Ferguson Protests + Afghan Government in Trouble + Oil Price War

Obama holds a PR event today (Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "Obama Plans Meetings on Ferguson Unrest at the White House") the goal of which is to put a lid on the public outrage over the police killing last August of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.

[Obama] will gather his cabinet on Monday to discuss the results of a review of federal programs that provide military-style equipment to state and local law enforcement agencies. The initiatives were called into question in August, after the Ferguson police responded with riot gear and assault-style weapons to protests in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown, the teenager, by Officer Darren Wilson.

“As the country has witnessed, disintegration of trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve can destabilize communities, undermine the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, undermine public safety, create resentment in local communities, and make the job of delivering police services less safe and more difficult,” a White House official said Sunday night, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe the meetings.

Don't count on any significant changes in the federal policy of offloading surplus military hardware to local constabularies.

The faux-macho, Fortune 500 thinking prevalent in our "Land of the Free/Home of the Brave" encapsulated in spouted lines like "Money talks; bullshit walks" is actually a helpful guide here. As long as the protesters stay mobilized in significant numbers the state will have to take special measures to fund the deployment of the highway patrol and national guard. According to Jack Healy and Monica Davey, "Darren Wilson, Officer in Ferguson Shooting, Resigns From Police Dept.":

The peaceful daytime demonstrations came as Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri sent state lawmakers a letter outlining what he called an urgent need to cover the ballooning costs of maintaining hundreds of National Guard troops and state police officers who are deployed here on the streets, day and night. The governor has called a special legislative session.

One Ferguson resident interviewed last month prior to the grand jury decision thought some sort of indictment had to be forthcoming because a spike in protests that would follow an acquittal would bankrupt the community. Unfortunately, St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch was not so prescient.

At this point I think the protests have legs. There was encouraging evidence of crossover between anti-racist and economic justice activists in the form of coordinated Black Friday protests.

Many significant shifts are currently underway. In Afghanistan the unconstitutional power-sharing agreement between Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah is near collapse. A helpful summary of recent events is found in this morning's Foreign Policy Situation Report by David Francis and Sabine Muscat:

Kabul is the focus of Taliban insurgents seeking to undermine the fledgling government of new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. The Afghan capital has been under siege in recent days with a dozen attacks in the last two weeks. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed the attacks were intended to scare foreigners out of the capital as well as to undermine Ghani. They follow the ratification of a bilateral security agreement between Kabul and Washington that will allow for 10,000 American troops to stay in the country in 2015. 

The Wall Street Journal's Nathan Hodge and Habib Khan Totakhil: "The past two weeks have seen a string of attacks on diplomatic and international targets in Kabul, including a deadly assault Saturday on a guest house belonging to a nongovernmental organization, Partnership in Academics and Development. This past Thursday a suicide attack hit Wazir Akbar Khan, the heart of the diplomatic quarter, and a car bombing struck a British diplomatic convoy." More here. 

The attacks, which targeted both Afghan officials and foreigners, have already forced the resignation of Kabul's Chief of Police Gen. Zahir Zahir. Ghani is scheduled to travel to London and Brussels this week to rally global support for his country. But political fallout in Kabul has already begun. 

Ghani has been unable to form a new government amid escalating violence and has dismissed most of the existing ministers in Afghanistan's government. The New York Times' Joseph Goldstein: "The underlying problem, which various factions in the government point to, is the power-sharing agreement that followed this year's disputed presidential election. It makes Mr. Ghani president and his election rival, Abdullah Abdullah, the chief executive. Since the deal was struck in September, Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah have been unable to agree on a new cabinet, leaving the government in the lurch and raising questions about the long-term chances of the power-sharing deal." More here. 

Optimism had grown in recent weeks that Ghani and Abdullah would be able to find a way to work together. Their original agreement allowed the United States to finalize the bilateral security pact. Now, with the fate of Ghani's government uncertain, there are sure to be questions from Washington about whether the pact will hold.

My only quibble with the way Francis and Muscat frame the upswing in Taliban attacks is that they make it seem as if it directly followed Ghani's signing the bilateral security agreement as soon as he took office in September. I think the recent spate of attacks in Kabul come after reports in November that Ghani had lifted Karzai's ban on U.S.-led nighttime raids and airstrikes.

A developing story that has global ramifications not just for the power elite but for every single one of us who consume is the present oil-price war underway. OPEC met last week and decided against any production limits (Stanley Reed, "OPEC Holds Production Unchanged; Prices Fall"). This dropped the price of barrel of oil down around $70.

There is plenty of speculation as to why the Saudis, whose fiscal breakeven is reported to be around $90 a barrel, are opposed to production quotas and willing to let the price drop to $60 level. Some say it is to kill off the U.S. shale oil boom in Texas and North Dakota; some say it is to punish Iran and Russia. Whatever it is I think it is pretty safe to say the Saudis are practicing some form of predatory pricing; they want to maintain market share above all else because that is where their power comes from.

Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith has a helpful post this morning: "OPEC Fires First Shot In Global Oil Price War."

To get a sense of the type of new energy frontier we are in, check out last week's story by Diane Cardwell, "Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels":

According to a study by the investment banking firm Lazard, the cost of utility-scale solar energy is as low as 5.6 cents a kilowatt-hour, and wind is as low as 1.4 cents. In comparison, natural gas comes at 6.1 cents a kilowatt-hour on the low end and coal at 6.6 cents. Without subsidies, the firm’s analysis shows, solar costs about 7.2 cents a kilowatt-hour at the low end, with wind at 3.7 cents. 

“It is really quite notable, when compared to where we were just five years ago, to see the decline in the cost of these technologies,” said Jonathan Mir, a managing director at Lazard, which has been comparing the economics of power generation technologies since 2008. 

Mr. Mir noted there were hidden costs that needed to be taken into account for both renewable energy and fossil fuels. Solar and wind farms, for example, produce power intermittently — when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing — and that requires utilities to have power available on call from other sources that can respond to fluctuations in demand. Alternately, conventional power sources produce pollution, like carbon emissions, which face increasing restrictions and costs. 

But in a straight comparison of the costs of generating power, Mr. Mir said that the amount solar and wind developers needed to earn from each kilowatt-hour they sell from new projects was often “essentially competitive with what would otherwise be had from newly constructed conventional generation.”

The Saudis and the Koch brothers will do everything they can to maintain their fossil-fueled hegemony.And at this point it is becoming apparent that it is going to be a very destructive effort.

Secessionists a Growing Concern

Paul Krugman is best when it comes to painting a picture of the present-day Republican Party. This is from his column this morning, "The Boehner Bunglers," which is so on the mark it needs to be quoted at length:

It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies. 

For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere else. But this wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too. 

Remember what happened in the 2012 election — not the fact that Mitt Romney lost, but the fact that all the political experts around him apparently had no inkling that he was likely to lose. Polls overwhelmingly pointed to an Obama victory, but Republican analysts denounced the polls as “skewed” and attacked the media outlets reporting those polls for their alleged liberal bias. These days Karl Rove is pleading with House Republicans to be reasonable and accept the results of the 2012 election. But on election night he tried to bully Fox News into retracting its correct call of Ohio — and hence, in effect, the election — for Mr. Obama. 

Unfortunately for all of us, even the shock of electoral defeat wasn’t enough to burst the G.O.P. bubble; it’s still a party dominated by wishful thinking, and all but impervious to inconvenient facts. And now that party’s leaders have bungled themselves into a corner. 

Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.

This is the critical week. Krugman is correct. Obama cannot negotiate, doing so would be to give up on democracy and surrender to a minority, and a belligerent and prideful one at that. Obama might indeed end up giving in, proving once and for all that Counterpunch is correct and that he is a Manchurian Candidate, but it is unlikely. Obama is after all the head of a gigantic political organization. For him to cave in not only guarantees that the GOP will maintain its strategy of governing by precipitating crises, by triggering shutdowns and defaults, but also that the Democrats will suffer a second body blow to their base in the span of a month (the first being Obama's call for war against Syria).

Boehner appeared on ABC yesterday and vowed that he indeed will let the government default, contrary to a report last week, if Obama does not negotiate.

If one thing has been accomplished during the Republican shutdown of government it is a stiffening of Democratic resolve in the Senate and White House that the Republican rump has to be dealt with decisively. There is no going forward on the path we've been on since the Tea Party took the House in the 2010 election cycle.

Republicans can longer win national elections. The electorate -- a white suburban majority -- that once chose Reagan and Bush no longer exists. Today it can only be found in rural counties and states of the Deep South and Mountain West. Once Tea Party rump efforts to govern the nation by means of blackmail flame out, we'll be left with a different sort of crisis with which to deal -- secession. It's already a hot topic in the comic books. Now it's appearing in the New York Times. Jack Healy has a story, "Fed Up on the Prairie, and Voting on Seceding From Colorado," about a vote in several northern rural Colorado counties to secede from the state:

They bristle at gun control laws and marijuana shops, green energy policies and steps to embrace gay marriage and illegal immigrants. 

“I would’ve never believed the state of Colorado would become this liberal,” said Lyle Miller, who owns the convenience store. “I’m afraid for my grandchildren. I want them to have the same heritage I had.” 

So in November, this rural county and 10 others will hold a quixotic vote on whether to secede from Colorado and work to form their own state, one that would cherish the farm towns and conservative ideals that people here say have been lost in Denver’s glassy downtown lofts or Aspen’s million-dollar ski condos. It would be called New Colorado, or maybe North Colorado — a prairie bulwark against the demographic changes and urbanization that are reshaping politics and life across this and other Western states.

 As population continues to gravitate to metropolitan areas and Tea Party efforts to control the federal government fail expect more secessionist movements to spring up.

Anne Barnard interviews deputy prime minister of Syria Qadri Jamil. Jamil is a member of the People's Will, a communist party. Not a Baathist, the deputy prime minister points to Bashar al-Assad's embrace of neoliberal policies as the root cause of the rebellion:

Mr. Jamil said his party had long believed that the economic liberalization policies that were the centerpiece of Mr. Assad’s early rule would “lead to a social explosion.” 

He said those measures left 44 percent of Syrians in poverty, citing United Nations figures from 2009, and raised unemployment levels to 20 percent. The policies, he said, destroyed local producers in places like the Damascus suburbs of Zamalka, Harasta and Douma — now centers of opposition — while fueling the growth of the new rich, whom he said were now influential not only in the government but also in the exile opposition. 

“All those towns whose names we are hearing now are similar to Detroit in America,” he said. “So how one cannot expect to have resentments in their circles? But nobody saw that in due time.”