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US Professor questions that United States is No. 1 – But in What?
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US Professor questions that United States is No. 1 – But in What?
--- Frank Oct. 17, 2014 in Waterloo, On
Oct. 17, 2014, mornig, I read the article The United States Is Number 1 -- But in What? I appreciate the rational comments of Dr Lawrence Wittner.
Besides those rational scholars as Dr Lawrence Wittner have been deeply worries for that democracy is destroying the world, most ordinary people are still foolishly keen on ridiculous game of the democracy.
Oct. 14, 2014, in the article President Napolitano and Premier Renzi creates new Era for Italy, I have discussed the nature of the democracy. I excerpt some as follow.
People are advocating democratic system that based on the partisan battle. However, people seem to have ignored a vital problem, that is, parties or we may say that most of forms people grouping have been acting as garbage absorber to accumulate of irrational people who are brain defects, to help them gain social power and obtain the energy that cannot achieved as individuals, and even the power of State Apparatus to ruin this world.
With the socialist camp headed by the Soviet Union failed, especially the collapse of the Berlin Wall in Nov. 9, 1989, marks the practice of socialism that based on the communist ideology has basically failed.
1992, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published the book The End of History and the Last Man. In the book, Fukuyama argues the great ideological battles between east and west were over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed. With anti-communist protests sweeping across the former Soviet Union, that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the endpoint of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government.
20 years later, in Foreign Affairs of September/October 2014 issue, Francis Fukuyama published article with exactly the opposite point of view - America in Decay - the Sources of Political Dysfunction. In book, he completely negated their own conclusions about democracy and desperately said that the U.S. political system has decayed and has NO WAY OUT.
Disappointment for American democracy, Fukuyama was not the on
Oct. 4, 2009, the 2008 Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, the professor of the Department of Economics at Princeton University, who published article <The Politics of Spite> in the New York Times, said that:
"The guiding principle of on
"It's an ugly picture. But it's the truth. And it's a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America's real problems has to understand."
Oct 16, 2013, I on
"MRI - Magnetic resonance imaging dynamic scans of the human brain have shown that human beha
Apr. 01, 2011, the report <Scans reveal differences in brain structure of antisocial teens> said with that:
"The neuroscientists used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the size of particular regions in the brains of 65 teenage boys with conduct disorder compared with 27 teenage boys who did not display symptoms of behavioural disorder. Their findings revealed that the amygdala and insula – regions of the brain that contribute to emotion perception, empathy and recognising were strikingly smaller in teenagers with antisocial behaviour. ”
"Even if people no significant behavioral problem as above mentioned, but, the character of each individual is also a big difference. Some people can do any thing rationally; some people are impulse and radical. Those are also due to the differences in brain development."
"In view of this, we must choose those people who are healthy in brain development to make decisions for the future of mankind."
"As a simple way, the national and international decision-making bodies should be formed by those people who have obtained high rank academic qualifications, such as, the professional experts, professors, and the Nobel Prize winners, and so on."
"There is a teaching class is widely welcomed by young people, no matter in North America, in Europe, in China, or even in Japan, it is the Harvard course Justice: A Journey in Moral Reasoning. The Lecturers isMichael J. Sandel, the American political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University."
"In the article <If I ruled the world: Michael Sandel> he said that 'If I ruled the world, I would rewrite the economics textbooks. This may seem a small ambition, unworthy of my sovereign office. But it would actually be a big step toward a better civic life.' "
Clearly，the philosopher Michael J. Sandel is surely able to think carefully and thoughtfully, and hesurely is rich in compassionate, and he can surely rule the world rationally.
It Is Time to Kick Out Brain-Defective Politicians by MRI Scan.
--- Frank Oct. 20, 2014 in Waterloo, On
The United States is No. 1 – But in What?
by Lawrence Wittner 10-12-14
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/157216
Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, "What’s Going On at UAardvark?"
The United States is No. 1 – But in What?
American politicians are fond of telling their audiences that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Is there any evidence for this claim?
Well, yes. When it comes to violence and preparations for violence, the United States is, indeed, No. 1. In 2013, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. government accounted for 37 percent of world military expenditures, putting it far ahead of all other nations. (The two closest competitors, China and Russia, accounted for 11 percent and 5 percent respectively.) From 2004 to 2013, the United States was also the No. 1 weapons exporter in the world. Moreover, given the U.S. government’s almost continuous series of wars and acts of military intervention since 1941, it seems likely that it surpasses all rivals when it comes to international violence.
This record is paralleled on the domestic front, where the United States has more guns and gun-related deaths than any other country. A study released in late 2013 reported that the United States had 88 guns for every 100 people, and 40 gun-related deaths for every 400,000 people―the most of any of the 27 economically developed countries surveyed. By contrast, in Britain there were 6 guns per 100 people and 1 gun-related death per 400,000 people.
Yet, in a great many other areas, the United States is not No. 1 at all.
Take education. In late 2013, the Program for International Student Assessment released a report on how 15-year old students from 65 nations performed on its tests. The report showed that U.S. students ranked 17th in reading and 21st in math. An international survey a bit earlier that year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that the ranking was slightly worse for American adults. In 2014, Pearson, a multinational educational services company, placed the United States 20th in the world in “educational attainment”―well behind Poland and the Slovak Republic.
American healthcare and health fare even worse. In a 2014 study of healthcare (including infant mortality, healthy life expectancy, and mortality from preventable conditions) in 11 advanced industrial countries, the Commonwealth Fund concluded that the United States ranked last among them. According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. healthcare system ranks 30th in the world. Other studies reach somewhat different conclusions, but all are very unflattering to the United States, as are studies of American health. The United States, for example, has one of the world’s worst cancer rates (the seventh highest), and life expectancy is declining compared to other nations. An article in the Washington Post in late 2013 reported that the United States ranked 26th among nations in life expectancy, and that the average American lifespan had fallen a year behind the international average.
What about the environment? Specialists at Yale University have developed a highly sophisticatedEnvironmental Performance Index to examine the behavior of nations. In the area of protection of human health from environmental harm, their 2014 index placed the United States 35th in health impacts, 36th in water and sanitation, and 38th in air quality. In the other area studied―protection of ecosystems―the United States ranked 32nd in water resources, 49th in climate and energy, 86th in biodiversity and habitat, 96th in fisheries, 107th in forests, and 109th in agriculture.
These and other areas of interest are dealt with by the Social Progress Index, which was developed byMichael Porter, an eminent professor of business (and a Republican) at Harvard. According to Porter and his team, in 2014 the United States ranked 23rd in access to information and communications, 24th in nutrition and basic medical care, 31st in personal safety, 34th in water and sanitation, 39th in access to basic knowledge, 69th in ecosystem sustainability, and 70th in health and wellness.
The widespread extent of poverty, especially among children, remains a disgrace in one of the world’s wealthiest nations. A 2013 report by the United Nations Children’s Fund noted that, of the 35 economically advanced countries that had been studied, only Rumania had a higher percentage of children living in poverty than did the United States.
Of course, the United States is not locked into these dismal rankings and the sad situation they reveal about the health, education, and welfare of its citizens. It could do much better if its vast wealth, resources, and technology were employed differently than they are at present.
Ultimately, it’s a matter of priorities. When most U.S. government discretionary spending goes for war and preparations for war, it should come as no surprise that the United States emerges No. 1 among nations in its capacity for violence and falls far behind other nations in providing for the well-being of its people.
Americans might want to keep this in mind as their nation embarks upon yet another costly military crusade.
About Professor Lawrence S. Wittner
http://www.lawrenceswittner.com/profile
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Lawrence Wittner is a prominent American historian who has combined intellectual life with activism for peace and social justice.
He attended Columbia College (B.A., 1962), the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1963), and Columbia University (Ph.D. in history, 1967). Subsequently, he taught at Hampton Institute, at Vassar College, and—under the Fulbright program—at the University of Tokyo and other Japanese universities. In 1974, he began teaching at the State University of New York/Albany, where he rose to the rank of Professor of History before his retirement in 2010.
Professor Wittner is the author of nine books, the editor or co-editor of another four, and the writer of over 250 published articles and book reviews. His most ambitious scholarly project thus far has been his Struggle Against the Bomb trilogy (One World or None, Resisting the Bomb, and Toward Nuclear Abolition), a history of the worldwide nuclear disarmament movement. From 1984 to 1987, he edited Peace & Change, a journal of peace research. His article "Peace Movements and Foreign Policy" won the Charles DeBenedetti award of the Conference on Peace Research in History in 1989, and his One World or None was awarded the Warren Kuehl Book Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1995 as the outstanding book published in the two preceding years on internationalism and/or peace movements. He received the New York State/United University Professions Excellence Award for scholarship, teaching, and service in 1990 and the Peace History Society's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.
A former president of the Council on Peace Research in History (now the Peace History Society), an affiliate of the American Historical Association, Professor Wittner also chaired the Peace History Commission of the International Peace Research Association.
He has received major fellowships or grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Aspen Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the United States Institute of Peace.
Published Articles on the Web by Lawrence Wittner
Global Problems Call for Global Solutions
Why Are Campus Administrators Making So Much Money?
When Will They Ever Learn? The American People and Support for War
Obamacare ‘bronze’ plan premiums expected to jump 14% in 2015
China: Sharpening Swords for War?
Richard L. Russell October 16, 2014
Richard L. Russell, Ph. D.
Richard L. Russell is Non-Resident Senior Fellow for Strategic Studies at the Center for the National Interest. He previously was an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University and a political-military analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Russell is the author of Sharpening Strategic Intelligence (Cambridge University Press), Weapons Proliferation and War in the Greater Middle East(Routledge), and George F. Kennan’s Strategic Thought (Praeger). He also has published more than forty journal and magazine articles and sixteen chapters in edited books. Russell received a Ph.D. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia where he studied political realism under the late Professor Kenneth W. Thompson, who revised Hans J. Morgenthau’s masterwork Politics Among Nations.
Russell may be contacted at DrRichardLRussell@gmail.com
China: Sharpening Swords for War?
From a realist’s geopolitical perspective, the United States needs to keep eyes on global hot spots with concentrations of power that could adversely affect American national interests. Of the three geographic centers of global power today, two are engulfed in war while the third is on the war’s precipice. In Europe, Russia has returned to its quest for global power with its steely paramilitary and military disembowelment of Ukraine. Moscow’s aggression now looms over other states in Europe, especially the Baltic states and Poland. In the Middle East, the Islamic State has lurched onto the international scene with a bloody rampage that has torn apart Syria and Iraq. The Islamic State looks ready is to expand and spill more blood along the borders of Jordan and Turkey and in Kurdish areas in Iraq, notwithstanding the American and international coalition air campaign against the jihadists.
In Asia, China has not yet shed any blood in war. But a read of Robert Haddick’s new book Fire on the Water: China, America, and the Future of the Pacific painstakingly shows through his level-headed, scholarly, and realist analysis that Beijing is sharpening its swords for war while Washington is distracted by chaos elsewhere. Haddick rightly judges that the United States “acting as an outside balancer, has played the central role in East Asia’s security, a responsibility that has boosted the prosperity of all. But just like Europe a century ago, it is doubtful that Asia, left on its own, could shape a stable balance of power in the face of China’s dramatic rise.”
Haddick is deliberate and measured and “calls it as he sees it,” which is a tone to be welcomed in the often ideological debates on China’s future in international security. Nevertheless, with his formidable political-military expertise Haddick makes a damning case that China is wielding astute diplomacy and building-up its military forces to exploit weaknesses in American military force projection capabilities into the Asian theater. China has diplomatically labored to settle numerous land disputes with neighbors. As Haddick tallies the diplomatic score, “Since 1998 China settled eleven lingering land border disputes with six of its neighbors, steps that removed security friction from potential overland threats.” China’s $400 billion deal to buy gas from Russia signed in May 2014 and its economic development agreements signed with India in September 2014 bolster Haddick’s assessment that Beijing is shoring-up relations with land border states.
Settling border disputes allows Beijing to turn and focus its geopolitical attention to the sea. China is using a paramilitary maritime force to place footholds on disputed islands and assert hegemony in the East and South China Seas. Haddick observes a disturbing contrast in behavior. While China has settled land disputes, “it has accelerated its demands for its maritime claims in the East and South China Seas.” China is playing a shrewd “salami tactics” game with assertive actions that taken in isolation fall short of cause for war, but collectively and over time significantly expand Chinese influence and coercion in Asia.
China couples its paramilitary maritime operations with a substantial build-up of military power for deterring and attacking American carrier battle groups. Haddick’s book details that the Chinese are growing land-based and space-based systems for detecting and targeting American battle groups, as well as building surface ships and attack submarines for firing anti-ship cruise missiles. All of these Chinese naval capabilities are designed to push American naval access beyond some 2,000 km from China’s coastline.
Chinese military capabilities to deny the United States the ability to operate fixed-wing aircraft add to the formidable threats to American forces in the region. As Haddick judges, “China’s Flanker fighter-bombers present a particular challenge to the United States and its allies because of their relatively long combat radius. The Flanker variants have an unrefueled combat radius of at least 1,500 kilometers. Five of the six U.S. air bases in the western Pacific (two in South Korea, three in Japan) lie within the combat radius of China’s Flankers.” China’s increasingly sophisticated and thickening air defenses, moreover, significantly increases the potential costs for American aircraft to hold at risk military assets on the Chinese mainland.
The Chinese are unconstrained in building-up their ballistic and cruise missile capabilities as the United States is by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Washington and Moscow signed the INF Treaty that bans land-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km. China is churning out ballistic missiles and cruise missiles to increasingly hold at risk regional airbases that host American short-range fighters. This is a particularly unnerving situation for the United States because Russia has been violating the terms of the INF Treaty by testing prohibited cruise missiles.
On top of conventional military capabilities to deny American military access, the Chinese are fielding unconventional capabilities to deter American military intervention. They are broadening their anti-satellite and cyber warfare capabilities that could be harnessed to disable American command, control, communications, and intelligence. The Chinese too are modernizing their strategic nuclear forces to include mobile land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles—the likes of which the United States does not have in its nuclear triad—and submarine-based nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
The Chinese are resolved to never again be intimidated by American conventional and strategic forces as they were during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis. While that crisis in the minds of American—if they even know about it—was a mere footnote in American security policy history, it was a watershed event for the Chinese. Haddick judges that “China’s military modernization program, begun in earnest after PLA planners carefully studied the results of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, has been specifically designed to exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. force structure, doctrine, and planning. Assumptions that U.S. commanders had long taken for granted will no longer be operative by the end of the decade.” Americans—with our sweeping demands to watch the globe to protect interests—are at a distinct disadvantage in the competition with Chinese who have a tighter basket of security interests upon which they can focus their strategic energies.
Haddick persuasively rejects an “offshore balancing” strategy for the United States in the Pacific and strenuously argues for a “forward presence.” In his analysis, “Offshore balancing would not only increase the likelihood that the United States would have to return during a conflict to restore stability (because without a U.S. forward presence, the likelihood of major power conflict rises), the strategy ensures that the U.S. would have to do so under very unfavorable circumstances.” Haddick hastens to add that “The U.S. forward presence strategy in the Asia-Pacific region is not charity work. The United States has performed this task for seven decades in order to protect U.S. security, to avert more costly great-power wars that would inevitably involve the United States, and to bolster America’s standard of living by promoting the security and growth of its trading partners in the region.”
Haddick’s assessment of how the American military would fare in battle against this tsunami of growing Chinese military capabilities is devastating. His analysis should break all the china (pun intended) of American military services whose procurement priorities focus on fighting the last wars. As Haddick captures the problem, “Simply put, military doctrine, long-ingrained service cultures, and defense acquisition practices have resulted in U.S. military forces that are far too heavily weighted toward short-range weapons systems unsuited for the vast operational distances in East Asia.” The navy is fixated on increasingly vulnerable aircraft carriers. The air force is preoccupied with short-range and exorbitantly expensive short-range fighters. The marines are struggling to find the means to mount amphibious assaults in an era in which cruise missiles can sink marines afloat long before they get anywhere close to a beach. And the army is largely AWOL in thinking about the future of warfare in Asia.
American policymakers and military planners need to rapidly and drastically rethink strategy for Asia, as well as the national means needed to fulfill it. Haddick calls for “a broad range of persuasive and dissuasive capabilities—diplomatic, economic, and military (irregular and conventional)—designed to convince China’s leaders that they will achieve no gains in the region from coercion. The strategy will do this by threatening to impose costs, creating resistance to coercive Chinese gains, and holding at risk assets and conditions valued by China’s leaders.” Haddick stresses that his recommended strategy relies on a hefty mix of long-range striking platforms and differs markedly from the navy-air force “Air-Sea Battle” concept because his does not call for first-strikes on China’s reconnaissance and command systems. Nor does Haddick expect American forward bases to be useful after war breaks out or American surface ships to operate for sustained periods within Chinese ballistic missile ranges.
Fire on the War provides superb political-military analysis unencumbered by the interests of the armed services, national security bureaucracies, and defense industries. It is an insightful and constructive contribution to better inform American decision-making, policy, military procurement, and, yes indeed, war planning for China. This book should be placed on the top of the reading stacks for anyone, from informed citizens, to students, faculty, military commanders, and policy makers, who want to get smart fast on the acute challenges for American security policy in Asia. Above all, Robert Haddick provides a great public and national service by warning those of us distracted by global crises in Europe and the Middle East of China’s strategically impressive and ominous sharpening of political and military swords in Asia.
Richard L. Russell is Non-Resident Senior Fellow for Strategic Studies at the Center for the National Interest.
Obamacare “bronze” plan owners may be in for a shock next year. Investors
predict the cheapest healthcare offering under the Affordable Care Act could jump nearly 14 percent in price.
In an analysis of expected rates for the biggest 15 cities in the nation, including Washington, D.C., Investor’s Business
Daily reported Friday that the cost for the plan could increase by an average of 13.9 percent for 40-year-old non-smokers earning 225 percent of the poverty level.
Plan owners in Seattle, Wash. will see the biggest price
difference. The cost of the bronze plan, after subsidies, will jump by 64 percent, from $60 to $98 per month.
In Providence, R.I., the plan cost
is expected to soar from $72 to $99 per month, from $88 to $111 in Los Angeles, $100 to $122 in Las Vegas, and $97 to $114 in New York.
Millions of people who did not enroll in ObamaCare last year are expected to sign up for a plan during the open enrollment session in 2015, but the increase in pricing could negatively impact that enrollment.
Some potential enrollees could opt out of their plans because of the double-digit cost increases, and younger enrollees may chose emergency “catastrophic” plans available to those under 30. However, if younger enrollees opt for emergency care plans, they are then grouped separately, leaving the a main insurance pool filled with relatively older and more costly participants.