Month: December 2023

Tuberville lifted his military blockade. But those officers are still stuck.

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Top officials say the holdup has real-world effects, as the Pentagon deals with conflicts on multiple fronts, from supporting Ukraine and Israel to fending off attacks on ground forces in Iraq and Syria and naval forces in the Red Sea.
“When it’s unclear whether or not your senior leaders are going to be in place at the time and place they’re needed, that of course creates unnecessary friction and does have impact on readiness,” Ryder said.

In one prominent example, Tuberville is still blocking Lt. Gen. Gregory Guillot, the deputy commander at U.S. Central Command, who is nominated to be the new head of U.S. Northern Command. That means Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, who was confirmed to replace Guillot at Central Command, can’t do so.

That also means Vice Adm. George Wikoff, who was confirmed to replace Cooper as the top commander overseeing all naval forces in the Middle East, has to stay put. The Domino effect continues down the line.

Similarly at the Pentagon, Tuberville still has a hold on Lt. Gen. Jim Mingus, now serving as the director of the Joint Staff, to be the Army’s No. 2. Even though his replacement, Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, has now been approved for the promotion, he still can’t move into the new position until Mingus gets confirmed.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/08/tuberville-military-blockade-00130798

The health care busts that follow mining’s boom-time benefits

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Mining companies offer good jobs with good benefits that can counterintuitively damage health care access. Health systems can grow dependent on those insurance plans to survive, and the benefits are in some cases so good that providers are reluctant to serve others in the community. It’s the consequence of a national health care system that feeds off employer-sponsored health insurance to turn a profit, and, as a result, warps itself to meet the needs of those who have it.
Six months of interviews with more than 90 patients, providers, retired miners, community leaders and health care experts across the U.S., including in three towns characteristic of the mining industry’s past, present and future — Williamson, West Virginia; Elko, Nevada; and White Sulphur Springs, Montana — reveal the breadth of these perils: retired and injured miners, and their families, struggling to get care; communities left with beleaguered or closed health facilities; and pricy hospital bills in towns where mines have driven up median incomes.”

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““Doctors want these big reimbursements from the very rich insurance policies that the gold mine provides. They don’t want the pennies they receive from Medicare,” said Jan Brizee, former ombudsman for the Nevada Office for Consumer Health Assistance representing Elko and other rural counties. “So you have somebody who’s retired after 25 or 30 years, and now they have nothing, having to travel out of town to get even primary care, let alone a specialist.”

Not all mining communities experience these problems, and similar issues exist in towns dependent on other industries with good benefits, like manufacturing. But mining communities face unique obstacles compared with other one-company towns — including remoteness and challenging geography — that make it difficult to attract other businesses that would diversify their health insurance landscape.

Miners also tend to be in worse health than their counterparts with other manual labor jobs, with higher rates of poor sleep and heart disease.”

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“Medicaid expansion and extra federal funding to support rural health centers and hospitals have helped in some towns. But providers bemoan stingy state Medicaid reimbursement rates that aren’t enough to pay the bills, paltry federal funding to support primary care and hospital designations that don’t meet the needs of all facilities.

For the most part, these solutions have inadequately addressed the systemic failures of employer-based health systems in these communities.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/10/mining-boom-local-health-care-00128143

Greens erupt as fossil fuel ‘phaseout’ is dropped from proposed climate deal

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The prospect of a deal to end fossil fuels faded on Monday in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, when organizers of the U.N. climate summit released a draft proposal that merely suggested reducing them instead.”

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“The draft “really doesn’t meet the expectations of this COP in terms of the urgently needed transition to clean sources of energy and the phaseout of fossil fuels,” U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said during a fractious, closed-door meeting late Monday night and early Tuesday, which POLITICO listened to via an unsanctioned feed.

But representatives of other countries, including a bloc that includes China and India, said they would not accept any language proposing either a “phaseout” or “phase-down” of specific energy sources.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/11/fossil-fuel-phaseout-dropped-cop28-00131066

Russia Is Fighting More Than One War. I Went to Check on the ‘Other’ One.

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Here’s what’s being ignored in Syria: An average of 84 civilians have been killed per day over the past decade, according to a U.N. estimate. This totals more than 306,000 deaths since 2011, when the Assad regime brutally cracked down on pro-democratic demonstrations and triggered the civil war.
The U.N. has said that these numbers represent a minimum estimate and that the likely number killed is much higher. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based NGO, has made an estimate of over 600,000 killed, including civilians and non-civilians. Russia has been assisting Assad since 2015, conducting air and ground operations against the opposition forces.”

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“The UAE began restoring diplomatic relations with the Assad regime in 2018. This year, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have pressed regional countries to recognize his government. And in May, Assad was welcomed back to a summit of the Arab League for the first time since 2011, in what Al Jazeera described as a “warm reception” — this despite an overwhelming amount of evidence that he and his regime have committed war crimes. Assad used the opportunity to deliver a speech stressing that other countries should not meddle in the “internal affairs” of Arab states.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/03/russia-syria-war-turkey-00128920

Sanctions aren’t working: How the West enables Russia’s war on Ukraine

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Which company is the leading maker of the so-called “high-priority battlefield items” trafficked to Russia that the Western coalition wants to interdict?
If you said Intel, then go to the top of the class: According to the sanctions team at the Kyiv School of Economics, the U.S. semiconductor giant again leads the pack this year. It’s followed by Huawei of China. Then come Analog Devices, AMD, Texas Instruments and IBM — all of which are American.

Russian imports of microelectronics, wireless and satellite navigation systems and other critical parts subject to sanctions have recovered to near pre-war levels with a monthly run rate of $900 million in the first nine months of this year, according to a forthcoming report from the Kyiv School’s analytical center, the KSE Institute.

All of this indicates that, while Western sanctions imposed over Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, had a temporary impact, Moscow and its helpers have largely succeeded in reconfiguring supply chains — with the help of China, Hong Kong and countries in Russia’s backyard like Kazakhstan and NATO member Turkey.”

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“In our investigations, we showed how U.S.-made sniper ammunition finds its way into Russian rifles, and how China has positioned itself as Russia’s go-to supplier of nonlethal, but militarily useful, equipment.”

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“Russians with close ties to Putin — and their money — continue to be more than welcome in Europe despite the death and destruction his regime has unleashed. His former wife, Lyudmila, and her new partner have splashed the cash on luxury property investments in Spain, Switzerland and France, as a POLITICO investigation found at the start of the year.

And when the European Council — the intergovernmental branch of the EU — does sanction Russian business leaders suspected of aiding and abetting the Putin regime, it has often relied on slipshod evidence that makes the decisions easy to challenge in court, POLITICO has also found.

Nearly 1,600 Western multinationals continue, meanwhile, to do business in Russia. Many that announced they would pull out have struggled to do so, as POLITICO discovered when it investigated Western liquor companies that said they had quit Russia — only to find that their booze was still freely available. And some companies that did stay, like Danone and Carlsberg, have been shaken down by Putin and his cronies — a case of Russian roulette, if ever there was one.”

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“With the EU apparently lacking the means, or the political will, to do more to economically isolate Russia, the bloc is sending its sanctions envoy, David O’Sullivan, on a mission to apply moral suasion to countries that are, as he diplomatically puts it, “not aligned” on sanctions.

On the high-priority battlefield technology, Sullivan told POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast last month that the EU has had “a limited success — but in an area which is absolutely critical to the defense of Ukraine.”

More broadly, he said: “The sanctions are a sort of slow puncture of the Russian economy. Perhaps not the blowout that some people initially predicted, but … the air is escaping from the tire and sooner or later the vehicle is going to become impossible to drive.”

To be fair, O’Sullivan isn’t overselling the efficacy of sanctions. And he may ultimately be proven right.

But he only will be vindicated if Western governments do a better job of holding their own businesses to account in stemming the flows of technology, equipment and spare parts that sustain Putin and his war of aggression.

That will come down to whether they have the will to enforce their decisions. And the evidence so far is that they don’t.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-sanctions-western-companies-intel-huawei-amd-texas-instruments-ibm/

US life expectancy no longer catastrophic, now merely bad

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The CDC estimates 375,000 Americans died due to Covid-19 infection in 2020, and about 460,000 in 2021 — an almost incomprehensible loss of human potential.
In 2022, there were fewer Covid-19 deaths, but still a lot: 244,000.”

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“In 1980, US life expectancy was among the highest in the developed world; now, it’s one of the lowest. There are many possible reasons for this: Compared with other countries, the US’s health care system is one of the most difficult to afford and navigate, and invests less in preventive care than in high-tech treatment. The nation wildly underfunds public health, has a high prevalence of processed foods, and promotes overwork and underrest. And access to guns and opioids has made high rates of death due to both a uniquely American problem.

The prevalence of many chronic health conditions — along with smoking cigarettes, another important contributor to premature death and Covid-19 mortality — can be changed by policy choices.

“Improving the public health system, rebalancing the health care system more toward prevention, thinking about the social drivers of health more intensely, addressing major social challenges that sometimes are right in front of our eyes and associated with a lot of death,” said Sharfstein, “all of those things are going to be necessary” to improve Americans’ overall health.”

https://www.vox.com/health/2023/11/29/23981047/us-life-expectancy-number-76-77-years-bad-why-covid-cdc