globalresearch--2019-12-26--Global War on Humanity: America’s Unceasing Pursuit of Hegemony

Global Research, and the Global Research News Hour radio program operate on a shoestring. This holiday period, please consider a one time or monthly donation. Go to Global Research’s main donation page and tag your gift ‘GRNH.’  “Essentially what we’re looking at is a broader perspective of how the United States de facto supported Nazi Germany with a view to a) destroying the Soviet Union, but also weakening the British Empire and competing empires including of course France, Belgium, Holland, and so on, and again those countries virtually are no longer colonial powers.” – Professor Michel Chossudovsky (from this week’s interview).  America was born out of a revolt against British imperial rule.  For decades, the British Empire would remain the hated enemy. In 1812, the young republic would declare war on Great Britain and try, unsuccessfully, to conquer the Canadian colonies.  Within less than a half century of its birth, the United States of America under President James Monroe, would establish a policy that would come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted that the USA would oppose any further colonization in the Americas (Western Hemisphere) by European powers. By establishing a sphere of influence outside its borders, the new republic was arguably taking its first steps in the direction of becoming an imperial power. [1]  Subsequent decades saw the U.S. continue to grow in geographic size economic power and geopolitical influence. By the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. would become a significant military and economic player, and after World War II, the U.S. would overtake all the European powers as the dominant force on the world stage.  A popular conception is that the United States is a democratic country devoted to the principles of the Founding Fathers and tasked with the responsibility of bringing freedom and democracy to the world. A less naive viewpoint might hold that governments corrupted by greed and the influence of big money have redirected the country’s foreign policy away from these high ideals toward whatever might benefit entrenched wealthy interests.  The notion that America’s military expansion might be guided by imperial rivalries with European powers is not immediately evident. Certainly, while menacing gestures and indignant statements toward nations like China or Russia or the so-called rogue or failed states like North Korea and Iraq may be common-place, U.S. leadership over the last century has typically exhibited a congenial attitude toward its counterparts in Europe.  In a recent paper by Professor Michel Chossudovsky (presented at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)) focussing on documentary record of both world wars, the interwar period, the Cold War and the post Cold War period, America has continued to adopt an adversarial attitude toward Great Britain.  In fact, the paper, published in Spanish as La globalizacion de la guerra: Cronología de la “Guerra Larga” de EE.UU. contra la Humanidad, exposes, among other aspects, U.S. support for Nazi Germany, a 1920-39 approved plan to invade Canada, and plans to wage a nuclear war against 66 Soviet cities in the immediate wake of World War II at a time when the two countries were allies.  In a feature length interview, Professor Chossudovsky elaborates on his thesis, placing world events spanning the last century, including the recent Brexit drama in the United Kingdom, in that context.  Professor Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, and Editor of Global Research. He has served as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international organizations. His books include The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), and The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015). In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia.  The transcript has been edited by Prof Chossudovsky. Text boxes, maps added.  Global Research: You presented your paper in Nicaragua at the beginning of December. Could you briefly introduce that paper to us?  Michel Chossudovsky: Well, the focus essentially was on the globalization of war and the chronology of U.S. hegemony.  The (“accepted scholarly”) history of the last hundred years is misleading because it presents Britain and the United States as allies, but in fact, they were never allies. They were competing Empires.  This confrontation between the United States and Britain has existed right from the onset of the founding of the United States in 1776. It became increasingly pervasive in the wake of the Civil War, 1865.  There were US military scenarios and war plans directed against the British Empire. These were not limited to the Western Hemisphere.  In essence, the objective of the United States was to weaken the British Empire and acquire a dominant position Worldwide.  There’s a lot of history, and I want to point to some landmarks.  The Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885, which was essentially a French and British initiative, the United States was excluded. They were there as observers, but they were never offered any role to play in “the carving up of Africa”, so that in effect, the European powers had already decided on the carving up of Africa without the United States.  Then you have the Spanish-American war of 1898, and then the First World War (1914-1918), and what we can say is that the United States consolidated its hegemony in relation to the British Empire specifically in Latin America and the Caribbean but also in Asia.  And although the Monroe Doctrine was not “officially” directed against the British Empire, it was nonetheless intent upon consolidating US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.  GR: Professor Chossudovsky, could you remind us briefly what exactly is the Monroe Doctrine and when it came about?  MC: Well, the Monroe Doctrine was initiated in the early 19th century, and it went through several phases. But ultimately, the concept was that European powers should not intervene in the Western hemisphere. It was directed largely against Spain and France but also Britain. And as we know France was also involved in Mexico at one point in its history (1862)  In other words, the Monroe doctrine laid the groundwork for hemispheric consolidation by the United States.  Now, what’s very important, particularly for Canadians, – because we have a particular way of understanding our history from 1867 onwards – is the fact that the United States had a plan to annex Canada, that was formulated in 1866.  Of course then we had Confederation (1867). But that war plan against Canada wasn’t dropped: After World War I, the United States formulated a plan to invade the British Empire (including Canada). It was called ‘War Plan Red.’  Now, the details of this plan to invade the British Empire might seem absurd. They were supposed to be allies.  What happened was that there were plans to invade Canada, there were war games right at the US-Canadian border – and there were plans to even use chemical weapons against Canadians.  Map: Invasion plan directed against Canada and British possessions in Caribbean  The bombing campaign underlying these War plans was formulated in the 1920s and 1930s. It consisted in a plan to bomb four major Canadian cities, namely Vancouver Montreal, Halifax, and Quebec City. This infamous project had been entrusted to none other than General Douglas MacArthur. Well he wasn’t General at the time. He became General during World War II.  But nonetheless, War Plan Red pointed to the fact that there was a certain continuity, and there were plans to invade Canada.  The United States never really dropped its intent to wage war on the British Empire. And in 1939, when World War II broke out, the United States remained neutral. It did not side with the Allies until much later. In early September 1939, the United States declared its neutrality. It did not take any action to prevent the invasion of France by Nazi Germany, nor the bombing raids directed against the U.K.  World War II commenced with the invasion of Poland and the Baltic States, which was followed by war on the Western Front, including the invasion and occupation of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as the bombings of the U.K.  The war on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union started in June 1941.  A detailed plan to invade Canada, entitled “Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan — Red” was approved by the US War Department under the presidency of Herbert Hoover in 1930. It was updated in 1934 and 1935 during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was “put on hold” in 1939 following the outbreak of the Second World War.  Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley was largely instrumental in the formulation and approval of Plan Red by the US administration.  In its day, War Plan RED was not meant to be funny. The 1928 draft stated that “it should be made quite clear to Canada that in a war she would suffer grievously”. The 1930 draft stated that “large parts of CRIMSON territory will become theaters of military operations with consequent suffering to the population and widespread destruction and devastation of the country…”  M.C: Now, the United States, in the course of the 1930s, but even extending further into World War II, was collaborating quite actively with Nazi Germany in the areas of finance, technology but also in the areas of military production, and this included the participation of Ford, Rockefeller, and also the Bush family.  The granddad of President Bush Junior was Prescott Bush. In other words the granddad of George W Bush was the director of the Union Banking Corporation, Brown Brothers Harriman, which in turn were partners with Thyssen Stahl, a major German conglomerate involved in the weapons industry of the Third Reich. And this has been reasonably well documented.  The United States continued to collaborate with Nazi Germany after September 1939. And after December 1941, namely Pearl Harbor, the US joined the allies, declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy. And there was a formal shift with regard to Nazi Germany. The Roosevelt administration adopted “Trading With The Enemy” legislation, In other words Washington took an official stance in support of its allies against Nazi Germany. But unofficially they continued collaborating with Nazi Germany.  Prescott Bush was a partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co and director of Union Banking Corporation which had close relations with German corporate interests including Thyssen Steel, a major company involved in the Third Reich’s weapons industry.  Standard Oil Was Selling Oil to the Third Reich  Invariably neglected by historian and journalists, there’s a something which is absolutely crucial to an understanding of WWII: Germany did not have any petrol, fuel – it had very limited supplies of petrol.  This is documented in the book by Jacques Pauwels, a prominent Canadian historian. Pauwels analyses the relationship between Standard Oil, which was owned by the Rockefeller family and the Nazi regime.  Standard Oil was the largest oil producer Worldwide. It controlled the oil industry, and Nazi Germany was dependent on oil.  And that oil was sold to Nazi Germany directly up until Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and subsequently it was sold via third countries indirectly, to bypass the “Trading With The Enemy Act” which was passed in the US Senate.  Well, in fact it was a previous legislation [1917] but nonetheless, it’s worth noting that the Bush family’s assets were confiscated under the “Trading with Enemy” legislation.  But as far as Standard Oil was concerned, they continued selling oil to Nazi Germany up until 1944-1945.  And the main reason for this was that without the oil supplies from Standard Oil, Nazi Germany could not under any circumstances have waged war on the Soviet Union, and in fact, even the Western Front would have been compromised.  So that the sale of US oil by Standard Oil to the Third Reich was crucial. The US was sleeping with the enemy. Unofficially the US was a de facto “ally” of Nazi Germany. There were no sanctions imposed on the Third Reich: After Pearl Harbor (December 1941) US oil was sold to the enemy through third countries, and then there was a large component of Standard Oil’s shipments which was sold out of Venezuela.  Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941 by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. It resulted in 26 million deaths.  It was understood that the Third Reich would be getting oil from the United States.  The Nazis were staunch military planners, and prior to launching Operation Barbarossa they ensured that they would have regular supplies of oil provided by Standard Oil.  Without US oil, they could not under any circumstances have waged war on the Soviet Union.  Text Box. The Unspoken Question. Where did Germany get its oil from?  Prior the December 1941, Texas oil was shipped on a regular basis to Nazi Germany.  While Germany was able to transform coal into fuel, this synthetic production was insufficient. Moreover, Romania’s Ploesti oil resources (under Nazi control until 1944) were minimal. Nazi Germany largely depended on oil shipments from US Standard Oil.  The Attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) occurred barely six months after the launching of Operation Barbarossa (July 1941). The United States enters World War II, declaring war on Japan and the axis countries.  Trading with the Enemy legislation (1917) officially implemented following America’s entry into World War II did not prevent Standard Oil of New Jersey from selling oil to Nazi Germany. This despite the Senate 1942 investigation of US Standard Oil.  While direct US oil shipments were curtailed, Standard Oil would sell US oil through third countries. US oil was shipped to occupied France through Switzerland, and from France it was shipped to Germany:  It should be noted that a large share of Nazi Germany’s oil requirements was met by shipments out of Venezuela which at the time was a de facto US colony.  Venezuela’s US sponsored (War-time) president General Isaías Medina Angarita (May 1941 – October 1945) was there to protect US oil interests as well as “trade with the enemy” from the onset of America’s entry into World War II in December 1941:  While Medina Angarita’s government pressured by Washington in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) remained officially neutral (de facto aligned with the US, while breaking its relations with Nazi Germany), oil shipments out of Venezuela to Germany were not discontinued. In a rather unusual twist (bordering on ridicule) Venezuela declared war on Germany in February 1945, when the war was almost over.  Without those oil shipments instrumented by Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, Nazi Germany would not have been able to implement its military agenda. Without fuel, the Third Reich’s eastern front under Operation Barbarossa would most probably not have taken place, saving millions of lives. The Western front including the military occupation of France, Belgium and The Netherlands would no doubt also have been affected.  M.C: The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration could have adopted severe sanctions against Standard Oil with a view to enforcing a blockade against Nazi Germany.  The US was not committed to peace: Washington’s unspoken objective was not only to destroy the Soviet Union, it also consisted in undermining Britain’s role as an imperial power.  Let us be under no illusions. Without the oil shipments instrumented by US Standard Oil and its subsidiaries, Nazi Germany’s imperial design could not have been undertaken.  It should be noted that the role of the US in supplying Nazi Germany with oil is casually ignored. Today’s Western “consensus” which was upheld by the European Parliament is to blame Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for WWII.  GR: Professor Chossudovsky, you said quite a bit there. Could you maybe just share with our listeners some of the key source documents that you used for your research that informed your analysis?  MC: Well, you know, from a historical standpoint, this US-Third Reich “alliance” was not clear in my mind, it was blurred. Moreover, with some exceptions it was not the object of (mainstream) scholarly research.  What I did was to indulge in what might be called common sense analysis. In this regard, I think that Jacques Pauwels book on World War II, is absolutely fundamental.  Common sense analysis tells us the following: you cannot wage a large scale military campaign without fuel.  Without the steady supply of fuel to Nazi Germany from Standard oil, the history of WWII would have been totally different. Operation Barbarossa would most probably not have occurred.  But then, there’s another element which I mentioned earlier with regard to the British Empire. War Plan Red against the British Empire was put on hold in 1939. But it was never abandoned.  From 1939 onwards, from a geopolitical standpoint, America’s unspoken hegemonic objective was to weaken all competing imperial powers including the British empire.  In other words, weaken Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium and Holland as well as Japan. All these countries had colonial possessions. And in the wake of World War II, Europe had been destroyed and the US economy was booming.  In the course of the post-war era, these colonial possessions (e.g. Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia) were taken over, integrated into America’s sphere of influence.  The two historic objectives of the United States in World War II were  1) to undermine the British Empire and competing imperial powers,  Secret Plan to Wage Nuclear War on the Soviet Union Formulated during WWII  There was a secret plan first formulated in 1942 confirmed by declassified September 15, 1945 documents, that the United States was intent upon waging a nuclear war against the Soviet Union.  Two atomic bombs were dropped respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki under President Truman (6 and 9 August 1945), and we know that in the first few minutes of that bombing of Hiroshima, a hundred thousand people were killed, and the same thing occurred with regard to Nagasaki.  These cities were totally destroyed, leading also to extensive nuclear radiation.  But what most people don’t know, is that on the 15th of September 1945, declassified documents from the U.S. war department pointed unequivocally to a detailed US plan to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union – with over 200 atomic bombs.  Some historians might have concluded: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dress rehearsals for this devastating project directed against 66 Soviet cities. Now, I think this is significant because this project was formulated when the Soviet Union and the United States were allies theoretically against Nazi Germany.  But in fact 20th Century history, I think, has to be looked at very carefully.  US oil for Nazi Germany’s motorized convoys of tanks and armored cars, its Luftwaffe planes was part of America’s plan to destroy the Soviet Union. That plan failed.  Another related plan consisted in Wiping the Soviet Union off the Map, by dropping of more than 200 atomic bombs on 66 Soviet cities. This project was tantamount to the planning of genocide.  Now, that project did not take place because the Soviet Union had information on this plan first formulated in 1942 and they were in the process of developing their own weapons system.  But what I’m saying is that the arms race did not start with the Cold War. The arms race started with the Manhattan Project (launched in 1939) which consisted in building nuclear weapons capabilities in the United States. And Canada, incidentally, was a partner in that project. And so was Britain.  Essentially what we’re looking at is a broader perspective of how the United States de facto supported Nazi Germany with a view to  b) weakening the British Empire and competing empires including of course France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, etc and so on, (Those countries virtually are no longer colonial powers.  GR: Another aspect of U.S. hegemony, as you put it, is also the economic dimension. We spoke with Michael Hudson a few months back and, you know, he mentioned the use of the U.S. dollar in maintaining their contro and financing their war agenda.  So, could you speak to the point of the use of the U.S. dollar, and the way that’s been used to maintain America’s hegemonic role – the way they’ve been able to use the creation of these institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and just the U.S. dollar as the currency – the world’s petro-currency?  MC: Well, you know, this goes back to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, where there was a decision which was virtually imposed in the post-war era, to establish the U.S. dollar as the international currency. And linked up to gold and then subsequently the gold standard was dropped.  But certainly this dollarization of the post World War II economy which went through several stages and which eventually led to the World Bank and the IMF playing a pro-active role in countries which were former colonies of the Western European powers: Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and of course Latin America – in other words, these were so-called ‘developing countries.’  But again it’s the Washington Consensus, it’s the World Bank, the IMF which became instruments leading to the consolidation of U.S. hegemony, namely U.S. dollar hegemony.  And definitely that – that is really, in a sense, an outcome of World War II where all the competing imperial powers are ultimately – well, they’re no longer competing powers and I’m talking about Italy, France, Britain, Belgium, Holland, and of course Germany.  That whole structure has been ultimately flattened, and the many of the countries – territories of these former colonial powers– are now within the U.S. sphere of influence.  And the dollar is their proxy currency.  So, it’s a structure of domination and hegemony using currency markets, economic conditionalities, control of wages, control of prices, and so on.  And then it’s also the whole process of relocation of industrial activity to cheap labour economies. And many of those cheap labour economies are the former colonies of the Western Powers.  GR: Now, there’s the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so the Soviet Union is no more.  And then we have entered into a new phase, but the United States and its NATO allies continue to advance towards the border of Russia.  we’re at the point where US-NATO is threatening Russia,  Moreover, since 2001 the US is waging a ‘Global War on Terrorism’. It’s the post 9/11 period.  So, does this signify an important course change, and how does that relate to this ongoing effort to supplant the British Empire?  MC: Well, I mean, in the wake of World War II NATO is established in 1949.  It’s the seventieth anniversary of NATO so to speak. And it’s the shift into the Cold War. Now NATO was actually established (April 1949) barely a few months before the founding of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) on October 1st 1949. And consistently of course, NATO has been targeting the Soviet Union on behalf of the Pentagon.  The United States has been the main power in sustaining the Cold War up until its “official end’ in 1989.  But in effect, the Cold War is not over. While the Soviet Union no longer exists. US-NATO is now directing it threats against the Russian Federation (which is bona fide capitalist country). Again, it’s part of a hegemonic project, not by the NATO member states but of the United States which controls NATO via the Pentagon.  And I think that the whole process of militarization after World War II with the establishment of the geographic command structures – the U.S. Central Command, U.S. Africa Command, U.S., you know, Pacific Command, etc – hundreds of military bases around the world, on the one hand.  And largely, well, they’re not only there threatening Russia, they’re threatening China.  And these bases are also there as a means to enforcing america’s sphere of influence, i.e. colonize regions which were formerly colonies of European countries.  In Southeast Asia, of course, what is very important are the strategic waterways.  Indonesia is a de-facto within the U.S. zone of influence and various other countries as well.  And so, it’s a process of global militarization in each of the major regions of the world.  This new hegemony in the wake of the Cold War is also characterized by various modes of interference into the affairs of sovereign states through military dictatorships in Latin America, regime change, engineered protest movements, sanctions, meddling in national elections, and so on.  It’s the whole gamut of military might which of course supports U.S. economic and financial interests in different parts of the world.  And it’s not strictly in the Eastern European context. It’s also in Central Asia, it’s in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and in the present structure we have a situation where the Russian Federation and China are allies under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which ultimately constitutes a powerful countervailing bloc in relation to U.S. hegemony, particularly in the Asian context.  GR: Most people understand there was a great deal of enmity between the United States and the British Empire in the late 18th century and early 19th century. But over the course of the last couple of centuries, one would think that, well, maybe they’ve changed their ways. I mean the United States is more of a partnership with the United Kingdom, as opposed to looking to supplant them as the dominant empire.  Could you maybe take on that idea, i.e. that there’s no interest in a partnership? Because there’s certainly been a lot of partnership in all of these military adventures we’ve seen since the second world war, but what indications are there that the objective of supplanting of the British Empire is still in effect?  MC: Well, you know, the world is characterized by what I would call cross-cutting coalitions. You can be friends in the area of diplomacy and politics, and then enemies in financial affairs. We can see the situation with regard to the relationship between, let’s say, the United States and Turkey, or Turkey and NATO. Turkey is an ally now of Russia, but it’s still part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  With regard to Britain and the United States – there are many cross-cutting relations. Britain is still Europe’s main financial market, and the City of London is considered one of the major financial centres in the world. And there are links between British and American firms. And there are links also with other European countries.  But, I think there’s something quite specific. Today the United Kingdon aligns itself with the United States. They are subordinate to the US.  And I don’t think British governments have any intention of restoring the British Empire, because, apart from the Commonwealth, it is more or less defunct – it doesn’t exist anymore.  But, on the other hand, it’s important to point out that in all recent wars, Britain has faithfully participated in an Anglo-American alliance, both with regard to Afghanistan, as well as, of course, with regard to Iraq during the Gulf War as well as in 2003. It was marked by the, The Bush-Tony Blair relationship.  In that regard, there is, of course, a very cohesive alliance.  But when you look at the hegemonic objectives of the United States, you realize that what’s happening today in the United Kingdom is the appointment under PM Boris Johnson of a U.S. proxy regime.  GR: Could you explain that a little bit?  MC: It’s something which is not so straighforward to explain. I should mention there are other cases of proxy governments in Western Europe, particularly in France and Germany.  But what this means is that essentially the United States is taking over the European landscape.  And in one form or another it has done that since the end of World War II, simply by the fact that there are U.S. military facilities in several European countries, and they have NATO and they control NATO.  But in the case of Britain. We must understand that Britain has never been part of the Eurozone. And there’s a reason for that, and it has to do with U.S.- U.K. relations in terms of financial institutions, markets, and so on.  But more recently, there’s been a UK-US negotiations, the details of which haven’t really emerged. Negotiations between Boris Johnson and the Trump administration, let’s say, with regards to macro-economic policy, specifically the privatization of health services.  In other words, what the U.S. is pushing for is the neoliberal restructuring of Britain, extensive privatization, repeal of the welfare state, something which was built in the post World War II era. And which has nothing to do with colonialism.  It had to do with the fact that, at one point, the British people pushed towards the development of social programs, education and so on.  And I think that what is happening now is that we have a government which ultimately is not representative of the British people. It has become an instrument of dominant U.S. hegemonic interests, as well as a continuation of the Anglo-american partnership dominated by Washington.  So that, I think that is the end game. The destabilization of Britain as a nation state. That destabilization is engineered by the Washington consensus.  If we look at the evolution of the British Empire from Queen Victoria at the end of the nineteenth century to the present, US hegemony ultimately prevails, The end game of Britain’s imperial ambitions is economic and political chaos under Brexit.  MC: …It’s not that Brexit per se is the issue. It’s the fact that a proxy government has been installed. It’s a corrupt government. It’s manipulated by financial interests and it is ultimately leading Britain, the former British Empire into a total political impasse.  GR: Professor Chossudovsky, you brought up Brexit there just now, and I just want to get some clarification. Does Brexit ultimately serve U.S. goals or was it just a means by which a certain kind of proxy, as you say, would get elected?  MC: Well, I think the broader objective is to create instability across the European landscape. It serves U.S. interests because it cuts Britain off from the European Union. But it also defines a whole series of trade agreements, and so on, which I think will ultimately benefit the United States.  The irony is that U.S. expansionism and hegemony feeds on creating and disrupting nation al and local economies. The result is destabilization.  US sponsored neoliberal reforms destabilize the national economy and create social divisions. (For instance the divisions created in EU member states). the nation state becomes fragmented. (eg. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are broken up). You create divisions within national societies.  At the same time the War on Terrorism is used, of course, to weaken the whole structure of Western European countries: it triggers the refugee crisis. The latter is marked by people fleeing the war theatres in Syria, or Iraq, or elsewhere. The refugee crisis is the direct result of U.S. military aggression, whether it’s direct military action or whether it is the result terrorist insurgencies.  The whole European landscape now is in crisis politically, socially. And is the consequence of these U.S. led wars in the Middle East, for instance.  But it is also the consequence of neoliberal policies which are now much more generalized, and which are now being adopted in many Western countries.  And inevitably, when you start adopting neoliberal policy in a country like the United Kingdom, you’ll destroy the whole fabric of the welfare state. That’s ultimately the objective.  GR: Professor Chossudovsky we’re going to have to bring the interview to a close shortly, but I wanted to ask one more question about the fact that when these plans – this hegemonic agenda – originated in the 19th century, the U.S. was ascendant, and now it would seem that today and for a couple of decades now, the U.S. has been on the decline with China apparently – appearing to be on the rise and forming partnerships with Russia and other countries. So, how do you see this – I mean, is this agenda of imperial dominance going to fall apart, given the immense debts that the U.S. has racked up, and the inability to sell U.S. Treasury bonds as they have in the past. How do you see this proceeding? Is the U.S. hegemon going to succeed or is it destined to fail?  MC: Well, you know, it has a lot to do with the sources of money wealth. And it’s the growth of speculative activities, the hedge funds, the deregulation of banking during the Clinton administration and the fact that now you can make money without necessarily producing anything. And you can speculate. And the various corrupt forms of wealth creation within the financial system ultimately are expense of the real economy.  Then, there’s the whole issue of delocation. And, in effect, what we’ve seen now in the United States is that certain industries are simply being wiped out – and it’s true also in Canada and Western Europe  And they’ve been de-located to Southeast Asia or even to China for that matter, to cheap labour havens in Southeast Asia.  But at the same time the implementation of these austerity measures, coupled with very large military budgets is leading to collapse of America’s economic infrastructure  So the real economy is in crisis. In the core of the US Empire, there’s a large share of the U.S. population which don’t even meet food requirements.  It’s a situation of impoverishment of the richest country on the planet.  And that has a lot to do with the way this neocolonial apparatus functions. You de-locate everything with a view to paying $150 a month to workers in Southeast Asia, which then leads to people loosing their job on assembly lines in North America and so on, and ultimately then this leads to the collapse in purchasing power and the downfall of economic activity, not to mention rising food prices. But also concurrently the whole infrastructure of the U.S. economy is in crisis.  And I suspect that this is going to backlash because the Empire is not in a position to assert its hegemony in relation to real economic activity.  And the levels of consumer demand have collapsed because of the process of off-shoring of jobs.  We might make a comparison with the Roman Empire. At one point, in the history of the Roman Empire, the use of slave labor had contributed to destroying the independent small scale handicraft economy as well as farming. With the extension of the slave labor economy, the levels of consumer demand simply collapsed, and the whole productive and trading structure went into crisis.  Well, we’re living that, in a sense. We delocate industrial activity to an overseas cheap labour economy with exceedingly low wages (from $100 and $300 a month), and then we close down our factories here.  And then we cut on all social expenditures with a view to funding the military industrial complex with large scale investments now of the order of $1.3 trillion for an absolutely useless nuclear weapons program: the only use for that program is to blow up the planet.  Meanwhile, the media tell us that that “nuclear weapons make the World safer”.  This hegemonic project seeks to minimize wages at a global level. In the central core of the US Empire: America, has a declining standard of living, it has high levels of illiteracy, it has poverty, racism.  And those social conditions in theheart of the Empire are exacerbated by the thrust of America’s hegemonic objectives in different parts of the world including e the ‘profit driven” global cheap labor economy.  The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .  The Global Research News Hour now airs Fridays at 6pm PST, 8pm CST and 9pm EST on Alternative Current Radio (alternativecurrentradio.com)  Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1 Thursdays at 1pm ET  Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.  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Find more details at www.caperradio.ca  RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/  Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 3pm.  Los Angeles, California based Thepowerofvoices.com airs the Global Research News Hour every Monday from 6-7pm Pacific time.


lewrockwell--2019-04-02--Are Western Doctors Compelled To Support

If we take a broad overview of the structure of conventional medicine in our Western societies, we are left with an inescapable conclusion: it is set up as a business, where profit is most highly valued and human health and safety is secondary. The evidence for this is overwhelming and is discussed in greater detail in many of our articles on the subject listed at the end of this article.  This is absolutely not to say that there are not loving, upstanding people who are doctors, researchers, or otherwise as part of the Western medical establishment. Not at all. I believe most of them are. However, when it comes specifically to the family doctors and pediatricians who are trusted by their patients to make recommendations for their patients’ health and well-being, there is a limit to how far they can push the boundaries of the highly controlled business structure they find themselves in.  This is probably most obvious when it comes to vaccines. I don’t think any doctor could tell me straight-faced that if they decided that vaccines were not safe for their patients, and they were openly vocal about it in public, that there wouldn’t be pushback from their industry, including intimidation and threats of losing their medical license. And so, unfortunately, there is a built-in bias from the start, and doctors know that going down the path of truly doing their own independent research into the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, in order to make an informed decision about what they will recommend to their patients, will either be a lot of work for nothing or will end up with them having to fight against their powerful establishment and risk losing their livelihood. Dissolving Illusions: ... Suzanne Humphries MD, ... Best Price: $29.48 Buy New $22.80 (as of 06:35 EDT - Details)  But haven’t doctors been thoroughly and convincingly shown already in Medical school the overwhelming proof that vaccines are safe and effective? There is somewhat of a misconception that the public is under about the process by which would-be doctors become convinced about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines:  Despite questioning the safety and efficacy of vaccination by reputable medical men since its introduction, debate has been, and is, increasingly discouraged. Information published in scientific journals is used to support this position, other views being regarded as “unscientific.” It was a received “article of faith” for me and my contemporaries, that vaccination was the single most useful health intervention that had ever been introduced. Along with all my medical and nursing colleagues, I was taught that vaccines were the reason children and adults stopped dying from diseases for which there are vaccines. We were told that other diseases, such as scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, typhus, typhoid, cholera, and so on, for which there are no vaccines at the time, diminished both in incidence and mortality (ability to kill) due to better social conditions. You would think–as medical students who are supposed to be moderately intelligent–that some of us would have asked, “But if deaths from these diseases decreased due to improved social conditions, mightn’t the ones for which there are vaccines also have decreased at the same time for the same reason?” But we didn’t. The medical curriculum is so overloaded with information that you just have to learn what you hear, as you hear it: nonvaccinatable diseases into the social conditions box and vaccinatable diseases into the vaccines box and then onto the next subject.–Dr. Jayne L. M. Donegan, foreward to Suzanne Humphries’ Dissolving Illusions  Having been convinced that vaccines are effective without spending any time looking critically at objective (not industry-funded) studies, doctors are led to treat the matter of the safety of vaccines as a foregone conclusion. This is notwithstanding the publicly available fact that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act has paid approximately $4 billion to families with vaccine injured children, and that only accounts for 1 percent of vaccine injured children. This is a fact that doctors are not informed about by their industry, and those who become aware of it are almost compelled to wilfully ignore. You can read more about that act and access direct primary sources here.  Vaccines, the industry will repeat until the cows come home, ARE SAFE. PERIOD. Yes, there are extremely rare exceptions when they do cause damage, the industry admits when pressed on the matter, but because they argue that vaccines are so important to societal health, the industry will continue to say with unwavering certainty that VACCINES ARE SAFE. Consequently, while they are afforded a narrow bit of leeway for de-combining vaccines and delaying schedules, the solemn duty of doctors is to promote the safety of vaccines to their patients.  This is all fine and dandy for doctors. Until one of their young patients have serious adverse reactions or even dies after receiving vaccines. Much as many doctors would be heartbroken and would like to offer true love and support to the parents, the position they have been put in by the medical industry forces them to sternly deny the possibility that vaccines could be the cause of the damage, not because logic dictates so, but because they fear that their future career is dependent on this denial.  I recently came upon a facebook post from March 22nd made by a woman named Catie Clobes that was actually the inspiration for this article. Her daughter Evee Gayle Clobes had tragically died on March 1st, a day and a half after receiving six vaccines at her six month doctor’s visit. The post below, from this brave woman looking for answers as to why her daughter died, explains it all:  Me: “I know this is going to sound morbid, but it sounds like with everything you’re saying to me, my daughter basically “took one for the team”, right?” Pathologist: “I don’t even know what to say to that.” I just finished up a very heated, baffling phone conversation with the very “cold” doctor who performed my daughter’s autopsy. The autopsy is pretty much complete on their end, there have been no answers, it’s at a finalizing paperwork phase. My mother was in the room when this call took place, she heard this all! I’m not exaggerating a thing. After several calls this week to try and get this doctor on the phone, I sent an email today requesting the simple additional tests that I wanted done in my daughter’s autopsy. I was assured the day of my daughter’s death by that office that “every test” would be performed, that her receiving vaccinations a day and a half prior was of concern, and they’d be running “those kinds of tests”, that they took infant deaths very seriously. I believed them. These simple tests I requested would reveal if vaccinations had played any part in my daughter’s death. Well less than an hour after sending that email, I finally got that doctor to call me back! She refused to do the tests, each and every one.  Me: “My daughter was in perfect health and then received 6 vaccinations and died a day and a half later. Why wouldn’t you run ANY tests to check if vaccinations were the cause?”  Pathologist: “It’s not medically necessary, there is no medical reasoning, and it’s not medically approved.”  No kidding, she said this!! She refused to acknowledge that it might even be a possibility that it was the cause! State or County Medical Examiner offices refuse and will not run any tests in an autopsy that could reveal any link to vaccination as the cause of death because it is not “medically accepted.” This is a fact. They will put SIDS on the death certificate before running of these tests.  At this point, being an angry, grieving mother, I said some controversial things to try and get some sort of sensible answer out of this woman. She was like a robot. I said to her, “It sounds like you’re just reading me some script the CDC and the government have given you!” I cried in disbelief and anger. I yelled, “If this was your baby that you just lost, you’d want answers no matter what it took.” I asked her opinion on why so many shots had to be given to such a small child? She never once gave any opinion. She kept repeating that science and research shows this and that, but none of it made sense. She had nothing to say about vaccination inserts saying that “SIDS” can occur, and all the other warnings. She had no solid fact, reasoning, nothing educational or productive. I couldn’t even believe I was speaking with a doctor. It was clear she was watching her words. I told her I didn’t believe in “SIDS” and that every death has a real reason behind it. She had nothing to say to that. What was NOT surprising was that a pause of hesitation came before each of her responses. Jabbed: How the Vaccin... Brett Wilcox Check Amazon for Pricing.  She actually started to say to me “Listen, you are a part of a community that…” and I stopped her and I said “NO! I have vaccinated all of my children. I have always trusted medical professionals. I was never told by any doctor that more than a fever could occur after my babies getting their shots. I never knew any better because people like you shame that “community” and silence them. Don’t label me to try and discredit what I’m saying. I was “provaxx” just like you until I sadly had to find out in the worst way possible how many babies and children have died and been hurt by these shots.” That’s when I made the “take one for the team statement”.  My last words to her were “you should be ashamed, you’re a doctor, and it’s your job to find answers and save lives and that’s not what you are doing.” There was silence on her end and then I hung up.  I’m making nothing up. This is not “stuff” I’m hearing, this is what I am living. I understand the need for vaccinations, I get the government’s reasoning, the importance. Sure. The lack of care, lack of research, lack of information about gene testing and titer level testing to prevent injuries and deaths, lack of any TRUTH or answers, and the lack of any real accountability when it comes to the negative, that I don’t understand. The corruption – that is what blows my mind.  So I will continue on my fight for the answer I am looking for. I’m just also on a mission to expose and share with everyone the crazy, sick truth I am experiencing along the way. (That’s what this post is about.)  Mommy has got your back, my “Eeves Peeves”! She always has and she always will. #justiceforevee


nationalreview--2019-01-21--Different Races Same Boat

Different Races, Same Boat

Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. turned his attention from an exclusive focus on racial justice to unequal opportunity more generally. The United States was “a nation gorged on money,” he wrote, “while millions of its citizens are denied a good education, adequate health services, decent housing, meaningful employment, and even respect, and are then told to be responsible.” He specifically blamed federal policymakers for “subsidies of the rich and unemployment and underemployment of the poor.”  King’s indictment against the status quo of his time, and against the political and economic elite responsible for it, could be leveled almost word for word today. Indeed, some people — and not just liberals — are still making that indictment today.  In the wake of Tucker Carlson’s viral populist manifesto earlier this month, populist- and libertarian-leaning conservatives have been debating the same point King raised over 50 years ago. Does economic inequality depend on individuals’ good and bad choices, or on the social circumstances in which individuals make those decisions?  Obviously, the answer is “both.” But it’s important, especially for conservatives, to dig in to the question. Too many of King’s — and, now, Carlson’s — critics point to America’s free(-ish) market economy and declare that opportunity was and remains wide open to anyone willing to work for it.  To the extent it is true, King himself would have agreed. “I refuse to accept the idea,” he once said, “that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him.”  But to what extent is it true? Certainly, conservatives should affirm the moral agency of the individual. But we must also recognize the ways in which social conditions, history, and policies make the exercise of personal responsibility more or less difficult.  King was right that “a productive and happy life is not something you find, it is something you make.” But you make it with other people. Supportive relationships and institutions do a great deal to facilitate opportunity.  For two years the Social Capital Project of the Joint Economic Committee has studied the health of families, communities, and civil society, documenting changes in social capital over time and its uneven geographic distribution across the country. One striking finding from the project was that ten of the eleven states with the lowest social capital — as measured by an index we created — and 17 of the bottom 20 fall within a continuous bloc running across the southern part of the country.  It was beyond the scope of our report to fully explain the reasons for this concentration of disadvantage, but we noted that these geographic patterns suggest deep-seated problems. The facts eventually led us to a troubling, but revelatory, correlation.  One of the seven components of our Social Capital Index measures the prevalence of marriage and intact families in a given area (the darker the blue, the worse the score). We then overlaid our county-level map of this “family unity” index with a map depicting the share of those counties’ 1860 population that was enslaved (the more red dots, the higher the proportion of slaves). Here’s what we found:  The correlation is far from perfect. But as you can see, it is unmistakable, although the data are separated by 150 years.  The institution of slavery stole agency from African Americans, for generations. Families were regularly split up, with children torn from their parents and spouses from each other. Black women were often sexually assaulted by their “owners.” Husbands and fathers were prohibited from exercising the authority that men at the time were supposed to wield. They were neither breadwinners nor protectors but were instead subjected to violent humiliation and abuse at the hands of the privileged few who profited from the arrangement.  We must remember this history — to say nothing of the century of Jim Crow that followed the Civil War, with its terror and debt peonage — when we weigh questions of opportunity and responsibility among African Americans.  But policies less extreme than slavery can also weaken social capital and lead people to act in ways that impede their success. For it is not just African Americans in the Southeast who have low social capital: This was an explicit theme in Carlson’s monologue, and it was an implicit factor behind Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.  President Trump won all eleven of the low-social-capital states east of Texas. Around 15 to 25 percent of whites in these states identify their ancestry as “American.” This group is overwhelmingly composed of southern whites, and it ranks below nearly all ancestry groups in terms of median household income. Nationally, the correlation across states and counties between low social capital and the share of the population that identifies as “American” is stronger than it is for all but a few of the major ancestry groups.  As J. D. Vance describes in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in this struggling region of the country, individuals’ poor habits and decisions limit their opportunity. But he also highlighted the impact of economic shifts and policies that have been either inadequate or ill-designed.  It is incumbent on conservatives — those of us who support the free enterprise system — to recognize that bad policy can inhibit access to free markets and better policy can enhance opportunity within them.  A populist conservatism — if it can find the right balance between promoting personal responsibility and addressing economic, social, and policy barriers to success — might be able to unite Americans across racial and cultural lines rather than dividing them. And it could strengthen conservatism overall at the same time.  Martin Luther King insisted that, in expanding opportunity for blacks, we would also be “rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.”  He was right then, and he may be even more right today.  As King put it, “we may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”


nationalreview--2019-05-02--The Case for Free Trade

The Case for Free Trade

It is both economic and moral  The policy of free trade — citizens freely buying and selling goods and services across borders without government interference — is under greater attack today than it has been in decades. Despite the fact that American public support for trade and globalization is at an all-time high, politicians, pundits, and a growing cadre of wonks on both the left and the right have become increasingly hostile to the long-standing U.S. political consensus in favor of multilateral trade liberalization. This hostility, however, is mostly misguided. Although it contains certain nuggets of truth about, for example, Chinese mercantilism or onerous trade-agreement rules, the case for free trade — economic, geopolitical, and, perhaps most of all, moral — is as strong today as it was when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations almost 250 years ago.  Trade and globalization have provided undeniable economic benefits for the vast majority of American families, businesses, and workers. Most obvious are the consumer gains. Several recent studies have found that freer trade with China, for example, has generated, through increased competition and lower prices, hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. consumer benefits — benefits that, according to economists Xavier Jaravel and Erick Sager, are the equivalent of giving every American “$260 of extra spending per year for the rest of their lives.” Consumer gains from imports, in general tilted toward the poor and the middle class, are especially tilted toward them when it comes to goods that are made in China and sold at stores like Walmart. The magnitude of such benefits also debunks the well-worn myth that free trade is mainly about cheap T-shirts. Indeed, trade’s consumer surplus is a big reason that Americans today work far fewer hours to own far better essentials than at any prior time in U.S. history.  Then there are trade’s overall benefits for the economy. A 2017 Peterson Institute paper calculated the payoff to the United States from expanded trade between 1950 and 2016 to be $2.1 trillion, increasing U.S. GDP per capita and per household by around $7,000 and $18,000 — with benefits, again, disproportionately accruing to households in the bottom income decile. The U.S. International Trade Commission, moreover, found in 2016 that U.S. bilateral and regional trade agreements such as NAFTA generated small but significant annual increases in GDP, as well as in employment and real wages among highly skilled and less skilled American workers. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain has noted, trade-skeptical populists who downplay this impressive macroeconomic boost ignore that, as our current economic moment attests, a small bit of extra GDP growth can mean big things for lower-wage, lower-skill workers in terms of employment and possible government assistance.  Trade and globalization also support American companies and workers, even in manufacturing. The Commerce Department, for example, has estimated that almost 11 million jobs depended on exports of U.S. goods and services in 2016, and foreign direct investment in the United States — the necessary flip side of our oft-maligned trade deficit — supported millions more. Meanwhile, American companies that adapt and thrive in today’s economy most often do so by making use of imports and global supply chains. The San Francisco Fed, for instance, recently estimated that almost half of U.S. imports are intermediate products purchased by American manufacturers to make globally competitive finished goods; the country’s biggest exporters, therefore, are also its biggest importers. Numerous other studies have found that the vast majority of the value of an American company’s assembled-abroad product (such as an iPhone, assembled in China) accrues to the U.S. company, including its workers and shareholders — not to the place of final assembly (despite what a gross bilateral trade balance, which attributes an import’s full cost to its final export source, might say).  These supply chains not only deliver modern marvels at amazing prices but also allow American companies and workers to focus on our high-value comparative advantages, such as professional services and advanced manufacturing, and leave the lower-value stuff to other countries and workers who lack such skills. Imports, the San Francisco Fed study found, also support millions of other American jobs in transportation, logistics, and wholesale and retail trade — indeed, almost half of all U.S. consumption dollars spent on items not “made in the USA” go to these Americans, not to foreigners.  Finally, there are the immense, unseen benefits of import competition on American economic dynamism (a market’s rate of change and innovation) and living standards. “When we find ways to get more from less, that means more resources available to expand opportunities elsewhere in the economy,” George Mason’s Russ Roberts recently noted. “That expansion is unseen. . . . But it’s hugely important.” Whether this creative destruction comes from trade or technology is irrelevant: The outcome is not just cheaper stuff but better (and once unimaginable) stuff, better jobs, better companies, and better lives. And it can occur only by letting consumers and their capital seek more-productive ends.  This is why the alternative to freer trade, taken to its extreme, is not $2,000 iPhones; it’s no iPhones at all.  Protectionism, meanwhile, has repeatedly proven a costly failure. When researchers at the International Monetary Fund recently examined tariff increases in 151 different countries between 1963 and 2014, they found that correlated with such policies were significant declines in domestic output and productivity, more unemployment, and higher inequality. The United States is not immune to these harmful forces: Two new studies, from economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research, have found that the economic pain from Trump’s 2018 tariffs fell entirely on American consumers (companies and individuals). My 2017 survey of the academic literature on over a century of U.S. protectionism pre-Trump showed that, with very few exceptions, it imposed immense economic costs on American consumers, workers, and companies (more than $600,000 per year for every U.S. job created) while also failing to open foreign markets or resuscitate protected American firms and workers over the longer term. In case after case, the jobs still disappeared, and the companies either went bankrupt or came back to the government for more help. And it’s happening again: Though American steel consumers are paying much higher prices than their global competitors, U.S. steel-industry stocks lag far behind the S&P 500 index. For these and related reasons, economists of the Left, Right, and center continue to oppose tariffs overwhelmingly (93 percent of a recent IGM Economic Experts Panel of dozens of top economists, to be exact), and they support freer trade and globalization.  In addition to generating economic benefits, trade has also long been a pillar of national and global security. As the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan noted in a Washington Post op-ed in 2018, the multilateral trading system arose not from a desire for global economic growth or to empower global consumers but from a fear of another global war. And this system, for all its fits and starts, met that aim reasonably well for more than seven decades. Since the end of World War II, Kagan wrote, the global trading system helped prevent “the slightest danger that economic competition would spill over into geopolitical competition” — “one of the great historical anomalies” of our time. The World Trade Organization has provided an impressively effective venue for the resolution of bilateral trade disputes as well as a key way — primarily through the accession process and its numerous obligations — for developing countries to undertake painful internal reforms as the “price” of joining the WTO, reforms that otherwise might have been too politically difficult. (Even China undertook such reforms, and its post-accession backsliding is far more a failure of WTO members’ enforcement than of the accession commitments themselves.) The WTO system certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s still far preferable to the piecemeal system of power politics, uncertainty, and outright war that preceded it. Indeed, the United States’ recent shift back toward this old system of bilateral deals and unilateral enforcement is already causing anxiety around the world, even for some of our closest allies, such as Japan and the U.K.  Finally, removing U.S. restrictions on Americans’ consumption of foreign goods, services, and capital is not merely an economic and geopolitical decision but also a moral one. Whether intended or not, trade liberalization has removed stark inequities in the previous, protectionist U.S. system — inequities that typically originated in a proverbial smoke-filled room full of lobbyists and elite policymakers. Protectionism invisibly propped up certain industries and workers at most Americans’ expense and generated the aforementioned economic and geopolitical problems.  Indeed, we are witnessing again today just how protectionism breeds elite cronyism and political dysfunction and hurts far more Americans than it helps. Former “big steel” lawyers and executives, now in the Trump administration, dole out tariff protection to their former colleagues who lobbied for it; those well-connected colleagues, in turn, get to decide the fate of their American customers’ requests for steel-tariff relief, even though the steel-consuming customers are a far larger share of the U.S. economy and work force than is the steel industry. And that’s just the steel tariffs. Is it any wonder that trade-related lobbying expenditures over the past two years have skyrocketed? Those on the left who aim to “get money out of politics” and those on the right who talk of “draining the swamp” reveal the weakness of such commitments when they turn a blind eye to the corruption directly resulting from the protectionist policies they support.  Why should certain American industries and workers have a moral claim to government protection? Why should government prioritize those workers’ living standards above their fellow citizens’? American footwear workers, for example, have long benefited from a government policy dating back to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that protects their jobs through hidden restrictions on the commerce of other Americans — restrictions that force everyone, including the poor, to subsidize footwear jobs by paying more for their shoes. Perhaps, if the taxes were repealed and Americans could buy shoes from whomever they wished, the nation would owe affected workers welfare or job training. But the workers are not owed the protection itself, and its removal is not an immoral act. It is the right thing to do, and the broader economic and geopolitical gains are just gravy.  The morality of trade does not stop at the water’s edge, either: The lowering of U.S. trade barriers, along with American leadership in creating agreements and institutions such as the WTO, has produced immeasurable benefits for the world’s poorest people. As the World Bank noted in its Report on the Role of Trade in Ending Poverty, since 1990, “a dramatic increase in developing-country participation in trade has coincided with an equally sharp decline in extreme poverty worldwide,” and the number of people living in extreme poverty has collapsed. Trade has also “helped increase the number and quality of jobs in developing countries, stimulated economic growth, and driven productivity increases.”  A new report from the International Labor Organization provides jaw-dropping stats in this regard: Between 1993 and 2018, the share of individuals in low- and middle-income countries working in extreme poverty fell from almost 42 percent to less than 10 percent — a decline of around 600 million people. Most moved from subsistence farming to formal wage or salary work, providing themselves with first-time access to health care and other benefits. And, contrary to popular belief, the job creation in developing countries did not happen primarily in “sweatshop” manufacturing: The share of industrial workers in low- and middle-income countries almost did not change between 1991 and 2018, with job growth instead coming from sectors such as construction and retail trade; between 1999 and 2017, inflation-adjusted real wages in these countries tripled. Child labor is also disappearing: The overall number of child workers (ages five to 17) decreased by approximately 94 million between 2000 and 2016 (from 246 million to 152 million) and is projected to decline by tens of millions more by 2025. These improvements have been especially strong among women and girls, who in many countries faced truly horrible social conditions (hunger, arranged marriages, etc.) before these new jobs existed.  Trade liberalization contributes to all of this.  Free trade is certainly not costless, and experts have surely miscalculated projected trade flows and their effects on certain labor markets. But the problems that some Americans face as a result of free trade do not outweigh its tremendous overall benefits for the country and the world. And the downsides of free trade cannot obscure either its fundamental morality or the proven pain and inefficacy of the lone alternative, protectionism. They also cannot change the fact that much of today’s globalization is driven not by “trade deals” or other top-down policy choices but by seismic technological shifts, such as the Internet and shipping containers; that the post-war world, of which large portions were recovering from war or descending into Communism, was a unique situation for American manufacturing workers; that, historically, technology has been responsible for eliminating most low- and middle-skill manufacturing jobs in America, and that it would eventually have consumed the others, too; and, finally, that the problems of small towns in “flyover” country may be, as Tim Carney documents in his new book Alienated America, due more to the collapse of cultural institutions such as marriage, church, and civic life than to any economic forces.  These challenges are some of the hardest of our time, and the solutions are neither clear nor easy. But a rejection of freer trade and an embrace of protectionism would only make things worse.  The views expressed in this essay are Scott Lincicome’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of his employers.


newyorker--2019-06-26--The Theory That Justified Anti-Gay Crime

In the bad old days, newspapers rarely mentioned gay men except in a certain kind of true-crime story. The first clue in the cases was often a body discovered in a hotel room. In 1920, the forty-seven-year-old scion of a New England piano-making family was found in New York’s Plymouth Hotel with “a fractured jaw and skull and deep wound over his left eye,” the New York Daily News reported. In 1936, the wrists and ankles of a thirty-five-year-old interior decorator were found trussed with lamp cord and radio wire, with two neckties and a towel twisted around his neck. The police weren’t always able to identify a killer, but, when they did, it often turned out to be younger man of a lower socioeconomic status. In 1949, for instance, it was a twenty-five-year-old parking-lot attendant who broke the neck of a wealthy fifty-five-year-old visiting New Orleans for Mardi Gras. The victims and killers had often just met, in casual circumstances, which puzzled some readers. Why would a man take the risk of inviting a strange man to his room? Reporters were sometimes coy. When the battered corpse of a writer of detective novels turned up in 1937, the Washington Post described him as the “victim of as sinister a mystery as ever he produced in book form.” In other newspaper accounts, however, reporters delivered, with relish, details about a victim that suggested a queer life, in which a motive for such risk-taking would presumably be found. The Philadelphia Inquirer catalogued “rich oriental rugs,” “hundreds of books,” a “large collection of classical recordings,” and “subdued but costly” furniture in the home of a lawyer strangled in 1953. After a thirty-four-year-old business student was discovered decomposing in his underwear in 1956, a reporter for the Washington Post noted a “pink pillowslip found looped around the man’s neck.” The probable explanation of these not-quite mysteries: a gay man had had the bad luck to pick up a sociopath. While stigma shadowed homosexuality, bedding a new lover was especially risky for gay men. The search for partners had to take place in what one nineteen-fifties social psychologist called “the twilight zone between the law-abiding and the criminal.” Assaulters knew that gay men who were assaulted rarely went to the police, for fear of having their orientation exposed and being arrested themselves. Moreover, even when an intimate attack ended in death, the law was sometimes lenient with a gay man’s killer. A judge might spare a victim’s family the “embarrassment” of a full-dress trial, for example. And, time and again, killers won lighter sentences by claiming to have been surprised by what newspapers euphemistically described as “indecent advances” or “improper proposals” from the deceased. For most of the twentieth century, it was widely believed that “normal” men sometimes reacted to a homosexual invitation with lethal violence, and the claim of “indecent advances” figured so often in reports of murdered gay men that the hazard of such violence was one of the few things that many heterosexuals knew, or thought they knew, about gay life. To shed light on these killings, the social conditions and psychological conflicts that gave rise to them, and the manipulative and sensationalist coverage that they often received in the press, the cultural historian James Polchin has written “Indecent Advances,” a grisly, sobering, comprehensively researched new history. The subject matter doesn’t make for light reading; Polchin admits to feeling “haunted” by what he discovered in archives. But it’s impossible to understand gay life in twentieth-century America without reckoning with the dark stories. Gay men were unable to shake free of them until they figured out how to tell the stories themselves, in a new way.  “Indecent advances” is not only Polchin’s title; it’s a refrain, proffered by defendant after defendant. The legal strategy of claiming to have been enraged by a victim’s sexual overture was known as the homosexual-panic defense. One of the questions at the heart of Polchin’s book is whether the term “homosexual panic” described a real psychological response or was merely an ideological pretext. It’s easy to see how convenient the notion must have been to defendants, but it also would have been convenient to conservative elements in society who wanted to keep gay men in a state of fear, analogous to false claims of black-on-white rape that long contributed to threats of lynching and to the suppression of civil rights. The oldest plea of homosexual panic in America seems to have been made in Massachusetts in 1868. Accused of killing a longtime friend, a young man named Samuel M. Andrews claimed that he had been driven into “transitory insanity” when the friend pushed him down, tore open his pantaloons, and said, “Now I’m going to have some, this time.” The word homosexual wouldn’t début in English for almost another two decades, but a fear of homosexuality was already being presented as a justification for killing a gay man. In the end, a jury did convict Andrews of manslaughter, perhaps because jurors were unable to square his claim that the overture had terrified and enraged him with his admission that his late friend had been making passes at him for the previous nine years, ever since an attempt on a memorable stormy evening that they had spent in bed together. Andrews knew the man he killed quite well (there were hints that the victim had planned to make Andrews his heir) but, in many of the cases described in Polchin’s book, which span the years between the First World War and Stonewall, the likely inside story was more transactional: an older man had intended to hire a piece of “rough trade,” as young working-class men were then called when they identified as straight but were willing to have sex with other men for money. In an article from 1957 in Archives of Criminal Psychodynamics, a social psychologist explained the risky, ambiguous nature of such exchanges: This provides a ready made situation for those who want to rob homosexuals. In by far the greater majority of cases, the actual sex relations will take place first, with the rationalization that the homosexuals will then not dare to report the theft to the police. With their homosexual desires satisfied, the guilt feelings may then be assuaged by robbing the host. Financial gain is of course an added incentive. In situations like this where the man who allows a homosexual to take him home is not conscious of his homosexual desires and is being led into the situation by unconscious drives, there is sometimes a panic reaction when he finds himself about to engage in overt homosexuality. Assault and even murder are apt to result. As preposterous as the idea of homosexual panic may sound today, for much of the twentieth century it was treated as something like common sense. “When a beast attacks, you are justified in killing him,” is the way one defense attorney phrased the principle behind it, in 1940. The press, too, sometimes discussed the idea approvingly. The New York Daily News described a 1944 murder of a gay man as an “honor slaying.” In 1952, homosexual panic was listed as a mental disorder in the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and, as late as the nineteen-nineties, the notion was still so current in the popular mind that a Christopher Street shop selling gay-themed T-shirts was called, in what seems to have been ironic homage, Don’t Panic. It turns out that the psychological concept has a less than illustrious origin. The term “homosexual panic,” Polchin reports, was coined by a psychiatrist named Edward Kempf, in a 1920 treatise titled “Psychopathology.” Polchin garbles a key quote from Kempf, printing “sexually attracted” where Kempf wrote “sexually attractive,” and I took a look at the relevant chapter to see if I could make sense of it. It’s understandable that Polchin got confused. Kempf’s text is neither lucid nor coherent. Kempf theorized that homosexual panic emerged from “the pressure of uncontrollable perverse sexual cravings,” that is, from the frustration of homosexual urges that typically arose in same-sex environments, such as prison or the military. According to Kempf, symptoms of the panic included a fearfulness that could lead to catatonia, a “compulsion to seek or submit to assault,” and delusional perceptions of being poisoned or entranced. Indeed, the hallucinations and paranoid delusions that many of Kempf’s patients suffered from were quite serious. One patient imagined that broken pills were being surreptitiously put into his pudding; another went through spells of believing he was God. What was wrong with the patients sounds much graver than suppressed homosexual urges, which, a century after Kempf, no longer seem as monstrous as they may have in his day. Polchin wonders if the men, many of whom were veterans of the First World War, were in shell shock—though an exact diagnosis now hardly matters. The puzzle for a historian to solve is why Kempf strained so hard to pin the misery of his patients on homosexuality. Some of the men in his care did have thoughts about homosexuality, and a few acted on their thoughts, but Kempf interpreted the panic of a man who ate metal polish as “clearly terror at his own homosexual eroticism,” and, when a patient simulated death by lying still on the floor, Kempf observed that “this usually means an offer of sexual submission.” He comes across as a doctor too focussed on his hobby horse to be able to see his patients. Perhaps Kempf saw every cigar as much more than a cigar because he was under the spell of Freud. In 1911, Freud speculated that delusions of persecution were caused by an unconscious attempt to fend off the idea “I love him” by rewriting it as “He hates me.” The argument was so ingenious that it held sway in psychoanalytic thought for decades. Since Stonewall, however, it hasn’t worn well. Assessing the supposed link between paranoia and homosexuality in a monograph in 1988, the psychiatrist Richard C. Friedman dismissed the notion that “homosexuals are paranoid” as “of course false,” and also denied the corollary, writing, “Not all decompensating, dangerous paranoid patients have homosexual ideation.” Friedman acknowledged that mental illness, fear of homosexuality, and violence could intersect. He recalled that, while serving as a medical officer in the Army, he once examined a paranoid schizophrenic patient who, when Friedman offered him a seat, snarled, “So you think I’m queer,” and attacked; the patient had to be restrained by four men. But Friedman preferred to describe the motive for this kind of rage as “pseudohomosexual”—stemming from a conflicted wish for dependence on a powerful man, rather than from a conflicted wish to have sex with another man. Men who act out such rages, Friedman noted, are not always delusional, and they may direct their rage at women as well as at gay men. The opportunism with respect to targets seems telling.  It took a long time to demote homosexual panic from common sense to history. Polchin organizes his account roughly in chronological order, and from time to time, along the way, suggests that the pattern of the crimes, or at least the slant of the reporting on them, altered with the decades. He notes, for example, that ideas about homosexuality were in such flux in 1919 that, when the U.S. Navy tried to root it out of Newport, Rhode Island, where the Naval War College was in louche proximity to summer homes of the rich and famous, the Navy instructed its undercover investigators to “use your own judgment whether or not a full act is completed.” Somehow the Navy investigators were to think of themselves as set apart from the gay men with whom they were having sex. Polchin sees in the crimes and reporting of the nineteen-fifties, meanwhile, a tendency for heterosexual men to assert masculinity through “violent rejections of queerness,” and a tendency for journalists to drum up panics about geographic clusters of homosexuals. Homosexuals drew crime to a neighborhood because they were the natural prey of hoodlums, the journalists warned. Polchin’s historicizing observations seem valid and accurate, as far as they go, but, if a nineteen-thirties murder was a little more likely to start with hitchhiking, and a nineteen-sixties murder with a pickup in a bar, the variations seem minor compared with the transhistorical—almost ahistorical—sameness of the underlying pattern, a threat that seems to have been a constant presence in gay lives for most of the century. A seed of change, however, was finally planted in the late nineteen-fifties, when the gay community began to write about such crimes themselves, making visible the complicity of the judicial system and the press in entrenching homophobia. In 1959, for example, the early gay-rights monthly ONE discussed a case in New Orleans in which three Tulane students murdered a man who, they claimed, had made an “improper advance” as they were trying to rob him. After a jury acquitted the killers, the courtroom broke into applause, and a local newspaper ran a photo of the defendants hugging their mothers. The writer for ONE reframed the acquittals as a further injustice: “How many more times must the innocent die and the guilty go free before the unsubstantiated claim of an ‘indecent proposal’ ceases to be an alibi for robbery and murder?” Through such reinterpretations, a new understanding of the crimes became part of the project of gay liberation. In 1984, an executive vice-president of the National Organization of Women pointed out how absurd it was that anti-gay rage had long been considered natural. “I am a lesbian and I have been approached by men in straight bars,” she said. “In discouraging their advances, I have never found it necessary to try to kill them.” In 1992, the journal Law & Sexuality published a definitive takedown of the homosexual-panic defense, by the historian Gary David Comstock. The psychological literature on the condition was scanty, Comstock noted, and the condition itself seemed largely irrelevant to the murder cases that it had been applied to. Summarizing the work of psychologists who had followed in Kempf’s footsteps, Comstock wrote that the symptoms typical of a man struggling with homosexual desires were “introspective brooding, self-punishment, withdrawal, and helplessness,” which hardly seemed like traits that would give rise to an uncontrollable impulse to kill. And it was far from clear what pertinence they had to the case of a hoodlum who had gone looking for a homosexual to shake down and then lashed out. “Legal defenses have misappropriated the disorder,” Comstock concluded. The violence described by Polchin has not vanished, though these days reports of it may be less visible, channelled by the Internet to readers who follow local news or have an interest in L.G.B.T.Q. matters. In my own home town, Brooklyn, in 2000, there were knife attacks in a part of Prospect Park with a reputation for gay cruising, followed by a murder in the same location in 2006. That same year, a twenty-nine-year-old gay black designer was lured by means of online messages to a beach known for assignations, in Sheepshead Bay, a neighborhood in South Brooklyn, where a small group of teen-agers and twenty-year-olds chased him into the path of an S.U.V. on a nearby highway. The details of the Sheepshead Bay case, however, suggest how much has changed through shifts in technology and mores. Thanks to evidence of flirtation left behind online, the police were able to track down the designer’s attackers quickly. And, in court, when one of the defendants tried to win sympathy, he testified not that the designer had come on to him but that he himself had for some time been secretly having sex with men he met online. In June, this change in mores was enshrined as law when New York’s state legislature became the seventh in the country to ban the homosexual-panic defense from courtrooms, a move inspired in part by the 2013 case of Islan Nettles, a Harlem woman whose killer told police that he had been infuriated by the discovery that she was transgender. In the demise of the homosexual-panic defense, the watershed seems to have occurred in the decade following the 1969 Stonewall riots, when the narrative of anti-gay crime moved decisively out of a gothic and psychological register and into a political one. In 1973 and 1974, arsonists set fire to gay churches and synagogues in California and Tennessee. In 1977, during a national campaign against gay rights by the former beauty queen Anita Bryant, a young man shouted, “Here’s one for Anita,” as he and three companions stabbed to death a gay San Franciscan named Robert Hillsborough. The following year, San Francisco’s first openly gay elected official, the city supervisor Harvey Milk, was assassinated by a colleague enraged by Milk’s political achievement. What the critique of the homosexual-panic defense, from ONE magazine to Polchin, suggests is that there can be a dark collaboration between an individual’s rage, whatever its psychological origins, and the license that a society extends, tacitly or openly, to its expression, and that politics may be the only way to bring this collaboration into the light.


npr--2019-10-16--Poor People Are Still Sicker Than The Rich In Germany, Despite Universal Health Care

Poor People Are Still Sicker Than The Rich In Germany, Despite Universal Health Care  Researchers around the world hail Germany for its robust health care system: universal coverage, plentiful primary care, low drug prices and minimal out-of-pocket costs for residents.  Unlike in the U.S., the prospect of a large medical bill doesn't stand in the way of anyone's treatment.  "Money is a problem in [their lives], but not with us," says Merangis Qadiri, a health counselor at a clinic in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Hamburg, in northern Germany.  But it turns out that tending to the health needs of low-income patients still presents universal challenges.  As an American health care reporter traveling through Germany, I wanted to learn not only what works, but also where the system falls short. So when I arrived here — in one of the country's wealthiest cities, with one of its largest concentrations of doctors — economists and researchers directed me to two of the poorest neighborhoods: Veddel and Billstedt, both home to high populations of recent immigrants.  Entering these areas felt like stepping into another city, where even though people have universal insurance, high rates of chronic illnesses such as diabetes, depression and heart disease persist. Treatment and preventive care are difficult to access.  The challenges faced at both outposts ― Poliklinik Veddel and Gesundheit für Billstedt/Horn (literally, "Health for Billstedt and Horn") ― underscore a point: Universal health care, in and of itself, may be a first step toward increasing a community's health, but it isn't a magical solution.  Life expectancy in these areas is estimated to trail that of Hamburg's wealthier neighborhoods by 13 years ― roughly equivalent to the gap between Piedmont, a particularly wealthy suburb of Oakland, Calif., and its more urban neighbor, West Oakland. In Hamburg, the difference persists even though residents never skip medication or doctors' visits because of cost.  Medical care is only part of the equation. An array of other factors ― known collectively as the "social determinants of health" ― factor strongly into these populations' well-being. They include big-picture items like affordable, nutritious food and safe areas to exercise — as well as small ones, like having the time and money to get to the doctor.  In Germany, as in the U.S., these are exceptionally difficult problems to treat.  In its three years of operation, Gesundheit für Billstedt/Horn has been visited by about 3,500 patients — 3% of the population in the two neighborhoods it serves. And maybe half of the people who come for a first visit return for a follow-up, says Qadiri, who works at Billstedt/Horn.  For one thing, many don't know the health outpost exists. For another, people might not feel they can spare the time from chaotic lives.  To address that problem, the Billstedt site, with its patient rooms up front and a large meeting space in the back, is situated in a bustling mall among shops that include an Afghan bakery, Turkish restaurant and McDonald's. The outpost doesn't have doctors onsite, but it employs health counselors, who offer advice on healthy living and guidance on how patients can manage chronic conditions, and communicate with patients' physicians as needed.  The Poliklinik, located in a separate neighborhood known as Veddel, uses social and community events to get patients in the door. The clinic organizes coffees, shows up at local church events and holds local movie nights. The strategy appears to work, at least somewhat: By 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the brightly decorated waiting rooms are filled with patients waiting to see a doctor or other health professional.  Still, Poliklinik sees only about 850 unique patients every three months, far short of the area's 5,000 residents, says Dr. Phillip Dickel, a general practitioner at the clinic.  Another limit on the clinic's ability to meet need: a shortage of doctors willing to work in this part of town. That includes general practitioners, to say nothing of gynecologists, mental health specialists and pediatricians ― few of whom practice in the area, he adds. In theory, one could take public transit to another part of the city to find a doctor, but that involves time and money for the commute.  Meanwhile, the environmental problems that plague these areas are in some ways more intractable, Dickel says.  Poliklinik's neighborhood, for instance, is just off the autobahn and filled with old industrial warehouses and factories.  That creates lower air quality and higher risks of asthma and lung diseases, Dickel says. Patients in all these neighborhoods confront housing shortages, so families become overcrowded in small flats. Aside from the psychological toll, illnesses and infections ― influenza, a cold or something more serious ― spread quickly.  While the clinics advocate for improved housing, sometimes the best the staffers at the clinics can do is give advice on how to minimize housing-related health risks.  Qadiri, the Gesundheit health counselor, tries to help patients with diabetes and heart disease find and incorporate fruits and vegetables in their diets and teaches them strategies to replace sugary beverages. She also encourages them to attend onsite exercise classes.  But nutritious food is harder to find in the areas these clinics serve than in one of Hamburg's wealthier neighborhoods. And fresh produce costs more than fast food.  "People can get care in Germany if they need it," Dickel says. "Much more important [than access], I would say, are the social conditions. That's the cause of the life-expectancy gap."  The Arthur F. Burns Fellowship is an exchange program for German, American and Canadian journalists operated by the International Center for Journalists and the Internationale Journalisten-Programme.  Kaiser Health News a nonprofit, editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation. KHN is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.