greater danger. The problem is not war — but commerce. Iraqi Kurds are selling oil and natural gas directly to Turkey, infuriating Washington and the central government in Baghdad, which fear that oil independence could lead Kurds to declare a broad independence and the fracturing of the nation.

Even as sectarian killing is again spiking across Iraq, and the Syrian civil war destabilizes the region, American officials in Baghdad say the flow of oil to Turkey may be the greatest potential risk to Iraq’s cohesion.

But a year-and-a-half-long diplomatic drive by the United States to stop the flow has so far failed, reflecting Washington’s diminished influence in the region, even with its two longtime allies. Not only will trucks continue to travel daily from the Kurdish region to two Turkish cities on the Mediterranean coast, and not only will the Kurds continue to deliver oil via a pipeline to Turkey, but the parties plan to build a second pipeline, whose details have been kept secret.

“The Kurdistan deal with Turkey is a huge violation against the Iraqi Constitution because they didn’t make the deal with the coordination of the central government,” said Ali Dhari, the deputy chairman of the Iraqi Parliament’s oil and gas committee. “This means the stealing of the Iraqi wealth, and we will not allow it.”

The oil accords with Turkey, potentially worth billions of dollars, are part of a broader effort by Iraqi Kurds in recent years to cut their own energy deals — including exploration agreements with foreign companies like Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Gazprom — that sidelined the central government. The Kurds, and the Turks, say they will pay Baghdad its fair share. But officials in the capital have long claimed such arrangements are illegal.

The controversy is in part the unfinished business of the American occupation of Iraq. The failure of the Iraqi government to pass a national oil law, one of the benchmarks set by President George W. Bush when he announced the United States troop “surge” in 2007, has left Baghdad and Erbil, the Kurdish capital, in a perpetual feud over how to divide profits and who has the authority to make agreements with international oil companies.

Qasim Mishkhati, a Kurdish member of Parliament’s oil and gas committee, insisted that the wealth from the deals would be shared with the rest of Iraq, and that it was the responsibility of the regional government in the north to find international markets for its oil resources. “Kurdistan is working to increase the national income so that all Iraqis can enjoy better services and more wealth,” he said.

Although the mechanism for such payments has not been worked out, the Turks and the Kurds have indicated that they would adhere to the existing proportions for the division of national revenue, meaning Baghdad would receive 83 percent of the net profit and the Kurds would keep 17 percent.

But the alarm in Baghdad and Washington has grown with these oil deals, which appear to be part of a slow, long-term strategy by the Iraqi Kurds to pursue a path of increasing autonomy that experts say has one endgame: an independent Kurdish state.

Tens of millions of Kurds live in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran, and they have long held ambitions for independence that for decades were thwarted. Now, amid the turmoil of the Middle East, Kurdish leaders are taking decisive steps to advance that dream, not just in Iraq, but also in Syria, where Kurdish factions recently declared an autonomous administration in the northeast.

The Iraqi Kurds run their own autonomous and relatively prosperous region in northern Iraq, control their own ports of entry, field their own army and intelligence service and conduct their own foreign policy. The Kurdish region also has separate visa rules, so an American, for instance, might wait weeks or months to secure a visa to Baghdad, but could buy one at the airport in Erbil. The region has also served as a safe haven for Sunni officials looking to escape the reach of the Shiite-led government, including former Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, accused in 2011 of terrorism.


But the oil deals also highlight the drastic reshaping of regional alliances in the past few years. In 2003 Turkey, worried that the American invasion of Iraq would promote Kurdish independence, forbade American troops to use its territory to enter Iraq.
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But now Turkey is in the process of making peace with its own Kurds, who have waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state with bases in Iraq. In a region where Turkey has few allies these days, the Iraqi Kurds have become close partners.

For Turkey, though, the energy deals with Iraqi Kurdistan, which include oil and natural gas, underscore a persistent national challenge to secure reliable supplies of energy for its economy. Turkey boasts the Middle East’s largest economy but has few domestic energy sources. It has historically relied on two countries for the bulk of its energy — Russia and Iran — and a national priority for Turkey has been to diversify its sources of oil and gas.

The only place in the world where demand for energy is growing faster than Turkey is in China, and the only people who pay more for gasoline at the pump than Turks are Norwegians. In Turkey it can cost more than $120 to fill the tank of a compact car because of high taxes the government has levied in an effort to keep demand down

While Turkey and the Iraqi Kurdish regional government have slowly expanded their relationship in the past few years, they have recently agreed to something ambitious and broader: a multibillion-dollar pact that includes the building of the second pipeline, according to press reports and oil executives involved in the negotiations.

That deal comes as Turkish and Iraqi government officials have recently sought to mend ties that had soured in recent years, an effort that included a visit to Baghdad on Sunday by Turkey’s energy minister, who indicated Turkey would try to win Baghdad’s support for the deals with the Kurds. Turkey had supported the Sunni Muslim opposition in Iraq, angering the Shiite leadership that dominates the government in Baghdad.

“There has been a rapprochement between Ankara and Baghdad, but what I see in the energy policy of Turkey relating to Kurdistan still seems to be a fly in the ointment for the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad,” said Badr H. Jafar, the chairman of the Pearl Petroleum consortium, the largest private oil and gas investor in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The recent steps taken to improve the relationship between Turkey and Iraq — a reconciliation pushed by the Americans — now seem to be the best bet, analysts said, to achieve an agreement on an elusive national oil law to divide the country’s vast petroleum profits.

The Iraqi Kurdish leadership “is positioning itself for greater autonomy in negotiations with Baghdad, but as relations between Ankara and Baghdad continue to warm it is inconceivable that the K.R.G. will be allowed to export to Turkey without Baghdad’s consent,” said David L. Goldwyn, the State Department’s coordinator for international energy affairs during the first term of the Obama administration, referring to the initials for the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq.

Turkey, though, has said it will ensure that the government in Baghdad will be paid for any oil it imports from Kurdistan in accordance with Iraq’s revenue-sharing arrangement.

“If done correctly, these deals have the potential to generate huge revenues for Iraq, distributed by the Iraqi government in accordance with the Iraqi Constitution and for the ultimate benefit of the Iraqi people, including of course, the Kurdish region,” Mr. Jafar said.

Tim Arango reported from Istanbul, and Clifford Krauss from Houston. Duraid Adnan contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 8:09 AM
Subject: re: Insurers Are Offered Assistance for Losses
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   From the beginning, Romneycare (or--as it is miscalled "Obamacare") was a kludge--an unwieldy contrivance of too many moving parts to keep the insurance companies in the healthcare business that could be better served by a singlepayer system. But now it is revealed that it is worse than a kludge; it is a sham.  The cost of healthcare coverage for the sickest among us will still be carried by our federal government, while the insurance companies will pocket the profits on those who need less from the system. This is neither socialized medicine nor the working of the free market. It is an indefensible siphon of wealth from the public into the pockets of the few. No one should think that this is ok.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/us/politics/insurers-are-offered-assistance-for-losses.html?hpw&rref=health&_r=0

Insurers Are Offered Assistance for Losses

By ROBERT PEAR

Published: December 2, 2013

WASHINGTON — The White House is offering more money to insurance companies as an incentive for them to let people keep insurance policies that were to have been canceled next year.

The administration floated several proposals on Monday to “help offset the loss in premium revenue and profit” that it said might occur if insurers went along with President Obama’s request to reinstate canceled policies.

Millions of people have received notices saying their policies were being canceled because they did not comply with minimum coverage requirements of the new health care law.

In a notice published Monday in the Federal Register, the administration acknowledged that insurers had a valid concern: They may be stuck with sicker, higher-cost customers in the new insurance exchanges because healthier Americans will stay on their existing health plans for another year.

Facing a political furor over the cancellation of insurance policies, Mr. Obama announced on Nov. 14 that he would temporarily waive some requirements of the new federal law and allow insurers to renew “current policies for current enrollees” for a year.

Insurers criticized the president’s move, saying it could upset the assumptions on which they had set premiums for new insurance products providing coverage in 2014.

Many people with serious illnesses were excluded from the old policies. As a result, the administration said, people on those policies may be healthier than average.

If they do not enroll in the new health plans, the administration said, the average cost of claims for people in those plans may be higher than expected, and this increase in costs could lead to unexpected financial losses for insurance companies.

To reduce this risk, the administration said it could provide financial assistance to certain insurers through a program under which the government will share in their losses and profits for the next three years.

Any such assistance would come on top of federal subsidies that the government plans to pay insurers to make coverage more affordable for low- and middle-income people under the new law. TheCongressional Budget Office estimates that those subsidy payments will exceed $1 trillion over the next 10 years.

The administration said it could not immediately determine the cost of the assistance for insurers because it did not know how many people would stay in existing plans or how many would decide to enroll in new policies that provide additional benefits and consumer protections, as required by the 2010 health law.

Robert E. Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, welcomed the proposal, saying, “We appreciate that the administration is taking steps to stabilize the market and minimize disruptions for consumers.”

But Jamie Court, the president of Consumer Watchdog, a liberal advocacy group, said the proposal was premature. “Insurers are already being paid by taxpayers for the vast majority of new enrollees,” he said.

 The notice published on Monday includes proposals on several other issues. Certain health plans sponsored by labor unions would be exempted from new fees imposed on insurance companies and on many self-insured group health plans.

Labor unions have been lobbying for such an exemption, saying the fees could be “highly disruptive” to Taft-Hartley plans administered jointly by labor and management representatives in construction, entertainment and other industries.

But Republicans denounced the administration proposal. Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said it would provide “special treatment to President Obama’s political allies.”

The fees, to be levied from 2014 to 2016, will provide money to insurers that incur high-dollar claims for consumers in the individual insurance market.

The administration on Monday also reported a surge in the number of people using the website for the federal insurance marketplace,HealthCare.gov.

Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that 375,000 people visited the website in the first 12 hours on Monday, about twice the normal traffic.

Because of the increase in demand, Ms. Bataille said, “we deployed a new customer queuing system, or waiting room, to help manage the traffic.” People will receive email messages inviting them to return to the site at another time when it is less busy.

The surge came just a day after the White House said the website was greatly improved and would “work smoothly for the vast majority of users.”

Jeffrey D. Zients, the presidential adviser leading efforts to fix the site, said Sunday that it could handle 50,000 users at a time. He reported that pages on the site were loading much faster, with a response time of less than one second and an error rate less than 1 percent.

But Ms. Bataille said federal officials decided to divert traffic from the website at a time when it had about 35,000 users on Monday. The performance of the site appeared to be faltering, as the response time exceeded two seconds and the error rate was nine-tenths of 1 percent, officials said
.

A version of this article appears in print on December 3, 2013, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Insurers Are Offered Assistance For Losses.