Yes, but of old people. Not so long ago, we were warned that rising global population would inevitably bring world famine. As Paul Ehrlich wrote apocalyptically in his 1968 worldwide bestseller, The Population Bomb, “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Obviously, Ehrlich's predicted holocaust, which assumed that the 1960s global baby boom would continue until the world faced mass famine, didn't happen. Instead, the global growth rate dropped from 2 percent in the mid-1960s to roughly half that today, with many countries no longer producing enough babies to avoid falling populations. Having too many people on the planet is no longer demographers' chief worry; now, having too few is.
China-Pakistan: Chinese Major General Yang Hui, director general of the Intelligence Directorate, visited Chief of Army Staff General Kayani at General Headquarters on 28 October, Associated Press of Pakistan reported. The two discussed matters of professional interest, according to Pakistan's Inter Services Public Relations.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: A visit by a Chinese intelligence general to Pakistan usually signifies a problem. The usual problem is that Pakistan is harboring, aiding, training and abetting anti-Han Chinese Islamic terrorists in the 42 terrorist camps that Pakistani intelligence sustains in Pakistani Kashmir.
Chinese intelligence officials seldom visit unless there is a problem. The Chinese do not seem concerned that Pakistani-trained terrorists kill Indians or Americans, but they do object to Pakistan providing or tolerating training of Xinjiang Uighurs who want to kill Han Chinese.
Phi Beta Iota: This is interesting at multiple levels–it suggests among other things that the US and China could be constructively discussing an international solution to Kashmir and to regional water issues (what really underlies Kashmir). That in turn could be tied to an international solution and regional water issue around Palestine.
Now that a few Democrats and the remnants of the AFL-CIO are waking up to the destructive impact of jobs offshoring on the US economy and millions of American lives, globalism’s advocates have resurrected Dartmouth economist Matthew Slaughter’s discredited finding of several years ago that jobs offshoring by US corporations increases employment and wages in the US.
At the time I exposed Slaughter’s mistakes, but economists dependent on corporate largess understood that it was more profitable to drink Slaughter’s kool-aid than to tell the truth. Recently the US Chamber of Commerce rolled out Slaughter’s false argument as a weapon against House Democrats Sandy Levin and Tim Ryan, and the Wall Street Journal had Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary, William S. Cohen, regurgitate Slaughter’s claim on its op-ed page on October 12.
I sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal, but the editors were not interested in what a former associate editor and columnist for the paper and President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy had to say. The facade of lies has to be maintained at all costs. There can be no questioning that globalism is good for us.
Cohen told the Journal’s readers that “the fact is that for every job outsourced to Bangalore, nearly two jobs are created in Buffalo and other American cities.” I bet Buffalo “and other American cities” would like to know where these jobs are. Maybe Slaughter, Cohen, and the Chamber of Commerce can tell them.
Last May I was in St. Louis and was struck by block after block of deserted and boarded up homes, deserted factories and office buildings, even vacant downtown storefronts.
Phi Beta Iota: We cannot say enough good things about these folks. This is righteous good stuff–eight times cheaper than industrial offerings, virtually no “true cost” externalities, interchangeable parts, human scale, the whole enchilada.
Somalia anti-piracy patrol: Update. The Danish navy says it sank a Somali pirate boat in the Gulf of Aden. Spokesman Kenneth Nielsen said Wednesday that the command and control ship HDMS Esbern Snare intercepted a suspicious boat Tuesday, confiscated weapons and fuel, and detained six pirates. The Danes then used explosives to mine and sink the boat. The suspected pirates were later released since officials said no crime had been committed.
Earlier Wednesday, the European Union's anti-piracy force said pirates attacked but failed to hijack a French-flagged ship off the coast of Tanzania. The Danish navy ship is part of NATO's anti-piracy operation in the region.
European Union's anti-piracy force says the pirates are holding 19 ships and more than 420 hostages.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: After several years of trying, the some 40 ships on anti-piracy patrols have made scant progress against the pirates but have maintained skills.
Venezuela- US: For the record. The Caracas government seized two factories owned by U.S.-based glass maker Owens Illinois, because it caused “environmental damage and exploited workers,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on 25 October. Today Venezuelan soldiers took possession of the factories.
Venezuela-Middle East: President Chavez said his government and Libya are creating a $1 billion joint investment fund to pay for projects the two countries will pursue together, according to a report by The Associated Press. Chavez also announced a $100 million joint fund with Syria, which will be used on projects such as aid in the construction of an oil refinery and to establish an olive oil processing plant.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: Chavez invariably goes out of his way to make questionable deals with countries that tend to have strained relations with the US. None of his new allies are in a position to help Venezuela in the event of trouble, which calls into question the wisdom of the investments, the utility of the associations and the soundness of Chavez' judgment.
Phi Beta Iota: We beg to differ with our esteemed colleague. The US is so over-extended in its elective wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as to call into question its ability to be effective anywhere else, including against Somali pirates. Furthermore, the passing of time and the accumulation of public knowledge has a “truth” effect that may not lead to reconciliation but will lead to more and more expropriation of ill-gotten gains by predatory capitalists who in the past were able to call in the US Marines to enforce unethical, illegal, and unjust seizures of property. Just as Australia is now getting serious about Native Title, so also is the rest of the Southern Hemisphere going to get serious about expropriating back into indigenous possession those lands acquired through illicit or unethical means.
The next President, and the next Director of National Intelligence (DNI), are going to have to lead a 180 degree change in how the US “does” intelligence. Instead of producing 4% “at best,” the DNI is going to have to lead the integration of education, intelligence, and research so as to meet 96% “at worst” of the needs of the Nation in both restoring domestic prosperity and in achieving truth & reconciliation abroad. Absent such a redirection, the US will not survive in its present form to 2025…in our always humble opinion. This will require leaders with integrity who place the public interest foremost.
Poor Goebbels, if only he had access to DVDs and the internet, he could have run a fear mongering operation as effective as the one described so brilliantly by Pam Martens here (also attached below) — a thought which suggests a question: Is 21st Century American Crony Capitalism merely a way station on the road to real fascism (as distinguished from the oxymoronic soundbyte of Islamofascism)? After all, in addition to fear mongering, Mussolini and Hitler enlisted the corporate class to weaken the working class to gain and retain power. To wit, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Mussolini, banned all Marxist organizations and replaced their trade unions with government-controlled corporatist unions. Until he instituted a war economy in the mid-1930s, Mussolini allowed industrialists to run their companies with a minimum of government interference. Despite his former anticapitalist rhetoric, he cut taxes on business, permitted cartel growth, decreed wage reduction, and rescinded the eight-hour-workday law. Between 1928 and 1932 real wages in Italy dropped by almost half. Mussolini admitted that the standard of living had fallen but stated that “fortunately the Italian people were not accustomed to eating much and therefore feel the privation less acutely than others.”
Although Hitler claimed that the Nazi Party was more “socialist” than its conservative rivals, he opposed any Marxist-inspired nationalization of major industries. On May 2, 1933, he abolished all free trade unions in Germany, and his minister of labour, Robert Ley, later declared that it was necessary “to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of the factory, that is, the employer.” Nazi “anticapitalism,” such as it was, was aimed primarily at Jewish capitalism; non-Jewish capitalists were allowed to keep their companies and their wealth, a distinction that was made in the Nazi Party's original program and never changed. Although Hitler reduced unemployment in Germany, most German workers were forced to toil for lower wages and longer hours and under worse conditions than had been the case during the Weimar Republic. His solution to the unemployment problem also depended on the recruitment of thousands of men into the military.
But of course any analogy to the United States is absurd. After all, since 1980, deregulation, union busting, a lower standard of living, lower wages, longer working hours, and using of the military and its industrial complex as a jobs program have not been accompanied by a rise in the politics of fear in the United States. … Oops.
There is one difference however, given Congress's and the Supreme Court's supine complicity in promoting these trends (by representing the interests of the Crony Capitalists at the expense of the masses), the President will not need a Reichstag Fire to keep the program moving.
The Far Right's Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive
By PAM MARTENS
Counterpunch
A secretive libertarian nonprofit with ties to Charles Koch bankrolled what was widely perceived to be a fear mongering effort to throw the Presidential election to Senator John McCain in 2008. Until now, where the money came from has been a hotly debated mystery.
Seven weeks before the Presidential election of 2008, approximately 100 newspapers and magazines in the U.S., including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and St. Petersburg Times, distributed millions of DVDs of the documentary, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” The DVDs were included in the Sunday editions. Altogether, including a separate direct mail campaign, 28 million DVDs flooded households in the swing voter states.
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CounterPunch can now report what this race-baiting, fear-mongering campaign cost and where the money, at least nominally, came from…..
