re: China, Japan and Safety (Mike Bonnie, US)

Cameron Sawyer wrote on 16 November:

I think it’s not totalitarianism which determines the level of street crime, but probably more factors like (a) the prevalance of poverty, particularly whether or not there exists some kind of underclass; (b) city planning character of a city–do people live and walk around in the centers of cities? Or do they travel by car and live in suburbs?; (c) general level of order in the country; (d) prevalance of drug problems in the city.

Mike Bonnie responds:

I agree with Cameron and believe he is right on each of the points he has made, with one addition. Although I don’t have empirical data to back this up, intuitively, safety has everything to do with levels of poverty and relative income (limits in extremes), more so than the form of government. It was not the intent of my November 15 message to point to any other correlation other than that of content of the media and feelings of safety.

The one thing missing from Cameron’s list, and I believe this to be what sets America apart from other countries, is access to weapons, in conjunction with sizable and increasing discrepancies between the “super rich” and people living below the poverty level. If one wanted to add “financial vehicles” to a list of potential weapons, America has more “hit and run fatalities” than many other countries. As a former licensed life-insurance agent, I know “financial death” may be more painful to some than “death” death, and will drive others to take drastic measures to alleviate the pain.

The ideal society to me is one that provides meaningful employment with sustainable wages, and family/community values (compassion). My favorite quote on this subject is the African saying, “He who does not produce his own food is not free.” The word “food” can be taken literally or figuratively. Let that saying apply to Western media.

re: US: Obama One Year after Elections (Paul Pitlick, US)

Paul Pitlick responds to Nigel Jones’s post of 4 November:

Although I don’t completely disagree with the assessment that Mr. Obama hasn’t done all that I wished he’d done by now, in the way that I would have wished, etc., etc., who would Nigel Jones wish to be the actual the US President? I’m very grateful it is not the McCain-Palin team, nor can I think of any other Republican who has any realistic idea of how to govern a complex society. Republicans have been complaining about government for years–no surprise that they don’t actually know how to govern. There may be a few other Democrats who could govern, although there are many more I wouldn’t trust.

Also, is it legitimate to make comparisons between Mr. Obama and his predecessor? For example, one year into the GWB presidency, a terrorist plot had been allowed to occur on US soil, in spite of warning signals within various levels of the US government, and the Bush administration gave only grudging cooperation with an investigation after the fact. Also, by November 2001, the Bush administration was working feverishly behind the scenes to fix the blame on Iraq, who had nothing to do with the attacks, to give a pretense to invade.

I could go on, but, in summary, would any American politician be a more effective president than Mr. Obama?

JE comments: Thoughts on Paul Pitlick’s last question? I cannot see either Hillary Clinton or John McCain doing a better job than the Smooth Communicator, Barack Obama, at this point.

Einstein and the US (Holger Terp, Denmark)

Holger Terp asks:

I’m reading up on Einstein at the moment.

One simple question from the ignorant:

Albert Einstein got a visa for the US on December 5, 1933.

When did he came to the States?

I simply can find the date of his arrival.

JE comments: I Googled, in quotation marks, “Einstein comes to US in” and received several hits for 1933. One source says 1940, which doesn’t sound right to me. If his visa was issued in December 1933, his departure, given the political climate in Germany at the time, must have been immediately after. His first visit Stateside was in 1921.

Einstein (we share a birthday, by the way) is one of my top heroes and always a welcome topic for conversation. The Argentine author on whom I wrote my dissertation, Elías Castelnuovo, met Einstein in Germany (I believe Berlin) in 1931. Castelnuovo in his memoirs wrote of Einstein’s inability to fix the leaky toilet in his apartment–fortunately, the intrepid “Argentine Gorki and master of all trades” stepped in to stop the deluge.

It’s time for a WAIS break from the unpleasantries of Nidal Hasan. Does anyone have an Einstein anecdote to share?

re: Nidal Malik Hasan: The View in Europe (Randy Black, US)

Randy Black writes:

In his 11 November post, Gilbert Doctorow offered his opinion that it is not enough to say that political correctness is at the root of the murders in Central Texas at Fort Hood. He wonders about the lessons to be learned, and offers that it may be unreasonable to send American Muslims to war in the Middle East. Gilbert apparently believes that it may put an unfair burden on the conscience of the men at war and is a terrible conflict of loyalties.

I offer: American Muslims are Americans who voluntarily enlisted in the American military. No one held a gun to their head or told them that they might be required to become suicide bombers or that they might have to behead their prisoners.

In my mind, their faith is, for the most part, irrelevant. They did not have to enlist. They did not have to accept the tens of thousands of dollars for medical school training as did Major Hasan after he graduated from Virginia Tech. They did not have to steal guns and ammunition and plot the shootings of more than 40 people, 13 of whom died leaving 19 children fatherless. I know that there are those among us who will apologize and claim that many more are fatherless in the Middle East because of US aggression.

My point is that Major Hasan, a physician, took it upon himself to enlist and to accept the substantial salary that comes with being a medical doctor and officer in the military. Then he took it upon himself to sue the US government for discrimination last year. Then he took it upon himself this year to assemble an arsenal and murder 13 of his fellow troops.

We are urged to not condemn Islam because of one crazy man’s actions. I am not. Apparently, the apologists are offering that once again, it’s all our fault. How quickly we forget that American blood was spilled on behalf of Muslims in the Balkans.

This murderer, Hasan, carefully calculated his crime. He planned it with precision, chose innocents in a closed area where he knew in advance that no one would be armed and carefully and specifically targeted men and women in uniform. This from a man born in the USA, educated at Virginia Tech and later at one of the nation’s better medical schools.

Apparently, half a year ago, he sued the US Army for discrimination based on his deceased parent’s Palestinian heritage. Even his relatives are crying that his lunacy should be excused due to the fact that Hasan is Arab, a Palestinian and a Muslim.

“Had Hasan been a pure American, there wouldn’t have been such a fuss about it,” said Mohammed Mohammed (his cousin).

If there is blame at this end of the chain, blame beyond Hasan, it’s with the commanders who ignored the pleas of Hasan’s military colleagues who complained very vocally in 2007 about a presentation that Hasan made at a medical conference. His presentation was supposed to be medical in nature. It was a damning presentation that made the case that suicide bombers were good and that Islam trumped the US Constitution. If you’re interested, read it at:

(read particularly page 12 and 48) Would you want to rely on Hasan if you were in a foxhole on a battlefield with him? I think not.)

Sources: http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/11/11/fort.hood.wounded.soldier/index.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6517405/Fort-Hood-shooting-Nidal-Malik-Hasan-was-not-a-terrorist-Palestinian-cousin-says.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2009/11/10/GA2009111000920.html?sid=ST2009110903704

re: Nidal Malik Hasan: The View in Europe (Michael Sullivan, US)

Michael Sullivan writes:

I would like to remind Gilbert Doctorow (11 November) that when you join one of the US armed forces you take an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign or domestic. You aren’t given a choice about who you would fight if you’re sent to war. Throughout history combatants of the same religion have waged war against each other. If a Muslim cannot fight for his country against another Muslim from another country, he should not enlist in the US armed forces.

To allow Muslims in the US armed forces to be excused from fighting against other Muslims around the world would destroy morale and be a terrible “politically correct” decision, especially since our most likely enemies today are Muslims in wars fighting terrorism.

JE comments: Nothing to disagree with here. I am reminded of the large number of German-Americans who fought against Germany in both World Wars–from Gen. Eisenhower down the ranks. Japanese-Americans, interestingly enough, tended to be sent to the European Theater of WWII to avoid suspected conflicts of interest. A double standard applied then; it would be politically unacceptable to do such a thing today by “excusing” Muslims from fighting against their correligionists. My observation? If the shooter were, say, Methodist instead of Muslim, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. The perp would have been viewed as what he is–an angry, deranged misfit.

Michael Sullivan’s straightforward response reminds us that Hasan should have left the military long ago if he struggled with divided loyalties. As an officer, he had ample opportunities to do so. How many psychiatrists are ordered to pick up a gun anyway?

re: Nidal Malik Hasan: The View in Texas (Michael Sullivan, US)

Michael Sullivan responds to Randy Black’s post of 9 November:

I’d hardly call it a knee-jerk reaction from the US Heartland as JE stated, as it’s a knife to the heart of every freedom-loving and patriotic American. Enough information and facts are out to realize Hasan acted as if he was a one-man terrorist cell and knew exactly what he was doing. He was definitely a Muslim jihadist. Every citizen in the US and freedom-loving people around the world should be filled with hatred and scorn toward jihadists and the senseless murders and atrocities they commit.

Our leaders keep telling us Islam is a religion of peace. They are being politically correct and afraid to take on the Islamist leadership for what they represent today. They look like fools, as the only Muslims making the news nowadays are jihadists and anti-US types.

I’m fired up as November 10th is the 234th Birthday of the United States Marine Corps and I’m fighting mad over what took place at Ft. Hood. Maj. Hasan was a traitor, a Muslim jihadist and had the blind trust of those service members he came in contact as he was an officer in the US Army. Enough jihadist information was known about him that he should have lost his commission and possibly arrested, depending on how big a role he played in anti-US or terrorist activities. Evidently the FBI was looking into his actions, but being a Muslim gave him a special “do not offend” status.

US: Nidal Malik Hasan: the View in Texas (Randy Black, US)

Randy Black writes:

On November 9th, John Eipper asked me off-Forum about the “local buzz” regarding the murders at Fort Hood when we learned of the tragedy this past week.

Having just returned from a five day trip (Wednesday- Sunday) with my daughter to the Big Bend National Park and to the Terlingua World Championship Chili Cook-Off, I went three plus days while there without radio, television or newspapers, not to mention being unable to get data off the cell phone or news feeds.

Cell phone reception that far off the beaten path is erratic at best along the Rio Grande in and near the Big Bend Park, there being a total of three cell towers in an area of more than 800,000 acres (1,250 square miles). Sometimes that’s good, however. There is literally no television or radio reception in the Terlingua area (600 miles southwest from Dallas and 240 miles from Midland). Okay, at night you can get the radio stations from south of the border.

Down there, when you have a signal and that’s rare, the cell phone is only a phone, no feeds or Internet access. The only paper there is a weekly that comes out on Wednesdays. We’re lucky to have that much. Thereafter, I got the occasional update from those who were coming in late from Alpine, Houston or El Paso.

Regarding the murders by the Army Major/physician who happens to be Muslim and who also apparently hates most things American, I didn’t know the tragedy until late Friday afternoon when they made an announcement on the PA at the chili cook-off. Everyone took off their hats and we had a moment of silence among the several thousands of participants. Someone sang America the Beautiful.

The “buzz” was mostly about the shame that the perp will likely not face the death penalty due to its rare enforcement and or that Obama will not support such a goal, him being such a friend of Muslims. I am not kidding: Obama really got the heat regarding his rumored Muslim upbringing. I heard this sentiment nearly all day on Saturday. And these were not exclusively Texans by any stretch of the imagination.

There was a significant contingent of retired military at the cook-off among the 5,000-6,000 or so who travel there annually for the event that has taken place on the first Saturday in November since 1967. Among the buzz: President Obama took just as much heat among those old and young soldiers as did the killer. Pres. Obama was absolutely vilified to the point that even I was surprised. Our president is hugely unpopular among our military it would seem. Several groups of contestants were from Fort Hood, and they criticized the fort’s military leaders for allowing such a nutcase/murderer to rise to such high rank. When it’s all said and done, I’d expect someone among the base’s management to take early retirement rather than be booted out for not listening to their own men and women who complained about Major Hasan’s rants over the past two years.

The participants at the cook-off range from 30-somethings to retired military, bankers, doctors, lawyers, auto mechanics, pilots, ditch diggers, undertakers and other n’er do wells from all over the US. Judging from the array of license plates on the trucks, cars and RVs at the cook-off, most were from outside of Texas. Some participants come from as far away as Guam, Puerto Rico, Belgium and Canada.

Judging from what I listened to around the camp fires Friday and Saturday nights, Obama is probably as unpopular among the American military that was there as is the demented shrink who killed all of those people out of hate for America.

From news reports: Classmates who participated in a 2007-2008 master’s program at a military college told The Associated Press that they complained to faculty during the program about what they considered to be Hasan’s anti-American views, which included his giving a presentation that justified suicide bombing and telling classmates that Islamic law trumped the U.S. Constitution.

Source: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_FORT_HOOD_SHOOTING?SITE=TXDAM&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

You can quote me.

JE comments: According to published reports, Maj. Hasan has been in the US Army since 1988–that’s 21 years of blame to go around. I don’t see how Pres. Obama, less than one year into his term, can be responsible in any way for the tragedy. But what is important is how many in the military perceive Obama as somehow “not one of us”–if indeed he is so unpopular in the military, what does this tell us about the nation? A “quiet loner” shooter, such as Cho at Virginia Tech, is not pegged as representative of any group; that Hasan was a Muslim will probably fuel knee-jerk hatred of Islam in the US Heartland. This is a very sad event that goes beyond the immeasurable suffering of the actual victims.

I asked Randy Black, our resident Texan-at-Large, for his thoughts on the Ft. Hood shooting, as it was surprising to me that no one had mentioned it yet on WAIS. Now the floodgate has been opened, and I anticipate many passionate responses.

US: Obama’s Presidency at 10 Months (Richard Hancock, US)

Richard Hancock writes:

I have read that a successful president is one who accomplishes no more than three objectives during the course of his first four years. I believe that Obama suffers from trying to accomplish too many things at once. I believe that he should have concentrated on (1) healing the country’s financial problems, (2) winning the war in Afghanistan, and (3) making inexpensive health care improvements. I will give Obama credit for making strong steps to accomplish no. 1 but, so far, his performance on Afghanistan is inconclusive, as are his efforts on health care. I have great doubts about placing great priority at this time on climate change and a card check to enable the easier unionization of workers. He certainly has not been a strong advocate of a balanced budget or programs to improve our deficit trade balance. His commitment to raise taxes only on those making more than $250,000 now appears to be a mirage and I believe that people are beginning to recognize this.

In the WSJ, Nov. 6, Congressman Shadegg of Arizona offers some sensible suggestions. He is in favor of a gradual approach in changing our medical system. His recommendations are as follows:

1. Do away with state regulations so that the sale of health insurance is placed on a national scale which would serve to lower premiums.

2. Give employees the right to buy health insurance on their own and to receive an income-tax deduction the same as the employer does for company-supplied health coverage.

3. Establish restrictions on “runaway medical practice litigation.”

Mr. Shadegg states that the above changes could be made at no cost, and that people have reason to be suspicious of the “expensive, untested, new health-care system” which is now before Congress.

Richard Hancock comments: My wife and I have health coverage which is written off on our taxes because we own and operate a language-translation company. Why should not any wage earner have the same privilege? We, along with about 80% of the American population, are satisfied with our current health care and have great misgivings about what this 1900-page monstrosity now in congress might bring us.

JE comments: A Poli Sci 101 question: wouldn’t Rep. Shadegg’s proposal to “do away with state regulations” on health insurance be an infringement on States’ Rights? Republicans (Shadegg is from the GOP) usually profess to favor more local control and less federal oversight.

As long as we’re putting things on a national scale, I offer two proposals:

1) A standardized, national driver’s license. Think of how many Americans are forced to apply for a new license just because they move to another state. It is wasteful to have 50 different sets of driving laws, regulations, sanctions, and “points.”

2) A national 10-cent deposit on beverage cans and bottles, like the one that’s worked successfully in Michigan for thirty years. While we’re at it, why not make it 25 cents? Think of the recycling advantages and the reduction of litter. Garbage is a huge problem. If garbage is worth money, it ceases to be garbage. Problem solved.

re: US: Obama One Year after Elections (Bienvenido Macario, Philippines/US)

Bienvenido Macario writes:

This is not exactly meant to defend Pres. Obama, but rather to present my understanding of the limits of the power of the US president. First, Pres. Obama was not sworn in until Jan 20, 2009. He was placed in office by nameless and faceless members of the electoral college, not by voters at large. This is the reality of American-style democracy that probably very few American voters are aware of. They do not elect the US President.

Whether we have a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, the US Congress dictates what the US President can and cannot do.

Pres. Obama should be credited with stopping the recession but at the cost of making Washinton DC the new financial capital of the US and at the expense of Wall St. Nothing really wrong there, except the US is has a market-based economy. When the financial and political capital of a country is one and the same there will soon be an inefficient economy.

Probably because of politics, after the recession was checked, Pres. Obama stopped stimulating the economy to recovery and work on how to spend the money that’s not even there yet–the health care reform bill.

In Pres. Kennedy’s “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech at Rice University in Houston in 1962, he reaffirmed America’s commitment to landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Money was not a problem, so even though we were in a Cold War and an ongoing Vietnam War by July 1969 the US put two men on the moon and brought them back.

The $1 trillion plus in 10 yrs. Health Care Reform is an uphill struggle; why? Because there is no money! Why? Because of the economy is broken!

Unfortunately Pres. Obama and his cabinet will get the blame, not the members of the electoral college.

An example of Washington DC as the new financial capital of America:

Fannie and Freddie spent $200 million in the last ten years lobbying before the US Congress. Their executives could get huge bonuses and no one questioned them.

Freddie Mac’s CFO committed suicide last year.

Now who will lobby for the entire US economy? Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, World Bank and the IMF are the worst examples of “too big to fail, too big to be wrong” corporations and institutions.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is like a typical Filipino politician, who says one thing and does the opposite. He speaks of “strengthening the US Dollar” and then throws away billions of taxpayer money on hopeless cases like the “Gang of Four” (IMF, WB, Fannie and Freddie). He should explain this conflict between his goals and policies to US taxpayers. He should answer to his employer, the American people.

JE comments: I went to college with Timothy Geithner (he graduated three years before me; we never met). Tim: if you’re reading these lines, I vote for a strong dollar! And Go Green!

Bienvenido Macario writes that national economies become inefficient when their political and financial capitals are one and the same. This is the rule for the overwhelming majority of countries–Russia, France, Japan, Mexico, the UK. In Europe, Germany and Switzerland are the only two countries with separate financial and political capitals. Elsewhere in the world, we have the examples of Australia, Brazil, (possibly) China, India, and the US. Does either model necessarily lead to inefficiency? New York City, interestingly enough, isn’t the political capital of anything–not even the state of NY. But New Yorkers will be quick to tell you they are the center of the universe.

re: US: Obama One Year after Elections (Harry Papasotiriou, Greece)

Harry Papasotiriou writes regarding the economic crisis:

Politics aside, the response of the Bush and the Obama administrations to the colossal banking crisis of September 2008- February 2009 has been on a continuum. Now that the panic of those five months is over, people can revert to their usual ideological disagreements. But during those five months, when it was uncertain whether major banks would survive, companies and corporations were uncertain whether their cash in those banks would remain available. Thus they cut production below sales, selling from their inventories, in order to ensure cash flow for their survival. Now that their inventories have been exhausted, the banking system has been saved (due to massive federal government intervention by both administrations) and consumer demand has not collapsed, they are drastically increasing production–hence the V-shaped recovery in production. But they have also instituted labor-saving measures, increasing their productivity, which means that unemployment will not decline soon.

Let me state that I tend to be a pro-free market conservative (Liberal in European terms). But in the face of a massive banking crisis of the kind that the United States experienced during those five months, I do believe in government intervention (as did Bush, Bernanke and Paulson). When panic takes over in the markets, disrupting their orderly and rational function, government intervention is essential. This part of Keynes’s insight, regarding the herd behavior of investors in capital markets, is best captured by his disciple Shackle, who focused on the psychology of panic situations. But once the panic is over, government should in my view retreat to a limited regulatory role and let the markets allocate scarce resources efficiently.

re: US: Obama One Year after Elections (Randy Black, US)

Randy Black writes:

Nigel Jones’s 4 November post in which he skewered the Obama administration is entertaining and in most aspects factual. Clearly, Obama campaigned hard for the Democratic Party candidates for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, making several campaign trips to both states. Just as clearly, Obama was defeated along with the gubernatorial candidates. Think about it: One year ago, Democratic Party leaders and much of the national media gleefully declared the Republican Party dead on arrival as they celebrated the death for weeks afterward.

A poll today reveals that “independent” voters now outnumber Republican and Democratic party members 2-1. This revelation is hardly good news for Obama or for any Republican candidate for that matter.

Significantly, there are more than 25 members of the Democratic Party-controlled House of Representatives who have banded together to petition Obama to not allow tax dollars to be part of any new Health Service that might subsidize abortions. Religious zealots? Republicans? Nope, the Democratic Party members in the House are the perps. Apparently, the once-united Democratic majority is splintering in all directions under the inept leadership of Nancy Pelosi, who is often vilified from one coast to the other. Also significant is the fact that Democratic Party Congressional leaders are fighting a Republican-led campaign to post proposed laws (bills) online at least three days before a vote. Apparently, the Democrats are afraid of the voters getting an opportunity to see what they’re up to.

While Nigel points out many failures of Obama one year in, BO has one significant victory. In one fell swoop, he vanquished his principal adversary. By appointing Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, he essentially sent her on a permanent “field trip.” Out of town, out of mind. Rather than having her in D.C. as a US Senator where she’d be grabbing headlines on a daily basis, she’s been banished to the outbacks of the world and only occasionally surfaces in a “grip and grin” photo op in Moscow or Cairo. A brilliant move on Obama’s part, in my opinion. Her always unfaithful hubby is left behind in their D.C. mansion with his girlfriends and poker buddies.

By the way, I assume that Nigel’s comment that BO spends too much time on the golf course is offered tongue-in-cheek. Playing something like 12 rounds of golf in one year hardly seems excessive to me, especially with the Fort Belvoir golf course only a few minute’s drive from the White House.

Nigel also compared BO to Jimmy Carter by saying that Carter was Cicero and BO is Bozo the Clown. That’s probably unfair to Bozo. Way back when Carter was the presidential candidate, I was drawn to the peanut farmer because he was not part of the insider-based Washington establishment. I thought that as an outsider, Carter would surely be superior to Gerald Ford, clearly an insider. Boy was I wrong. Carter was a one-legged duck in a sea of sharks. Whether or not BO will succeed as President probably depends upon a bit of arm twisting in the smoke filled rooms of the Capital. Will Barack Obama turn out to be a “one-term wonder”? We’ll probably know in about one more year.

In the meantime, BO will continue to try to nationalize major industries as he’s already done with GM and Chrysler and a number of major banks and investment houses. Can he effectively nationalize the health care industry? Only the Shadow knows and at the moment, he’s not talking. My daughter has been buying Ford stock as fast as she can gather up the funding from me and her savings permits.

JE comments: Ford was trading at under $2/share in February, and is now in the high $7s–a quadruple return for those wise/brave enough to grab a ride early this year. But “past performance does not guarantee future returns”–one of my favorite disclaimers on financial prospectuses. Ford is clearly the darling among Detroit’s erstwhile Big Three. Will the FoMoCo honeymoon last? Let’s call up the Shadow once again…

re: US: Obama One Year after Elections (David Crow, US)

David Crow writes:

I disagree with Nigel Jones’s assertion, seconded
by John Heelan (both from 4 Nov.), that President Obama has “failed
to lift the economy from the doldrums.” On the
contrary, his swift, bold action–including the
stimulus package, the bank bailout, and the auto
bailout–averted a replay of the Great
Depression. GDP is growing again at an
annualized clip of 3.5%. Unemployment was
growing by nearly half a percentage point per
month when President Obama took office. That
pace has slowed dramatically to an average of
one-tenth of a percentage point for the last four
months (Source: Trading Economics,
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/Unemployment-Rate.aspx?Symbol=USD ).

Halting the free fall of the world’s largest
economy is no mean feat. Let’s give credit where credit is due.

re: US: Obama One Year after Elections (John Heelan, UK)

Nigel Jones wrote on 4 November:

A year in and the (Obama) administration has failed to lift the economy from the doldrums, with ten percent of the workforce jobless, a dollar plunging nearly as fast as the BO’s poll ratings and a country mired in unsustainable debt. (Just like Britain, in fact.)

John Heelan responds:

There is much truth in my countryman’s acerbic comments on Obama. However, perhaps he is being a little unfair in timescales.

As his hero, Margaret Thatcher–a far more draconian leader than Obama–found out, the economic depredations of the previous government were so deep that it takes substantially more than a single year to turn things around.

When Thatcher came to power in 1979 (I voted for her!), inflation was at 27%, over-powerful trades unions had caused wage inflation and time lost on strikes, unemployment was approaching a post war record of 700,000 and government debt was so large that IMF loans were required.

A devotee of Milton Friedman’s monetarist policies, Thatcher instituted extreme deflationary policies. Taxes were raised, government spending cut and interest rates increased as the government sought to reduce inflation.

A year later, the deflationary fiscal and monetary policies had reduced inflation, but at a cost. Aggregate Demand had fallen, economic growth had dropped leading to full recession by mid-1980, and unemployment was well on its way to the 3 million, a level that lasted for several years.

Would Nigel have said then that Thatcher had failed in her first year?

Is not Obama in a similar mess with the US economy wrecked by 8 years of Bush administrations? Is not one year too soon to turn the US “supertanker”?

If so, Nigel is being unfair to Obama. If not, I look forward to his similar comments after Cameron wins the next election and fails one year later to have remedied UK’s economic mess left by New Labour.

re: US: Obama One Year after Elections (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

When commenting Nigel Jones’s post of 4 November, JE wrote:

Anyone willing to come to President Obama’s defense?

Cameron Sawyer responds:

Certainly, I am willing to give a somewhat milder assessment, also from a right-wing perspective.

Nigel brings up some valid criticism, but his overall view is much colored by an emotional view.

He says that Obama has mostly engaged in “prolonged dithering,” rather than accomplishing anything. I can’t really agree with this. The change in the direction of our foreign policy was rather decisive and rather quick, and very much welcome. The level of productiveness of work with other countries has been increased many-fold. A decision has been made about Iraq, which was surely the biggest foreign policy issue we have, and I think the decision made is probably the best of a bad menu of choices. A decision has also been made about Afghanistan–and I agree with Nigel that this one was probably wrong, but we can’t accuse him of dithering.

The economic crisis has been managed reasonably well by almost all accounts. Pumping tons of money into the economy by the state is the only plan anyone has, and it seems to have helped. We have avoided economic collapse. We do not have the inflation which skeptics, including myself, predicted. The debt is awful, but it is less than the average debt of Western European countries, as a proportion of GDP.

The socialization of medicine, which is the pet project of the Democrats, is something I am passionately opposed to, so I am happy that this has failed so far. But other than disagreeing with the policy, I can’t blame the administration too much for this. It has been done in a serious-minded and intelligent way, which is one reason why it is failing. Resort has not been made to the whole toolbox of propaganda and manipulation, and for this I respect the Obama administration.

Concerning scandals, mentioned by JE: this is not actually a trivial issue. The remarkable lack of scandals in the Obama administration is just a sign of the high quality of management and teamwork in the Obama administration. It forms a stark contrast to the awful Clinton administration, which was scandal-ridden exactly because it was so poorly run and staffed by so many questionable characters (starting with the then-president and his odious wife). The Obama administration is a real class act in comparison, and in fact in absolute terms as well. I don’t agree, by and large, with its domestic policies, but that fact does not make Obama, in my eyes, a “Bozo.”

US: Obama One Year after Elections (Nigel Jones, UK)

It’s hard to believe that the US presidential elections of 2008, so thoroughly scrutinized on the e-pages of WAIS, celebrate their first anniversary today (4 November). To mark the occasion, we hear from Nigel Jones:

I have been waiting in vain for American WAISers to start a discussion a year after the election of President Barack Obama–or the Blessed One, as he is known in some disrespectful quarters.

Perhaps they are keeping quiet out of sheer embarrassment? Let me, therefore, with due trepidition as a mere Brit, get the ball rolling and attempt a provisional first-year report on the BO as he appears from over the pond, who, let us not forget, is already one quarter of the way through his first (and hopefully only) term in office.

It is an appropriate day to attempt such an assessment, since it is not only a year to the day since the President was elected; but, by unhappy (for him) coincidence, it is also the day when the GOP won back the Governorship of one state–Virginia, which fell to the Dems relatively recently–and took a second, New Jersey, from the Democrat incumbent, in the first statewide win in a traditionally Democratic state since 1997. And this despite the BO personally intervening in the campaign. His long honeymoon with the voters seems to be definitively over. The bubble has burst, not with a bang but a whimper.

It is not before time. For, wherever we look, the Obama administration is a disaster zone with a capital D.

A year in and the administration has failed to lift the economy from the doldrums, with ten percent of the workforce jobless, a dollar plunging nearly as fast as the BO’s poll ratings and a country mired in unsustainable debt. (Just like Britain, in fact.)

Despite controlling both houses of Congress, BO has failed to implement the central plank of his platform: Health Service reform. Hardly surprising really, since it would cost $1.055 trillion dollars over a decade, and could only be funded by higher taxes which Americans are understandably reluctant to pay.

The hallmark of BO’s style is not the smack of firm government, but the prolonged dither. He has deliberated for months over where to go in Afghanistan, preferring to spend time on the golf course or windbagging in TV studios rather than take a hard decision on a fruitless and unwinnnable war that is killing young Americans almost daily. We’re still waiting for him to make that choice.

He has failed to close the Guantanamo detention centre, despite promising to do so.

After pumping $787 billions into the economy–enacting the traditional Democrat remedy that the way to solve a problem is to drown it in other people’s cash–that money has now gone with the wind and the US has a projected cumulative deficit of $9 trilllion dollars over the next ten years: a debt to make even our own Prime Minister, Gordon “borrower” Brown’s eyes water.

In foreign affairs, apart from the Afghan quagmire, the BO has achieved precisely nothing. The Israeli-Palestine stalemate remains exactly where it was. Iran is busy completing its nuclear programme without a squeak of protest; he has stripped eastern Europe of its missile defence system without getting so much as a “thanx” in return from Russia.

Even in peacenik, left-wing, Europe that ole BO magic appears to be wearing thin: a personal appearence by the President at Copenhagen failed to secure the 2016 Olympics for his hometown of Chicago. OK, he did win the Nobel Peace Prize–but that was ludicrously decided upon by the Awards committee only days after he moved in to the Oval office.

Faced with this mounting array of failure, ineptitude and stasis, what has the BO done? Why, what most failing leaders do: he has blamed the Media, heaping abuse on the one major TV outlet not to have fallen under his spell–Fox News.

It is scarcely surprising that more and more Americans are wondering what they did in that moment of madness one year ago. The unpalatable truth is that, sickened by the idiocies of George W. Bush, they elected a Bozo of awesome proportions. A silver tongued Bozo, perhaps, but a Bozo all the same. Despite the soaring, empty rhetoric, he is beginning to make Jimmy Carter look like Cicero.

I feel at least slightly qualified to attack Obama because my country too elected a preening, narcissistic, strutting vacuum in 1997–and are still paying the price for having done so. In six months we will finally eject our useless left-wing Government. I’m sorry that you have another three years of pain to endure before you get the chance to do the same.

Oh, yes, and where exactly did he put that pesky birth certificate?

JE comments: Anyone willing to come to President Obama’s defense? He hasn’t been brought down by any major scandals during his still-young administration. But on the other hand, the economy has not turned around, at least not in my neighborhood, and the (ever-diminishing) buck inevitably stops on the presidential desk. Unless recovery comes soon, he will be blamed.

President Obama is doing a lot, but has he done anything? Time will only make it more difficult for him to enact significant reform. It is inevitable that the Democrats will lose some seats in Congress in next year’s elections–if mid-term election history teaches us anything, it is that yesterday’s contests in New Jersey and Virginia will be a harbinger of 2010.

re: Obama and Nobel Peace Prize (Alan Levine, US)

Alan Levine writes:

On 20 October Alain de Benoist gave a colorful account of US actions in Kenya, including a $1,000,000 payoff and the CIA secretly funding an Oslo think tank via a shell organization in Minneapolis. May I ask how Alain is privy to such knowledge? Is his account confirmed by its participants? If so, case closed. If not, what is the evidence?

re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine; on Safeway’s Policies (Gene Franklin, US)

Gene Franklin (GF) responds to Cameron Sawyer (CS)’s post of 17 June:

CS: Charging people more who cost the system more can also bring some benefits by creating healthy incentives, and is arguably more fair to those people who do take care of themselves and thus cost the system less.

GF: I agree, and suggest that a rising penalty for poor behavior will help, as it does in California with a “good driver” discount on auto insurance.

CS: But a fundamental problem of health care is that a relatively small proportion of chronically ill people account for most of the costs. You can dramatically cut the health care costs of most people if you just identify and cut off those people and let them die. But that would be barbarous. Sharing around the cost of taking care of such people is part of the task of health care policy.

GF: I recently heard on “Charlie Rose” that if insurance companies are sensitive to the wishes of patients and will pay for hospice and home care, including palliative treatments, both costs and satisfaction are improved.

CS: I agree with Richard Hancock that a policy of employing more, rather than less market forces in the health care system is probably the right way forward. But how to do that in practice? I don’t know.

GF: A suggestion along these lines: the fee-for-service produces two versions of frustration. In one case we have those who go into medicine from a concern to help others who, on starting a fee-for-service practice, find themselves frustrated as CEO of a business. In the other case, there are those who went into medicine to make money who find themselves frustrated with patient complaints. The cure for both is to implement incentives for MDs to go into group practice dedicated to health care with positive incentives when customers stay healthy, rather than when customers are sick–such units as Mayo, Kaiser, Cleveland Clinic, etc., and then the system will discourage the perverse incentives of fee-for-service.

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: on Third Parties (Alan Levine, US)

Alan Levine responds to Alain de Benoist’s post of 15 June:

Might Alain also acknowledge that his suspicion that American voting ballots do not contain parties that question the “basic tenets” of the regime is incorrect? I ask because Alain is on record arguing that the US is a mass society of sameness. (I paraphrase and hope I don’t do his view an injustice.) Might he acknowledge that at least in this one respect that the US is not as all-the-same as he suspects?

JE comments: “Basic tenets” is subject to a wide scope of interpretation. Who was the last candidate to capture the White House on a platform that challenged “basic tenets”? Possibly Abraham Lincoln, although he didn’t actually stress abolitionism in his 1860 campaign platform. The Emancipation Proclamation came about primarily due to military urgency. Of course, there are always minor-party candidates that take BTs head-on. As I learned in my intro to Poly Sci course so many years ago, truly successful third parties eventually cease to exist, as their ideas become mainstream (or in the case of Lincoln’s Republicans, they themselves become a mainstream party).

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine; on Safeway’s Policies (Richard Hancock, US)

Richard Hancock follows up on his posting of 16 June:

I failed to add in the WSJ Safeway article that Safeway also has union employees but the Healthy Measures program currently applies to non-union employees. CEO Steven Burd said that he is working with union leaders to incorporate the Healthy Measures program in his union work force as well. He didn’t say why the union workers had not joined this program. I would speculate that union workers were not in favor of the Healthy Measures program, but I don’t believe this invalidates the point that a healthy lifestyle is the best way to lower medical costs.

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine; on Safeway’s Policies (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

Cameron Sawyer responds to Richard Hancock’s post of 16 June:

The cynic in me says that Safeway found an even better way to reduce health costs than it lets on–it simply refuses to hire obese or diabetic people, or other people who account for a disproportionate share of health care costs.

Of course providing incentives to people to take better care of themselves can bring some benefits. But you can’t prevent even preventable diseases by incentives alone. Some people smoke just because they need to, and love to, even though they are fully aware that they are shortening their lives and ruining their health, just to name one example. Incentives will not affect most smokers’ behavior, nor that of most obese people.

Charging people more who cost the system more can also bring some benefits by creating healthy incentives, and is arguably more fair to those people who do take care of themselves and thus cost the system less. But a fundamental problem of health care is that a relatively small proportion of chronically ill people account for most of the costs. You can dramatically cut the health care costs of most people if you just identify and cut off those people and let them die. But that would be barbarous. Sharing around the cost of taking care of such people is part of the task of health care policy.

I agree with Richard that a policy of employing more, rather than less market forces in the health care system is probably the right way forward. But how to do that in practice? I don’t know.

–

For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine; Insurance and Wal-Mart (Randy Black, US)

In his comments to Richard Hancock’s post of 16 June, JE commented:

Safeway’s CEO writes an op-ed to boast that 74% of his employees have health coverage? What’s wrong with this picture? … I wonder what the comparable statistic is for those who work at Wal-Mart.

Randy Black responds:

I fear that John Eipper misunderstood the intent of the article, and that perhaps relevant facts were omitted from the Safeway CEO’s comments.

The statement was that 74 percent of non-union employees have insurance coverage. I called Safeway and they said that the other 26 percent of non-union employees either have insurance via other sources such as a spouse, get coverage via Medicare, or are not eligible for coverage due to being seasonal, part-time or contract employees who may have coverage elsewhere.

Relating to John’s questions about coverage for employees, full and part time, of Wal-Mart, we’ve discussed and dissected this topic to great length dating back to at least 2004 when the Wal-Mart company opened its insurance coverage to part-time workers and implemented a very low-cost coverage option for its lowest paid workers, in some cases for coverage as low as $9 per month for the children of employees and $11 per month for the actual employee.

Additionally, according to my pharmacist whom I just phoned, Wal-Mart has been opening doc-in-a-box type clinics within their stores nationwide that serve employees and the public for at least four years.

According to a 2006 NY Times article: 75 percent of (Wal-Mart) workers have some form of health insurance, either through Wal-Mart, a spouse or a previous job. The remaining 25 percent have no insurance. That was true three years ago.

But by 2009, Wal-Mart says that 95 percent of its 1.4 million employees have health insurance coverage, according to a Feb 13, 2009 Washington Post story.

From the Washington Post: Once vilified for its stingy health benefits, the world’s largest company has become an unlikely leader in the effort to provide affordable care without bankrupting employers, their workers or taxpayers in the process. From its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., the retailer is doing in the real world what many in Washington are only beginning to talk about.

At a time when other firms are scaling back or eliminating health coverage, Wal-Mart has made a serious dent in the problem of the uninsured. New figures being released today show that 5.5 percent of its employees now lack health insurance, compared with a nationwide rate of 18 percent.

The company has also put into practice many of the innovations that experts say will lead to higher-quality, more efficient care. Using its high-tech marketing savvy, Wal-Mart has introduced digital records, partnered with prestigious organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, and begun targeting costly health problems such as obesity and premature births.

Yet for all of Wal-Mart’s achievements, the story of its immersion in the world of health policy is also a warning about the depth and breadth of one of the thorniest challenges facing the country today .

Sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/business/24walmart.html?ex=1298437200&en=cbb3f6f81f9716b1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/12/AR2009021204096_pf.html

JE comments, from back at WAIS HQ/Royal Oak: No WAISer gets to the bottom of a story like Randy Black! I fear that when it comes to Wal-Mart, I must be a couple of years behind the times. 5.5 percent uninsured still works out to about 80,000 “working poor” Wal-Martites (and their families!) without insurance. Shouldn’t a company with W-M’s resources be able to bring the figure to 100%, should it really choose to? Coverage for all employees is taken for granted at “respectable” (in my book) US companies.

(Randy might be heartened to learn that last week I visited a Wal-Mart in suburban Cincinnati. It was just to make an urgent “pit stop,” however. The store was admittedly big, new, shiny and clean…as were its rest rooms!)

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

US: Cincinnati Report (John Eipper, US)

JE writes:

WAIS World HQ has been in the “Queen City” since 8 June, and we return to Michigan this afternoon. Aldona and I spent the week working for the ETS/College Board organization as faculty readers of AP (Advanced Placement) exams. For WAISers unfamiliar with the AP system, they are examinations that allow high school students to earn college credit before entering the university. We spent the week with about 800 other Spanish language and literature educators, busily reading critical essays by 17 year-olds. Scan the essay, apply the rubric, evaluate and fill in the bubbles on a computer form, with two 15-minute breaks and a one-hour lunch: though we’re all intellectuals here, this regimented experience gives one a sense of what factory work must be like.

During our evenings we toured this city, less than 300 miles from home but heretofore unknown to me. First stop: Wikipedia. I learned that Cincinnati (founded in 1788) was the first US boom town west of the Alleghenies, and the first “great” city founded by Americans, not colonists (the original mayor of Cincinnati was German, but bear with me here). It was, an is, ideally suited for commerce–first fluvial and later railroads. Cincinnati lies at the crossroads of North and South, East and West. The same could be said of my childhood home, St. Louis, and Cincinnati strikes me as a very similar place. Both are once-great, now smallish cities marked by the German and African-American cultures–bricky, gritty, rivery and fanatical about baseball. The legendary Cincinnati Reds, like the St. Louis Cardinals, are one of the sport’s most storied teams. The Reds play in a new home, the Great American Ballpark, sponsored (I assume) by the Great American Insurance Company whose headquarters is a block away. But the name of the ballpark says it all: if Cincinnati is America’s city, the Reds are America’s team–baseball as synecdoche. I was disappointed that the Reds are out of town this week.

But not all has been harmonious: WAISers will recall the riots here of 2001–the most recent major race-related disturbance in the United States. African-Americans were outraged when police killed an unarmed youth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Cincinnati_riots

One wonders if the symbolic gesture of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, opened in 2004, has contributed to healing this city’s racial wounds. (Cincinnati was the first free city on the route of escaped slaves heading north.) Time permitting, I hope to visit the museum later this afternoon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Underground_Railroad_Freedom_Center

As I pointed out in the recent Cincinnati Trivia Quiz, two major US retailers are headquartered here (see attached photo, taken from our 21st-floor hotel window). I originally assumed that the Macy’s building was a Macy’s and not the Macy’s (isn’t Macy’s in New York?), but the corporation’s massive consolidation with Federated Department Stores in the 1990s brought the HQ to Cincinnati. Kroger, after acquiring Ralph’s, Fred Meyer and other chains, now competes with Wal-Mart for national dominance in the grocery business. The stand-alone grocery and the “full-service” department store–are these old retail models destined to fall before the onslaught of the Big Box? One might say it’s inevitable that Cincinnati will give up its dominance to Bentonville, Arkansas. I’ve visited the latter as well, and must say I prefer the tidy corporate skyscraper to Bentonville’s sprawling empire of low-rise, ramshackle and visually nasty Wal-Mart corporate buildings.

Cincinnati can best be appreciated from across the Ohio river, in Kentucky. Crossing on foot the historic Roebling suspension bridge (the world’s longest from 1866 until the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883), we spent two peaceful evenings exploring Covington, with its brick row houses and Old South flavor. Ulysses S. Grant’s parents lived here during the Civil War and while USG was in the White House; the house still stands. Newport, across the Licking River from Covington, has developed a major tourist industry with I-Max theaters, shopping, dining, drinking, and riverboat cruises. Our favorite moment of rest was enjoying a homebrew from the Hoffbrauhaus, a Bavarian-themed beer garden with majestic vistas of the lit-up Cincinnati skyline. A great nod to this city’s Germanic roots, and the perfect preface to our next travel destination: Berlin, on 15 July.

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA




re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine (Richard Hancock, US)

Richard Hancock writes:

The WSJ of June12 prints an article by Steven A. Burd, CEO of Safeway, called “How Safeway Is Cutting Health-Care Costs.” He claims that market-based solutions can reduce the national health-care bill by 40%. Citing the health-care plan that Safeway introduced in 2005, he says that the key is to reward healthy behavior. During the four years since 2005, Safeway has kept its per capita health-care costs flat while most American companies’ costs have risen 38% over the same period. He adds that 74% of all costs are owed to chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). He states that 80% of cardiovascualar and diabetes diseases are preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable as are 90% of obesity cases.

Seventy-four per cent of non-union Safeway people have insurance coverage, premiums of which are partially paid by employees.Those who live a more healthy life style are given premium reductions. Data is collected by outside parties and those who pass tests for all of the chronic conditions listed above have premium costs reduced by $780 per individual and $1,560 for families. He says, “At Safeway, we are building a culture of fitness…our obesity and smoking rates are 70% of the national average.” He states that they are constrained by current federal laws from increasing these incentives. For example, Safeway can only reward members $312 for not using tobacco when the cost of insuring a tobacco user is $1400.

I read this article with interest. It leads me to believe that we should not rush to establish a government single-payer insurance plan. I think that the Safeway plan offers a nice balance of benefits while rewarding people who demonstrate good health behaviours. That’s not to say that the federal government could not do the same but I have my doubts. I think that the government will ultimately end up rationing health care. Medical procedures that are not life-threatening will be delayed or not done at all. Those who can afford such operations will have them done. Those who cannot will live a life of lesser quality.

JE comments: Safeway’s CEO writes an op-ed to boast that 74% of his employees have health coverage? What’s wrong with this picture? But at the same time, I wonder what the comparable statistic is for those who work at Wal-Mart.

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

Herb Abrams wrote on 15 June:

Cameron is apparently skeptical about the government’s ability to produce a Honda. GM and Chrysler, with all of their great contributions of the past, seem pleased to get some help from the taxpayers, via government.

Cameron Sawyer replies:

Indeed, I think the newly intimate involvement of these previously private-sector producers with the state, particularly GM where the involvement is most intimate, is their death-knell. There is no precedent of a government manufacturing something on a large scale and doing it well, and there is no reason which I have heard to expect anything better than what happened to the U.K. auto industry in the 1960s and 1970s, in whose footsteps we are following–in other words, a complete fiasco. The fact that the failed management of these bankrupt or semi-bankrupt companies are willing to accept a government bailout doesn’t demonstrate anything.

Herb Abrams: I would point to the NIH as a prime example of one of the great enterprises of the 20th and 21st centuries, central to the support of virtually all of the bio-medical research that has changed the texture of diagnosis and therapy. It’s not a Honda, but it’s an enormously complicated organism, run inordinately well by of all things the Federal government.

Cameron Sawyer: But I never said that all state-run things are shambles. It may well be that the NIH is a marvel (I can’t comment). States do militaries, education, R&D, and probably some other things pretty well. The Soviet system, for all of its horrors and obvious failures, did an amazingly good job with education (I think actually the best the world has ever seen, which is amazing considering the corrosive effect of ideology), and with basic scientific research (not the best in the world, but highly competitive). What I said was that the state does the production of things badly. And that’s what makes me skeptical about a U.K.-style–yes, Soviet-style–system, where doctors and most of the rest of the health-care industry are public servants, inasmuch as health care is a service which needs to be produced. The French system is fundamentally different from the Soviet- and U.K.-style command economy systems; in France the state does not produce health care and is not a single-payer.

I’d like to say again that I comment with great hesitancy as it seems to me that there is no health care system in the world which works really well. A really good health care system is yet to be invented, as far as I can tell, and it will certainly not be invented by me.

JE comments: This morning’s USA Today reports that the Connor Ave. (Detroit) assembly plant is back in production, the first Chrysler facility to restart since 4 May. The first vehicles off the line? Dodge Vipers: 10 cylinders, over 8 liters of displacement, about a zillion horsepower. Not the ideal car-of-the-future Obama-mobile! (Have I ever mentioned that I want a Viper?)

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: on Third Parties (Alain de Benoist, France)

Alain de Benoist writes:

Alan Levine (14 June) is right: we should never use the word “always” in political matters. But what about “never”? Maybe we should avoid this word too. What’s left?

JE comments: We’ll “always” have what Wikipedians call “weasel words”: “tends to,” “often,” and “usually.” Or how about “experts claim”? But never say never: most people “tended to” say that an African-American would “never” be elected President.

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: on Third Parties (Roy Domenico, US)

Roy Domenico writes:

Regarding Alan Levine’s observations of 14 June, I might add that I frequently vote for 3rd parties–or more accurately against the “Big 2.” I voted for Perot twice, never really thinking he’d be elected but with some satisfaction that he briefly made a dent in what the Italians call the “party-ocracy” (partitocrazia). And to Alan’s comment on the Perot impact, I add that my vote for Ralph Nader in 2000 might also have had an impact, and I have been frequently criticized by my Democratic friends for this. But who could have known? After the invasion of Iraq, however, I felt that the third party was not an option and, in 2004, I held my nose and voted for the one who has been called “the talking tree in ‘The Wizard of Oz’” or, simply, “Lurch.”

JE comments: Pass the Heinz 57, my friends!

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Thoughts on Wilson’s Presidency (Robert Whealey, US)

On 9 June, JE invited WAISers to reflect on Woodrow Wilson, whom JE termed the first “global” US president. Robert Whealey replies:

Wilson was the best President since Lincoln who was a liberal/progressive. We shall leave out FDR, because any president must be judged by his inheritance, not by standards of today. Wilson kept the country out of foreign war from 1914-April 1917.

Wilson’s major accomplishments were the passage of the Clayton anti-Trust Act, establishment of the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Reserve Bank. He appointed Louis Brandies to the Supreme Court–no longer a Christian club. He was a friend of the labor unions.

He was pressed into recommending to Congress a Declaration of War for about six reason–some of them good, others bad.

1. Good: Stop unlimited submarine warfare and restore International Law.

2. Good: Establish a League of Nations to replace the flawed balance of power system.

3. Ambiguous: Save British and French democracy from German militarism. Had Germany won, the world would probably been worse. He assumed the war would
be short, because the Russian Provisional government seemed to be a group of liberals and soon would be victorious on the Eastern Front. This was one of Wilson’s big flaws. He knew too little about European nationalistic politics. After April 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution, Wilson led the US into a long Russian intervention and imperialist adventure into 1919.

4. Bad: Joining the European War to collect the war debts, previously granted to Britain and France. If the British and French military lost, the American capitalists could not collect. Maintaining neutrality in 1917-18 would have meant economic sacrifice at home.

(Jefferson tried the embargo of 1808 which worked for peace, but led a slump that led Madison to the War of 1812).

5. Naive: Fooled by British propaganda. Private press was not neutral and the British cables controlled the news from Europe.

6. Ambiguous/ Bad: Extend America sea power into the Caribbean. Col. House, from Texas, was in favor of war from the beginning. House argued that if
the Germans won, the American Navy would have trouble with the Kaiser’s Navy in the future.

Therefore Wilson was a closet imperialist and and open racist. Yet he was no worse than his contemporaries.

Seventh flaw: In 1919, his wartime authority weakened his hand at Versailles. An arrogant Wilson failed to consult the Republican opposition. It became a bad omen for Truman in Korea, Johnson in Vietnam and Bush 43 in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once word “war” is sounded, Congress and the press stop thinking.

JE comments: In a few weeks we’ll be boarding the metro at the Plac Wilsona station in Warsaw (it’s close to my sister-in-law’s apartment). Poles, for pretty obvious reasons, fondly remember Woodrow Wilson. Czechs probably do, too. I don’t think we’ll see any monuments to WW in Hanoi, however.

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: on Elections and Political Parties (Harry Papasotiriou, Greece)

Harry Papasotiriou comments on Alan Levine’s post of June 14:

Let me add the information that in the 1912 US presidential elections the Socialist candidate got 9% of the popular vote.

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For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine (Herb Abrams, US)

(JE: In the chaos of my temporary move to Cincinnati, I overlooked this message from Herb Abrams when he first sent it a week or so ago. My apologies to Herb.)

Herb Abrams responds to Gene Franklin (29 May) and possibly others:

Sorry to be tardy, but I’ve been tied up with the agenda for a planning retreat, now complete.

The piece by Atul Gewande in the New Yorker was informative, provocative, and a timely reminder of the complexity of issues of cost of health care. The central theme was the variation in intensity of use of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures in two Texas communities with apparently comparable demographics. The starting point for his article was the per capita Medicare expense, virtually twice as much in one as in the other. He speculated that the striking difference might be attributable, among other things, to overuse as a means of augmenting physician income.

The article could have been culled from the literature a few decades ago. By that I mean that for at least the past forty years John Wennberg and his colleagues at Dartmouth Medical School have been first teasing out and then documenting in solid fashion a remarkable regional variation in use of specific medical procedures. The number of radical prostatectomies per unit of comparable male population might vary by as much as fifty or more percent, if my memory serves me correctly. Early on in one town in Vermont 10% of kids had tonsilectomies; in a town 2 hours away, 70% had the same surgery. Why? Without good evidence, the doctors in one town believed surgery cut down the number of sore throats. A large number of women over 60 have had hysterectomies, yet a consensus on indications has not been clear.

Large regional differences in hospitalization rates have also been documented. The reasons underlying these variations, which are not limited to the American continent, have not been fully clarified. They certainly were not explained by the conflicts of interest detailed by Gewande. Physician ownership of a medical or imaging facility, with not only self referral but unneeded utilization, were not evident in the Wennberg variations, although today they impose a significant burden on the health care bill. The evidence that ownership–of an EKG, an echo unit, an Xray machine etc.–by a doctor in practise is associated with increased use is unequivocal. But it’s not simply greed. Decision making in medicine is made hopefully in the best interests of the patient most of the time, but everyone has a set of biases, or preferences based on his medical school experience, his internship, his residency, his mentors, his life in practise, his reading, his ability and willingness to change, his access to new evidence, his belief that more is always better, the mythology his colleagues have elaborated, etc. etc. This is important because the physician is so central to the genesis of cost.

In a slightly lateral direction, each summer we leave Stanford to live in our house on Martha’s Vineyard in the town of Chilmark. Among our neighbors who were economists there was our good friend Eli Ginzberg, a Professor of Economics at Columbia who died some years ago. Although manpower was his central focus, health care was on his mind. During one or another of our long walks on the South Beach, he suggested a simple and economical solution to rising health care costs. “Herb,” he said, ” on the first day of the first semester go in to the first year class in every medical school in the country. Offer every student a $100,000 check to drop out of medical school and go to law school. When they agree, you’ll have removed 10,000 individual sources of $400,000 per annum cost, because that’s what each physician generates on average each year. That’s four billion a year; year after year it adds up to real money, in Everett Dirksen’s coinage.”

Eli had other solutions made in less jest but none embodied a more central truth than the concept that physicians are the generating machines of a huge portion of cost quite beyond their own income.

Coming back to Gene’s question, I think he’s come to a wise conclusion: salaried physicians in group practise are a great way to go. I’ve been on salary from 1952 on as a university employee at either Stanford or Harvard, starting out with $4000 a year in my first year as a medical school faculty member and living the life of Reilly ever since. It’s not exactly a traditional group practise, but it seems to work well. In this context, the most important element is choosing a good primary care doctor and letting him get to know you as you get to know him.

Cameron Sawyer (May 29) equated a single-payer system with “Stalinist medicine,” or something like that. The fact is that the organization of medical care under a single payer approach has many faces. In all of the Western European countries the single payer functions pretty well–with a national health insurance scheme, with private insurance companies and standardized fees, with physicians as government employees, with a mix of public-private as in France, with a mix of provincial funding as in Canada, etc. It enables economies of scale and significant administrative savings, as compared to dozens or hundreds of regional private insurance plans designed to maximize the bottom line.

In 2004 we had a single-payer plan on the ballot in California. Forty per cent of voters supported it. That was at a time when the passion for bringing some rationality to our non-system of health care was remote from the feelings abroad in the land today. Among its features: the insurance couldn’t be canceled; full in-patient and out-patient care were covered; prescription drugs were covered; there was free choice of physicians; a carefully designed revenue schema with appropriate reserves; the end of insurance company control and interference in the patient-doctor relationship; reduced administrative cost.; etc. With another 12 % of voters, it would have become law. Hopefully, universal coverage will emerge from the Obama administration in a reasonable form.

What is encouraging is that Cameron supports most of the Obama approach, if not a single payer. He has come out four square for the Massachusetts system, with insurance mandated for all. When Hillary proposed that, Obama demurred. I think he’s had second thoughts. So far, a significant number of the previously uninsured are now covered in Massachusetts. Whether costs can be covered remains unclear. It’s a noble try, but it certainly isn’t single payer, which is what the country really needs. What is also urgent is a system whereby every patient carry his complete medical record on a card in his wallet, cards compatible with the electronics of every health provider. While not a cure, it will eliminate a mountain of duplication and paper while improving the mechanics of care.

Cameron is apparently skeptical about the government’s ability to produce a Honda. GM and Chrysler, with all of their great contributions of the past, seem pleased to get some help from the taxpayers, via government. I would point to the NIH as a prime example of one of the great enterprises of the 20th and 21st centuries, central to the support of virtually all of the bio-medical research that has changed the texture of diagnosis and therapy. It’s not a Honda, but it’s an enormously complicated organism, run inordinately well by of all things the Federal government.

As usual, in the rare event that I get started, I may run on a bit.

–

For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: on Elections and Political Parties (Alan Levine, US)

Alan Levine writes:

In his 14 June post on the elections in Iran, Alain de Benoist wrote the following about the United States: “in the US there always [are] only two real candidates… in the two-party US political system, most of the other candidates are eliminated through the primary elections, but I suspect that any candidate that would criticize the ‘basic tenets’ of the US would not get on the ballot.”

The US primary system does whittle down the number of candidates, but only within each party. Any and every party can have a candidate in all general elections provided it follows state and local laws, which primarily concern gathering a certain number of signatures. Thus it is necessary to give one correction of fact and one correction to Alain’s suspicion. First, Alain’s suspicion (”I suspect that any candidate that would criticize the ‘basic tenets’ of the US would not get on the ballot”) is incorrect. On US ballots on every level–from president, to congress, to governor, to state representatives, to local offices, there are commonly Communist, Socialist, and sometimes neo-nazi and militia candidates among with the Libertarian, Green, Beer-drinking, and numerous other parties. Clearly, the first aforementioned groups “criticize the basic tenets” of the United States–and would change these tenets should they be elected in sufficient numbers. Depending on state and local laws, sometimes the candidates’ party affiliation is listed on the ballot, sometimes just their name (but consistent for all candidates in each jurisdiction). In any case, there are often 20 or more candidates running for a given office, several of which fundamentally challenge the “basic tenets” of the US.

The “always” in Alain’s above statement–as “always” usually is in political matters–is also incorrect. Of course, Alain is generally right that there are typically only two “real” candidates in American elections, in the sense that two parties dominate the hundreds of other parties. But the US has several times had significant third-party candidates for president, including most recently Ross Perot who was at one time leading in the 1992 polls and ended up with just under 20% of the vote (arguably, and I emphasize arguably, tilting the election to Bill Clinton from George H.W. Bush). We’ve also had two former presidents, Millard Fillmore and Theodore Roosevelt, run as a third-party candidate for the Know-Nothing and Bull Moose parties, respectively. Three current members of Congress are also from other parties, two are independents (both former Democrats), one a socialist. If one wanted to cite these as the exceptions that prove a general two-party rule in American nationalist politics, I wouldn’t object. I am only pedantically objecting to the “always.”

Smaller party candidates do, however, tend to do better on smaller levels of government in the US. On the state level, at least four governors have been elected as independent candidates or from other parties since 1990–Walter Hickel (Alaska Independence Party), Lowell Weicker (Connecticut Independent Party), Angus King, an independent in Maine, and Jesse Ventura (Reform Party–Ross Perot’s creation), and many more have been elected to state legislatures, mayorships, town councils, etc. So while the general rule is still true in state and local politics, it is less so.

–

For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

WAISers: “Grandpa Tells His Story” (Steve Torok, Thailand)

Steve Torok writes:

I am going in for my second five-day chemotherapy session on Monday:
apparently more tough then the first! I spent the last few days at home
writing something for my grandchildren (for their parents to tell), since they
arrive on the 20th, the day after I get out of the hospital. WAISers might be
interested, since I intend to expand this to a full-fledged memoir after I
come out and some of the follow-up stories can be found as WAIS postings this
past year.

Grandpa Tells His Story

Some five dozen years ago Grandpa lived in this magic castle that you are visiting now with his parents and sister Ilonka. His father Ferenc was a well-known lawyer, his mother Palma knew several languages but liked French best after Hungarian, since she studied in a convent school run by French nuns in Budapest before she married. Then, she studied cooking in a French cooking class and secretarial skills, shorthand to support her young husband’s work in his Budapest office. That never happened since my father was too successful: he was one of the highest 50 taxpayers in Budapest around the time in 1941 when my sister was born (three years after me), and my mother was busy with us children while my father could hire helpers and secretaries for his office. He bought this “magic castle” the year before my sister was born. There was also a war: my father had to serve during the recovery of Transylvania as an officer and he ordered the furniture in this “magic castle” from Korosfo, Transylvania at that time from an old craftsman Pentek Mihok, who brought the pieces and assembled them here without any nails!

Then, of course, Hungary lost the war, and the Russians occupied Hungary for the next 44 years (1945-1989). Since the Russians were communist, they installed a communist system. My father lost his law practice and our Budapest office with our apartment there. Consequently, at the end of the war we lived in the “magic castle” that my father managed to save only by bringing 3 families to live with us: my grandfather and grandmother, who lost their estate and home to the communists, his estate manager’s family with two children, Peti and Eniko, similar age to us and the brother of the wife of the estate manager who lost his job and place in Southern Hungary where he was a bank manager before. They had four daughters, Ildi, Reka, Emese, Agnes–again, of similar age to us.

My father was soon put under police surveillance by the communists, so my mother had to work: she managed to find secretarial and then laboratory assistant work with the Professor of Insectology at the Hungarian Agricultural University that was established in Godollo, in the old Norbertine College taken away by the communists.

My grandmother had the task of looking after the 8 children while our mothers (and, after a while, our fathers) were at work. She was a grand old lady who soon lost her husband (my grandfather ) who could not really survive the loss of everything in his life that he created before as a successful lawyer.

My grandmother taught us to appreciate helping in the household…everyone, except me who as “the boy” was always an exception . My grandmother lost a son after the First World War and a second in childbirth, so had only daughters, my mother the smallest. All this yearning for raising a son she showered on me: after my father bought me an air-gun when I was around ten and taught me how to hunt, my grandmother cooked and prepared all the sparrows I shot in the woods behind our house for me to eat. Never point your gun away from the earth unless you aim at a possible source of food: don’t hunt just for pleasure, my father taught me. I did not quite follow since I was very proud I shot a beautiful squirrel also … that , then, my father proceeded to get stuffed and prepared so that I could keep it as a trophy… it decorated the closet in my room for many years to come…

My Sister Ilonka

I remember when my sister was born as one of my first memories. Similar memories from the same time I only have of a large, dark vestibule in our Budapest apartment where I was playing on the floor with a large, green toy car (it must have been only a small toy, but I was small then at 3 years and it appeared big compared to my hand). My mother kept on telling me that soon I would have a little brother or sister, then she disappeared from home in Csomor from our grandfather’s house where she was spending the last week of her pregnancy. Soon my father came for me: you want to come with me to see your little sister? I was very excited… we went in a taxi to the Redcross Hospital in Buda, where in an upstairs room my mother was lying in bed, pale but happy, cuddling a little baby with a shock of dark hair peaking out from her wrapper! This is Ilonka, my father said, do you love your little sister? I looked with big eyes, went closer to my mother who stroked my head with her free hand and said: don’t forget to always love, protect, and take care of your little sister.

It did not always turn out like that: these past sixty years she took care of me more than I took care of her.

But, I digress: my little sister was a lovely girl, the apple of my father’s eyes…Soon we were in Besnyo, where she ran to meet my father who was driving his Fiat Topolino, up the wagon road in front of our house, with such dancing steps at the age of two, that my father said: this girl will be a ballerina!

That was not to be… around that time they did some excavations on the hill where our winery was being planted behind our house and near the little wooden “rest house” (fillagory) on the top of the mound that looked like ancient Celtic (or Avar?) burial, they dug up some old pottery that they proudly presented to my father. My mother soon threw the shards out, since my sister contacted polio (bacteria that sometimes survive in the earth for many years) just then; a minor epidemic was starting. We only realised that something was wrong when in the living room of the “magic castle” my sister was running toward us, as she did in the garden to my father before and, suddenly, she tried to turn left and sat down… Soon, her left side became paralysed and the doctor, Gal Bela Bacsi, with a big epidermic needle tried to give fresh blood plasma to her and to me too, trying to stop the disease that they did not know how to handle at that time. The polio vaccine was many years away, The doctor only hoped the blood plasma contained some immunising material…I did not contract the disease and because of this I am now, perhaps, immune to it, but my parents had the task of trying to rehabilitate my sister. Again, at that time, methods for this were not well known, though the then US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt has gone through such rehabilitation, so my parents never lost hope. My sister remained my father’s “little sunshine “ as
she bravely went through electric massage treatment, gymmnastic exercises and, later, a series of pioneering operations that allowed her to walk again at the age of 16. In the meantime, for me she was no different: I was always able to tease her, since she had a quick temper and reacted to my teasing quickly. I helped her when I could, she was always my little sister and playmate, when she was home from her long bouts of hospital stay and rehabilitation…again I am running
ahead, but 60 years later after her career (comparable to Roosevelt, in Pharmacy, and Science, always taking care of my parents, and now me), I still tease her!

Then, of course, the war made things even more difficult …

The War, Communism and Revolution

There are some stories about the war I remember. The Russians were attacking Budapest and, first the allies, then the Germans (once the Russians took it ) were bombing it. Whenever there was a bombing raid, sirens sounded and we went to the little cellar next to the house (now next to the “other half” where Zsoka lives) and I was pointing a little toy warship at the airplanes, firing away with sparks at them as they were trying to avoid the anti-aircraft guns and reflectors aimed at them in the night sky. I did not shoot down any, and my father ordered me back to the back of the cellar and closed the cellar door. We had to wait until the siren sounded again and we could come up into the house and turn the light on again. We were about 30 km-s from Budapest, not in real danger of being bombed (in fact, that is why we moved out of the city in 1944).

But we still had to follow the protocol of air defence.

Later, when the land front came through we were in real danger, so we moved underground into a fortified agricultural fodder storing cistern that had a roof and fortified top put on it and became a real shelter. There were Russian troups and tanks coming down the vineyard behind our house, then there were 5 mortar bunkers at the top of our garden put there by the attacking Russian troops to cover them as they were attacking the Germans on the hill across the valley (Fenyves, now built up entirely, including the Valley in between, but then with only few summer houses…)

Later, these mortar bunkers served as our secret underground “house” with Peti and some neighbourhood boys at the time I was hunting in the woods around (there, that has grown huge by now!).

We told the girls stories that it is a huge underground complex. So, they sneaked in when we were away and found out that it was only an L-shaped tunnel covered with a makeshift roof, with a fireplace at the end with a makeshift chimney where we made some illegal log-fires, stealing matches from the kitchen, since the old Indian fire making methods of rubbing a stick against a hole in a wood we could not quite make work. I was Winnetou, the Great Indian chief, a hero from Karl May’s wild-west books that I was devouring at that time sitting in the wild chestnut tree branches over our hut. My grandmother knew I liked to read, so she bought me adventure books in German that at age ten I read fluently after she (and our nanny Tante who only talked to us German, tought us spoken German. At that time my parents enrolled me in the Norbertine Highschool (Gymmnasium) that is now the Agricultural University, so from September, 1948 I was walking across the hill with my school bag for a half an hour, each way, every day. Since it was a “Licee Francais” I learned to read and write and speak French the next two years, that I could use some 40 years later to pass the UN French language exam. The Russian exam I also passed, on the strength of the Pushkin and Lermontov poems I learnt while studying the only possible foreign language available for us the next six years of state schools, once the Norbertine’s were closed in 1950. I continued my high-school education in Aszod’s Petofi Gymmnasium where I obtained a Maturandum (High School Certificate) with distinction in June, 1956.

This all sounds very easy, but it was, indeed, difficult: we were considered “class enemies” by the communists and my Father and Uncle had to spend quite an effort to get me in high-school already: I had to work the summer of 1950 at minimum wage in our former vineyard that my father had to “offer to the State”
the year before…. My Uncle was, fortunately, in the ministry of Education, so he could informally help by sending a word.

This procedure was even more difficult for University: after being refused in Budapest in spite of my high distinction Maturandum Certificate, there was a new program starting in Debrecen that fall in Nuclear Physics by Professor Szalay . There were some 200 applicants for the 16 places: the ones who got in had some Distiction medals. I was one of the 16, again thanks to a timely phone-call by my uncle Tivadar, KisTiti’s father.

We are racing ahead a bit: I joined University in September, 1956 and was enjoying the challenge. I continued with sports: gymmnastics (where I was 3rd in Pest Prefecture that year, and 36th in the National Youth Competition in the National Sports Arena that took place that year. I was sixth in Pest Prefecture in Hungarian Combined skiing (downhill, slalom, and jumping) in February, organized at the Borzsony mountains. I had a good coach at the Agricutural University’ s “Haladas” team (where my mother worked now, since 1950), a former 1936 Olympic Team Member, Speci Bacsi.

In Debrecen to this I added target shooting with small calliber (20/20) rifles. In fact we had a shooting competition on the 20th of October (a Sunday) while the night before we had the opening Grand Ball of the year in the Aula of the University where I had the distinctions in being one (half) of the 20 couples that waltzed though the hall diagonally on the marble floor to the Blue Danube Waltz of Johann Strauss, to great applause. Then, I drank too much, and didn’t do too well on the shooting competion next day, but managed to save three unused shells in my pocket.. as if preparing for the revolution that was upon us on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, starting with student meetings, continuing with demonstrations, marches. By the 23rd in Budapest they were shooting at us. In Debrecen, the student Committee managed to control the situation and we were patrolling the University with the weapons of our reserve officer school, but no ammunition (except I had 3 bullets in my pocket!)

I have written about this elsewhere, it is published in 56 stories, that you can read (Lauer Learning, 2006, Hungarian America Coalition). Suffice it to say that I still had these bullets in my pocket when I approached the border on the night of 24 November, 1956. I threw them away then, since if I would have been caught with them by the Russian border guards, I would have been shot. I was not caught, we reached Austria safely where I could “breathe freely” finally…

This reminds me : when the Russians came down the hill in 1944 and tried to flush us out from our “bunker” by firing into the chimney and ordering us out, I, oblivious of danger , was the first to walk out up the stairs. They were looking down at us with drawn tommy guns, and then started laughing: Malenkij klapec, Malenkij Klapec…(small boy). Then, they took my watch. My mother had the presence to take out the bullets from my father’s service revolver in his jacket on a hanger, and throw them into the darkest corner of the room that the raiding Russians could not see: they were looking for Hungarian soldiers and officers and my father would have been shot if they find those bullets!

Moral: never get caught with bullets on you…

JE comments: These memories are absolute gems. Steve, I’d be grateful if you can follow up with a more detailed account of the events of 1956. On behalf of WAISdom, I thank you for telling your story. And Godspeed to you as you undergo chemotherapy next week. All WAISdom will be on your side, my friend.

–

For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine (Gene Franklin, US)

Randy Black wrote on 28 May:

As a WAISer with friends and relatives stretching from north to south across the UK since Elizabeth II was crowned in 1952, decades before Margaret Thatcher, I have always heard complaints about the British universal health system. I’ve sat around the breakfast tables of rich and poor from one end of England to the other all of my adult life and listened to the nightmarish tales of years-long waits for simple medical procedures that might prolong someone’s life that never came to reality. So don’t blame it on Margaret Thatcher alone.

Gene Franklin responds:

I just read in the latest edition of The New Yorker (June 1) a very interesting article on health care and the causes of the high costs in the USA.  Their conclusion was that the (a?) main cause was overuse by doctors. The authors made a distinction between doctors who place patients first (Mayo Clinic) and those who place making money first (a county in Texas on the Rio Grande). I drew the conclusion that the best possibility is to put all doctors on salary and in a group practice like Mayo or Kaiser. There seems to be no difference based on who the payer is, Government or private insurance company.

I’d be very interested in WAIS responses to the article, especially those of Herb Abrams.

–
For information about the World Association of International Studies (WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

Herb Abrams wrote on 24 May:

To be precise, Cameron never mentioned either the “N-word” or “nationalized medicine” or “taboo” in his comments. Instead, he chose to be imprecise by assuming that cost was equated with efficiency alone and disregarding the very high consumer satisfaction of the elderly with Medicare (once condemned as “socialized medicine” by so many who are thrilled to have it available).

Cameron Sawyer responds:

Herb is confused–the precise quote is I wrote that the “N-word” [nationalized medicine], as JE called it, is taboo in the U.S. because of a widespread feeling among Americans that governments are not good at producing anything efficiently.

And I certainly never, but never choose to be imprecise. Nor did I say that “cost is equated with efficiency alone,” in fact I said exactly the opposite: Efficiency of production is a very important value–if you want to deliver more of something and of better quality to more people, you need to be able to produce it efficiently. But efficiency is not the only value. So Herb has made a perfect mess out of everything I wrote on health care. I am sure that there are many valid arguments against what I wrote, but it would be nice if these arguments could be made against what I wrote, and not against these distortions.

High “consumer satisfaction” with Medicare may or may not prove anything about the quality of the service. Of course people are grateful to have something, which they have been taxed to death to provide. They have been deprived of the means to pay for it themselves by heavy taxation, and so are grateful to get something in return, not really realizing that it is not a free lunch at all. This is the main technique of creeping socialism–namely, middle class entitlements. And Herb correctly points out that the most effective way to implement a socialized medical system will be to gradually extend Medicare so that it swallows up the whole medical system. It would be effective, I’m sure, but I don’t think that necessarily makes it right.

Herb casually brushes away the idea that our tort system is one of the causes of the U.S. health system’s acknowledged high cost–”I wonder if Cameron has some references that support his belief that the tort system is such a considerable element in cost.” The idea is controversial, as I specifically mentioned (I even cited a study which contradicts the idea), but I am very surprised that Herb, who is obviously so knowledgeable, is not aware of the considerable volume of serious and widespread argument that not only the direct cost of medical malpractice insurance and tort awards, but much more the indirect cost of our rapacious tort system–through “defensive medicine” and other mechanisms–is an immense drag on the system, costing up to $100 billion a year or more. The Department of Health and Human Services itself wrote in 2003 that:

Defensive medicine that is caused by unlimited and unpredictable liability awards not only increases patients’ risk but it also adds costs. The leading study estimates that limiting unreasonable awards for non-economic damages could reduce health care costs by 5-9% without adversely affecting quality of care. This would save $60-108 billion in health care costs each year. These savings would lower the cost of health insurance and permit an additional 2.4-4.3 million Americans to obtain insurance.

http://aspe.hhs.gov/daltcp/reports/litrefm.pdf

It’s really beyond the scope of any of my posts to argue whether this is true or not, or to the extent claimed here (or maybe even more), but one cannot just brush this aside, denying that it is, at the very least, a very serious question. As to the Swedish method of resolving malpractice claims cited by Herb–I don’t really understand his point, or what he is arguing against. That system is exactly the opposite of our U.S. tort system–the insurance companies themselves and some representative of the medical system and some lawyer decide cases by fiat. The patient doesn’t have much chance there! That will create the ultimate in cost savings, and is probably a lot better than what we have, but query whether it’s not going too far!

Herb has a simple and strong conviction that a single-payer system is the solution to all of our problems. He also seems to imply that he could even explain to us why the U.S. system is so costly, if he only had time to write it all down. I am happy for him, to have such certitude and complete knowledge. I don’t think Herb made it to the end of my post (which was boring, so he may be forgiven), which expressed a much more skeptical and hesitant view:

Health care is one of those things which most developed societies, including by the way the U.S., feel that everyone should have some access to. Some efficiency has to be sacrificed as soon as you start to interfere with markets in order to guaranty access to health care to people who might not be able to afford it on the open market. That’s OK in my opinion. But it’s worth studying how to achieve the greatest equity with the least loss of efficiency. In my opinion, all known health care systems have severe disadvantages. A really good health care system is yet to be invented, and will require some creative thinking across ideological lines.

As to the U.K. and Soviet systems–Herb says that they are different, but does not specify exactly how. He seems to think that if patients are happy with it, that’s all we need to know. I have said that one ought to take this with a grain of salt–if a person thinks that it’s free (which is not true), or if he thinks he wouldn’t have health care but for health care provided to him by the government (unlikely to be true in a developed country), then he may well fervently count his blessings, even if in reality he would be much better off with another system. A certain amount of data shows that Americans, also, are extremely pleased with their medical care–but what does that prove? Furthermore, I am not sure how satisfied Brits actually are with their health care system. A lot of the data is obvious propaganda commissioned by the NHS itself. And there is other evidence of considerable unhappiness with the well-known faults of NHS–rationing of care by long waiting times for medical procedures, rationing which is sometimes quite effective because the patients die while waiting, and thus no longer need the procedure. The worst comment on the U.K. health system I have heard is probably the attitude of Russian emigrants there of my acquaintance–they say, among those I know, in one voice, that it’s exactly the same as the old Soviet system, and that they avoid using it at all costs, preferring to seek treatment in private clinics back home.

I am not saying that the U.K. NHS is worse than our system (both systems have, in my opinion, glaring faults), but I really do think that a good health care system, much less a perfect one, has yet to be devised, and I caution against the idea that we can fix everything with the wave of a hand, such as by implementing a “single-payer system” (which is quite a euphemism for what is truly and accurately called “socialized medicine,” on par with “sanitation engineer” for garbage man).

JE comments: On this topic Herb Abrams has sent a followup post (next in the queue).

–
For information about the World Association of International Studies (WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine (Tim Brown, US)

Tim Brown responds to Herb Abrams’s post of 24 May:

I would appreciate some sources to support the assertion that malpractice “is a small part of” medical costs in the US, since my providers say just the opposite.

Perhaps the actual cash that changes hands to settle medical tort cases is “small” relative to the overall cost of medical services. But every provider I have spoken with
about this says a major part of their expenses is insurance to cover the legal costs of defending themselves.

When I ask why I have to spend so much time filling out forms, sign a new privacy act statement and so forth during every visit, the answer is always that these are legal requirements. When I ask whose, they respond “government regulations and recommended legal protection.” Once when I had a few skin tags removed I asked my dermatologist if he was going to send every one of them to a laboratory and he said, “Yes, absolutely!” “Is that what the College of Dermatology recommends?” “No, my lawyer.” Looking at my medical insurance reports that added up to several thousands of dollars. Before my wife could have minor surgery she had to sign a five- or six-page statement that had nothing to do with her surgery but everything to do with the doctor trying to protect himself. The document was written by a lawyer to protect her doctor, not her health. No signature, no surgery.

I constantly see TV and print advertisements by tort lawyers seeking people to join in medical class-action suits. Are these law firms wasting tens of millions of dollars or getting rich? When I receive medicine the disclaimers, warnings, cautions and downright scary “information and instructions” run page after page, most of it in 4-point font and so jargon-laden as to be all but incomprehensible to a layman, much of it legalese not medical. Is this all a waste of ink?

I lived in Europe nine years, Asia four and Latin America more than twenty, and never saw even a fraction of this sort of thing. In fact everywhere I lived the first line of health care was usually yourself with most medicines such as antibiotics available over the counter. But here, even when I known pretty much what the problem is and how to treat it, I must go to a doctor for a prescription.

Elsewhere, if I had a cold, low fever or minor problem, the first stop was a pharmacy where, in most cases, the pharmacist could give me what I needed. The next line of health care was, as it is more and more here, non-physician health providers. As an economist I find it difficult to believe when you add all this up it adds only a small amount to US medical costs. But I’m open to persuasion if someone can give me evidence to the contrary.

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For information about the World Association of International Studies (WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: Nationalized and Socialized Medicine (Herb Abrams, US)

Cameron Sawyer wrote on May 20:

To be precise, I wrote that the N=word [nationalized medicine] is taboo in the United States…

Herb Abrams responds:

To be precise, Cameron never mentioned either the “N-word” or “nationalized medicine” or “taboo” in his comments. Instead, he chose to be imprecise by assuming that cost was equated with efficiency alone and disregarding the very high consumer satisfaction of the elderly with Medicare (once condemned as “socialized medicine” by so many who are thrilled to have it available). Consumer satisfaction is not necessarily a metric that alone depicts quality of care. But dissatisfaction as intense as that exhibited by a large segment of the U.S. voting population under 65 certainly reflects concern about quality, access, and/or cost, all three important elements of health care. In contrast, the level of satisfaction is higher in all of the countries I mentioned, as well as in Canada. (The term “nationalized” medicine is rarely heard; two very different systems, the British and the Russian, are embraced by that rubric. “Socialized” medicine is the favorite term for those who consider health care a privilege; national health insurance is a more accurate depiction of many approaches in the developed world; “universal” coverage comes in many sizes and shapes.)

There are objective indices of care such as infant mortality and life expectancy. The figures for Western Europe, which spends nothing like our 17% of GNP, are better than ours. Why the cost is so much higher here is a great question that would take some time to answer in full. Certainly profit is one part of the answer. We’re all familiar with many of the others such as overutilization and the increasing complexity of technology, some of it with marginal yield. Perhaps the largest factor is that the system is a non-system with many components that are not fully coordinated.

Malpractice, real or alleged, is a very small but definite part of the puzzle, but hardly an “enormous” (Cameron’s word) cost factor. (I wonder if Cameron has some references that support his belief that the tort system is such a considerable element in cost.) In Sweden, a three-man board representing law, medicine, and the health insurance plan considers all complaints and evaluates the presence of negligence or malpractice. If compensation is in order, it is provided but on a scale vastly different from the jury awards in the USA. In this country, the Workmen’s Compensation model would probably serve us well. Litigation is far less common in the Western European countries than in the USA.

There are many bits and pieces that circulated through the last week or two of WAIS comment on health care, including John Heelan’s “Thank goodness for the National Health Service…” Clearly, with whatever complaints we hear, neither labor, nor liberals, nor conservatives would give it up.

Random notes on Russia. I have not viewed Russian medicine first-hand since the 1980s. At that time, both facilities and care were marginal in many areas, with a few pockets of excellence (eg, the Vishnevsky Institute of Surgery in Moscow). Much of it reflected the educational structure and two levels of so-called “doctors,” all of whom were ill paid, as Cameron pointed out. In the late thirties or forties a distinguished historian of science at Johns Hopkins–Henry Sigerist–wrote a glowing book about Soviet health care. The book was notable for focusing on theory rather than on the actual practice at the time.

In the mid-eighties I was able to bring in some prosthetic valves to Moscow for a dissident who was in serious heart failure and desperately needed valve replacement. Somehow or other, his brother managed to get into the hotel, which was largely occupied by foreign visitors, and pick up the package. The surgery, I learned later from the daughter in the USA, was done in Latvia, and he was able to return to work as an engineer. At the Moscow Institute of Cardiology I was informed proudly by the director of the cardiac catheterization laboratories that he had translated my three-volume work Abrams’ Angiography into Russian. I asked, “With whose permission?” He reddened and mentioned something about the absence of an international copyright convention. A few years later, they showed me a copy of the Little, Brown edition in English that they had acquired. I guess the economy was improving (the book price was $500, a reflection of the cost of fine weight paper and a large number of illustrations requiring special handling).

It is certainly true that in my area of cardiovascular and interventional radiology there has been an increase in quality in some of the Russian centers.

Let me end this overlong comment by noting my conviction that the problems in health care in the USA will not be resolved until a singer-payer system is in place. We have the very best health care in the world, for some. We have inadequate care and access for others. My personal approach would move Medicare down (from 65 to 60), then up (from 20 to 25), then down again (from 60 to 55), then up, then down etc. etc. over at least a 10-year period of gradualist change, inclusiveness, and improvement until universal coverage was in place. The WHO ranks the French system as first among unequals, and perhaps we could borrow the best features from a few of those in operation.

–

For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: on Nationalized Medicine (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

Herb Abrams wrote on 19 May:

Cameron Sawyer (18 May) expresses a “feeling” that the U.S. government “usually does a poor job at producing…health care services.”

Cameron Sawyer responds:

To be precise, I wrote that the “N-word” [nationalized medicine], as JE called it, is taboo in the U.S. because of a widespread feeling among Americans that governments are not good at producing anything efficiently.

Herb went on to write: “The largest single payer system in the U.S. is Medicare; at least 90% of senior citizens consider Medicare a godsend as their primary provider. Its administrative cost is about 3+ percent.”

The cost of administration is no measure whatsoever of the efficiency of production of something. That assumes that the processes of production are all the same whoever is doing the production–a completely static, and thus false model.

Nor is private health insurance, the way it is run in the U.S., necessarily ideal, either–it does not work according to market principles and could be even worse. There is some evidence that the U.S. health care system is actually less efficient than it is in Europe–it is vastly more expensive. It is hard to tell, because there is also the U.S. tort system at play, enormously increasing costs. But that our system is, at least, not ideal, is obvious to almost everyone.

Efficiency of production is a very important value–if you want to deliver more of something and of better quality to more people, you need to be able to produce it efficiently. But efficiency is not the only value. Health care is one of those things which most developed societies, including by the way the U.S., feel that everyone should have some access to. Some efficiency has to be sacrificed as soon as you start to interfere with markets in order to guaranty access to health care to people who might not be able to afford it on the open market. That’s OK in my opinion. But it’s worth studying how to achieve the greatest equity with the least loss of efficiency.

In my opinion, all known health care systems have severe disadvantages. A really good health care system is yet to be invented, and will require some creative thinking across ideological lines.

JE comments: I’d be interested to know the state of health care in Russia–what percentage of the population has some sort of private insurance? How has the national system changed since the Soviet days? This is a huge topic, but a few paragraphs from Cameron would be, as usual, very enlightening.

–

For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: on Nationalized Medicine (Gene Franklin, US)

Herb Abrams wrote on 19 May:

Cameron Sawyer (18 May) expresses a “feeling” that the U.S. government “usually does a poor job at producing…health care services.” The largest single payer system in the U.S. is Medicare; at least 90% of senior citizens consider Medicare a godsend as their primary provider. Its administrative cost is about 3+ percent; in California, with a health care expenditure of about $110 billion, private insurance runs to 29% (administration, profit, fancy CEO offices, overhead, advertising, etc.) The $33 billion could cover many uninsured. The next largest single payer is the V.A. system. We have a V.A. hospital on the Stanford campus, and the veterans I talk to year after year are adamant about the quality of their care. Some complaints? Of course. But they’re not among the 47 million without coverage, and by and large they like their doctors.

Health care in the U.S. is viewed as a privilege; in Western Europe as a right. This began with Bismarck, and has survived the passage of time since his death. The “state” in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, etc. does a helluva good job in my personal experience viewing those systems over the years.

Gene Franklin responds:

I greatly appreciate having the facts given by Herb Abrams placed on the table. These facts and the “feeling” identified by Cameron Sawyer raise a question in my mind that I’d like to put before WAIS. That is, to what extent do the feelings of suspicion of government and of individual self-reliance by Americans arise from the extraordinary diversity of this country? It seems to me that government actions are community actions designed to help all citizens. However, in such a diverse society it is hard to feel sympathy for so strange a bunch of “others.” As a result, we gather in pseudo tribal ghettos surrounded by our own kind. Some tribes are based on religion, some on race, and some on economic status. In this climate, there is a tendency, so it seems to me, that we plan to provide all services by private rather than government means since by definition the government is going to “waste” our money helping those undeserving others. Consistent with this is the movement to cut all taxes and reduce government until it is so small it can be drowned in a bath tub. That is, all of government except those parts that help me and my tribe.

What is wrong with this analysis?

JE comments: I can’t find any holes in it. Has Gene Franklin spoken a truth about US society that most would prefer to leave unsaid? Granted, there are other “diverse” nations (the UK comes to mind) that have universal health-care systems.

–

For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: on Nationalized Medicine (Herb Abrams, US)

Herb Abrams writes:

Cameron Sawyer (18 May) expresses a “feeling” that the U.S. government “usually does a poor job at producing…health care services.” The largest single payer system in the U.S. is Medicare; at least 90% of senior citizens consider Medicare a godsend as their primary provider. Its administrative cost is about 3+ percent; in California, with a health care expenditure of about $110 billion, private insurance runs to 29% (administration, profit, fancy CEO offices, overhead, advertising, etc.) The $33 billion could cover many uninsured. The next largest single payer is the V.A. system. We have a V.A. hospital on the Stanford campus, and the veterans I talk to year after year are adamant about the quality of their care. Some complaints? Of course. But they’re not among the 47 million without coverage, and by and large they like their doctors.

Health care in the U.S. is viewed as a privilege; in Western Europe as a right. This began with Bismarck, and has survived the passage of time since his death. The “state” in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, etc. does a helluva good job in my personal experience viewing those systems over the years.

JE comments: It’s great to hear from Herb Abrams after a year or more. I wish he’d write the Forum more often! Herb: what are your thoughts on Pres. Obama’s plans to revamp the US system of health coverage?

–

For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: on Universal Health Coverage (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

Cameron Sawyer responds to John Heelan’s post of 28 May:

I’m not defending either the U.K. or the U.S. health care systems, but when John Heelan wrote “With the NHS I do not have to worry that the first vital sign paramedics will check is my creditworthiness,” he was talking about a well-known phenomenon of “patient-dumping,” where U.S. hospital turn patients away who cannot prove that they will be able to pay for treatment.
 
There is some truth to this and is certainly a valid criticism of our system.  Certainly, if you show up at a hospital in the U.S. hoping to get some kind of non-emergency care, you will have to prove that you can pay for it before you will be provided with that care.  But it is important to note that since 1986, a good 23 years ago, all hospitals in the U.S. are obligated by law to provide emergency medical treatment to any patient who walks in the door, without regard to ability to pay, or even citizenship.  That policy was implemented through the “Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act”; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act .  The state does not reimburse the cost of complying with the Act; hospitals are required to treat patients unable or unwilling to pay at their expense, that is, at the expense of the rest of their patients.
 
The result of this law is extremely sweeping.  More than half of all emergency room treatment is not paid for at all, which obviously doubles the cost of such treatment to those who do pay.   It means that all persons present in the U.S. do have access to universal and free (if you can’t or won’t pay) emergency medical treatment.   So it is not true that the U.S. does not have socialized medicine–in fact, a large part of the U.S. medical system, including Medicare, Medicaid, and most emergency medical treatment — is not organized according to market principles. 
 
Advocates of universal health insurance in the U.S. claim that the “Patient Dumping Act,” as the law is sometimes referred to, costs those American families who do have health insurance more than $1,000 a year through cost-shifting.  The argument is that the cost of universal health insurance will not be as high as critics say, because these “hidden taxes” will disappear.  See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090528/ap_on_he_me/us_health_overhaul_uninsured .  There may be something to that.
 
Simply forcing hospitals to treat uninsured patients for free may or may not be more efficient or more equitable than other socialized schemes.  But one thing is clear–a system which provides free universal emergency care, but leaves you on your own with respect to all other kinds of care, certainly creates some distortions.  One of these is that some poor people use emergency rooms as their basic health care service. 
 
I have so far refrained from expressing any opinion on what kind of health care system would be better than the various bad options which exist in the world today.  If anyone is interested, I will now venture an opinion.  Despite my right-libertarian principles, I do think that a developed country ought to ensure that everyone has access to some kind of basic civilized level of health care, and not just emergency care.  I suspect that state-run, centrally-planned, Soviet-style systems (euphemistically called “single-payer” systems) are inherently inefficient just like every other state-run production of any good or service, which means that either the care will be poor or the cost will be unjustifiably high (or some combination of the two), and that care will always be rationed in some hidden or overt way, all of which is highly undesirable.  If the state can’t produce a decent automobile, or even a bad automobile efficiently–think Ladas, Trabants and Yugos (and soon Chevys too)–what makes you think it can do any better with producing health care?  I think that private health insurance will be found to be the most efficient way to pay for health care.  The right role for the state would be something like this:  HHS will define from time to time the mandatory minimum level of health care services to which every American must have access.  Then, every American will be obligated by law to have such a basic policy,  just like every driver is obligated to have a policy of liability insurance.  Then–HHS will work out a definition of who is in danger of not being able to afford such a basic policy, and the state will provide basic policies to such people at taxpayers’ expense.
 
That way you have the broad majority of people paying directly for their own health care on market terms, with unlimited choice of the type of care, choice of doctors or hospitals, whether to join an HMO, etc.–as long as the scope of care provided meets the federally mandated minimum.  This will provide the greatest efficiency and the greatest choice.  Then just the margins of society–poor people, maybe the unemployed, maybe retired people through Medicare–will be serviced at taxpayer expense.  Because the great majority of actors are buying and selling services on an arms-length market basis (today about 68% of Americans rely on private health insurance, compared to 28% relying on Medicare and Medicaid, and about 15% with health insurance at all), the non-market part of the system will function much better–prices are formed in a market.
 
Thus we can preserve most of the efficiency of a market-based system while providing universal access to health care, and I think this is the best balance between the conflicting goals of efficiency and equity.
 
Unfortunately that is only 10% of an answer, because the interaction of private health insurance and health care providers, the way it is practiced today in the U.S., is complicated, inefficient, and even dysfunctional to some extent.  In theory private health insurance, provided by a range of competing insurers and interacting with empowered consumers, ought to provide an optimum result, but in practice does not, not even close. 
 
One of the problems is that health insurance which covers only risks does not solve all of the challenges in how to pay for health care.  That is because besides the risks of illness or accident among ordinary healthy people, there is a certain part of the population which is chronically ill with something or another, and is a much more intensive consumer of health care.  So rational private insurers will do everything possible to avoid having chronically ill people among their clients.  So equity demands not only finding some way to pay for basic health care for those who can’t afford it, but also how to pay for the disproportionate health care expenses of the chronically ill.  The market won’t do that.  “Single-payer” systems easily overcome this problem because all health care costs go into one pot anyway, but it is the tail wagging the dog, in my opinion, to implement that type of system with so many enormous disadvantages just to solve one knotty problem.   So in my opinion, some system of regulation of insurance needs to be invented which will equitably spread the costs of care for the chronically ill.  There are lots of schemes and proposals, but that is already beyond the scope of this already too-long post.
 
It is interesting to study the successes and failures of various health care systems around the world, in order to glean lessons.  They are almost all unique.  One system which seems to stand out is the French system, which provides an unusually high standard of care at a cost which is high for Europe, but considerably less than the cost of the U.S. system (about $4,000/capita or 11.2% of GDP compared to $7,500/capita and more than 15% of GDP in the U.S.).  The system is based on private insurance (unlike the U.K. NHS system, which is a straight Soviet-style state-run and state-funded system) but with heavy domination by the state and largely funded by the state, so it certainly does not follow my model.  But the French system seems to do extraordinarily well at the production of health care–it is obviously more efficient than the U.S. system.  Why?  I don’t know; it’s worth studying.  It might contradict my theories as described above.  The French system is much more market-oriented than the U.K. system–the mandatory part of the system provides basic coverage, while fully 86% of the population have private insurance to cover their choice of additional levels of health care services above the mandatory minimum.  Maybe the French system is so efficient because it’s just a really good implementation of a bad system, compared to really bad implementation of a good system in the U.S.; or maybe there is some unusual or superior feature of it.  One fairly obvious disadvantage of the French system is that it is largely paid for by impositions on employers.  This increases the cost of employing people, which together with other features of French employment law create quite severe disincentives on job-creation which contributes to chronic unemployment in France.  But this is not an inherent feature of the French health care system, which seems to me on the whole to be perhaps the closest thing we have to really successful system in actual practice.

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For information about the World Association of International Studies (WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: on Public Safety and “Good Ol’ Days” (Randy Black, US)

Randy Black writes:

On 26 April, Mike Bonnie lamented days gone by the wayside regarding pedestrian safety, leaving windows and doors unlocked, playing outside after dark, TV, Halloween candy and so on. Mike painted America with a broad stroke of generalization paint.

While I am absolutely supportive of Mike’s wistful view of days gone by, I am not particularly fond of that color of paint.

I miss days gone by, but look forward to the future with anticipation. This is exactly why we chose to build our home and live in Allen, Texas, north of Dallas.

I invite Mike to visit the Black family in Allen, a smallish suburb of about 85,000 and discover a place of safety, peace and relative quiet.

For instance, when my girls, the family dog and I visited a new community shopping area yesterday in Allen, a place of about 15 city blocks, cars stopped for us to use the cross walks. Later, when we came out of the grocery store, same story. The parking meters in the shopping area are free but signs indicate that any money collected goes to the local food bank. The local cops were on Segway self-propelled two-wheel units in the shopping areas and apparently mostly bored but friendly to all. The area, Watters Crossing, features public areas, parks, creeks and ground-level shops and cafes with apartments on the upper floors, much like the European model.

Not that Allen does not have its share of car break-ins coupled with the occasional bank holdup but generally, we feel pretty safe. Of course, our front door is locked at night but once in a blue moon, we forget and no one is the worse for wear.

The last time I saw graffiti in Allen was when someone sprayed a mild vulgarity on the gym wall of the elementary school across the street three years ago. The perp was caught the next day after one of the teachers recognized the handwriting of the 6th grader and turned him in. The city cleaned off the wall within two days and the kid had to serve community service picking up litter along the Allen roadways for four Saturdays with other such “hardened” criminals.

About locking all doors and windows, not that I’m inviting trouble but it’s my thought that if a bad guy wants in, a locked door will not stop him. But nighttime break ins of homes in Allen are pretty rare, considering that this is Texas and the bad guys know that many have weapons and will use them. The facts be known, probably less than 10 percent of Texans own guns, but the bad guys don’t know which ones those are. Drive-by shootings are nearly unheard of in the northern suburbs outside of Dallas.

The local cops say their biggest headache is people leaving their rear entry to the alley garage doors open when they leave in the morning, thus inviting bad guys cruising the alleys. Thus, our neighborhood crime watch is active and recently alerted the cops who caught someone who’d snatched someone’s golf clubs from the open garage and was working a different alley a few blocks away.

Moreover, on Halloween, the neighborhood streets and sidewalks are like a fair. Certainly, many parents escort their kiddoes door to door but many do not and no one asks for candy to be x-rayed. When we return home afterward, of course we take a look at the candies but generally, since we know a majority of the families in our 500-home neighborhood, we’re mostly just ensuring that Natasha gets a limited amount of sugar before bedtime.

I invite Mike Bonnie to Allen for a couple of days. We look forward to his visit.

JE comments: Aldona and I have visited the Black home in Allen, and it’s a very pleasant place. Mike: take Randy up on his invite! I’m interested in the “neo-downtown” shopping mall model of the type Randy describes. There are a couple of them around here, which is ironic: most of the real downtowns in Michigan were destroyed four decades ago by…the shopping center/mall. Now they are trying to re-create the friendly facade of storefronts in the sprawl of suburbia, complete with diagonal parking and apartments in the upper floors. This is considered more friendly and humane than the 1970s-’80s mega-mall. What’s next? The neo-coldwater flat?

–

For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: on Perceptions of Race (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

Cameron Sawyer responds to Alain de Benoist’s post of 6 November:

Alain as usual makes many important and valid points, but I would like to offer a different defense of the proposition that “race is a social construct.”

I believe that this statement is true, even though there are undeniably differences between subgroups within the human species as Alain rightly points out. What I mean to say is that denying the existence or relevance of race as we know it, beyond the realm of social mythology, does not require denying any differences between subgroups.

There is good evidence for this in the admirable *Guns, Germs & Steel* by Jared Diamond. Genetic differences between subgroups within the human species do not correspond to our social perceptions of “race.” We are particularly interested in skin color as a sign of race, but skin color is trivial, genetically speaking, rapidly acquired and lost in very short evolutionary time in response to environment. Three of the five major branches of the human species live in Africa, namely, the Bantus, Pygmies, and Khosians, as different from each other as they are from Europeans, and yet we think of an “African” race. On the contrary, Indians, called “Asians” by the British, and considered a different race, are nearly the same as Western Europeans genetically, at least the northern Indian peoples. This is because they have darker skin, but this is a trivial characteristic. So there is simply no such thing as an “African” or “South Asian” race, genetically speaking.

The Nazis came up with their own system of racial groups and theories about which groups are inferior and which are superior. This is likewise nonsense, not corresponding to anything genetic, despite their efforts to create a scientific method of skull configuration measurement and classification and so forth. The Germans, as it turns out, are no more Aryan than the supposedly inferior Slavs, and probably less so.

In short, although there are certainly differences between groups of people, our perception of race is indeed socially constructed and has little to do with anything objective. I refer WAISers to Daniel Blackburn’s “Why Race is Not A Biological Concept”
http://www33.homepage.villanova.edu/edward.fierros/pdf/Blackburn~Concept.pdf

http://www33.homepage.villanova.edu/edward.fierros/pdf/Blackburn%7EConcept.pdf 
–
For information about the World Association of International Studies (WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: on Perceptions of Race (Alain de Benoist, France)

Alain de Benoist writes:

Nushin Namazi wrote (1 November) : “Vincent Littrell is not alone when he says there is only one race: the human race. In anthropology, we learn that race is a social construct–it is an arbitrary designation linked to skin color. In biology, race is defined as a subgroup within a species (a population within a species that differs in terms of genetic variance from other populations of the same species), not scientifically applicable to humans because there are no subspecies within modern Homo sapiens.”
 
This statement is highly problematic.
 
There is to begin a problem of vocabulary or semantics. First, if race is a “social construct,” then the “human race” is also a social construct (of a bigger dimension). Second, it is contradictory to say that races do not exist and that they are “social constructs.” Socially constructed, “arbitrary” and non-existing are not synonyms. Social constructions are very real, as they consist in representations which are quite effective in the social-historical world, which is specific to man. The idea that a social construct can be easily changed, while biological realities are immutable is quite wrong: today some biological characteristics can been much more easily changed that some social constructs. Third, if race is (rightly) defined as “a subgroup within a species,” a “human race” does not mean a thing, as *Homo sapiens* is a species (that is a biological category including all populations fully capable of interbreeding), not a “subgroup within a species.”  A race should not be defined the same as a species. There is only one human species (at least today, because there were several other human species in prehistory). The “human race” can only be a metaphor or a literary figure without any scientific content.
 
Nushin wrote: “In anthropology, we learn that race is a social construct–it is an arbitrary designation linked to skin color.”  In which anthropology ? In cultural anthropology, maybe (see for example a textbook like William A. Haviland, *Cultural Anthropology. The Human Challenge*, 2005). Certainly not in physical anthropology. One can read in one of the latest AAPA (American Association of Physical Anthropologists) statements “on biological aspects of race”: “Biological differences between human beings reflect both hereditary factors and the influence of natural and social environments” (see *American Journal of Physical Anthropology*, 1996, pp. 569-570). Actually, while there is still much discussion about such a topic, most of physical anthropologists and geneticians know very well that, inside humankind, there are different populations which “differ in terms of genetic variance from other populations of the same species.”  Any reader of journals specialized in genomics or molecular biology can check it.
 
The idea that race is only “linked to skin color” is very naive. Skin color is certainly quite visible, but even in former times, when anthropometric methods (measures of phenotypical, that is externally visible traits, features of the face, the shape and size of the head, cartilages and muscles, with the underlying skeleton) were the only ones available, it was always considered as one of the less significant of racial and ethnic features. If race were only skin-deep, archaeologists would be unable to tell the race of the dead people they are excavating. Actually, the race of an individual can easily by recognized by an examination of the bones. Today, the examination of just three sections of DNA is sufficient for policemen, criminologists or forensic scientists to identify the race of a body or of a suspect.
 
The reality is that human races exist. They exist as biological facts, because they are created by differences in the gene frequencies, as they exist also as social construct, that is as social reality, as political category, as juridical category, etc. Gender is (in part) a social construct, but this social construct does not obliterate the fact that sex is a biological reality (related to our sexual chromosomes X and Y). It is the same for race. Most (not all) of biological features are created by differences in the genes that people inherit from their parents ; they come from our ancestry and are transmitted by inheritance. If racial features were not of a biological nature, they could not be observed in newborns.
 
The idea that races “do not exist” (or that they are social constructs that have no biological meaning whatsoever) began to be sustained after the WWII, not for scientific reasons, but for ideological or political reasons, and certainly with very good intentions. People thought at that time that racism would more easily disappear if it was possible to show that races do not exist. This was of course (and unfortunately) rather naive. Common people who see every day members of different races in the street are not ready to believe that they are victims of an optical illusion. To the contrary, they use very often race to sort their social groupings and to define their social and economic interactions, in a way that can have significant biological consequences, which explains why they are prone to react with frank disbelief when told there is no such thing as race. That kind of statements was however adopted (not without provoking serious polemics in the scientific world) mainly by UNESCO after 1956. It is today especially widespread in mass-circulation media and among social scientists, who are by tradition reluctant to take biological facts into account and who think often that it is “politically correct” to deny the reality of human race or fashionable to pose as a “racial deconstructionist” (see the documentary released in 2003 by the Public Broadcasting System, “Race: The Power of an Illusion”). Significantly, the idea of the non-existence of human races was also official in USSR under Stalin, when Lyssenko tried (unsuccessfully) to impose the principles of his so-called Mitchurinian “biology.”
 
One of the most common arguments advanced to “deconstruct” the notion of race was the observation that all human individuals share 99.9% of their genetic code or genome. But this observation does not lead very far, as it is well known that we also share 98.7% of our genome with chimpanzees and 90% with all non-primate mammals (horses, pigs, cats, dogs, cows, etc.). Men and women share much more than 99.9 % of their genome, but men and women do not belong to the same sex. Moreover, people seldom realize that 0.1 % of the genome is not at all insignificant. The active or functional part of the human genome consists of about 22,000 genes (2007 estimates) containing 87 million “genetic letters,” or nucleotide base pairs of DNA, of the total of about 2.9 billion base pairs in the complete human genome, that is an average of about 4,000 genetic base pairs or “letters” per gene. This means that genetic differences in 0.1% of the base pairs represents about 2.9 million genetic differences in the genome, or 87,000 genetic differences in the genes.
 
Another argument, advanced by Nushin Namazi, is that no race has “exclusive possession of any particular variant of any gene or genes.” Usually, it is added that there is a greater degree of genetic variation within a race than between races (85% against 15%, said Richard Lewontin in 1972). This is quite true, but not conclusive, because races are precisely defined by the differential frequency of a given characteristic (nobody would have the idea to classify humanity intro discrete geographic categories with absolute boundaries). Type-O blood for example is present in all races, but not with the same frequency. However, blue eyes are more than extremely rare in black Africa, and frizzy hair more than extremely rare in Finland! This argument is quite near to a different one: the fact that between the main racial types, there is plenty of intermediary types (clines). Actually, it is quite true that, due to different factors, there are no clear dividing lines between the races, but instead a continuum of individuals and groups forming a gradient or cline of gradually changing racial type between the races. But the existence of a cline does not mean that races do not exist. As with any continuum of type, or space or time, the two ends of the continuum are the most distinct from each other, while any two intermediate points on the continuum are less distinct from each other. There also plenty of degrees or clines between very cold and very hot, between very young and very old, between being bald and being not bald, between an hour and three days, but nobody would conclude from the existence of these “intermediaries” that heat, coldness, childhood, time, aged or bald people are not realities. The existence of clines proves that all humans are part of the same biological species, not part of the same race
 
Finally, it is quite true that there are variations among the specialists about the definition of race, that concepts of race vary geographically as well as historically, and that each society is prone to create its own racial categories and definitions. These variations are no proof of the inexistence of races, as there is a great amount of concordance inside the mainstream of specialists about the main human subdivisions. It’s only a proof that a fact can always be the subject of a phenomenological or hermeneutical approach. Actually, the number of races to be defined depends also on what one is attempting to do, learn, study or describe.
 
But things have completely evolved over the last few years, more exactly since the decipherment of the human genome. Since the advent of molecular biology, few human biologists base racial classifications on any criteria that cannot be shown to be genotypic. Well known works published by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (*The History and Geography of Human Genes*) and others have permitted to establish the genetic distances between populations. More recently (last 5-6 years), the study of major genetic markers, like mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), haplotypes (series of polymorphic markers caracteristic of a DNA segment) and above all single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP, or “snips”), have shown that frequencies of the same common genetic variants differ between populations based on the ancestries of their members. Geneticists have also begun grappling forensic, epidemiological and pharmarcogenomic data that raise the question of race at the DNA level. There are wide ethnic differences in drug metabolism, response to alcohol and tobacco, proportion of lactose-competent adults, proportion of individuals carrying the sickle-cell allele, Tay-Sachs disease, high blood pressure, etc. The fact that African-Americans are three times as likely to die from heart disease, for instance, has already had for consequence the creation of a first drug specifically manufactured for them, the BiDil, put on the US market in 2005 by the company NitroMed, which openly used race as a descriptor of its efficacy.
 
Of course, it is always possible to escape using the word “race.” One can speak about subspecies, groups, sub-groups, populations, ancestral markers, groups of descent or ancestry, and so on. But the reality is the same: specific collective allelic variations in DNA can be linked to ancestral ethnic and geographical origins. What is important is that the differences we observe are often highly genetic, and that they differ in frequency or average amounts in different populations. Races can now be identified using fewer than 100 genetic markers, and the comparison of randomly chosen DNA variants produces the same races as the commonsense view. Racial backgrounds are not skin deep, but just a swap of DNA away.
 
The literature on the topic is enormous, but frequently obscured by prejudices as well as by emotional or polemical considerations. For a good synthesis, see for example Vincent Sarich (emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley) and Frank Miele, *Race: The Reality of Human Differences*, 2004, Boulder:  Westview Press; Sally Lehrman, “The Reality of Race,” in *Scientific American*, 13 January 2003; Richard Dawkins, “Race and Creation,” in *Prospect* October 2004 (also in Dawkins, *The Ancestor’s Tale*, 2004, Boston:  Houghton Mifflin). A few additional references (more technical, but quite significant) : M.D. Shriver, G.C. Kennedy and E.J. Parra, “The Genomic Distribution of Population Substructure in Four Populations Using 8,525 Autosomal Snips,” in *Human Genomics*, 2004, pp. 274-286 ; E.J. Para, R.A. Kittles and M.D. Shriver, “Implications of Correlations Between Skin Color and Genetic Ancestry for Biomedical research,” in *Nature Genetics*, 2004, pp. S54-60; M.S. Shriver, R. Mei and E.J. Parra, “Large Scale SNP Analysis Reveals Clustered and Continuous Patterns of Human Genetic Variation,” in *Human Genomics*, 2005, pp. 81-89; International HapMap Consortium, “A Haplotype Map of the Human Genome,” in *Nature*, 2005, pp. 1299-1320.
 
It is obvious that to deny the reality of human races will not end racism. Pretending races do not exist is not the same as creating equal opportunities for all of them (and for all of their members). Moreover, it would be a great mistake to believe that racism consists in recognizing the reality of races, and anti-racism in denying it. Racism consists in saying and believing that some races are better than others (or superiors to others), and in organizing agenda following this false assumption. Racism consists in a pathological use and interpretation of differences. To say that there is “only one human race” seems generous, but implies some blindness towards reality. It can also be perverse, because this “only one race” is quite generally conceived along the model of one specific race (usually the Caucasian one). That kind of universalistic discourse can then be used as a pretext for a new kind of colonization. Human races (plural) are part of human diversity. They are all beautiful. By comparison, human race (singular) looks rather poor.

JE comments:  This exhaustive post from Alain de Benoist makes a strong case.  A solution to the divide between scientists and social scientists might best be accomplished by jettisoning the word “race” altogether–perhaps to be substituted by “human difference”?

I would welcome Phyllis Gardner’s thoughts on this topic.

Finally (and off-topic):  You are reading this post via Gmail because I am still struggling with the new Stanford webmail account, which despite its “new and improved” claims, makes it impossible to send an e-mail with many “BCC” recipients.  I will continue to work on the problem throughout the day.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA 

US: on an Obama Presidency (Richard Hancock, US)

Richard Hancock writes:

The main worry that I have about Obama is his policy on taxes. If he
carries out all of his promises, 50% of American citizens will pay no
income taxes and will receive federal government payments in the
amount of approximately $1,000 per family. This looks like an attempt
by Obama to buy votes. Stimulus payments such as were dispersed this
year are a doubtful help to the economy and a regular annual payment
to up the income of the lower half of earners is far worse. People
should improve their income by working as a team with their employers
so that businesses are able to pay them better wages. This requires
an equal effort on the part of both parties. Labor and Management
can’t get this done if they continue to demonize each other.

I think that our greatest need is for management and labor to come
together in a cooperative effort. The problems of the Big Three
automobile manufacturers are a case in point. Foreign companies such
as Toyota and Honda have largely avoided the trap of Union-Management
conflict and seem to be able to work together for their common good.
The Detroit companies have a heritage of management-labor conflicts
which they can’t seem to put away. I feel that the Democratic support
of a bill to permit labor unions to organize without a secret ballot
would be a disaster if passed.

I live in Oklahoma, a right-to-work state. The only labor troubles
that we hear of is from state employees who are constantly agitating
for higher wages. We hear almost nothing from workers in the private
sector. Incidentally, Oklahoma is a red state. A favorite tactic here
is not to tie your opponent with George Bush but rather with Barack
Obama. If Obama wins, I hope that the Republicans will do well enough
in the Senate to block some of the harmful legislation that the
Democrats are vowing to pass.

JE comments: The Devil’s Advocate asks: the United States is, in a
word, insolvent. We borrow, therefore we are. So either we pay
higher taxes or our children/grandchildren will. Aren’t both
candidates, in their all-out quest for votes, obfuscating on
this obvious point?

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re: US: Shelly Mandel (NOW) Endorses Palin (Gene Franklin, US))

JE commented on 28 October (see Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich’s post from
that date):

If indeed the pay for women McCain staffers “averages out” relatively
higher than for Obama’s staff, this is a statistic worth noting.

Gene Franklin responds:

I agree that “it is a statistic worth noting” but not for the reason
given by Nushin Namazi on 27 October. There are two principles here:
Equal pay for equal work and equal opportunity regardless of gender.
It is the latter issue which may be violated by the Obama staff if in
fact they passed over qualified women for men only because of gender.

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re: US: on Perceptions of Race (Robert Whealey, US)

Robert Whealey responds to Vincent Littrell’s post of 27 October:

I agree with Vincent Littrell that as a moral ideal,
there is only one human race. The informed clergy among the
Christians, Jews and the Muslims all preach this ideal.

But the real world, people are prejudiced against strangers, whether
they are Germans, Russians, Muslims or Angolans. Rabbis are better
educated than the Pentecostal and Mormon preachers. I have more trust
in American Mormons than I do in an unknown imam from the Middle East.
Liberalism and Socialism which are 19th-century amendments to
Christianity and Judaism also preach equality, as an ideal.

I am voting for Obama on economic grounds, but he is going to have
trouble in rural America.

A bigger problem than racial prejudice is class. Whites are less
prejudiced against Cubans than against Haitians. The Dominicans also
discriminate against Haitians. The rich of New York and Texas
discriminate against West Virginia Whites.

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re: US: Shelly Mandel (NOW) Endorses Palin (Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, US; ex-Iran)

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich responds to Nushin Namazi’s post of October
27, concerning the gender balance between the salaries of Obama’s and
McCain’s staffers:

I first heard of this outrageous allegation on Fox news. As an independent
researcher, I consider it an obligation on my part to watch Fox “news” in
order to understand how and when misinformation is being propagated.
*National Review* Online, which Ms. Namazi has forwarded, is home to notorious
neoconservatives who have not serve this country’s interests, but an agenda
that only leads to escalating conflict around the globe. Their allegations
are unfounded and dangerous–much like Fox.

Here is some news on equal pay: If a male and female worked at the same job
but the female got less pay, or anyone for that matter, this would be
considered inequality. One hardly “averages out” pay into the number of
people–male or female. As far as choosing advisers: frankly, I would like
a candidate to choose the best, male or female is irrelevant. Emphasizing
gender/color/race is itself discriminatory. What is important is for all
to pay a fair pay. Misleading the public about such issues is not
acceptable. These are serious times. The world in a recession. America is
in deep trouble financially, as it finds itself engaged in two wars with an
uncertain future. With so many challenges at home and abroad, the future
president must act wisely and benefit himself from the best council
available to him–that is good judgment. We must learn to care about
America, the world, and put ourselves last for a change. While the order
may change (the world, America), certainly it is time to put ourselves last.

I wonder why NRO or Fox have not mentioned the fact that Palin or McCain, who
seem to be so concerned about women and children, drag a 7-8 year old child
on stage throughout the campaign holding a few month-old special needs baby?
I would have thought that the most important thing a child needs is
stability, rest, and discipline, not being another ornament on a campaign
trail.

JE comments: If indeed the pay for women McCain staffers “averages
out” relatively higher than for Obama’s staff, this is a statistic
worth noting. I do agree with Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, however, that
it is inappropriate for Sarah Palin to parade out her children at
every turn on the campaign trail. Are these true “family values” or
is it merely opportunism?

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re: US: Sarah Palin and Environmental Issues (Massoud Malek, US; Iran)

Massoud Malek writes:

On August 4, 2008, a lawsuit was filed in federal district court by
the state of Alaska, challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s
decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the
Endangered Species Act due to global warming.

Alaska argues that the decision will harm oil and gas exploration,
fisheries and tourism, and that it ignores the bears’ recent
population growth. “We believe that the decision to list the polar
bear was not based on the best scientific and commercial data
available,” Palin said in announcing the lawsuit.

According to Alaska Wildlife Alliance, Governor Palin allows airborne
killing of wolves and bears and has sanctioned the massacre of adult
wolves at their den-sites and then permitted the systematic execution
of their pups.

Palin, an avid hunter, has put the weight of the state behind
defeating a ballot measure that would have limited the aerial shooting
of wolves. Nationwide aerial hunting has been banned since 1972’s
Airborne Hunting Act, but Alaska gets around that by saying the
hunters are working for the state to control predators. The idea is to
produce more moose and caribou to hunt.

The Alaska Fish and Game Department has been allowing aerial wolf
hunting–even though voters said no to it twice–since 2003. (The
legislature later overturned the voters’ decision.) But on August 26,
Alaskans voted 92,781 to 74,124 to allow it. Why did Alaskans change
their mind? It could have been, as the *Anchorage Daily News*
suggests, because the wording was confusing: “Some who voted no on
Measure 2 thought they were banning the practice, when in fact it took
a yes vote to stop private hunters from gunning wolves and bears from
the air.” And others blame the state for spending $400,000 on an
“educational campaign” on the issue, alongside nearly as much from
hunting groups.

http://www.akwildlife.org

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i536jfOol1gh7ago3QLE3rrEvhZgD92BSE780

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2008/08/30/animals-and-money-palins-fiscal-weakness-for-hunters/

JE comments: Airborne hunting? Where is the “sport” in that?
Massoud Malek has brought up some issues I find very disturbing.

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US: Marine Expelled (John Eipper, US)

JE writes: On 8 April, WAISer Massoud Malek posted a YouTube link to a
very disturbing video, which apparently showed a US Marine in Iraq
throwing a puppy off a cliff. Here’s the URL for Massoud’s post:

http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/wais/cgi-bin/index.php?p=15045

As a followup, MSNBC reported on 11 June that the Marine Corps has
concluded its investigation of the incident, and has decided to expel
the Marine featured in the video, Lance Cpl. David Motari, as well as
subject him to an unspecified “non-judicial punishment”:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25108189

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re: US: Obama Victorious; on VP Selection (David Krieger, US)

David Krieger responds to Miles Seeley’s post of 9 June:

I also think that Bill Richardson would be a good choice for vice president,
particularly since Edwards has taken himself out of the running.

I don’t understand, though, why JE [when commenting Miles Seeley's post]
referred to former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan as “now
disgraced.” It seems to me that, by his reflections and revelations,
he is now somewhat less disgraced than he was as Press Secretary as
the mouthpiece for this criminal administration.

JE comments: My choice of words was poor. I meant that McClellan is
now “disgraced” in Bush’s view; i.e., after publishing his scathing
critique of the Administration, he’s no longer welcome in the White
House. “Estranged” would have been a better way of phrasing it.

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re: US: Obama Victorious; on VP Selection (Miles Seeley, US)

Bill Richardson-for-VP momentum is growing in the WAIS ranks. In
response to Orlo Steele’s post of 9 June, Miles Seeley writes:

My wife and I liked the way Richardson acted during the primaries, and
we agree he would be a good candidate for VP.

JE comments: Put me on board as well; this Hispanist believes it is
high time we had a fluent Spanish speaker in the #2 job in Washington.

In the White House itself we haven’t had a competent Hispanophone since
Jimmy Carter. Pres. Bush, in the immortal words of former (and now
disgraced) Press Secretary Scott McClellan, “speaks Spanish but not
that well”:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,194255,00.html

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Asia Center for Security Studies (Siegfried Ramler, US)

Siegfried Ramler responds to John Heelan’s post of 8 June:

Both the East-West Center and the Asia Center for Security Studies are
non-political, non-partisan institutions dedicated to research and
dialogue. They represent functions similar to the Woodrow Wilson
International Center and Brookings in Washington, DC, and the Hoover
Institution at Stanford, with the participation of fellows and
researchers and the conduct of conferences, lectures and seminars with
national and international outreach. Through these functions the
Centers contribute to international understanding.

The People’s Friendship University of Russia, unlike these
institutions, is a degree-granting university with an international
student body. As to that university’s current characteristics and
impact, I am not in a position to comment. I would assume, however,
that it has changed considerably since its former identity during the
Cold War as Patrice Lumumba University.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: WHINSEC Visit II: The Classroom (John Heelan, UK)

John Heelan responds to Alain de Benoist’s post of 4 June:

The UK’s Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, originated at the same
time as St. Cyr and West Point, has fulfilled a similar role to that
of WHINSEC, although its overseas students come from many of the
previous UK colonies in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. A Sandhurst
course is almost mandatory for males in succession to the throne of
the UK and some other countries. Like SOA, it has some among its
past graduates whose subsequent history is not boasted about.

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re: US: Obama Victorious (David Krieger, US)

David Krieger responds to Nigel Jones’s post of 4 June:

Choosing a vice president will be a major decision for Obama, and will
reflect upon his leadership. To choose Hillary Clinton, who has been so
willing to undermine his leadership and question his integrity, would be
a very poor decision on the part of Obama. She also comes with the
unattractive baggage of Bill. Hillary’s candidacy has been about
herself, while Obama’s has been about changing America. I think Obama
will be wise enough to avoid the trap of selecting Hillary, and his
candidacy will be better for it. On the other hand, Hillary could be
offered a cabinet position in the health area. I doubt, though, that
she would leave the Senate for a cabinet position.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Obama Victorious; on Clinton as VP (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

Cameron Sawyer writes:

It would be a grave mistake for Obama to offer Hillary the V.P. spot.
I agree with Dick Morris’s view (and this is a guy who knows first
hand what he’s talking about):

“Instead of conceding defeat and campaigning for Obama, auditioning
for the spot of loyal teammate, Hillary insists on keeping her options
open and vies for the spotlight with Obama, exactly what you do not
want a vice president to do.”

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/06/no_menageatrois_for_obama.html

She’s really vying for a kind of coalition government, and agreeing to
something like that would be an incredible sign of weakness on Obama’s
part which would undermine his leadership. He should not be having
any of that, and judging by the very well-run campaign Obama managed,
he is not so stupid as to get himself into that position. And she has
behaved really stupidly, simply demanding the V.P. spot like that,
with the implicit threat that she will keep right on damaging him if
he doesn’t share the ticket with her. Of course he can’t accept that
implicit blackmail.

Even now, when he’s actually won, she is working against him, arguing
that she “won the popular vote,” when she should be conceding and
starting to go into action to help him without conditions, if she had
the slightest concern about her party rather for her own personal
ambitions. So she is a huge liability to Obama and to the party, and
the sooner she’s out of the picture in any role other than simply
campaigning for the party, the better for the Democrats.

For the Democrats. I am on record here for admiring Obama for a
number of different qualities, but Obama’s policy platform is not one
of them. As a right-libertarian, I am hoping for McCain victory, as
the lesser of two evils, so Hillary–just keep at it! You’ve already
split off a huge chunk of the Democratic electorate and put them in
play for the Republicans, and every one of your nasty, narcissistic
press conferences puts the Republicans ahead by another step. Money
just couldn’t buy the benefit you are creating for what would
otherwise be a completely hopeless Republican ticket. You are a real
piece of work.

Actually she is so odious, that my hoping for her to keep going
reminds me of the Germans in WWI, giving money to the Bolsheviks and
shipping Lenin through Germany back to Russia in a sealed car (like
toxic waste), so that Lenin would undermine the Tsarist government and
weaken Russia in the war with Germany. Am I doing the same thing (in
my own inner world) by delighting in Hillary’s continuing rampage of
destruction through the Democratic party? Maybe I should start
worrying instead? What if she becomes a Republican? Oh my God…

JE comments: I never tire of Great War analogies, but this one is a
“Duesy.” (Just had to use the word, as I drove past the Auburn, Indiana
home of Duesenberg last week. Wonderful small town, and what an
automotive heritage.)

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US: Obama Victorious (Nigel Jones, UK)

Nigel Jones writes:

Before America awakes, may I be the first WAISer to congratulate Barack Obama on his victory over Hillary Clinton? By far the most nauseating moment, in a campaign not short of emetics, was that of Bill Clinton whining about the dirty tactics which had allegedly undone his lady wife. It takes one to know one, Bill!

I now predict that Obama will offer Hillary the Vice-presidential ticket which she will use as a platform to undermine his leadership in the same way that
Gordon Brown did to Tony Blair. Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, it is going to be a bumpy ride.

JE comments: 30 minutes ago I awoke to learn the news from Nigel Jones, and I too congratulate Barack Obama. Just yesterday (or was it Monday?) Hillary Clinton announced something we thought we’d never hear: she’s available for the VP slot. In the spirit of party unity, I don’t see how Obama can turn her down.

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(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: WHINSEC Visit II: The Classroom (Alain de Benoist, France)

Alain de Benoist responds to JE’s post of 3 June:

John Eipper has given to WAIS some interesting reports on his visit at
WHINSEC headquarters at Ft. Benning. That WHINSEC has corrected some
of the most unpleasant aspects of the ex-School of Americas is quite
possible. However, the simple fact that WHINSEC is a place where
foreign military people are instructed in the art of war by US
instructors (”nearly all courses at WHINSEC are conducted in Spanish,”
JE wrote) seems to me very strange. Is there any other western country
where something like WHINSEC exists? It is quite clear that the
foreign military officers instructed at Ft. Benning will not be
inclined, when they are back in their respective countries, to
fight against US politics and interests in Latin America. In that
sense, WHINSEC is nothing more than one propaganda tool among many
others.

JE comments: When reflecting on WHINSEC’s ultimate purpose, one must
conclude that it strives to foster a sense of cooperation (with the
US) among Latin America’s military elites and elites-to-be. Its mere
existence suggests a US role as “hegemon” in this relationship.
Regarding the language of instruction (a point of particular interest
for this Hispanist), the choice of Spanish is a practical matter, as few
NCOs from Spanish America would be fluent enough in English to take
classes in that language. We should also recall that SOA was located
in Panama prior to 1984.

One followup point: not all the instructors at WHINSEC are from the
US. I attended a class taught by a Captain from Panama, and other
instructors hail from non-US countries–I’m thinking about the role of
the Colombian National Police sergeant in explaining the narcotics lab mock-up
we visited (see my post from 30 May).

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

US: WHINSEC Visit II: The Classroom (John Eipper, US)

JE writes:

What kind of schooling takes place at the (former) School of the
Americas? (To be sure, SOA is no more, as it was re-named
WHINSEC–Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation–in
2001.)

As an educator, Latin Americanist and E-i-C of WAIS, I set out to find
the answer. On 28 May during my visit to Ft. Benning, I attended two
classes at WHINSEC: the first was an Intelligence Officer course
covering enemy weapons systems; the second a Civil Military Operations
course on military decision-making. For both classes I was escorted into the
room after the session had already begun. Gauging from the
instructors’ surprise at my presence, I am convinced that they were
not briefed beforehand on the visit.

Nearly all courses at WHINSEC are conducted in Spanish, with the
occasional class in English for the benefit of students from the
Anglophone Caribbean nations. Brazilian students (I saw but one
during my visit, who incidentally was the only woman out of the 40+
students in the two classes I observed) are also expected to follow the
class lectures in Spanish. It was most impressive, and a bit
intimidating, to see so many military types in the classroom–I spent
a good deal of my time attempting to decipher the different
uniforms, which was easy for those who wore their national flags
(literally) on their sleeve. Not surprisingly, Cuba and Venezuela
were not represented, but Bolivia was, despite president Evo Morales’s
pledge to send no more students to WHINSEC. Colombia and the Central
American nations, together with the Dominican Republic, had the
largest contingents. Despite the crazy quilt of uniforms and the
uniformity of military haircuts, the classroom dynamic seemed fairly
typical of what one might see at a college in the US–some students
listened attentively, others took notes, and still others appeared
rather disengaged, even sleepy.

At the conclusion of the Intelligence Officers class, I spoke for
fifteen minutes with the instructor, Sgt. Rivera of the US Army.
Sgt. Rivera had a great deal of insight on the academic culture one
experiences at WHINSEC. For starters, he stressed the challenges he
faces as an NCO instructor in a classroom of officers–in Latin
America, officers are not accustomed to “learning” anything from
enlisted personnel. The wisdom of the Old Sarge, a commonplace of US
military culture, apparently does not translate well into Spanish.
(Sgt. Rivera, by way of full disclosure, is actually a young guy.)

Regarding hemispheric relations in the microcosm of the classroom,
Sgt. Rivera explained that while students tend to be assigned seats
with their compatriots, they also inevitably form friendships beyond
national boundaries. He noted that soldiers from Colombia and Ecuador
(Venezuela, as noted above, no longer participates in WHINSEC) had the
chance to dialogue face-to-face on their nations’ recent near-war
disagreement. I had to conclude that by enabling Latin American
officers to meet and befriend their counterparts from neighboring
nations, this must have some deterring influence on fratricidal wars
in the Hemisphere.

One rule observed at the Institute: in classroom discussion students
are free to talk about their own countries, but they are discouraged
from offering opinions about their neighbors. This listening ethic to
me seems very salubrious for dispelling stereotypes that might lead to
conflict.

The Civil Military Operations course was taught by Captain Zambrano, a
gregarious and charismatic officer from Panama. Zambrano was
adept at creating a “student-centered” classroom environment, as he
actively encouraged student input on their own experiences in military
decision-making. On two occasions, Cpt. Zambrano brought up the
importance of respecting human rights and international law throughout
military operations–even while he was discussing theory of a combat nature.

I must stress that I observed nothing nefarious in the WHINSEC
curriculum, and throughout my brief time in the classroom, I was
struck by its similarities with a typical university environment.
Indeed, I had to remind myself during my observation that these were
professionals training, literally, in the art of war–Sgt.
Rivera’s PowerPoint presentation showed tanks, artillery and other
instruments of death. Yet WHINSEC also trains personnel in peacekeeping and
emergency response.

After much reflection on my experience at WHINSEC, I have to conclude
that its closure would not serve any future good. In the first place,
WHINSEC is a tiny organization within the behemoth US military
machine, and its elimination in response to public pressure would be
little more than a symbolic victory for opponents of heavy-handed US
policy throughout the world. (I still believe, however, that the old
SOA, concerned with “stability” above all during the Cold War times,
was guilty of, or at least complicit in, injustices in our Hemisphere;
I also believe that SOA/WHINSEC’s critics can take credit for the
positive changes that the Institute has undergone in recent times–in
a sense, SOA Watch has “won” its battle with SOA.)

As long as armed forces must exist in this violent, imperfect world,
WHINSEC offers a forum for NCOs and mid-level military officers to
reach across national boundaries, and perhaps understand each other
just a bit better. This is not a bad thing.

My next post on WHINSEC will address my conversations with Col.
Gilberto Perez, the WHINSEC commander, and Major John Kaiser, the
Institute’s Chaplain.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: UK Surpasses US in Per Capita GDP (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

Cameron Sawyer responds to Henry Levin’s post of 7 January, concerning
the per capita GDP of the UK surpassing that of the US:

‘Living standards’ and nominal GDP per capita are not the same thing at
all. The cited article completely distorts this. The changing exchange
rate last year–which caused the increase in nominal GDP of the UK
mentioned in the article–neither raised UK living standards nor
reduced US living standards. According to GDP at PPP, the only GDP
measure that corresponds to real living standards (because prices are
accounted for), US living standards continue to be far higher than the
UK, more than 30% higher; see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

….and the gap grows almost every year since the long-term growth rate
trend is higher in the US.

So the US is not ‘losing ground’ at all compared to Western Europe, which
in fact falls further and further behind in living standards. We are
losing ground only against the much faster growing economies of the
post-Communist space plus India and China, but there is still a lot of
ground to go before parity is reached. Russia will be the first of this
set of rapidly growing large economies to reach parity with the West,
but this moment is still many years away.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: UK Surpasses US in Per Capita GDP (John Heelan, UK)

JE commented on 7 January (see Henry Levin’s post from that date): Defenders of the American Way might also point out that we have a bigger ‘footprint’–larger homes and cars (and *much* better showers!).

John Heelan remarks: … accompanied, of course, by even larger per capita carbon footprints!

JE comments: This is all very true. Two or three decades hence, if/when the Chinese begin constructing ‘McMansions’ by the tens of millions, then we in the US will know that we are truly a less prosperous nation.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: UK Surpasses US in Per Capita GDP (Robert Crow, US)

Robert Crow responds to Henry Levin’s post of 7 January, concerning
the UK’s recent surpassing the per capita GDP of the US:

The devil is in the details. If you do not adjust for purchasing
power parity–and the calculation in this article does not (as is
noted briefly)–you have not proven much.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: UK Surpasses US in Per Capita GDP (Harry Papasotiriou, Greece)

Harry Papasotiriou responds to Henry Levin’s post (7 January)
regarding UK per capita GDP surpassing that of the US:

According to an OECD study from 2006, given recent relative growth trends,
German and French per capita GDP was set in twenty years to be only half of
US per capita GDP. Perhaps Continental Europe should learn more from the
example of the Thatcher reforms in the UK.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

UK/US: UK Surpasses US in Per Capita GDP (Henry Levin, US)

Henry Levin forwards the following article from the *The Australian* (7
January), together with the comment, “This should stir up many WAISers”:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23014509-643,00.html

JE comments: According to this very interesting study, the British
are richer than the Americans for the first time since the 19th
century. The article’s title, “Britain passes US in living
standards,” might be debatable, however, as the US enjoys lower prices
in everything from housing to fuel to consumer goods (but not health care or education). Defenders of the American Way might also point out that we have a bigger ‘footprint’–larger homes and cars (and *much* better showers!). But we are losing ground, especially as the dollar continues to get beaten up.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: UK/US: Pound-Dollar Exchange Rates (Tor Guimaraes, US)

Tor Guimaraes writes:

I find Robert Whealey’s question (8 December), “Who is going to bail
the US out in 2013 or 2023, after their military adventures in the
Middle East come to naught?” rather devastating and too close to the truth.
Unfortunately I feel even more pessimistic. Besides the incredible
financial drain on the American people from our latest wars, the US
government’s political/military activities over the last decades,
albeit always done to promote freedom/democracy/goodness, have managed
to create some other major strategic problems: (1) an increasingly
negative image for our country all over the world; (2) the creation of
some characters who in turn are creating enormous problems for the
future: Islamic Fundamentalists in Iran and Lebanon, Osama Bin Laden, etc.;
(3) the destruction of the American middle class so necessary to
support a strong military in the future. The conversion of these
three forces is giving me some serious nightmares in light of the fact
that our leaders are bickering over abortion, gay rights, Republicans
versus Democrats, health insurance, education, etc.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Michael Sullivan, US)

Michael Sullivan responds to Alain de Benoist’s post of 11 October:

The base/installation numbers do matter when you’re trying to use the
numbers against the US to show it has abusive military power in such large
numbers all over the world and, therefore, implying that the US is
imperialistic and interventionist to the detriment of the rest of the
world.

I explained what a military base or installation is in an earlier
post. Any other discussion not using that criteria and we’re talking about
apples and oranges. 6,000 US bases/installations according to Wikipedia
includes bases and warehouses! Almost all internet sources I read were
biased about US bases/installations worldwide, and most all used figures that
were attributed to Chalmers Johnson in one form or another, as he must be the
father of the movement against the number of US bases/installations
worldwide. But to add to the confusion the figures Chalmers Johnson uses in
one source are 700-800 US bases/installations worldwide and not 6,000 in the
US and 737 overseas as several other sources quote.

I just got through reading several anti-US bases articles on the
internet and to my surprise found one of my WAIS postings along with Tim
Brown’s included! I didn’t realize WAIS posted our comments for public
consumption. Now I understand why there are so few of the 200 WAISers
participating in this Forum.

Responding to Alain de Benoist’s query: The advantages of a Naval
power are homeland security, seabasing and the ability to project power
without having bases on foreign shores when not required. These are the
primary reasons the US has these capabilities in the US Navy. The US Navy
doesn’t support land campaigns except in support of Marines coming from the
sea or their SEAL teams. That requires an Army but it can keep the sea
lanes open by clearing mines, attacking enemy vessels, provide anti-air and
anti-submarine defense, taking heavy equipment across the oceans that the
Marines use and run aircraft or missile strikes from the sea. The US Navy
with its power projection can be at trouble spots breaking out just about
anywhere in the world (71% of the earth’s surfaces are covered by water) in
a matter of days if they’re not already present due to rising tensions. The
early days of the Afghanistan campaign is a classic example when no bases
were available in the area to support US air operations or the movement of
troops.

Building a large Navy is expensive and impossible today due to fiscal
and manpower constraints. I remember back in the 1980s when the goal was a
600-ship US Navy…I think we have a 315-ship Navy now. The battleship is
gone and with it long range naval gunfire, but new weapons have taken its
place. The aircraft carrier capable of carrying 80 plus aircraft is the
long pole in the US Navy’s inventory, and this capability leads all navies of
the world.

The US needs to have a second to none Navy in order to protect the
nation’s security with thousands of miles of coastline, keep commerce moving
in the world’s sea lanes and supporting our allies with our treaties and
commitments.

JE comments: I am baffled by Michael Sullivan’s surprise that our
posts are available for public consumption. Our able Webmaster,
Nushin Namazi, archives and classifies all posts, where the world can view them at–

wais.stanford.edu

This web link has been listed at the bottom of every post for many
years–at least since I became a WAISer in 2000. Might some view this website as an invasion of WAISer privacy? Perhaps, but I believe that Prof. Hilton envisioned our organization as a beacon of Peace and Light for the entire world, not just for our twelve-score members.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Harry Papasotiriou, Greece)

Harry Papasotiriou responds to the question that Alain de Benoist posed (11
October): Is there a difference in warfare between Sea powers and Land
powers?

I believe that there is an enormous difference. The sea powers seek to
dominate international commerce and its channels. Their grand strategy
relies heavily on economic means. Take what I would describe as the
Hamiltonian strategy of the United States, which varies relatively little
from administration to administration, in contrast to other aspects of
American grand strategy. The Hamiltonian strategy is based on the
assumption that so long as the United States is the world’s leading economy,
it is in its interest to operate an open international economic system,
accessible to all states. This system produces economic growth for the
states that participate, hence it is a magnet of attraction. The more
states participate, the more states are attached to the United States in a
political sense.

In order for this strategy to work, the United States needs to provide
system-wide “public goods,” if I may use an economics term. These include
managing international economic crises. They also include providing
security for international commerce. Hence the need for a global network of
military installations, to enable the armed forces of the United States to
deal with regional state or non-state (terrorism, piracy) threats to the
open international economic system, including threats to the oil supplies
necessary for the functioning of the global economy. Recently, for example,
the United States set up Africom, a West African regional command under the
European/NATO command, to deal, in cooperation with West African states,
with regional piracy and terrorism threats.

The overall success of the Hamiltonian strategy can be seen by a simple
comparison. Napoleon and Hitler attempted to conquer all Europe by military
means, and were fiercely resisted to the point of ultimately failing. The
United States recently extended the Atlantic Alliance, which it dominates
politically, from Western Europe to most of Eastern Europe, without firing a
shot. Indeed, it was the states of Eastern Europe that were banging on the
door, seeking admission into NATO. Beginning with the Truman Doctrine and
the Marshall Plan, and continuing with NATO’s recent enlargement, the United
States has achieved by peaceful, largely economic means, what Napoleon and
Hitler were unable to do by military means.

A key aspect to the success of the Hamiltonian strategy is, that it does not
require the kind of large land forces that would pose a threat of conquest
for other major powers. The Unites States has an unrivaled navy and air
force, but relatively small land forces. They are appropriate for securing
the open international economic system from peripheral threats, but not for
the conquest of other major powers. Hence these major powers are not
coalescing against the United States, in spite of its superiority in
material factors of power. The traditional concept of the balance of power
is really about threats. The Hamiltonian strategy, with its emphasis on
naval and air power, but not large land forces, ensures that the other major
powers do not feel sufficiently threatened as to forgo the benefits of the
open international economic system in order to form an anti-American
coalition.

JE comments: Shall we broaden this discussion to include Africom? Perhaps our newest WAISer, Ralu Anachebe of Nigeria, would care to comment.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Death of Justice? (Robert Whealey, US)

Robert Whealey responds to John Heelan’s post of 10 October:

I’m no legal mind, but as a historian I trace the evolution of the court
system. It is still a 5 to 4 Supreme Court, with conservative Roman
Catholics in charge.

There is not much of a future for liberalism, socialism or
Protestantism in America. The court like the Congress and the
President, is dominated by money. Democracy is fading and plutocracy
is growing. This court will not check Presidential authoritarianism.

Bush calls himself a Commander-in- Chief, but is no longer enforcing
the laws of Congress.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Alain de Benoist, France)

Alain de Benoist writes:

Randy Black (9 October) continues to criticize the ‘de Benoist and
Johnson’ figures about American bases/installations overseas. I
should repeat that these figures are also to be found in an official
US government source: *Base Structure Report (A Summary of DoD’s Real
Property Inventory), US Department of Defense, Office of the Deputy
under Secretary of Defense (Installations & Environment) Fiscal Year
2003 Baseline*. This document (148 pages) makes a clear distinction
between large, medium and small installations/locations, and lists 8
installations for Belgium.

What surprises me is that some WAISers seem to be very defensive
about the number of US military bases/installations worldwide. Are
they embarrassed for some reason? Anyway, the purpose of my initial
post about this topic was not only to speak about numbers. More
important questions were: what do foreign bases mean in the
context of present warfare? What is today the role of naval military
power compared to other military powers? Is there a difference in
warfare between Sea powers and Land powers? Maybe it is more difficult
to approach that kind of problems. It is a pity that there was no
response to such questions.

JE comments: I agree with Alain de Benoist: discussing the numbers matters much less than discussing the point and usefulness of these military bases.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

US: Death of Justice? (John Heelan, UK)

John Heelan writes:

The US Supreme Court granted no new cases Tuesday and, in a major
action, refused to reopen the question of the government’s power to
limit or scuttle lawsuits by claiming that ’state secrets’ have to be
protected. The Court denied review of an attempt to challenge the
Central Intelligence Agency’s program of capturing individuals abroad
and sending them to other countries for aggressive interrogation–the
so-called ‘extraordinary renditions’ program. There were no noted
dissents from the denial order in El-Masri v. U.S. (06-1613).

The Justices’ next opportunity to grant review of a case testing this
privilege is American Civil Liberties Union v. National Security
Agency, a challenge to the government’s secret terrorism eavesdropping
program. (That case has just been docketed as 07-468.)

http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/

What hope is there for 07-468 as a defence against the rapid trend
towards US and UK police states?

(”1984″ lives today in the White House and Supreme Court, as well as
in 10 Downing Street, the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice
[sic!])

JE comments: Can some of WAIS’s keenest legal minds comment on this?
(Keen legal minds–you know who you are!) I learned last night of the
Supreme Court’s refusal to review the El-Masri case, and given the questionable legality of ‘extraordinary rendition’ (not to mention questions of torture), the Court’s decision shocked me. Perhaps, however, there are legal details that John Heelan and I have overlooked.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Tim Brown, US)

Tim Brown follows up on Holger Terp’s post of 8 October:

Can any of my fellow WAISers provide counts of bases other than US–for example, French bases in former African colonies, non-US NATO bases in Europe, Russian bases in CIS or NIS, and so forth. Doubtless the US has more than anyone else. But we are not the only country with military establishments outside its home territories.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Randy Black, US)

Randy Black writes:

Alain de Benoist (8 October) wrote that the US military has
installations at Brussels, Ch�teau Gendebien, Chi�vres, Chi�vres
Airbase, Daumerie Caserne, Mons, Shape Headquarters, and Sterrebeek
Dependent School.

My objection is the use of the term installation to imply a military
presence by the US.

It appears that Chalmers Johnson is playing fast and loose with the
terminology as to what constitutes a US military base-installation or
elementary school. In his earlier posts, M. de Benoist forwarded the
Chalmers Johnson reports that referred to the installations as
military in nature.

Neither is always the case. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, I suppose it
depends upon how you define military installation.

Mons is a NATO installation, not a US military base; Chi�vres and
Chi�vres Airbase are one and the same and are US-run operations that
occupy a facility originally built by the Nazis.

Sterrebeek is a 300-student school, kindergarten-grade 12, for the
children of NATO families and embassy children of NATO families, and
thus is not a US military installation, although I’m told it may
technically qualify because a few of the teachers are paid out of the
Department of Defense budget since a few American teachers and
children are among the faculty and the 300 students.

Finally, the US Department of Defense (2005) lists 2,900 sites (not
6,000 installations/bases per de Benoist and Johnson) within the 50 US
states, 78 within its territories and 770 among the 39 foreign
locations (not 133 per de Benoist and Johnson).

Today, I queried a retired US Air Force officer who once worked at
McGuire AFB in the global logistics command and who was responsible
for dozens of overseas logistical operations. He flew in Vietnam, the
Philippines and Italy among other locales during his flying and later,
his desk jockey career.

His response was that to qualify as a US installation, one only has to
have one person there and in some cases, they are not even there full
time. If the US pays rent for an office, desk and telephone anywhere
in the world, it’s a US installation in a technical sense. Thus, the
US Navy’s attach�’s guy in some backwater in Africa, sharing an office
with, and advising the local military, is technically a US military
installation. Likewise, the math teacher furnished to a private NATO
school for the children of foreign diplomats in Belgium is technically
a US military installation of her or his own.

On the topic of the French military presence around the globe, my
retired Air Force friend reminded me of a time in the mid-1980s when
France decided to try to save Chad (Africa) from some unpleasant
happenings involving the Libyan invasion. France sent in the
French Foreign Legion down to defend Chad, but discovered they didn’t
have the military capability to fly their Hawk missile batteries along
with the troops to help with the effort.

The Hawks, naturally, had been donated to the French by the Americans
and were ironically used by the French to shoot down Libyan supersonic
TU-22B bombers, sold to Libya by the USSR.

As a result of their own military shortcomings (read: the French did
not have an all-weather transport large enough to carry such large
loads), the French requested that the US fly the missile batteries
from St. Dizier, France to Africa on American C-5s. In what were very
dangerous blizzard conditions in France, the C-5s of the 21st Air
Force pulled off the assignment safely and the French and Chad were
saved.

Yet, six months later, when the US had problems in Libya, the French
would not allow the American bombers to fly over France. Thus the
American bombers had to fly from England completely around the Iberian
peninsula, about 1,300 miles extra each way, refueling several times,
to accomplish their dangerous mission. The reason for the mission was
primarily that Libya had supported the efforts of terrorist attacks
such as the Abu Nidal group that was behind the Rome and Vienna
airport attacks and the Libyan agents’ bombing of a West Berlin disco
bombing in 1985.

During the bombing runs, and long before smart bombs, several of the
bombs missed their target and slightly damaged the French Embassy,
probably because the pilots were tired from the extra 1,300 miles
detour around France.

Source: http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/20050527_2005BSR.pdf

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:bOOVhttXNt8J:www.cdef.terre.defense.gouv.fr/publications/cahiers_drex/cahier_retex/retex6.pdf+St.+Dizier+France+and+Hawk+missile+batteries+and+Chad&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_El_Dorado_Canyon

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Michael Sullivan, US)

Michael Sullivan writes:

I think I’m on a different frequency than Alain de Benoist and Margaret
Mackenzie-Hooson (8 October) regarding US bases and installations; if we had 6,000 in the US that would mean an average of 120 bases/installations in each state!

A base/installation normally has a fence around it, buildings of some
kind, roads, a Commanding Officer, and MPs or “rent-a-cops” on the gates. They
have a base infrastructure as well as tenant military units aboard the
base/installation. It’s a mini city.

“If figures can lie” as the saying goes, this is the perfect case. If
Chalmers Johnson counted ROTC units in both high school, college and
recruiting stations around the country where they have 2-4 active duty
military personnel, then he skewed the figures by calling them
bases/installations to arrive at 6,000.

As far as overseas goes I’m talking about American bases or foreign
bases were US troops are stationed and they have a US Commanding Officer and
the rest of the base infrastructure. Because a KC-130 lands at some foreign
airfield, drops off supplies and refuels does not make it a US base or
installation.

I have no knowledge about secret bases, but there can’t be many or the
secrets would get out like in some of the foreign countries where al-Qaeda
prisoners were said to be housed.

JE comments: It still appears that we have not gotten to the bottom of this. Does the 6000 figure include Armed Forces recruiting stations? There’s one in Adrian…

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Holger Terp, Denmark)

Holger Terp writes on the topic of US Military Bases:

There are at least the following types of US bases: Main Operating
Bases, Standby Deployment Bases, Storage/Support Facilities,
Communications Facilities and COB-bases.

The 2003 US Defense Department’s *Base Structure Report* lists 702
foreign bases owned or leased by the Pentagon, with about 6,000 more
installations in the US and its possessions. As vast as this network
seems, the report inexplicably fails to include any locations in
Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Qatar and Kosovo. And to
these must now be added at least 14 garrisons in Iraq.

Then there is “under-reporting.” In Asia, the 10 US Marine Corps
facilities on Okinawa, including the sprawling 485-hectare USMC
Futenma Air Station, have only one entry. The array of intelligence
gathering and other military installations in Britain are nowhere to
be found in the report, possibly because they all are technically
Royal Air Force facilities. Moreover, while a surface-based
“boost-phase” missile defense system to counter North Korean missiles
can be deployed on ships in the international waters of the
Sea of Japan, effective coverage by a surface-based system to counter
Iranian missiles would require launch sites in at least Afghanistan
and Iraq (and possibly Turkmenistan), according to a Congressional
Budget Office study completed in July.

See also: US Bases and other overseas military presence Program; US
DoD Base Realignment and Closure; Campaign for the Accountability of
American Bases (CAAB); US Comprehensive Environmental Response,
Compensation, and Liability Act; Cooperative Security Site; US Defense
Environmental Restoration Program; Cooperative security locations
(CSLs); Diego Garcia; Forward operating locations (FOLs);
forward-operating sites; Formerly Used Defense Sites; Fylingdales; US
the Global Posture Review; Greenham Common; Main operating bases
(MOBs); munitions and explosives of concern; Molesworth; U.S. Naval
Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; UK Sites; the US Overseas Basing
Commission; perimeter; Roosevelt Roads Naval Station-Puerto Rico; staging base; theater architecture; SOSUS; Thule; UXO.

Relevant Literature:

American Forces in Italy. / William M. Arkin ; Richard Fieldhouse. In:
END Papers, 1984:8 pp. 64-79. US Base Structure Report, 1999
http://www.dod.mil/faq/pis/sites.html.

Bombs in the Backyard: Bases and Facilities with Significant Current
or Historical U.S. Nuclear Weapons or Naval Nuclear Propulsion
Missions. Compiled by Stephen I. Schwartz, Director, U.S. Nuclear
Weapons Cost Study Project - As of August 2002 - (Bases and
facilities with active nuclear weapons, weapons-related and/or naval
nuclear propulsion missions).

Campbell, Duncan: America’s base motives. In: New Statesman,
1982:2700/2701 pp. 12-13.

Campbell, Duncan: Bases build-up. In: New Statesman, 1983: 2744 pp. 12-13.

DoD Announces Installation Realignment in Germany. July 29, 2005.

Fletcher, Harry R.: Air Force Bases: Volume II: Air Bases Outside
the United States of America.
(Reference series; United States Air Force HistoricaI Research
Agency, Center for Air Force History United States Air Force. -
Washington, D.C.: 1993. -219 pp.)

http://www.raf-upper-heyford.org/USAF_BASES_OUTSIDE_THE_US.pdf

Forbes, Keith Archibald: American military bases in Bermuda 1941 to 1995.
http://www.bermuda-online.org/milquit.htm

GAO; United States Government Accountability Office: Military Bases:
Observations on DOD’s 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Selection Process and
Recommendations: Statement Before the Defense Base Closure and
Realignment Commission.

http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-905.

GAO: Report to Congressional Committees January 2005:
Military Base Closures: Updated Status of Prior Base Realignments and
Closures. GAO-05-138.

http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-138

Garamone, Jim: US Air Force Fleet Experiencing Pains of Age.

Garamone, Jim: U.S. Military Footprint in Europe Changing to Meet Strategy.

Kane, Tim: Troop Deployment Dataset, 1950-2003.

The Heritage Foundation, Center for Data Analysis, October 2004, at
www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/troopsdb.cfm.

Luber, Burkhard: Bedrohungs Atlas Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 1982. -
ISBN 3-7795-7371-7.

Miller, John M.: Bases and Battleships: Foreign presence of troops,
bases and navies, and their political, military and social impacts. A
new focus for peace movments. 1989.

Missouri Department of Natural Resources Division of Environmental
Quality: Federal Facilities.

Pilger, John: ‘Paradise Cleansed’: Our Deportation of the People of
Diego Garcia is a Crime That Cannot Stand.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1317945,00.html

The Monthly Review: Editorial.

- http://www.monthlyreview.org/0302editr.htm.

U.S. Department of Defense, Directorate for Information Operations and
Reports, Statistical Information Analysis Division, “Military Personnel
Historical Reports: Active Duty Military Personnel by Regional Area
and by Country,” at

www.dior.whs.mil/mmid/military/history/309hist.htm (October 19, 2004).

US military on the scent of oil, by Colonel Daniel Smith
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FK20Aa01.html

JE comments: What an impressive set of references! I am becoming very intrigued. Holger Terp presents some irrefutable sources–although the figure of 6000 US ‘military bases and installations’ still seems extremely high to me. (By way of a comparison, there are, however, some 31,000 McDonald’s restaurants located throughout the world.)

Stay tuned for another post from Michael Sullivan on this topic.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: John Quincy Adams and the *Amistad* Case (David Duggan, US)

David Duggan responds to Mike Bonnie’s post of 8 October, concerning
the *Amistad* Supreme Court case:

Actually, there’s an interesting legal twist in this case: the Supreme
Court did not rule on the slavery issue, and particularly on the slave
trade issue (the trading in slaves having been outlawed by the United
States in 1819). Rather, the issue was whether a court could, under a
treaty, look behind documents of title to determine that they were
shams. Spain, Cuba’s sovereign, had outlawed the slave trade (that is,
the transport of slaves on ships bearing its flag), but under a
peculiar understanding and practice, allowed slavery in Cuba. The
Africans, who were defendants in the case under provisions of maritime
law that allow the property of a disabled ship to be held and sold to
pay the claims of those who had rendered assistance to the ship, had
been given false documents changing their African names (e.g., Quato,
Kimbo, Yaboi) to Spanish names (Pedro, Antonio, Jose), thereby
allowing their passage from Havana to Principe to work as slaves. As
is customary under international law, Spain requested that the United
States petition the district court to advance the claim of the alleged
slave owners, Ruiz and Montez, for return of their property. The
Court, per Justice Story (who had written a treatise on international
law), held that “these Negroes were never the lawful slaves of Ruiz or
Montez, or of any other Spanish subjects. They are natives of Africa,
and were kidnapped there, and were unlawfully transported to Cuba, in
violation of the laws and treaties of Spain, and the most solemn
edicts and declarations of that government.” 40 US at 593. The
official reporter of the case had wanted to insert Adams’ argument,
but did not receive it: “As many of the points presented by Mr. Adams
…. were not considered by the Court essential to its decision: and
were not taken notice of in the opinion of the Court… the necessary
omission of the argument is submitted with less regret.” 1841 US LEXIS
at 99-100. I believe that Adams is the only former president of the
United States to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and one of
only a handful of presidents to do so. The most recent was Richard
Nixon who (twice) argued Time v. Hill in the mid 1960s.

JE comments: Thanks to David Duggan (an attorney) for his legal insight on this landmark case. As long as we are discussing the sixth US president, it is noteworthy that JQ Adams was also the only former Chief Executive to serve in the House of Representatives.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide; on Chalmers Johnson (Margaret Mackenzie-Hooson, US)

Margaret Mackenzie writes, in response to Michael Sullivan’s and Alain de Benoist’s recent discussion on a Chalmers Johnson article concerning US military bases:

Because I knew Chalmers Johnson as a colleague when he was at
Berkeley, serving on
doctoral committees with him, I am relieved to see that his counting
of bases has been
given credibility as a matter of definition. He is a man of deep
integrity, and I write
this remembering that often I did not agree with his opinions, but
always I trusted the
data he assembled. As far as I have known for some time, his count
includes a set of
secret bases that is never revealed or included in official figures.
He is no longer at
Berkeley, having taken the special early retirement that was offered
there about twelve
years ago. He went to the University of California at San Diego, and
lives now at Cardiff
nearby, where he is writing full time. My husband, David Hooson, a WAIS
fellow, was Dean
of Social Sciences at Berkeley until 1980, and Chalmers was Chair of
Political Science at
the same time. I know that David, who knew him well and has read all
his books, respects
him as an excellent scholar and exceptional colleague.

JE comments: As always, best wishes to veteran WAISers David Hooson and Margaret Mackenzie-Hooson. Thank you very much for writing.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Nuclear Power and Homer Simpson (John Heelan, UK)

Concerning Homer Simpson’s ‘candidacy’ for US President, JE asked on 7 October:

Is Homer Simpson a ‘proven fund raiser’?

John Heelan responds:

According to Newsweek**, the Homer Simpson brand over its 17-year run has raised some $2.5 billion, which makes current and past political war chests seem paltry.

** http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18237345/site/newsweek/?from=rss

JE comments: I stand corrected; or, as Homer himself would say…’Doh’!

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re: US: John Quincy Adams (Mike Bonnie, US)

Mike Bonnie adds to the conversation on President John Q. Adams (see
Robert Whealey’s post of 7 October):

John Quincy Adams also argued for inalienable individual rights. Note
his argument before the Supreme Court in the Case of the Amistad, a
slave ship captured off the Long Island, NY coast.

Teaching With Documents: The Amistad Case:

In February of 1839, Portuguese slave hunters abducted a large group
of Africans from Sierra Leone and shipped them to Havana, Cuba, a
center for the slave trade. This abduction violated all of the
treaties then in existence. Fifty-three Africans were purchased by two
Spanish planters and put aboard the schooner Amistad for
shipment to a Caribbean plantation. On July 1, 1839, the Africans
seized the ship, killed the captain and the cook, and ordered the
planters to sail to Africa. On August 24, 1839, the Amistad was seized
off Long Island, NY, by the U.S. brig Washington. The planters were
freed and the Africans were imprisoned in New Haven, CT, on charges of
murder. Although the murder charges were dismissed, the Africans
continued to be held in confinement as the focus of the case turned to
salvage claims and property rights. President Van Buren was in favor
of extraditing the Africans to Cuba. However, abolitionists in the
North opposed extradition and raised money to defend the Africans.
Claims to the Africans by the planters, the government of Spain, and
the captain of the brig led the case to trial in the Federal District
Court in Connecticut. The court ruled that the case fell within
Federal jurisdiction and that the claims to the Africans as property
were not legitimate because they were illegally held as slaves. The
case went to the Supreme Court in January 1841, and former President
John Quincy Adams argued the defendants’ case. Adams defended the
right of the accused to fight to regain their freedom. The Supreme
Court decided in favor of the Africans, and 35 of them were returned
to their homeland. The others died at sea or in prison while awaiting
trial.

More documents can be found on the National Archive web site:
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/amistad/index.html?template=print

JE comments: I believe this was John Quincy Adams’s finest hour–and the story made a powerful film, too.

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re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Alain de Benoist, France)

Alain de Benoist writes:

Quoting the Chalmers Johnson article I had previously forwarded,
Michael Sullivan wrote (6 October): “Alain’s sources on US
bases/installations at home and abroad are highly inflated.” Actually,
the discrepancy seems to be enormous. Michael says there are 238 “US
military bases/installations in the US,” while Johnson puts the
number at 6,000. For US military bases/installations overseas, Michael
gives the number of 76, while Johnson’s figure is 702.

It is not realistic nor honest to explain such differences by a
supposed Chalmers Johnson inability to count the number of
bases/installations. There is obviously a matter of definition implied
here. If one goes to the article “Military of the United States” from
Wikipedia, one reads: “As of 2005, the US occupied over 700 military
bases in over 36 countries worldwide.” This is exactly the number
given by Johnson (and I do not think he wrote this article!). The
reference which is given here is: “Base Structure Report (A Summary of
DoD’s real Property Inventory), US Department of Defense, Office of
the Deputy under Secretary of Defense (Installations & Environment)
Fiscal Year 2003 Baseline.”

This document (148 pages) gives all needed information, by
distinguishing large, medium and small installations/locations. For
the US and US territories, the total number is 6,000 (including 100
large and 96 medium installations). For US military
bases/installations overseas, the total number is 702 (including 15
large, 19 medium and 668 small installations).

For Belgium, where Randy Black wrote there is only one
base/installation, 8 different installations are quoted: Brussels,
Ch�teau Gendebien, Chi�vres, Chi�vres Airbase, Daumerie Caserne, Mons,
Shape Headquarters, Sterrebeek Dependent School (with a total of 1,120
occupied acres, 217 owned buildings, 225 leased buildings, and
1,609 civil and military personnel).

************************

In a separate message, Alain de Benoist responds to Randy Black’s post of 6 October, concerning Greenpeace:

Greenpeace has certainly operated during its history a certain number of illegal violent actions (which we can regard as legitimate or not). That does not make Greenpeace a terrorist organization, except if one decides to call ‘terrorism’ all kinds of illegal violent actions, which makes no sense. To label as ‘terrorism’ all kinds of illegal violent actions is the best way to make it impossible to understand what real terrorism is.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Randy Black, US)

Randy Black writes:

If the question from John Eipper (5 October) appears to be why does the US need a platoon of Marines at nice, safe embassy such as those in Paris, Rome or London, the answer is obvious. While Paris, London and Rome appear pretty glamorous as compared to the other 127 posts around the world, safe is a relative term. I suppose that Athens appears to be a safe posting too, true? It was hit with a rocket attack recently. Our embassy in Moscow has taken a rocket hit in the past couple of years. You’d think that Moscow with its very tight and brutal local police security could head off and prevent such attacks.

While the host country is responsible for the exterior security, the US
government is responsible for protecting everything within the walls of any
embassy. Security equipment, materials, embassy employees, especially the
diplomats. The embassies JE raises questions about are among the larger
embassies, have multiple entrances and buildings within their areas of
responsibility.

To say that 30 Marines, more or less, is a lot, or is too many,
ignores the size and scope of their responsibilities. Moreover, it’s assumed that among the 30 men and woman in a platoon, someone is always off duty, on vacation, at the doctor, sleeping, eating, guarding, doing administrative chores, doing community affairs PR, and other matters. To me, 30 does not sound like very many, all things considered.

Personally, I have always admired the Marine guards whom I’ve come in brief
contact with inside our embassies and consulates around the world.
Just getting inside an embassy, where you are factually on US sovereign territory, with everyone there greeting every American with respect is a treat.

From the Marine Corps Embassy Security Group Web site:

The Marine Security Guard Battalion mission is to exercise command, less
operational control of the Marine Security Guards, in that it is
responsible for their training, assignments, administration, logistical support, and discipline.

The Marine Security Guards’ primary mission is to provide internal security
services at designated U.S. Diplomatic and Consular facilities to prevent the
compromise of classified information and equipment vital to the national
security of the United States of America. The secondary mission of Marine
Security Guards is to provide protection for U.S. citizens and U.S. Government
property located within designated U.S. Diplomatic and Consular
premises during exigent circumstances, which require immediate aid or action.

(Mission is the general term for embassy, consulate or legation, commonly
referred to as a “post”.)

MSGs focus on the interior security of a diplomatic post’s building(s). In only the most extreme emergency situations are they authorized duties exterior to the
building(s) or to provide special protection to the senior diplomatic officer
off of the diplomatic compound. MSGs carry a certain level of diplomatic
immunity in the performance of their official duties.

Sources: https://www.msgbn.usmc.mil/?pg=company/pub/about/default.htm

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Nuclear Power and Homer Simpson (John Heelan, UK)

JE commented on 7 October: When commenting Gene Franklin’s post of 6
October, I mentioned Homer Simpson, whose slothful incompetence has given the
nuclear power industry a very bad reputation.

John Heelan responds:

Perhaps that reputation is also besmirched by the activities of Mr.
Burns, aided and abetted in his activities by his toady–whom he
despises–Waylon Smithers. In one relationship (fictional though it
may be) one can observe savage comment on an ugly face of capitalism
that has regard only for personal power and profits at the expense of
its neighbours and workforce, supported by those whom the elite
actually hate for their weakness.

(Homer Simpson for President! Based on recent experience, it seems
that he has all the right credentials: affable, gregarious, faithful,
good family values, regular church-goer, not too intelligent, easily
led, attracted and diverted by satisfying short-term hungers,
geographically inept, patriotic, failed entrepreneur, apolitical,
easily bought.)

JE comments: Yes, but we forgot the most important credential of all: is HS a ‘proven fund raiser’?

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: John Quincy Adams (Robert Whealey, US)

JE asked on 5 October (see Robert Whealey’s post from that date):

Why was John Quincy Adams, our sixth president and the first ‘legacy
chief executive,’ the most visionary of all presidents? Compared to
Lincoln? Wilson? TR? FDR? JFK? RWR?

Robert Whealey responds:

John Quincy Adams as Secretary of State negotiated the end of the War of
1812. He saved Madison from a disastrous imperial war. He set the
guidelines for the 49th parallel in 1837. He issued the Monroe
Doctrine. JQA after defeat as President worked on the anti-Slavery
question in the House of Representatives for 20 years.

In my original post, I spoke of vision, not power.

Lincoln was shot before Reconstruction could work.

Wilson had great vision in establishing the League of Nations. It was
a great advance in international law. It is the foundation of the UN
Charter.

Yet the LN failed 1919 to 1939. The American people were not ready to work for
international law. Nor were the six great powers ready.

Wilson shares in this failure. His 14 Points in 1918 were great and
visionary, and led to the armistice in 1918.

But by 1919, he destroyed himself at Versailles. He could not
compromise with Republicans in the Senate. He did not really
understand the depth of European nationalism and imperialism. He got
sidetracked on an anti-communist crusade in Russia.

Some other historian can comment on FDR as a visionary compared with
the vision of JQA.

In any case, JQA, AL, WW, FDR, were all giants compared to those
who have inherited the office since 1945. Thank God, no one so far
will venture to defend George W. Bush at this late date.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: France/US: on Nuclear Waste and Greenpeace (Jordi Molins Coronado, Spain)

Randy Black wrote on 6 October:

“When groups use violent means, or legal means, to stop
progress–whether it be the use of nuclear energy to benefit a country
or to force us to stop inventing better ways to feed the people–that
is terrorism.”

Jordi Molins Coronado responds:

Everything is not so black and white: the patent system is a method to
“stop progress” in order to accomplish a higher goal: to give
incentives for further progress.

Additionally, the management of externalities may encourage the
curtailing of individual freedoms. Pollution is an externality
(several top economists have created the Pigovian club, which suggests
coping with this externality via the introduction of carbon taxes).

According to Randy Black’s definition of terrorism, most big nations
are using terrorism on a daily basis (recall, for example, recent Spain
vs. Catalonia posts).

About whaling: from *The Economist*, 12 July 2007:

“Coastal whaling for smaller cetaceans falls outside the purview of
the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which manages whale stocks
(though, perversely, minke whales, which are managed, are smaller than
Baird’s beaked ones). In 1986 a moratorium went into effect on most
types of whaling, to protect devastated stocks. At the commission’s
annual meeting in May, Japan threw a hissy fit when its request for
the resumption of coastal whaling for bigger species was turned down.
As it is, Japan kills hundreds of larger whales each year, mainly in
Antarctic waters, in the name of ‘research,’ which is allowed under
IWC rules. A number of the crew on the long-distance whalers come from
Taiji and Wada, whose supermarket shelves are laden with whale meat.
Children eat it once a month at local schools.”

JE comments: ‘Research,’ indeed! Does anyone in WAISdom hold a pro-whaling position? Though it’s a difficult view to defend, I suspect that someone will try to do so. In the tradition of WAIS openness to diverse ideas, I’ll be here to post the reply when it comes in.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Michael Sullivan, US)

Michael Sullivan responds to Alain de Benoist’s forward of the
Chalmers Johnson article (4 October):

Alain’s sources on US bases/installations at home and abroad are highly inflated. One of the military base counts I found had all of the bases listed by name and country and, therefore, have used it as a source for easy reading. US bases were not listed for the following countries: Bosnia, Kosovo Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, Kuwait and the -Stans (Uzbeki-, Turkmeni-, Kyrgyz-, Tajiki-). Throw in 100 or 200, if you like, and there are still nowhere near the number described in Alain’s post.

1. Number of US military bases/installations in the US (College and high
school ROTC units are not considered bases/installations):

Actual…238 Johnson’s figures…6,000, where possibly could he
come up with a figure like this?

2. Number of US military bases/installations overseas:

Actual…76 Johnson’s figures…702 As, I said throw in
hundred more or 200 hundred more and it’s still preposterous. Marine
Security Guard Details in the countries that we have diplomatic
relations aren’t counted as they are not bases/installations. The
leading countries for US bases overseas are Germany and South Korea,
not including Iraq or Afghanistan for which I can’t find the numbers.

Best source for clarity:

Aircraft carriers are not foreign bases, and that’s one of the
advantages, as you don’t need a country’s approval to operate in
international waters. It’s called “Sea basing” and is one of our greatest
national assets for projecting power. You don’t have to worry about sapper
attacks, suicide bombers or IEDs and they can be effective in just about any
place in the world. Granted enemy subs, missiles and aircraft can be a huge
threat to the carrier, but they have an entire striking group task force to
protect them. In the GWOT they haven’t lost one person to a terrorist or
insurgent.

I believe we’re down to 11 carriers now with the already done or soon
to be decommissioning of JFK and Kitty Hawk. Usually 2-3 carriers are
always in the yard going through overhaul or mods. Two or three are
required in US waters for training pilots, strike groups and ships’ crews
before deploying on operational cruises. That leaves five or six carriers
that are full up rounds ready to carry out their missions where needed for
the various numbered US Fleets.

I read Chalmers Johnson’s impressive bio as he was a Naval officer, a
CIA type and now a Professor at UC, Berkeley. It states he was a “Cold War
warrior” but once the Soviet Union fell apart in 1989 he had a change of
heart and felt the US was acting too much as an imperial power. However,
I’m not sure he is very good at researching or adding up US
base/installation numbers!

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
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homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US/France: Bush’s New Lapdog? (Alain de Benoist, France)

Alain de Benoist writes:

Muqtedar Khan wrote (5 October): “After Tony Blair’s retirement as
Washington’s poodle and Gordon Brown’s stodgy refusal to fill in the
vacancy, it appears that Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France,
has volunteered for the job.” In my opinion, this is unfortunately
quite true. I would only disagree on a minor point. Muqtedar Khan
wrote also: “Sarkozy is a man capable of vision and initiative.” I
think the French president has no vision for anything, except for his
high esteem for himself, which is only surpassed by his incredible
vulgarity.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Tim Brown, US)

JE commented on 4 October (see Tim Brown’s post from that date):

Why does the US need an entire platoon of Marines at nice, safe
embassies such as those in London, Paris, and Rome?

Tim Brown responds:

In response to JE’s query: The primary mission of Marine Guards at a
diplomatic post is not to man the ramparts against raging mobs,
although they can do that if necessary. (My wife got tear gassed once
when the Marines had to pop gas to defend the embassy it Tegucigalpa
against a narco trafficker’s rent-a-mob.) It is to ensure internal
security. This includes several sub-missions: standing watch at
entrances, much like TSP does at airports, and controlling the flow of
persons in and out; managing the disposal of classified materials that
are being burned or otherwise destroyed after they have been
discarded; patrolling the interior, especially when the offices are
closed; checking office by office and literally desk by desk for
security violations, confirming that safes have been properly closed
(which requires more than just slamming their doors shut);
raising and lowering the flag, and much more. The size of a
detachment is determined by the number of posts that must be manned,
not the number of people employed by the mission–in other words it
is not a matter of the size of a building but the security
requirements of a Mission. And a large Mission often has
both several buildings and several entrances.

An analogy. While I was Senior Fellow at New Mexico’s Border Research
Institute there was considerable clamor to open an additional border
crossing near El Paso. Those favoring it were arguing that, after all,
it would very cheap since it would only need one INS (now ICE)
officer. So I was asked to do a study. This is the gist of what I
said. First, just to have one officer on duty 24/7 requires a minimum
of seven officers, because one works at most 8 hours a day, 5 days a
week. And, when you into consideration lapse time (sick leave,
vacations, training periods, periods when one employee has left or
retired and another can be hired, trained and enter onto duty) you
actually need 2 or 3 more. And even the very toughest officers must go
to the bathroom once in a while. Was the border crossing going to be
closed every time someone had to do the necessary? If not, you
actually wold have to double that number so that a minimum of 2 were
present at all times. And what about their safety and security, and so
forth?

And, while on bathrooms, assuming out-houses or the use of nature
would not suffice, I asked, who was going to clean them? Also, who was
going to do the needed administrative work so the officers could be
paid? And would they work without supervision, transportation,
communications systems, a/c in summer and heating in winter or require
support? And on and on. The truth is that just to keep one person on
duty 24/7 for a full year requires about 14-18 employees.

Further, the costs per employee are not just salary but also
insurance, Social Security, vacations, recruiting replacements,
training, background investigations and so forth. So, when all this
was added together, to keep a one person border crossing in operation
for a year would employ 12-14 persons and cost a minimum of about $3
million a year, And that did not include fixed expenses like
construction and maintenance of the building they would work in.

A one-Marine post in Mali? No way!

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Tim Brown, US)

Tim Brown responds to Randy Black’s post of 4 October:

A side note: Marine Security Guard detachments at American embassies and other diplomatic posts abroad (Consulate generals, international missions and so forth) range from single guard-post presence requiring a minimum of 4 watch-standers and an NCOIC to platoons at large embassies such as those in London, Paris and Rome. I myself was an MSG in Managua, Nicaragua 1956-59, acquired my love of foreign affairs, learned Spanish and was married there, and Nicaragua and Central America became the focus of much of my diplomatic and academic careers.

As to Chalmers Johnson, I gather he spent three or four years as a low-level CIA analyst before leaving for academe where he had respectable credentials and then retired. He merits consideration but does not appear to be particularly well qualified as a source on US bases worldwide.

JE comments, somewhat naively: why does the US need an entire platoon of Marines at nice, safe embassies such as those in London, Paris, and Rome?

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Randy Black, US)

Randy Black writes:

The opinions of Chalmer Johnson, forwarded by Alain de Benoist on 4 October, are dated and flawed.

Generally, we are told that Johnson is a former CIA consultant from
the late ’60s to early ’70s. It’s interesting to point out that his expertise is China and Japan. Otherwise, one must cautiously temper their acceptance of his
opinions on the US global military presence and US foreign policy.

Additionally, in several of Chalmers Johnson’s publications, he makes
the claim that there are 18 US military bases in Belgium.

The truth? One base.

Chievres Air Force Base, Belgium has about 1,200 U.S. personnel, uniformed and
civilian, as part of the NATO/SHAPE Support Group. I’ve been there; it’s a
pretty small operation in terms of US military numbers. It’s just behind the
Fina Petrol station, near Brougelette and Mons. The airfield dates to
the early 1900s and has served many purposes over the past century. For instance, the Nazis used the airfield during WWII. As one would expect, today the French, Italians, Greeks and a dozen other nations have their forces there as part of NATO.

The reason that SHAPE/NATO is in Belgium? The French, having acquired the bomb
by 1965, demanded that the other European (and NATO) forces evacuate French
soil. Thus, they relocated to Belgium, which offered the European forces and
the US its territory.

The move was precipitated by NATO’s move from a philosophy of massive
retaliation to one of a flexible response to any attack by the Soviets. De
Gaulle (and the French), having just developed their own nuclear
bombs, did not agree with NATO’s thoughts and kicked everyone out.

The irony? Forty years after De Gaulle kicked NATO/SHAPE out of France, the
French rejoined the efforts in Belgium, sending 15 French officers along with
several hundred French civilians and troops to NATO HQ. Additionally,
the French also operate as part of NATO’s presence in Afghanistan.

Source: http://www.nato.int/shape/about/background2.htm

Other fallacies in the Chalmers report include that Brown and Root is part of
Halliburton, which, of course, is not true, having been sold off since
the 2004 Chalmers piece.

Finally, Chalmers Johnson makes the outrageously unsupported claim that the US
maintains military bases in hundreds of countries, including most African
nations. I checked and double-checked and for the life of me, cannot find
support for such a claim. For instance, Johnson claims that we have a military
base in Malawi, Chad, Mali, etc.

If one defines a US military base as the presence of at least one uniformed US
soldier protecting a US Embassy, I suppose Johnson is right. That’s right, one
marine evidently lives in Malawi. Of course, Johnson and others also
claim that we have US military bases in Russia, France (seems unlikely), Fiji,
Mexico, Peru and Nepal. Go figure.

Source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance8.html

Sidebar: The first of six Mirage aircraft from 2/3 Champagne Squadron, French
Expeditionary Air Group, landed in Afghanistan at Kandahar Airfield recently,
where they are part of the NATO presence. When the relocation is complete the
French Air Wing will have 150 personnel, including a Special Forces
combat group of 20 and 100 personnel from the Air Expeditionary group.

The Mirage 2000D is an air-to-ground fighter which has been
operational with the French Air Force since 1992; it has seen active service in operations over Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Source:

http://www.nato.int/isaf/docu/pressreleases/2007/09-september/pr070928-660.html

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide (Alain de Benoist, France)

Alain de Benoist writes:

Michael Sullivan (23 September) wrote that he finds it “very hard to
believe that the US has anywhere close to 737 military bases outside
US territory,” and he asked for some sources for this information. I am
pleased to answer his request. A good summary about that topic
was published in 2004 by Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant:

Here is the beginning of this piece:

America’s Empire of Bases
by Chalmers Johnson

As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize–or
do not want to recognize–that the United States dominates the world
through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens
are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet.
This vast network of American bases on every continent except
Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire–an empire of
bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high
school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this
globe-girdling Baseworld, one can’t begin to understand the size and
nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind
of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.

Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies,
technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other
nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating
some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose
names sum up our martial heritage–Kitty Hawk, Constellation,
Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl
Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John
C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous
secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the
world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to
one another.

Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries, which
design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or, like the now
well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a subsidiary of the
Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract services to
build and maintain our far-flung outposts. One task of such
contractors is to keep uniformed members of the imperium housed in
comfortable quarters, well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable,
affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the American economy
have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second
war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense Department was ordering up
an extra ration of cruise missiles and depleted-uranium armor-piercing
tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock,
almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier,
Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun
Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.

At Least Seven Hundred Foreign Bases

It’s not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of
bases. Official records on these subjects are misleading, although
instructive. According to the Defense Department’s annual “Base
Structure Report” for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and
domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or
rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6,000
bases in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats
calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace
just the foreign bases–surely far too low a figure but still larger
than the gross domestic product of most countries–and an estimated
$591,519.8 million to replace all of them. The military high command
deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus
an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian
officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners.
The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars,
hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases
4,844 more.

These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all
the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails
to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo–even though it is
the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever
since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan,
although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures
throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half
years since 9/11.

Alain de Benoist comments:

The information given by Chalmers Johnson has been updated in his
recent book, of which I have already given the title.

See also: .
For other critical appreciations, two more references:

(in English);
(in French).

Okinawa is a more complex story. In 1972, some parts of Okinawa were
returned to Japan. In the following decades, there were many incidents
involving US soldiers (including the rape of a local schoolgirl by
three US servicemen and the crash of a US marine helicopter into a
university campus in Ginowan), which provoked violent demonstrations.

A testimony:
.

On 13 April 1996, The *New York Times* published an article titled: “US will return Base in Okinawa.”

Then, in October 2005, the US and Japan agreed on a plan to relocate
the American base of Okinawa. See *International Herald Tribune*,
October 26, 2005.

JE comments: Alain de Benoist originally sent this post to me last week, during a particularly busy time at WAIS World HQ. My apologies to Alain for the delay in posting.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: US: Military Bases Worldwide; on Nationalism (Jordi Molins Coronado, Spain)

Jordi Molins Coronado writes:

Alain de Benoist and Cameron Sawyer have recently posted essays
against nationalism. Especially, Alain de Benoist wrote, “Nationalism
….is very different from simple patriotism.” I agree with that.
But, at least in my own experience (Spain), those nations that were
brutal enough to subjugate militarily other nations call themselves
patriots, and use the term ‘nationalists’ to refer to the nations they
subjugate.

In Spain, the process went as follows: Castile imposed its military
muscle over Catalonia during the War of Spanish Succession. It abolished
Catalan institutions, and substituted them with its own. The Catalan
language and culture were forbidden. Then, a process of cultural
substitution happened over almost three centuries. The positions of
political and economic power were given by the autocratic power to
those that supported it. Those people had children, who occupied these
positions, already without having been guilty of military action.
After more than two centuries of the dictatorial transmission of power, a
democracy was established. The supporters of the dictatorship accepted
the transition towards democracy if their positions of power were
maintained. Also, it had to be explicitly stated in the new democratic
Constitution that it is not legal, and it never will, to hold a
referendum asking the people if they want to remain in Spain or not.

Now, ’small’ nationalists are asking for power devolution and more
democracy. But the ‘big’ nationalists argue that they are not
nationalists themselves, only patriots. Their argument is that law is
on their side.

Some questions:

- Isn’t originally the law flawed?

- Is being a ’small’ nationalist, asking for power devolution and more
democratic power, as bad as AdB and CS suggest? Isn’t the ‘big’
nationalism much worse?

JE comments: What Jordi Molins Coronado terms ’small’ nationalism
seems ever to be gaining more adherents throughout the world–I think,
in particular, of Europe, where there is an ever-increasing tendency
towards fragmentation (former Yugoslavia, Czechs and Slovaks, Spain’s
autonomous regions), all the while the ‘Continent’ is engaged in the
fitful attempt to consolidate its institutions (currency, laws, trade,
etc.) As far as Jordi’s first question is concerned, there is no
doubt that ’small’ nationalisms were squelched by centuries of laws
from the metropolitan centers. This is all worth talking about in
more detail.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

US: Senator Feinstein’s Gun Permit (Gene Franklin, US)

Gene Franklin writes:

Some weeks back Randy Black reported the although she was a major advocate of
stricter gun control laws, Senator Feinstein (California) carried a
concealed weapon.
I wrote to the Senator, and here is her reply:

Dear Mr. Franklin:

Thank you for writing to me about my permit to carry a concealed weapon. I
would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight.

I possessed a concealed weapon permit for a short time beginning in 1976.
In the mid-1970s, a terrorist organization, The New World Liberation Front,
carried out two attacks against me and my family. In the first, a bomb
was placed outside the window of my daughter’s bedroom. It detonated
but did not explode. We were lucky: the weather was particularly (and
unusually) cold, and the
explosive they used didn’t explode in below-freezing temperatures. In
the second, they
shot out the windows of our beach home. My husband was terminally ill
with cancer
at the time.

Later, some of the members of the New World Liberation Front were arrested,
and the threat abated. At that point, I had the gun–and several other
weapons that were turned into the police–melted into a cross, which I
presented to Pope John Paul
II when I visited Rome in 1982. Currently, I do not possess a gun, nor
do I have a permit
to carry a concealed weapon.

I hope this addresses what you may have heard on the subject. If I can be
of additional assistance, please do not hesitate to call my Washington, D.C.
staff at (202) 224-8209; 3841.

JE comments: Thank you, Gene, for contacting Senator Feinstein with
our question. Now we have an answer straight from the Horse’s Mouth,
an answer which seems to dispel some of the stories on the topic which
have appeared on the Internet.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Collective Responsibility (Robert Whealey, US)

Robert Whealey writes, in response to Richard Hancock’s post of 30
October:
I never did have a “fit of pique.” I only raised points of logic and
history. I simply say going to an “Indian Casino” is no way to pay
reparations to two, five, or 500 tribes who have left descendants. Why
should you or I pay any fine or tax for what General Custer did at the
Battle of Big Horn?
It is the concept of reparations that offends. “Vengeance is mine said the
Lord.” The French paid Reparations for the Franco-Prussian War in 1870,
which were paid off in about three years. Reasonable. In 1919 the French
being temporarily on top, demanded much more from the Weimar Republic. The
1919 Reparations never were paid off, but had there been no World War II,
they would have gone on until 1988. Totally beyond reason.�

–
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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Collective Responsibility (Mike Bonnie, US)

Miles Seeley wrote on 30 0ctober: “Of course, it would also anger me to
pay any of the reparations [for the US crime of slavery], since my
father’s family fought on the Union side in the Civil War, and my mother’s
side came from Scotland to Canada and then the US in the 1890s. What is
our guilt and liability?”

Mike Bonnie responds: I hope Miles Seeley won’t mind if I tag on his message two questions and a comment. Regardless of our culpability or lack thereof (preception is reality), what level of reparations would be tolerable? Would supporting the election of a Black president be acceptable? Provided of course, that this would restore a bit of hope for

achieving the quality of life most White people enjoy. The issue today among people I’ve listened to, who are dark-skinned (not White), is “economic slavery” and the lack of hope for advancing their
quality of life–these realities have replaced the ankle chains of
slavery.
For the record, my European great-grandfather also fought for the North in the Civil War, and my Native American ancestors were relocated to
Oklahoma. �
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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Which City is Murder Capital? (Mike Bonnie and Paul Pitlick, US)

Mike Bonnie and Paul Pitlick almost simultaneously forwarded this AP
article, which on 30 October named St. Louis the “Most Dangerous City in
the US.” Paul Pitlick stressed that the news might be of some comfort to
frustrated Detroit Tigers fans such as myself. Perhaps not–Detroit,
according to the article, is in second place:

*****************
A ranking of the most and least dangerous cities: A list of the most and
least dangerous cities overall, as compiled by Morgan Quitno Press, which
bases the rankings on FBI figures released in June.

http://www.woodtv.com/global/story.asp?s=5604989

St. Louis is most dangerous city in U.S. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061030/ap_on_re_us/city_crime_list

By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD, Associated Press Writer

ST. LOUIS - A surge in violence made St. Louis the most dangerous city in
the country, leading a trend of violent crimes rising much faster in the
Midwest than in the rest of nation, according to an annual list.
The city has long fared poorly in the rankings of the safest and most
dangerous American cities compiled by Morgan Quitno Press. Violent crime
surged nearly 20 percent in St. Louis from 2004 to last year, when the
rate of such crimes rose most dramatically in the Midwest, according to
FBI figures released in June.

“It’s just sad the way this city is,” resident Sam Dawson said. “On the
news you hear killings, someone’s been shot.”

The ranking, being released Monday, came as the city was still celebrating
Friday’s World Series victory at the new Busch Stadium. St. Louis has been
spending millions of dollars on urban renewal even as the crime rate
climbs.

Mayor Francis Slay did not return calls to his office seeking comment
Sunday.

Scott Morgan, president of Morgan Quitno Press, a private research and
publishing company specializing in state and city reference books, said he
was not surprised to see St. Louis top the list, since it has been among
the 10 most dangerous cities for years.

The study looks at crime only within St. Louis city limits, with a
population of about 330,000, Morgan said. It doesn’t take into account the
suburbs in St. Louis County, which has roughly 980,000 residents.

Visiting St. Louis on Thursday, FBI director Robert Mueller said it was
too early to tell why some types of crime were rising faster in the
Midwest.

Mueller said the FBI is working harder to form partnerships with police
departments to launch programs like St. Louis’s Safe Streets task force,
which focuses police efforts on problematic neighborhoods.

The safest city in 2005 was Brick, N.J., with a population about 78,000,
followed by Amherst, N.Y., and Mission Viejo, Calif. The second most
dangerous city was Detroit, followed by Flint, Mich., and Compton, Calif.

The bad news for St. Louis was good for Camden, N.J., which in 2005 was
named the most dangerous city for the second year in a row.

Camden Mayor Gwendolyn Faison said Sunday she was thrilled to learn that
her city no longer topped the most-dangerous list.

“You made my day!” said Faison, who has served since 2000. “There’s a new
hope and a new spirit.”

Cities are ranked based on more than just their crime rate, Morgan said.
Individual crimes such as rape or burglary are measured separately,
compared to national averages and then compiled to give a city its
ranking. Crimes are weighted based on their level of danger.

The national FBI figures released in June showed the murder rate in St.
Louis jumped 16 percent from 2004 to 2005, compared with 4.8 percent
nationally. The overall violent crime rate increased nearly 20 percent,
compared with 2.5 percent nationally.

While crime increased in all regions last year, the 5.7 percent rise in
the 12 Midwestern states was at least three times higher than any other
region, according to the FBI.

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Collective Responsibility (David Crow, US)

David Crow writes:

I agree with Mike Bonnie (October 27), in that I also would like to hear
from Black Americans [on the issue of reparations for the crime of
slavery--JE]. I don’t know that there are any African Americans in WAIS.
If not, we ought to do something about it.
Regarding reparations, I’m actually not sure how atonement for slavery translates into specific measures. The word “reparations” conjures up
one-time cash transfers, but I think that a massive investment in public
education and health would be better because 1) it would also cover poor
whites and, thus, be less divisive and enjoy broader public support; and
2) it avoids messy problems of determining who gets the payments, since
not every black in the US is necessarily a descendant of slaves.
The problem is that this doesn’t take into account the specifically racial

nature of the crime of slavery. Maybe the answer is to accompany public investment with an official apology and a series of measures to promote historical memory of slavery and recognize African-American contributions
to US culture? The same goes, of course, for other wronged ethnic groups.

As for the comparison to WWI, the US is in exactly the obverse position of Germany’s in the 1920s: rather than a powerful “oppressor” (Allies) extracting resources from a helpless “victim” (Germany), we would have a powerful benefactor (USA) redressing wrongs of empowered former victims (Black Americans). I really don’t think the German case is instructive at
all for our purposes. �

JE comments: What is the racial composition of our organization? I know
the vast majority of WAISers in the “virtual” or electronic sense only, so
I cannot answer David Crow’s very relevant question. Is this a topic we
should address in an open and frank discussion?

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Collective Responsibility (Vincent Littrell, Belgium)

Vincent Littrell responds to the recent WAIS discussion on the US paying
reparations for the crime of slavery:

I also don’t think reparations are the answer. However, throughout “white”
America there is a searing blindness to or ignoring of economic and social
divisions along ethnic/racial lines, with ethnic minorities being on the
low end of the totem pole (it appears to me that many Asian-American
communities do escape this plight to a large degree, and I am not ignoring
the plight of poor “whites” either; I state this in the context of the
issue of race relations in America). In 1996, when I was a graduate
student at Louisiana State University, I attended a large meeting on
finding solutions to racial problems at and around the LSU campus. About
200 or so people attended. Most were “black.” This meeting was highly
publicized yet only 4 “white” people and a couple of Asians showed up. Of
the 4 “white” people in attendance, 3 were from Europe. I was the only
actual “white” American citizen then there (excepting the “white” dean of
students who was a speaker), and I’m from Alaska. You want to talk about
an intense experience in terms of witnessing and being the focal point
(because of my lovely pink hew of skin…I always joke with my wife that
I’m not “white” but “pink”) for the anger and rage that surged forth from
attendees? I’ll never forget it. The lack of “white” presence was fiercely
denounced. This experience certainly awoke me to a much larger problem of
“white” ignoring of the problem…especially in the southern states where
the ratio of “white” to “black” is more balanced (than say Minnesota,
Idaho, or North Dakota).
Regarding “black” America, though the black middle-class in America is on
the rise, the effects of economic/political suffocation of black Americans
that soon followed emancipation are still very strong. The plight of many
Native Americans in the US is atrocious indeed…their ancient culture is
under siege and in many cases shattered (see the situation of many Alaskan
native villages and Indian reservation in the lower 48 states today).
Native Americans are the ignored ones of America. My mother is a
psychologist who has worked many years with Alaskan natives, the situation
of so many of those proud cultures is saddening indeed.
My own experiences with anti-”black” and anti-”white” prejudice in America
in large part stem from the fact that my wife is “black” (she dislikes
that term when applied to her and will argue the point that she is not
“black” but light brown…but as we Americans have a penchant for labeling
humans based on a loose perception of skin color, the appellation “black”
sticks to her when in the US). Our family experiences in southern states,
West Virginia, and inner city Washington DC have educated us as to the
depth of racial prejudice that still exists in many places. Though Europe
certainly has its own issues regarding ethno-centric prejudice, my wife
and I have not experienced any problems in regards reaction to
“inter-racial” marriage in our nearly 7 years in Europe that we do when we
are in the US. When we go back to the US, I wonder sometimes what sort of
climate my lovely children will face as they are “mixed.” Such climate of
course depends on where we end up I suppose.
Bottom Line: There is only one race, that is the human race. My beautiful
wife and most lovely children are proof enough for me on this. In my view,
though it might seem simplistic in some respects, “White” America as a
collective needs to internalize the fact that there is a terrible racial
divide that still exists in America and those who might be labeled in
economic terms as the “haves” have to make self-motivated sacrifices to
alleviate the imbalances (this does not necessarily need to be limited to
race either)…while those that fall in the ethnic/racial minority need to
forgive and overlook to some degree the ignorance and prejudice of
“whites” of the past. All the great faiths do teach forgiveness. I do
believe things are in many respects getting better. It is a process to be
sure.
JE comments: Thanks go to Vincent Littrell for this outstanding personal
essay.�

–
For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Collective Responsibility (Mike Bonnie, US)

Robert Whealey wrote on 25 October:
I do not ignore the fact that slavery was the social system from 1619 to
1820 in the 13 colonies and the several states…Any Reparation Bill for
the Blacks will be passed by Congress and not be likely to pass unless the
US loses a war at the hands of Chinese or Mexicans…Again even in the
unlikely event of a loss of World War III, the 12% of the population that
is Black will not get reparations from the Whites of America…I am not
guilty for any crime committed by any American who lived before my birth
date 1930.

Mike Bonnie responds:
I agree with Robert Whealey 100%. Reparations from Whites is a likely as
war with China or Mexico, based on “the fact that slavery was a social
system.” It’s important to make the distinction here that I’m not agreeing
slavery was “right.” Referring back to Mr. Whealey’s message of Oct. 24,
“Any suggestion of reparations is ridiculous. Have you forgotten the
Treaty of Versailles, 1919? Individuals, not groups, are responsible for
crimes. There can be no reparations for the Civil War.” As best I recall
from courses in corporate law, it surprises me that a corporation could
even be held responsible, seeing corporations hold many of the privilages
of “indiviuals.” That’s not to say, full disclosure of past acivities
involving slavery shouldn’t be required when considering future potential
earnings, or individuals and agents acting on behalf of a corporation
shouldn’t be held accountable.

“In common law countries, the classic statement of this principle
[corporate personhood] is found in Lennard’s Carrying Co Ltd v Asiatic
Petroleum Co Ltd [1915] AC 705, where Lord Haldane said: ‘My Lords, a
corporation is an abstraction. It has no mind of its own any more than it
has a body of its own; its active and directing will must consequently be
sought in the person of somebody who is really the directing mind and will
of the corporation, the very ego and centre of the personality of the
corporation.’”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation

What may be more likely is corporations recognizing the potential
marketing of products and services, making individual and concerted
efforts to “come clean” with history, thus being the “good neighbor.”
�

–
For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Collective Responsibility (Robert Whealey, US)

Robert Whealey writes:
I do not ignore the fact that slavery was the social system from 1619 to
1820 in the 13 colonies and the several states. Beginning in the 1820s,
several state legislatures gradually freed individual slaves. Then in 1863
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves of
the South. The legislatures and the Congress redefined crimes in terms of
slavery and property.
Corporations are also empowered to do business by state legislatures. The
Clayton Act and the SEC created special corporate crimes in which CEOs
like Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay are liable. Corporations have limited liability, but the CEOs are responsible for the crimes of embezzlement.
Any Reparation Bill for the Blacks will be passed by Congress and not be likely to pass unless the US loses a war at the hands of Chinese or Mexicans. Again even in the unlikely event of a loss of World War III,
the 12% of the population that is Black will not get reparations from the
Whites of America.
This short history of slavery and German financial history 1919-1933 underlines the original point of paying somebody reparations as ridiculous

or absurd. Damages are only paid after a court case or a peace treaty. Reparations are not another name for charity, and they are based on bad faith–revenge or guilt.
I am not guilty for any crime committed by any American who lived before
my birth date 1930.

JE comments: I am absolutely convinced that the United States will never
go to war with Mexico or China. Our culture is intimately linked with
that of Mexico, and the US is economically intertwined with both nations. Surplus Chinese capital keeps the United States government afloat: if war
with China broke out, who would loan the US the money to pay for it? Or
for that matter, who would make the toys that keep the children of America
happy?
�

–
For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Demographic Trends (Evelyn Aleman, US)

Evelyn Aleman writes:

Identity is a conundrum…
I agree with John Eipper, in that the term of the use “Anglo” in reference
to European-Americans is incorrect. If there is a need to define all
people in America, then we need to properly respect and celebrate their
roots…
I always understood the term “Hispanic” to mean people who are of Spanish
heritage. While studying in Spain, I was told by my university professors
that Hispanics were those who belonged to Hispania or Iberoamerica. Okay,
I can relate…However, the larger issue for me is the use of the term “Latino,” since many Hispanics/Latinos living in the US, particularly politicians and the media, make use of the word often. The Spanish consider many people living along the Mediterranean “Latinos,” since they
share a common language root: Latin.
My Spanish professors insisted that it was a term developed by the French
somewhere in the early 19th century as their interests in Iberoamerica/
Latin America grew. They feel that the term Hispanic is much more
accurate: of course.
Anyhow, here’s an essay that I wrote and published some years ago in the
LA Times, about this whole Latino identity issue…Please note that the
current title on the essay was written by Times editors…

VOICES / A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES
The Term ‘Latino’ Describes No One
Los Angeles Times - Los Angeles, Calif. Author: EVELYN G. ALEMAN Date: Apr 10, 1999 Start Page: 7 Section: Metro; PART- B; Opinion Desk Document Types: Commentary Text Word Count: 379
(Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 1999 all Rights reserved)
As an educated Latino woman living in the United States, I am constantly challenged by the traditional mores and values embodied by my Salvadoran family. Defining what it is to be “Latino” can be as complex as defining what it means to be an American. Can a Latino find nationalism in the
quilt of American cultural heterogeneity?
I thought about my friends and relatives who came to the US from Latin America, and how they referred to themselves in their countries of origin
as nicaraguense, peruano, salvadoreno or dominicano, but in the United States they find a fraternizing cohesive element in the term “Latino.” Perhaps this is a way of disassociating themselves from past lives or perhaps the term embodies the much-longed-for Bolivarian dream of Latin American unity. Or maybe it is, as many say, used for the benefit of the census. Whatever the term’s true meaning may be, it appears to be the word

of choice for the majority of Latins living in the United States whether first, second or third generation.
It is interesting that though many Latin American immigrants acknowledge that we’re all Americans, the term “American” is taboo. It is a term
solely reserved for Americans of European descent. Consequently, many
immigrant children and second-generation Latinos find themselves at a
crossroads as they try to assimilate into the American way of life. For
many, choosing between being an “American” and being a Mexican American or
Guatemalan American is frustrating because choosing one can be perceived
by the other culture as a denial of roots and heritage. The term “Latino”
appears to fill the void by fulfilling the desire to associate and accept
the Latin American culture while creating an identity rooted in a common
language–Spanish–within the amalgamation of diverse cultures found in
the United States.
It may be that as America increasingly evolves into a sea of cross
cultures that terms like “Latino,” “Asian American” and “African American”
may eventually be replaced by the term “American.” However, in the
meantime, it is imperative that we acknowledge and welcome the diversity
of all cultures living in American society and move away from umbrella
terms like “Latino.”
Credit: Evelyn G. Aleman is a graduate student at Pepperdine University
and works with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or

distribution is prohibited without permission. �

JE comments: It is great to hear from Evelyn Aleman after a relatively
lengthy silence. I believe that her LA Times essay, though first
published some seven years ago, remains very relevant to recent WAIS
discussions on demographics and identity. One observation: I also have
read that “Latin America” was invented by French Imperialists, as a way of
justifying French “Latin” hegemony, during the time of Napoleon III’s
Intervention in Mexico. Can any WAISer identify precisely *who* came up
with the term “Latin America”?

–
For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Collective Responsibility (Randy Black, US)

Randy Black writes:
Regarding John Hart’s October 24th posting (which I have not seen
and can only take JP’s [JE's?] word that he made such a claim) and John
Eipper’s follow up, I must add that Mr. Eipper’s postion that JPMorgan may
have had involvement is a position that I would like to see supported. In
other words, show me the facts that indicated that JPMorgan, in any way,
was complicit in the practice of slavery.
I know for a fact that the JPMorgan organization spent millions of dollars

tracking all such activities globally and the ONLY such activities was a very disjointed connection that occurred decades earlier, and which they unknowingly inherited via bankruptcy of the other parties. The only reference I can find to Morgan’s connection regarding southern railroads
is that the banker reorganized, and thus saved from extinction, many of
the bankrupted southern lines in 1893. That certainly does not make them “complicit” in slavery.
The City of Chicago accepted Morgan’s well-documented case with no objection.�

JE comments: I did not take a “position” at all in my comment to John
Hart’s post of 24 October. Since it is very brief, I will re-play
yesterday’s exchange in its entirety:
John Hart: Why bother with semi-connected operations like acquired banks?
Morgan was directly in Georgia and with the Savannah-Atlanta railroad.

JE: I believe that John Hart is suggesting that Morgan had a
portfolio of investments in the US South during the Antebellum
period–thus it would be complicit with the slave economy.

–
For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Demographic Trends (Richard Hancock, US)

Richard Hancock writes:

When I was a boy in New Mexico, the division between Anglos and Hispanics
was about 50-50. The term “Anglo” referred to any person, except Indians
and Blacks, who was not Hispanic. In our county we had people from all
over Europe who were not of English extraction, and they were all called
“Anglos.”
Now I see that some Hispanic writers refer to “Anglos” as
European-Americans, which is also inaccurate because it does not include
Hispanics from Spain.

I prefer the old forms of “Anglos” and “Hispanics.” �

JE comments: A quandary for demographic categorization is whether or not
Spaniards can be counted as “Hispanic.” Etymologically speaking,
“Hispanic” means exactly this: “Spanish.” But herein lies the rub. I
recall that some fourteen years ago, when I headed a search committee for
a faculty hire (at a US university where I no longer work), a very
qualified Spaniard was excluded from consideration because she did not fit
into the “the new initiative guidelines.” Translation: according to this
institution of higher learning, Spanish is *not* Hispanic.

–
For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

re: USA: Collective Responsibility (Istvan Simon, US)

Istvan Simon writes:

David Crow (24 October) commented on the idea of offering some redress to
the descendants of slaves for our past mistreatment of their ancestors.
The “our” in the sentence is in spirit of collective responsibility for
this blot on our History, even though clearly my family took no part in
the original crime, which happened when they were all living in Hungary.

This idea has been circulating for some time in the Black community. One
could argue that this idea would be both unfair and ineffective. It could
be argued even, that the “Affirmative Action” programs, and the consequent
set-asides were just that: a form of redress for past ill transgressions. Despite all of the above, I view with some sympathy any idea that tries to
repair the ill that was caused. �

–
For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA