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PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS ON HOW THE 'FREE TRADE' CASE FOR OFFSHORING AMERICA'S JOBS HAS COME UNGLUED Roberts on the sensational exposure of the faked "gains" and phantom stats of the free traders. Who was America's most anti-imperialist president? Try Grover Cleveland! JoAnn Wypijewski on the unlikely hero of Hawai'i's restoration movement. Alexander Cockburn reports on evangelical Christians in crisis amid fresh onslaughts by forces of darkness. The Warbler's Parable: Rosa Miriam Elizalde on the black-masked visitors to Cuba defying the US economic blockade.
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Today's Stories June 23 / 24, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Robert
Fisk Alison
Weir Robert
Fantina June 22, 2007 Andy
Worthington Sherwood
Ross Eliana
Monteforte Robert
Weissman Richard
Rhames Christopher
Brauchli Ramzy
Baroud Ehud
Krinis, David Shulman and Neve Gordon David
Michael Green Kathryn
Webber Website
of the Day
June 21, 2007 Peter
Linebaugh Natsu
Saito Ron
Jacobs Saree
Makdisi John
Stauber Scott
Liebertz Tom
Clifford Robert
Jensen Michael
J. Smith Jeb
Sprague Website
of the Day
Omar
Barghouti Andy
Worthington Margaret
Kimberley Robert
Weissman Russell
D. Hoffman Rannie
Amiri Stephen
Lendman Dave
Lindorff David
Swanson Anne
Dachel Website
of the Day
June 19, 2007 Ralph
Nader Dr.
Shepherd Bliss Bill
and Kathleen Christison Jeff
Leys Dave
Zirin Chris
Floyd Ben
Terrall Anthony
Papa VIPS Linda Flores Website
of the Day
John
Ross Paul
Craig Roberts Martha
Rosenberg Norman
Solomon Don
Santina Isabella
Kenfield James
Brooks Eva
Liddell Sam
Husseini Akiva
Eldar Website
of the Day
Alexander
Cockburn John
Halle Robert
Fisk Andy
Worthington Uri
Avnery Fred
Gardner Saul
Landau P.
Sainath Missy
Comley Beattie Alan
Gregory Walter
Brasch Website
of the Weekend
June 15, 2007 Alan
Farago Andy
Worthington Michael
Simmons Franklin
Lamb Gary
Leupp John
Ross Website
of the Day
June 14, 2007 Michael
Donnelly
Faisal
Kutty Harry
Browne Charles
Jonkel Steven
Higgs Bruce
Dixon Bruce
K. Gagnon
Website
of the Day June 13, 2007 Glen Ford Marjorie Cohn Bill Christison Charles Jonkel Silvia Cattori Richard Gott Firmin DeBrabander William S. Lind Keith Rosenthal Website of the Day June 12, 2007 Jeffrey St.
Clair Paul Craig
Roberts P. Sainath Ralph Nader Omar Waraich Dave Lindorff Harvey Wasserman Malini Johar
Schueller Ramzy Baroud Website of
the Day
June 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Paul Craig
Roberts Uri Avnery Norman Solomon Eva Liddell Rannie Amiri Rachel Voss Christopher
Brauchli D. K. Wilson Website of
the Day
Alexander Cockburn George Ciccariello-Maher Saul Landau Robert Fisk Brian Cloughley Ron Jacobs Ward Boston Conn Hallinan Leonard Peltier Lawrence Davidson John Ross Kate Allan Fred Gardner Stephen Fleischman Monica Benderman Geoff Bailey Missy Beattie Patrick Dyer Tim Lengerich James Irani
Gary Leupp Michael Tillery Michael Simmons Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
June 8, 2007 Serge Halimi Patrick Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair
Paul Craig Roberts William Blum Joshua Frank Lance Selfa Dave Lindorff Lawrence Ferlinghetti Website of the Day
Marjorie Cohn Soldz, Reisner
and Olson: Soldz, Reisner
Paul Craig Roberts Bill Quigley Silvia Cattori Carl G. Estabrook Ellen Taylor Corporate Crime
Reporter Brenda Norrell D. K. Wilson Kevin Zeese Website of
the Day
Alain Gresh Gary Leupp Steven Sherman Bruce Dixon Corporate Crime Reporter Brian M. Downing Ron Jacobs George Bisharat Nicole Colson Bruce K. Gagnon Website of the Day
June 5, 2007 Michael Neumann Jonathan Cook David Vest Robert Fantina Hoffman, Parsneau and Chowdhury John V. Walsh Richard Cretan Adam Engel William S. Lind Myles Hoenig Jim Minick Website of
the Day
Nizar Latif Diana Johnstone Gregory Wilpert Paul Watson Susan Rosenthal,
MD Richard Ward Eva Liddell Zahi Khouri Evelyn Pringle China Hand Karyn Strickler Website of the Day
June 2 / 3, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Marc Levy Martin Smith Diana Johnstone John Ross Uri Avnery Sunsara Taylor Richard Neville P. Sainath Missy Comley
Beattie Nisrine Abiad Rannie Amiri Margot Pepper Eric Stewart Ralph Nader Dan Bacher Shaun Harkin Richard Rhames Frederick Hudson Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
Dave Marsh Saul Landau David Phinney Robert Jensen Stanley Heller Yifat Susskind Robert Weissman Paul Buchheit William S.
Lind Sherwood Ross Stephen Lendman Website of the Day
Robert Bryce Patrick Cockburn Gary Leupp Kathy Kelly Marjorie Cohn Chris Kutalik
Corporate Crime Reporter Dave Lindorff Website of the Day
May 30, 2007 James Ridgeway Franklin Lamb Terrence E. Paupp Uri Avnery Alan Maass Rock and Rap
Confidential Ralph Nader Nirmal Ghosh Jean Daniels Tom Barry Website of the Day
Stephen Soldz Eliza Ernshire Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Evelyn Pringle Mike Whitney David Swanson John Holt Cynthia McKinney Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day
Bill Quigley Col. Dan Smith Cindy Sheehan Dr. Susan Block Jeeni Criscenzo Douglas Valentine Website of the Day 
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Weekend
Edition CounterPunch DiaryZyklon B on the US BorderBy ALEXANDER COCKBURN Zyklon B came to El Paso in the 1920s. In 1929, for example, a U.S. Public Health Service officer, J.R. Hurley, ordered $25 worth of the material--hydrocyanic acid in pellet form--as a fumigating agent for use at the El Paso delousing station, where Mexicans crossed the border from Juárez. Zyklon, developed by DEGESCH (the German Vermin-combating Corporation) was made in varying strengths, with Zyklon C, D and E representing gradations in potency and price. As Raul Hilberg describes it in The Destruction of the European Jews, " strength E was required for the eradication of specially resistant vermin, such as cockroaches, or for gassings in wooden barracks. The 'normal' preparation, D, was used to exterminate lice, mice, or rats in large, well-built structures containing furniture. Human organisms in gas chambers were killed with Zyklon B." In 1929, DEGESCH divided the world market with an American corporation, Cyanamid, so Hurley presumably got his Zyklon B from the latter. As David Dorado Romo describes it in his marvelous Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An underground history of El Paso and Juárez : 1893-1923 (available from Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso), Zyklon B had become available in the U.S.A. in the early 1920s when fears of alien infection had been inflamed by the alarums of the eugenicists, most of them from the "progressive" end of the political spectrum. In 1917, the U.S. Congress passed and Wilson--an ardent eugenicist--signed the Immigration Law. The United States Public Health Service simultaneously published its Manual for the Physical Inspection of Aliens. The Manual had its list of excludables from the U.S. of A., , a ripe representation of the obsessions of the eugenicists: "imbeciles, idiots, feeble-minded person, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority (homosexuals), vagrants, physical defectives, chronic alcoholics, polygamists, anarchists, persons afflicted with loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases, prostitutes, contracts laborers, all aliens over 16 who cannot read." In that same year U.S. Public Health Service Agents "bathed and deloused" 127,123 Mexicans at the Santa Fe International Bridge between Juárez and El Paso. The mayor of El Paso at the time, Tom Lea Sr., represented, in Romo's words, "the new type of Anglo politician in the 'Progressive Era'. Progressive didn't necessarily mean liberal back then. In Lea's case, 'progress' meant he would clean up the city." As part of his cleansing operations, Lea made his city the first in the U.S. to ban hemp, aka marijuana, as an alien Mexican substance. He had a visceral fear of contamination and, so his son later disclosed, wore silk underwear because his friend, Dr. Kluttz, had told him typhus lice didn't stick to silk. His loins thus protected, Lea battered the U.S. government with demands for a full quarantine camp on the border where all immigrants could be held for up to 14 days. Local health officer B.J. Lloyd thought this outlandish, telling the U.S. surgeon general that typhus fever "is not now, and probably never will be, a serious menace to our civilian population." Lloyd was right about this. Lea forced health inspectors to descend on Chihuahuita, the Mexican quarter of El Paso, forcing inhabitants suspected of harboring lice to take kerosene and vinegar baths, have their heads shaved and clothes incinerated. Inspection of 5,000 rooms did not stigmatize Chihuahuita as a plague zone. The inspectors found two cases of typhus, one of rheumatism, one of TB, and one of chicken pox. Ironically, Kluttz, presumably wearing silk underwear, contracted typhus while supervising these operations and died. But Lloyd did recommend delousing plants, saying he was willing to "bathe and disinfect all the dirty, lousy people coming into this country from Mexico." The plant was ready for business right when the Immigration Act became law. Soon Mexicans were having their bodies checked, daubed with kerosene where deemed necessary and their clothes fumigated with gasoline, kerosene, sodium cyanide, cyanogens, sulfuric acid and Zyklon B. The El Paso wrote respectfully in 1920, " hydrocyanic acid gas, the most poisonous known, more deadly even than that used on the battlefields of Europe, is employed in the fumigation process." The delousing operations provoked fury and resistance among Mexicans still boiling with indignation after a lethal 1916 gasoline blaze in the El Paso City jail. As part of Mayor Lea's citywide disinfection campaign, prisoners in the jail were ordered to strip naked. Their clothes were dumped in one bath filled with a mixture of gasoline, creosote and formaldehyde. Then they were forced to step into a second bath filled with "a bucket of gasoline, a bucket of coal oil and a bucket of vinegar." At around 3:30 p.m., March 5, 1916, someone struck a match. The jail went up like a torch. The El Paso Herald reported that about 50 "naked prisoners from whose bodies the fumes of gasoline were arising", many of them locked in their cells, caught fire. 27 prisoners died. In late January 1917, 200 Mexican women rebelled at the border and prompted a major riot, putting to flight both police and troops on both sides of the border. The use of Zyklon B became habitual. Health officers would spray the immigrants' clothes. Now, Zyklon B, in gaseous form, is fatal when absorbed through the skin in concentrations of over 50 parts ppm. How many Mexicans suffered agonies or died, when they put on those garments? As Romo recently told the El Paso-based journalist Paul Spike, writing for the online UK daily The First Post: "This is a huge black hole in history. Unfortunately, I only have oral histories and other anecdotal evidence about the harmful effects of the noxious chemicals used to disinfect and delouse the Mexican border crossers--including deaths, birth defects, cancer, etc. It may well go into the tens of thousands. It's incredible that absolutely no one, after all these years, has ever attempted to document this." The use of Zyklon B on the U.S.-Mexican border was a matter of keen interest to the firm of DEGESCH. In 1938, Dr. Gerhard Peters called for its use in German Desinfektionskammern. Romo has tracked down an article Peters wrote in a German pest science journal, Anzeiger für Schädlingskunde, which featured two photographs of El Paso delousing chambers. Peters went on to become the managing director of DEGESCH, which handled the supply of Zyklon B for the Nazi death camps. He was tried and convicted at Nuremberg. Hilberg reports that he got five years, then won a retrial that netted him six years. He was re-tried in 1955 and found not guilty. In the U.S.A., the eugenicists rolled on to their great triumph, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which doomed millions in Europe to their final rendezvous with Zyklon B twenty years later. By the 1930s, the eugenicists were mostly discredited, though many--particularly in the environmental movement--remain true to those racists obsessions to this day. The Restriction Act, that monument to bad science married to unscrupulous politicians and zealous public policy for the sake of unborn generations, stayed on the books unchanged for 40 years. In 1918, disease did indeed strike across the border, as Romo points out. Romo quotes a letter from Dr. John Tappan, who had disinfected thousands Mexicans at the border. "10,000 cases in El Paso and the Mexicans died like sheep. Whole families were exterminated. This was "Spanish" flu, which originated in Haskell county, Kansas.
Bloomberg-Schwarzenegger Two facts give political traction to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's announcement that he's quitting the Republican Party and registering as an Independent and won't convinicingly deny that he's planning a presidential bid in 2008. One, he's a billionaire. Two, in 1992 another billionaire, Ross Perot, ran for the presidency as an independent and it cost George Bush Sr. a second term in the White House. Here in America, running as a Third Party presidential candidate is like exercising the right to go on strike. It's legal to try but the law simultaneously makes it almost impossible to win. In 2004, Ralph Nader ran for the second time as a Third Party challenger against George Bush Jr and John Kerry. The Democrats, probably wrongly, blamed him for Al Gore's loss to Bush in 2000, when Nader got 2.7 per cent of the vote. By September of 2004 Nader was fighting enormously expensive courtroom battles for access to the ballot in over a dozen states. Skilled Democratic lawyers tied him up in litigation and wore him down. He got 0.4 per cent of the vote. Though he was far more obviously a deadly threat to Bush than Nader was to Gore or Kerry, Republicans at the time and in the years thereafter have never never evinced the obsessive loathing for Perot as Democrats had and still have for Nader. The Democrats have always thought, quite simply, that Nader had no right to be a third party challenger, endangering their man. To their credit, Republicans are more relaxed about Third Party challenges. Perot got nearly 20 million votes in 1992, 19 per cent of the turnout. Clinton got 43 per cent, Bush 37 per cent. Though Democrats claim Clinton would have won the electoral college even if Perot hadn't run, the math isn't persuasive in their cause. Perot did well because many Republican and independent voters were mad at Bush for raising taxes despite a pledge to the contrary. Bush had also offended the influential Jewish constituency by openly attacking the Israel lobby--something his son has never forgotten. Both Bush and Clinton were pushing for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Perot had the vigorous opposition to NAFTA all to himself. He was also very good at presenting himself as the Mr Fix-It who would rise above partisan politics and get things done. Bloomberg has got that last
role nailed down, as has the California governor he was visiting
with, just before his announcement, Arnold Schwarzenegger. That
would be a fun fusion ticket, a Jew and a Nazi, reprising the
old Jabotinsky-Hitler alliance of the war years. Of course under
present constitutional law, Arnold cannot be president. But he
could run for the veep position, and then President Bloomberg
could force through a constitutional amendment so Arnold could
succeed him (though Bloomberg might worry about premature Termination.)
Neither Schwarzenegger nor Bloomberg give a toss for party labels
or loyalties. After humiliation in the referendum, Schwarzenegger,
being an actor, shifted effortlessly from his disastrous initial
role as a Reaganite trying to rewrite California's constitution,
into a born-again New Dealer espousing big government, vast public
expenditures and, of course a crusade against global warming.
In the wake of his announcement on Tuesday, the pundits have been drawing intricate scenarios about the likelihood that a Bloomberg presential run would be bad for the Democrats. This is nonsense. After eight years of Bush all Democrats are going to unite around their candidate who, on current early showing, will be Hillary Clinton. There's no sign of a third party challenge from the left, unless--CounterPunch's devout hope -- the anti-war militant Cindy Sheehan, who recently announced her disgust with the Democrats, decides to run with Nader in just two vital swing states, Ohio and Florida. Many Republicans--particularly those of libertarian bent, who defected to the Democrats in the midterm elections last year -- loathe Bush Jr the way they did his father, albeit for different reasons, most particularly the war in Iraq. At present the maverick libertarian Republican Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate denouncing the war. He's won plenty of support but he hasn't the money to last into next year. By running as an antiwar Independent, Bloomberg could doom any Republican nominee, whether it be Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney or John McCain. Bloomberg would also be able to scoop up the large, mostly tacit chunk of voters chafing at the Israel lobby. In the mid-90s this Jewish American told Jerusalem Report, an Israeli magazine, that he had "no particular desire to visit Israel," that "'I'm not terribly religious .... I don't spend time davening [i.e., praying]. If I don't call God, he won't call me" and 'I won't give too much money to the United Jewish Appeal,because of the hold the religious have on Israel. I have one wish: Shoot all the clerics."
Eugenics and Global Warming Just as I was absorbed in Romo's history, discussed above, and re-reading in consequence one of my favorite books, Allan Chase's The Legacy of Malthus, about the eugenics movement in the United States and its appalling consequences, I was directed by a helpful CounterPuncher to a very interesting essay by Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at M.I.T., and one of the most prominent skeptics about the anthropogenic origins of global warming and about the actual dimensions of the "crisis". In 1995 he published an essay, "Science and Politics: Global Warming and Eugenics". I offer some excerpts here, with a reference to the full essay at the end of this column:
Lindzen's stimulating essay can be read in full here. R.S. Lindzen: Science and politics: global warming and eugenics. in Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved, R. Hahn, editor, Oxford University Press, New York, 267pp (Chapter 5, 85-103). [pdf] Talking of cashing in on the environment, I asked Amazon for an exciting looking book called Lost Gold of Rome by Daniel Costa, and the best Amazon could come up with was Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage by Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston (Hardcover - Oct 9, 2006.). Costa had emailed CounterPunch this alluring synopsis of his work, which is actually available from Amazon UK. "The little known saga of the barbarian king Alaric and his secret tomb filled with the gold of pagan and Catholic Rome serves as a vehicle to the epic story of the survival of late ancient-early medieval Rome. The book presents Rome in an original way: it weaves the description of many sites into the captivating account of those mysterious and fateful centuries. It also chronicles the rise of Islam and its violent collision with the European society of the early Dark Ages, a story reminiscent of today's confrontation between the jihadist warriors/terrorists and Western world. The disastrous effects of Christian disunity during the Dark Ages are illustrated convincingly and disquietingly." I shall report further to CounterPunchers when Dr Costa's book arrives from Browse for Books, in the Isle of Man. Footnote: a shorter version
of the first item appeared in the print edition of The Nation
that went to press last Wednesday.
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CounterPunch Books of the Crossroads: HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy  Click Here to Buy! How the Press Failed The Gang's All Here: Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly...End Times Leaves No Reputation Unstained!  Buy End Times Now! CounterPunch Books! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal  Click Here to Order!  Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair           The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn   Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont               CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed        Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh                   |
