Chris Hedges's Blog, page 455

Just Half of Young Americans Foresee a Better Financial Future

About half of young Americans expect to be financially better off than their parents, according to a new poll, a sign that the dream of upward mobility is alive but somewhat tempered.

The poll, by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and MTV, found that half of 15- to 26-year-olds think they eventually will be better off than their parents in terms of household finances. About 29 percent expect to do as well as their parents, and 20 percent expect to be worse off.

Parents were slightly more optimistic: 60 percent think their children will do better than they did, a view that held true for parents across all income groups. Overall, only 12 percent of parents said that they felt their children might do worse.

It’s no longer a guarantee that children will achieve upward income mobility. About half of the Americans born in 1984 earned more at age 30 than their parents, down from 92 percent in 1940, according to the study by famed economist Raj Chetty and others that was released in 2016.

Jennifer Narvaez, 23, is among those who anticipates her financial future will be a bit brighter than that of her parents. Narvaez said she expects to have more opportunities as a college graduate to get a job and own a home than her parents, who grew up in Nicaragua and immigrated to the United States. The Miami resident holds an undergraduate degree in biology and is planning on attending medical school to become a cardiologist.

Narvaez is less certain about the prospects of the U.S. economy, particularly as the nation appears to be marching into a trade war with China.

“It’s a weird time,” she said. “I feel like it’s hard to predict what will happen because of the kind of administration we have.”

Alex Barner, 20, also felt optimistic that he might fare better than his mother, who had him at age 18 and raised him as a single mother. He is attending college in New Mexico and is considering a future career in business management.

While Barner is hopeful he will do well in life, he also has some concerns about the trajectory of the nation and its economy. Like Narvaez, he’s concerned by the trade policy of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Barner also said he feels politicians need to focus more on matters that affect people in the here and now, such as health care and student loan relief.

Respondents were divided about how they expect the nation’s economy will fare in the year ahead. About 29 percent of young people expect the economy to improve, 30 percent expect it will get worse and 41 anticipate it will stay the same. Similarly, 35 percent of parents expect improvement, 27 percent expect conditions to get worse and 38 percent expect the economy to stay as is.

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The Youth Political Pulse poll was conducted Aug. 23 to Sept. 10 by the AP-NORC Center and MTV. The poll was conducted using NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. It includes 580 young people ages 15-26 and 591 parents of children in the same age group. The margin of sampling error for all young people is plus or minus 6.6 percentage points, and for parents it’s plus or minus 7.5 percentage points.

Why Is The Washington Post Sanitizing Racists?

The Washington Post has published a raft of commentary recently lamenting what its authors see as the decline of free speech, largely in response to the New Yorker canceling plans to interview Steve Bannon at its annual festival (FAIR.org, 9/7/18). The magazine had faced criticism for inviting Bannon, former chair of the white supremacist Breitbart News and once the chief strategist for President Donald Trump.

The Post’s pieces suffer from dubious, superficial understandings of free speech, and function as attacks on the left that whitewash the far right.

Fareed Zakaria (Washington Post, 9/13/18) wrote that “liberal democracy” is premised on “a bet on freedom—of thought, belief, expression and action,” and the New Yorker canceling Bannon is the principal case Zakaria discusses to defend his claim that these rights are under siege. Michael Taube (Washington Post, 9/12/18), a former speechwriter for right-wing Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, likewise saw the Bannon/New Yorker episode as evidence that people in the US are unconcerned with “defending free speech, championing intellectual discourse and allowing opposing voices to be heard.”

In an op-ed piece written shortly before the Bannon/New Yorkeraffair, former Indiana governor and current Purdue University president Mitch Daniels (Washington Post, 8/29/18) warned of a “new authoritarianism now threatening our democratic system,” stemming from “the gross excesses of today’s would-be authoritarians, on campus and elsewhere.”

If one takes a minimalist approach to free speech, centering on the First Amendment guarantee not to be jailed or otherwise harmed by the state for expressing one’s views, then it’s clear that such a right hasn’t been violated: The New Yorker abandoning plans to host Bannon doesn’t prevent him from thinking or believing anything.

If one takes a more expansive definition of free speech, holding that the right is only meaningful when a person is allowed access to the (usually privately owned) means of delivering their words, there is still no convincing argument that his freedom is being violated here: As Zakaria himself noted, Bannon was recently showcased by the Economist (9/15/18) and the Financial Times (), as well as on 60 Minutes (9/10/17) and CNN (6/1/18). It’s hard to portray Bannon as a free speech martyr based on his lack of access to mass media, since he has had more such access than all but a few people in the United States.

Of all the people in the world, 99.99999 percent are not interviewed onstage at the New Yorker festival, so not having that particular platform can’t in itself be a violation of free speech.  Editor David Remnick and his colleagues necessarily have to have criteria for who is chosen to speak, and the vast majority of people can’t meet those criteria.

What seems to have rankled the guardians of free speech at the Washington Post is that Remnick announced that Bannon would participate and then changed his mind, after receiving negative feedback from the wider world. The position, then, is that only a small group of insiders should have any meaningful role in deciding who gets to speak on prestigious platforms, and allowing the public to have input on such decisions puts free speech in jeopardy: Speech is free when only elites decide who gets to speak.

While Daniels discusses zero cases to support his claims, and Taube only addresses Bannon’s, Zakaria cites two further instances of colleges disinviting guests as part of his effort to demonstrate that “freedom of thought, belief, expression and action” are endangered: Condoleezza Rice, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq and the resultant hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, and Charles Murray, who uses pseudoscience to contend that inequality is caused by what he sees as the inherent inferiority of black and Latino people, women and the poor.

Yet it’s hard to argue that colleges are obliged to host anybody who happens to have a public profile, or that failure to do so constitutes tyranny. Nor do these authors address the rights of people who work and study on those campuses, and the communities in which they are located, to exercise their freedom of “thought, belief, expression and action” by opposing their schools’ giving racists, misogynists and war criminals a megaphone, thereby increasing their institutional legitimacy.

Demonizing the Left

Taube described as a “left-wing mob” the celebrities who said on social media that they would withdraw from the New Yorker festival unless it scrapped the Bannon interview. The publication, according to Taube, “caved in to far-left yelps of fury.” He went on to write:

Unfortunately, the growing number of Americans situated on the radical left are getting louder and more aggressive. They reject free speech, they refuse to tolerate differences of opinion, and they don’t want opposing views to share the same forum or venue.

According to this framing, the left is a mindless horde of tyrants, yet neither Taube nor any of the authors I’m discussing can enumerate a single leftist who “reject[s] free speech,” even though the crisis is supposedly so dire that it merited three op-ed columns in a single paper in two weeks.

These writers seem not to recognize that “leftists” and others may disagree with the decision to amplify some views, not because they’re “opposing,” but because they’re abhorrent. Should a black person have to debate their humanity? Is that what we mean by democratic debate? There are a great many people who believe the Earth to be flat; are their voices censored by authoritarianism, or simply deemed unworthy of serious consideration?

Zakaria’s article was titled “The Threat to Democracy — From the Left.” He claimed that there is

a worrying erosion of a core democratic norm taking place on the left. It has become commonplace to hear cries on the left to deny controversial figures on the right a platform to express their views.

The message underlying Zakaria’s comments is that people who care about democracy need to reject the left, but it’s leftists, who advocate and organize for extending democracy for workers, women and ethnic minorities, who have won the partial gains that have been made in these realms, over opposition from conservatives and liberals.

Daniels referred to conservatives as being “on the receiving end of today’s repression,” indicating that it’s leftists who are the “authoritarians” carrying out this “repression.” The not-very-subtle implication here is that conservatives are in need of solidarity, and that leftists, apparently a source of despotism, must be opposed.

Meanwhile, activists on the left face actual repression from conservative forces that’s much more serious than racists and war criminals being disinvited to a New Yorker festival or a university talk:  Hundreds of activists face criminal charges for resisting Trump, white supremacists and neo-Nazis; 57 US senators want to make it a federal felony to participate in international boycotts of Israel or Israeli settlements; police infiltrate and spy on Black Lives Matter activists, while the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit is deployed against African-Americans opposed to police brutality.

Sanitizing Racists

These articles offer what amounts to an apologia for Bannon and his political cousins. In Taube’s article, Bannon is described as “highly controversial.” Taube praises the Toronto-based Munk Debates, which scheduled a debate between Bannon and George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, for “showing real courage of conviction and the willingness to have a controversial figure speak in front of an audience.”

To characterize Bannon as merely “controversial” is to sanitize his views, considering that he oversaw a media outlet that fostered antisemitism, spread Islamophobic lies and ran misogynistic content, to say nothing of accusations of Bannon’s personal animus against Jews and charges of domestic violence.

The closest Zakaria comes to a robust account of Bannon’s views is to say that “some” of them “can reasonably be described as evoking white nationalism.” Merely “evoking” white nationalism is presumably distinct from running a media machine designed to mobilize it—providing “the platform for the alt-right,” as Bannon described Breitbart (FAIR.org, 11/15/16).

Zakaria went so far as to compliment Bannon, calling him

an intelligent and influential ideologist, a man who built the largest media platform for the new right, ran Trump’s successful campaign before serving in the White House, and continues to articulate and energize the populism that’s been on the rise throughout the Western world. He might be getting his 15 minutes of fame that will peter out, but, for now, he remains a compelling figure.

To Zakaria, the left is a threat to democracy, whereas a man who has helped popularize every form of bigotry is “intelligent” and “compelling.” The implicit criteria offered by Zakaria as to who should be granted a prominent platform is proximity to power: If one gave the “new right” (that is, the fascist right) its “largest media platform,” ran a “successful campaign” and served in the White House, and your brand of “populism” is “on the rise throughout the Western world,” then of course you deserve to be onstage at the New Yorker festival.

Other people have different criteria—believing that the idea of treating entire categories of people as subhuman has long been discredited, and that holding up such ideologies as worthy of debate does more to spread than discourage them. But that position will get you denounced in the Washington Post as an enemy of free speech and a “new authoritarian.”

Amazon Bows to Critics, Raises Minimum Wage to $15 an Hour

After months of intense public pressure from progressive lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and company employees who shared their harrowing stories of low pay, long hours, and brutal warehouse conditions, Amazon announced on Tuesday that it is raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all of its U.S. workers by next month.

“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” Amazon CEO and world’s richest man Jeff Bezos said in a statement, openly acknowledging that the move came in response to widespread outrage over the trillion-dollar company’s poverty wages, which have forced thousands of workers to rely on food stamps to survive.

While Bezos insisted that Amazon is “excited” to implement the wage hike—which will benefit more than 350,000 full-time, part-time, and seasonal workers—commentators were quick to note that the ultra-billionaire CEO is not raising wages out of the kindness of his heart.

“Amazon isn’t doing this because they’re nice,” investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein noted in response to Amazon’s announcement of the wage hikes, which will go into effect Nov. 1. “Public pressure forced them to.”

Thank you @BernieSanders for your role in making this happen.

“The company said Tuesday the wage hike will benefit more than 350,000 workers, which includes full-time, part-time, temporary and seasonal positions.”https://t.co/fOkyRqFyl5

— Justice Democrats (@justicedems) October 2, 2018

Remember all the mockery Bernie Sanders got for fighting with Amazon?

There’s more to progressive politics than just shouting at Trump, and Sanders is directly responsible today for a major wage victory against an enormously powerful employer. https://t.co/ndm1PVKnZp

— David Atkins #11Justices (@DavidOAtkins) October 2, 2018

This is huge, and I suspect the decision’s driver was primarily a scruffy-haired Senator from Vermont. https://t.co/xRLWPbmgj7

— Stephanie Kelton (@StephanieKelton) October 2, 2018

While progressives were quick to highlight Sanders’ role in bringing about the wage hikes—the senator has hosted town halls, held rallies, and introduced legislation to pressure Amazon to pay its employees a living wage—Sanders told the HuffPost in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s announcement that all credit for higher pay and better conditions should go to workers.

“I think the workers have stood up and fought back,” Sanders said. “What we have done is call attention to the fact that it is a disgrace that the wealthiest person in this country and in this world are paying wages so low that workers are forced to go on food stamps and Medicaid.”

“I think the pressure is building not only on Bezos and Amazon but every other employer in America: Pay your workers a living wage, at least 15 bucks an hour,” Sanders concluded.

How America Can Free Itself From Wall Street

Wall Street owns the country. That was the opening line of a fiery speech that populist leader Mary Ellen Lease delivered around 1890. Franklin Roosevelt said it again in a letter to Colonel House in 1933, and Sen. Dick Durbin was still saying it in 2009. “The banks—hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created—are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill,” Durbin said in an interview. “And they frankly own the place.”

Wall Street banks triggered a credit crisis in 2008-09 that wiped out over $19 trillion in household wealth, turned some 10 million families out of their homes and cost almost 9 million jobs in the U.S. alone. Yet the banks were bailed out without penalty, while defrauded home buyers were left without recourse or compensation. The banks made a killing on interest rate swaps with cities and states across the country, after a compliant and accommodating Federal Reserve dropped interest rates nearly to zero. Attempts to renegotiate these deals have failed.

In Los Angeles, the City Council was forced to reduce the city’s budget by 19 percent following the banking crisis, slashing essential services, while Wall Street has not budged on the $4.9 million it claims annually from the city on its swaps. Wall Street banks are now collecting more from Los Angeles just in fees than it has available to fix its ailing roads.

Local governments have been in bondage to Wall Street ever since the 19th century despite multiple efforts to rein them in. Regulation has not worked. To break free, we need to divest our public funds from these banks and move them into our own publicly owned banks.

L.A. Takes It to the Voters

Some cities and states have already moved forward with feasibility studies and business plans for forming their own banks. But the city of Los Angeles faces a barrier to entry that other cities don’t have. In 1913, the same year the Federal Reserve was formed to backstop the private banking industry, the city amended its charter to state that it had all the powers of a municipal corporation, “with the provision added that the city shall not engage in any purely commercial or industrial enterprise not now engaged in, except on the approval of the majority of electors voting thereon at an election.”

Under this provision, voter approval would apparently not be necessary for a city-owned bank that limited itself to taking the city’s deposits and refinancing municipal bonds as they came due, since that sort of bank would not be a “purely commercial or industrial enterprise” but would simply be a public utility that made more efficient use of public funds. But voter approval would evidently be required to allow the city to explore how public banks can benefit local economic development, rather than just finance public projects.

The L.A. City Council could have relied on this 1913 charter amendment to say no to the dynamic local movement led by millennial activists to divest from Wall Street and create a city-owned bank. But the City Council chose instead to jump that hurdle by putting the matter to the voters. In July 2018, it added Charter Amendment B to the November ballot. A “yes” vote will allow the creation of a city-owned bank that can partner with local banks to provide low-cost credit for the community, following the stellar precedent of the century-old Bank of North Dakota, currently the nation’s only state-owned bank. By cutting out Wall Street middlemen, the Bank of North Dakota has been able to make below-market credit available to local businesses, farmers and students while still being more profitable than some of Wall Street’s largest banks. Following that model would have a substantial upside for both the small business and the local banking communities in Los Angeles.

Rebutting the Opposition

On Sept. 20, the Los Angeles Times editorial board threw cold water on this effort, calling the amendment “half-baked” and “ill-conceived,” and recommending a “no” vote.

Yet not only was the measure well-conceived, but L.A. City Council President Herb Wesson has shown visionary leadership in recognizing its revolutionary potential. He sees the need to declare our independence from Wall Street. He has said that the country looks to California to lead, and that Los Angeles needs to lead California. The people deserve it, and the millennials whose future is in the balance have demanded it.

The City Council recognizes that it’s going to be an uphill battle. Charter Amendment B just asks voters, “Do you want us to proceed?” It is merely an invitation to begin a dialogue on creating a new kind of bank—one geared to serving the people rather than Wall Street.

Amendment B does not give the City Council a blank check to create whatever bank it likes. It just jumps the first of many legal hurdles to obtaining a bank charter. The California Department of Business Oversight (DBO) will have the last word, and it grants bank charters only to applicants that are properly capitalized, collateralized and protected against risk. Public banking experts have talked to the DBO at length and understand these requirements, and a detailed summary of a model business plan has been prepared, to be posted shortly.

The L.A. Times editorial board erroneously compares the new effort with the failed Los Angeles Community Development Bank, which was founded in 1992 and was insolvent a decade later. That institution was not a true bank and did not have to meet the DBO’s stringent requirements for a bank charter. It was an unregulated, non-depository, nonprofit loan and equity fund, capitalized with funds that were basically a handout from the federal government to pacify the restless inner city after riots broke out in 1992—and its creation was actually supported by the L.A. Times.

The Times also erroneously cites a 2011 report by the Boston Federal Reserve contending that a Massachusetts state-owned bank would require $3.6 billion in capitalization. That prohibitive sum is regularly cited by critics bent on shutting down the debate without looking at the very questionable way in which it was derived. The Boston authors began with the $2 million used in 1919 to capitalize the Bank of North Dakota, multiplied that number up for inflation, multiplied it up again for the increase in GDP over a century and multiplied it up again for the larger population of Massachusetts. This dubious triple-counting is cited as serious research, although economic growth and population size have nothing to do with how capital requirements are determined.

Bank capital is simply the money that is invested in a bank to leverage loans. The capital needed is based on the size of the loan portfolio. At a 10 percent capital requirement, $100 million is sufficient to capitalize $1 billion in loans, which would be plenty for a startup bank designed to prove the model. That sum is already more than three times the loan portfolio of the California Infrastructure and Development Bank, which makes below-market loans on behalf of the state. As profits increase the bank’s capital, more loans can be added. Bank capitalization is not an expenditure but an investment, which can come from existing pools of unused funds or from a bond issue to be repaid from the bank’s own profits.

Deposits will be needed to balance a $1 billion loan portfolio, but Los Angeles easily has them—they are now sitting in Wall Street banks having no fiduciary obligation to reinvest them in Los Angeles. The city’s latest Comprehensive Annual Financial Report shows a government net position of over $8 billion in cash and investments (liquid assets), plus proprietary, fiduciary and other liquid funds. According to a 2014 study published by the Fix LA Coalition:

Together, the City of Los Angeles, its airport, seaport, utilities and pension funds control $106 billion that flows through financial institutions in the form of assets, payments and debt issuance. Wall Street profits from each of these flows of money not only through the multiple fees it charges, but also by lending or leveraging the city’s deposited funds and by structuring deals in unnecessarily complex ways that generate significant commissions.

Despite having slashed spending in the wake of revenue losses from the Wall Street-engineered financial crisis, Los Angeles is still being crushed by Wall Street financial fees, to the tune of nearly $300 million—just in 2014. The savings in fees alone from cutting out Wall Street middlemen could thus be considerable, and substantially more could be saved in interest payments. These savings could then be applied to other city needs, including for affordable housing, transportation, schools and other infrastructure.

In 2017, Los Angeles paid $1.1 billion in interest to bondholders, constituting the wealthiest 5 percent of the population. Refinancing that debt at just 1 percent below its current rate could save up to 25 percent on the cost of infrastructure, half the cost of which is typically financing. Consider, for example, Proposition 68, a water bond passed by California voters last summer. Although it was billed as a $4 billion bond, the total outlay over 40 years at 4 percent will actually be $8 billion. Refinancing the bond at 3 percent (the below-market rate charged by the California Infrastructure and Development Bank) would save taxpayers nearly $2 billion on the overall cost of the bond.

Finding the Political Will 

The numbers are there to support the case for a city-owned bank, but a critical ingredient in effecting revolutionary change is finding the political will. Being first in any innovation is always the hardest. Reasons can easily be found for saying no. What is visionary and revolutionary is to say, “Yes, we can do this.”

As California goes, so goes the nation, and legislators around the country are watching to see how it goes in Los Angeles. Rather than criticism, council President Wesson deserves high praise for stepping forth in the face of predictable pushback and daunting legal hurdles to lead the country in breaking free from our centuries-old subjugation to Wall Street exploitation.

The Defense Department Is Losing the Battle Against Climate Change

A rock seawall protecting the Air Force’s Cape Lisburne Long Range Radar Station on the North East Alaska coast is under increasing duress from extreme weather patterns affecting Arctic sea ice. early $50 million has been spent replacing vulnerable parts of the wall already.

In 2013, a late summer monsoon rainstorm struck Fort Irwin, in California, flooding more than 160 buildings and causing extensive damage that took weeks to clean up. Some buildings were out of commission for months.

The 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire, one of the most destructive wildfires in Colorado’s history, only narrowly missed Peterson Air Force Base. The fire cost some $16 million to battle.

These are just some of the findings that make up a U.S. Department of Defense vulnerability report, published earlier this year, looking at the impact of climate change on more than 3,500 military installations. Its conclusion? That more than half of these installations are affected by flooding, drought, winds, wildfires, storm surges and extreme temperatures. Drought proved the single biggest challenge to the military, affecting nearly 800 bases. Next up was wind, which affected more than 750 bases, while non-storm surge-related flooding impacted a little more than 700 bases.

“As an institution, the military sees climate change as a threat to what they do on multiple levels,” said Michael Klare, professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. “It’s a threat to their bases. It’s a threat to their operations. It creates insurgencies. t creates problems for them. They’re aware of that, and they want to minimize those impediments.”

Indeed, climate change has long been on the military’s radar. It was the George W. Bush administration, for example, that required the Defense Department to procure 25 percent of its energy for its buildings from renewables by 2025. Even President Ronald Reagan received military memos warning of global warming. While in 2014, the department published a roadmap establishing an outline to deal with the threats from climate change within the military, as ordered by then-President Barack Obama.

Although President Trump’s administration is known for its climate change denialism, major figures within the military are still noticeably vocal about the issue. In February, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned in a Worldwide Threat Assessment that the impacts from global warming—more air pollution, biodiversity loss and water scarcity—are “likely to fuel economic and social discontent—and possibly upheaval—through 2018.” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has been called the “lone green hope” for his long-established views on the threat of global warming.

Given the immediate threat of rising sea levels, theU.S. Navy is leading the charge to better understand these impacts at the ground level. Last year, a Navy handbook provided a planning framework for incorporating the threat of climate change into development projects at Navy installations. To put this into context, a 2016 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) analysis of 18 military installations along theU.S. East coast and the Gulf of Mexico found that by 2050, most of these bases will experience 10 times the number of floods than they do currently. In about 80 years, eight of the bases could lose as much as 50 percent of their land to rising seas. Naval Air Station Key West, in Florida, could be almost entirely underwater by the end of the century.

“We did use the high sea level rise scenario because generally, the military has a low tolerance for risk,” said Shana Udvardy, UCS climate preparedness specialist and a co-author on the study. “And we’re basically on track for the high scenario because of the rate of ice sheet melting. It’s very likely to happen, and it’s after mid-century that we’ll really see the changes in the extent and frequency of tidal flooding.”

According to U.S. Geological Survey scientist Curt Storlazzi, who has studied the effects of global warming on military installations on the Marshall Islands for the Defense Department, the twin impacts of rising sea levels and storm waves will increase the magnitude of flooding there by “double” in the next couple of decades. “That’s going to negatively impact both the military and civilian populations,” he said. “That’s the big takeaway—most civilian and defense infrastructure doesn’t do well with salt water.”

The Center for Climate and Security, a non-partisan group of defense and national security experts, continues to study the myriad threats of climate change on the military. In this recent report, the group outlined how extreme weather patterns will expand the department’s role in tackling national and global security threats, highlighting how humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions are “increasingly important responsibilities for military commanders around the world.”

But former Rear Admiral David Titley, professor of meteorology at Penn State University and an expert in climate change, the Arctic and national security, argues that the military as a whole has yet to really grapple with the problem of climate change in any long-term strategic way, nor has it looked at how to cost-effectively prioritize resources—views mirrored in a recent Government Accountability Office report.

Change could be on its way in this regard. Rep. Jim Langevin, the ranking Democrat on the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee, pushed through an amendment in the 2018 defense spending bill directing the Defense Department to identify the 10 military installations most vulnerable to climate change and to identify ways to mitigate the forecasted damage. “You would argue that that’s where you put your first dollar towards buying down the risk,” Titley said. “There may be bases that have higher climate vulnerability, but the impact may not be that big a deal relative to others.”

Langevin also included a provision in the 2019 defense spending bill requiring the department to factor energy and climate resiliency efforts into major military installation plans. But Titley is circumspect about the Defense Department’s overall ability and willingness to institutionally get to grips with the problems climate change poses. “We’ll see whether the department of defense actually does that or not,” said Titley. “There’s no real leadership on this issue.”

Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, said that the military’s public overtures on climate change ring a little hollow when stacked up against the actual dollars directed toward green initiatives within the military—efforts like biofuel to power aircraft carriers and solar energy in combat zones.

According to an Institute report from last year, “Combat vs. Climate,” the ratio in military spending in 2017 to deal with regular security threats versus climate change was 28:1—a slight improvement on the 2015 ratio of 30:1. But as the report finds, “spending 28 times as much on traditional military security as on climate security is hardly commensurate with the magnitude of this ‘urgent and growing threat,’ as the military has defined it.”

Further, while the military’s budget grew by $61 billion in 2018, the amount of money the department continues to funnel toward green initiatives and renewable energies hasn’t grown proportionately, said Andrew Holland, the American Security Project’s director of studies. Nor does the military, he said, see its primary mission as tackling climate change. Indeed, the military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels. Last year, the department used more than 85 million barrels of fuel to power ships, aircraft, combat vehicles and contingency bases. The cost? Nearly $8.2 billion.

“We have a military whose job is to fight and win America’s wars,” Holland said. “But where you can take clean energy initiatives that fight climate change and also increase the military’s operational ability to fight and win those wars, that’s a double win.”

Another obstacle is that there’s no “line item for climate change” within the defense spending bill, said the UCS’s Shana Udvardy. “So, it’s really up to each installation to figure out where they’re going to get the resources, and which resources they’re going to allocate to these types of adaptation measures,” she said. What’s more, both Udvardy and Holland agree that the military has recently grown increasingly secretive about its green initiatives, for fear of retaliation by the White House.

Trump has already pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, for example, and signed an executive order rolling back all Obama-era climate change related actions within federal agencies. There are notable signs that this has trickled down to the Defense Department—the latest National Defense Strategy had been scrubbed clean of any reference to climate change, for example.

“None of us have any clue as to how bad it’s going to be,” said Michael Klare, about the impacts from global warming. “But this something that the military does understand better than most people—it’s not the polar bears we should be worried about, it’s about whole societies that are going to collapse and send out waves of migration, which we’re seeing already.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life , a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by EcoWatch .

Getting Past ‘He Said, She Said’ in the Kavanaugh Case

Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee spent hours Thursday attempting to coax straight answers out of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on his alcohol consumption and allegations he had engaged in sexual misconduct—as Kavanaugh shouted, deflected and repeatedly declared his love for beer. Despite inconsistencies in his story, the Democrats focused more on procedural issues and the need for an FBI investigation than on pressing him about his answers.

Nathan J. Robinson, in an analysis for Current Affairs, did what many of those senators could not—he combed through Kavanaugh’s and Christine Blasey Ford’s testimonies and, he said, found lies in the judge’s statements. The analysis by Robinson, who has a law degree, is remarkable not only for its legal insight but because he paid close attention to what Kavanaugh said, compared with his supposedly corroborating evidence and the evidence of his accuser.

Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, addresses the idea that this situation is just a case of “he said, she said”: “The existence of a ‘he said, she said’ does not mean it’s impossible to figure out the truth,” he explains. “It means we have to examine what he said, and what she said, as closely as possible.”

Fighting back against commentators who throw up their hands and sigh about how both Dr. Ford and Kavanaugh are convincing, Robinson reminds us of this:

If both parties speak with passion and clarity, but one of them says many inconsistent, evasive, irrational, and false things, while the other does not, then we actually have a very good indicator of which party is telling the truth. If a man claims to be innocent, but does things—like carefully manipulate words to avoid giving clear answers, or lie about the evidence—that you probably wouldn’t do if you were innocent, then testimony alone can substantially change our confidence in who to believe.

Robinson says that one of the most blatant lies is related to the calendars Kavanaugh kept of his school years. The nominee claims, “The calendars show a few weekday gatherings at friends’ houses after a workout or just to meet up and have some beers.”

That’s the kind of gathering Dr. Ford describes in her account of her assault:

After a day of diving at the club, I attended a small gathering at a house in the Bethesda area. There were four boys I remember specifically being there: Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge, a boy named P.J., and one other boy whose name I cannot recall. I also remember my friend Leland attending. I do not remember all of the details of how that gathering came together, but like many that summer, it was almost surely a spur-of-the-moment gathering. … People were drinking beer in a small living room/family room-type area on the first floor of the house.

Robinson points out that Kavanaugh “says that he never attended a gathering like this, but that’s obviously false because the type of gathering he says he did attend is exactly the kind she describes.”

There are multiple instances when Kavanaugh claims something that obviously cannot be true, Robinson writes.

Robinson explains how Kavanaugh doubles down on the idea that all the people Ford names as witnesses said the attack on Ford “didn’t happen.” There is a difference between “didn’t happen” and, as Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge says, “don’t recall,” Robinson points out. Kavanaugh also cites the statement of P.J., who wrote: “I am issuing this statement today to make it clear to all involved that I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she [Dr. Ford] has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh.”

Not so fast, says Robinson:

Kavanaugh says P.J. denied that the event happened. That’s not what the statement says. Kavanaugh is a federal judge, a real smart cookie. I hope he knows the difference between the absence of an awareness of an event and an awareness of the absence of an event.

This may seem trivial but it isn’t, Robinson explains, in the case of someone being considered for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.

Robinson also combs through Kavanaugh’s roommates’ accounts of his binge drinking, contrasting that with Kavanaugh’s vigorous denials, his unwillingness to answer senators’ questions directly and frequently answering questions with questions.

Robinson presents a thorough, detailed and clear analysis of a drama that has riveted the nation. The piece is long but written in accessible language with straightforward examples. Read it here.

Noam Chomsky: Facebook and Google Pose a Manifest Danger

In “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (1988), authors Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky identified what they called the “five filters of editorial bias”: Size, Ownership and Profit Orientation; the Advertising License to Do Business; Sourcing Mass Media News; Flak and the Enforcers; and Anti-Communism.

While the Soviet Union has since been relegated to the dustbin of history, Herman and Chomsky’s text has proved indispensable, with multinationals like Google, Amazon and Facebook tightening their stranglehold on the news industry and the economy at large. As Chomsky warns, these corporations’ eagerness to appease their advertisers and manipulate their users’ behavior has “very serious distorting effects” on the stories we consume. “I don’t think that’s a healthy development, but it is happening,” he says. “And that means essentially dividing much of the population … into cocoons [or] bubbles, into which they receive the information conducive [only] to their own interests and commitments.”

Last week, Chomsky explored this topic and more in an exhaustive interview (“American Dissident”) with The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill. What follows are just a few of the activist author’s more trenchant observations and digressions.

On the Republican White House

There’s an authentic constituency of corporate power and private wealth, and they’re being served magnificently by the executive orders [and] legislative programs that are being pushed through. [These] represent the more savage wing of the traditional Republican policies catering to private interests, private wealth, and dismissing the rest as irrelevant and easily disposed of.

At the same time, [Trump] is managing to maintain the voting constituency by pretending, very effectively, to be the one person in the world who stands up for them against the hated elites. And this is quite an impressive con job. How long he can carry it off? I don’t know.

On Trump’s handling of North Korea

He’s being lambasted for taking positions which, in my view, are pretty reasonable. So, for example, in the case of Korea: The two Koreas, last April 27th came out with a historic declaration, in which they laid out fairly explicit plans for moving towards reconciliation, integration, and denuclearization of the peninsula.

They pretty much pleaded with outsiders—that means the United States—to permit them to proceed, as they put it, on their own accord. And so far Trump has not interfered with this very much, calling off temporarily at least the military exercises, which he has correctly said are highly provocative. He’s been lambasted for that, but it’s exactly the right position I think. Right now, President Moon is in North Korea, [and] if they can make positive moves on their own accord—as they’ve requested—that should be beneficial.

On the continued existence of NATO

Raising questions about NATO, for example, is quite a reasonable thing to do. One might certainly ask why NATO even exists after the collapse of the Soviet Union—not that there weren’t questions before, there were—but the official story was that NATO was in place to defend the West against the Russian hordes, which, putting aside the validity of that claim, was the official stand.

What is true is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, 1991, there was a period under Yeltsin in which the United States pretty much dominated what was happening in Russia and the region around Russia. NATO was expanded. The Russian economy totally collapsed under the imposed harsh market reforms. There was a radical collapse of the economy, sharp increase in the mortality rate. Russia was really devastated. … I would not like to have dinner with [Putin], but you can understand his policies. His policies were to try to restore some role for Russia at least in its own region of the world. … We might recall the traditional invasion routes through which Russia was attacked [were] virtually destroyed several times in the last century.

On the Syrian Civil War

Well, the first point to bear in mind … is that Assad is a horrible war criminal. The bulk of the atrocities, which are enormous, are his responsibility. There’s no justifying Assad. On the other hand, the fact of the matter is that he is essentially in control of Syria now, thanks largely to Russian [and] partially to Iranian support.

The Russians actually entered Syria extensively after the CIA had provided the rebel forces, which are mostly run by Jihadi elements, with advanced anti-tank missiles which were stymieing the Syrian Army, at which point the Russians came in with air power and overwhelmed the opposition. The current situation is that Assad has pretty much won the war. Like it or not. There was in the early stages a Democratic, secular, quite respectable opposition, but they were very quickly overwhelmed by the Jihadi elements, supported from the outside — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United States, and others.

…

The United States, like other great powers, does not pursue humanitarian objectives. It pursues objectives determined by power considerations, and they lead to different positions with regard to the Kurds or others at different times.

On the imminent dangers of Big Tech

If you read a major newspaper, say the New York Times, you get a certain range of opinion. It’s narrow. It’s basically centrist to far right, but at least it’s a range of opinion. Those who are more addicted to social media tend to turn directly to what supports their own views, not to hear other things, that’s not a good thing. Google, Facebook and the rest, those are commercial institutions. Their constituency is basically advertisers, and they would like to establish the kinds of controls over their consumers that will be beneficial to [a] business model that enabled them to get advertising. That has very serious distorting effects. And we know that they provide massive information to the corporate system, which they use in their own efforts to try to shape and control behavior and opinion. All of these are dangerous developments. The power of these private corporations to direct people in particular [is] a serious problem which requires considerable thought and attention.

Listen to the interview on the Intercepted podcast or read a copy of its transcript here.

Texan, Japanese Win Nobel for ‘Landmark’ Cancer Therapy Work

STOCKHOLM—Researchers from the United States and Japan won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that help the body marshal its cellular troops to attack invading cancers. One cancer doctor said “an untold number of lives … have been saved by the science that they pioneered.”

James Allison of the University of Texas and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University will share the 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize for 2018. Their parallel work concerned proteins that act as brakes on the body’s immune system.

Their research, which has led to drugs that release the brakes on the immune system, constitutes “a landmark in our fight against cancer,” said the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which selects the winners of the prestigious award.

The discoveries by Allison, 70, and Honjo, 76, “absolutely paved the way for a new approach to cancer treatment,” Dr. Jedd Wolchok, chief of the melanoma and immunotherapeutics service at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told The Associated Press.

He said the idea of releasing the brakes on immune system cells has led to drugs for the skin cancer melanoma and for cancers of the lung, head and neck, bladder, kidney and liver. Just last week, such a drug was approved for treatment of another kind of skin cancer called squamous cell cancer, he said.

Wolchok said “an untold number of lives … have been saved by the science that they pioneered.”

The approach to cancer treatment that was honored with this year’s Nobel was used to treat former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who was diagnosed in 2015 with melanoma, which had spread to his brain.

One of Carter’s treatments was a drug that blocked the immune-cell “brake” studied by Honjo. Carter announced in 2016 that he no longer needed treatment.

Although the concept of using the immune system against cancer arose in the 19th century, initial treatments based on the approach were only modestly effective.

“Everybody wanted to do chemotherapy and radiation. The immune system was neglected because there was no strong evidence it could be effective,” said Nadia Guerra, head of a cancer laboratory at Imperial College London.

Allison’s work, much of it done at the University of California-Berkeley, changed that by proving the immune system could identify tumor cells and act against them.

“It’s like your body uses your own army to fight cancer,” she said.

Allison studied a known protein and developed the concept into a new treatment approach, while Honjo discovered a new protein that also operated as a brake on immune cells.

“I’m honored and humbled to receive this prestigious recognition,” Allison said in a statement released by the university’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he is a professor.

“A driving motivation for scientists is simply to push the frontiers of knowledge. I didn’t set out to study cancer, but to understand the biology of T cells, these incredible cells that travel our bodies and work to protect us,” he said.

T cells are key immune system soldiers.

At news conference later Monday in Kyoto, Honjo said what makes him most delighted is when he hears from patients who have recovered from serious illnesses because of his research.

Honjo, an avid golf player, said a member of a golf club once walked up to him suddenly, thanking him for the discovery that treated his lung cancer.

“He told me, ‘Thanks to you I can play golf again.’ …That was a blissful moment. A comment like that makes me happier than any prize,” he said.

The American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer says he and colleagues gave a celebratory toast to Allison at a party on Friday — days before the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Medicine — because they agreed this could be his year.

Dr. Otis W. Brawley, a close friend of Allison’s, said the Nobel committee usually waits about ten years to make sure a scientific discovery “sticks as being really important.”

He said Allison’s work a decade ago “really opened up immunotherapy” as a fifth pillar of cancer treatments, after surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and precision therapy.

“The discovery of Jim Allison led to the first drug that routinely caused patients with a metastatic disease — melanoma —  to go into complete remission,” he said.

Allison’s drug, known commercially as Yervoy, became the first to extend the survival of patients with late-stage melanoma. In a statement Monday, he urged more support for basic science research.

Allison said scientists need to better understand “how these drugs work and how they might best be combined with other therapies to improve treatment and reduce unwanted side effects. We need more basic science research to do that.”

“It’s a great emotional privilege to meet cancer patients who’ve been successfully treated with immune checkpoint blockade. They are living proof of the power of basic science,” he added.

Allison’s and Honjo’s prize-winning work started in the 1990s and was part of significant advances in cancer immunotherapy. Such treatment is also called “checkpoint therapy,” a term that inspired the name of the Checkpoints, a musical group of cancer researchers for which Allison plays harmonica.

“In some patients, this therapy is remarkably effective,” Jeremy Berg, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, told the AP. “The number of different types of cancers for which this approach to immunotherapy is being found to be effective in at least some patients continues to grow.”

Therapy developed from Honjo’s work led to long-term remission in patients with metastatic cancer that had been considered essentially untreatable, the Nobel Assembly said.

In other Nobel Prize announcements, the physics prize will be announced Tuesday, followed by chemistry on Wednesday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The economics laureate, which is not technically a Nobel but is given in honor of Alfred Nobel, the prizes’ founder, will be announced next Monday.

No Nobel Literature Prize is being given this year because the Swedish Academy, the body that choses the literature winner, has been in turmoil after sex abuse and financial scandal allegations. The academy hopes to award both the 2018 prize and the 2019 literature prize next year.

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Heintz reported from Moscow. Malcolm Ritter in New York, Maria Cheng in London, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Mike Warren in Atlanta contributed to this story.

The IRS’ Work Against Tax Cheats Faces Virtual Collapse

This story was co-published with The New York Times.

Tax evasion is at the center of the criminal cases against two associates of the president, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. The sheer scale of their efforts to avoid paying the government has given rise to a head-scratching question: How were they able to cheat the Internal Revenue Service for so many years?

The answer, researchers and former government auditors say, is simple. The IRS pursues fewer cases of tax evasion than it did less than 10 years ago. Provided you’re not a close associate of President Donald Trump, there may never be a better time to be a tax cheat.

Last year, the IRS’ criminal division brought 795 cases in which tax fraud was the primary crime, a decline of almost a quarter since 2010. “That is a startling number,” Don Fort, the chief of criminal investigations for the IRS, acknowledged at an NYU tax conference in June.

Bringing cases against people who evade taxes on legal income is central to the revenue service’s mission. In addition to recouping lost revenue, such cases are supposed “to influence taxpayer behavior for the hundreds of millions of American citizens filing tax returns,” Fort said. With fewer cases, experts fear, Americans will get the message that it’s all right to break the law.

Starting in 2011, Republicans in Congress repeatedly cut the IRS’ budget, forcing the agency to reduce its enforcement staff by a third. But that drop doesn’t entirely explain the reduction in tax fraud cases.

Over time, crimes only tangentially related to taxes, such as drug trafficking and money laundering, have come to account for most of the agency’s cases.

“Due to budget cuts, attrition and a shift in focus, there’s been a collapse in the commitment to take on tax fraud,” said Chuck Pine, who used to be the third-ranking criminal enforcement officer at the IRS and is now a managing director at BDO Consulting. “I believe there are thousands of individuals who have U.S. tax obligations and are not complying with U.S. tax laws.”

The result is huge losses for the government. Business owners don’t pay $125 billion in taxes each year that they owe, according to IRS estimates. That’s enough to finance the departments of State, Energy and Homeland Security, with NASA tossed in for good measure. Unlike wage earners who have their income separately reported to the IRS, business owners are often on the honor system.

The IRS declined to comment on its enforcement efforts.

Cohen’s and Manafort’s cases illustrate different but common types of tax cheating, and how the IRS has struggled to enforce the law. Cohen failed to report income from domestic businesses. Manafort used exotic foreign locales and shell corporations to hide his money.

Cohen’s tax evasion schemes were straightforward. Besides paying off a pornographic movie star and a former Playboy model in violation of campaign finance laws, he pleaded guilty to lying on his tax return. Whether it was income from his business owning taxi medallions, millions of dollars in interest payments on a loan he’d made to another taxi operator or the $30,000 he made by brokering the sale of a luxury handbag, Mr. Cohen simply hid the money from his accountant and the government. Over five years, he didn’t disclose $4.1 million, saving himself $1.5 million in taxes.

The IRS typically catches such evasion by auditing taxpayers. Theoretically, evidence picked up in audits can be used to start criminal cases.

But the rate at which the agency audits tax returns has plummeted by 42 percent since the budget cuts started. Criminal referrals were always rare and are becoming rarer still, dropping from 589 referrals in 2012 to 328 in 2016. With the government conducting 1.2 million audits in 2016, that’s one criminal referral for roughly every 3,600 audits.

“The focus of auditors and tax collectors is not to identify fraud, it’s to collect tax,” said a special agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Management has set other priorities, he says. “So by default, the employees are not doing it.”

In addition, current and former IRS agents say that audits are not as intensive as they used to be. Because the IRS pushes agents to close audits more quickly, they make fewer requests for records and interviews.

“The quality of those referrals was also down,” said Marie Allen, a recently retired auditor who worked at the IRS for more than 30 years conducting complex financial investigations. “That is what people popularly think we should be doing, and I’m trying to say it ain’t so.”

Budget cuts have diminished the criminal investigation division, trimming the number of agents by a fifth since 2010. Recently, the IRS closed four of its 25 field offices, according to Fort. In New York state, home of the country’s financial industry, the revenue service is down to 161 agents, about a hundred fewer than it had 15 years ago.

It doesn’t help that many agents prefer chasing flashier crimes than tax evasion. Rob Warren, a research associate at Catholic University who previously spent a quarter century at the IRS, interviewed 30 former special agents. He asked each agent which of their cases had been their favorite. The answers, Warren said, typically were only tangentially related to taxes.

“It was usually narcotics, Ponzi schemes, some public corruption,” Warren said. “Agents loved Ponzi cases because there was a real victim, an old lady or something like that.”

Federal prosecutors seek out special agents for these cases because they are skilled financial investigators. And tax crimes, like failing to declare illegal income from, say, a bribe or cocaine sales, can be easier to prove than bribery or selling drugs.

In recent years, the IRS has also been pulled away from classic tax dodging cases by soaring rates of identity theft. IRS management assigned scores of agents to chase perpetrators who used stolen identities to collect tax refunds.

One tax fraud hotbed that has been a clear priority of both the IRS and the Justice Department is going after money Americans stashed overseas without reporting it to the federal government. But there are clear reasons that Manafort, who hid his money in places like Cyprus and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, might still have escaped detection.

Switzerland has been the Justice Department’s primary target over the past 10 years, an effort that has resulted in settlements with the giant Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse, and dozens of smaller institutions.

The IRS allowed Americans with foreign accounts to voluntarily disclose them and pay a smaller penalty than they would have had they been caught hiding the information. Some 56,000 people participated, netting the government $11.1 billion. The IRS’ criminal division also brought several cases against people for concealing accounts.

For all this success, there has been little change in the amount of wealth stashed overseas. Americans have about $1.2 trillion of personal assets in tax havens, according to data compiled by Gabriel Zucman, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and two colleagues. It’s unclear what portion has been disclosed to the IRS.

“What has happened over the last 10 years is real progress,” Zucman said. “But what the data suggest is that it has not had a dramatic effect on the amount of offshore wealth.” Money has flowed out of Switzerland and into Asian tax havens like Hong Kong and Singapore.

Moreover, the IRS has made little use of new weapons in the fight against wealth hidden overseas. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law that was supposed to provide a crucial tool for government auditors and prosecutors. That law, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, required banks with American account holders to report information to the United States. Like employers filing W-2 forms about their workers, these reports would force account holders to come clean.

Eight years later, the program is still getting off the ground. Countries around the world have signed agreements, and more than 100,000 foreign banks have sent information to the United States. But “there is no ongoing compliance impact of the FATCA at this time,” according to a report this year by the inspector general for the IRS.

The report found serious problems with the millions of records collected so far. About half of the records, for example, didn’t include identification numbers for the taxpayers, making it difficult to match the accounts with specific individuals. The IRS hadn’t set up a process for using the records. The agency said it was working on such a system.

Here, too, the cuts to the IRS’s budget have had an impact. During the Obama administration, the IRS asked Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to carry out the program but received nothing. Since Trump took office, the revenue service has stopped asking.

North and South Korea Begin Removing Landmines in DMZ

North and South Korean troops began removing some of the landmines planted at their heavily fortified border on Monday, Seoul officials said, in the first implementation of recent agreements aimed at easing their decades-long military standoff.

The demining comes amid resumed diplomacy over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program after weeks of stalemated negotiations. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is to visit Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, this month to try to set up a second summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

On Monday, South Korean army engineers with demining equipment were deployed to the border village of Panmunjom and another frontline area called “Arrow Head Hill” where the Koreas plan their first joint searches for soldiers killed during the 1950-53 Korean War.

The troops began removing mines on the southern part of the two sites. Later Monday, the South Korean military detected North Korean soldiers engaged in what it believed was demining on the northern part of the sites, a South Korean defense official said on condition of animosity, citing department rules.

The official refused to provide more details. North Korea’s state media didn’t immediately confirm its reported demining.

At Arrow Head Hill, where some of the fiercest battles occurred during the Korean War, Seoul officials believe there are remains of about 300 South Korean and U.N. forces, along with an unspecified number of Chinese and North Korean remains.

The Korean War left millions dead or missing, and South Korea wants to expand joint excavations with North Korea for remains at Demilitarized Zone areas. The Koreas remain split along the 248-kilometer (155-mile)-long DMZ that was originally created as a buffer zone at the end of the Korean War. About 2 million mines are believed to be scattered in and near the DMZ, which is also guarded by hundreds of thousands of combat troops, barbed wire fences and tank traps.

Mines dislodged by flooding and landslides have occasionally caused deaths in front-line areas in South Korea. In 2015, a landmine blast blamed on North Korea maimed two South Korean soldiers and pushed the Koreas to the brink of war.

The agreement to clear mines, the first such effort since the early 2000s, was among a package of tension-easing deals struck by the Koreas’ defense chiefs on the sidelines of a leaders’ summit last month in Pyongyang. Aiming to reduce conventional military threats, they also agreed to remove 11 front-line guard posts by December and set up buffer zones along their land and sea boundaries and a no-fly zone above the border to prevent accidental clashes.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Monday the military deals will “end all hostile acts on land, sea and sky between South and North Korea.” In a speech marking South Korea’s 70th Armed Forces Day, Moon also called for a stronger national defense, saying “peace can continue only when we have power and are confident of protecting ourselves.”

Moon, a liberal who aspires to improve ties with North Korea, is a driving force behind U.S.-North Korean nuclear diplomacy. Critics of his engagement policy have lambasted the recent inter-Korean military deals, saying a mutual reduction of conventional military strength would weaken South Korea’s war readiness because the North’s nuclear program remains largely intact.

“I think it’s the worst-ever South-North Korean agreement that made a concession in our defense posture before [North Korean] denuclearization is achieved,” Shin Wonsik, a former vice chairman of the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week.

Many experts say the fate of inter-Korean deals can be affected by how nuclear negotiations go between the United States and North Korea. Past rapprochement efforts were often stalled after a standoff over the North’s nuclear ambitions intensified.

After provocative tests of three intercontinental ballistic missiles and a powerful nuclear weapon last year, North Korea entered talks with the United States and South Korea earlier this year, saying it’s willing to deal away its expanding nuclear arsenal. Kim Jong Un has subsequently held a series of summits with U.S., South Korean and Chinese leaders and taken some steps such as dismantling his nuclear test site.

The nuclear diplomacy later came to a standstill amid disputes over how sincere North Korea is about disarmament. But Trump, Pompeo and other U.S. officials have recently reported progress in denuclearization discussions with the North. Pompeo is to make his third trip to North Korea soon.

Meanwhile, on Monday, South Korea held a ceremony marking the recent return of the remains of 64 South Korean soldiers missing from the Korean War. They were earlier found in North Korea during a joint 1996-2005 excavation project between the United States and North Korea. Forensic identification tests in Hawaii confirmed they belong to South Korean war dead, according to Seoul’s Defense Ministry.

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Associated Press writer Kim Tong-hyung contributed to this report.