The Nature of Foxes

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 13, 2024 5:34 pm

Bad Samaritans in Foreign Aid
Posted on November 13, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This is an elegant and persuasive analysis that shows how foreign aid donations reflect donor state self-interest. It would be nice, but also a lot to ask, to see how US aid correlates with our military presence in various recipient states. Israel alone tends to prove out that assumption but it would be useful to see how well that relationship holds elsewhere.

By Rabah Arezki, Senior Fellow Foundation for studies and Research on International Development (FERDI); Director of Research French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS); Senior Fellow Harvard Kennedy School; Youssouf Camara; Frederick Van Der Ploeg, Professor of Economics University of Oxford; and Grégoire Rota-Graziosi. Originally published at VoxEU

Critics of foreign aid are often quick to point out the faults of recipient countries. This column looks at the motives of the donor countries themselves. Examining the flow of foreign aid following major discoveries of natural resources, the authors find that aid flows tend to increase following a discovery despite the recipient country becoming wealthier. The finding suggests that donor countries are not entirely altruistic, but prioritise access to valuable natural resources and their strategic interests above recipient need.

Critics of foreign aid often focus on deficiencies in recipient countries. In this column, we explore whether foreign aid from donor countries is self-interested. We provide empirical evidence that recipient countries that experience major natural resource discoveries receive more, not less, bilateral aid (all else equal). This is a paradox, considering that major discoveries are associated with an effective relaxation of international borrowing constraints. Given the role of critical minerals in the energy transition, foreign aid is likely to continue be used to further the interest of major powers at the expense of poorer countries.

Critics of foreign aid often focus on deficiencies in recipient countries and related aid ineffectiveness (Bauer 1972, Easterly 2003, Edwards 2014, Frot et al. 2012, Fuchs et al. 2012, Galiani et al. 2016, Lohmann et al. 2015). The criticism is especially salient in the case of bilateral aid as donors stand to benefit from a potential quid pro quo with recipients. This quid pro quo may centre around access to markets, but perhaps more importantly, also around access to natural resources in developing countries. Indeed, developing countries are less industrialised and tend to consume fewer natural resources than they produce. That situation lends itself to influence over these resources by foreign economic powers given (known) reserves. Yet, there has been little systematic analytical or empirical exploration of whether foreign aid donors pursue their own self-interests when giving aid (Fuchs et al. 2012).

Throughout the 19th century, Western European powers competed to secure access to natural resources such as cotton, copper, iron, and rubber, which were critical for their industries. These colonial enterprises were undertaken through coercion and military might. In the modern era, a new race between major economic powers to secure critical resources for their industries is at play. The race between these economic powers is especially acute nowadays given the two main technological transformations taking place today, namely, decarbonisation and digitalisation. To dominate the new industries emanating from these transformations, it has become vital for major powers to secure access to critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and rare earth.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is rich in mineral resources. It has the world’s largest reserves of cobalt, a critical component for batteries in electric vehicles, and is responsible for 68% of the world’s production. It is no surprise that DRC has become the darling of major economic powers such as China, the US, and the EU. The latter are simultaneously committing to foreign aid and signing major mineral contracts. Other anecdotal evidence of the concomitance between foreign aid and natural resource abundance plays out in Guyana, Mozambique, Mongolia, Namibia, and Papua New Guinea. Rather than using coercion, as was the case in the 19th century, bilateral foreign aid can be viewed as ‘greasing the wheels’ for the signing of lucrative mining contracts – for exploration, extraction, and ultimately trade flows. In other words, traditional donors as well as non-traditional donors such as China are in a contest to secure natural resources located in developing countries by granting aid.

Identifying Self-Interest of Donors

In a recent paper (Arezki et al. 2024), we explore more systematically whether foreign aid is self-interested. To identify elements of a self-interest motive in donors’ decision to allocate foreign aid, we exploit the timing and size of major discoveries which can be argued to be plausibly exogenous (see Figure 1). Major mineral discoveries are salient shocks: the median discovery is 29.81% of GDP. Such discoveries are also frequent and widespread: over the past decades, there have been hundreds of discoveries of mineral (and hydrocarbon) resources all around the world including South Asia, Latin America and most notably sub-Saharan African countries.

Figure 1 Mineral discoveries have become a salient feature in the developing countries
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Source: MINEX

A consequence of a major discovery is an immediate increase in (known) wealth. In this way, the discovery raises the value of the collateral countries could use to borrow internationally, alleviating potential external borrowing constraints – even before the resource is effectively extracted. Considering the above, countries experiencing major discoveries should receive less rather than more foreign aid.

Consider a mental experiment where donors are given the choice to provide aid to two otherwise identical countries that differ only along one dimension, namely, the occurrence of a discovery. The choice of aid allocation should be directed towards the country without a discovery if donors are exclusively ‘altruistic’ (i.e. poverty reduction in recipient countries is their primary objective). If donors are also sufficiently motivated by ‘self-interest’, however, aid may go towards the country which discovered resources. Indeed, self-interested donors attempt to secure access to the newly discovered resources. In a simple two-by-two donor-recipient model with a contest success function, we formalise the intuitions from this mental experiment to analyse the effect resource discovery on foreign aid.

A New Paradox of Foreign Aid and Natural Resources

The paradox we explore is that as developing countries become (relatively) ‘richer’ on account of major discoveries, they tend to receive more rather than less foreign aid. Foreign aid – as defined by the official development assistance as recorded by the Development Assistance Committee – is a drop in the bucket for traditional donor countries, at about $214.4 billion, or 0.37% of their combined gross national income (GNI), in 2023. But foreign aid is a major source of funding for most developing economies. Moreover, exporters of mineral resources such as DRC, Mongolia, and Zambia have remained as recipients aid, with historical peaks reaching 67%, 17% and 57%, respectively, of their GNI (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 Foreign aid remains significant portion of income in developing countries
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Source: OECD (2024).

Our empirical estimates are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model when adding a donor self-interest motive. Our core estimate suggests that following a mineral discovery, recipient countries obtain on average 36% more aid than countries without such a discovery. Results show that recipient countries that discover major resources receive more aid, more quickly, everything else equal. We verify that the grant and not just the loan components of aid increase following a discovery and that the flow of bilateral aid increases more from the country of the nationality of the discoverer. Results are robust to a wide array of checks including accounting for the nature of discovery, the heterogeneity of donors and recipients, and using different estimators.

Consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model, estimates show that after a major mineral discovery, the current account and saving rate decline for the first five years and then rise sharply during the ensuing year. These results suggest that countries experiencing giant discoveries borrow from the rest of the world well before extraction starts. We document that major mineral discoveries lead to a deterioration of the current account implying the country borrows from the rest of the world. Mineral discoveries imply that a country is richer than previously thought and hence tending to relax external borrowing constraints. The increase in foreign aid following major mineral discoveries thus suggest that donors are self-interested.

Conclusion

These results have important policy implications. Although several traditional donors in advanced economies have announced they would limit the amount of foreign aid, it is likely that foreign aid could continue to play a key role in helping securing access to critical minerals. The extraordinary growth in demand for critical minerals is putting upward pressure on prices and stimulating new critical mineral discoveries all around the world. In developing countries, this new bonanza presents opportunities but also important risks (Arezki and van der Ploeg 2024). Absent governance system shifts, the rush for critical minerals risks could create a ‘new curse of critical minerals’. Given the role of these critical minerals in the energy transition, foreign aid is likely to continue be used to further the interest of major power at the expense of poorer countries.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... n-aid.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 18, 2024 3:04 pm

U.S. Foreign Aid Is Embarrassing Itself

Three days ago the President of China Xi Jinping opened a Chinese financed a deep-water port in Chancay, Peru.

LIMA, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping launched a week-long diplomatic blitz of South America on Thursday by inaugurating a massive deep-water port in Peru, a $1.3 billion investment by Beijing as it seeks to expand trade and influence on the continent.
...
Xi and Peruvian President Dina Boluarte participated on Thursday by video link in the opening of the Chancay port, about 80 kilometres (48 miles) north of Lima on the Pacific Ocean, and signed a deal to widen an existing free trade agreement.
Xi said that Chancay, a 15-berth, deep-water port, was the successful start of a "21st century maritime Silk Road" and part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, its modern revival of the ancient Silk Road trading route.


The U.S. is, according to Newsweek, considering Peru to be in its "backyard" (for the record: the distance between Washington DC and Lima, Peru, is 5,700 kilometer):

However, a Chinese state-owned enterprise running a deepwater port so close to U.S. soil has Washington worried. The project marks another significant expansion of China's presence in a part of the world the U.S. considers its sphere of influence.
"On the big geostrategic issues, the Peruvian government is not sufficiently focused on analyzing the benefits and threats to the country," an anonymous U.S. official told the Financial Times late last year.


.U.S. Southern Command chief Army General Laura Richardson characterized China's infrastructure projects across the Caribbean, Central and South America as a security threat. "They're on the 20-yard line, in the red zone to our homeland," Richardson told Newsweek last year, referencing China's closer proximity.

Not to be outdone by China's generous investment the U.S. decided to publicly counter it. A day after Xi opened the port megaproject U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken dropped into Lima:

Secretary Antony Blinken @SecBlinken - 2:28 UTC · Nov 17, 2024
Today we announced that the United States will support the city of Lima in building a new passenger train line that will expand access to reliable and affordable transportation for over 200,000 people every single day.
Embedded video


In his speech Blinken said:

“Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance.” Paul Simon, one of our great poets, wrote that line in one of his songs, and I think it speaks powerfully to each of us. Trains connect people. They bring communities together. They take distances down between us. And they are not just a symbol, but the practical manifestation of possibilities – the possibilities that come when we connect to each other. They’re so much a part of the national mythology of the United States, our own extraordinary construction project. And I’m so grateful today to be part of this project in helping create greater connectivity here in Peru.
And so this is an exciting day in our partnership: The United States will support the City of Lima as it develops the new passenger train line that’s going to connect downtown to the eastern suburbs. The Caltrain rail system in California, as you’ve heard already, will contribute more than a hundred high-quality railcars and engines, and American companies will provide over 50 percent of the services for this project and the supplies for the project, from signaling equipment to railroad tracks to engineering and design expertise.


Caltrain? Why Caltrain?

Caltrain finds international buyer for retired diesel fleet - SFGate

Caltrain is sending its retired diesel fleet to Lima, Peru, where it will have a second chance at life by providing commuter rail service. On Saturday, the U.S. Department of State, Lima representatives and several world leaders will celebrate the next stage for the trains while gathering for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in the Peruvian capital.
...
“These trains have a long and proud legacy of service that we’re proud to pass along to the people of Peru,” Caltrain Board Chair Dev Davis said in a news release. “The F40s hold a special place in the heart of train enthusiasts, and there’s no better task for them than to keep helping people get where they need to go.”
Caltrain received $6.32 million from the deal, which involved selling 90 passenger cars and 19 diesel locomotives. Sam Sargent, Caltrain’s director of strategy and policy, told SFGATE on Friday that there were other buyers interested in the fleet, but the department was drawn to the offer from the Municipality of Lima, Peru, since it wanted to purchase the fleet wholesale.[/i]

The locomotives Caltrain is selling(!) to the city of Lima are 40 years old. As are the passenger cars they will be pulling. The locomotives' exhaust fuming engines had been made inoperable to get funding for the new electric trains:

To send the trains to Lima for further use, Caltrain had to first procure a waiver from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District so the trains could still return to service.

The people in Lima will surely notice how much more the U.S. is caring about its 'backyard' than China is.

Posted by b on November 18, 2024 at 8:08 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/11/u ... .html#more

And some wonder why China is winning...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 11, 2024 3:58 pm

Rob Urie: Politics by Other Means, Health Insurance Industry Edition
Posted on December 10, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Rob Urie takes a step back to place the murder of the UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson in a broader political/economic context. It’s not news that the US health care industry prioritizes profit over care. But most choose to avert their eyes to the fact that the government enables this exploitation of ordinary citizens.

One quibble with Urie’s post. He suggests that employer plans could have even worse claims denial rates than Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid, where private insurers must provide the data on their handling of individual claims. As many business articles have suggested, the reverse is likely to be true. Employer plans have more members and employers have bargaining leverage, in terms of being able to switch insurers or even self insure. IRS rules also make it hard for employers to offer better terms to executives (see here for an idea of the rules). Mind you, that may not wind up being much leverage given the general crapified level of US health insurance, but no one has less leverage than individual consumers.

And an observation now that Luigi Mangione has been charged in Thompson’s murder, and due to his family wealth, seems able to hire the caliber of lawyers that can defend him well: his case is very unlikely to go to trial. The last thing the government and people in power want is a potentially messy trial. They will try hard to get him to cop a plea. And if the pain from his not-very-successful back surgery is ongoing, you can be sure it will be made difficult for him to get his meds to make him more cooperative.

By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack

The assassination of United Health Care executive Brian Thompson has some not-insignificant aggregation of the American public musing that Thompson reaped what he had sown. Without the assassin revealing his motive for the shooting, no motive is attributed here. But there is enough in the public domain regarding insurance companies and insurance claim denial rates by individual companies to organize a political argument around what may have motivated the shooter.

From this dark celebration, a sense is emerging that the assassin was addressing the problems of the age that the American political system is incapable of addressing. American elections operate under the fallacy that the results reflect the will of the people. Ideologues and paid pleaders even attribute ideological motives to the corrupt opportunists who ascend in the American form of political economy. And every story of imminent redemption is soon revealed to be just one more step in the process of imperial decline.

Having rebegun writing publicly soon after the ACA (Obamacare) was passed, my warning at the time was that the keys to the American healthcare kingdom were being handed to a corporate form— the health insurance industry, that would never stop using its economic power to benefit its executives alone. Further, corporate control over our lives is a form of political control. Markets didn’t form the ACA. It was structured as a bribe paid for by the American people to keep Mr. Obama’s party in power.

One of Joe Biden’s key selling points to Democrats in 2020 was his promise to shovel more of the people’s money into the ACA even as Americans were dying at levels associated with societal collapse (details below). And while, this being America, his PMC constituents had little understanding that the society that their ‘lessors’ inhabited had collapsed around them, public expenditures in the name of the ‘little people’ led many of them to believe that they had been absolved for perpetuating this system.

A paradox of capitalism is that public expenditures funneled through corporations act against their alleged intent. Through the benign (liberal) view of the intersection of commerce and government, ‘partners’ in the public and private sectors work together to solve social problems while making bank doing so. The less benign view is that this coalition represents the class interests of our ‘betters’ against us. The role of government in this latter view is to keep us prostrate and powerless so that we can be most effectively preyed upon by ‘private’ interests.

In 2022, the last year that data is currently available for, Andrew Witty, the head of United Health, the parent company of Mr. Thompson’s United Health Care, was the fourth best paid health insurance executive in the US, earning a tad over $22 million. As the data below suggests, the special talent of both Mr. Witty and Mr. Thompson is taking in insurance premiums without paying claims. Using color coding or some such, a chimpanzee could be trained to deny insurance claims. However, America is set up to reward this type of behavior.

The accounting formula P = R – C; where P = Profit, R = Revenue, and C = Cost; explains a lot about the US. With respect to both generating environmental ‘externalities’ and denying insurance claims, costs aren’t being borne by the corporations they belong to. Doing this raises their profits. Profitability in turn boosts the company’s stock price, and with it, executive compensation. Executives then use the gains ‘earned’ from robbing their customers to control political outcomes via political donations; through the Federal revolving door of legislators becoming corporate executives; and through large-scale grifts like the ACA.

In 2009, a de-privatized Medicare for All would have been the rational and just solution to insurer control of the health care system. In contrast to the ideological view that corporate health insurance is more efficient because it is private, Medicare has consistently delivered (and here) better health care at a lower cost than private insurance. The logic that remains tells us that the continuing effort to privatize the American health care system is therefore to loot it.

To the issue of causality, the ACA and declining life expectancy have moved together in time through a decade of changing circumstances. The common root is the political – economic backdrop which features the virtual abandonment of the public health roll historically played by the Federal government. After chiding the first Trump administration for its reluctant response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden administration oversaw the effective dismantling of the very idea of public health in the US. This being America, Biden’s low bar will represent the new high bar.

This story has additional resonance with yours truly because both of my parents had to hire lawyers to get their pensions. Neither had been accused of wrongdoing and both were in good standing with their employers when they retired. Suffice it to say that the situation wouldn’t have ended well for anyone involved had the lawyers not been able to resolve it. The time to tell someone they will not receive their pension is before they labor for 25 – 35 years to earn it. But in my parent’s case, the lawyers worked it out.

The scuttlebutt (internet chatter) is that Brian Thompson had net worth of $43 million dollars when he met his maker. While average household net worth in the US in 2023 was a touch over $1,000,000, median net worth was about one-fifth of this amount, at $193,000. Interpretation is that wealth distribution in the US is radically skewed by a small group of very rich. They are so rich compared to the rest of us that the scale dwarfs what most Americans imagine rich to be.

(Income and wealth in the US are exponentially distributed, meaning that statistical interpretation must be undertaken with awareness of what this entails. An average that is greater than the median is skewed, meaning that the average is unrepresentative of the experience of most people. This makes most averages of income and wealth either intended to overstate the experience of most people, meaning deceptive, or ignorant of economic statistics).

ProPublica revealed in an article from June 2023 that private insurers in the US have no legal obligation to publish their claim denial rates. The exception is insurers in the ACA, Obamacare. And while no authoritative source on the matter was readily found, estimates have it that claim denial rates above 5 – 10%, or 10% by another forum, are signals of possible financial distress and / or fraudulent business practices. With respect to the ACA data, the average claim denial rate has hovered around 18% since 2014, the year the ACA was implemented.


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Graphic: with dates relevant for assessing the effects of the ACA, in 2021, 67.3% of ACA insurers had claim denial rates above 11%. The threshold for legitimacy is 10%. While this is better than the 78.4% of 2015, the year after the ACA was implemented, the difference is mainly attributable to a few outliers, one with a 92.5% claim denial rate. All of the largest insurers in the ACA have claim denial rates that are several multiples of the rate deemed by the industry to be legitimate. Source: kff.org.

In 2021, the last year for which data is available, 67% of Obamacare (ACA) plans had claim denial rates above 11%. Many were in the high thirties – low forties. The highest claim denial rates are concentrated amongst the larger insurers, those insuring the most customers. These tend to feature well-paid executives who have large personal and career incentives to line their own pockets by denying legitimate claims.

Part of the logic of forcing ACA insurers to disclose claim denial rates is that Americans are legally mandated to either have health insurance through their workplace or to buy it through the ACA exchanges. I had to search for the data and perform statistical analyses to understand these claim denial rates. Most people will not do this. The difference between the ten highest and ten lowest claim denial rates amongst ACA providers in 2021 is 41%. Interpretation is that the top ten insurers deny 41% more claims than the bottom ten insurers.

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Graph: discussion of health insurance that isn’t informed by outcomes is of limited value. Since 2014, the year that the ACA was implemented, Life Expectancy at Birth has declined dramatically in the US. The largest decline illustrated is from the Covid-19 pandemic. As horrifying as the absolute number is, the relative number— against peer countries, is even worse. What this indicates is that the American healthcare system is failing, irrespective of the ACA. Source: worldbank.org.

Given that health insurers that sell policies through ACA exchanges know that they will have to disclose their claim denial rates, it seems reasonable to infer that the health insurers who sell policies directly to employers have even higher claim denial rates. According to ProPublica, this is because there is no legal requirement that health insurers outside of the ACA disclose their denial rates. And continuing, it is common practice for insurers to keep claims denial data hidden.

Question: who would willingly buy insurance from a company that denies one-third of the claims it receives? By the health insurance industry’s own metrics, this level of denials is wildly abusive. And it’s a permanent game of Russian Roulette for insurance ‘customers.’ If fortune is with you, the healthcare that you have already paid will be funded. If it isn’t, the rest of your life will be spent bagging groceries to pay for $300 aspirins as excess medical debt renders you unemployable.

Soon after the ACA was passed, Democrats started calling it ‘universal healthcare.’ If it weren’t for the 30% – 40% of claims that don’t get paid because there is no entity with the power to make insurance companies do so, they might have an argument. What is particularly galling about the effort is that the long history of predatory behavior by the insurance industry was available to anyone who cared to look. The idea that ‘market forces’ would discipline the industry had already been disproved by history. This makes its subsequent adoption in the ACA ideological.

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Graph: corporate profits as a percentage of GDP in the US are currently near record levels. This is further evidence of a power imbalance between capital and we, the people. One of the sources of these record profits is health insurers that collect premiums and then refuse to pay claims. Compare this graph with the one immediately above it and it becomes clear that rising corporate profits are correlated with the rapid decline in life expectancy in the US. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

To return to the question of causality for a moment, correlation, or the co-movement of data across time, doesn’t prove causality. The correlation of corporate profits with declining life expectancy is a product of Federal efforts to protect the wealth of the rich when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived. This is phrased the way that it is to convey the point that pandemic funds could in theory have been paid directly to those who were economically displaced by the pandemic. But much of the money went into goosing the stock market instead.

In terms of options, the American powers-that-be offer only self-defeating choices. If all of the large ACA insurers have claim denial rates of 30% – 40% (they do), capitalist ‘choice’ is a fraud. As with Biden v Trump, were a real choice to be offered, the uniparty exists to neuter it. The Democrats could have crafted a system that works. Functioning healthcare systems do exist in other countries. But what they created instead is a system built for looting.

The employees at American corporations who haven’t yet been trained in what not to say sometimes give the game away. The representative of my internet service provider stated openly that his company had colluded with the other providers in the state to eliminate price competition. A former home insurance agent offered that once a claim is paid, the company divides the payout across future premium payments until the company has recouped the payout. This is a description of a payday loan, not insurance. Actual insurance is a risk sharing scheme.

We’re human, runs the logic, therefore we will all face medical emergencies that 1) we cannot predict the timing of and 2) which we cannot afford to pay for individually. By pooling resources, we pay in when we don’t need health care expecting that when we do need it, it will be there. But this isn’t what capitalist corporations are structured to do. They hire MBAs whose job it is to imagine ways to not pay the company’s bills. Straight up screwing their most vulnerable customers is the easiest power play.

The role of capitalism in this American healthcare debacle is important to understand. The ideological argument in favor of the private provision of healthcare is that capitalist enterprises are more ‘efficient’ than government programs because of the profit motive. Missing from this logic is that refusing to deliver purchased goods is a way to cut costs, and thereby increase profits. Changing the terms after the purchase has been made is one way of achieving this end.

On personal experience, through a series of large and small purchases over the last year, every purchase featured the delivery of different terms after the purchase was made than before it was made. I would have decided against making three-quarters of the purchases had the final terms been provided before the purchase was made. Companies know this, hence the deception. One such purchase of musical software will require days of work to remove from my system. This was revealed to me only after the (nonrefundable) purchase had been made.

The point is that this is the capitalist profit motive in action. Before she went full-Hiawatha, Elizabeth Warren called these gotchas ‘tricks and traps,’ The claim / promise that came with the ACA was that the tricks and traps had been eliminated in exchange for the Federal government delivering 45 million new customers to the health insurance industry. But the enforcement mechanism— market discipline, is a fantasy. Health insurers wouldn’t deny 30% – 40% of their claims if they thought that doing so would sink their businesses.

A confusion that plagues capitalist economics lies between the large and intrusive state that is needed to keep capitalism functioning under Neoclassical theory, and the blanket support for existing power that defines neoliberalism. The tendency of capitalist enterprises to behave badly has long been understood by economists. The term used to describe this bad behavior is ‘moral hazard.’ What this means is that when given the opportunity, corporations take it. The purpose of the large and intrusive state then is to assure that these opportunities to behave badly don’t arise.

Beginning in the Jimmy Carter – Ronald Reagan era, the theory was popularized that ‘free markets,’ or markets unencumbered by regulations, would regulate themselves. The theory had it that customers wouldn’t do business with nefarious actors because the are nefarious. To solve this problem, nefarious actors use government to hide their activities. Anti-terrorism laws were passed to protect factory farms from exposure of slaughterhouse conditions. Industrial agriculture was able to get disclosure laws repealed that would have alerted customers that GMO crops are present in their food. And insurance companies are allowed to hide claim denial rates from their customers.

The rationales for doing so were / are paper thin. Slaughterhouse conditions are relevant information for those who eat meat. If cruelty is part of the process, that impacts both the quality of the product and the moral calculus of whether or not to partake in it. And the seed producers unleashed GMO crops outside of sterilized conditions. The first GMO test that I saw (1998) featured GMO corn planted next to non-GMO corn. Cross pollination was the obvious plan.

Soon thereafter the seed companies began suing non-GMO farmers for patent infringement for the cross-pollination that the seed producers had intentionally engineered. Not infecting non-GMO crops via pollination should rightfully have been the burden of the seed company that was introducing the GMO crop. But they are large corporations and the victim-farmers are small enterprises. This is the same type of power relationship that United Health Care has with its ‘customers.’

In contrast to the ideological complaint that government regulations impinge on the ability of corporations and oligarchs to earn profits, the history of the US government has been to support business against the interests of the people since neoliberalism first gained credence beginning in the 1970s. The insurance industry in particular has been given special dispensations that render it immune to market forces. Not only does the ACA force people to buy insurance that is illegitimate on its face because of excessive claim denial rates, but there is no recourse against these fraudulent denials outside of company-run ‘tribunals,’

To the issue of capitalist efficiency, my favorite example is the automated checkout counters installed in stores. Amongst the dozen or so people I’ve spoken with about the matter, all believe that ‘we all’ benefit from this type of innovation. What the machines actually accomplish is to shift the cost of checking out away from the stores and onto its customers. No labor is saved through this practice. It was shifted from the cashiers who were paid to do it onto the customers who aren’t paid to do it. There is nothing ‘efficient’ about the practice.

The regular call amidst the recurring crises of capitalism is for reform. Through the liberal lens, ‘we’re all in this economy together.’ Through a Marxist lens, the use of government by the rich against the rest of us reflects asymmetrical class power. And the shifting of costs from capital and the oligarchs to ‘the little people’ has defined class relations across the current age. The rich and corporations today pay a tiny fraction of costs of their social support. Despite having never voted on the matter, the rest of us have been tasked with making up the difference.

I’ve been wondering when the shooting would start since 2009 or thereabouts. That was when the contours of Barack Obama’s consequence-free bailouts of the bankers who caused the Great Recession was matched against the ‘freeing’ of their victims (from their employment, homes, families, and broader society) to crawl into a ditch and die. But ‘the system’ was saved, right? Since then, finance capitalism gone wild has brought ‘us’ two pointless and murderous wars, a society that is dysfunctional to the point of full-on collapse, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Few among us wish for violence, particularly those of us who have seen it manifested. That is why it would have been socially beneficial had Brian Thompson been hauled out of his office in handcuffs in front of television cameras for his company’s business practices. The problem is that they were / are probably legal. In the American iconography, Thompson is a hero and his killer is a goat. But Thompson likely killed a lot more people than his shooter has. And he appears to have done so without compunction.

The bet here is that the social / government response to the shooting will be increased political repression. Greater efforts will be made to hide corporate malfeasance under the theory that doing so will reduce the risk of further executive assassinations. The result-to-date of this practice has been an explosion in corporate malfeasance that may not be reported in the news, but is being felt in the streets. I personally won’t ever do business again with companies once I have been burnt. But I have fewer needs than most and otherwise just don’t care about consumer culture.

While it’s socially endearing in some circles to argue that the wrecking crew has just arrived, American capitalism has always been run by gangsters. From 2016 – today, American Democrats have defended the American state and its institutions by arguing that any and all criticism comes from nefarious foreign actors and homegrown malcontents. But what they were ultimately defending was Brian Thompson’s right to line his own pockets by refusing to pay insurance claims.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12 ... ition.html

******

Combined wealth of 12 US billionaires passes 2 trillion dollars
December 10, 2024
Ultra-rich use their wealth and power to undermine democracy

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by Omar Ocampo

The collective net worth of America’s top twelve billionaires has surpassed $2 trillion as of December 3.

This is an unsettling new milestone for wealth concentration in the United States. The oligarchic dozen is richer than ever, and they are endowed with extreme material power that can be used to pursue narrow political interests at the expense of democratic majorities.

The collective wealth of this iteration of the oligarchic dozen has increased by more than $1.3 trillion, or 193 percent, since Forbes published its 34th annual list of global billionaires in April 2020.

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There is one newcomer to the moneyed club that we surveyed back in 2020: Jensen Huang. He replaces Walmart heiress Alice Walton. The ascendancy of Huang is noteworthy. As cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, his wealth has skyrocketed from $4.7 billion in 2020 to $122.4 billion — a mind-boggling 2,504 percent increase — over the last four years.

Huang’s surging wealth is directly tied to the hype surrounding artificial intelligence. The demand from Big Tech for Nvidia’s semiconductor chips to power AI has pushed the company’s stock market value to new heights. To put that demand into perspective, Huang could have been the world’s first trillionaire if his ownership stake in Nvidia, currently at 3.5 percent, mirrored Larry Ellison’s 40 percent stake in software giant Oracle.

The looming expansion of the oligarchic dozen’s carbon footprint is worrisome. Every single individual owns or is a controlling shareholder of a business that is investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence.

The energy that data centers demand to power AI is effectively delaying the green energy transition. The lack of green energy supply compels data centers to rely on new and existing fossil fuel infrastructure to meet its ever-expanding power consumption needs.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, along with others in the billionaire class, have unsurprisingly used the power of their wealth to expand their political and economic influence. They have both purchased large media platforms, which has granted them the ability to set the terms of public debate with the hopes of influencing public opinion in their favor.

Musk has not been shy about his support for president-elect Donald Trump. It is reported that his super PAC spent $200 million to ensure the Republican ticket’s electoral victory. In return, Trump is expected to repeal tax credits for electric vehicles to the competitive advantage of Musk’s Tesla.

Bezos did not directly join the fray, but he staged a coup of The Washington Post’s editorial board and prevented them from making a presidential endorsement, keeping Amazon’s current contracts with the federal government in good standing and protecting future ones.

We see the effects of this growing concentration of wealth and economic inequality everywhere – plutocratic influence on our politics, wealth transfers from the bottom to the top, and the acceleration of climate breakdown.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... n-dollars/

All the above is true, but it couldn't happen without the connivance of the rest of the upper class, which in this day might be defined as those having over a million dollars wealth less their primary residence, given sky high real estate.
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 28, 2024 3:25 pm

Record Increase in U.S. Street People in 2024

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This increase marks a new record, bringing the total number of homeless Americans to more than 771,000, a significant rise from approximately 580,000 reported in 2022. Dec 27, 2024 Photo: @XHNews


December 27, 2024 Hour: 10:03 pm

Racism, public health crises, and the impact of natural disasters are also mentioned as elements that aggravate the lack of shelter for thousands of citizens.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has released an alarming report that reveals an 18 percent increase in the number of homeless people between January 2023 and January 2024.

This increase marks a new record, bringing the total number of homeless Americans to more than 771,000, a significant rise from approximately 580,000 reported in 2022.

The report highlights that the affordable housing crisis, inflation, and stagnant wages for low- and middle-income households are key factors contributing to this alarming situation.

Every January, communities nationwide conduct the Point-in-Time Count, a one-night count of the number of people experiencing homelessness in America.

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Racism, public health crises, and the impact of natural disasters are also mentioned as elements that aggravate the lack of shelter for thousands of citizens.

Particularly worrying is the figure that nearly 150,000 children experienced homelessness in 2024, representing a 33 percent increase over the previous year.

This age group has been the most affected by the increase in homelessness, raising serious questions about child welfare in the country.

Despite these disappointing numbers, some cities like Dallas and Los Angeles, as well as Chelsey County in Pennsylvania, have managed to record a decline in housing problems.

However, the overall trend is concerning and reflects a crisis that requires urgent attention.

The current situation underlines the need for effective and sustainable policies that address the root causes of homelessness in the U.S., as well as a renewed commitment to protect the most vulnerable populations, including children, who are most affected by this social crisis.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/record-i ... e-in-2024/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 30, 2024 3:07 pm

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The Empire Burns The Middle East While US Homelessness Surges

The US empire is up to its elbows in the middle east working frenetically to manipulate what happens there, while in the United States itself homelessness has taken another record-shattering leap forward.

Caitlin Johnstone
December 31, 2024

The IDF has built a beachside resort on the coast of northern Gaza where its soldiers can take a break from committing genocide to relax, get massages, drink iced coffee, and eat ice cream and cotton candy by the shore.

Meanwhile, the last hospital in northern Gaza has been burned down by the Israeli military after days of violent siege warfare on the medical facility.

The IDF is now saying that it may stay in southern Lebanon past the 60-day limit it agreed to in its ceasefire deal with Hezbollah, which means we may soon be looking at yet another protracted illegal Israeli military occupation.


A recent report from Drop Site News cites more than a dozen BBC staff who say all the British state media outlet’s reporting on Israel and Palestine is ultimately controlled by a single editor named Raffi Berg, who previously worked for the CIA. The BBC reporters told Drop Site News that Berg consistently manipulates headlines and reporting in a way that benefits the information interests of the Israeli government.

An anti-Assad outlet called Verify Syria has found that viral video footage purporting to show women and children being freed from Sednaya Prison after Assad’s ouster actually showed no such thing. In reality the location where the terrified women and children were filmed was a family charity facility called the Dafa Association, and they were terrified because the facility was being attacked by armed “revolutionaries”.

This comes as the US-backed al-Qaeda affiliates who are now in charge in Syria announce that they probably won’t be holding elections for another four years.


The US empire is up to its elbows in the middle east working frenetically to manipulate what happens there, while in the United States itself homelessness has taken another record-shattering leap forward. Homelessness in the US has increased by a staggering 18 percent since last year — and last year also saw a giant spike in homelessness of 12 percent from the year before. Officially there are now around 770,000 homeless Americans, though the real number is likely several times higher.

This massive injustice is entirely by design. As the hub of a globe-spanning empire, the US needs to keep its citizenry poor, divided, distracted and powerless in order to keep them from meddling in the gears of the imperial machine. The more free time and mental spaciousness Americans have, the more they’ll awaken to how depraved their government is and how badly it’s screwing them over. The managers of the western empire naturally have a vested interest in keeping Americans poor, sick, ignorant, and propagandized. Which is why they remain so.

The US-centralized empire thrives on lies, manipulation, callousness, and stupidity. The entire world is made worse by its existence. It degrades the collective soul of our species. It’s bad for Americans, and it’s bad for everyone else. Humanity will be much better off when this murderous power structure finally crumbles.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/12 ... ss-surges/

******

The U.S. State doesn’t aim at the well-being of its citizens

Bruna Frascolla

December 30, 2024

This peculiar State, which does not care about the well-being of its citizens, does care about its military power.

In the last text, we saw that the State, while aiming at the well-being of its citizens, can do good even to foreign citizens. An example of this is the Russian State, which, by financing its press abroad, allows Western Europeans and North Americans to have access to information and opinions that are different from those published by the profit-oriented media outlets in their countries. Despite all the liberal propaganda, one thing is certain: if something aims at profit, it does not aim at the common good. For this very reason, a liberal State, like the U.S., does not tend to have the same effects as a normal State.

Does the U.S. State aim at the common good of its citizens? Looking at health, education and housing, we can say no: the purpose of the U.S. State is to enrich the owners of capital. In the health sector, Luigi Mangione shed a renewed light on the fact that insurance companies make huge profits by denying treatment to their policyholders. His manifesto, which is very rational, was only published by an independent journalist; and Michael Moore, cited as a reference, reported having been sought out by the media to condemn homicides. His text on the subject, which was another manifesto, was also hidden by the press.

In higher education, Brazil saw, with the PT governments, the arrival of U.S. conglomerates: they buy all the private colleges, pay starvation wages to professors and charge the government tuition fees, putting the poor in debt, who in the end receive an irrelevant diploma, due to the poor quality of the course. Basic education in U.S., whether public or private, is also not the best, and the lack of general knowledge of North Americans is notorious. Another thing we saw in movies – North Americans paying mortgages because they do not own their house – became a national scourge, with the copying of the U.S. models for financing public housing.

Research itself is also geared towards corporate interests. Laboratories take public money and create patented medicines, which are then sold to the State for use on citizens. The safety and efficacy of such drugs is attested by regulatory agencies known for their “revolving door,” due to the rotation between public and private positions occupied by the same individuals. It is worth remembering that the opioid addiction epidemic is the fault of Purdue Pharma and the FDA.

The U.S. elites can leave their fellow citizens in ignorance, since skilled jobs can be filled by Asian immigrants. As for unskilled workers, they can die due to lack of medical care or drug addiction, for a multitude from third world, especially from Spanish America, supplies the needs of this type of labor. In the U.S., the lives of citizens are disposable because they are easily replaceable by foreingers.

Just like men, States have a moral personality and must be judged according to their past actions. If the U.S. treats its citizens this way, why should we believe that they treat citizens from abroad any better? It is no wonder, then, that anti-State discourse is so common in the United States, whether on the left (with anarchism) or on the right (with anarcho-capitalism). The idea that alternative communities need to be created to escape the central State is as old as the English colonies, populated by sectarian Protestants who wanted to create their own communities independent of the Anglicans. Given this perspective, it is natural that the State is seen as a “necessary evil” – and if people already think of the State as evil, it is even more natural that the State they founded is in fact evil.

But lest it all be a vale of tears, we cannot fail to point out that the revolution in information technology and communication – from the invention of the Internet and GPS to search engines and social networks – owes much to U.S. military technology and intelligence. This peculiar State, which does not care about the well-being of its citizens, does care about its military power. This is certainly a different purpose than private profit, and that is why the United States has made such a contribution to human skills and knowledge.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... -citizens/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 31, 2024 3:07 pm

Concerning Jimmy Carter...

Yes, Yes and Again ...

... Yes! Larry nails it.

The death of former President Jimmy Carter at the age of 100, does not mark the end of an era. Actually, his death is an exclamation point for the disastrous US foreign policy of the last 45 years, especially with respect to the threat from Islamic extremism and the troubled relations with Russia. Jimmy Carter’s reign set the stage for much of the current unrest and turmoil in west Asia and Ukraine. While it is true that Mr. Carter worked diligently after leaving Washington, DC to burnish his image as a humanitarian, his policies towards Russia and Iran became festering sores on the American political body that linger, still suppurating, until today.

For those who still have lingering doubts, here is from my latest book about sheer ignorance of the American "strategists":

Brzezinski stands here as a special figure not just because of his fanatical Russophobia, but because of his very prominent position as a foreign policy adviser to the Obama Administration and later, before his death, to Joe Biden and, in general, to the Democratic Party establishment going back to the times of Lyndon Johnson. In this respect this professional political scientist, who distinguished himself as a National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration, was a classic product of America’s humanities academe in a sense that most of its “products” never had any serious understanding of either real scientific-technological developments or, as is the case even today, had any clear idea of the tsarist/Soviet or contemporary Russian history, economy, cultural idiosyncrasies and, especially, its military history. Remarkably, these very same people have very little understanding of their own country, the United States, precisely because modern American higher education does not provide a required tool kit for proper connection to that reality. The only tool this education provides is the ability to juxtapose accurately selected facts which serve politically expedient narratives, but not to engage with an objective picture.


In layman’s terms, Brzezinski would have been described as a military amateur, as would be the majority of America’s geopolitical thinkers, who have never had a systemic military and technological education and never served a day in military officer uniform. In other words, most American geopolitical thinkers who emerged in 1970s through the 1990s elucidated their views on geopolitics founded on an anecdotal image of military power—a defining tool of geopolitics.


The United States, akin to an acute appendicitis patient being rolled into the operations room, allowed appendectomy to be performed on itself by a random illiterate fanatic from the street who wouldn't pass a simple elementary school exam in arithmetic. Yet, here we are today. Brzezinski wanted Poland to be "free", and in pursuing this objective, as is expected from most "political scientists" and consistently low intelligence US National Security Advisers, he laid the bomb under America's future, including by manipulating an intellectually mediocre POTUS such as late Carter into insane foreign policy.

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2024/12 ... again.html

Quite a few folks out here in the ozone are saying that Carter was one of if not the most moral of US presidents. Well, that's a pretty low bar...But if so then he was incredibly naive to seek that job, having little real grasp on current affairs or history. Perhaps he was fool enough to think he could do the job morally. Regardless, he initiated the 'Taliban project' in Afghanistan and the Contra war in Central America. He also fully armed the vicious Indonesian government in it's bloody suppression of Timor. Yes, he was a 'Good Christian' after he left office, but no amount of good works and penance will wash the blood from his hands.
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 02, 2025 3:40 pm

Will Warnings of A Nuclear War Go Unheeded?
By Max Parry - January 2, 2025

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[Source: scottritter.substack.com]

Symposium at National Press club designed to mobilize support for a new nuclear weapons freeze movement reminiscent of the one in the 1980s

On December 7th, former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter hosted a panel entitled “No Nuclear War: A Call for Reason” at the National Press Club in the nation’s capital.

The three-part symposium brought together a range of anti-war speakers to address the growing threat of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia. Trepidation over that increasingly likely scenario has only mounted following the reckless brinkmanship by the lame duck Biden administration in supplying long-range ATACMs (Army Tactical Missile Systems, pronounced “attack-’ems”) to Ukraine.

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Scott Ritter at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. [Image Courtesy Max Parry]

Not only do the precision-guided munitions give Kyiv the ability to strike deep within Russian territory, but the U.S.-made missiles must be launched with the help of Western personnel, something that will be interpreted by Moscow as an attack by NATO. While the live-streamed discussion was overshadowed by the earth-shattering news of the fall of Damascus to Western-backed jihadists, the catastrophic developments in the Middle East only made the apocalyptic theme more pertinent.

Participants in the forum included former Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich, retired Army colonel and Washington insider-turned-critic Lawrence Wilkerson, Code Pink organizer Medea Benjamin, The Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal, his wife and fellow journalist Anya Parampil, Black Agenda Report editor Margaret Kimberley, broadcast host Wilmer Leon of (now defunct) Sputnik radio, political commentator Garland Nixon, author and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik, MIT physicist Theodore Postol, and 25-year-old LaRouche Party agitator Jose Vega.

The inclusion of Vega, a congressional candidate in New York’s 15th District who has made a name for himself by publicly heckling politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) over her vote to arm Ukraine, was perhaps the most controversial.

However, it was refreshing to see Benjamin willing to appear alongside the young LaRoucheite, after previously dropping out of last year’s “Rage Against the War Machine” rally at the Lincoln Memorial because Code Pink objected to the appearance of incendiary social media influencer Jackson Hinkle as a speaker. As Dr. Wilmer Leon joked, radioactive isotopes in a fallout do not discriminate based on political affiliation.

Ritter, who came to national attention when he sounded the alarm that Saddam Hussein did not possess Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in the lead-up to the Iraq War, began by underscoring the imminent danger of the crisis between the U.S. and Russia due to a complete breakdown in diplomacy. The ex-Marine Corps intelligence officer argued the current deteriorated state of relations surpasses even that of the Cuban Missile Crisis, because at least there was a dialogue between Washington and Moscow back in October 1962.

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Colonel Larry Wilkerson [Source: therealnews.com]

Larry Wilkerson then told an anecdote from his days as Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff of how the U.S. and China successfully deescalated an international incident in April 2001 after a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea, thanks to hotline communications.

As several panelists noted, perhaps more worrying is that the public today is seemingly oblivious to the likelihood of annihilation, a fear that preoccupied Americans at the height of the Cold War.

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Ted Postol at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. [Image Courtesy Max Parry]

Professor Ted Postol, who has previously exposed U.S. deception over chemical weapons attacks in Syria and the effectiveness of Patriot missiles during the Gulf War, gave an unnerving slideshow presentation of what the detonation of a single nuclear warhead over D.C. would look like to startle the audience. To put things in perspective, the MIT scholar compared the hypothetical blast to the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as atomic weapons today are far more advanced than the A-bombs used to vaporize Japanese cities in 1945.

Unfortunately, that prospect is frighteningly real. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has proceeded to tear up every non-proliferation agreement that brought the arms race to an end, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty canceled by the Trump administration in 2019.

Signed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, the two statesmen agreed that “a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought”, a joint declaration Dr. Wilmer Leon helped the crowd remember. Even though the USSR ceased to exist just a few years later, Washington decided it still needed to preserve a nuclear advantage over a non-existent foe — or so we thought.

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Reagan and Gorbachev. [Source: upi.com]

During the 1990s, the Clinton administration made NATO enlargement a cornerstone of its foreign policy and acceded several Warsaw Pact countries as member states. Clinton in the process ignored Russia’s objections and the previous verbal guarantee made by Bush-era Secretary of State James Baker to Gorbachev that the alliance would not move “one inch to the east” past a reunified Germany.

Simultaneously, NATO launched military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo to justify its obsolete existence, further outraging the Kremlin with attacks on Moscow’s historic Serbian ally. As his successor Vladimir Putin recently reminded a BBC reporter, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had come to power with the help of Western meddling and it was only when he denounced the bombing of Belgrade as a violation of international law that the U.S. suddenly acknowledged his inebriated and feckless state.

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[Source: gulftoday.ae]

Following 9/11, the George W. Bush administration unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that put a guardrail on the development of missile defense systems and guaranteed mutually-assured destruction. The neoconservative Bush Doctrine held that the realpolitik strategy of containment was obsolete and that American adversaries must be destroyed preemptively.

As Ritter explained, offensive nuclear war planning was reintroduced into military doctrine under the pretext of preventing another catastrophic attack — but the so-called War on Terror wasn’t the endgame. By the time of Bush’s second term, Moscow found itself in the crosshairs of Western imperialism despite the earlier bromance between Putin and his American counterpart in which the latter claimed to have looked into the Russian President’s eyes and glimpsed “his soul.”

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Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush in a vintage 1956 Volga at Putin’s estate in 2005 [Source: nbcnews.com]

Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference marked a turning point, as he both condemned America’s misadventures in the Middle East and cautioned NATO about its eastward expansion on Russia’s doorstep. The very next year, Moscow gave a helping hand militarily to the breakaway republics in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in their rebellions against Georgia, which had been transformed into a belligerent NATO cat’s paw in the wake of a Western-financed color revolution.

Part of a wave of Russian-bordering nations that underwent regime change after disputed elections and mass protests calling for European Union integration, the unrest in Georgia’s Rose Revolution was fomented by foreign-funded civil society groups and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Soon, a major stretch of highway leading to the Tbilisi airport would bear George W. Bush’s name.

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[Source: flickr.com]

When Barack Obama assumed the White House, there was ostensibly supposed to be a reset in U.S.-Russia relations, resulting in a memorable diplomatic blunder between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during a photo-op in Geneva, Switzerland.

In hindsight, it should have been a warning sign that the gimmicky ‘reset’ button presented by the former First Lady to the seasoned diplomat was mislabeled with the Russian word for “overload.” Nevertheless, Obama and then-President Dmitry Medvedev ratified the New START Treaty in 2010 and agreed to a reduction in their arsenals.

Meanwhile, the neocon cabal hiding in plain sight within the Obama administration led by Hillary and her State Department apprentice, Victoria Nuland, had other plans.

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Sergey Lavrov and Hillary Clinton in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2009. [Source: businessinsider.com]

During the 2012 presidential debates with Republican nominee Mitt Romney, Obama mocked his GOP opponent for singling out Russia as the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, saying “the 1980s called and want their foreign policy back — because the Cold War’s been over for twenty years.” Obama’s zinger successfully cast his rival as an out of touch neo-Cold Warrior living in the past, but it wouldn’t be long before the Democratic Party would adopt his mentality.

Romney had attempted to pounce on a hot mic exchange caught earlier in the year between Obama and Medvedev at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea, where the nation’s first black president suggested he was open to a post-election compromise with Moscow. As per usual, Obama was talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Not only did the Nobel Peace laureate continue Washington’s illegal wars against foreign states that didn’t follow its dictates — as had already occurred in the NATO-led overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya — in 2014 the U.S. orchestrated a coup d’état in Kyiv to install a fanatically Russophobic government.

With the Russian intervention in Syria the subsequent year, Moscow (temporarily) thwarted the U.S. attempt to topple Bashar al-Assad and the fight against the Islamist insurgency became a proxy conflict with Washington. By the time of Donald Trump’s incumbency, the notion that the Kremlin interfered in the American democratic process to ensure his surprise victory was an article of faith within the establishment and any hope of salvaging U.S.-Russia ties vanished.

Trump was persona non grata for merely suggesting reconciliation with Moscow as a candidate, but as Commander-in-Chief he withdrew the U.S. from the INF and Open Skies treaties, pushing the world closer to the brink of doomsday.

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[Source: rand.org]

Trump also opted to send lethal arms to Ukraine in its war with pro-Russian separatists in Donbass, a decision Obama had reluctantly declined. A 2019 document authored by the highly influential RAND Corporation think tank, which boasts of its role in the strategic planning that won the Cold War, prognosticated the furnishing of military aid to Kyiv as the first step in “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.” The deliberate provocation, which Western media uniformly refers to as “unprovoked”, achieved its initial objective when Russia was forced to finally launch its special military operation in Ukraine a year into Joe Biden’s tenure.

There was a tiny shred of optimism when Biden first took office with his willingness to extend New START another five years, the last remaining arms limitation agreement between the U.S. and Russia. Unfortunately, the Western sanctions placed in retaliation for the SMO in Ukraine made the inspection protocols unenforceable on Moscow’s end, prompting Russia to suspend its participation in the accord (albeit without a formal withdrawal).

The pact is now practically null and void with the latest $895 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill passed by Congress that restores the capacity of B-52 bombers to carry nukes, an alarming reversal of the New START limits set to expire in February 2026.

For Biden to green light Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied ATACMs, shortly after Putin approved revisions to Moscow’s nuclear doctrine, is sheer madness. After all, the decree warns that an attack on Russian soil by a non-nuclear state (Ukraine denuclearized in the 1990s) with the backing of a nuclear-armed power will be considered a joint attack. Trump has pledged to negotiate an end to the Ukraine quagmire in his non-consecutive second term and his re-election was a resounding protest vote by the American people against interminable war.

Biden’s game of chicken is an affront to the nation’s democratic wish to broker peace with Moscow, a desire shared by an increasing number of Ukrainians polled who are being forced into conscription by press gangs. Biden has shown he is willing to put the very existence of humanity at risk in order to undermine the incoming administration.

In Oliver Stone’s 2017 documentary series The Putin Interviews, one of the most memorable segments was when the veteran Hollywood filmmaker screened Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic political satire Dr. Strangelove for the Russian leader. Putin had given Stone a history lesson on how the Soviets entered the arms race, reminding him that the American couple Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were merely couriers of the top-secret information provided to the KGB.

The source of the classified documents given to Soviet intelligence by the Rosenbergs, who were convicted of espionage in 1951 and executed two years later, had been the Manhattan Project scientists at Los Alamos themselves (including Theodore Hall, subject of the documentary A Compassionate Spy). Unlike those in power, Ted Hall and fellow physicist Klaus Fuchs understood the importance of nuclear deterrence and counterbalancing America’s exclusive possession of atomic weaponry at the time, an equilibrium now once again in jeopardy.

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Still from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb [Source: compactmag.com]

Another movie made in Tinseltown at the peak of the arms buildup was Stanley Kramer’s 1959 post-apocalyptic drama On The Beach (starring Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire, and Ava Gardner), based on British author Nevil Shute’s novel about the sole remaining survivors of World War III in Australia awaiting nuclear winter. Many military analysts, including Ritter, argue that the balance of power militarily currently lies in Russia’s favor with the advent of its cutting-edge hypersonic weapons capability.

Yet even if some were to survive the immediate effects of a nuclear holocaust, it goes without saying there would be no real ‘winner’ of such a conflict and humankind would meet the same fate as the characters in On The Beach. According to a simulation of a nuclear war between NATO and Russia by academic researchers at Princeton University, there would be over 90 million casualties within the first few hours alone.

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Gregory Peck in On The Beach [Source: sensesofcinema.com]

Some might call Ritter an alarmist, particularly amid speculation that behind closed doors Moscow hammered out a deal to sacrifice the Syrian government in exchange for retention of eastern Ukraine to avoid a standoff that could lead to nuclear war.

But can the world really afford to take the chance to be dismissive?

Quite literally, the future of life on earth has been hinging on the restraint of the much-maligned Putin, who appears to be the lone voice of reason in this terrifying stalemate.

Even if true, there is no guarantee Trump will follow through on his election promise and things may only get worse. The powers that be seem intent on silencing Ritter, with an FBI raid on his home in upstate New York in August and his passport revoked by the State Department after being dragged off a plane by authorities on his way to Russia earlier in the summer.

At a minimum, the appeal by the conference to support H.R. 10218 introduced by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) to prohibit the transfer of ATACMs to Ukraine is the least that can be done while we stand on the precipice of Armageddon.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... -unheeded/

*******

The Weakling Wunderwaffe

William Schryver
Dec 20, 2024

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F-35A Joint Strike Fighters in Flight

The F-35 Lightning II “Joint Strike Fighter” is destined to go down in military history as arguably the most ill-conceived, incompetently engineered, and combat-ineffectual large-scale production aircraft of the jet propulsion era.

It is notoriously under-powered, cripplingly frail, and fatally under-armed.

Its maintenance requirements are so onerous as to render it a net liability in the context of a major air campaign against a peer adversary. For every hour of flight, it requires at least 20 hours of maintenance, including frequent engine swap outs because its feeble powerplant basically fries itself after a few hours of high-demand conditions.

With a full weapons and fuel load, the F-35 struggles to achieve Mach 1 speeds.

Its internal weapons bay can carry only FOUR units.

Fewer than 450 of all types have been delivered to the US military (~300 F-35A to the US Air Force; ~100 F-35B to the US Marine Corps; ~30 F-35C to the US Navy).

Peace-time “Full Mission Capable” rates: F-35A: ~35%; F-35B: ~15%; F-35C: ~30%.

This means that the entire global US air fleet could launch fewer than 130 F-35s at any given time. Under high-intensity conflict conditions, the “full mission capable” rates would likely be reduced by half or more after just a single combat sortie.

In the context of an air campaign against Russia in eastern Europe, it must also be understood that the US simply does not have sufficient basing and maintenance capabilities in the region. In order to supply the logistical requirements of a major air fleet at war, it would be necessary to transfer the equivalent of a half-dozen fully staffed and equipped Hill Air Force Bases to the vicinity of the battlefield – this is of course an impossibility.

So people who talk about the US humiliating the Russians with overwhelming “5th Generation Air Power” are spouting ridiculous nonsense. The reality is that any US air campaign against Russia would be fought almost exclusively with decades-old 4th generation platforms going up against best-in-class Russian air defenses and a significantly upgraded Russian Air Force that would outnumber and outrange US air frames in the theater.

And those aircraft that survived the initial strike mission would discover their bases had been blasted to pieces in their absence.

As I have written on several occasions over the past few years: The US could not win an overseas war in a non-permissive environment against a peer-adversary – least of all against the Russians. It would be a logistical power projection challenge well beyond the current capabilities of the American military.

https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/the ... underwaffe
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2025 3:04 pm

A Bad December for the Empire: The Gloves Come Off Part 3, Open Up a New Front!
US$10 trillion+ Down The War Making Drain

Roger Boyd
Jan 03, 2025

<snip>

The Cost of These Failures

The Cost of War Project at Brown University estimated that the 20 years of war post-9/11 cost the United States US$8 trillion, as well as costing the lives of over 900,000 people directly (and millions more indirectly). Add in the past 4 years, together with the usual associated “black budgets” and the cost is most probably significantly above US$10 trillion for little real foreign policy benefit; but of course to the benefit of US military contractors. By December 2024 the US budget deficit was about US$36 trillion, so the cost of all the needless wars since 2001 represent probably a third of that (not even including normal US defence spending of US$1 trillion per year when all related budgets are taken into account). US government debt/GDP is 123%, an amount that would be around 80% without all the war spending.

The US current account deficit shrank to US$818 billion in 2023, but has widened significantly in 2024 and looks to top US$1 trillion for the full year. In Q3 2024 it was US$310.9 billion, 4.2% of GDP. The current account has widened much faster than the trade deficit, as the investment account became negative due to the increasing foreign indebtedness of the US. With a rapidly increasing current account deficit (from 4.2% of GDP), a government debt to GDP ratio of 123% and a government deficit of 6.5% of GDP, most nations would already be implementing austerity policies to save themselves from a currency crisis.

But not the US with the benefit of the US reserve currency, and control over its vassals. As with anything though, there is a limit and the US is pushing its luck. That is why we hear Trump demanding that Europe buy more US oil and gas and threatening tariffs. Even talking about removing the Russian and Iranian sanctions to help protect the dollar. But instead of taking some measures to reduce the government deficit, Trump fully supports spending like a drunken sailor on “defence” and talks about big tax cuts while pointing to mythical savings from the DOGE; much like Reagan’s “voodoo economics”.

The US in the current period is very much like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, a slow growing sclerotic economy attempting to keep up with a much faster and financially fit competitor. China spends only 2% of GDP on defence spending, and does so with a much greater level of efficiency and effectiveness than the US; while its economy grows at 5% per year against the US level of about 2% (and little or no growth in the European and Asian vassals). China can simply outspend the US with ease, while focusing its forces in a single theatre and on defence. Then we also have a very efficient and effective Russian MIC within an economy bigger than Germany, focused on its single theatre of operations. Then we have Iran focusing on defence within its own theatre. The US has spread itself across the globe. It is the US that needs to stop spending like a drunken sailor before it destroys its US$ reserve currency benefits, and is finally forced by external financial realities to cut back its foreign aggressions. A judgement day that it delayed for decades when it removed itself from the gold standard and moved to floating currencies in the early 1970s, while using its economic, financial and military muscle to maintain the US dollar as the reserve currency.

(Much more at link.)

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/a-bad- ... re-the-8e8
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 09, 2025 3:13 pm

The Ugly Face of War That Casualty Numbers Don’t Reveal
January 8, 2025

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Palestinian children walk amid scattered debris in a tent camp in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, after an overnight Israeli airstrike, January 2, 2025. Photo: AFP.

By Vijay Prashad – Dec 30, 2024

In the apartment of my friends in Baghdad (Iraq), they tell me about how each of them had been impacted by the ugliness of the US-imposed illegal war on their country that began in 2003. Yusuf and Anisa are unusual people, both members of the Federation of Journalists of Iraq and both with experience as “stringers” for Western media companies that came to Baghdad amid the war. When I first went to their apartment for dinner in the well-positioned Waziriyah district, I was struck by the fact that Anisa—who I had known as a secular person—wore a veil on her face. “I wear this scarf,” Anisa said to me later in the evening, “to hide the scar on my jaw and neck, the scar made by a bullet wound from a US soldier who panicked after an IED [improvised explosive device] went off beside his patrol.”

Earlier in the day, Yusuf had taken me around New Baghdad City, where in 2007 an Apache helicopter had killed almost twenty civilians and injured two children. Among the dead were two journalists who worked for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor Eldeen. ‘‘This is where they were killed,” he tells me as he points to the square. “And this is where Saleh [Matasher Tomal] parked his minivan to rescue Saeed, who had not yet died. And this is where the Apache shot at the minivan, grievously injuring Saleh’s children—Sajad and Duah.” I was interested in this place because the entire incident was captured on film by the US military and released by Wikileaks as Collateral Murder in 2010. Julian Assange was persecuted largely because he led the team that released this video. It presented direct evidence of a horrific war crime.

Namir Noor Eldeen was 22 years old. During his assignment in Mosul from 2004 to 2006, he had photographed a masked Iraqi insurgent looking straight at the camera, in one hand a rocket propelled grenade launcher and in the other a police flak jacket. Reassigned to Baghdad, Namir photographed the worst parts of the collapse of his country: pictures of dead bodies and car blasts, insurgents and survivors, US soldiers and their heavy equipment. There is one picture from January 2007 that I remember vividly: a young boy carries a football under his arms as he steps around a pool of blood, beside which sit a few rumpled schoolbooks. When I heard that Namir had been killed by US soldiers, I thought of that boy. I think of him now. He would be in his 20s, watching the livestreamed genocide in Palestine. I wonder if he remembers that pool of blood and those schoolbooks, the dead children whose bodies had been removed before he went by with his football.

“No one believed us when we talked about the crimes of the United States in Iraq, even after the Abu Ghraib photos were released in 2004,” Yusuf told me. “But when Wikileaks published the video of Collateral Murder, it was hard to deny the attitude of the US soldiers and the war crimes committed against ordinary Iraqis.” Yusuf holds one hand close to his body. He was hit in the shoulder by a US soldier’s stray bullet. Another journalist attacked for trying to tell the truth. Yusuf cannot move that shoulder. But, when he first saw the video on the Wikileaks site, he tells me, he was ecstatic. It told the world what he already knew, what the victims of the War on Terror already knew.

“No one in our neighbourhood has been untouched by the violence. We are a society that has been traumatised,” Anisa said to me in the evening. “Take my neighbour for instance. She lost her mother in a bombing and her husband is blind because of another bombing.” The stories fill my notebook. They are endless. Every society that has experienced the kind of warfare faced by the Iraqis, and now by the Palestinians, is deeply scarred. It is hard to recover from such violence.

***

I am walking near the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. My friends who are showing me the area point into the fields that surround it and say that this land has been so poisoned by the United States dropping Agent Orange that they do not think food can be produced here for generations. The US dropped at least 74 million litres of chemicals, mostly Agent Orange, on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, with the focus for many years being this supply line that ran from the north to the south. The campaign was known as Operation Ranch Hand because Agent Orange had been developed as a herbicide for industrial agriculture. In Vietnam it was used to tear through the vegetation in the forests and along the coastline of the Mekong Delta to remove the cover used by the Vietnamese guerrillas. The spray of these chemicals struck the bodies of at least five million Vietnamese and mutilated the land. A Vietnamese journalist Trân Tô Nga published Ma Terre Empoisonnée (My Poisoned Land) in 2016 to call attention to the atrocity that has continued to impact Vietnam over four decades after the US lost the war. In her book, Trân Tô Nga describes how, as a journalist in 1966, she was sprayed by a US Air Force Fairchild C-123 with a strange chemical. She wiped it off and went ahead through the jungle, inhaling the poisons dropped from the sky. When her daughter was born two years later, she died in infancy of the impact of Agent Orange on Trân Tô Nga.

“The people from that village over there,” they tell me, naming the village, “birth children with severe defects generation after generation.” When we walk through the village later, it becomes apparent through the sight of all manner of deformities—including large numbers of people with hydrocephalus or swollen heads—that the poison continues to have its deadly impact generation after generation.

These memories come back in the context of Gaza.

Of course, the genocide has taken so many lives: nearly 50,000 dead by the last official count. But there are other enduring parts of modern warfare that are hard to calculate. There is the immense sound of war, the noise of bombardment and of cries, the noises that go deep into the consciousness of young children and mark them for their entire lives. There are children in Gaza, for example, who were born in 2006 and are now eighteen, who have seen wars at their birth in 2006, then in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and now, in 2023-24. The gaps between these major bombardments have been punctuated by smaller bombardments, as noisy and as deadly. A survey of the children in Gaza by War Child Alliance found that death feels imminent for 96 per cent of them—traumatised by the murder of their family members and terrorised by the sound and ferocity of the bombings. “The psychological toll on children was severe, with high levels of stress manifested in symptoms such as fear, anxiety, sleep disturbances, nightmares, nail biting, difficulty concentrating and social withdrawal,” the report noted. This is a child mental health catastrophe.



Then there is the dust. Modern construction uses a range of toxic materials. Indeed, in 1982, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recognised a phenomenon called ‘sick building syndrome’, which is when a person falls ill due to the toxic material used to construct modern buildings. Imagine now that a 2,000-pound MK84 bomb lands on a building and imagine the toxic dust that flies about and lingers both in the air and on the ground. This is precisely what the children of Gaza are now breathing as the Israelis drop hundreds of these deadly bombs on residential neighbourhoods. There is now over 42 million tons of debris in Gaza, large sections of it filled with toxic substances.

In 2021, the Israeli bombing of highly urbanised Gaza left 12,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. A World Bank study at that time found that these buildings generated 1 million tonnes of rubble and debris, and that within this debris existed 30,000 tonnes of hazardous waste that includes asbestos and medical waste. An interim assessment of the damage done by the Israeli bombing from 2023-24 shows that 88,868 buildings have been destroyed in Gaza. There is yet no account of the volume of hazardous waste, but it is thought to be enormous. The World Bank estimates that the cost of the damage is around $18.5 billion, which is 97 per cent of the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank) in 2022. The United Nations (UN) says that it will take a minimum of 15 years to clear the debris, which means that regardless of the circumstances of a peace agreement, the Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed from Gaza for a generation. But, living in tents here and there, they will continue to breathe in the toxic materials that will generate health hazards for multiple generations to come.

***

US President George W. Bush’s adventure in Iraq was not an aberration in the War on Terror; it was its highest point, its defining action. Reason went out of the window and in its place came a jumble of anxieties mixed in with older currents of racism—hatred of Arabs who were seen to be inherently duplicitous and only able to learn their lessons through violence. Unforgivable bombardment of Baghdad and Fallujah fixed the outlines, which were then coloured in by lesser actions up and down the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. Iraq lingers despite every effort to erase it from the map. The immensity of the tragedy of Iraq—the cause of great destabilisation in West Asia and North Africa to this day, including Syria—has been utterly forgotten.

A few years ago, I was in Sabha, in southern Libya, where a battle had been raging between two rival—and unofficial—armies, the forces of the city of Misrata and the Libyan National Army (led by General Khalifa Haftar). Earnest protests by residents of the city for the war to go elsewhere had been ignored. Moth-eaten military bases and lucrative checkpoints were the targets of this war. Sabha sits at a strategic point in the Sahara Desert, linking the trafficking from Agadez (Niger), Darfur (Sudan), Zouar (Chad), Kidal, Gao, and Menaka (Mali) and Ghat (Algeria). It is through Sabha that human traffickers cart people to the Libyan coastline to become refugees to Europe or extremists for the wars in Libya and Syria as well as back to Boko Haram in Nigeria. Africa’s central region has been wracked by war, driven not merely by terrorism but by International Monetary Fund-induced economic collapse, Western-backed kleptocracy, and the wars of Africa’s Great Lakes for resources—including those that run our cellphones—that have spilled out of the Congo region. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s regime change war in Libya, the French military intervention in Libya and the presence of US Special Forces in 33 of the 54 African states did little to settle an already disturbed situation. There was little to choose between the wars in Libya and in the eastern Congo—both catastrophic for the future of Africa, both fuelled by the capillaries of economic polices driven by the West and by an arms industry buoyed by Western arms sales. There are trillions to be made by these arms companies and their associates in the blood spilt across the Global South and in the terror inflicted on the minds of young children.

Anisa and Yusuf do not have any children. Their apartment is modest. There are not many photographs on the walls. There are a few prints of paintings, where I first learned of the work of Layla Ali Sadiq Al-Attar (1944-1993), who had been the director of Iraq’s National Art Museum. The print from al-Attar on the wall of the modest living room was of the painting called “Mother Earth” (1980) that depicts a woman’s back emerging from ploughed fields. The painting is both comforting and disturbing. Al-Attar was killed on 27 June 1993 when US President Bill Clinton authorised an attack on the office of Iraq’s General Intelligence Directorate. Of the 23 cruise missiles fired at Baghdad, two struck Al-Attar’s house and killed her, her husband (Abd al-Khaleq Jeridan), and their housekeeper, as well as blinded her daughter (Reem). Anisa collects these kinds of stories.

On the mantelplace, there is a small Palestinian flag. Next to it is a little piece of shrapnel. I ask them about it. Anisa says that it is the shrapnel that was removed from Yusuf’s left eye socket, where he now wears a jaunty patch. Then she smiles. I wonder if she is pulling my leg. But it is unlikely. Horror must be laughed at directly or survival is impossible.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-ugly-fac ... nt-reveal/

*****

U.S. Loses Fight Against World Anti Doping Agency

In April last year the U.S. government, with the prominent help from the New York Times, opened a campaign against the World Anti Doping Agency WADA and against Chinese sports competition.

Top Chinese Swimmers Tested Positive for Banned Drug, Then Won Olympic Gold - New York Times

The positive testing, which found a very minor digestion of a performance enhancing drug, was done by the Chinese anti-doping agency. It had immediately blocked the athletes from further competitions. A thorough investigation found that the drugs had ben ingested unwittingly. WADA had accepted those results. The athletes were free to take part on future competitions.

But as the U.S. did not like to compete against world class Chinese athletes it instigated a smear campaign against them.

Smearing The 'Enemy' - A Typical U.S. Info-Op - Moon of Alabama

The Chinese anti-doping agency as well as WADA handled the case by the book. There was a plausible explanation of a food contamination with tiny amounts of a drug during a swimming event in China. No other test before and after that event had been positive. The amount of drugs involved was too tiny to make a difference. WADA did not put out a public notice about the incident as no further action was required. No athletes were publicly named and shamed as none had been proven to be guilty.
But that did not fit the U.S. messaging agenda that was designed to defame China. Thus other headlines in the usual western propaganda media were following up: ...


WADA responded to the onslaught:

WADA thoroughly reviewed the cases in early 2024 with all due skepticism, and concluded that there was no evidence to challenge contaminated meat as the source of the positive tests and therefore decided not to appeal to CAS. None of the various other Anti-Doping Organizations appealed either. As WADA has indicated previously, once there is no evidence to contest a no-fault contamination scenario, no Anti-Doping Organization has ever appealed a case to convert a finding of no violation into one of a violation with no fault.
...
The politicization of anti-doping continues with this latest attempt by the media in the United States to imply wrongdoing on the part of WADA and the broader anti-doping community. As we have seen over recent months, WADA has been unfairly caught in the middle of geopolitical tensions between superpowers but has no mandate to participate in that.


In August 2024, in a slashback to the U.S., Reuters published an 'Exclusive' story about the illegal handling of doping cases by the U.S. anti-doping agency. USADA let athletes continue to competed even after the had been caught doping.

Athletes undercover? Global and US anti-doping agencies clash over tactics - Reuters / CNN

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) says US agency USADA broke the global code by letting several athletes it had caught between 2011 and 2014 violating drugs rules go undercover and keep on competing without prosecution in exchange for information on other violators.
USADA says the tactic is necessary and allowed, and wants to keep using it. WADA says it is against its code and that athletes caught breaking doping rules should not get to line up in races, potentially winning prize money and medals, without first being publicly prosecuted and sanctioned.


Now the U.S. had egg on its face.

But it did not relent in its efforts to make WADA do as it says.

The Biden administration, in consultation with Congress, decided to withhold its dues from WADA. But that attempt to get its will has also failed:

U.S. Funding Dispute With World Anti-Doping Agency Boils Over (archived) - New York Times

The United States had held back its funding to the agency, known as WADA, after losing faith in its ability to guard against the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs at events like the Olympics, the White House said.
...
On Wednesday, the antidoping agency responded by removing the United States, which had been the single largest country funder to the agency, from a position on its board.
WADA said in a statement that in line with its rules, “representatives from a country which has not paid its dues are ineligible to sit on the foundation board or the executive committee.”

Loss of the board seat is automatic, the agency added.


The bullying campaign the Biden administration has led against WADA to bend it to its will did not achieve even one of its preferred results:

U.S. policy toward WADA has been led by Dr. Rahul Gupta, the Biden administration’s drug czar, who oversees the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
...
Dr. Gupta’s chief demand was that WADA submit to an outside audit of its operations. He also said that WADA needed to drop a defamation lawsuit it filed against American antidoping authorities, who have accused WADA of covering up the positive tests. And he wanted proof that an ethics complaint filed against him — that appeared designed to have him kicked off WADA’s executive committee — was dropped.
But despite a lengthy back and forth between the White House and WADA — including face-to-face meetings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, last month — the agency failed to go along with Dr. Gupta’s demands. It also signaled that if the United States failed to pay there would be consequences and WADA would find alternative funding.

In Riyadh, an Olympic official told a White House official that failure to pay U.S. dues could affect the country’s ability to host or participate in the Olympic Games, according to two people familiar with the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.


The U.S. had launched a smear campaign against WADA. It has stopped to pay its share for WADA and lost its executive committee seat.

Rejecting to be bullied WADA and the International Olympic Committee are pulling on the same string.

Should the U.S. not relent in its attempts to break the rules future Olympic events, like the 2034 Winter Games planned for in Salt Lake City, may well move to other places.

U.S. athletes, which USADA allows to take part in competitions despite their doping, may well be excluded from future events.

The U.S. is convinced that its Might Makes Right.

But while bullying may work against weak European 'allies', it fails when it tries to bend international organizations which have the backing of the rest of the world.

Posted by b on January 9, 2025 at 14:42 UTC | Permalink
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 17, 2025 2:59 pm

Louisiana Gov. Landry kidnaps unhoused people ahead of Super Bowl
January 17, 2025 Louisiana Workers Council

Image
Jan. 15, New Orleans – activists held a press conference outside City Hall, drawing a crowd of around 100 against Gov. Jeff Landry’s pre-Super Bowl internment of unhoused people. Photo: Louisiana Workers Council.

$16 million to intern the unhoused could give everyone an apartment

Jan. 15, New Orleans – Gov. Jeff Landry took the next step in taking over New Orleans. Before daylight, armed state police, under threat of arrest, rounded up unhoused people camping close to the French Quarter and the Superdome, which is hosting the profitable Super Bowl on Feb. 9. Personal items, IDs, medicine, medical and social service records were destroyed.

This move bypassed the city and set up a “transitional” warehouse shelter in an industrial area near a Black community. The shelter had no heat, beds, food, windows, or necessities. An unhoused hospitality worker called it an internment camp.

According to the No Harm collective, the governor gave a contract months ago to Workforce Group to set up a so-called shelter. The company is owned by a private equity firm and a pal of the governor. This cruel pre-dawn raid was done with less than 48 hours notice.

The warehouse is almost six miles from downtown and has no sidewalks. The nearest bus stop is a half-hour walk away, making it impossible for people to make their social service appointments, which sometimes take months to schedule. Meetings with agencies at the site will take place in tents. The temperature in New Orleans this week is dropping to 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Unhoused people with jobs at night would be shut out of their beds at 9:00 p.m.

The Super Bowl is an exclusive event, bringing billions in profits to New Orleans and national corporations. The city itself undertook 400 projects and, with the state, spent millions in preparation. Meanwhile, a ticket is going for $5,000 each. Luxury boxes (renovated with taxpayer money) are upwards of $50,000.

No Harm exposed that “not counting cost for the Louisiana State Police…the warehouse carries a price tag of $11.4 million for two months or $16.2 million for thee months, about $80,000 per each of the 200 beds. With $16.2 million, 200 unhoused people could get six years of rental assistance for a studio.”

So why isn’t that done? Because just like state prisons and immigrant prisons, there is a profit to be made by imprisonment. The state, with almost no resistance from New Orleans officials, refused to allow the city to vote for rent control, wages, or any meaningful way to stop soaring rents. The state refused to raise the $7.25 per hour minimum wage. Also, the racist governor wants to increase gentrification of the city.

Most importantly they aim to stop working-class solidarity by criminalizing poor people, to further attack food stamps (SNAP), and Medicaid. The state has already cut thousands off and reduced benefits for thousands more. The state is creating more conditions of homelessness by giving insurance companies a free hand to raise insurance costs by three times or more, which raises rents and causes foreclosures. Every week, foreclosed properties are auctioned off to developers in New Orleans. The governor and state legislature are simply a transmission belt for the budget to be used to increase profits for capitalists.

We New Orleans workers have had a war by the billionaires declared on us. Thousands are a paycheck or rent payment away from homelessness. A third of children are in poverty and senior hunger is higher here than anywhere in the country, and incarceration is the highest in the world. We are not taken in by the governor, who is reducing taxes for the rich while maintaining the highest sales tax in the U.S., claiming this raid and kidnapping of unhoused people makes us safer.

Imposing rent controls, raising wages, cutting insurance rates, keeping hands off SNAP and Medicaid are what we need to unite and fight for.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... uper-bowl/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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