The Myths of US Exceptionalism

Jack Rasmus

One of the elements of cultural ideology in the USA is that the United States is somehow exceptional compared to other countries; that is, it is different in a number of positive ways that distinguish it from all other countries.

Exceptional in Health, Education & Retirement?

In a perverted way, there is some truth to this. The United States is exceptional in that it is the only advanced economy in the world that has failed to provide universal health care for its citizens. It has a large, parasitical for-profit health care system, dominated by multi-billion dollar profit making private health insurance companies that suck $1 trillion a year from the wallets of US consumers for pushing paper around, a vast network of ‘for profit’ hospital chains that suck another $900 billion a year, pharmaceutical drug companies that charge $94,000 for drugs to treat someone with hepatitis C (that’s $1,125 per pill) and charge patients $14,000 to $64,000 a month for cancer drugs, and it has the highest paid professional medical personnel in the world. The US spends more than $3 trillion a year, and rising, on health care. That’s about 18% of its $17.4 trillion annual GDP, or almost one dollar out of every five spent on everything is for healthcare. That’s the highest spending on healthcare in the industrial world. In return for that massive spending , it ranks 39th in infant mortality rates, 42nd in adult mortality, and 36th in life expectancy. Yes, the US is exceptional in health care.

It is also exceptional in education. Its college students have become, in effect, indentured servants to the education establishment of overpaid administrators and bankers, owing more than $1.1 trillion in debt just to get a college education—more per capita higher education debt than any other country in the world. The cost of attending a four year college today is, on average, $30,000 to $60,000 a year for a four year undergraduate education. For those who can’t afford college there’s no meaningful job training programs available any longer. Meanwhile, 70% of college professors and instructors in the US are part time/temp workers, many of whom earn poverty wages and have no benefits. That too is ‘exceptional’, I suppose.

US workers work the longest hours among the industrial economies, have the shorted annual paid vacations (on average 7 days paid a year), and face the prospect of poverty when they retire or can no longer work. Social security pensions average only $1,100 a month, private pensions (called 401k plans) average less than $50,000 total savings for those age 60 and approaching retirement, and more than half of US workers live pay check to pay check with no personal savings whatsoever. As 70 million ‘baby boomers’ born after 1945 start to retire, tens of millions of them face the prospect of a penniless, poverty-ridden retirement. No wonder the fastest growing segment of the US workforce is those aged 65-74, as many return to work just to make ends meet.

Income inequality in the US is also the most extreme among the advanced economies, and growing worse every year. CEOs of US corporations make around 400 times the average pay of the average worker in their company—the biggest gap in the industrial world. (In 1980 they made only 35 times).The wealthiest 1% households (investor class nearly all), gained no less than 95% of all the net income growth in the US since 2010, which compares to 65% during the George W. Bush years, 2001-2007, and to 45% during the Clinton years in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the median family income has been declining in the US at 1%-2% every year for the past decade. (Ok, maybe that’s not exceptional, since pay for workers has been steadily declining in Europe and Japan too).

US workers may get only 6 months unemployment benefits, at less than one-third their pay, when they lose their jobs, compared to German workers, for example, who get up to two years in jobless benefits and job retraining to boot. But, what the hell, we got more aircraft carriers than the Germans.

Yes, the US is exceptional. Its workers are the sickest, most indebted, most overworked, insecure, and among the least compensated and the most fearful of the future than any in the advanced industrial world.

The US is also exceptional in that it spends more on its military than all the rest of the advanced economies combined. The US’s true ‘war budget’ is about $1 trillion a year, not the reported $650 billion or so for the Pentagon, which is stuffed away in dozens of corners in its annual economic budget. It has more than 1000 military bases worldwide. It is engaged constantly in more wars worldwide than any other country by far. And it spies every day on more of its, and rest of the world’s, citizens than all the ‘spooks’ in the rest of the world do combined. ‘Exceptional’? You bet.

The Myth of US Economic Exceptionalism

Another favorite focus of late for the ‘US is exceptional’ crowd is the US economy.

Japan may be in its fourth recession since 2009. The Eurozone may be slipping in and out of recession every couple of years. But the US economy is in full recovery. So we’re told. It is growing nicely, while the rest of the world lags behind. Or so the ideological spin goes.

The ‘exceptionalists’ like to refer to last summer 2014’s US economic growth figures of 4% to 5% in GDP growth rates, its 200,000 a month new jobs created in 2014, and its ever-rising stock and bond markets as evidence of such economic exceptionalism. But a closer look, at last year’s much hyped 5% GDP growth in the 3rd quarter 2014, and at the data for most recent months in early 2015, show there is nothing exceptional about the US economy.

Long term, it continues to grow at an annual rate about half of what is normal in past decades.

Over the past six years, occasional quarter GDP growth rates of 4-5% typically are followed by a sharp collapse of GDP growth, or even negative GDP, within months. This in fact has happened four times since 2009 resulting in a ‘stop-go’ economic recovery: in the first quarter of 2011, fourth quarter of 2012, first quarter of 2014 last year—and it appears it may happen again a fifth time in the recent first quarter, January-March 2015.

The US economy’s ‘yo-yo’, or ‘seesaw’, economic trajectory is nothing special or exceptional. Japan and Europe have been experiencing the same. Their ‘bouncing’ along the bottom is just at a level closer to the bottom (or even below it) than has been the US economy’s the past five years. Whereas the US economy’s growth spikes up to 4% or so on occasion, only to collapse back again to zero or less growth, the US economic growth longer term has been averaging about 1.7% annually the past five years. That’s about half its normal growth rate compared to US recoveries from recessions in the past. Japan and Europe might spike to only 2% on occasion, but then slip to negative growth—i.e. into a bona fide recession.

So it’s ‘stop-go’ recovery for all three, occurring just at different levels of ‘go’ and of ‘stop’. Nothing exceptional or different economically over the longer term, in other words.

Comparing the US temporary 5% economic growth of last July-September 2014, to what will almost certainly prove to be a 1% or less growth rate for the January-March 2015 period when the final numbers come in later this May, shows that temporary, ‘one-off’ factors occurred last summer 2014 to produce the brief 4%-5% GDP US growth. Those temporary factors have since reversed or disappeared in the first three months of 2015. Take away those one-off factors of nine months ago, and one gets the less than 1% growth likely to register for the most recent three months, January-March 2015. Here’s a brief explanation:

Shale Gas/Oil Industrial Production Boom

In early 2014 the shale gas/oil boom was in full swing in the US. That boosted what is called Industrial Production and much of last year’s jobs growth. But when the global oil price glut began last June, precipitated by Saudi Arabia and its emirate friends attempt to drive the shale gas/oil producers in the US into bankruptcy, the shale boom in the US came to an abrupt halt. Industrial production slowed rapidly after the summer and has continued ever since, turning negative since December. Jobs began to disappear. It is projected that jobs in Texas, the largest shale producer, will decline by 150,000 in early 2015. 

Manufacturing & Exports

In early 2015 US manufacturing and exports continued to grow, as the US dollar remained low giving US exports an advantage. But the collapse of world oil prices and the simultaneous talk by the US central bank it would raise interest rates resulted in a 20% rise in the dollar. Japan and Eurozone QEs pushed it still higher. The result was the beginning of a collapse in late 2014 of the contribution of US manufacturing and exports to US economic growth. That continues into 2015. Manufacturing orders have declined every month since December 2014.

Obamacare Consumer Health Spending

Another one-time boost to US GDP in mid-2014 was the signing up of 9 million of US consumers into the government’s new privatized health insurance coverage program, who couldn’t get health insurance. They started paying monthly premiums, and using health care services. That provided a boost to consumer spending that didn’t previously exist. But by 2015 the sign ups have leveled off. No more additional boost consequently in 2015.

Auto Buying Boom Goes Bust

Another consumer spending element that was peaking last summer was the boom in auto sales in the US. That too has now come to an end, as the market in the US has become saturated in terms of auto sales after four years. Auto sales since December, usually a strong month for auto sales, declined and have continued declining through February. The auto boomlet in the US is over.

General US Consumer Spending

Consumer spending in general has turned negative, starting in December. The US indicator, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index (PCE) declined in December-January, was flat in February and suggests no change in March. Consumer spending was supposed to surge, according to mainstream economists, as consumers enjoyed lower gasoline prices. Instead, consumers saved the lower gasoline prices or used it to help pay off their massive debt loads (which this writer predicted would be the case last year). US retail sales, which constitute the largest part of consumer spending, grew at a 4%-5% rate over last summer. But once again has turned negative since December 2014, falling by -1.0%, -0.9%, -0.6%, December through February, and likely falling again in March 2015. So both retail sales and consumer spending in general have turned negative.

Business Spending 

In the third quarter, July-September, of the year for the past five years, businesses in the US have boosted their spending, building up their inventories, in anticipation of a rise in year end holiday consumer spending. But the holiday spending then typically falls short of expectations, and businesses ‘work off’ the inventories in the first quarter, January-March, of the following year. This has happened yet again in 2015. Another element of business spending, on new equipment, is barely inching along, growing only 0.6% in the fourth quarter of 2014 and likely no more or even less in the first quarter.

Government Defense Spending 

It is a well-known and documented fact that in the US, every other year in which there is a national election, the federal government holds off spending early in the year so it can release it in the summer before the election. That occurred in 2012 before the national presidential elections and in 2014 before the midterm Congressional elections. That government spending gives an added boost in the July-September quarter, as politicians try to create the impression the economy is doing better than it is longer term. That too happened last summer. But that spending will contract early in 2015 relative to last summer.

US Jobs Creation 

Job creation always lags the real economy. And after growing jobs at a rate of 200,000 a month last year (mostly low paid, part time/temp, service jobs), jobs growth in March rose by only 126,000. Preceding months of January-February were also reduced. The employment data thus are now confirming the general economic slowdown in the first quarter 2015 as well. Apologists for the politicians will no doubt use the excuse of ‘bad weather’ for the feeble March jobs numbers. But what’s really happening is job creation is, and will continue, to slow due to real reasons. The ‘canary in the jobs mine’ is jobs in the goods producing sector, which have been slowing rapidly for several months and now turned negative in March. That reflects the collapse in manufacturing, mining, and good production that began late last year and now continues. The

Ideology of US Exceptionalism

In short, there is nothing exceptional about the US economy when one looks behind the ideological spin. It continues on its stop-go trajectory of the past five years. The economy weakens significantly every 4th quarter/1st quarter and the weak growth is ‘made up’ the following summer. Smoothing and averaging it all out over the year produces the longer term sub-historical average growth rate of around 1.8%–i.e. half of normal. And nothing exceptional. Japan and Europe are doing the same, just at a lower level of ‘stop-go’, sub-normal.

Long term US GDP growth is averaging 1.8% vs. 0.5% (Europe) vs. 0% (Japan). Does that make the US economy exceptional? Not really. 20 million are still jobless in the US; roughly the same as in the Eurozone. That’s not exceptional. Prices are now flat in the US (i.e. no change) and heading toward deflation; price stagnation also exists today in Europe and Japan . Real investment is declining in the US as in Europe and Japan—again nothing exceptional. And real wage incomes continue to decline for median income workers in the US—as they do for workers in Europe and Japan.

One of the favorite ideological strategies of ruling elites and classes is to convince their working classes that they are exceptional—i.e. meaning their situation may not be great, and may even be declining, but at least they are not as bad off as others. ‘It could be worse, just look at those poor workers in country X and Y. It may not be great here, but what the hell, we’re not so bad off, are we?’ The appeal to exceptionalism is just another ideological ploy to get working classes to accept their deteriorating conditions. It’s just another ideological tool to immobilize people. To accept their reality as their fate. To make them believe that, as their living conditions are getting worse, it’s not really that bad. But it is….

Revisiting Marx and Liberalism

Edward Martin

For Marxist social philosophy, Jon Elster recognizes personal freedom and social solidarity as inseparable. Marxist tradition rejects, for the most part, liberal attempts to rationalize the division of justice and equality into two principles: one, in the area of political liberties; and two, in the area of economics. Social participation in liberal theory is primarily directed at the maximization of political freedoms while economic participation is limited to those with resources and capital. For Locke, the liberal democratic rights theory also prioritizes the individual’s negative immunity from political coercion or interference by any part including government itself. Yet, the implied notion of justice and rights in Marxism nonetheless stresses positive entitlements to participate fully in both political and economic spheres. Here, the rationale is the prevention of alienation and exploitation of the human person and thus forego, for the time being, revolutionary violence. Thus, as R.G. Peffer notes, what is developed in Marxist tradition is a support and defense of human rights and human dignity.

Both social and economic rights, such as the right to work, material security, healthcare, etc., are paramount in Marxist theory. In liberal theory, however, these rights can arbitrarily be sacrificed since liberalism, especially as it manifests itself in market policies, becomes, according to Marx, “an individual separated from community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice … The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property, and their egoistic persons.” For Marx, liberal theory fails precisely because individual and social freedoms can only be realized if they are connected in a meaningful way by making political and economic justice and rights correlative. The result for Marx (and Engels) should thus be “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Steven Lukes recognizes that Marx’s concept of the human person within the context of a common good is critical for understanding his notion of solidarity. In “The Jewish Question”, Marx supports human rights based on the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1971.” The goal of this support for human rights and dignity sought to prevent exploitation and oppression in both political and economic terms. This theme also exists in the Communist Manifesto, in which Marx states, “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.” Here, Marx distinguishes between socialism and communism, and socialism for Marx is the “first stage of communism,” which must deal with the reality of moderate scarcity within the context of the socialization of productive property, etc. The “higher stage of communism” for Marx presupposes material abundance in a coercion-less society. Thus Marxist praxis, in its antiauthoritarian and revolutionary dimensions, incorporates a notion of social solidarity which embraces concepts of human dignity and interdependence.

In his early writings, Marx argues for a view of self as essentially social, as an integral part of community, a “species-being.” Marx states, “It follows from the character of this relationship [the human family] how far man has become, and has understood himself as, a species-being, a human being.” Marx continues:

“It is above all necessary to avoid postulating ‘society’ once again as an abstraction confronting the individual. The manifestation of his life – even when it does not appear directly in the form of a communal manifestation, accomplished in association with other men – is, therefore, a manifestation, and affirmation of social life. Individual human life and species-life are not different things, even though the mode of existence of individual life is necessarily either a more specific or a more general mode of species-life, or that of species life a specific or more general mode of life.”

For Marx, a deeper cultural commitment is needed beyond the one that liberalism provides, and, suffice it to say, libertarianism. Not only is the person fundamentally social in relationships with others, but also fundamentally social in thinking and action. Thus, Marx declares, “Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are social activity and social mind.” By stressing this notion of social solidarity, Marx further states, “In his species-consciousness man confirms his real social life, and reproduces his real existence in thought; while conversely, species-life confirms itself in species-consciousness and exists for itself in its university as a thinking being. Though man is a unique individual – and it is just his particularly which makes him an individual, a really individual communal being – he is equally the whole, the ideal whole, the subjective existence of society as thought and experience. He exists in reality as the representation and the real mind of social existence, and as the sum of human manifestations of life.” With this awakening, the material self-interests of people draw themselves into collaboration and solidarity. As Gregory Baum specifies, true humanity for Marx is thus realized in commitment to others through solidarity, or “Gattungswesen,” that is, a being that identifies itself with the entire species.

Now in Marxist thought, complete human liberation demands a transformation of the entire social and economic system which serves the human community. In this sense, society in all its dimensions must become a living expression and realization of human freedom if solidarity is to convey any significance at all. In Marx’s words, “Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species being; and when he has recognized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this power from himself as a political power. In this sense, for Marx, the bourgeois rights of the individual, over and against society, are reflections of the failure of society to achieve concrete freedom. Equality of political rights, in this sense, denies the relevance of distinctions of birth, social rank, education and occupation. Such liberal equality for Marx is abstract and one-dimensional because it does not abolish the unequal distribution of power in economic and social life; it simply tolerates the exercise of freedom in the political sphere.

This form of economic alienation and exploitation (false consciousness) is, for Marx, built into the system of capitalism, but is also legitimized by the political structure which supported it. This is due to the fact that profit was the underlying truth upon which economic relationships were based. Since this was the case for Marx, the “immanent laws of capitalist production itself” pitted capital against labor, and thus capital’s own destruction by “the revolt of the working class … trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.” Marxist solidarity – which seeks to mitigate rigid class stratifications through universal class consciousness – is thus brought about through the initiatives of the proletariat, working class, exploited and suffering. Moreover, capitalism does not defend human rights or human dignity. In fact, it has historically worked against them both. Instead, capitalism defends the “right” to extract the surplus value created by workers.

Class conflict, resulting from alienation and exploitation, can also be understood within the context of imperialism and dependency. International aspects of capitalist development demonstrate that less developed countries are strategically important to capitalists not only as sources of raw materials and manufacturing, but also investment outlets for surplus capital. The exploitation of these markets becomes so significant as a means of staving off the inevitable destruction of capitalism that capitalists and neo-imperialists will resort, according to Lenin, to repressive measures in order to maintain acceptable profit margins. Lenin argued that this struggle left nothing for the exploited and oppressed. Although outright acquisition of colonies is largely a thing of the past, the major capitalist powers still attempt to economically control and often politically manipulate less developed countries as a means of sustaining economic growth. This so-called “new imperialism” differs from that which Lenin describes mainly in form rather than substance. Even in a post-communist world, the objectives of this control are still the same. Specifically for Marx, Lenin and Harry Magdoff, it is securing a marginally profitable supply of raw materials, providing markets for exports of manufactures, and establishing profitable outlets for the investment of capital. Thus, market measures and foreign aid have failed under neoliberal strategies to benefit those most in need. In fact, Susan George argues the foreign debt of the Third World has become increasingly problematic for these countries in terms of prepayment and increased aid to these countries has become counterproductive and therefore threatens international solidarity.

If human rights and human dignity are to have real significance, then equality of political liberties must coexist with the equality of social classes on a global scale. The fact remains, however, that liberal democracy continues to reflect class distinctions. Consequently, inequalities, especially inordinate distributions of wealth that exist between the rich and poor, continue to be the concrete reality in social life imposed by the dominant class or power-elite. For Marx, this will only lead to further class antagonisms, violence, and inevitable revolutions. Thus all rights, and specifically most urgent rights in Marx’s view, are rooted in claims to social and economic equality and only secondarily in claims to political equality. This is why Marx declares, “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development conditioned by it.” The primary goal of Marxism, Jon Elster affirms, is the abolition of class distinctions and the establishment of a communist society in which full and concrete freedom is realized in order to promote the dignity of the human person and social solidarity.

Marx also distinguishes between political liberation and human liberation. Political liberation, in general, aims to guard against and free persons in society from the coercion of others or political repression by the state. Consequently, this form of emancipation guarantees the recognition of political and civil rights. Nonetheless, political freedom does not free or emancipate members of society from the “separated, isolated, individualistic, and egoistic condition of civil society itself,” according to Marx’s interpreters like R.G. Peffer. In order to overcome this problem, Peffer continues, “Marx thus prescribes human emancipation, that is, ‘the emancipation of civil society.’ But a necessary condition for human emancipation is the incorporation of the abstract, moral citizen into the individual as a member of civil society.” This form of solidarity – human emancipation within society – is of the highest importance to Marx and his concept of human community. Moreover, if community is to have meaning and value, it must then combat all forms of alienation and exploitation which are rooted primarily in capitalist designs. In this sense, solidarity, which is a core concept in Marxist theory, promotes the interdependence of people and respect for human rights and dignity.

Human liberation and human dignity also assume religious dimensions. Pope John Paul II recognizes that, even if the idea that “debts must be paid” is relevant/just, it is not right to demand or expect payment when the effect would be the imposition of political choices leading to hunger and despair for entire peoples. It cannot be expected that the debts which have been contracted should be paid at the price of unbearable sacrifices. In such cases, it is necessary to find – as in fact is partly happening – ways to lighten, defer, or even cancel the debt, compatible with the fundamental right of peoples to subsistence and progress. In fact, Catholic theologians, such as Gustavo Gutiérrez and Gerhard Ludwig Müller (currently Cardinal and Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Office of the Inquisition), have argued that Liberation Theology has encompassed this notion of Marxist solidarity and human dignity. Once viewed with suspicion and even hostility by Rome, Müller states, “In my judgment, the ecclesial and theological movement that began after the Second Vatican Council in Latin America under the name ‘liberation theology,’ … is one of the most significant currents of Catholic theology in the 20th century.” Both Gutierrez and Muller argue that the contributions of Liberation Theology to Church teaching, in particular its articulation of the “preferential option for the poor,” provides an ecclesial foundation which is similar to Marx’s notion of solidarity and human dignity.

NY Times Covers Up Washington’s Monstrous Evil

Dave Lindorff

The NY Times on Monday ran a lengthy piece (“One Woman’s Mission to Free Laos from Millions of Unexploded Bombs”) on Channapha Khamvongas, a 42-year-old Laotian-American woman on a mission to get the US to help Laos clean up the countless unexploded anti-personnel “bombis” that it dropped, which are still killing peasants — especially children — half a century after the so-called “Secret War” by the US against Laos ended.

The article explained that Khamvongas, as a young adult in Virginia, had read a book by anti-war activist Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War (originally published in 1972 and reissued in 2013), which featured accounts and hand drawings by refugees from that war of the deadly US aerial attacks and bombings of their farms and villages. It was a book that sparked revulsion in the US over the saturation bombing of Southeast Asia’s smallest and least developed country — a nation of under six million people.

While the Times article mentioned that the secret air war, launched by Lyndon Johnson against Laos in 1964 and continued by Richard Nixon through 1973, was “one of the most intensive air campaigns in the history of warfare,” and that it had made Laos, a country the size of Great Britain with a population of only a few million peasants, into “one of the most heavily bombed places on earth.” What it did not make clear was that this bombing and strafing campaign, which Branfman’s research showed was so intense that US jets were even killing individual water buffalo, and so continuous that any Lao person, including children, who dared to venture out from underground shelters during the daytime, was targeted.

Instead, Times reporter Thomas Fuller simply parrots the official US line about the Laos air war, which was kept secret from the American public at the time, writing that the campaign’s “targets were North Vietnamese troops — especially along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a large part of which passed through Laos — as well as North Vietnam’s Laotian Communist allies,” the Pathet Lao.

This is a patent falsehood.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through Laos but along its lengthy eastern boarder with Vietnam. The bombing of Laos, though, was extensive, covering the whole country, and especially the large region of Northern Laos known as the Plain of Jars — an agricultural region in the center of Northern Laos (named for the many neolithic jars found there) that was so heavily bombed that it resembled the surface of the moon (today the circular craters that dot the place are now mostly ponds and breeding grounds for mosquitos). And the goal of the country-wide bombing campaign, as Branfman’s interviews of its refugee survivors made clear, was to disrupt agriculture and kill anything that moved in the country, in hopes of defeating the Pathet Lao insurgency.

Not once in the article is the term “war crime” mentioned, though clearly what the US did to Laos in its Secret War against the people of Laos was a war crime of almost unrivaled horror. (During the war, the Pathet Lao forces, at their greatest, numbered about 35,000, yet the US bombing is estimated to have killed over 100,000 Laotians, which would be about 1.5 percent of the country’s population. The equivalent today in the US would be if some country bombed and killed 3.2 million Americans.)

Not only was this little country bombed. It was littered with anti-personnel bombs that spread tennis-ball sized shrapnel-producing “bombis,” only some 70% of which exploded as intended. The rest remain buried in the soft earth, where they can explode decades later if struck by a plow, or found by a too curious child.

I visited Laos in 1995 as a journalist, and witnessed the continuing horror of this US war crime. Though the Secret War had ended more than 20 years earlier, I kept seeking young kids hobbling along on crutches, with stump legs, or missing hands, some missing both legs. Asking about this, I was told they had been blown up by bombis left over from the war.

Visiting the US Embassy in Laos, which at the time, at least, featured on a flagpole both the US flag and the black-and-white POW/MIA flag of the right-wing pro-war National League of Families, I asked the Press and Cultural Affairs attache about the plague of left-over bombis in the country, and why the US was doing nothing to help clear them away. He said Congress had blocked any such humanitarian action because of pressure from the National League of Families, which was pushing its absurd claim that Communist Laos, two decades after the war ended, was still secretly holding US POWs and MIAs, and was not accounting for America’s dead. He acknowledged off the record that the whole idea of impoverished Laos still holding US prisoners of war was ridiculous, and agreed that Laos — a heavily jungled and sparsely populated country — had not accounted for many of its own MIAs, much less missing Americans who had died or been killed. But he claimed there was nothing that could be done until that issue was resolved.

Of course there is a second matter. Just as the US has done nothing to help Vietnam clean up the massive amount of bombs and the carcinogenic Agent Orange herbicide that was spread across their land by US forces during the war, and has done nothing to help the post-war victims of US anti-personnel weapons and of Agent Orange in that country, not wanting to admit to its war crimes, it has also been loath to assume responsibility for cleaning up the anti-personnel weapons legacy in Laos for the same reason.

It appears that Ms. Khamvongas and her organization, Legacies of War, are finally having some success now at getting the US to belatedly start providing at least some of that assistance — reportedly about $14 million last year. It’s a drop in the bucket considering some 580,000 bombing missions were flown during the air campaign, dropping 270 million bombs. And nearly a third of that ordinance — an estimated 80 million bombs and bombis — are still out there, unexploded, waiting to be disturbed so they can complete their deadly missions.

Some 20,000 Laotians have been killed by unexploding bombs — 40% of them children — mostly by the fragmentation bombis, subsequent to the end of the war in 1973. Far more have been maimed and permanently injured.

Khamvongas doesn’t talk about blame, and that may be understandable for someone who is simply trying to get the US to pony up the money to help get the job done. (A number of countries that are blameless, including Ireland, Japan, Norway and Switzerland, as well as one that shares some of the blame, Australia, are contributing another $25 million a year to the bomb-removal effort.)

But the fact tht Khamvongas doesn’t want to focus on blame doesn’t excuse the Times from having to be honest about what actually happened to Laos and its people, and about America’s criminality in blanketing the country with anti-personnel weapons whose main victims, by design, were and sadly still are civilians, including a disproportionate number of children.

At a time when the US is running a new kind of air war, one involving the use of attack drones, a war which is reportedly also killing primarily civilians, and which is similarly operating in secret from the American people in numerous countries of the world, it is critical that news organizations like the Times, which are always quick to parrot US government calls for war crimes prosecutions of other countries like Syria, Serbia, ISIS or the breakaway Donbass Republics, also call out the war crimes of the United States.

Silence on such grave matters is not just reprehensible journalism; it is a case of aiding and abetting America’s crimes.

10 Lessons from the Ebola Outbreak

Cesar Chelala

As the Ebola outbreak continues claiming victims , albeit at a reduced rate, it is time to reflect on what we have learned so far in dealing with this serious infection. Although its impact is mainly in a relatively reduced geographical area, the fact that a few cases happened in distant countries increases the potential for an expanded outbreak. So far we have learned that:

1. Health services in some African countries need to be significantly upgraded to manage with a large scale epidemic.

In the course of travels to Africa, I saw first hand how health services in several countries do not respond to people’s basic needs in spite of substantial funds from abroad. In many cases, significantly improved services thanks to help from foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments quickly deteriorate once they leave the country. Both local governments and foreign donors bear responsibility. The issue of “aid effectiveness” has sparked some changes, but they need to be deeper and more widely embraced.

2. Foreign aid should focus on strengthening human resources and entities should closely monitor the spending of funds they donate.

Financial aid is important to improve health services in recipient countries, but always complemented by know-how in order to deal effectively with the most urgent problems affecting people in those countries.

3. Speed of response is critical in controlling an epidemic.

ONE of the factors involved in the initial faulty response to the Ebola epidemic was the belief that this latest outbreak would be contained as were some of previous ones. However, local and the international responses, both from the World Health Organization and industrialized countries, were late and inefficient. Rapid Response Teams, both within or outside the WHO, are critical for this response to be quick and efficient.

4. Special attention to social and cultural factors is critical to prevent the rapid spread of   an epidemic.

In the case of Ebola, poorer communities with the most ineffective social and health services were the most affected. Culturally, long-standing traditions that relatives should clean, dress and bury dead persons, even when they were affected by Ebola, led to the rapid spread of the infection. Safe handling of the remains of Ebola victims is also crucial. A recent study from the U.S. National Institutes of Health showed Ebola can be contracted by people who come into contact with the body of someone who died from the disease up to a week before, a longer period of time than was previously believed.

5. Medical and paramedical personnel who could be in contact with infected        persons should be provided with adequate personal protective equipment.

Lives which could have been SAVED with adequate protection were lost because of the lack of it. Protective equipment should be used as soon as a causal infectious agent has been identified or merely suspected.

6. Ebola is an ongoing threat.

So far, Ebola has affected nearly 24,000 people and killed almost 10,000, according to WHO statistics. Although the number of cases has leveled off, it is important to emphasize that Ebola is still a serious health threat. Contacts should continue to be traced and new cases and contacts rapidly identified. There is no room for complacency.

7. Education is an indispensable ally in the fight against Ebola.

Education STARTING at the community level all the way to health care workers is indispensable in stopping the spread of Ebola. Facts about its detection and handling infected contacts as well as the importance of prompt treatment should be clearly understood by all, and appropriate precautions taken.

8. Local doctors and health workers should be involved from the beginning and their opinions taken into consideration.

Ebola STARTS as a local disease, and local doctors and health workers are better prepared than foreign doctors to deal both with local customs and traditions and with the fears among the population. The best way to approach Ebola is through the common efforts of local doctors and foreign experts.

9. Ebola survivors may also need treatment for other health conditions.

Increasing reports among Ebola survivors point to a wide array of health problems such as impaired vision, musculoskeletal problems, fatigue and chronic pain. Eye problems top the list of complaints. These conditions, which some physicians are calling the “post-Ebola syndrome,” need further research, according to WHO.

 

10. Ebola is not necessarily a fatal disease.

According to WHO statistics, 24,000 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have contracted Ebola since late December 2013, with a few isolated cases in other countries. More than 14,000 are survivors, which indicates that with appropriate care the disease isn’t necessarily fatal, a sign of hope in a dramatic scenario.

“The Whole Town Cried”

Gregory Elich

It was 1999, shortly after the NATO war. I was with a delegation that came to Yugoslavia to document NATO war crimes, and we found no shortage of them. In all of the towns and cities we visited, not one had been spared destruction.

One of our stops was at Aleksinac, a small mining town that NATO had targeted with a special ferocity. The town was led by a strong socialist local government, which may not have been entirely unrelated to NATO’s attentions. Local officials provided us with statistics that were startling for such a small town: 767 houses and 908 apartment flats were destroyed or damaged, as were 302 public buildings. Dragoljub Todorovich, a 74-year-old retired teacher, was at the opening meeting. Metal braces encased his left leg, and he walked with crutches. A missile levelled his home in one of the attacks. “I had been told for forty to fifty years that Americans were our friends,” he reflected. “Americans, with Russians, destroyed fascism together. I survived the Second World War. I was a partisan during the war.” Now war had once again visited Todorovich, but this time he nearly hadn’t survived.

Following our meeting, we visited the site of Todorovich’s home. Nothing remained but blasted concrete and bricks strewn about the area. As we stepped through the rubble, the clinking of bricks underfoot wove a counterpoint to his words. “When I regained consciousness, I saw that only a small part of skin connected my leg with my body,” he recalled. Although surgery saved Todorovich’s leg, he would remain crippled for the remainder of his life. During his fourteen-week recovery in the hospital, he was in constant pain and suffered a heart attack. One thought persisted in his bedridden state: “The worst way possible – that was the way America chose.”

We strolled down Dushan Trivunac Street, where on April 5 of that year, NATO warplanes wiped out nearly an entire city block. On the night of the attack, Vukoman Djokich heard NATO planes swoop overhead. Djokich knew what the sound meant, and warned his wife, “It’s Aleksinac’s turn now. They are surely going to bomb us.” The sound of planes faded, but two minutes later the noise returned. An instant later an explosion thundered, and Djokich saw a “blazing light.” A second explosion followed in quick succession, filling the house with light and knocking Djokich off his chair. The door to his home blew down, and the roof collapsed. Djokich and his wife managed to pull themselves together and escape through the doorway, where they were confronted by the sight of “huge fire, smoke and a cloud of dust. People were screaming and crying for help.”

Damaged home adjacent to destroyed neighborhood on Vuk Karadzhich Street.  Photo: Gregory Elich.

Despite the destruction this site had suffered, all of the rubble had been cleared by the time of our visit and it was now a construction site. Neatly stacked bricks and building materials bordered the area, and a dump truck and towering crane stood ready as workers were just departing for lunch. The only sign of the tragedy that had taken place was a neighboring apartment building, still pockmarked by shrapnel from the blasts. Further down the street, at the site of another explosion, the foundation of a new building was already being laid.

Turning down Vuk Karadzhich Street, we entered an appealing neighborhood of two-story homes with red tile roofs and balconies lined with flowers. At the end of the street, we came to a residential area had been bombed on April 5. In a deposition taken two weeks after the attack, Srboljub Stojanovich described the attack. “There was a terrific explosion. The windowpanes burst, the ceiling fell down on us, and the walls collapsed and practically buried us. After that, I could only hear the screams and cries of my family members. My whole body was injured.” He and his family managed to dig their way out from under the rubble, but a ghastly sight awaited them. “There were heaps of various construction material, glass, destroyed vehicles, and people coming out and trying to help those who were buried. I could hear cries for help, crying, screams, calls, and all this was horrific.”

Thirteen-year-old Dushan Miletich was at home with his brother and parents when NATO planes began to bomb the town. “I remember a terrible explosion, the electricity went off, and then the ceiling, pieces of glass and wood came down on us,” he told investigators. “I was injured by this; especially my head, and I could feel the blood trickling down. My parents somehow managed to pull us out through the house window.” The force of the blast threw his father, Slavimir, against the wall. “Immediately after that,” Slavimir reported, “I felt I was hit on the head by an object, which made me fall to the ground. I felt blood gushing down my face. I stood up and went to the room where my wife was with my two sons, and from where I could hear crying and screams.” After their escape through the window, “We ran through smoke and dust, jumping over beams, glass, smashed tiles and bricks. I heard weeping, sobbing and cries for help. There was a family with a baby in the street, seeking shelter.” Slavmir’s wife, Verica, recalled, “The streets were jammed with people who cried.”

As soon as Vukica Miladinovich heard NATO warplanes “flying at an extremely low level making a great noise,” she and her family raced to the basement and closed the door. “Immediately after that, two detonations were heard. I had the impression that my body would burst at that moment. At such moments, people lose their minds. The room was shaking like in the worst and strongest earthquake. I stood next to my bed. Air pressure threw me away, but when falling down I still managed to cover my children with my right hand and press them to the bed. The room was in darkness, covered with smoke and dust. The door which was flung out of its frame hit my father-in-law.” Vukica’s eyeglasses shattered in the blast, damaging her eye. “I wiped the blood pouring from my eye. I became afraid that I had lost my sight, but soon after, although it was dark, I started recognizing shadows. I thought that fire would break out. The basement was stuffy, and there was little air. We were suffocating.” She called out to her children and managed to locate them in the darkness. “A bed bar was stuck in my son Marko’s leg, but he managed to take it out by himself. I knew that my father-in-law and sister-in-law were dead, and my mother-in-law was hurt. I could not afford to lose any more time.” Vukica began frantically digging with her bare hands and legs, trying to open a passageway through all the piled rubble. Then the house began to collapse around her, with debris falling everywhere, but she managed to clear the way and rescue her children and mother-in-law.

Her husband, Bratislav, was away from home when the missiles struck. Arriving on the scene, he was informed of what had happened to his family. His mother was to die in the hospital two days later. The loss of his parents and sister was so devastating to Bratislav that he considered committing suicide.

Danijela Dimitrijevich, president of the Socialist Youth in Aleksinac, acted as our translator and guide. She told us that she had frequent nightmares of hearing an air raid siren, which caused her to awake, thinking the town was going to be bombed. Dimitrijevich described the reaction when she arrived in town for work the morning after the attack. “Everyone was in a big shock. It was unbelievable to us. I didn’t expect to see this. I cried. It was the only possible feeling for me at that moment. Not just me. The whole town cried. The whole town.”

Everyone in Zago Militich’s family was wounded in the attack. She wept as she told us, “We have been friends [with Americans] until now. This is something none of us expected. We always thought they were our friends. I am 65-years-old, and now I must think about finding a new home.”

Damaged home near bombed neighborhood of Nishka and Uzhichka Streets. Photo: Gregory Elich.

Photographs of the neighborhood from the day after the bombing showed a staggering level of destruction. Like other sites in Aleksinac, this neighborhood had been largely cleared of rubble by the time of our visit. A power shovel had scooped out most of the debris, and the ground was freshly dug. Adjoining the area, there was a house that had lost most of its roof. Shrapnel had sprayed two apartment buildings near the area, leaving dozens of gaping holes and twisted windows. No sign remained of the destroyed houses except a lone wall with a stairway leading nowhere.

Dragoslav Milenkovich’s home was in one of the damaged apartment buildings. “Everything was shaking, breaking apart. No one knew where it would fall,” he told us. “Large shrapnel smashed through the wall, and everything was on fire.” Milenkovich lost everything he owned. With nowhere else to go, he was staying as a guest in a neighbor’s home.

Angrokolonijal, a food processing plant, was also targeted by NATO on the night of April 5, killing a night watchman. We found the main storage building locked and no one present. Peering through a hole, we saw a devastated interior. The registration office near the gate was a ruin. Across the street, most of the roof was torn away from the Commercial Department auxiliary building. A fence, twisted and bent from the heat of the blast, prevented us from going inside. Based on what we were able to view from one end of the building, we assumed that the interior damage was extensive. By the time of our visit, construction inspectors had already determined that all of these buildings would have to be torn down.

In the next lot was Empa, a worker cooperative that manufactured streetlights and lights for factories and homes. On the periphery of the blast radius at Angrokolonijal on April 5, it would later become a direct target, sustaining more than $300,000 in damage. The plant’s director, Slobodan Todorovich, told us that the attack killed one worker and wounded another. During the war, air raid sirens in the town sounded almost daily, he said, and workers stayed at their posts during the bombardment as a show of resistance to NATO. Empa was hit in the last of NATO’s three assaults on Aleksinac. That attack took place in the early morning of May 28, when NATO warplanes fired 21 missiles into the town.

The neighborhood of Nishka and Uzhichka Streets was one of the targets in that last attack. The walls of many brick homes stood eerily erect, but the roofs were gone and the interiors empty. One house appeared to have taken a direct hit. Only a portion of a few walls were still standing, surrounded by piles of rubble. Someone had placed a memorial to one of the victims on a wall. We saw these remembrances everywhere we went in Yugoslavia, posted at the sites where victims had been killed. Single sheets of paper or cloth, posted on walls, trees or telephone poles, displaying a photograph and name of the person killed along with comments. The victims were not forgotten. In a communal society, every person killed was seen as a loss for the whole community.

One woman approached us and spoke of those who died. “When we saw that everything was destroyed, we were crying. We saw that our neighbors were dead and we were shocked.” One of those who NATO killed was Dushanka Savich, a technical manager in the local confectionary factory that had sustained severe damage in one of the bombing raids. “She was a very good neighbor,” the woman told us. “She regretted that she never had children.” I could not help dwelling upon this woman with her failed dream of parenthood. What other dreams did she harbor that now would never be realized? How could she have known that all of her dreams would vanish in an instant, along with her life and all of its joys and struggles and everyday pleasures? Our witness had a message for U.S. President Bill Clinton: “I am not guilty, and my children are not guilty.”

Another woman spoke of a man named Predrag Nedeljkovovich, killed when an explosion caused a wall to fall on him. He built his home in Aleksinac only the year before. “No mother will ever again give birth to such a man,” she said. “He worked very hard in the hospital to help people. He was a man of very good disposition, and he was not ashamed to do anything. He did everything, from cleaning to managing the hospital. He always had time to talk with people, also with sick people. He was not arrogant.” He was a man of kind and gentle disposition, and now he was gone. This woman felt nothing but bitterness towards Western leaders. “We came out of hell but they will not.” There was a pause, and then the emotions welled up within her. “Predrag is here in my heart,” she whispered as she lightly touched the center of her chest. A painful silence fell, and then she burst into tears.

How America Became an Oligarchy

Ellen Brown

“The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. . . . You have owners.”

— George Carlin, The American Dream

According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.

“Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?

The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the doctrine that “all men are created equal” – that all people have “certain inalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – is an American original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but the voters’ collective will no longer prevails.

In Greece, the left-wing populist Syriza Party came out of nowhere to take the presidential election by storm; and in Spain, the populist Podemos Party appears poised to do the same. But for over a century, no third-party candidate has had any chance of winning a US presidential election. We have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is between two candidates, both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age.

In state and local elections, third party candidates have sometimes won. In a modest-sized city, candidates can actually influence the vote by going door to door, passing out flyers and bumper stickers, giving local presentations, and getting on local radio and TV. But in a national election, those efforts are easily trumped by the mass media. And local governments too are beholden to big money.

When governments of any size need to borrow money, the megabanks in a position to supply it can generally dictate the terms. Even in Greece, where the populist Syriza Party managed to prevail in January, the anti-austerity platform of the new government is being throttled by the moneylenders who have the government in a chokehold.

How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten too big to be governed by majority vote?

Democracy’s Rise and Fall

The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called “The Collapse of Democratic Nation States” by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments:

The influence of money was greatly enhanced by the emergence of private banking. The banks are able to create money and so to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth. This control of money-creation . . . has given banks overwhelming control over human affairs. In the United States, Wall Street makes most of the truly important decisions that are directly attributed to Washington.

Today the vast majority of the money supply in Western countries is created by private bankers. That tradition goes back to the 17^th century, when the privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England’s money after Parliament stripped that power from the Crown. When King William needed money to fight a war, he had to borrow. The government as borrower then became servant of the lender.

In America, however, the colonists defied the Bank of England and issued their own paper scrip; and they thrived. When King George forbade that practice, the colonists rebelled.

They won the Revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold.

This was the system euphemistically called “fractional reserve” banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the banks’ privately-issued notes was actually held in their vaults. These notes were lent at interest, putting citizens and the government in debt to bankers who created the notes with a printing press. It was something the government could have done itself debt-free, and the American colonies had done with great success until England went to war to stop them.

President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists’ paper money system when he issued the Treasury notes called “Greenbacks” that helped the Union win the Civil War. But Lincoln was assassinated, and the Greenback issues were discontinued.

In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.

The Populist movement of the 1890s represented the last serious challenge to the bankers’ monopoly over the right to create the nation’s money. According to monetary historian Murray Rothbard, politics after the turn of the century became a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties sometimes changed hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players.

In All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nomi Prins names six banking giants and associated banking families that have dominated politics for over a century. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks.

Democracy Succumbs to Globalization

In an earlier era, notes Dr. Cobb, wealthy landowners were able to control democracies by restricting government participation to the propertied class. When those restrictions were removed, big money controlled elections by other means:

First, running for office became expensive, so that those who seek office require wealthy sponsors to whom they are then beholden. Second, the great majority of voters have little independent knowledge of those for whom they vote or of the issues to be dealt with. Their judgments are, accordingly, dependent on what they learn from the mass media. These media, in turn, are controlled by moneyed interests.

Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then enabled those other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government.

The final blow to democracy, says Dr. Cobb, was “globalization” – an expanding global market that overrides national interests:

[T]oday’s global economy is fully transnational. The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments. . . . Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not.

The most glaring example today is the secret twelve-country trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If it goes through, the TPP will dramatically expand the power of multinational corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge and supersede domestic laws, including environmental, labor, health and other protections.

Looking at Alternatives

Some critics ask whether our system of making decisions by a mass popular vote easily manipulated by the paid-for media is the most effective way of governing on behalf of the people. In an interesting Ted Talk, political scientist Eric Li makes a compelling case for the system of “meritocracy” that has been quite successful in China.

In America Beyond Capitalism, Prof. Gar Alperovitz argues that the US is simply too big to operate as a democracy at the national level. Excluding Canada and Australia, which have large empty landmasses, the United States is larger geographically than all the other advanced industrial countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) combined. He proposes what he calls “The Pluralist Commonwealth”: a system anchored in the reconstruction of communities and the democratization of wealth. It involves plural forms of cooperative and common ownership beginning with decentralization and moving to higher levels of regional and national coordination when necessary.

Dr. Alperovitz is co-founder of an initiative called The Next System Project, aimed at defining the issues in a national political debate as a first step to realizing the possible. He quotes Prof. Donald Livingston, who asked in 2002:

What value is there in continuing to prop up a union of this monstrous size? . . . [T]here are ample resources in the American federal tradition to justify states’ and local communities’ recalling, out of their own sovereignty, powers they have allowed the central government to usurp.

Taking Back Our Power

If governments are recalling their sovereign powers, they might start with the power to create money, which was usurped by private interests while the people were asleep at the wheel. State and local governments are not allowed to print their own currencies; but they can own banks, and all depository banks create money when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged.

The federal government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as Abraham Lincoln did. Alternatively, it could issue some very large denomination coins as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks.

The freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom – the freedom to work and to have food, shelter, education, medical care and a decent retirement. President Franklin Roosevelt maintained that we need an Economic Bill of Rights. If our elected representatives were not beholden to the moneylenders, they might be able both to pass such a bill and to come up with the money to fund it.

New Research Links Neonicotinoid Pesticides to Monarch Butterfly Declines

Jonathan Latham

USDA researchers have identified the neonicotinoid insecticide clothianidin as a likely contributor to monarch butterfly declines in North America. The USDA research is published in the journal Science of Nature and was published online on April 3rd (Pecenka and Lundgren 2015.

Monarch butterfly populations (Danaus Plexippus) have declined precipitously in North America in the last twenty years. This decline has commonly been linked to loss of milkweeds (Asclepias species) from farmer’s fields. Monarch caterpillars are dependent on milkweeds. The ability of farmers to kill them with the Monsanto herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) has therefore led to this herbicide being considered as a major contributor to the decline of the monarch butterfly.

However, industrial farming methods include other known or potential causes of monarch disappearances. One of these is the known toxicity of Bt insecticides found in GMO crops. For instance, in 2006 pollen from Syngenta’s BT176 corn (no longer on the US market) was shown to have a lethal dose of 14 pollen grains towards caterpillars of European Swallowtail butterflies. Pollen from GMO crops falls on the milkweeds where monarchs feed and individual maize plants produce millions of pollen grains.

Neonicotinoids have been strongly implicated in pollinator declines worldwide. As shown by a report from a task force of the International Union of Nature Conservation based in Switzerland. Neonicotinoids, such as clothianidin (Bayer), are a particular hazard because, unlike most pesticides, they are soluble molecules. From soil or seed treatments they can reach nectar and are found in pollen. Neonicotinoids are now the most widely used pesticides in the world (Goulson 2013). Up to now there has been negligible research on the effects of neonicotinoids on butterflies and this new research is therefore the first to link neonicotinoids to the survival and reproduction of any butterfly.

In their experiments the USDA researchers showed that clothianidin can have effects on monarch caterpillars at doses as low as 1 part per billion. The effects seen in their experiments were on caterpillar size, caterpillar weight, and caterpillar survival. The lethal dose (LC50) they found to be 15 parts per billion. The caterpillars in their experiments were exposed to clothianidin-treated food for only 36hrs, however. The researchers therefore noted that in agricultural environments caterpillar exposure would likely be greater than in their experiments. Furthermore, that butterfly caterpillars would be exposed in nature to other pesticides, including other neonicotinoids.

In sampling experiments from agricultural areas in South Dakota the researchers found that milkweeds had on average over 1ppb clothianidin.

On this basis the USDA researchers concluded that “neonicotinoids could negatively affect larval monarch populations.”

This new report is therefore the first to link neonicotinoids to monarch butterfly survival and reproduction. Neonicotinoids are neurotoxins that are partially banned in the EU.

“These results are very worrisome, but it is also crucial not to get lost in the specifics of chemical toxicology and individual species declines” says Allison Wilson, Science Director of the Bioscience Resource Project, a non-profit public interest science organization. “Industrial agriculture is a lethal combination of methods that is causing the extinction of thousands of species worldwide. It is affecting birds, amphibians, bats and other pollinators besides butterflies. Many ecosystems are staring down the barrel.”

“”The saddest irony is that, though industrial agriculture experts call their methods ‘scientific’, using toxins to kill pests runs contrary to all biological understanding, including the sciences of ecology, of evolution, and of complex systems. The proof of this is that the very best results in all of agriculture come from farming methods that reject all industrial inputs. Agribusiness would very much like that not to be known.”

“The best news is that there is a simple way to transfer to sustainable agricultural methods: remove the subsidies for industrial farming.”

America’s Safari to Nowhere

Michael Brenner

Every Soul is captive

Of its own Deeds

– Qur’an  74:38

From late 2007 through 2010, the United States and its Israeli partner ruled the roost in the Middle East. It was the best of all worlds – for them. With that construct now shattered, they are trying desperately to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. Sadly for them, their only tools are gorilla glue and prayer beads. Moreover, they are laboring without architectural design or engineering blueprints.

Let’s look back at that earlier structure so as to identify its sustaining features. That will serve as a point of reference for understanding why it collapsed with what implications for the hoped-for reconstruction. A main element was the clearing of the site of potential threats to American-Israeli dominance. Saddam Hussein, as leader of the Arab “rejection” bloc, had been violently removed from the scene and his regime uprooted. Al-Qaeda was hanging on by its fingertips in the high ridges of the Hindu Kush unable to strike any serious blows at America or its friends. The Palestinians had been neutered. Abba’s PLO had been coopted through seduction and intimidation to the point where it was little more than a Quisling auxiliary to Israeli occupational rule. Hamas in the Gaza was thoroughly isolated physically and diplomatically while subject to periodic muggings by the IDF which served to remind them who ran the ‘hood.  The mullahs’ Iran had been ostracized by the world community thanks to some deft American diplomacy that turned the equivalent of a traffic misdemeanor into a grievous felony which allowed for the infliction of punishing sanctions.

As to Iraq, the chaotic conditions created by the American invasion and occupation that was marked by bloody sectarian violence seemed to have calmed enough to encourage hopes in ever optimistic Washington that the country would gain a measure of stability – under American guidance. Officials looked forward to maintaining a dominant influence via a somewhat pliable al-Maliki, ‘advisers’ placed in key positions of the civilian and military establishments, and a Status of Forces Agreement intended to keep in place a considerable mix of Special Forces, airbases, and trainers.

Meanwhile, the tacit coalition committed to enforcing the status quo across the Middle East was intact. It joined the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf dependents, Egypt and Jordan in a modern day counterpart to the Concert of Europe.

It was not to be. First, the Arab Spring shook the flimsy structure to its foundations. Then, the counter-revolution restored or strengthened authoritarian elites who redoubled political oppression. These measures had the effects of further estranging religious minorities who were a particular object of repression, elevating threat perceptions in Sunni governments to paranoid levels with attendant aggravation of relations with Shi’ite Iran, and opening new opportunities for the Israelis to meddle in ensuing civil wars (Syria) and to crack down even more severely on the Palestinians. As for the Democratic elements who made the Arab Spring, they have been relegated to the margins of history except for the attention lavished on them by foundations and the writers of doctoral dissertations. (Tunisia being the one, outstanding exception).  An ancillary effect has been a residue of bitterness and suspicion in those Arab capitals about the United States which is criticized for having duplicitously undermined their friends in their naïve fondness for democracy promotion. Those suspicions are reinforced by anxieties over the prospect of an American modus vivendi with Iran which increasingly has come to be seen as a mortal sectarian and political enemy.

The degeneration of Syria into a multi-party civil war has added greatly to the disarray. It also has highlighted the intellectual disarray within the Obama administration. Officials in Washington face a crisis wherein they have no friends and steadily declining influence. American policy has been reduced to a patchwork of ad hoc measures which do not amount to a viable strategy; indeed, they do not amount to a strategy at all. The sudden and surprising (to Washington) emergence of ISIL has created multiple new dilemmas for America while exacerbating old ones. The spillover from Syria into Iraq in particular exposes the illusory basis of the official line about a stable, friendly government in Baghdad. There, the conundrum of what to do about ISIL casts a disturbingly stark light on the contradictions built into the American position.

The United States has no solid partners in the fight against ISIL.  Iraq’s shi’ite government desperately wants military help while assiduously avoiding doing anything that might alienate the Iranians who are their closest allies and whose military assistance is crucial. Washington in turn refuses to acknowledge that it has common interests with Iran and pursues the childish course of making believe that the Iranians and the Iraqi shi’ite militias they sponsor don’t count.  Last week’s airstrikes on Tikrit showed the full extent of this fecklessness. Obama tried to leverage the al-Abbadi government’s request for the strikes into a demand that the Shi’ite militias (and their Iranian advisers) distance themselves from the battle so that Washington could capture all the glory of victory. They overlooked the awkward fact that the small contingents of the Iraqi regular army involved never could take the city on their own even after it were pulverized by the Americans. The blackmail attempt failed. Most significant, it demonstrated that Washington still lives in a fantasy world – with visions dancing in their heads of the phantom Petraeus army which dissolved into nothingness almost a year ago outside of Mosul.

At the strategic level, the overriding reality is that the U.S. and Iran are tacit allies by dint of circumstances, e.g. they have a common, dangerous enemy. Any attempt to replace that truth with a juvenile spitting contest means failure. Moreover, in the long-run, Iran of course will have the dominant external influence in Baghdad. If Washington doesn’t know that, then a drastic redeployment of personnel at the highest levels is in order. Buying into the Israeli and Saudis self-serving idea that Iran is the Islamic Great Satan – as John Brennan and others have stated bluntly – is a testament to abiding ignorance and strategic obtuseness.  The Obama people seem to believe that it better serves us to oppose Iran at every turn than to improve our chances of defeating ISIL, of securing the Baghdad government, and of reaching some modus vivendi with the IRI which could bear fruit in several other places where we’re in a jam.

Nobody else in the region is ready to jump into the fight against ISIL with badly needed ground troops either.  The Saudis play their usual game of holding our coats while singing choruses of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”  They take absolutely no responsibility for the critical support that the KSA and some of its citizens have given to ISIL and associated jihadists groups. The same for the Gulfies. Furthermore, we seem to get nothing in return from the KSA for our unstinting backing – more energetic efforts to cut off funding to ISIL, less promotion of virile Wahhabi doctrine in the Islamic world, more restraint in trying to undermine the nuclear talks with Iran?

As to the other Sunni states, King Abdullah of Jordan is too scared about imperiling his rule at home to get mixed up in actual combat against ISIL. Same for Egypt.  All of them prefer shooting Houthis in Yemen (the dreaded shia) who do not endanger them directly rather than fighting ISIL which does. Turkey, too, is playing the same double-faced game as Erdogan excites himself with visions of a reinvigorated Caliphate adorned with a red fez.

Then there is Israel. Bibi Netanyahu has been launching an audacious campaign to hijack American Middle East policy. To date, he has been unable to instigate a war against Iran – his priority. Still, his outrageous personal foray into American partisan politics succeeded in fusing domestic and external forces into a powerful bloc that has crimped the administration’s flexibility in dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue and attendant matters. Israeli pressure no longer is just a matter of Palestine. It is the Netanyahu government’s vision of a safe (i.e. no challenge to Israel) region that drives Israel’s scheming to to produce a confrontation with Iran, for unseating Assad in Damascus even if it opens the door to ISIl et al, to weakening Baghdad’s Iran-allied Iraqi government, for intensifying and spreading the emerging Sunni-Shi’ite civil war within the Islamic world.  The United States Congress, the overwhelming majority of the MSM and the commentariat have bought into this Israeli way of thinking. Some do so out of a dedication to Israel’s self-defined national interest, some do so because they believe in a coincidence of Israeli and American interest, some because it’s the political fashion, some to get reelected. The White House long refused to acknowledge these realities. Even in the wake of the Israeli orchestrated mutiny against Obama in Congress, his response has been tempered as he follows his standard course of conflict avoidance, conciliation and placatory gestures.

This timidity owes in part to the administration’s own attitude toward the myriad Middle Eastern problems.  The diverse bits and pieces of policy represent the tactical thinking of the President and his senior advisers who cope without an overall conception of what they are doing.  That void seems to have been filled by absorbing the essence of the Israeli and Saudi world views through a strange process of osmosis. To call the result a strategy would be an unjustified compliment.  The United States today has no strategy.  It has an orientation – one that is suffused by a nostalgia for what used to be. They are not the same thing. That leads to overall incoherence and misjudgments on specific issues. Thus, the White House fights in parallel with Iran against ISIL in Iraq while every other day some high official or other inveighs against Iranian influence there. Thus, the White House denounces the Houthis in Yemen as an enemy, going so far as aiding in tangible ways the Saudi led assault on their neighbor, even though the Houthis are bitter enemies of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular while the Saudis vacillate. Thus, the United States is sleep-walking into the trap of taking sides in Islam’s civil war that goes back 1,300 years.

No Houthi has attacked or killed Americans – except rhetorically. They are known for their practical bent, not their Islamic fundamentalism. Americans are incapable of accepting that our stomping around the region killing and offending many “folks” (to use Obama’s down-home term) makes some of them angry enough to call Uncle Sam the political equivalent of ‘bastard” or “SOB.” A grown-up power does not take name-calling as the basis for making strategic judgments.

Thereby, we raise serious questions whether we have the skills and probity of judgment to handle the responsibilities that we have assumed throughout the Greater Middle East – and worldwide.

The United States is heading over a cliff in the Middle East.  The impending crack-up, though, evokes no serious debate about the thinking and methods that have led us there. Instead, the only criticism solicited or heard is from the John McCains and Lindsey Grahams who have perfect records of being wrong on everything since 2001. The foreseeable accident is due to driving a vehicle with faulty steering at breakneck speed on a treacherous stretch of road. Their advice: we should go faster. No nation, however strong, can overcome that level of … [fill in the blank].