Carolyn Ann Vlk and I worked dilegently in trying to find the answer to the question, How Are Our Children Being Internationally Abducted And Illegally Removed From Our Country?
We believe we have found a significant part of the answer, and on behalf of Carolyn and myself, we urge you to read the titled report: "International Parental Child Abduction and Human Trafficking In The Western Hemisphere".
The primary concern of this report concerns international departure documentation requirements children under the age of 16 are required to present to customs agents when exiting the United States via land or sea. These requirements presently a parent or legal guardian the ability to remove a minor under the age of 16 without a valid passport. In fact, part of the concern with the present travel requirements is that a child can be legally removed from the country using a photocopy of a valid birth certificate. Additionally, if the child or children are traveling with only one parent, all that is required is that the traveling parent present a letter from the child's other parent authorizing travel. According to the government official's comments cited in the report, documentation fraud is a great concern with respect to immigration to and from the United States.
Examples of potential loophole usage of WHTI for international parental child abduction include when a parent intends to wrongfully remove a child via a closed-loop cruise. In this typical scenario a parent will board a cruise ship with their child that begins and ends in the same port; however, these cruise ships typically will have port-of-calls in other countries (Mexico and island-nations of the Caribbean), making it easy for an abduction to occur. Another example of this type of loophole is when a parent simply drives or walks across the borders between the United States and Mexico or Canada.
It is imperative that our nation's courts become aware of these loopholes so that they may act to prevent a child's abduction. Equally, it is important that legislation is passed that will modify a child's travel documentation requirements under the WHTI. As our nation's citizens continue to obtain U.S. Passports in increasingly high numbers, any previous argument that the costs of a passport are too high for vacationing families intending to travel abroad for the first time is decreasing in validity. More importantly, with thousands of at-risk children and their lives at stake, combined with the fact that international parental child abduction is increasing at substantial rates, it is now more critical than ever that we correct an outdated law while also rasing awareness of this issue so that courts and judges may take appropriate steps to prevent an abduction from occurring.
To download a PDF copy of the report, Please Click Here.
To download a Word copy of the report, Please Click Here.
In advance, thank you for taking the time to read this report - it very well may one day help you protect a defenseless child.
Sincerely,
Peter Senese
www.peterthomassenese.com
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
New York City Public Libraries May Operate THREE DAYS A Week.
Can someone please tell me why many government leaders at every level think that whenever there is a budget crisis on hand, that its time to cut library funding?
So, earlier this morning I was sipping my morning tea and reading one of the New York City local rags when I first read the article about how Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a $66 billion dollar revised budget plan yesterday (Friday).
According to Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a possible mayoral contender, “library services will be cut by 29 percent, which means most branches would only be open three days a week.”
Are you kidding me?
Please say you are, because if library branches were to only be open three days a week in our nation’s biggest city with the largest population of children, we sure as heck are going to have a GIANT problem on our hands.
New York City with libraries closed four days a week? There are really no words that come to mind that can properly express the outrage and grave concern of this possibility. After all, we have a moral obligation to our children to keep our magical libraries open . . . just the way our parents helped build and sustain libraries that we all use today.
How big of a disaster is this going to be? The New York City has three independent public library systems. They are: The New York Public Library (which operates libraries in Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island), The Brooklyn Public Library, and the Queensborough Public Library. Each library system has a central library and many local branch libraries. In fact, there are hundreds of local branch libraries – and from experiences I have witnessed with my own eyes, these local branches are substantially utilized by their local patrons.
Did I mention that if Mayor Bloomberg’s budget cuts are approved that there is a good chance our New York City public libraries will only operate three days a week? Well, it appears that this may be true.
This possibility must not be put anywhere near the table.
Our libraries are off limits. It is foolish to remove the one institution in our great city that is the truest, clearest, and most symbolic beacon of hope for mankind to enhance our own existence: our libraries.
Several months ago, I petitioned for the beautiful city of Los Angeles to pass ‘Measure L’, and keep our city’s libraries open. Fortunately, the citizens of Los Angeles overwhelmingly passed ‘Measure L’, and by doing so, actually increased the library’s operating budget to the point where local city branches should in the near future operate seven days a week.
It is inconceivable that the great City of New York and its three central libraries with their hundreds of local branches will operate only three or even four days a week if the mayor’s planned budget is adopted. But that is the reality if Mayor Bloomberg cuts this critically important cultural and learning institutions budget by 29%.
Our libraries are as vital an institution to our great city of New York as any other institution. We must not cut our library’s budget. We must not reduce operation hours and days. And we must not give up on ourselves.
We must keep our libraries open! After all, a book is a free ticket to anywhere in the universe, and our libraries are realm transporters that can take us anywhere.
I know I will do my best to keep our New York City Libraries open. I hope you will, too.
I think I am going to take a walk to midtown, say hello to Leo and Astor, stick my head into the great Map Room, and then walk up the marble stairway before visiting the Great Reading Room at the New York City Central Library on 5th Avenue. But not before I walk by my local branch on Columbus Avenue.
Peter Thomas Senese is a best-selling author and self-professed Librophiliac. He lives in New York and Los Angeles.
So, earlier this morning I was sipping my morning tea and reading one of the New York City local rags when I first read the article about how Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a $66 billion dollar revised budget plan yesterday (Friday).
According to Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a possible mayoral contender, “library services will be cut by 29 percent, which means most branches would only be open three days a week.”
Are you kidding me?
Please say you are, because if library branches were to only be open three days a week in our nation’s biggest city with the largest population of children, we sure as heck are going to have a GIANT problem on our hands.
New York City with libraries closed four days a week? There are really no words that come to mind that can properly express the outrage and grave concern of this possibility. After all, we have a moral obligation to our children to keep our magical libraries open . . . just the way our parents helped build and sustain libraries that we all use today.
How big of a disaster is this going to be? The New York City has three independent public library systems. They are: The New York Public Library (which operates libraries in Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island), The Brooklyn Public Library, and the Queensborough Public Library. Each library system has a central library and many local branch libraries. In fact, there are hundreds of local branch libraries – and from experiences I have witnessed with my own eyes, these local branches are substantially utilized by their local patrons.
Did I mention that if Mayor Bloomberg’s budget cuts are approved that there is a good chance our New York City public libraries will only operate three days a week? Well, it appears that this may be true.
This possibility must not be put anywhere near the table.
Our libraries are off limits. It is foolish to remove the one institution in our great city that is the truest, clearest, and most symbolic beacon of hope for mankind to enhance our own existence: our libraries.
Several months ago, I petitioned for the beautiful city of Los Angeles to pass ‘Measure L’, and keep our city’s libraries open. Fortunately, the citizens of Los Angeles overwhelmingly passed ‘Measure L’, and by doing so, actually increased the library’s operating budget to the point where local city branches should in the near future operate seven days a week.
It is inconceivable that the great City of New York and its three central libraries with their hundreds of local branches will operate only three or even four days a week if the mayor’s planned budget is adopted. But that is the reality if Mayor Bloomberg cuts this critically important cultural and learning institutions budget by 29%.
Our libraries are as vital an institution to our great city of New York as any other institution. We must not cut our library’s budget. We must not reduce operation hours and days. And we must not give up on ourselves.
We must keep our libraries open! After all, a book is a free ticket to anywhere in the universe, and our libraries are realm transporters that can take us anywhere.
I know I will do my best to keep our New York City Libraries open. I hope you will, too.
I think I am going to take a walk to midtown, say hello to Leo and Astor, stick my head into the great Map Room, and then walk up the marble stairway before visiting the Great Reading Room at the New York City Central Library on 5th Avenue. But not before I walk by my local branch on Columbus Avenue.
Peter Thomas Senese is a best-selling author and self-professed Librophiliac. He lives in New York and Los Angeles.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Estimated U.S. Cost Of bin Laden: Three Trillion Dollars
This is a great article written by Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley of the National Journal.
The most expensive public enemy in American history died Sunday from two bullets.
As we mark Osama bin Laden's death, what's striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we've gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.
What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden's terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.
All of that has not given us, at least not yet, anything close to the social or economic advancements produced by the battles against America's costliest past enemies. Defeating the Confederate army brought the end of slavery and a wave of standardization—in railroad gauges and shoe sizes, for example—that paved the way for a truly national economy. Vanquishing Adolf Hitler ended the Great Depression and ushered in a period of booming prosperity and hegemony. Even the massive military escalation that marked the Cold War standoff against Joseph Stalin and his Russian successors produced landmark technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the economy.
Perhaps the biggest economic silver lining from our bin Laden spending, if there is one, is the accelerated development of unmanned aircraft. That's our $3 trillion windfall, so far: Predator drones. "We have spent a huge amount of money which has not had much effect on the strengthening of our military, and has had a very weak impact on our economy," says Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government who coauthored a book on the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Certainly, in the course of the fight against bin Laden, the United States escaped another truly catastrophic attack on our soil. Al-Qaida, though not destroyed, has been badly hobbled. "We proved that we value our security enough to incur some pretty substantial economic costs en route to protecting it," says Michael O'Hanlon, a national-security analyst at the Brookings Institution.
But that willingness may have given bin Laden exactly what he wanted. While the terrorist leader began his war against the United States believing it to be a "paper tiger" that would not fight, by 2004 he had already shifted his strategic aims, explicitly comparing the U.S. fight to the Afghan incursion that helped bankrupt the Soviet Union during the Cold War. "We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," bin Laden said in a taped statement. Only the smallest sign of al-Qaida would "make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations." Considering that we've spent one-fifth of a year's gross domestic product—more than the entire 2008 budget of the United States government—responding to his 2001 attacks, he may have been onto something.
Other enemies throughout history have extracted higher gross costs, in blood and in treasure, from the United States. The Civil War and World War II produced higher casualties and consumed larger shares of our economic output. As an economic burden, the Civil War was America's worst cataclysm relative to the size of the economy. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service estimates that the Union and Confederate armies combined to spend $80 million, in today's dollars, fighting each other. That number might seem low, but economic historians who study the war say the total financial cost was exponentially higher: more like $280 billion in today's dollars when you factor in disruptions to trade and capital flows, along with the killing of 3 to 4 percent of the population. The war "cost about double the gross national product of the United States in 1860," says John Majewski, who chairs the history department at the University of California (Santa Barbara). "From that perspective, the war on terror isn't going to compare."
On the other hand, these earlier conflicts—for all their human cost—also furnished major benefits to the U.S. economy. After entering the Civil War as a loose collection of regional economies, America emerged with the foundation for truly national commerce; the first standardized railroad system sprouted from coast to coast, carrying goods across the union; and textile mills began migrating from the Northeast to the South in search of cheaper labor, including former slaves who had joined the workforce. The fighting itself sped up the mechanization of American agriculture: As farmers flocked to the battlefield, the workers left behind adopted new technologies to keep harvests rolling in with less labor.
World War II defense spending cost $4.4 trillion. At its peak, it sucked up nearly 40 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Research Service. It was an unprecedented national mobilization, says Chris Hellman, a defense budget analyst at the National Priorities Project. One in 10 Americans—some 12 million people—donned a uniform during the war.
But the payoff was immense. The war machine that revved up to defeat Germany and Japan powered the U.S. out of the Great Depression and into an unparalleled stretch of postwar growth. Jet engines and nuclear power spread into everyday lives. A new global economic order—forged at Bretton Woods, N.H., by the Allies in the waning days of the war—opened a floodgate of benefits through international trade. Returning soldiers dramatically improved the nation's skills and education level, thanks to the GI Bill, and they produced a baby boom that would vastly expand the workforce.
U.S. military spending totaled nearly $19 trillion throughout the four-plus decades of Cold War that ensued, as the nation escalated an arms race with the Soviet Union. Such a huge infusion of cash for weapons research spilled over to revolutionize civilian life, yielding quantum leaps in supercomputing and satellite technology, not to mention the advent of the Internet.
Unlike any of those conflicts, the wars we are fighting today were kick-started by a single man. While it is hard to imagine World War II without Hitler, that conflict pitted nations against each other. (Anyway, much of the cost to the United States came from the war in the Pacific.) And it's absurd to pin the Civil War, World War I, or the Cold War on any single individual. Bin Laden's mystique (and his place on the FBI's most-wanted list) made him—and the wars he drew us into—unique.
By any measure, bin Laden inflicted a steep toll on America. His 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa caused Washington to quadruple spending on diplomatic security worldwide the following year—and to expand it from $172 million to $2.2 billion over the next decade. The 2000 bombing of the USS Cole caused $250 million in damages.
Al-Qaida's assault against the United States on September 11, 2001, was the highest-priced disaster in U.S. history. Economists estimate that the combined attacks cost the economy $50 billion to $100 billion in lost activity and growth, or about 0.5 percent to 1 percent of GDP, and caused about $25 billion in property damage. The stock market plunged and was still down nearly 13 percentage points a year later, although it has more than made up the value since.
The greater expense we can attribute to bin Laden comes from policymakers' response to 9/11. The invasion of Afghanistan was clearly a reaction to al-Qaida's attacks. It is unlikely that the Bush administration would have invaded Iraq if 9/11 had not ushered in a debate about Islamic extremism and weapons of mass destruction. Those two wars grew into a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign that cost $1.4 trillion in the past decade—and will cost hundreds of billions more. The government borrowed the money for those wars, adding hundreds of billions in interest charges to the U.S. debt.
Spending on Iraq and Afghanistan peaked at 4.8 percent of GDP in 2008, nowhere near the level of economic mobilization in some past conflicts but still more than the entire federal deficit that year. "It's a much more verdant, prosperous, peaceful world than it was 60 years ago," and nations spend proportionally far less on their militaries today, says S. Brock Blomberg, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California who specializes in the economics of terrorism. "So as bad as bin Laden is, he's not nearly as bad as Hitler, Mussolini, [and] the rest of them."
Yet bin Laden produced a ripple effect. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have created a world in which even non-war-related defense spending has grown by 50 percent since 2001. As the U.S. military adopted counterinsurgency doctrine to fight guerrilla wars, it also continued to increase its ability to fight conventional battles, boosting spending for weapons from national-missile defense and fighter jets to tanks and long-range bombers. Then there were large spending increases following the overhaul of America's intelligence agencies and homeland-security programs. Those transformations cost at least another $1 trillion, if not more, budget analysts say, though the exact cost is still unknown. Because much of that spending is classified or spread among agencies with multiple missions, a breakdown is nearly impossible.
It's similarly difficult to assess the opportunity cost of the post-9/11 wars—the kinds of productive investments of fiscal and human resources that we might have made had we not been focused on combating terrorism through counterinsurgency. Blomberg says that the response to the attacks has essentially wiped out the "peace dividend" that the United States began to reap when the Cold War ended. After a decade of buying fewer guns and more butter, we suddenly ramped up our gun spending again, with borrowed money.
The price of the war-fighting and security responses to bin Laden account for more than 15 percent of the national debt incurred in the last decade—a debt that is changing the way our military leaders perceive risk. "Our national debt is our biggest national-security threat," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters last June.
All of those costs, totaled together, reach at least $3 trillion. And that's just the cautious estimate. Stiglitz and Bilmes believe that the Iraq conflict alone cost that much. They peg the total economic costs of both wars at $4 trillion to $6 trillion, Bilmes says. That includes fallout from the sharp increase in oil prices since 2003, which is largely attributable to growing demand from developing countries and current unrest in the Middle East but was also spurred in some part by the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Bilmes and Stiglitz also count part of the 2008 financial crisis among the costs, theorizing that oil price hikes injected liquidity in global economies battling slowdowns in growth—and that helped push up housing prices and contributed to the bubble.
Most important, the fight against bin Laden has not produced the benefits that accompanied previous conflicts. The military escalation of the past 10 years did not stimulate the economy as the war effort did in the 1940s—with the exception of a few large defense contractors—in large part because today's operations spend far less on soldiers and far more on fuel. Meanwhile, our national-security spending no longer drives innovation. The experts who spoke with National Journal could name only a few advancements spawned by the fight against bin Laden, including Predator drones and improved backup systems to protect information technology from a terrorist attack or other disaster. "The spin-off effects of military technology were demonstrably more apparent in the '40s and '50s and '60s," says Gordon Adams, a national-security expert at American Univeristy.
Another reason that so little economic benefit has come from this war is that it has produced less—not more—stability around the world. Stable countries, with functioning markets governed by the rule of law, make better trading partners; it's easier to start a business, or tap national resources, or develop new products in times of tranquility than in times of strife. "If you can successfully pursue a military campaign and bring stability at the end of it, there is an economic benefit," says economic historian Joshua Goldstein of the University of Massachusetts. "If we stabilized Libya, that would have an economic benefit."
Even the psychological boost from bin Laden's death seems muted by historical standards. Imagine the emancipation of the slaves. Victory over the Axis powers gave Americans a sense of euphoria and limitless possibility. O'Hanlon says, "I take no great satisfaction in his death because I'm still amazed at the devastation and how high a burden he placed on us." It is "more like a relief than a joy that I feel." Majewski adds, "Even in a conflict like the Civil War or World War II, there's a sense of tragedy but of triumph, too. But the war on terror … it's hard to see what we get out of it, technologically or institutionally."
BIN LADEN'S LEGACY
What we are left with, after bin Laden, is a lingering bill that was exacerbated by decisions made in a decade-long campaign against him. We borrowed money to finance the war on terrorism rather than diverting other national-security funding or raising taxes. We expanded combat operations to Iraq before stabilizing Afghanistan, which in turn led to the recent reescalation of the American commitment there. We tolerated an unsupervised national-security apparatus, allowing it to grow so inefficient that, as The Washington Post reported in a major investigation last year, 1,271 different government institutions are charged with counterterrorism missions (51 alone track terrorism financing), which produce some 50,000 intelligence reports each year, many of which are simply not read.
We have also shelled out billions of dollars in reconstruction funding and walking-around money for soldiers, with little idea of whether it has even helped foreigners, much less the United States; independent investigations suggest as much as $23 billion is unaccounted for in Iraq alone. "We can't account for where any of it goes—that's the great tragedy in all of this," Hellman says. "The Pentagon cannot now and has never passed an audit—and, to me, that's just criminal."
It's worth repeating that the actual cost of bin Laden's September 11 attacks was between $50 billion and $100 billion. That number could have been higher, says Adam Rose, coordinator for economics at the University of Southern California's National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, but for the resilience of the U.S. economy and the quick response of policymakers to inject liquidity and stimulate consumer spending. But the cost could also have been much lower, he says, if consumers hadn't paid a fear premium—shying away from air travel and tourism in the aftermath of the attacks. "Ironically," he says, "we as Americans had more to do with the bottom-line outcome than the terrorist attack itself, on both the positive side and the negative side."
The same is true of the nation's decision, for so many reasons, to spend at least $3 trillion responding to bin Laden's attacks. More than actual security, we bought a sense of action in the face of what felt like an existential threat. We staved off another attack on domestic soil. Our debt load was creeping up already, thanks to the early waves stages of baby-boomer retirements, but we also hastened a fiscal mess that has begun, in time, to fulfill bin Laden's vision of a bankrupt America. If left unchecked, our current rate of deficit spending would add $9 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That's three Osamas, right there.
Although Bin Laden is buried in the sea, other Islamist extremists are already vying to take his place. In time, new enemies, foreign and domestic, will rise to challenge America. What they will cost us, far more than we realize, is our choice.
On a very personal note, I, like millions of my fellow Americans are relieved to know that the madman no longer walks on this planet. There have been reports that Al Quada had split into two fractions, with the more lethal division still actively in existence. I pray that peace will prevail. God Bless America. Peter Thomas Senese
The most expensive public enemy in American history died Sunday from two bullets.
As we mark Osama bin Laden's death, what's striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we've gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.
What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden's terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.
All of that has not given us, at least not yet, anything close to the social or economic advancements produced by the battles against America's costliest past enemies. Defeating the Confederate army brought the end of slavery and a wave of standardization—in railroad gauges and shoe sizes, for example—that paved the way for a truly national economy. Vanquishing Adolf Hitler ended the Great Depression and ushered in a period of booming prosperity and hegemony. Even the massive military escalation that marked the Cold War standoff against Joseph Stalin and his Russian successors produced landmark technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the economy.
Perhaps the biggest economic silver lining from our bin Laden spending, if there is one, is the accelerated development of unmanned aircraft. That's our $3 trillion windfall, so far: Predator drones. "We have spent a huge amount of money which has not had much effect on the strengthening of our military, and has had a very weak impact on our economy," says Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government who coauthored a book on the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Certainly, in the course of the fight against bin Laden, the United States escaped another truly catastrophic attack on our soil. Al-Qaida, though not destroyed, has been badly hobbled. "We proved that we value our security enough to incur some pretty substantial economic costs en route to protecting it," says Michael O'Hanlon, a national-security analyst at the Brookings Institution.
But that willingness may have given bin Laden exactly what he wanted. While the terrorist leader began his war against the United States believing it to be a "paper tiger" that would not fight, by 2004 he had already shifted his strategic aims, explicitly comparing the U.S. fight to the Afghan incursion that helped bankrupt the Soviet Union during the Cold War. "We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," bin Laden said in a taped statement. Only the smallest sign of al-Qaida would "make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations." Considering that we've spent one-fifth of a year's gross domestic product—more than the entire 2008 budget of the United States government—responding to his 2001 attacks, he may have been onto something.
Other enemies throughout history have extracted higher gross costs, in blood and in treasure, from the United States. The Civil War and World War II produced higher casualties and consumed larger shares of our economic output. As an economic burden, the Civil War was America's worst cataclysm relative to the size of the economy. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service estimates that the Union and Confederate armies combined to spend $80 million, in today's dollars, fighting each other. That number might seem low, but economic historians who study the war say the total financial cost was exponentially higher: more like $280 billion in today's dollars when you factor in disruptions to trade and capital flows, along with the killing of 3 to 4 percent of the population. The war "cost about double the gross national product of the United States in 1860," says John Majewski, who chairs the history department at the University of California (Santa Barbara). "From that perspective, the war on terror isn't going to compare."
On the other hand, these earlier conflicts—for all their human cost—also furnished major benefits to the U.S. economy. After entering the Civil War as a loose collection of regional economies, America emerged with the foundation for truly national commerce; the first standardized railroad system sprouted from coast to coast, carrying goods across the union; and textile mills began migrating from the Northeast to the South in search of cheaper labor, including former slaves who had joined the workforce. The fighting itself sped up the mechanization of American agriculture: As farmers flocked to the battlefield, the workers left behind adopted new technologies to keep harvests rolling in with less labor.
World War II defense spending cost $4.4 trillion. At its peak, it sucked up nearly 40 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Research Service. It was an unprecedented national mobilization, says Chris Hellman, a defense budget analyst at the National Priorities Project. One in 10 Americans—some 12 million people—donned a uniform during the war.
But the payoff was immense. The war machine that revved up to defeat Germany and Japan powered the U.S. out of the Great Depression and into an unparalleled stretch of postwar growth. Jet engines and nuclear power spread into everyday lives. A new global economic order—forged at Bretton Woods, N.H., by the Allies in the waning days of the war—opened a floodgate of benefits through international trade. Returning soldiers dramatically improved the nation's skills and education level, thanks to the GI Bill, and they produced a baby boom that would vastly expand the workforce.
U.S. military spending totaled nearly $19 trillion throughout the four-plus decades of Cold War that ensued, as the nation escalated an arms race with the Soviet Union. Such a huge infusion of cash for weapons research spilled over to revolutionize civilian life, yielding quantum leaps in supercomputing and satellite technology, not to mention the advent of the Internet.
Unlike any of those conflicts, the wars we are fighting today were kick-started by a single man. While it is hard to imagine World War II without Hitler, that conflict pitted nations against each other. (Anyway, much of the cost to the United States came from the war in the Pacific.) And it's absurd to pin the Civil War, World War I, or the Cold War on any single individual. Bin Laden's mystique (and his place on the FBI's most-wanted list) made him—and the wars he drew us into—unique.
By any measure, bin Laden inflicted a steep toll on America. His 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa caused Washington to quadruple spending on diplomatic security worldwide the following year—and to expand it from $172 million to $2.2 billion over the next decade. The 2000 bombing of the USS Cole caused $250 million in damages.
Al-Qaida's assault against the United States on September 11, 2001, was the highest-priced disaster in U.S. history. Economists estimate that the combined attacks cost the economy $50 billion to $100 billion in lost activity and growth, or about 0.5 percent to 1 percent of GDP, and caused about $25 billion in property damage. The stock market plunged and was still down nearly 13 percentage points a year later, although it has more than made up the value since.
The greater expense we can attribute to bin Laden comes from policymakers' response to 9/11. The invasion of Afghanistan was clearly a reaction to al-Qaida's attacks. It is unlikely that the Bush administration would have invaded Iraq if 9/11 had not ushered in a debate about Islamic extremism and weapons of mass destruction. Those two wars grew into a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign that cost $1.4 trillion in the past decade—and will cost hundreds of billions more. The government borrowed the money for those wars, adding hundreds of billions in interest charges to the U.S. debt.
Spending on Iraq and Afghanistan peaked at 4.8 percent of GDP in 2008, nowhere near the level of economic mobilization in some past conflicts but still more than the entire federal deficit that year. "It's a much more verdant, prosperous, peaceful world than it was 60 years ago," and nations spend proportionally far less on their militaries today, says S. Brock Blomberg, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California who specializes in the economics of terrorism. "So as bad as bin Laden is, he's not nearly as bad as Hitler, Mussolini, [and] the rest of them."
Yet bin Laden produced a ripple effect. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have created a world in which even non-war-related defense spending has grown by 50 percent since 2001. As the U.S. military adopted counterinsurgency doctrine to fight guerrilla wars, it also continued to increase its ability to fight conventional battles, boosting spending for weapons from national-missile defense and fighter jets to tanks and long-range bombers. Then there were large spending increases following the overhaul of America's intelligence agencies and homeland-security programs. Those transformations cost at least another $1 trillion, if not more, budget analysts say, though the exact cost is still unknown. Because much of that spending is classified or spread among agencies with multiple missions, a breakdown is nearly impossible.
It's similarly difficult to assess the opportunity cost of the post-9/11 wars—the kinds of productive investments of fiscal and human resources that we might have made had we not been focused on combating terrorism through counterinsurgency. Blomberg says that the response to the attacks has essentially wiped out the "peace dividend" that the United States began to reap when the Cold War ended. After a decade of buying fewer guns and more butter, we suddenly ramped up our gun spending again, with borrowed money.
The price of the war-fighting and security responses to bin Laden account for more than 15 percent of the national debt incurred in the last decade—a debt that is changing the way our military leaders perceive risk. "Our national debt is our biggest national-security threat," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters last June.
All of those costs, totaled together, reach at least $3 trillion. And that's just the cautious estimate. Stiglitz and Bilmes believe that the Iraq conflict alone cost that much. They peg the total economic costs of both wars at $4 trillion to $6 trillion, Bilmes says. That includes fallout from the sharp increase in oil prices since 2003, which is largely attributable to growing demand from developing countries and current unrest in the Middle East but was also spurred in some part by the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Bilmes and Stiglitz also count part of the 2008 financial crisis among the costs, theorizing that oil price hikes injected liquidity in global economies battling slowdowns in growth—and that helped push up housing prices and contributed to the bubble.
Most important, the fight against bin Laden has not produced the benefits that accompanied previous conflicts. The military escalation of the past 10 years did not stimulate the economy as the war effort did in the 1940s—with the exception of a few large defense contractors—in large part because today's operations spend far less on soldiers and far more on fuel. Meanwhile, our national-security spending no longer drives innovation. The experts who spoke with National Journal could name only a few advancements spawned by the fight against bin Laden, including Predator drones and improved backup systems to protect information technology from a terrorist attack or other disaster. "The spin-off effects of military technology were demonstrably more apparent in the '40s and '50s and '60s," says Gordon Adams, a national-security expert at American Univeristy.
Another reason that so little economic benefit has come from this war is that it has produced less—not more—stability around the world. Stable countries, with functioning markets governed by the rule of law, make better trading partners; it's easier to start a business, or tap national resources, or develop new products in times of tranquility than in times of strife. "If you can successfully pursue a military campaign and bring stability at the end of it, there is an economic benefit," says economic historian Joshua Goldstein of the University of Massachusetts. "If we stabilized Libya, that would have an economic benefit."
Even the psychological boost from bin Laden's death seems muted by historical standards. Imagine the emancipation of the slaves. Victory over the Axis powers gave Americans a sense of euphoria and limitless possibility. O'Hanlon says, "I take no great satisfaction in his death because I'm still amazed at the devastation and how high a burden he placed on us." It is "more like a relief than a joy that I feel." Majewski adds, "Even in a conflict like the Civil War or World War II, there's a sense of tragedy but of triumph, too. But the war on terror … it's hard to see what we get out of it, technologically or institutionally."
BIN LADEN'S LEGACY
What we are left with, after bin Laden, is a lingering bill that was exacerbated by decisions made in a decade-long campaign against him. We borrowed money to finance the war on terrorism rather than diverting other national-security funding or raising taxes. We expanded combat operations to Iraq before stabilizing Afghanistan, which in turn led to the recent reescalation of the American commitment there. We tolerated an unsupervised national-security apparatus, allowing it to grow so inefficient that, as The Washington Post reported in a major investigation last year, 1,271 different government institutions are charged with counterterrorism missions (51 alone track terrorism financing), which produce some 50,000 intelligence reports each year, many of which are simply not read.
We have also shelled out billions of dollars in reconstruction funding and walking-around money for soldiers, with little idea of whether it has even helped foreigners, much less the United States; independent investigations suggest as much as $23 billion is unaccounted for in Iraq alone. "We can't account for where any of it goes—that's the great tragedy in all of this," Hellman says. "The Pentagon cannot now and has never passed an audit—and, to me, that's just criminal."
It's worth repeating that the actual cost of bin Laden's September 11 attacks was between $50 billion and $100 billion. That number could have been higher, says Adam Rose, coordinator for economics at the University of Southern California's National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, but for the resilience of the U.S. economy and the quick response of policymakers to inject liquidity and stimulate consumer spending. But the cost could also have been much lower, he says, if consumers hadn't paid a fear premium—shying away from air travel and tourism in the aftermath of the attacks. "Ironically," he says, "we as Americans had more to do with the bottom-line outcome than the terrorist attack itself, on both the positive side and the negative side."
The same is true of the nation's decision, for so many reasons, to spend at least $3 trillion responding to bin Laden's attacks. More than actual security, we bought a sense of action in the face of what felt like an existential threat. We staved off another attack on domestic soil. Our debt load was creeping up already, thanks to the early waves stages of baby-boomer retirements, but we also hastened a fiscal mess that has begun, in time, to fulfill bin Laden's vision of a bankrupt America. If left unchecked, our current rate of deficit spending would add $9 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That's three Osamas, right there.
Although Bin Laden is buried in the sea, other Islamist extremists are already vying to take his place. In time, new enemies, foreign and domestic, will rise to challenge America. What they will cost us, far more than we realize, is our choice.
On a very personal note, I, like millions of my fellow Americans are relieved to know that the madman no longer walks on this planet. There have been reports that Al Quada had split into two fractions, with the more lethal division still actively in existence. I pray that peace will prevail. God Bless America. Peter Thomas Senese
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Concerns Over Pakistan: Did They Know bin Laden Was Living In Abbottabad?
The news of Osama bin Laden's death is a great victory for the people of the United States and our government. Now, in the truest sense of the word 'closure' all of us connected to the attacks on our nation and the life we embrace can perhaps heal in a different way.
I know that my own heart and spirit moved forward after hearing the news of how our brave U.S. Navy SEAL 'Team Six' invaded the closed-quartered compound located in the heart of Abbottabad where bin Laden lived for what could have been up to six years. Flashbacks and memories created during the months I spent at and around Ground Zero continue to flood my mind. They are both hard and comforting. Yet, bin Laden's death eases the pain.
I also had many phone calls with friends and family deeply connected to Ground Zero. In fact, after speaking to my brother John, who is a 'First-in, Last-out' New York City Firefighter who heroically was at the Financial Center during the attacks on our nation's Twin Towers, I realized just how important finding bin Laden was. "We got him. It's finally over," my brother said before letting me know he was in route to Ground Zero to stand in honor of all who lost their lives during that 11th day of September.
So today we celebrate closure to a madman's wicked scheme to hurt innocence. This said, I know this war on liberty we face is far from over, but our SEAL's cut the Al Qaeda's serpent's head off with a bullet to the forehead and one to the chest. Amen.
Of course there are many questions, and they are extremely important. The first that comes to mind is how did bin Laden live in Abbottabad without our government being tipped off? Abbottabad is home of Pakaistan's elite military training grounds. Grounds mind you that appear to be less than a half mile from where bin Laden was holed up. Grounds that had U.S. military personnel training Pakistan's army only a few years ago. Did the elite military complex in Abbottabad serve as a protective fort for bin Laden. Was there a tunnel that connected the military academy with bin Laden's complex?
If in fact bin Laden was in Abbottabad for several years, then the possability that the Pakistani government was in collusion with protecting the world's number one terrorist and murderer is something we all must be deeply concerned with. After all, we provide Pakistan with billions of dollars each year in aide. Set that aside and add up all the tax-payers money that was spent looking for bin Laden alone, and I'm sure the number will surpass the aide provided to Pakistan.
I applaude President Obama and his team in their decision to keep the details of our U.S. SEAL strike concealled from the Pakistani government. It is unquestionably due to this strategy that we were able to get to bin Laden.
According to the news, the Navy SEAL 'Team Six' spend 40 minutes on the ground hunting for bin Laden. After killing the terrorist they were able to confiscate a large horde of computers and information storage devices. Hopefully this is the motherload our intelligence agencies have been looking for.
But today belongs to America and all who are attached to the victory found in the death of bin Laden.
As we all take a giant step forward in our healing process, we must keep a mindful eye on Abbottabad and discover exactly what the three-headed dysfunctional Pakistani government's operations run by the political government, the military, and the ISI [their intelligence branch] knew.
Additionally, in bin Laden's death combined with an anticiapted escalation to end the reign of terror against Al Quada, there is a sense of hope growing that I am unfamiliar with. It is the hope that my child and yours will sooon live in a world free of terrorist and perhaps one day in the not too distant future free of conflict that leads to man trying to act in violence against a people for whatever their reason is.
God Bless America. Land of the free. Home of the brave.
Peter Thomas Senese
I know that my own heart and spirit moved forward after hearing the news of how our brave U.S. Navy SEAL 'Team Six' invaded the closed-quartered compound located in the heart of Abbottabad where bin Laden lived for what could have been up to six years. Flashbacks and memories created during the months I spent at and around Ground Zero continue to flood my mind. They are both hard and comforting. Yet, bin Laden's death eases the pain.
I also had many phone calls with friends and family deeply connected to Ground Zero. In fact, after speaking to my brother John, who is a 'First-in, Last-out' New York City Firefighter who heroically was at the Financial Center during the attacks on our nation's Twin Towers, I realized just how important finding bin Laden was. "We got him. It's finally over," my brother said before letting me know he was in route to Ground Zero to stand in honor of all who lost their lives during that 11th day of September.
So today we celebrate closure to a madman's wicked scheme to hurt innocence. This said, I know this war on liberty we face is far from over, but our SEAL's cut the Al Qaeda's serpent's head off with a bullet to the forehead and one to the chest. Amen.
Of course there are many questions, and they are extremely important. The first that comes to mind is how did bin Laden live in Abbottabad without our government being tipped off? Abbottabad is home of Pakaistan's elite military training grounds. Grounds mind you that appear to be less than a half mile from where bin Laden was holed up. Grounds that had U.S. military personnel training Pakistan's army only a few years ago. Did the elite military complex in Abbottabad serve as a protective fort for bin Laden. Was there a tunnel that connected the military academy with bin Laden's complex?
If in fact bin Laden was in Abbottabad for several years, then the possability that the Pakistani government was in collusion with protecting the world's number one terrorist and murderer is something we all must be deeply concerned with. After all, we provide Pakistan with billions of dollars each year in aide. Set that aside and add up all the tax-payers money that was spent looking for bin Laden alone, and I'm sure the number will surpass the aide provided to Pakistan.
I applaude President Obama and his team in their decision to keep the details of our U.S. SEAL strike concealled from the Pakistani government. It is unquestionably due to this strategy that we were able to get to bin Laden.
According to the news, the Navy SEAL 'Team Six' spend 40 minutes on the ground hunting for bin Laden. After killing the terrorist they were able to confiscate a large horde of computers and information storage devices. Hopefully this is the motherload our intelligence agencies have been looking for.
But today belongs to America and all who are attached to the victory found in the death of bin Laden.
As we all take a giant step forward in our healing process, we must keep a mindful eye on Abbottabad and discover exactly what the three-headed dysfunctional Pakistani government's operations run by the political government, the military, and the ISI [their intelligence branch] knew.
Additionally, in bin Laden's death combined with an anticiapted escalation to end the reign of terror against Al Quada, there is a sense of hope growing that I am unfamiliar with. It is the hope that my child and yours will sooon live in a world free of terrorist and perhaps one day in the not too distant future free of conflict that leads to man trying to act in violence against a people for whatever their reason is.
God Bless America. Land of the free. Home of the brave.
Peter Thomas Senese
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
Tenth Installment On Child Abduction Film Series Released
PETER THOMAS SENESE NARRATES FILM SERIES ON INTERNATIONAL PARENTAL CHILD ABDUCTION: RELEASES TENTH FILM SEGMENT IN 'CHASING PARENTS: RACING INTO THE STORMS OF INTERNATIONAL PARENTAL CHILD ABDUCTION.
In a recently released educational video segment concerning 'The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative', Peter Thomas Senese discusses how the policies established under WHTI substantially minimizes travel document requirements for children traveling abroad via land or sea, presenting significant opportunity for child abductors and human traffickers the means to criminally remove defenseless children from one nation's borders to another.
In the now completed new video segment, Senese presents how the detrimental issues concerning WHTI policy are outlined and offers solutions that must be implemented in order to help prevent this grave and growing problem.
'Challenges Connected To The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative' is the newest release in the now completed ten-segment educational documentary film series titled 'Chasing Parents: Racing Into The Storms Of International Parental Child Abduction' produced and narrated by best-selling author Peter Thomas Senese.
Mr. Senese, a child abduction prevention advocate and author of the critically acclaimed novel 'Chasing The Cyclone' stated, "It is inconceivable that in the severe and escalating environment of international child abduction and child stealing that exists today, the WHTI policy marginalizes children's safety by not requiring all individuals traveling abroad to use a passport regardless of their age. Harmonization of a passport mandate for all international travel will dramatically reduce the number of cross-border abductions immediately."
To view 'Challenges Connected To The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative' and the 'Chasing Parents: Racing Into The Storms Of International Parental Child Abduction' film series, please visit http://www.chasingthecyclone.com or http://www.internationalparentalchildabduction.info.
Pacifica TWST is a media and entertainment company. Our feature film, television, documentary, and publishing efforts focus on current issues that effect the global community at large.
In a recently released educational video segment concerning 'The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative', Peter Thomas Senese discusses how the policies established under WHTI substantially minimizes travel document requirements for children traveling abroad via land or sea, presenting significant opportunity for child abductors and human traffickers the means to criminally remove defenseless children from one nation's borders to another.
In the now completed new video segment, Senese presents how the detrimental issues concerning WHTI policy are outlined and offers solutions that must be implemented in order to help prevent this grave and growing problem.
'Challenges Connected To The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative' is the newest release in the now completed ten-segment educational documentary film series titled 'Chasing Parents: Racing Into The Storms Of International Parental Child Abduction' produced and narrated by best-selling author Peter Thomas Senese.
Mr. Senese, a child abduction prevention advocate and author of the critically acclaimed novel 'Chasing The Cyclone' stated, "It is inconceivable that in the severe and escalating environment of international child abduction and child stealing that exists today, the WHTI policy marginalizes children's safety by not requiring all individuals traveling abroad to use a passport regardless of their age. Harmonization of a passport mandate for all international travel will dramatically reduce the number of cross-border abductions immediately."
To view 'Challenges Connected To The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative' and the 'Chasing Parents: Racing Into The Storms Of International Parental Child Abduction' film series, please visit http://www.chasingthecyclone.com or http://www.internationalparentalchildabduction.info.
Pacifica TWST is a media and entertainment company. Our feature film, television, documentary, and publishing efforts focus on current issues that effect the global community at large.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Save The Los Angeles PUblic Library
The Los Angeles Public Library System has faced dramatic operating budget reductions over the past few years, substantially limiting the library’s operations and services it offers the city’s patrons. On March 8th, 2011 the citizens of Los Angles have an opportunity to vote ‘Yes’ on Measure ‘L’ and have the city’s budget appropriate much needed funding for the city’s library system.
On March 8th, 2011 the citizens of Los Angeles will have an opportunity to vote “Yes” on Measure ‘L’ and keep the city’s revered cultural and educational institution open.
By voting ‘Yes’ on Measure ‘L’, the citizens of Los Angeles will have the opportunity to significantly impact the financially handicapped Los Angeles Public Library System, which in recent years has received inadequate funding from the city’s operating budget. The goal is clear: to reverse the already incomprehensible and highly detrimental damage done to one of the nation’s finest cultural and learning centers by halting the existing city policy that has caused dramatic library programming cutbacks and budget reductions – a trend that clearly will continue if Measure ‘L’ does not pass.
Author Peter Thomas Senese, a strong proponent of Measure ‘L’ commented, “It is critical for the immediate and long term future of the city of Los Angeles and for all who live here to vote “Yes” on Measure ‘L’. By doing so, we will keep our library doors open and accessible, adequately staffed, and capable of delivering much needed resources and programming that will serve the unique and large patron population that exists in our wonderful community. I urge everyone to support our libraries and vote ‘Yes’ on measure ‘L’.
Presently, the Los Angeles Public Library, with the Riordan Central Library and 72 branch facilities has been reduced to operating 5 days a week. According to various studies, if Measure ‘L’ does not pass, there is a distinct possibility that branches may only remain open 4 days a week. Already, the library staff – gatekeepers of knowledge and information – has been cut by 28% this past year. Similar to a very real potential reduction in library hours if Measure ‘L’ fails, it appears certain that there will be additional personnel reductions for an already understaffed library staff.
If Measure ‘L’ passes, it is expected that library hours will soon resume from the present shortened operating week, to a six-day, and eventual seven-day schedule in the near future. Alarmingly, Los Angles ranks last in the country of the top eight public library systems with respect to resources for acquisitions. This too would change if Measure ‘L’ passes, as the city would be obligated to increase as a percentage of its budget, resources dedicated to library operations.
Peter Thomas Senese, a self-professed Librophiliac added after a day of calling Angelinos seeking their support for Measure ‘L’, “A book is a free ticket to anywhere in the universe and our libraries are realm transporters that can take us anywhere. It is clear that many individuals in this city do not realize the dire situation our libraries face today, but it is serious. Unquestionably, it is the responsibility of those individuals who can vote ‘Yes’ on Measure ‘L’ to do so. After all, all of us, including our children, have a right to have access to our library and all the wonderful resources and unique programming it could offer if properly funded. By saying ‘Yes’ to Measure ‘L’, what we’re really saying is ‘Yes’ to our future.”
Measure ‘L’ will not require residents or property owners to pay more taxes or fees. While the amount of funds the Library receives from the city is based on a percent of property values, Measure L will only increase the library’s share of existing city funds. Measure ‘L’ funds are subject to audits.
For More Information on Measure ‘L’, please visit www.yesonlibraries.com.
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