The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A History of Sustainable Violence. By Aaron David Miller.

A History of Sustainable Violence. By Aaron David Miller. Foreign Policy, May 19, 2016.

Miller:

There’s a reason why Israelis and Palestinians haven't made true and lasting efforts for peace — their conflict is now the status quo.

Shortly after becoming secretary of state in 2013, John Kerry spoke to the American Jewish Committee and made it clear that the status quo between Israelis and Palestinians was simply “not sustainable.” A year later, at the Brookings Institution’s annual Saban Forum, Kerry made his point again. “The status quo between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not sustainable,” he said, “and the alternatives to peace are neither acceptable nor viable.”

Much like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Kerry has issued perennial warnings to the Israelis and Palestinians — though more the former, actually — that if they don’t change their ways, and soon, a variety of disasters will befall them.

When Kerry repeated his message once again late last year in another speech at the Brookings Institution, he noted that the status quo — including “violence, settlement activity, demolitions” — was “imperiling the viability of a two-state solution.”

Some, of course, might argue it already has. Others, including Kerry himself, have predicted even worse disasters are ahead: a third intifada, the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, or a permanent one-state reality that would all but guarantee constant violence.

And yet over the course of the past 16 years, we have witnessed one full-blown Palestinian intifada (2000-2004); three bloody wars between Israel and Hamas (2008-2009, 2012, and 2014); an intense eruption of Palestinian lone-wolf stabbings and shootings of Israelis (October 2015-present); and what has become the daily indignities inherent in the relationship between the occupier and the occupied.

It would seem, then, that this unsustainable status quo (and the pain and misery that it carries) to which Kerry constantly refers has proved well … quite sustainable.

Surely Kerry is correct in his analysis that keeping things exactly as they are is unnecessarily costly and potentially disastrous. But his calls for change are falling on deaf ears. Why isn’t anyone listening?

The politically inconvenient truth is that not even a solution-oriented or peripatetic U.S. secretary of state will be able to scare or persuade hard-edged Israeli and Palestinian leaders — through either threats or appeals to their enlightened self-interests — into real and actionable change.

Israelis and Palestinians have their own agendas and their own concerns. Call them excuses, rationales, or self-perpetuating delusions if you will, but these rationales and fears have trumped American arguments to move beyond this conflict “status quo.” And they will likely continue to do so. Here’s why.

Changing the status quo is just too risky

Almost 50 years after Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, it’s stunningly clear that the fear of dramatically changing the status quo outweighs the risks of managing it.

It’s hard for big powers to appreciate fully the way in which small ones calculate risks and gains, particularly in a conflict that is perceived to be existential in nature. But it shouldn’t be. This isn’t just a real estate deal. It’s a brutal and bloody struggle that stirs up hatreds and passions among those who don’t want it resolved. Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin were murdered for their peacemaking.

At the Camp David summit in July 2000, I heard Yasser Arafat say several times that he wouldn’t give the Americans the chance to walk behind his coffin. Translation: Don’t think I’ll sign a deal that will get me killed. Arafat was happy (ego-wise) to be at the summit, but he also knew that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had been at Camp David, too, in 1978 with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and that despite getting 100 percent of Sinai back and all Israeli settlements there dismantled, the Egyptian leader had been murdered. Arafat didn’t negotiate seriously at Camp David, but he certainly wasn’t going to risk his life and legitimacy by settling for the 92 percent of the West Bank that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered at the summit.

Whether a gloomy Barak (who had, by the 2000 summit’s end, taken to dressing in all black) was thinking about Rabin’s murder at the hands of an Israeli terrorist is unknown. Barak did go further on a deal with the Palestinians than any other Israeli leader had before. But no Israeli leader — certainly not in what was the first serious negotiating session with a Palestinian counterpart — was willing or able to meet Palestinian requirements. And the Israeli leader was surely thinking about his political survival. Barak had arrived at Camp David with a shaky government that collapsed while he was there. Once it was clear there would be no deal, the Camp David dynamic became very much a gotcha game of domestic politics. Who was going to be blamed for the failure of the summit or, to use former Secretary of State James Baker’s notion, on whose doorstep would the dead cat be left? Nobody has ever been assassinated or discredited by their constituents for not making peace and blaming the other side. Barak blamed Arafat for the failure of Camp David and tried to discredit him and Palestinians as negotiating partners. Bill Clinton, who believed Barak had made historic compromises, agreed and criticized Arafat. We left the summit with no agreement and very little prospect of achieving one in the six months that remained in Clinton’s presidency.

The fact is negotiating political agreements, let alone implementing peace treaties that reshape public attitudes and change the way adversaries think and behave toward one another, isn’t for the faint-hearted. It takes big, bold leaders who are willing to risk separating themselves from their respective tribes at considerable risk. Indeed, one reason that status quo prevails is that these leaders are so rare. And the deals they can do equally so. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty combined strong leaders and issues much less complicated and sensitive than those like Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. That was also why King Hussein and Rabin were able to negotiate an Israel-Jordan treaty. Weaker leaders without that kind of authority and strength and who lack the capacity and motivation to do a deal (see: Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Palestinian Authority president and Israeli prime minister, respectively) cannot be expected to produce those kinds of historic achievements, particularly when the issues they’re negotiating are so explosive.

Managing is easier … and safer

Israelis and Palestinians may not be adept conflict resolvers, but despite their ongoing dysfunctional relationship as occupier and occupied, they actually have found ways to avoid pushing one another past the brink or the proverbial point of no return.

For example, in frustration with dealing with Israel, Abbas has, since 2008, repeatedly threatened to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and turn over the proverbial keys to Netanyahu so he could “be responsible for the Palestinian Authority.” Of course, that’s never happened. Nor have Palestinians or Israelis permanently terminated security cooperation. For its part, Israel has built settlements, walls, and annexed Jerusalem, but it has avoided annexing the West Bank, thereby leaving open the possibility of an agreement — at least theoretically. So while Israelis and Palestinians can’t seem to solve the two-state problem or stop fighting, they can’t stop cooperating either.

Paradoxically, while close proximity drives the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it also helps mitigate it. Palestinians have a crippling dependency on Israel for water, electricity, access to the outside world, and a range of goods and services — including employment opportunities. Indeed, unlike during the Second Intifada, Israel recently decided to grant 40,000 additional work permits to Palestinians.

As long as Abbas and the Palestinian Authority want to govern the West Bank — and there’s no indication that desire is going to end — the Palestinians need Israeli help in handling security, particularly in checking Hamas’s influence. Abbas has said many times that security cooperation is in the Palestinians’ interest. And it also frees the Israelis from having to reoccupy large areas of the West Bank. Palestinian intelligence chief Majid Faraj estimates that his security forces have stopped 200 attacks since last October. And Israel’s internal security service — the Shin Bet — and chief of general staff, too, confirm that the problem Israel faces on security would be much worse without the Palestinian Authority.

Analyst Neri Zilber describes the Palestinian Authority as Israel’s secret weapon in its war against terrorism. Abbas is walking a fine line. He doesn’t want his 30,000-man security force to appear to be Israel’s police force. He seems to be succeeding. Since last fall, only three members of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces have been implicated in the current violence. In a remarkable admission to Israel’s Channel 2 last in March, Abbas admitted that without security cooperation, a “bloody intifada would break out.”

Washington is a status quo enabler

Much of that security cooperation is funded by the United States and plays a significant role in helping maintain stability and, yes, the status quo. It is a cruel irony that Kerry warns of an unsustainable status quo that Washington plays a big part in sustaining. U.S. technical and financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority helps keep Abbas in power. Indeed, since the Palestinian return to the West Bank in 1994, the United States has been key to the international donor effort on behalf of the Palestinian Authority and the key crisis manager in defusing violence and getting both sides out of bad situations that could have easily escalated to worse ones. I spent much of my life in the 1990s helping keep the Oslo process alive and prevent and preempt big explosions. The United States is in a perverse investment trap: It wants Israelis and Palestinians to grasp the dangers inherent in the status quo. Yet it seems to have no choice but to shelter them from it.

Add to that America’s enduring special ties with Israel (unlikely to wither anytime soon), its willingness to bankroll and arm the Israelis, and its readiness to defend the country from international criticism and pressure, and it’s easier to see how the status quo ambles along without fundamental disruption. And that reality has been reinforced in the past five years by a Middle Eastern meltdown, the rise of the Islamic State, the Syrian civil war, and the Iranian nuclear deal that have distracted the international community and the United States from seriously focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. And there’s little to suggest a change in that focus.

It’s tempting to suggest that if the United States applied real pressure on Israel by threatening to cut its military aid, Israel would have no choice but to be more compliant on the Palestinian issue. There’s, of course, no way to know. No Democratic or Republican administration has ever even hinted at such an approach, let alone tried to implement one. And it’s hard to imagine such a scenario.

One might ask Kerry that if things are as bad as he describes them, why he and the administration haven’t adopted a remedy more in keeping with the severity of the disease. Though I think the answer is already pretty stunningly clear: Like its predecessors, this administration lacks both the will and the capacity to take on America’s close Israeli ally on the peace process’s most crucial sticking points — settlements, forcing Israel to change its position on borders or Jerusalem, among others. And even if those within the Obama administration could summon up the necessary courage, they know in the end it still wouldn’t be sufficient.

I worked on this issue in various capacities under four administrations — from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush — and none of them seriously believed that American pressure or a U.S. peace plan could move the two sides closer to resolving their conflict, let alone delivering a deal without the willing participation of the parties themselves.

No surrender

After 50 years of violence, terrorism, and conflict, one might reason that Israelis and, particularly, Palestinians have experienced more than enough suffering to compel a resolution. And one could argue that because the suffering (on both sides) has spanned generations, it has only stiffened the resolve to resist and fight on. After 50 years of Israeli occupation, Palestinians are not about to abandon their national narrative. And unlike a traditional colonial situation where the occupying power could leave and sail home (see: the British in India, France in Algeria or Vietnam), Israel isn’t going anywhere and will remain a permanent part of the neighborhood — whether the West Bank situation is resolved or not.

Since neither surrender nor victory is a realistic option, both sides have no choice but to operate in the status quo — shifting between conflict and accommodation. In that vein, the Palestinian Authority works pragmatically with Israel on issues like security and water. And, as a February poll by the Awrad research firm reveals, only 42 percent of the Palestinians surveyed supported a third intifada — a drop from the survey conducted just a few months earlier that saw 63 percent support. Overall, the findings saw that there is now little desire for the kind of mass uprising of the First Intifada or for the kinds of suicide attacks that were carried out in Israel during the second. Indeed, it’s been seven months since the outbreak of the so-called “intifada of knives,” but those attacks didn’t lead to surging demonstrations or more shows of violence, signaling, possibly, that there is clearly an appetite for broader engagement on the part of the Palestinian public. Indeed, the status quo is further reinforced by a Palestinian national movement that is divided and dysfunctional and lacks anything resembling the unity, will, or capacity to articulate a coherent national strategy to create a Palestinian state through force, diplomacy, or a combination of the two.

As for the Israelis, a combination of factors reinforces the inertia of a seemingly unchangeable status quo. Prime Minister Netanyahu, now an apparent constant in Israeli governance, has no interest in negotiating an endgame deal with the Palestinians. The continuation of Palestinian violence, a still hostile Hamas government in Gaza, a Middle East in meltdown, an Arab world distracted by Iran and the Islamic State, and Israel’s growing closeness with Egypt all create very little chance that there will be an intense focus on negotiations to create a Palestinian state. Even with the surge of lone-wolf attacks (now abating somewhat), the normalcy and vitality of life in Israel proper results in zero pressure on the government to do anything about the Palestinian issue. Indeed, Israel, according to the global happiness index, ranked the 11th-happiest country in the world in 2015 — a stunning fact, particularly when you look at the preceding 10. The very real danger that the continuing occupation will erode Israel’s character as a Jewish democratic state, increase its international isolation, and strain relations with its friends, including the United States, is present but simply not felt immediately or severely enough to overcome the risks of taking bold steps to end that occupation.

Is there anything left to do?

Perhaps the most compelling reason that the status quo continues is that no way has been found of fundamentally altering it to the benefit of Israelis and Palestinians alike.

This may seem tautological. But it makes an important point. Fifty years on, many different options have been tried: quality of life and the Jordanian option in the 1980s; the Oslo interim accords of the 1990s; the Camp David endgame efforts (2000); the Annapolis negotiations (2007-2008); Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza (2005); the Kerry peace effort (2013-2014). None has worked. And the cumulative impact of these failures has begun to seriously undermine the notion that there is in fact a solution that’s workable and acceptable to both sides.

But no matter. The same proximity that creates conflict between Israelis and Palestinians will also guarantee that they will continue to look for these kinds of solutions. Whether they find them is another matter. Indeed, even as I write this column, Israelis and Palestinians are coming off yet another seemingly hopeful but apparently failed effort to negotiate Israel’s turning over of more control to Palestinians in parts of the West Bank.

And I’m certain that before the year is out there are three things you will be able to take to the bank. John Kerry will again be talking about the unsustainable status quo and the dangers it presents. The Obama administration will have launched some effort to leave its mark on the peace process, and the unsustainable sustainable status quo and the headaches it portends will still be around to plague the U.S. president lucky enough to sit in the White House next year.

The Meaning of Trump. By Walter Russell Mead.

The Meaning of Mr. Trump. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, May 23, 2016.

Mead:

What energizes the Trump phenomenon is the power of “NO!”: people who think the train is about to head off a cliff want to pull the emergency cord that stops the train even if they don’t know what happens next.

The punditocracy whipped itself up into a a hot frenzy over the weekend about Mr. Trump’s recent rise in the polls against Secretary Clinton, with the RCP average showing the presumptive Republican nominee with a statistically meaningless but eye-catching lead of 0.2 percent. But there is less here than meets the eye. Trump is benefitting from the normal phenomenon of GOP voters rallying around the standard bearer now that his nomination is all but certain. Clinton meanwhile is still mired in the contest with Sanders. Once the nomination fight is over, she should also get a bump.

We aren’t going to get into the horse race punditry here; the U.S. press burns through vast resources of energy and time over-reporting and over-analyzing every random twist in a grossly over-hyped presidential campaign season that now stretches out across two of every four years. The country would be much better off if both news writers and news readers paid less attention to the horse race and more attention to the events and trends that are reshaping the world—and that will have more impact on the next four years than the personality of the person elected to occupy the Oval Office.

As far as one can say anything sensible about the race at this point, it appears to look like this: Clinton is the putative favorite given Obama’s favorable job approval ratings, the state of the economy, and demographic trends that don’t seem to favor the Trump campaign. But there is a non-trivial chance that Trump’s non-conventional attacks can derail the Clinton campaign—much as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth derailed the Kerry campaign in 2004.

Just as Kerry made his Vietnam service the cornerstone of his campaign (at a time when the shock of 9/11 still made Americans suspicious of candidates without very tough national security credentials), Secretary Clinton has made feminism the foundation of hers. The Swift Boat Veterans’ assault on Kerry’s war record was successful enough to undercut public confidence in the essential premise of his campaign. If Trump can make the charge that Clinton helped her husband vilify and marginalize the women who came forward to charge him with exploitative personal encounters, it’s just possible that her campaign could be holed below the waterline.

Team Clinton will have to think hard about how to respond. Trump looks like a vulnerable candidate—one with so many flaws that his candidacy must inevitably implode once he comes under serious scrutiny. But as he showed during the primary campaign, Trump isn’t subject to the normal rules. Between policy flip-flops, lack of knowledge and experience, business woes, ill-tempered outbursts, and scapegoating of minority groups who are likely to vote in November, he presents his opponents with an embarrassment of riches: there are so many attractive targets for negative ads that even Lee Atwater would be hard pressed to decide which to hit first.

But this apparent weakness and vulnerability conceals a strength: Trump is an unconventional candidate whose proposition to the electorate isn’t about particular policy stands, experience, credentials or even personal and political honesty. Trump is the purest expression of the politics of ‘NO!’ that I personally can recall. He’s the candidate for people who think the conventional wisdom of the American establishment is hopelessly out of touch with the real world. He’s the little boy saying that the emperor, or in this case, the aspiring empress, has no clothes. What energizes the Trump phenomenon is the very power of rejection: people who think the train is about to head off a cliff want to pull the emergency cord that stops the train even if they don’t know what happens next. To many of Trump supporters, Hillary Clinton looks like Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: the enforcer of a fatally flawed status quo and the personification of bureaucratic power in a system gone rogue.

What makes Trump so appealing to so many voters is that the establishment does seem unusually clueless these days. The great American post-Cold War project of seeking peace and security through the construction of a New World Order based on liberal internationalism and American power doesn’t seem to be working very well, and it’s not hard to conclude that neither the neoconservatives nor the Obama-ites really know what they are doing. When it comes to the economy, it’s been clear since the financial crisis of 2008 that something is badly awry and that the economists, so dogmatic and opinionated and so bitterly divided into quarreling schools, aren’t sure how the system works anymore, and have no real ideas about how to make the world system work to the benefit of ordinary voters in the United States. With the PC crowd and the Obama administration hammering away at transgender bathroom rights as if this was the great moral cause of our time, and with campus Pure Thought advocates collapsing into self parody even as an epidemic of drug abuse and family breakdown relentlessly corrodes the foundations of American social cohesion, it’s hard to believe that the establishment has a solid grip on the moral principles and priorities a society like ours needs.

Trump appeals to all those who think that the American Establishment, the Great and the Good of both parties, has worked its way into a dead end of ideas that don’t work and values that can’t save us. He is the candidate of Control-Alt-Delete. His election would sweep away the smug generational certainties that Clinton embodies, the Boomer Progressive Synthesis that hasn’t solved the problems of the world or of the United States, but which nevertheless persists in regarding itself as the highest and only form of truth.

The interest groups and power centers that surround Secretary Clinton like a praetorian guard—Wall Street, the upper middle class feminists, the African American establishment, the Davoisie, the institutional power of the great foundations and educational bureaucracies, Silicon Valley, Hollywood—have defeated their intellectual and political rivals in their spheres of interest and influence. Supporting her is a massive agglomeration of power, intellect, wealth and talent. Her candidacy is the logical climax of the Baby Boom’s march through the institutions of American life. Even the neoconservatives are enlisting in her campaign.

The American Right for all its earnest efforts has been unable to construct a counter establishment that can compete with the contemporary liberal behemoth. Libertarian nostalgia for the 1920s and 1890s, social conservative nostalgia for the faux-certainties of the 1950s; paleocon isolationism; white nationalism; ‘reformicon’ tweaks to the liberal policy agenda—none of these mutually hostile and contradictory sets of ideas can challenge the Boomer Establishment synthesis. The Clintonian center-Left won the cultural and intellectual battles of its time against both the hard left and the fragmented right. The Clinton candidacy is about inevitability, about the laws of historical and institutional gravity.

Yet though the Boomer Consensus has triumphed in the world of American institutions and ideas, in the eyes of many Americans it has not done all that well in the real world. Foreign policy, financial policy, health policy, support of the middle class, race relations, family life, public education, trade policy, city and state government management, wages: what exactly has the Boomer Consensus accomplished in these fields? Many Americans think that the Consensus is a scam and a flop when it comes to actually, well, making things better for the average person. It has made life better, much better, for the upper middle class; few would dispute its accomplishments there. And Wall Street has every reason to pay large speaking fees and make large financial contributions to the champion of the orthodoxy that helped make it so rich.

But many and possibly most Americans think that the Boomer Consensus didn’t work for them. They may not have much confidence in the various conservative and socialist alternatives to the consensus, but they believe that something about it is flawed, and they want it stopped dead in its tracks. This is where Trump comes in. His supporters aren’t united around a set of positive ideas, but they are united in opposition to the status quo. They believe that the emperor has no clothes, even if they can’t agree on a replacement wardrobe.

This makes it easy and profitable for Trump to wage negative campaigns—against Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and the Republican establishment in the primary, against Hillary Clinton and the conventional wisdom of the center left in the general. It also makes it much harder for negative campaigns to hurt him: his appeal doesn’t stem from approval for particular policies, but from opposition to elements of the status quo. His supporters may not expect Mexico to pay for a border wall, but they believe that he doesn’t like unlimited illegal immigration and that he will do something about it. His supporters do not necessarily think he will start a trade war with China, but they don’t think that the conventional approach to globalization is working and they expect him to try something different. At the very least, they believe that he won’t exude serenely toxic moral smugness as he steers the country down a dead end road, that he will at least try to wrench the country off its current course.

This makes him hard to hit. To accuse him of a business career based on flim flam and razzle dazzle doesn’t hurt him with people who think the economic game is rigged. To accuse him of sponsoring outrageous policy ideas that the experts unite in condemning won’t hurt him with people who have lost faith in the experts and the oracles of conventional wisdom. To accuse him of inconsistency won’t hurt him with people who think the establishment is hypocritical and self-serving.

Myself, I don’t think the system is quite as corrupt as some Trump supporters believe or, perhaps more accurately, I lack their confidence that burning down the old house is the best way to build something new. But it would be equally wrong and perhaps more dangerous to take the view that there is nothing more fueling his rise than ignorance, racism and hate. The failure of the center-Left to transform its institutional and intellectual dominance into policy achievements that actually stabilize middle class life, and the failure of the center-Right to articulate a workable alternative have left a giant intellectual and political vacuum in the heart of American life. The Trump movement is not an answer to our problems, but the social instinct of revolt and rejection that powers it is a sign of social health. The tailors are frauds and the emperor is not in fact wearing any clothes: it is a good sign and not a bad sign that so many Americans are willing to say so out loud.

Those of us who care about policy, propriety and the other bourgeois values without which no democratic society can long thrive need to spend less time wringing our hands about the shortcomings of candidate Trump and the movement that has brought him this far, and more time both analyzing the establishment failures that have brought the country to this pass, and developing a new vision for the American future. The one thing we know about 2016 is that neither of these two candidates has what it takes to repair or to renovate the ship of state. Clinton stands for the competent management of an unsustainable status quo, like Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago: a pair of safe and steady hands on the wheel as the ship glides slowly toward the reefs. Trump, at least so far as we can infer what a Trump administration would be like, stands for the venting of steam and the striking of satisfying poses.

We can hope that a President Clinton’s instincts for power and self-preservation will make her something better than the earnest custodian of a failing status quo, and we can hope that a President Trump would prove inspired and lucky rather than bumptiously sharp-tongued. But hope is not a plan. The likeliest forecast is that under either candidate, the slow unraveling of the liberal world order and the American domestic system will continue and possibly accelerate. The 2020 election may take place against an even darker background than what we now see; if America’s intellectuals and institutions don’t start raising their games, 2016 could soon start to look like the good old days.

Did Climate Change and Infectious Disease Contribute to the Demise of the Neanderthals?

Neanderthals last walked the earth around 40, 000 years ago.

Did Climate Change Contribute to Demise of Neanderthals? By David DeMar. New Historian, May 14, 2016.

Neanderthals: victims of human disease? by Sarah Foster. Varsity, April 22, 2016. Related article here.


DeMar:

New research into nutritional stress patterns in the remains of Neanderthals in Europe may support the theory that climate change contributed to the demise of our closest ancient evolutionary cousins.

Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years in the past, and researchers have been searching for definitive reasons for their demise since their discovery and classification as a species separate from but related to Homo sapiens, or modern humans. Many theories suggest that Neanderthals lost in the struggle for resources, with modern humans out-competing them.

However, a zooarchaeologist from the University of Colorado Denver says she’s found evidence that European Neanderthals may have weathered periods of extreme cold brought about by climate change, based on signs of nutritional stress left behind in their remains. Jamie Hodgkins, CU Denver assistant professor of anthropology, analyzed the remains left behind by animals hunted by Neanderthals, discovering that our extinct relatives worked particularly hard to glean every bit of sustenance from the meat and bones when the weather turned colder.

Focusing on caves in southwestern France that are proven to have been inhabited by Neanderthals, Hodgkins took a hard look at the bones of prey animals that had been unearthed in these caves and examined the telltale signs left behind on these remains from the butchering process. She discovered that, during colder periods punctuated by increased glacial activity, these bones had been processed more heavily, including a larger number of percussion marks. This indicates a need to expose the marrow from within these bones, implying a reduction in the availability of food overall.

Paleoanthropologist Jamie Hodgkins

In a press release from the university, Hodgkins remarked that the research she and her team had conducted uncovered a pattern that showcased how Neanderthals suffered high levels of stress in cold and harsh environments. With the climate becoming colder and harsher, Neanderthals had to devote more time and energy into pulling every last calorie they could from bones, the researcher added, stating that the evidence of this need was even apparent in bones that yielded relatively little marrow. Remains such as the small bones of the prey animals’ feet bore the marks of perhaps desperately hungry Neanderthals, as much as larger bones with more easily accessible marrow.

The findings of Hodgins’ team lends further support to theories surrounding the extinction of the Neanderthals in regards to climate change being a factor. Climate change had very real effects, according to the research findings, and Hodgkins says that the study of Neanderthal behavior presents opportunities to understand how rapidly deteriorating climatic conditions had such a serious and negative effect on our now-extinct close evolutionary cousins. If the end of the Ice Age saw Neanderthal populations in a precarious position thanks to the scarcity of food, it wouldn’t have taken much effort on the part of modern humans to upset this delicate balance and plunge our closest relatives over the brink of extinction.

The new research study, which has recently been published in the Journal of Human Evolution, can be found online here.

Foster:

Genome sequences from Neanderthals reveal that some infectious diseases are perhaps far older than previously thought.

Disease infections have had a profound impact on human history, from large-scale epidemics like the Bubonic Plague, which wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century, to the less deadly ailments that irritate us on a daily basis. Diseases also affect us in more intimate ways. As we evolve alongside pathogens, our genomes change: genetic variants that provide resistance are preserved while weaker ones die out. Understanding which infectious diseases plagued the first humans is no simple task, as much of the remaining artifacts from tens of thousands of years ago are fossilised bone. However, a growing number of high-quality genome sequences from Neanderthals and other early hominins (a term encompassing humans and their closest ancestors) have provided researchers with an immense repository of information, revealing that some infectious diseases are perhaps far older than previously thought.

The Neanderthals, who inhabited Eurasia from around 250,000-28,000 years ago, were hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands of 15-30 individuals. Such conditions, it has been postulated, were unsuited to the rampant proliferation of infectious diseases. In fact, it has been claimed that infectious diseases exploded long after the Neanderthals had been replaced by anatomically modern humans who migrated out of Africa and outcompeted Neanderthals and other hominins in Eurasia. Disease and pestilence exploded, the argument goes, with the onset of animal domestication and agriculture around 8,000 years ago, when large and dense populations living in proximity created the ideal conditions for diseases to jump from livestock and spread quickly throughout vulnerable populations.

Dr. Charlotte Houldcroft in the laboratory at Biological Anthropology, Cambridge.

A paper by Cambridge’s Charlotte Houldcroft and Simon Underdown of Oxford Brookes University synthesises evidence from pathogen genomes, early hominin genomes, and evidence from bones and other artifacts to propose an update to this paradigm. The authors argue it was likely that many diseases infected hominins far earlier than previously thought, and therefore that the agricultural era perhaps affected the dynamics of existing diseases more so than promoting the widespread emergence of novel human pathogens.

The story goes as follows: early humans migrated from Africa to Eurasia, carrying with them African diseases, and in their new home our ancestors encountered Neanderthals who carried a different subset of infectious diseases. Neanderthals and humans interbred – humans who are not of African descent carry around two per cent Neanderthal DNA – and almost certainly exchanged diseases. Exposure to the wave of unfamiliar pathogens carried out of Africa by humans probably contributed to the demise of the Eurasian Neanderthal population.

Detailed comparisons of modern human genomes with those of Neanderthals have revealed small bits of genetic information related to infection and immunity that researchers believe made their way into the human genome through interbreeding with Neanderthals. By conferring increased resistance to the new suite of diseases that humans encountered as they moved into Eurasia, these bits of Neanderthal DNA may have conferred an advantage on the humans carrying them, and therefore remained in the gene pool. In particular, researchers found Neanderthal-derived genetic variants protective against tick-borne encephalitis virus and bacterial sepsis in the modern human genome.

Some diseases thought to have been transmitted from animals to humans, such as the bacteria that cause typhoid and whooping cough, had actually been co-evolving with hominins long before being passed on to livestock. Such evidence bolsters the idea that these pathogens afflicted hominins prior to the onset of widespread agriculture. The rise of agriculture and the associated dramatic shift in population dynamics then aggravated their impact on human populations, ushering in the “age of pestilence and famine” which killed off the Neanderthals.

The authors’ synthesis of new genomic data may lead to a significant advancement in understanding, but ancient genomics still has much to offer. Further advancements in techniques for obtaining high-quality ancient DNA and in our ability to identify the clues that diseases leave in the genome may continue to provide exciting insights into how infectious disease impacted our ancestors’ lives.

Sykes Picot Map. May 8, 1916.

Sykes Picot Agreement Map. Signed May 8, 1916. National Archives UK, Document Record MPK 1/426. Wikipedia.

America in 2016 Resembles 1910 More Than the Postwar Era. By Michael Barone.

America Today Resembles 1910 More Than the Postwar Era. By Michael Barone. Real Clear Politics, May 17, 2016.

Barone:

What’s your benchmark? What is the historical era with which you compare life in contemporary America?

For many astute commentators on various points of the political spectrum, it is postwar America, the two decades after the United States and its allies won World War II and before Lyndon Johnson sent half a million U.S. troops to Vietnam.

Conservatives look back fondly on postwar America’s high marriage rates and stable families, few divorces and out-of-wedlock births, low crime rates and widely shared cultural values celebrated in classic movies and television sitcoms that almost everyone watched. Liberals look back fondly on postwar America’s high income equality and labor union membership, its low rates of unemployment and rising education levels, its high marginal tax rates and its high rates of social mobility.

Neither side embraces the whole package. No one today wants to go back to legally mandated and violently enforced racial segregation. Very few Americans today want to return to stigmatizing homosexuality.

But some things have been lost. Books like libertarian Charles Murray’s Coming Apart or liberal Robert Putnam’s Our Kids, which lament the family instability and economic stagnation of today’s downscale America, inspire a nostalgia for a time widely seen as the American norm.

But was it really the norm? Postwar America was the result of unique circumstances – economic dominance when competitor nations were devastated, cultural uniformity that followed from a universal popular culture and the common experience of military service (16 million Americans served in the wartime military; the proportional equivalent today would be 38 million).

So let me offer a different benchmark: the America of 1910 or some other year before the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

I started thinking about that on a recent weekend sightseeing tour of lower Manhattan. It’s become a kind of outdoor museum, with few cars on the street and with dozens of tourists eyeing the massive buildings -- the columned stock exchange, JP Morgan’s austere headquarters, the massive Equitable Building and the 60-story Woolworth Building looming over lower Broadway – with their marble gleaming as it must have when they were newly built 100 or so years ago.

The America of 1910 was a lot more like today’s America than you might think. The economy was growing, but fitfully. Disruptive technology was threatening old industries, creating new jobs but eliminating many others.

Income inequality was much greater than today, and living conditions more disparate. Electricity was common in cities but unavailable on the farms where half of Americans lived. John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford were billionaires at a time when average annual incomes were below $1,000.

It was an America even more culturally divided than we are today. Within a mile or so of Wall Street lived hundreds of thousands of Jewish and Italian immigrants in the world’s most crowded neighborhoods. Immigration as a percentage of pre-existing population between the opening of Ellis Island in 1892 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was three times the level of 1982-2007.

The South was in many ways a separate and underdeveloped country, still estranged half a century after the Civil War, with income levels one-quarter those of New York. Even as 30 million Europeans crossed the ocean to America, only 1 million Southern whites and 1 million blacks moved North despite the promise of much higher wages.

Marriage rates were lower than in postwar America, and many young people dropped by the wayside. Alcohol consumption was much higher than today; prostitution, female and male, was common. People didn’t like to talk about these things, but you get hints about them in the novels of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser.

The Americans of 1910 faced terrorism and globalization, too. Anarchists murdered President William McKinley in 1901 and set off a bomb that killed dozens next to J.P. Morgan’s 23 Wall Street in 1920. This America was interlaced with the global economy and, with its growing economic and demographic might, risked being drawn into any world war.

So, America in 1910, with nearly 100 million people, was in important ways less like the postwar America of 150 million than like today’s America of 300 million. Studying how Americans handled – or mishandled – similar challenges may prove more fruitful than yearning to restore the unique and non-replicable America of Charles Murray’s, Robert Putnam’s and my youth.

Les Enfants Terribles of Barack Obama. By Hisham Melhem.

Les enfants terribles of Barack Obama. By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya English, May 7, 2016.

Melhem:

The world according to President Barack Obama described recently in the Atlantic Magazine and the portrait of Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, in the current issue of the New York Times Magazine reveal an insular White House suspicious of the foreign policy establishment entrenched in Washington and New York, including senior members of Obama’s cabinet, contemptuous of traditional allies and friends in Europe and the Middle East, and disdainful of what they see as the very gullible American Media they became very adept at skillfully manipulating and ventriloquizing its narratives.

Some of the president’s relatively young men, particularly Rhodes and Jon Favreau a former speechwriter, are like him, gifted wordsmiths who see the skillful use of “messaging” and the way the “narrative” is advanced, as important as the content of the policy, and at times the “narrative” supersedes everything else. In Obama’s universe words sometimes are synonymous with policy and action. In these two lengthy articles, Obama’s universe is cold, unsentimental, calculating, deceitful, and its inhabitants are willing to live comfortably with horrendous tragedies like Syria’s “where more than 450,000 people have been slaughtered.” What is so egregious in these two lengthy articles is that the President and his men did not even come close to questioning a single decision or position they have taken in the Middle East in more than seven years. There was no hint of an attempt at introspection or honest self-criticism; only naked, unbridled arrogance and self-righteousness.

A portrait of the advisor as a young man

The portrait of Ben Rhodes as “the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus (Obama) himself” is stunning. Rhodes channels and mirrors the President. The two are inseparable. The braggart Rhodes boasts “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.” Rhodes and Denis McDonough, White House Chief of Staff, and others who constitute Obama’s inner circle of advisors are more powerful and influential than Secretaries of State and Defense. Obama insists on controlling national security issues and foreign policy from the White House. Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel found that out in a humiliating way when he was asked to step down because he was out of step with the White House on Syria and ISIS, and because the inner circle never warmed up to him. One of Obama’s most consequential and most controversial decision was taken, after he took a walk and consulted Dennis McDonough at the height of the Syrian crisis in the summer of 2013, when Obama decided to retreat from his announced decision to punish the Syrian regime after its use of chemical weapons and killing 1,400 civilians.

It was after the walk, that Obama called his Secretaries of State and Defense, to inform them of his decision. Obama did not even bother to consult them first. When Obama began his secret contact with Cuba, via the Vatican, he assigned that mission to Ben Rhodes, who began his contacts without the knowledge of Secretary of State John Kerry. Rhodes was tasked with selling the Iran deal to congress and the American people. When Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007 he was 30 years old, and he brought with him “a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour.” Rhodes derisively refers “to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East”. One would suspect that Obama shares this sentiment with his young guru.

Rhodes, the morally dubious and masterful manipulator concocted a deceptive “narrative” about the evolution of the negotiations with Iran, and successfully sold it to the American Media. This tale of the deal alleges that negotiations became possible in the wake of a new political reality in Iran following the elections that brought the moderates, including President Hassan Rouhani to power. But that narrative “was largely manufactured”. When Obama claimed in 2015, that the deal was struck “after two years of negotiations” he was technically correct, but “actively misleading because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Ira had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” Obama’s advisors always understood that he was eager for a deal with Iran since the beginning of his first term; “It’s the center of the arc,” Rhodes explained to the New York Times Magazine.

In describing how he manipulates the media, Rhodes and one of his aides drip with derision towards the reporters they spoon feed the narratives and the messaging they want. Rhodes’ in your-face cynicism screams in the following passage: “Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. ‘All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,’ he said. ‘Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.’” This passage is full of ironies. Rhodes was in his twenties when he was a congressional aide writing reports, and he expressed his brutal contempt of reporters to a journalist.

Obama’s bargain

President Obama and his men come across in the two articles as insurgents trying to disrupt the “Washington playbook” written by the despised “foreign-policy establishment” with its dangerous “credibility” fetish, which according to Obama tends, as a default position to prescribe militarized options to settle international crisis. After all this is the President who was elected to end the “dumb” war in Iraq, and terminate the longest war in America’s history in Afghanistan; and who extended a hand to Iran’s clenched fist in his first inaugural speech. For all of Obama’s declarations and speeches about a “new Beginning” with the Muslim world, his intentions to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict in his first term, his supposed sympathy with Arab and Iranian reformers, his central interest –bordering on obsession- was to strike a strategic bargain with Iran leading to a historic opening, hence his dogged determination to reach a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. To that end Obama and his men used subterfuge and misled the American people and their representatives about the negotiations, and betrayed his promises to the Syrian people when he refrained from seriously challenging Iran’s predations in Syria fearing that such posture could undermine the prized nuclear deal.

Now in the twilight of his presidency, with the nuclear deal with Iran behind him, Obama and his men feel liberated enough, to voice their criticism of and to express their disdain for their traditional friends and partners in the Middle East who are seen as “free riders” or entitled to unqualified American support. With the exception of Iran, and the imperatives of fighting al-Qaeda and the “Islamic State” (ISIS) Obama did not exhibit serious and sustained intellectual curiosity in the societies of the Middle East, or the kind of genuine sympathy with the plight of the numerous victims there that would require effective support. Reading Obama and his unscrupulous foreign policy guru Ben Rhodes one could easily sense their disdain for things Middle Eastern, and their eagerness to abandon the region and never look back. As related by Ben Rhodes to the New York Times Magazine, the deal with Iran “would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.”

Betraying Syria

Syria hovered over the negotiations with Iran. Leon Panetta, who served as Obama’s head of the C.I.A. and later Secretary of Defense said that Obama was obsessed with avoiding a conflict with Iran, even if it was at the expense of ignoring Syria’s tragedy, “If you ratchet up sanctions, it could cause a war. If you start opposing their interest in Syria, well, that could start a war, too.” When the author of the article asks Rhodes about the ability of White House officials “to get comfortable with tragedy” in reference to Syria, Rhodes’ answer is startling; “Yeah, I admit very much to that reality,” he says. “There’s a numbing element to Syria in particular. But I will tell you this,” he continues. “I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we’re there — nearly a decade in Iraq.”

When the author asks Rhodes why the Obama administration is “spending so much time and energy trying to strong-arm Syrian rebels into surrendering to the dictator who murdered their families, or why it is so important for Iran to maintain its supply lines to Hezbollah.” Rhodes mumbles something about John Kerry, and then says something to the effect, “that the world of the Sunni Arabs that the American establishment built has collapsed. The buck stops with the establishment, not with Obama, who was left to clean up their mess.” This cowardly denial and the claim that Obama is absolutely blameless in the slow death of Syria, is the most jarring in the article.

The Obama administration’s claims that Syrian tyrant Assad and his cohorts should have no place in the new Syria that emerges after the negotiations rings hollow. When the author describes Rob Malley, Obama’s senior advisor on ISIS and Syria as the official “currently running negotiations that could keep the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in power” the circle of deceit and the betrayal of Syria is complete. Les enfants terribles of Obama are like him; conceited, arrogant, contemptuous and proud of it.

American Capitalism’s Great Crisis. By Rana Foroohar.

American Capitalism’s Great Crisis. By Rana Foroohar. Time, May 12, 2016.

Foroohar:

How Wall Street is choking our economy and how to fix it

A couple of weeks ago, a poll conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics found something startling: only 19% of Americans ages 18 to 29 identified themselves as “capitalists.” In the richest and most market-oriented country in the world, only 42% of that group said they “supported capitalism.” The numbers were higher among older people; still, only 26% considered themselves capitalists. A little over half supported the system as a whole.

This represents more than just millennials not minding the label “socialist” or disaffected middle-aged Americans tiring of an anemic recovery. This is a majority of citizens being uncomfortable with the country’s economic foundation—a system that over hundreds of years turned a fledgling society of farmers and prospectors into the most prosperous nation in human history. To be sure, polls measure feelings, not hard market data. But public sentiment reflects day-to-day economic reality. And the data (more on that later) shows Americans have plenty of concrete reasons to question their system.

This crisis of faith has had no more severe expression than the 2016 presidential campaign, which has turned on the questions of who, exactly, the system is working for and against, as well as why eight years and several trillions of dollars of stimulus on from the financial crisis, the economy is still growing so slowly. All the candidates have prescriptions: Sanders talks of breaking up big banks; Trump says hedge funders should pay higher taxes; Clinton wants to strengthen existing financial regulation. In Congress, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan remains committed to less regulation.

All of them are missing the point. America’s economic problems go far beyond rich bankers, too-big-to-fail financial institutions, hedge-fund billionaires, offshore tax avoidance or any particular outrage of the moment. In fact, each of these is symptomatic of a more nefarious condition that threatens, in equal measure, the very well-off and the very poor, the red and the blue. The U.S. system of market capitalism itself is broken. That problem, and what to do about it, is at the center of my book Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business, a three-year research and reporting effort from which this piece is adapted.

To understand how we got here, you have to understand the relationship between capital markets—meaning the financial system—and businesses. From the creation of a unified national bond and banking system in the U.S. in the late 1790s to the early 1970s, finance took individual and corporate savings and funneled them into productive enterprises, creating new jobs, new wealth and, ultimately, economic growth. Of course, there were plenty of blips along the way (most memorably the speculation leading up to the Great Depression, which was later curbed by regulation). But for the most part, finance—which today includes everything from banks and hedge funds to mutual funds, insurance firms, trading houses and such—essentially served business. It was a vital organ but not, for the most part, the central one.

Over the past few decades, finance has turned away from this traditional role. Academic research shows that only a fraction of all the money washing around the financial markets these days actually makes it to Main Street businesses. “The intermediation of household savings for productive investment in the business sector—the textbook description of the financial sector—constitutes only a minor share of the business of banking today,” according to academics Oscar Jorda, Alan Taylor and Moritz Schularick, who’ve studied the issue in detail. By their estimates and others, around 15% of capital coming from financial institutions today is used to fund business investments, whereas it would have been the majority of what banks did earlier in the 20th century.

“The trend varies slightly country by country, but the broad direction is clear,” says Adair Turner, a former British banking regulator and now chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a think tank backed by George Soros, among others. “Across all advanced economies, and the United States and the U.K. in particular, the role of the capital markets and the banking sector in funding new investment is decreasing.” Most of the money in the system is being used for lending against existing assets such as housing, stocks and bonds.

To get a sense of the size of this shift, consider that the financial sector now represents around 7% of the U.S. economy, up from about 4% in 1980. Despite currently taking around 25% of all corporate profits, it creates a mere 4% of all jobs. Trouble is, research by numerous academics as well as institutions like the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund shows that when finance gets that big, it starts to suck the economic air out of the room. In fact, finance starts having this adverse effect when it’s only half the size that it currently is in the U.S. Thanks to these changes, our economy is gradually becoming “a zero-sum game between financial wealth holders and the rest of America,” says former Goldman Sachs banker Wallace Turbeville, who runs a multiyear project on the rise of finance at the New York City—based nonprofit Demos.

It’s not just an American problem, either. Most of the world’s leading market economies are grappling with aspects of the same disease. Globally, free-market capitalism is coming under fire, as countries across Europe question its merits and emerging markets like Brazil, China and Singapore run their own forms of state-directed capitalism. An ideologically broad range of financiers and elite business managers—Warren Buffett, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Vanguard’s John Bogle, McKinsey’s Dominic Barton, Allianz’s Mohamed El-Erian and others—have started to speak out publicly about the need for a new and more inclusive type of capitalism, one that also helps businesses make better long-term decisions rather than focusing only on the next quarter. The Pope has become a vocal critic of modern market capitalism, lambasting the “idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy” in which “man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.”

During my 23 years in business and economic journalism, I’ve long wondered why our market system doesn’t serve companies, workers and consumers better than it does. For some time now, finance has been thought by most to be at the very top of the economic hierarchy, the most aspirational part of an advanced service economy that graduated from agriculture and manufacturing. But research shows just how the unintended consequences of this misguided belief have endangered the very system America has prided itself on exporting around the world.

America’s economic illness has a name: financialization. It’s an academic term for the trend by which Wall Street and its methods have come to reign supreme in America, permeating not just the financial industry but also much of American business. It includes everything from the growth in size and scope of finance and financial activity in the economy; to the rise of debt-fueled speculation over productive lending; to the ascendancy of shareholder value as the sole model for corporate governance; to the proliferation of risky, selfish thinking in both the private and public sectors; to the increasing political power of financiers and the CEOs they enrich; to the way in which a “markets know best” ideology remains the status quo. Financialization is a big, unfriendly word with broad, disconcerting implications.

University of Michigan professor Gerald Davis, one of the pre-eminent scholars of the trend, likens financialization to a “Copernican revolution” in which business has reoriented its orbit around the financial sector. This revolution is often blamed on bankers. But it was facilitated by shifts in public policy, from both sides of the aisle, and crafted by the government leaders, policymakers and regulators entrusted with keeping markets operating smoothly. Greta Krippner, another University of Michigan scholar, who has written one of the most comprehensive books on financialization, believes this was the case when financialization began its fastest growth, in the decades from the late 1970s onward. According to Krippner, that shift encompasses Reagan-era deregulation, the unleashing of Wall Street and the rise of the so-called ownership society that promoted owning property and further tied individual health care and retirement to the stock market.

The changes were driven by the fact that in the 1970s, the growth that America had enjoyed following World War II began to slow. Rather than make tough decisions about how to bolster it (which would inevitably mean choosing among various interest groups), politicians decided to pass that responsibility to the financial markets. Little by little, the Depression-era regulation that had served America so well was rolled back, and finance grew to become the dominant force that it is today. The shifts were bipartisan, and to be fair they often seemed like good ideas at the time; but they also came with unintended consequences. The Carter-era deregulation of interest rates—something that was, in an echo of today’s overlapping left-and right-wing populism, supported by an assortment of odd political bedfellows from Ralph Nader to Walter Wriston, then head of Citibank—opened the door to a spate of financial “innovations” and a shift in bank function from lending to trading. Reaganomics famously led to a number of other economic policies that favored Wall Street. Clinton-era deregulation, which seemed a path out of the economic doldrums of the late 1980s, continued the trend. Loose monetary policy from the Alan Greenspan era onward created an environment in which easy money papered over underlying problems in the economy, so much so that it is now chronically dependent on near-zero interest rates to keep from falling back into recession.

This sickness, not so much the product of venal interests as of a complex and long-term web of changes in government and private industry, now manifests itself in myriad ways: a housing market that is bifurcated and dependent on government life support, a retirement system that has left millions insecure in their old age, a tax code that favors debt over equity. Debt is the lifeblood of finance; with the rise of the securities-and-trading portion of the industry came a rise in debt of all kinds, public and private. That’s bad news, since a wide range of academic research shows that rising debt and credit levels stoke financial instability. And yet, as finance has captured a greater and greater piece of the national pie, it has, perversely, all but ensured that debt is indispensable to maintaining any growth at all in an advanced economy like the U.S., where 70% of output is consumer spending. Debt-fueled finance has become a saccharine substitute for the real thing, an addiction that just gets worse. (The amount of credit offered to American consumers has doubled in real dollars since the 1980s, as have the fees they pay to their banks.)

As the economist Raghuram Rajan, one of the most prescient seers of the 2008 financial crisis, argues, credit has become a palliative to address the deeper anxieties of downward mobility in the middle class. In his words, “let them eat credit” could well summarize the mantra of the go-go years before the economic meltdown. And things have only deteriorated since, with global debt levels $57 trillion higher than they were in 2007.

The rise of finance has also distorted local economies. It’s the reason rents are rising in some communities where unemployment is still high. America’s housing market now favors cash buyers, since banks are still more interested in making profits by trading than by the traditional role of lending out our savings to people and businesses looking to make longterm investments (like buying a house), ensuring that younger people can’t get on the housing ladder. One perverse result: Blackstone, a private-equity firm, is currently the largest single-family-home landlord in America, since it had the money to buy properties up cheap in bulk following the financial crisis. It’s at the heart of retirement insecurity, since fees from actively managed mutual funds “are likely to confiscate as much as 65% or more of the wealth that … investors could otherwise easily earn,” as Vanguard founder Bogle testified to Congress in 2014.

It’s even the reason companies in industries from autos to airlines are trying to move into the business of finance themselves. American companies across every sector today earn five times the revenue from financial activities—investing, hedging, tax optimizing and offering financial services, for example—that they did before 1980. Traditional hedging by energy and transport firms, for example, has been overtaken by profit-boosting speculation in oil futures, a shift that actually undermines their core business by creating more price volatility. Big tech companies have begun underwriting corporate bonds the way Goldman Sachs does. And top M.B.A. programs would likely encourage them to do just that; finance has become the center of all business education.

Washington, too, is so deeply tied to the ambassadors of the capital markets—six of the 10 biggest individual political donors this year are hedge-fund barons—that even well-meaning politicians and regulators don’t see how deep the problems are. When I asked one former high-level Obama Administration Treasury official back in 2013 why more stakeholders aside from bankers hadn’t been consulted about crafting the particulars of Dodd-Frank financial reform (93% of consultation on the Volcker Rule, for example, was taken with the financial industry itself), he said, “Who else should we have talked to?” The answer—to anybody not profoundly influenced by the way finance thinks—might have been the people banks are supposed to lend to, or the scholars who study the capital markets, or the civic leaders in communities decimated by the financial crisis.

Of course, there are other elements to the story of America’s slow-growth economy, including familiar trends from globalization to technology-related job destruction. These are clearly massive challenges in their own right. But the single biggest unexplored reason for long-term slower growth is that the financial system has stopped serving the real economy and now serves mainly itself. A lack of real fiscal action on the part of politicians forced the Fed to pump $4.5 trillion in monetary stimulus into the economy after 2008. This shows just how broken the model is, since the central bank’s best efforts have resulted in record stock prices (which enrich mainly the wealthiest 10% of the population that owns more than 80% of all stocks) but also a lackluster 2% economy with almost no income growth.

Now, as many top economists and investors predict an era of much lower asset-price returns over the next 30 years, America’s ability to offer up even the appearance of growth—via financially oriented strategies like low interest rates, more and more consumer credit, tax-deferred debt financing for businesses, and asset bubbles that make people feel richer than we really are, until they burst—is at an end.

This pinch is particularly evident in the tumult many American businesses face. Lending to small business has fallen particularly sharply, as has the number of startup firms. In the early 1980s, new companies made up half of all U.S. businesses. For all the talk of Silicon Valley startups, the number of new firms as a share of all businesses has actually shrunk. From 1978 to 2012 it declined by 44%, a trend that numerous researchers and even many investors and businesspeople link to the financial industry’s change in focus from lending to speculation. The wane in entrepreneurship means less economic vibrancy, given that new businesses are the nation’s foremost source of job creation and GDP growth. Buffett summed it up in his folksy way: “You’ve now got a body of people who’ve decided they’d rather go to the casino than the restaurant” of capitalism.

In lobbying for short-term share-boosting management, finance is also largely responsible for the drastic cutback in research-and-development outlays in corporate America, investments that are seed corn for future prosperity. Take share buybacks, in which a company—usually with some fanfare—goes to the stock market to purchase its own shares, usually at the top of the market, and often as a way of artificially bolstering share prices in order to enrich investors and executives paid largely in stock options. Indeed, if you were to chart the rise in money spent on share buybacks and the fall in corporate spending on productive investments like R&D, the two lines make a perfect X. The former has been going up since the 1980s, with S&P 500 firms now spending $1 trillion a year on buybacks and dividends—equal to about 95% of their net earnings—rather than investing that money back into research, product development or anything that could contribute to long-term company growth. No sector has been immune, not even the ones we think of as the most innovative. Many tech firms, for example, spend far more on share-price boosting than on R&D as a whole. The markets penalize them when they don’t. One case in point: back in March 2006, Microsoft announced major new technology investments, and its stock fell for two months. But in July of that same year, it embarked on $20 billion worth of stock buying, and the share price promptly rose by 7%. This kind of twisted incentive for CEOs and corporate officers has only grown since.

As a result, business dynamism, which is at the root of economic growth, has suffered. The number of new initial public offerings (IPOs) is about a third of what it was 20 years ago. True, the dollar value of IPOs in 2014 was $74.4 billion, up from $47.1 billion in 1996. (The median IPO rose to $96 million from $30 million during the same period.) This may show investors want to make only the surest of bets, which is not necessarily the sign of a vibrant market. But there’s another, more disturbing reason: firms simply don’t want to go public, lest their work become dominated by playing by Wall Street’s rules rather than creating real value.

An IPO—a mechanism that once meant raising capital to fund new investment—is likely today to mark not the beginning of a new company’s greatness, but the end of it. According to a Stanford University study, innovation tails off by 40% at tech companies after they go public, often because of Wall Street pressure to keep jacking up the stock price, even if it means curbing the entrepreneurial verve that made the company hot in the first place.

A flat stock price can spell doom. It can get CEOs canned and turn companies into acquisition fodder, which often saps once innovative firms. Little wonder, then, that business optimism, as well as business creation, is lower than it was 30 years ago, or that wages are flat and inequality growing. Executives who receive as much as 82% of their compensation in stock naturally make shorter-term business decisions that might undermine growth in their companies even as they raise the value of their own options.

It’s no accident that corporate stock buybacks, corporate pay and the wealth gap have risen concurrently over the past four decades. There are any number of studies that illustrate this type of intersection between financialization and inequality. One of the most striking was by economists James Galbraith and Travis Hale, who showed how during the late 1990s, changing income inequality tracked the go-go Nasdaq stock index to a remarkable degree.

Recently, this pattern has become evident at a number of well-known U.S. companies. Take Apple, one of the most successful over the past 50 years. Apple has around $200 billion sitting in the bank, yet it has borrowed billions of dollars cheaply over the past several years, thanks to superlow interest rates (themselves a response to the financial crisis) to pay back investors in order to bolster its share price. Why borrow? In part because it’s cheaper than repatriating cash and paying U.S. taxes. All the financial engineering helped boost the California firm’s share price for a while. But it didn’t stop activist investor Carl Icahn, who had manically advocated for borrowing and buybacks, from dumping the stock the minute revenue growth took a turn for the worse in late April.

It is perhaps the ultimate irony that large, rich companies like Apple are most involved with financial markets at times when they don’t need any financing. Top-tier U.S. businesses have never enjoyed greater financial resources. They have a record $2 trillion in cash on their balance sheets—enough money combined to make them the 10th largest economy in the world. Yet in the bizarre order that finance has created, they are also taking on record amounts of debt to buy back their own stock, creating what may be the next debt bubble to burst.

You and I, whether we recognize it or not, are also part of a dysfunctional ecosystem that fuels short-term thinking in business. The people who manage our retirement money—fund managers working for asset-management firms—are typically compensated for delivering returns over a year or less. That means they use their financial clout (which is really our financial clout in aggregate) to push companies to produce quick-hit results rather than execute long-term strategies. Sometimes pension funds even invest with the activists who are buying up the companies we might work for—and those same activists look for quick cost cuts and potentially demand layoffs.

It’s a depressing state of affairs, no doubt. Yet America faces an opportunity right now: a rare second chance to do the work of refocusing and right-sizing the financial sector that should have been done in the years immediately following the 2008 crisis. And there are bright spots on the horizon.

Despite the lobbying power of the financial industry and the vested interests both in Washington and on Wall Street, there’s a growing push to put the financial system back in its rightful place, as a servant of business rather than its master. Surveys show that the majority of Americans would like to see the tax system reformed and the government take more direct action on job creation and poverty reduction, and address inequality in a meaningful way. Each candidate is crafting a message around this, which will keep the issue front and center through November.

The American public understands just how deeply and profoundly the economic order isn’t working for the majority of people. The key to reforming the U.S. system is comprehending why it isn’t working.

Remooring finance in the real economy isn’t as simple as splitting up the biggest banks (although that would be a good start). It’s about dismantling the hold of financial-oriented thinking in every corner of corporate America. It’s about reforming business education, which is still permeated with academics who resist challenges to the gospel of efficient markets in the same way that medieval clergy dismissed scientific evidence that might challenge the existence of God. It’s about changing a tax system that treats one-year investment gains the same as longer-term ones, and induces financial institutions to push overconsumption and speculation rather than healthy lending to small businesses and job creators. It’s about rethinking retirement, crafting smarter housing policy and restraining a money culture filled with lobbyists who violate America’s essential economic principles.

It’s also about starting a bigger conversation about all this, with a broader group of stakeholders. The structure of American capital markets and whether or not they are serving business is a topic that has traditionally been the sole domain of “experts”—the financiers and policymakers who often have a self-interested perspective to push, and who do so in complicated language that keeps outsiders out of the debate. When it comes to finance, as with so many issues in a democratic society, complexity breeds exclusion.

Finding solutions won’t be easy. There are no silver bullets, and nobody really knows the perfect model for a high-functioning, advanced market system in the 21st century. But capitalism’s legacy is too long, and the well-being of too many people is at stake, to do nothing in the face of our broken status quo. Neatly packaged technocratic tweaks cannot fix it. What is required now is lifesaving intervention.

Crises of faith like the one American capitalism is currently suffering can be a good thing if they lead to re-examination and reaffirmation of first principles. The right question here is in fact the simplest one: Are financial institutions doing things that provide a clear, measurable benefit to the real economy? Sadly, the answer at the moment is mostly no. But we can change things. Our system of market capitalism wasn’t handed down, in perfect form, on stone tablets. We wrote the rules. We broke them. And we can fix them.

Rana Foroohar is an assistant managing editor at TIME and the magazine’s economics columnist. She’s the author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business.

This appears in the May 23, 2016 issue of TIME.