After a decade of decline San Francisco Enters a Cruel Tech Boom Era

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November 24, 2013

Backlash by the Bay: Tech Riches Alter a City

By ERICA GOODE and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — If there was a tipping point, a moment that crystallized the anger building here toward the so-called technorati for driving up housing prices and threatening the city’s bohemian identity, it came in response to a diatribe posted online in August by a young Internet entrepreneur.

The author, a start-up founder named Peter Shih, listed 10 things he hated about San Francisco. Homeless people, for example. And the “constantly PMSing” weather. And “girls who are obviously 4s and behave like they’re 9s.”

The backlash was immediate. Fliers appeared on telephone poles calling Mr. Shih a “woman hatin’ nerd toucher.” CheapAir offered him a free ticket back to New York. Readers responded that what they hated about San Francisco were “entitled” technology workers like him.

Mr. Shih, who said he received death threats after the post, deleted it and apologized.

But a nerve had been struck. As the center of the technology industry has moved north from Silicon Valley to San Francisco and the largess from tech companies has flowed into the city — Twitter’s stock offering unleashed an estimated 1,600 new millionaires — income disparities have widened sharply, housing prices have soared and orange construction cranes dot the skyline. The tech workers have, rightly or wrongly, received the blame.

Resentment simmers, at the fleets of Google buses that ferry workers to the company’s headquarters in Mountain View and back; the code jockeys who crowd elite coffeehouses, heads buried in their laptops; and the sleek black Uber cars that whisk hipsters from bar to bar. Late last month, two tech millionaires opened the Battery, an invitation-only, $2,400-a-year club in an old factory in the financial district, cars lining up for valet parking.

For critics, such sights are symbols of a city in danger of losing its diversity — one that artists, families and middle-class workers can no longer afford. On the day of Twitter’s public offering this month, 150 demonstrators protested outside the company with signs reading “People not profit” and “We’re the public, what are you offering?”

More and more longtime residents are being forced out as landlords and speculators race to capitalize on the money stream.

Mary Elizabeth Phillips, a retired accountant, is fighting eviction from the rent-controlled apartment where she has lived for almost half a century. If her new landlords have their way, she will have to move in April, shortly after her 98th birthday, because they want to sell the units.

Her neighborhood has given way around her. The car dealership across the street is now a luxury apartment complex, complete with rooftop herb garden, a butterfly habitat and a Whole Foods.

“I can understand it from an investment standpoint,” she said of her landlords’ actions. “But I don’t think I’d ever be that coldblooded about this.”

While the technology boom has bred hostility, it has also brought San Francisco undeniable benefits. Mayor Edwin M. Lee credits the technology sector with helping to pull the city out of the recession, creating jobs and nourishing a thriving economy that is the envy of cash-starved cities across the country.

The industry is “not so much taking over but complementing the job creation we want in the city,” Mr. Lee said while giving a tour of middle Market Street to show off its “renaissance” from a seedy skid row to a tech district where Twitter, Square and other companies have made their home.

Yet city officials must grapple with the arithmetic of squeezing more people into the limited space afforded by San Francisco’s 49 square miles. And it is the housing shortage that underlies much of the sniping about tech workers.

San Francisco has the least affordable housing in the nation, with just 14 percent of homes accessible to middle-class buyers, said Jed Kolko, chief economist at the real estate website Trulia. The median rent is also the highest in the country, at $3,250 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.

“Affordable housing projects are constructed, and the money set aside for that purpose is used, but the demand is just far greater than what can be supplied,” said Fred Brousseau of the city budget and legislative analyst’s office. Evictions under a provision of state law that allows landlords to evict rent-controlled tenants if they convert a building for sale have more than tripled in the past three years, just as they did during the first tech boom.

To Yelly Brandon, a 36-year-old hairstylist, and her boyfriend, Anthony Rocco, an archivist, the obstacles to finding housing became clear when they spent two months searching for an apartment. At open houses, they said, they were competing with young tech workers, who offered more than the asking price and cash up front.

“People were just throwing money in the air,” Ms. Brandon said.

The influx of wealth is, in turn, changing the tenor of neighborhoods. Fort Mason, a renovated military post on the bay, has been nicknamed “Frat Mason” for the 20-something “tech bros” — tech company salespeople, marketing employees and start-up founders — who have moved into luxury apartments there and play bocce on the great lawn.

Nowhere are the changes starker than in the Mission District, once a working-class Hispanic neighborhood, now a destination for the tech elite.

Evan Williams of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook have bought homes near there.

Longtime residents of the Mission District complain that high-end apartments, expensive restaurants and exclusive boutiques are crowding out the bodegas, bookstores and Mexican bars. They complain about workers who, like residents of a bedroom community, board company buses every morning and return every evening to drink and dine on Valencia Street.

And they grumble about less tangible things: an insensitivity in interactions in stores and on the street, or a seeming disregard for neighborhood traditions. The annual Day of the Dead procession, meant to be solemn, has turned into a rowdy affair that many newcomers seem to view as a kind of Mexican Halloween.

“Some of the people in the stores that I knew, they are good people and nice people, and then I see them get evicted and then the people who move in there are not as nice,” said Rene Yañez, an artist and founder of Galería de la Raza in the 1970s, who started the procession. Mr. Yañez and his partner, who is battling cancer, are being evicted from the apartment they have occupied for decades.

Evictions are higher in this neighborhood than in any other part of the city.

“They are not only expelling the homeless and the gangbangers,” said Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a performance artist. “They are also expelling the performance artists, the poets, the muralists, the activists, the working-class families — all these wonderful urban tribes that made this neighborhood a very special neighborhood for decades.”

“One day,” he added, “they will wake up to an extremely unbearable ocean of sameness.”

Some tech companies are trying to give back. Salesforce has donated millions of dollars to the public schools, and Twitter, which declined to comment on its effect on the city, is providing lawyers to help fight evictions, under an agreement with the city in exchange for tax breaks.

But the onus, many people say, is really on the city government.

“There has to be some kind of public support to make sure you don’t just have a city of the very wealthy, but people to make the city run,” said Kevin Starr, an urban planning expert at the University of Southern California.

“You can’t have a city of just rich people,” he said. “A city needs restaurant workers, a city needs schoolteachers, a city needs taxi drivers.”

Mr. Lee says he has a strong commitment to affordable housing — he pointed to the Housing Trust Fund, which will provide $1.5 billion in affordable housing over the next 30 years — and to preserving the character of San Francisco’s neighborhoods.

Wholesale evictions, he said, are “not good for the city.”

He conceded, “We have to figure some things out.”

For his part, Mr. Shih said the response to his post was a lesson he will not soon forget. He has augmented his work on Airbrite, the company he and a colleague started, with volunteering at homeless shelters.

“What I did was wrong,” he said. “I feel like the changes the tech scene has made to San Francisco have made people very angry, and I was caught in the cross-fire.”

 

Iran Agrees to Six Month Suspension of Nuclear Program

From The New York Times

Mark Ländler in Geneva

GENEVA — The United States and five other world powers announced a landmark accord Sunday morning that would temporarily freeze Iran’s nuclear program and lay the foundation for a more sweeping agreement.

It was the first time in nearly a decade, American officials said, that an international agreement had been reached to halt much of Iran’s nuclear program and roll some elements of it back.

The aim of the accord, which is to last six months, is to give international negotiators time to pursue a more comprehensive pact that would ratchet back much of Iran’s nuclear program and ensure that it could be used only for peaceful purposes.

Shortly after the agreement was signed at 3 a.m. in the Palace of Nations in Geneva, President Obama, speaking from the State Dining Room in the White House, hailed it as the most “significant and tangible” progress of a diplomatic campaign that began when he took office.

“Today, that diplomacy opened up a new path toward a world that is more secure,” he said, “a future in which we can verify that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful and that it cannot build a nuclear weapon.”

In Geneva, the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said he hoped the agreement would lead to a “restoration” of trust between Iran and the United States. Smiling and avuncular, he reiterated Iran’s longstanding assertion that its nuclear program was peaceful, adding that the Iranian people deserved respect from the West.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who flew to Geneva early Saturday for the second time in two weeks in an effort to complete the deal, said it would “require Iran to prove the peaceful nature of its nuclear program.”

Iran, which has long resisted international monitoring efforts and built clandestine nuclear facilities, agreed to stop enriching uranium beyond 5 percent, a level that would be sufficient for energy production but that would require further enrichment for bomb-making. To make good on that pledge, Iran will dismantle links between networks of centrifuges.

Its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent, a short hop from weapons-grade fuel, would be diluted or converted into oxide so that it could not be readily used for military purposes. Iran agreed that it would not install any new centrifuges, start up any that are not already operating or build new enrichment facilities.

The agreement, however, does not require Iran to stop enriching uranium to a low level of 3.5 percent, or to dismantle any of its existing centrifuges.

The accord was a disappointment for Israel, which had urged the United States to pursue a stronger agreement that would lead to a complete end to Iran’s enrichment program. But Iran made it clear that continuing enrichment was a prerequisite for any agreement.

The United States did not accept Iran’s claim that it had a “right to enrich” under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. But American officials signaled last week that they were open to a compromise in which the two sides would essentially agree to disagree on how the proliferation treaty should be interpreted, while Tehran continued to enrich.

In return for the initial agreement, the United States agreed to provide $6 billion to $7 billion in sanctions relief. Of this, roughly $4.2 billion would be oil revenue that has been frozen in foreign banks.

This limited sanctions relief can be accomplished by executive order, allowing the Obama administration to make the deal without having to appeal to Congress, where there is strong criticism of any agreement that does not fully dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.

The fact that the accord would only pause the Iranian program was seized on by critics who said it would reward Iran for institutionalizing the status quo.

Mr. Obama addressed those concerns in his speech, insisting that the easing of sanctions could be reversed if Iran failed to reach a final agreement or reneged on the terms of this one.

“Nothing will be agreed to unless everything is agreed to,” he said.

He also noted the qualms of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf allies of the United States, saying they “had good reason to be skeptical of Iran’s intentions.” But he said he had a “profound responsibility” to test the possibilities of a diplomatic solution.

In Geneva, Mr. Kerry said of the agreement: “It will make our partners in the region safer. It will make our ally Israel safer.”

Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington.

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The deal would also add at least several weeks, and perhaps more than a month, to the time Iran would need to produce weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear device, according to estimates by nuclear experts. American officials argued that it would preclude Iran from shortening the time it would need to produce enough bomb-grade uranium for a nuclear device even further, and would provide additional warning if Iran sought to “break out” of its commitment to pursue only a peaceful nuclear program.

A second and even more contentious debate centered on whether an initial deal would, as the Obama administration said, serve as a “first step” toward a comprehensive solution of the nuclear issue, one that would leave Iran with a peaceful nuclear program that could not easily be used for military purposes.

Two former American national security advisers, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, recently sent a letter to key American lawmakers endorsing the administration’s approach. “The apparent commitment of the new government of Iran to reverse course on its nuclear activities needs to be tested to insure it cannot rapidly build a nuclear weapon,” they wrote.

But some experts, including a former official who has worked on the Iranian issue for the White House, said it was unlikely that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would ever close the door on the option to develop nuclear weapons. Instead, they said, any initial six-month agreement is more likely to be followed by a series of partial agreements that constrain Iran’s nuclear activities but do not definitively solve the nuclear issues.

“At the end of six months, we may see another half step and six more months of negotiations — ad infinitum,” said Gary Samore, a senior aide on nonproliferation issues on the National Security Council in Mr. Obama’s first term. Mr. Samore is now president of United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonprofit group that advocates tough sanctions against Iran unless it does more to curtail its nuclear program.

The agreement also reflected compromises on other issues.

On the contentious issue of the heavy water reactor Iran is building near Arak, which could produce plutonium and therefore another path to a bomb, Iran agreed not to produce fuel for the plant, install additional reactor components there or put the plant into operation.

Iran is not required to dismantle the facility, however, or convert the plant into a light water reactor that would be less useful for military purposes.

Regarding enrichment, Iran’s stockpile of such low-enriched uranium would be allowed to temporarily increase to about eight tons from about seven tons currently. But Tehran would be required to shrink this stockpile by the end of the six-month agreement back to seven tons. This would be done by installing equipment to covert some of that stockpile to oxide.

To guard against cheating, international monitors would be allowed to visit the Natanz enrichment facility and the underground nuclear enrichment plant at Fordo on a daily basis to check the film from cameras installed there.

But Iran did not agree to all of the intrusive inspection regime that the International Atomic Energy Agency had said was needed to ensure that the Iranian program is peaceful.

Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington.

The Return of Russian Hard Power?

Michael Weiss the Daily Beast

As Russia plays war games on imaginary NATO targets and Putin pumps billions into the army, the country’s Eastern bloc neighbors are growing increasingly concerned about the return of Kremlin’s military muscle.

Last Good Friday, two Russian Tu-22M3 bombers, escorted by four Su-27 fighter aircraft, simulated an aerial assault on two military targets in Sweden— the first near the capital Stockholm and the second in a southern part of the country. This was then followed in September by Zapad-13 (“Zapad” means “West”), Russia’s biannual military exercise, which this year was jointly held with Belarusian forces variously in Belarus, along the borders of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and in Kaliningrad, Russia’s non-contiguous seaport territory that lies between Poland and Lithuania.

Russian President Vladimir Putin carrying a hunting rifle in the Republic of Tuva. (AFP/Getty)

Though initially billed as a counterterrorism operation targeting “illegal armed groups,” Zapad-13 was very clearly aimed at fighting conventional armies on European soil. Which ones? Stephen Blank of the Jamestown Foundation has noted that the “simulated ‘terrorists’ were apparently Balts intent on mounting operations in Belarus against that government and on behalf of their supposedly oppressed ethnic kinsmen.” (Moscow propaganda usually has it that independent Baltic states with pro-European and pro-American bents are the modern-day embodiment of Nazi regimes insufficiently grateful for their “liberation” and occupation by the Red Army.)

An estimated 70,000 soldiers took part in Zapad-13, three times the number given in advance to NATO by the Russian government, although this year, contrary to reports in the Polish press, Russia did not simulate a nuclear strike on Warsaw, as it has in the past. Seventy thousand troops, however, imply quite lot of “terrorists” in need of vanquishing by land, air or sea. Included in the order of battle were a Belarusian amphibious landing force, Russian paratroopers and Spetsgruppy (special forces), and 10,000 paramilitary troops from Russia’s Interior Ministry as well as unmanned aerial vehicles for targeting and damage assessment.

According to Karlis Neretnieks of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences, the exercise was intended to put Europe on notice that Russia’s military is vastly improved from its dilapidated state during the 2008 “summer war” with Georgia: “Altogether we see a rapidly increasing Russian capability to mount large scale, complex, military operations in its neighbourhood, coordinated with operations in other areas. It would be a mistake to see this as just a problem for the Baltic States.” On October 28, five more Russian warplanes staged mock bombing runs against Sweden, Poland and Lithuania while en route to an airbase in Kaliningrad, though this time, the Swedish Air Force was ready and dispatched two jets to intercept the Russian bombers. (Colombia and Japan have also recently had their airspaces violated or buzzed by Russian long-range bombers, sending their respective Air Forces into states of alert.)

All of this transpired, it should be noted, at a time when only two countries in NATO —Poland and Estonia, both of which are deeply unsettled by routine Russian mock-invasions of their territories—are meeting their annual defense expenditure requirements for membership in the alliance and when the Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski can easily envisage another war fought on the continent, in contrast with the bland reassurances of NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen that such a contingency is a thing of the past. Try telling that to the other countries that once fell on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. To them, Russian hard power is most certainly “back” and now poses a more immediate threat to Europe than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the margins of the U.N. General Assembly last September, one diplomat confided in the sense of alarm with which Eastern European countries registered President Obama’s claim, in his address at Turtle Bay, that “[w]e’re no longer in a Cold War.” If only Russia agreed.

For one thing, NATO’s own just-concluded war game belied any sense of continental security. Zapad-13 and the other unannounced pretend-invasions were no doubt staged by Russia in pre-emptive response to Operation Steadfast Jazz 2013, the largest NATO live-fire exercise in seven years. It was conducted in all three Baltic states and Poland, from November 2-9, largely to reaffirm the alliance’s commitment to their defense in the event that, as Rasmussen put it, “any country with bad intentions” tries to attack them. He denied, however, that Steadfast Jazz was in any way a rebuttal to Zapad-13. It was a “signal to anyone who might have an intention to attack a NATO ally,” he said, “but I don’t expect Russia to have any intention to attack NATO allies…so you might say it is a signal ‘to whom it may concern.’” In a show of how little Washington, at least under the current administration, seems to fret about its Eastern European allies, a measly 160 personnel out of a total 6,000 came from the United States, while France sent more than 1,000. Sweden, Finland and Ukraine, none of them NATO members, also participated.

Steadfast Jazz didn’t go off without some expected interference from those “whom-it-may-concern.” Before and during the exercise, Estonian and Latvian government websites were hit with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCD COE), which is based in Tallinn, was erroneously linked to the defacement of several Ukrainian government and NGO websites, with forged email accounts from CCD COE claiming that these assaults were all part of Steadfast Jazz. Similar attacks then followed against the Latvian Ministry of Defence and Defence Forces sites. As Piret Pernik at the Estonian think tank the International Centre for Defence Studies writes, what was so extraordinary about these incidents was how the Russian state-controlled press reported on them. On November 4, for instance, regnum.ru, a news service which Estonian intelligence has linked to Russia’s security services, published an article suggesting that CCD COE “accidentally” hit Ukrainian and Latvian portals during Steadfast Jazz’s conventional military operations. Then, on November 6, Voice of Russia, also run by the Kremlin, reiterated these claims with the assessment that NATO was so incompetent in the realm of cyber-security that it wound up attacking itself. Pernik didn’t think this message coordination between “hacktivist” groups and Russian media organs a mere coincidence and neither should you.

NATO has long been the obsession and bugbear of the Kremlin, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived Moscow of its Warsaw Pact military counterbalance. And despite the fact that Russian officials have conceded in their more truthful moments that NATO’s planned missile defense shield, which is now being installed in Eastern Europe, poses no real security threat to their territory, they nevertheless characterize the program aimed at intercepting Iranian and North Korean ballistic missiles—as hostile. This was exactly what the newly appointed Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, did at the last Valdai International Discussion Club, a yearly chin-wag for regime loyalists and softies marketed as the Russian answer to the German Marshall Fund conferences. Shoigu, who replaced the scandal-plagued and reform-minded Anatoly Serdykuov, helped increase Russia’s military budget this year by 26 percent. He is now viewed as the most popular and recognizable minister in Russia, according to recent polls.

Indeed, Shoigu’s a true man of the times in the sense that he is completely backward-looking. He wants a return to Soviet-era mobilization, a policy fraught with past failures, and, as part of his ambitious ministry overhaul, he’s now overseeing the production of naval ships at a level that is only half of what the U.S. currently spends (just a few years ago, that amount was less than a tenth). By 2020, if current targets are met, Russia will have added 40 new, combat-ready brigades to its army, giving it eight more than what the U.S. is projected to have by 2017. Seventy percent of those forces will be outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment. The defense ministry has also announced plans to create a million-man, active-duty army by 2020. As the U.S. languishes in sequestration blues, Putin has unilaterally pledged $755 billion to completely modernizing the Russian army and restoring it to its lost period of grandeur. Two horribly mismanaged wars in Chechnya in the mid-to-late 90s, and a less-than-stellar performance in 2008 against Georgia provided the justification for this mass renovation. Putin has said, with near Five-Year Plan hyperbole, that modernizatsiia can become a catch-all economic reform in its own right, “a locomotive that will pull the various industries: metallurgy, mechanical engineering, the chemical and radio-electric industries, the entire IT and telecommunications range.”

And yet, as impressive as these statistics are on paper, they’re still coming from a state notorious for cooking its books and undershooting the mark across all sectors. They should therefore be assessed with a fair degree of skepticism. To start with, no ambitious state investment scheme in Russia is ever honestly pursued, be it the Skolkovo dot-com village, which former president Dmitry Medvedev wanted to erect on the outskirts of Moscow and which is now a project rife with embezzlement allegations and counter-allegations, or the much-hyped Sochi Olympics, which has already cost some $50 billion. Sochi is not only the most expensive Games in world history but also, as opposition figures Boris Nemtsov and Leonid Martynyuk have surmised, one of the most excessive self-enrichment schemes in Russian history, with roughly half the inflated budget going to “embezzlement and kickbacks” that have a habit of benefiting Putin’s closest friends. The ruling United Russia party is now, thanks to opposition leader Alexey Navalny, universally known as the “party of crooks and thieves.” In 2011, Transparency International’s Bribe Paying Index ranked Russia as the worst in the world for perceived likeliness for palm-greasing. About 16 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product—$300 billion out of $1.5 trillion—is frittered away annually in corruption schemes.

It seems highly likely, then, that Russia’s military modernization program will similarly devolve into a racket. Though there are also prima facie fudges with Shoigu’s forward-thinking. Alexander Golts, a Russian military expert, has ably dealt with the million-man military myth, citing two clear and insurmountable problems. “The first and most important reason is that the acute demographic decline has resulted in a sharp drop in the number of young men reaching 18 years of age—to 800,000,” he wrote in the Moscow Times recently. “The second reason is that widespread corruption allows thousands of eligible conscripts to receive exemption from service.”  Pay a bribe, skip the draft. Nor is contract service a panacea given the strong disincentive for young Russians to want to join the ranks: the especially barbaric hazing ritual known asdedovshchina graduates plenty of body-bags per year in lieu of fit soldiers. My colleague Andrew Bowen has also suggested that lackluster International Monetary Fund forecasts for Russian economic growth will undermine any long-term blue-sky military plans. Finally, manufacturing standards in the military industry are as robust as elsewhere in Russia: ships that do not sail and missiles that do not launch are still a common problem. In fact, when Russia’s only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, sailed for Syria well over a year ago, a source close to the U.S. Navy told me that the American Sixth Fleet was on hand in case of an emergency. What kind of emergency? “The Kuznetsov might sink.”

One skeptic of this hard-power reassertion theory is Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s security services who teaches at New York University. He told me that a British Royal Navy officer informed him a few years ago that “if ever it were necessary to deal with the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean, NATO could leave it to the Italians to do it without any help.”  Galeotti also agrees that militarymodernizatsiia is a convenient cover for greasing the palms of Russia’s already surfeited officer class. “Efforts to build a million-man army and massive new procurement programs seem to be mechanisms to keep generals in work and transfer tax money to the defense-industrial sector and corrupt managers and middlemen rather than having any bearing on Russia’s genuine security needs,” Galeotti said, citing as the most pressing security need, the rise of a domestic ultra-nationalist far right—which has taken to riots and pogroms against migrant workers in recent months—and a more muscular China.

But rather than focus on these imminent threats, Russia’s painted a bullseye on the back of another perceived external nemesis, the European Union, which has lately found itself the subject of febrile propaganda campaigns and obnoxious attempts to derail its greater commercial and trade cooperation with former Soviet republics. Notwithstanding the 2008 credit implosion and its continuing knock-on effects in southern eurozone countries, which have threatened a destabilizing “exit” from the common currency, former Easter bloc countries still view the EU as a more reliable partner for international business and trade than they do Russia. That’s why the Kremlin has created a shadow EU known as the Customs Union, which includes Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and whose sole mission seems to be keeping ex-satellites from being lured into Brussels’ orbit. Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan were set to sign an Association Agreement with the EU at the Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius on November 28-29, which would offer them economic incentives amounting to free trade and possibly pave the way toward full membership later on. Such incentives, however, come with political preconditions related to freedom of speech, human rights and standards of living. Russia not only wants a neo-Soviet protectorate with these countries—one enforced by tariff arrangements instead of tanks—but it also wants them to behave more like Russia, which is to say dictatorially and outside the confines of international legal norms. Armenia, for instance, was going to sign the Association Agreement until Putin brought President Serzh Sargsyan to Moscow for a private conference. Whatever occurred between the two has not been publicly disclosed, although no doubt Russia’s military support, upon which Armenian is heavily dependent (Armenia’s sole air defence is provided by the Russian base at Gyumri), was raised as a reason to resist the westward pull. Armenia has now decided to join the Customs Union.

Russia’s Department of Public Health also proscribed the importation of Moldova’s wine, just it had previously done with Georgia’s, citing a pretext of unmet sanitary conditions—though fermented Moldovan grapes were evidently hygienic enough for Russian consumption before the Association Agreement was mooted. Sergei Glazyev, an advisor to Putin, left no room for second-guessing this hostile gesture when he said that Ukraine’s tropism toward the EU was “suicidal,” perhaps only leaving out that the suicide would be assisted. In fact, Glazyev threatened to partition Ukraine as punishment, ominously warning that the Kremlin would be “legally entitled to support” ethnic Russians in the country who did not wish to move closer to Brussels—exactly the kind of language Moscow has used to justify a de facto military annexation of Georgia’s breakaway regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia. So starting in August, Ukrainian goods were halted for a laborious inspections regimen at the Ukraine-Russia border (though no such restrictions apply to Russian goods traveling the opposite direction), creating what Ukrainian officials refer to as a “customs terror” that could cost Kiev as much as $2.5 billion by year’s end. Moscow has also intimated that it will deport the many Ukrainian migrant laborers who work in Russia and who generate billions of dollars in capital. Vladimir Pastukhov, in Novaya Gazeta, described the relationship as a triangle, featuring Ukraine as a cheating husband, the EU as an attractive young mistress and Russia as a bitchy wife. Lorena Bobbitt comes to mind.

What is new in the Kremlin’s bullying of its “near abroad” is also new in Russia. Legalized bigotry, whereby “homosexual propaganda” —purportedly conceived to combat pedophilia but defined so nebulously as to endanger the entire gay population—is now being exported to Ukraine to scuttle Kiev’s lurch toward Brussels. A brilliant piece of investigative journalism, by J. Lester Feder of BuzzFeed, found that Ukraine’s growing anti-LGBT movement, rife with NGOs that equate the Association Agreement with the “homosexualizing of Ukraine,” is largely the work of Russian agitprop. One such group, Ukrainian Choice, Feder writes, is “funded by Viktor Medvedchuk, a wealthy businessman and former parliamentarian, who is so close to the Russian president that local media routinely allude to the fact that Vladimir Putin is his child’s godfather.” The EU thus faces a dilemma: push back against Ukrainian intolerance on a major civil rights issue and risk driving the country further into Moscow’s embrace; stay silent, and forfeit any economic compact in accordance with the Treaty of Rome’s rules on human rights requirements. It’s a zugzwang because either way, Putin wins. And he just did.

On Thursday, the Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov’s cabinet posted a decree stating that the government was no longer pursuing an Association Agreement with the E.U. and instead prescribed a trilateral commission consisting of Kiev, Moscow and the Brussels to address Ukraine’s faltering economy in accordance with more Kremlin-friendly trade arrangements. Interested onlookers of this affair, such asSwedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, knew Ukraine was headed in this direction for weeks. Among the outstanding quarrels with the E.U. is President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to bend on the politicized incarceration and torture of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was convicted of abuse of office in 2011 and remains the most visible casualty of the wreckage that is Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Yanukovych’s party abstained from a series of parliamentary votes that would have allowed Tymoshenko to be transported to Germany for medical treatment (she was badly beaten by prison guards last year). “Ukraine government suddenly bows deeply to the Kremlin,” Bildt tweeted after the cabinet rendered its decision.

Even those countries that Russia doesn’t consider within its own back yard or that it didn’t used to occupy militarily are susceptible to nastiness. The Netherlands, too, has lately discovered the cost of crossing the KGB-czar. When Putin travelled to Amsterdam in April, rather than being greeted as dignified head of state, he found a city justifiably enraged at Russia’s new anti-LGBT law. Amsterdam’s mayor refused to meet him and even flew a rainbow LGBT flag atop City Hall. One Dutch businessman who used to live in Moscow told The Guardian that Putin “was insulted to his core, and for a couple of weeks afterwards there was a non-stop campaign on Russian TV showing Holland to be a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, run by paedophiles and hashish dealers.” Dutch police subsequently arrested at high-ranking diplomat from the Russian embassy in The Hague after neighbors complained that he and his wife were drunk. Little more than a week later, that diplomat’s openly gay counterpart in the Dutch embassy in Moscow had his home invaded by vandals who wrote “LGBT” in lipstick on a mirror. Finally, Russia arrested 30 Greenpeace activists—two of them Dutch—and two journalists for scaling an offshore Russian oil rig in the Arctic in protest of the drilling. First charged with “piracy,” each member of the retinue now faces seven years in jail if found guilty of “hooliganism.” Twenty-nine of the 30, including the two Dutch journalists, have now been granted bailed after spending over two months in jail. Yesterday, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg, to which the Dutch government appealed on human rights grounds, also ruled yesterday that the Dutch-flagged Greenpeace boat, Arctic Sunrise, and all 30 passengers should be permanently released.

All of this suggests that the more immediate threat that a re-energized and revanchist Russia poses to the West isn’t advancing armies or aerial assaults but a sophisticated combination of hard and soft power plays that have become something of a Putinist stock-in-trade. These will include new trade wars, cyber attacks, acts of espionage, energy blackmails, and a more updated version of what the KGB used to term “active measures,” that is, the spreading of misinformation and propaganda, designed to make Russia’s enemies—chiefly Washington and Brussels—look bad. So while Russia’s military strives toward great-power worthiness unto 2020, Moscow’s old hostilities will be dealt with using familiar old methods.

Central America’s New Cold War

The daily beast Mac Margolis

From an attack on an El Salvador group tracking down disappeared children from the country’s civil war to Daniel Ortega’s recent power grab, are Central America’s old, bloody faultlines reemerging?

The attack was swift and violent. It was a few hours before dawn in San Salvador when three armed men broke into the headquarters of Probúsqueda—an El Salvador civic group dedicated to tracking down disappeared children—and went to work. Holding three employees at gunpoint, the raiders rifled drawers, plundered computer files and set the offices of the non-profit on fire.

A man walks past in front of graffiti of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Masaya November 4, 2013. (Oswald Rivas/Reuters via Landov)

This was no random act of vandalism. The smell of gasoline still laced the air when the forensic teams arrived on the scene hours later. And though police investigators have yet to discover who launched the assault, no one in this war-scarred Central American nation missed the underlying meaning of the rampage.

The Nov. 14 attack came less than 72 hours after an historic hearing at the Salvadoran Supreme Court. There, eyewitnesses represented by Probusqueda told the high court of the day 30 years ago when government troops stormed their village, shooting to kill. The witnesses, all children at the time, lost their parents in the 1982 massacre but survived to tell the tale. After years of uneasy silence, their harrowing stories—and many more like them—are becoming public for the first time, shedding light on an era that many powerful Salvadorans would prefer to forget. “There is clearly a part of society that seeks to destabilize the country by these means, and we do not yet know who they are,” the bishop Martín Barahona, of the Anglican-Episcopal Church of El Salvador, declared.

Adding credence to the menace was the move by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador last month to close down Tutela Legal, a legal office that keeps a data bank of some 50,000 documents related to human-rights abuses committed during the Salvadoran civil war. Tutela Legal’s archives have become crucial evidence in the trials of former military men, many of whom have been brought to trial in the United States.

For over a decade, between 1979 and 1992, El Salvador was a central battleground in the Western hemisphere’s version of the Cold War, when security forces—often backed by the United States— fought determined Marxist guerrillas across the Central American isthmus, with repercussions from Moscow to Patagonia. An amnesty law in 1993 drew a cloak over that bloody era that saw 75,000 Salvadorans slain, on the belief that society could recover only if its wounds were left to scar and blood enemies agreed to look the other way. The assault on Probúsqueda was a brusque reminder of how thin that conviction ever was, and a troubling sign that the old Central America maybe never went away after all.

This worry is alive not just in El Salvador. In Nicaragua, former Sandinista guerrilla Daniel Ortega laid aside his Kalashnikov and embraced the ballot box, parlaying his image of freedom fighter into votes. Now in his third presidential term, he has turned the Nicaraguan bureaucracy into a bully pulpit, issuing edicts, stifling the independent press and strong-arming political opponents—not unlike the very military men he confronted as a freedom fighter. And in a plot twist worthy ofGabriel Garcia Marquez, Ortega’s own stepdaughter has accused the former Sandinista of abusing her sexually when she was a child.

In  Guatemala, memories of the dirtiest chapter of Central America’s dirty war came rushing back this year when former president  Efrain Rios Montt was brought to trial on charges of genocide for the key role he played during the 36-year-old conflict that took 220,000 lives.  But generalissimos don’t go down quietly and the ex-strongman, backed by loyal soldiers and expensive lawyers, maneuvered to annul a guilty verdict in the Constitutional Court earlier this year and forestall a retrial  until 2015. Now human rights group despair that the 78-year-old Rios Montt will ever be made to pay for his alleged crimes.

And yet, such incidents, dramatic as they may be, seem less like a return of Central America’s bad old times of dictatorship and guerrilla insurgency than they do a dull echo of a bygone era. As El Faro, El Salvador’s leading digital publication, wrote in a lead editorial about the attack against Probúsqueda: “The message was sent in the style of the old days. But the old days are gone.”

Clearly the raid on the advocacy group, which has worked to trace children whose parents were killed by the military, was a warning to those who would stir the memory pot. Likewise, the hasty shuttering of Tutela Legal, with its potentially damning archives in the cases of the “disappeared,” was widely interpreted as a response to the growing climate of intimidation in El Salvador.

But the world has turned since the Latin Cold War. Civic groups are speaking up and demanding that there can be no reconciliation can take place until the truth is told. Courts in El Salvador and Guatemala are reviewing the silence of the amnesty law. Backing them is the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which ruled  last year that “gross violations of human rights” were not shielded by amnesty.

The decision created a precedent for national courts to prosecute culprits of heinous acts such as the 1981 El Mozote massacre, perhaps the worst in Latin American history, in which Salvadoran troops killed nearly 1,000 people in six villages, including at least 450 children.

For the first time, the goons and martinets who wrote the rules in Central America are seeing their day in court. Even onetime untouchables like Rios Montt must now answer to a judge and jury for their alleged “crimes against humanity.”

Sure, brutes and warlords still roam the region, but the worst enemies no longer wear uniforms or wield guerrilla manuals. The good news is that the Armed Forces have mostly retreated to the barracks. The bad news is that today’s oppressors are more sophisticated and wield more clout than ever. Many are leveraging their popular mandates to garner superpowers, such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, whose congressional majority has just handed him the right to rule by decree for the next year. Elsewhere, Generalissimos have given way to narcotraficantes and their transnational criminal operations, who have intimidated authorities, bought off judges and cops, and turned Central America into a killing ground rivaling the days of the dirty wars.

Latin America is the most “insecure region” in the world, with more than 10 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, the threshold for “epidemic” violence, according to the United Nations. Between 2000 and 2011, as violent crime fell most everywhere else, the Latin America murder rate rose 11 percent. A total of 1 million people were murdered last decade.

Not surprisingly, three of the most violent nations on the planet are in Central America, with Honduras and El Salvador topping the list. Despite the return of free elections, the region is still hobbled by political corruptions, frail democratic institutions, and fratricidal politics. Tin horn dictatorships have become tin horn democracies. All the better for international drug cartels whose capos would rather milk the state than overthrow it. That’s the kind of power that the old generalissimos only dreamed of.

Democrats strip GOP of power to block many Obama appointees

WASHINGTON -- The Democratic-controlled Senate on Thursday changed its long-standing rules to strip the Republican minority of its filibuster power to block many presidential nominations, making it easier to confirm President Barack Obama’s appointees but increasing partisan tensions in an already acrimonious chamber.

After threatening to do so for months, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pulled the trigger on the so-called “nuclear option,” a series of procedural maneuvers to change Senate rules from requiring a 60-vote threshold for nominees.

With a 52-48 vote, the Senate agreed to consider all executive branch and judicial nominees, expect for Supreme Court picks, under a majority-rules system. The Senate has 53 Democrats, 45 Republicans and two independents who caucus and usually vote with Democrats.

Three Democrats – Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Carl Levin of Michigan and Mark Pryor of Arkansas – joined all 45 Republicans in opposing the change.

Obama hailed Reid for ending “an unprecedented pattern of obstruction in Congress that’s prevented too much of the American people’s business from getting done.”

“Enough is enough. The American people’s business is far too important to keep falling prey to Washington politics,” the president said at the White House. “A deliberate . . . effort to obstruct everything no matter the merits, just to re-fight the results of an election, is not normal.”

Obama had a different opinion when he was in the minority himself in a Republican-led Senate and Republican George W. Bush was in the White House.

“If the majority chooses to end the filibuster, if they choose to change the rules and put an end to democratic debate, “ he said in 2005, “then the fighting, the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse.”

White House spokesman Josh Earnest pushed back on any talk of a flip-flop, saying circumstances have changed for the worse since 2005. He said there were 59 judicial vacancies when Obama took office. Now, he said, there are 93.

“That is an indication of how this filibuster situation has gotten out of control,” Earnest said. “And it’s why the president is pleased that Sen. Reid has taken the steps that he’s taken today to make this process more efficient.”

By invoking the nuclear option, Reid also reversed himself on the importance of the filibuster to the minority party. He opposed the option when then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., toyed with it in 2006.

“A filibuster is the minority’s way of not allowing the majority to shut off debate, and without robust debate, the Senate’s crippled,” Reid wrote in his book “The Good Fight: Hard Lessons From Searchlight to Washington.”

Reid triggered the option by asking the Senate to reconsider the nomination of Patricia Millett to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, one of three judicial nominees recently blocked by filibusters. In the first test of the new rules, the senators voted 55-43 to advance Millett’s nomination. The Senate will do that when it returns from its Thanksgiving recess.

Reid said he had no choice after Republicans blocked the three D.C. circuit court picks and the nomination of Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The filibuster of Watt was the first of a sitting member of Congress since 1843.

“It’s time to change the Senate before this institution becomes obsolete.” Reid said on the Senate floor as senators sat at their desks listening attentively. “The American people – Democrats, Republicans, independents – are fed up with this gridlock, this obstruction.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., blasted Reid, accusing him of trying to “break the rules to change the rules” and waging a naked power grab to push through Obama’s agenda and nominees.

McConnell and other Senate Republicans likened Thursday’s action to the way Democrats in the Senate and House of Representatives pushed the Affordable Care Act through both chambers for Obama to sign into law.

“He may have just as well have said, ‘If you like the rules of the Senate, you can keep them,’ ” a smiling McConnell said, paraphrasing Obama’s broken promise on the health care law.

Reid and McConnell accused each other of reneging on an agreement they forged last July and a vow they made last January on nominations. Reid said Republicans broke that vow when they initially blocked the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., to be the defense secretary. Hagel was eventually confirmed.

McConnell asserted that Reid and other Democrats were simply itching for a fight and had used the court nominations to wage one. Republicans objected to the nominations because they maintain that the three slots on the court aren’t needed because of the court’s caseload.

“They cook up some fake fight over judges that aren’t even needed,” McConnell said.

Senate Republicans – and Democrat Levin – warned that there’ll be dire consequences for amending the Senate rules.

“Majorities are fickle. Majorities are fleeting. Here today, gone tomorrow,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. “So they have chosen to take us down this path. The silver lining is that there will come a day when the roles are reversed.”

But Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said he hoped that Reid would go farther to prevent senators from holding up legislation.

“We just had the spectacle of a bill that I reported out of committee – unanimous, Republicans and Democrats,” Harkin said. “Passed the floor of the House unanimously. Comes to the Senate. One senator held it up for 10 days. Should one senator be able to stop things around here like that?”

Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, said Reid had no choice but to seek the change.

“If Reid did not do this now, he’d have problems later on with other judges,” Ornstein said.

But the move might change the dynamic of the Senate. A place that depends on comity and hundreds of years of unwritten rules might change dramatically, according to Ross Baker, a Rutgers University political science professor.

“Whether the Senate turns into a Superfund site depends on the Republicans,” Baker said. “The Democrats will get the three nominees. It’ll make the Senate a much tougher place to do business.”

Maria Recio contributed to this article.

The Filibuster Had to Be Killed

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., looks on while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., speaks at a news conference on Capitol Hill on Nov. 21, 2013. You know the filibuster had to be killed if a traditionalist like Reid was the one who sounded the death knell.

I’m glad to hear that Sen. John McCain thinks the partial end of the filibuster passed today is a “devastating” breach of Senate procedure. The Senate rules need to be devastated.

The filibuster is anti-democratic. It gives a minority of representatives from a minority of states a stranglehold over the country and in particular over the president’s power of appointment. The filibuster is not in the Constitution, barely existed before 1917, and didn’t take on anything like its current form until the middle of the 20^th century. Only very recently has it become the monster it is now. It is past time for the filibuster to go, and damn the conventional wisdom about the consequences.

Until now, both parties have held off from killing the filibuster when they’ve controlled the presidency but not the Senate, because they’ve been mindful of what they stand to lose when they’re on the other side of the power divide. But the Democrats have been so much the losers in this that even Majority Leader Harry Reid, a defender of Senate tradition and gridlock if ever there was one, has admitted the truth born of the brute force of Republican obstructionism: He has no choice, which is why he pushed to end the filibuster for presidential appointees and non-Supreme Court judicial nominees. (The filibuster remains intact for Supreme Court nominations and regular laws.)

Take the D.C. Circuit—the federal court of appeals that is second to the Supreme Court in importance—as just one example of the Republicans’ advantage, since it’s the cause of the collision that finally sent the Democrats over the edge. Around 2005, after he won re-election, President George W. Bush succeeded in pushing through a slate of D.C. Circuit judges who included hard-core conservatives such as Thomas Griffith, Brett Kavanaugh, and Janice Rogers Brown. They have done all kinds of work for the right since then. Most recently, Brown came through with a ruling against Obamacare’s requirement that employers provide health insurance that covers contraception. As Bush lined up his nominees to the courts (not to mention federal agencies), the Democrats kept their promise only to filibuster selectively, based on “extraordinary circumstances.”

As a result, Bush was able to build a federal judiciary with an overwhelming majority of Republican-appointed judges. As Charlie Savage wrote in 2008 before Obama became president: “Republican-appointed judges, most of them conservatives, are projected to make up 62 percent of the bench next Inauguration Day, up from 50 percent when Mr. Bush took office. They control 10 of the 13 circuits, while judges appointed by Democrats have a dwindling majority on just one circuit.”

That’s pretty much how the presidential power of appointment is supposed to work. You win the White House, you control the courts, until the next time around, when it’s the other party’s turn to pick judges. But the Republicans in the Senate have indefatigably changed the game. They have appointed just one of Obama’s five nominees to the D.C. Circuit—Sri Srinivasan, the single golden compromise. Caitlin Halligan withdrew after more than a year of waiting and filibustering. Last summer,Obama announced three nominees at once—Patricia Millett, Robert Wilkins, and Cornelia Pillard. All hyper-qualified. None radical. One even worked in the Bush as well as the Clinton Solicitor General’s Office and has represented the pro-business behemoth that is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. When Obama made his triple-nomination announcement, I figured that the president would go two for three. Or at least one for three. Right?

Wrong. The Republicans filibustered all three of Obama’s picks. Not because they were extraordinary nominees, but because they were nominees, period. The normal business of filling vacant seats on the D.C. Circuit became, in the heated rhetoric of Republican senators such as Chuck Grassley, nefarious “court packing.” Grassley said there was no need for more judges on that court because the workload was down. Never mind that he'd confirmed the Bush judges who at that point brought the total number of non-senior judges on the court to 11—exactly three more than there are now. The real reason for the Republican united front was simple math: The D.C. Circuit now has four judges appointed by Republicans and four judges appointed by Democrats, plus six senior judges, five of whom are Republican appointees. Fifteen of the 19 last picks have been made by GOP presidents. The senior judges hear plenty of cases. The appeals courts issue rulings in panels of three. And so, as Moshe Marvit pointed out in Dissent in May, the number that matters most is this: At that point in 2013, almost 80 percent of the D.C. Circuit panels were majority or exclusively Republican appointees.

That’s the Republican advantage. It’s been working well for them. They saw no reason to give it up. Why not keep pushing the filibuster envelope if no one makes you back off?

That’s why Reid finally pushed back. The fight for bipartisan normalcy has already been lost. The majority leader merely sounded the death knell. There will be lots of loud lamenting at the wake that follows. Don’t be fooled. If the Republicans were in the Democrats’ position, they’d have done the same thing months ago. Now Millett, Wilkins, and Pillard can take their seats on the bench. And soon the funeral speeches will end, and the next phase of life in the Senate will begin.