In Washington, there are two sure ways to get rich: you can work as a corporate lobbyist or you can work with a Peter Peterson-funded organization and whine about government debt. The Peterson Foundation, along with its allies at the Washington Post and other media outlets, have long worked to fan irrational fears about government debt just as Donald Trump and other demagogues have fanned racism and xenophobia. One small positive of a Donald Trump presidency is that it may provide a teachable moment on the meaninglessness of such fears.

The NYT gives us an excellent lead in with this piece on the need to repair locks and dams on inland waterways. The piece tells us of Trump's plan to spend $1 trillion improving the country's infrastructure, then adds:

"To avoid raising taxes or increasing debt, his plan calls for much of the money to come from the private sector, with a proposed tax credit offered in return. ...

"Even with a tax credit, though, companies building roads or locks would want a return on their investment — most likely in the form of toll collection, said Mike Toohey, president of the Waterways Council, an advocacy group for the river shipping industry."

So let's look at how we are avoiding raising the debt in this story. First, the infrastructure is supported through a tax credit rather than direct spending. If we spent $1 trillion directly then this would add $1 trillion to the debt. We will then have to pay the interest on this debt as long as it is outstanding. (Currently, the real interest rate on government debt is nearly zero, since the inflation rate is almost as high as the long-term interest rate.)

Read More ...

Author (Photo: From a painting by C.R. Grant - Engraving from The Providence Plantations for 250 Years, Welcome Arnold Greene, 1886. Return of Roger Williams from England with the First Charter, 1644. From a painting by C.R. Grant. Engraving from The Providence Plantations for 250 Years, Welcome Arnold Greene, 1886.) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry. "John Barry's Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul establishes Williams as a brave thinker and also a deft political actor . . . Mr. Barry puts Williams squarely among our great political thinkers, crediting him with bringing liberal democracy to the American colonies." — The Wall Street Journal "Barry now turns his meticulous hand to the origins of two fundamental and perpetual American fixations: the conflict between church and state and that between the power of the state and the conscience of the citizen. . . . Present-day implications of an elemental clash of ideas may hover over every page, yet the vital drama of Barry’s story emblazons two competing visions of American destiny: John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” vs. Williams’s community of conscience. As Barry shows well and often prophetically, the national soul formed out of that drama remains a troubled, and occasionally tortured, one." — The Washington Post "To call it a biography sells it short. What it is, really, is the history of an idea—about the critical importance of separating church from state. So revolutionary was this idea that it caused Williams to be banished from Massachusetts. . . . Williams created the first place in the Western world where people could believe in any God they wished—or no God at all—without fear of retribution." — Joe Nocera, The New York Times "In Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, New York Times bestselling author John M. Barry tells the story with passion and an eye for fine detail. . . . If the story were not compelling enough, Barry's dramatic first chapter of conflict, confrontation and banishment into the wilderness is worth the price of admission alone. . . . As Barry notes, the dispute 'opened a fissure in America, a fault line which would rive America all the way to the present.' John Barry deserves our thanks for illuminating this critical and timely chapter of American history." — The Seattle Times "There's a recurring theme among the religiously political/politically religious that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that in this modern era we have somehow strayed from God and from our roots. John M. Barry's new book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty is a counterargument and it is a significant reminder of whence, exactly, this little experiment in democracy of ours came . . . Absorbing." — Los Angeles Times "This biography should be read with today's headlines in mind . . . Thoroughly researched and accessibly written . . . This is an important book because it brings back an important founding point in the development of the American character. But it also is a timely reminder that the issues that drove Williams into exile in Rhode Island are very much alive and just as perilous today." — The Washington Times "Fascinating... a swath of history Barry brings to urgent life with the same focused intelligence which distinguished The Great Influenza." — Booklist https://www.amazon.com/Roger-Williams-Creation-American-Soul/dp/0143122886/ref=la_B000APJ76S_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480212270&sr=1-3

Author (Photo:Battle of St Quentin Canal (Saint-Quentin). Men of the 5th Australian ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War I by Nick Lloyd. PART 1 of 2. “A sobering but essential read on the last days of a horrific conflict.... The American role in the final victory has been downplayed by Eurocentric historians.... Now we have an esteemed British historian...giving America’s soon-famed “doughboys” their just due.” —The Washington Times “A brilliantly enlightening approach to war and men’s lives.... Lloyd has provided an accessible overview of how strategic and tactical shifts—like the surge in Iraq and the associated urban outposts—can help alter the course of a war and indeed end it. But much more importantly...he explores how those strategic and tactical shifts affected the lives of soldiers. As history progresses, it is their lives and experiences that are often most at risk of fading. There are no living veterans of the Great War, making it all the more essential that not only the tactics, tools, and economy of war, but also the soldiers themselves, remain the important pieces of history. At its best, Hundred Days does just this.” —Daily Beast “Lloyd’s narrative is first-rate.... With clarity and genuine sympathy for the combatants, Lloyd tells the story of the summer fighting that led to the long and increasingly rapid retreat of the German armies in the fall.... Ten million soldiers died fighting in World War I, and perhaps as many as 20 million more were wounded. Their stories deserve to be told. Professor Lloyd has done so very well indeed.” —Army Magazine https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Days-Campaign-Ended-World/dp/0465074928/ref=la_B0034NRE4K_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480224061&sr=1-1

Author (Photo:... Japanese aircraft prepare to take off from an aircraft carrier, reportedly the Shokaku, for a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7. ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow By Eri Hotta - Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta. PART 2 of 2. “Hotta illuminates the extraordinary ideological and military predicament in which Japan found itself in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor…[She] brings to life the key figures of a deeply divided Japanese leadership…[and] scrupulously details [their] negotiations and squabbles…against a backdrop of dauntingly complex domestic and international maneuverings.” —The New Yorker “Outstanding...In lucid prose, Hotta...persuasively sketches the very distinct personalities shaping the decisions that drove Japan toward war….She makes it clear that there are two versions of the Asia-Pacific War in China and Japan that hardly meet at all…[and] concludes that after 1945, Japan’s actual ‘past, with its improbable story of how the war came to pass, became another country.’ It is a country that policymakers in Tokyo, Beijing, and Washington should seek to understand, not least through this humane and fair-minded book.” —Rana Mitter, The New York Review of Books https://www.amazon.com/Japan-1941-Countdown-Eri-Hotta/dp/0307739740/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480096430&sr=1-1

Christopher Faricy makes a return visit to New Books Network for Part II of a conversation about Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the ways in which the…

Across the continent, rightwing populist parties have seized control of the political conversation. How have they done it? By stealing the language, causes and voters of the traditional left

Author (Photo: Hideki Tojo and the War Cabinet, Tokyo 1941) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow By Eri Hotta - Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta. PART 1 of 2. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A groundbreaking history that considers the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective and is certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific. When Japan attacked the United States in 1941, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. In a groundbreaking history that considers Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective, certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific, Eri Hotta poses essential questions overlooked for the last seventy years: Why did these men—military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor—put their country and its citizens in harm's way? Why did they make a decision that was doomed from the start? Introducing us to the doubters, bluffers, and schemers who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta brilliantly shows us a hidden Japan—eager to avoid war but fraught with tensions with the West, deluded by reckless militarism, tempted by the gambler’s dream of scoring the biggest win against impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally proved inevitable. https://www.amazon.com/Japan-1941-Countdown-Eri-Hotta/dp/0307739740/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480096430&sr=1-1

Rocked by the phone-hacking scandal and haemorrhaging readers, the rightwing tabloids seemed to be yesterday’s news. But now, in Theresa May’s Brexit Britain, they look more powerful than ever

Author (Photo: ... Effect of the Drought on Uvas Reservoir | by donjd2) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow The California Drought & the "Culture of Badgering." Matt Richtel, @NYTimes. @mrichtel "“ ‘You’ve been in the shower too long,’ ” he recalled her saying. “How do you know that?” he pleaded. She had proof — his back was red. “It was the gotcha moment,” said Mr. Allen, who occasionally jokes with his younger wife that she has “junior water rights” and therefore can’t shower until the following day. The culture of badgering has intensified since January 2014, when the drought led Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency and ask Californians to voluntarily cut water use by 20 percent. But as conditions worsened, the state stopped asking so politely. In June and July, for instance, state water agencies issued more than 70,000 warnings for overuse and more than 20,000 penalties. (The fines varied widely, but were generally several hundred dollars or less, state officials said.) Yes, they do. And so does the whole neighborhood.Nice to meet you. Christopher October 15, 2015 Every drop that we save this year will be sold to agricultural interests next year. These farmer-oligarchs are not small family operations.... David Illig October 15, 2015 My wife and I live in a region in Maryland that has no water shortages that I know of. But our home is supplied by a well. It only makes... Many of the warnings were issued because “someone’s neighbor ratted on them,” said Max Gomberg, climate and conservation manager for the State Water Resources Control Board. The actual penalties, he said, were assessed to “a tiny percentage of people who just don’t care.”... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/science/a-culture-of-nagging-helps-california-save-water.html

The NYT ran a major article warning that a Chinese led trade deal, involving a number of countries in East Asia and the Pacific region, was likely to move forward more quickly with the demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This is reported as being an ominous outcome that should concern readers.

This is the opposite position that economists generally take toward efforts to reduce trade barriers. In most economic models, when some countries reduce their trade barriers and therefore increase economic growth, it also benefits countries who are not party to these trade deals.

This was the reason that the United States generally supported the process through which European countries came together, first in the common market and then in the European Union. The argument was that a more economically prosperous Europe would be a better customer for U.S. products and also a better competitor. In the latter role, Europe would provide economic gains to U.S. consumers as well by offering better and/or lower cost products.

It is interesting that the NYT and other proponents of the TPP are now prepared to turn standard economic logic on its head in order to push this pact. For those without a stake in promoting the TPP, the greater economic integration of the region should be viewed positively.  

The Washington Post editorial page (11/14/16) decided to lecture readers on the meaning of progressivism. OK, that is nowhere near as bad as a Trump presidency, but really, did we need this?

The editorial gives us a potpourri of neo-liberal (yes, the term is appropriate here) platitudes, all of which we have heard many times before and are best half-true. For framing, the villains are senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who, it tells us, “are embracing principles that are not genuinely progressive.”

I’ll start with my favorite, the complaint that the trade policy advocated by Warren and Sanders would hurt the poor in the developing world. Or, to use the Post‘s words:

And their ostensible protection of American workers leaves no room to consider the welfare of poor people elsewhere in the world.

I like this one, because it turns standard economic theory on its head to advance the interests of the rich and powerful. In the economic textbooks, rich countries like the United States are supposed to be exporting capital to the developing world. This provides them the means to build up their capital stock and infrastructure, while maintaining the living standards of their populations. This is the standard economic story where the problem is scarcity.

But to justify trade policies that have harmed tens of millions of US workers, either by costing them jobs or depressing their wages, the Post discards standard economics, and tells us that the problem facing people in the developing world is that there is too much stuff. If we didn’t buy the goods produced in the developing world, there would just be a massive glut of unsold products.

In standard theory, the people in the developing world buy their own stuff, with rich countries like the US providing the financing. It actually did work this way in the 1990s, up until the East Asian financial crisis in 1997. In that period, countries like Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia were growing very rapidly while running large trade deficits. This pattern of growth was ended by the terms of the bailout imposed on these countries by the US Treasury Department through the International Monetary Fund.

The harsh terms of the bailout forced these and other developing countries to reverse the standard textbook path and start running large trade surpluses. This post-bailout period was associated with slower growth for these countries. In other words, the poor of the developing world suffered from the pattern of trade the Post advocates. If they had continued on the pre-bailout path, they would be much richer today. In fact, South Korea and Malaysia would be richer than the United States if they had maintained their pre-bailout growth rate over the last two decades. (This is the topic of the introduction to my new book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer; it’s free.)

It is also important to note that the Post is only bothered by forms of protection that might help working-class people. The United States prohibits foreign doctors from practicing in the United States unless they complete a US residency program. (The total number of slots is tightly restricted, with only a small fraction open to foreign-trained doctors.) This is a classic protectionist measure. No serious person can believe that the only way for a person to be a competent doctor is to complete a US residency program. It costs the United States around $100 billion a year ($700 per family) in higher medical expenses. Yet we never hear a word about this or other barriers that protect the most highly paid professionals from the same sort of international competition faced by steelworkers and textile workers.

Moving on, we get yet another Post tirade on Social Security:

You can expand benefits for everyone, as Ms. Warren favors. Prosperous retirees who live mostly off their well-padded 401(k)s will appreciate what to them will feel like a small bonus, if they notice it. But spreading wealth that way will make it harder to find the resources for the vulnerable elderly who truly depend on Social Security.

But demographics — the aging of the population — cannot be wished away. In the 1960s, about five taxpayers were helping to support each Social Security recipient, and the economy was growing about 6 percent annually. Today there are fewer than three workers for each pensioner, and the growth rate even following the 2008 recession has averaged about 2 percent. On current trends, 10 years from now the federal government will be spending almost all its money on Medicare, Social Security and other entitlements and on interest payments on the debt, leaving less and less for schools, housing and job training. There is nothing progressive about that.

There are all sorts of misleading or wrong claims here. First, the economy did not grow “about 6 percent annually” in the 1960s. There were three years in which growth did exceed 6 percent, and it was a very prosperous decade, but growth only averaged 4.6 percent from 1960 to 1970.

I suppose we should be happy that the Post is at least getting closer to the mark. A 2007 editorial praising NAFTA told readers that Mexico’s GDP “has more than quadrupled since 1987.” The IMF data put the gain at 83 percent. So by comparison, they are doing pretty good with the 6 percent growth number for the ’60s.

But getting to the demographics, we did go from more than five workers for every retiree to less than three today, and this number is projected to fall further to around two workers per retiree in the next 15 years. This raises the obvious question, so what? The economy did not collapse even as we saw the fall from five workers per retiree to less than three, so something really really bad happens when it falls further?

We did raise taxes to cover the additional cost, and we will probably have to raise taxes in the future. We get that the Post doesn’t like tax increases (no one does), but this hardly seems like the end of the world. The Social Security trustees project that real wages will rise on average by more than 34 percent over the next two decades. Suppose we took back 5–10 percent of these projected wage gains through tax increases (still leaving workers with wages that are more than 30 percent higher than they are today); what is the big problem?

Of course, most workers have not seen their wages rise in step with the economy’s growth over the last four decades. This is a huge issue, which is the sort of thing that progressives should be and are focusing on. But the Post would rather distract us with the possibility that at some point in the future we may be paying a somewhat higher Social Security tax.

The Post’s route for savings is also classic misdirection. It tells about high-living seniors who get so much money from their 401(k)s they don’t even notice their Social Security checks. Only a bit more than 4 percent of the over-65 population has non–Social Security income of more than $80,000 a year. If the point is to have substantial savings from means-testing, it would be necessary to hit people with incomes around $40,000 a year, or even lower. That is not what most people consider wealthy.

We could have substantial savings on Medicare by pushing down the pay of doctors, and reducing the prices of drugs and medical equipment. The latter could be done by substituting public financing for research and development for government-granted patent monopolies (also discussed in Rigged). These items would almost invariably be cheap in a free market. But the Post seems uninterested in ways to save money that could affect the incomes of the rich.

One can quibble with whether the current benefits for middle-income people are right or should be somewhat higher or lower, but it is ridiculous to argue that raising them $50 a month, as proposed by Senator Warren, will break the bank.

Then we have the issue of free college. The Post raises the issue, pushed by Senator Sanders in his presidential campaign, and then tells readers:

Our answer — we would argue, the progressive answer — is that there are people in society with far greater needs than that upper-middle-class family in Fairfax County that would be relieved of its tuition burden at the College of William & Mary if Mr. Sanders got his wish.

There are two points to be made here. First, there is extensive research showing that many children from low- and moderate-income families hugely overestimate the cost of college, failing to realize that they would be eligible for financial aid that would make it free or nearly free. This means that the current structure is preventing many relatively disadvantaged children from attending college. Arguably, better education on the opportunities to get aid would solve this problem, but the problem has existed for a long time, and better education has not done much to change the picture thus far.

The second point is that the process of determining eligibility for aid is itself costly. Many children have divorced parents, with a non-custodial parent often not anxious to pay for their children’s college. Perhaps it is appropriate that they should pay, but forcing payment is not an easy task, and it doesn’t make sense to make the children in such situations suffer.

In many ways, the free-college solution is likely to be the easiest, with the tax coming out of the income of higher earners, the vast majority of whom will be the beneficiaries of this policy. There are ways to save on paying for college. My favorite is limiting the pay of anyone at a public school to the salary of the president of the United States ($400,000 a year). We can also deny the privilege of tax-exempt status to private universities or other nonprofits that don’t accept a similar salary cap. These folks can pay their top executives whatever they want, but they shouldn’t ask the taxpayers to subsidize their exorbitant pay packages.

There is one final issue in the column worth noting. At one point it makes a pitch for the virtues of economic growth, then tells readers, “It’s not in conflict with the goal of redistribution.”

At least some of us progressive types are not particularly focused on “redistribution.” The focus of my book and much of my other writing is on the way that the market has been structured to redistribute income upward, compared with the structures in place in the quarter century after World War II. It is understandable that people who are basically very satisfied with this upward redistribution of market income would not want this rigging of the market even to be discussed, but serious progressives do.

---

Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (11/15/16).

Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

Author (Photo:How did the British government respond to the Boston tea party? | Reference.com ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow American Tempest: How the Boston Tea Party Sparked a Revolution by Harlow Giles Unger """American Tempest" re-defined my understanding of The Boston Tea Party, and what its legacy is to modern Americans. I will never think of 'taxation without representation' quite the same way ever again..."American Tempest" does more than tell us what happened before, during, and after The Boston Tea Party. The author makes his case for "why" it happened."Blogcritics.org, 3/16/12"A history of the events surrounding the American Revolution, but it is not like any history you were likely to have been taught back in high school...All the significant players are accounted for...They just aren't quite the noble selfless characters that graced the pages of my high school history book...Unger's narrative is eminently readable. And if you can read what he has to say without gritting your teeth in patriotic fury, you may find yourself on the way to the library to see what some of the other modern scholars have to say about the period." "The Federal Lawyer," July 2012 "[Unger] details the Colonies' move to independence in a coherent and convincing narrative...There is a lot of history, and a lot of detail, in this relatively short volume, which remains exciting though the outcome is not in doubt."" Portland"" Book Review," 5/22/12" https://www.amazon.com/American-Tempest-Boston-Sparked-Revolution/dp/030682079X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1478998303&sr=1-1&keywords=unger+tea+party

At a time when public mistrust of science runs high, and non-experts are hard-pressed to separate fact from industry-sponsored spin, Sense About Science, a charity based in London with an affiliate in New York, presents itself as a trustworthy arbiter. The organization purports to help the misinformed public sift through alarmist claims about public health and the environment by directing journalists, policymakers, and others to vetted sources who can explain the evidence behind debates about controversial products like e-cigarettes and flame retardants.

One reason the public is so confused, suggested Tracey Brown, the group’s director, in a recent Guardian op-ed, is that the media feeds alarmism by focusing on who sponsors scientific studies, rather than asking more important questions about whether the research is sound. Even when there is no evidence of bias, Brown contended, journalists attack industry-funded research, running exposés on subjects such as fracking, genetically modified plants, and sugar. Brown lamented that what she called “the ‘who funded it?’ question” is too often asked by “people with axes to grind.”

Brown’s downplaying of concerns about such research invites skepticism. Since the mid-1990s, numerous studies have shown that industry-funded research tends to favor its sponsors’ products. This effect has been documented in research financed by chemical, pharmaceutical, surgical, food, tobacco, and, we have learned most recently, sugar companies. In the 1960s, the sugar industry secretly paid scientists to minimize the role sugar plays in causing heart disease and blame saturated fat instead, according to a study published in the September issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. For decades, industry-funded research helped tobacco companies block regulations by undermining evidence that cigarettes kill. Precisely because of the very real risk of bias, prestigious scientific journals have long required researchers to disclose their sources of support. Journalists in pursuit of transparency have good reason to ask, “Who funded it?”

Sense About Science claims to champion transparency. The organization has campaigned to see the evidence behind policy decisions and asked for pharmaceutical companies to release all the results of clinical trials, not just the positive ones. Nearly 700 organizations have signed on to the clinical trials initiative since it began last year. These are salutary efforts, and Brown points out that with the exception of one program funded by publishers, none of the group’s projects are underwritten by companies. But this sidesteps a larger issue.

Sense About Science does not always disclose when its sources on controversial matters are scientists with ties to the industries under examination. And the group is known to take positions that buck scientific consensus or dismiss emerging evidence of harm. When journalists rightly ask who sponsors research into the risks of, say, asbestos, or synthetic chemicals, they’d be well advised to question the evidence Sense About Science presents in these debates as well.

 

In 2002, Dick Taverne, an English politician and business consultant, founded Sense About Science “to expose bogus science,” he explains in his memoir, “Against the Tide.” Through his consulting work, Taverne had cultivated relationships with energy, communications, food, and pharmaceutical companies. Sense About Science’s early sponsors included some of Taverne’s former clients and companies in which he owned stock.

Taverne must have known the power of media narratives about science firsthand, because he had experience with the tobacco industry, which labored mightily to change the conversation about its product in the face of evidence that cigarettes were lethal. According to internal documents released in litigation by cigarette manufacturers, Taverne’s consulting company, PRIMA Europe, helped British American Tobacco improve relations with its investors and beat European regulations on cigarettes in the 1990s. Taverne himself worked on the investors project: In an undated memo, PRIMA assured the tobacco company that “the work would be done personally by Dick Taverne,” because he was well placed to interview industry opinion leaders and “would seek to ensure that industry’s needs are foremost in people’s minds.” During the same decade, Taverne sat on the board of the British branch of the powerhouse public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, which claimed Philip Morris as a client. The idea for a “sound science” group, made up of a network of scientists who would speak out against regulations that industrial spokespeople lacked the credibility to challenge, was a pitch Burson-Marsteller made to Philip Morris in a 1994 memorandum.

It’s not hard to identify traces of this approach in Taverne’s later work. Writing in his 2005 book, “The March of Unreason,” Taverne complained that “eco-fundamentalists” and fearmongers had fomented a backlash against science and technology, which had in turn produced a “multiplication of health and safety regulations.” That year British Petroleum donated 15,000 pounds to Sense About Science, and Taverne argued in the House of Lords that as much as 80 percent of global warming might be attributable to solar activity, even though that theory had been discredited two years earlier. Taverne, who stepped down as chairman of Sense About Science in 2012, did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Sense About Science established an American affiliate in 2014, under the direction of a Brooklyn-based journalist named Trevor Butterworth. In financial documents, Sense About Science claims Sense About Science USA as a sister organization “with close ties and similar aims.” High-profile scientific publishers, as well as such reputable institutions as the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the Columbia Journalism Review, have promoted Butterworth’s services to scientists and journalists.

From 2003 to 2014, Butterworth contributed to the website of an organization called STATS, a nonprofit that promoted statistical literacy. STATS had its own connections to the tobacco industry, in this case through founder Robert Lichter, a conservative political scientist and now a communications professor at George Mason University. Lichter also co-founded and continues to run the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which Philip Morris hired in 1994 to survey news reports about tobacco as part of its strategy, outlined in a memo from March of that year, to counter “personal and public bias” in stories about cigarettes’ health risks.

Lichter, like Sense About Science’s Tracey Brown, has argued that industry money doesn’t necessarily taint the science it supports. In 2003, a congressional report charged the George W. Bush administration with stacking a government committee on childhood lead poisoning with industry scientists. Lichter appeared as an analyst on CNN and said, “Studies have found that scientists who have consulted for industry do not differ in their assessment of risks, of health risks, from scientists who have not consulted for industry.” Lichter did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment or citations to these studies.

Before STATS was dissolved in 2014, and its web site adopted by Sense About Science USA, it received regular grants from free-market sources. Between 1998 and 2014, STATS received $4.5 million, 81 percent of its donations, from the Searle Freedom Trust, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, Donors Trust (a fund largely sustained by Charles Koch), and other right-wing foundations. Searle, which describes its mission as promoting “economic liberties,” gave STATS $959,000 between 2010 and 2014. Anti-regulatory foundations, including these, spent over half a billion dollars between 2003 and 2010 to “manipulate and mislead the public over the nature of climate science and the threat posed by climate change,” according to a 2013 study by Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle.

With these roots, Sense About Science should not surprise anyone when it promotes anti-regulatory voices on issues like asbestos. In a 2006 brochure called “Science for Celebrities” and purporting to correct misperceptions about synthetic chemicals, Sense About Science offers John Hoskins, a toxicologist formerly of the Medical Research Council Toxicology Unit at the University of Leicester. Under the rubric “Toxic effects depend on dose,” Hoskins reassures us: “Away from the high doses of occupational exposure a whole host of unwanted chemicals finds their way into our bodies. Most leave quickly but some stay: asbestos and silica in our lungs, dioxins in our blood. Do they matter? No!”

More than two decades ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared asbestos a proven human carcinogen. Since then, as countries continue to mine asbestos, industry groups have argued that certain varieties, including chrysotile and crocidolite, are not so toxic. In response, several groups, including the Collegium Ramazzini, an international body of occupational and environmental health experts, have issued consensus statements warning that no form of asbestos is safe at any dose. In calling for a universal ban on all forms of asbestos in 2010, the Collegium Ramazzini observed that the asbestos industry’s attacks on evidence that “irrefutably” links its product to cancer “closely resemble those used by the tobacco industry.”

Brown maintains that Sense About Science has not disagreed with the scientific consensus on asbestos, and she notes that dose and type of exposure are the issue. But when I asked Hoskins why his position differed from the scientific consensus, he shrugged over email, “Once upon a time the consensus was that the earth is flat.” Hoskins further replied, “Unfortunately, to say that within a population low-level exposure of many chemicals must be dangerous is not borne out by reality, much to the chagrin of those who live in the fantasy world of ‘chemical-free.’ ”

Hoskins’s résumé states that he has represented the Chrysotile Institute in “discussion with the governments of several countries.” But he did not disclose this relationship to the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Public Health journal when he co-authored two scientific papers disputing claims that chrysotile or crocidolite caused a rare cancer in exposed populations. When his industry ties came to light, the journal issued errata for both papers to disclose this competing interest. (Hoskins denies any conflict of interest, insisting that his role in authoring the papers was confined to providing information the other authors requested. Yet all but one of the other authors had also failed to disclose their asbestos interests, which now appear in the errata.)

Soon after the first paper appeared, eight public health researchers wrote a letter to the editors of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Public Health expressing outrage that the journal would publish a paper with “gross mistakes” and “no scientific content.” A group that included many of the letter’s signatories asked the journal to consider retracting the second paper, citing “seriously misleading information.” But the journal’s editors declined to retract the papers, which remain in the technical literature, casting doubt on the scientific consensus that all forms of asbestos are hazardous to human health.

It’s hard to make a case for the safety of a substance like asbestos, which most people know causes cancer. Other commercial products are easier to defend, not because they are less hazardous, but because consumers are not as familiar with the evidence questioning their safety and utility. Scientists have known since 1997 that flame retardants, for example, can cause cancer. These brominated and chlorinated chemicals are used in a wide range of consumer products, including nursing pads and car seats. For more than three decades, studies in animals and humans have linked them to cancer, developmental delays, and other serious health problems. By 2010, the evidence was so persuasive that nearly 150 scientists from 22 countries signed a statement warning that flame retardants “are a concern for persistence, bioaccumulation, long-range transport, and toxicity.” Flame retardants’ fire safety benefit not only remains unproven, the scientists asserted, but the chemicals form highly toxic byproducts when burned.

Sense About Science has long relied on dubious numbers to insist on the efficacy of these chemicals.  In 2006 it published a pamphlet on “misconceptions about chemicals” in which it claimed that British laws requiring flame retardants in furniture had reduced fire deaths by 20 percent, citing a 2000 European Commission report called “Flame Retardants.” A European Commission press officer told me she knows of no such report. “The reference to the 20 percent reduction in fire deaths is repeatedly quoted in papers and publications from flame retardant industries and associations, and they always refer to ‘Flame Retardants, DG Environment Video 2000,’ which we cannot find.” On the contrary, she told me, it is simply “not possible to correlate fire deaths to non-flammability requirements.”

Who did make the claim? Flame retardant industry trade groups, including the European Flame Retardant Association and the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, run by Philip Morris’s longtime PR firm Burson-Marsteller. The U.S.-based Citizens for Fire Safety also repeated the claim until it disbanded, following revelations in 2012 that leading flame retardant producers ran the organization, not the grassroots group of “staff and volunteers committed to national fire safety” its literature asserted.

The same year, Sense About Science again called on John Hoskins, identified as an independent toxicologist, this time to fact-check a study that found potentially carcinogenic flame retardants in sofas. In his response, Hoskins wrote: “The bottom line is that danger of fire is many, many times greater than any imagined danger from chemicals used to prevent it.”

“Everything I wrote about flame retardants was taken from published works,” Hoskins told me. “Reviewers at the time found nothing to criticize and I have had no comment from the thousands of people who must have read the pieces.”

Sense About Science reprinted its guide on chemicals in 2014. “The trade-off between fire risk and toxicology is changing, and we represented that newer precautionary thinking in our most recent publications,” Brown, the group’s director, told The Intercept in an email. The new guide acknowledged “allegations of side effects” from flame retardants, including persistence in the environment and toxicity to humans and animals. But it also retained the unsupported claim that regulations requiring the chemicals saved lives. The guide even retained the text that countered concerns about traces of flame retardants found in children’s bodies by asserting that because the chemicals protected children from death or injury from fire, “To fail to expose them to such chemicals could be regarded as negligent.”

Scientists who reviewed human studies had come to a different conclusion the year before. They warned that although such links were impossible to prove conclusively, the evidence suggested that children’s exposure to flame retardants could have serious health consequences, including neurobehavioral and developmental problems. The scientists called for regulatory oversight.

Of all the controversial chemicals in the public eye, the one Trevor Butterworth, Sense About Science USA’s director, has most fervently defended is bisphenol A, a compound used to make plastics. BPA is found in hard plastics, the lining of canned drinks and foods, thermal receipts, and other consumer and industrial products, including cigarette filters. Manufacturers produce billions of pounds of BPA each year. Its market value is projected to reach $20 billion by 2020. And numerous studies and scientific consensus statements have linked BPA, which can interfere with hormone signaling, to developmental and reproductive disorders.

Leading reproductive biologists released a consensus statement in 2007 warning that “the wide range of adverse effects of low doses of BPA in laboratory animals exposed both during development and in adulthood is a great cause for concern with regard to the potential for similar adverse effects in humans.”

Two years later, while working for STATS, Butterworth published a 27,000-word investigation sharply questioning the validity of the scientific studies and news reports about BPA’s health effects. Butterworth’s central claim was that a handful of scientists, journalists, and environmental activist groups had ignored good science in a crusade to paint BPA as “the biological equivalent of global warming.” He singled out a widely acclaimed special report by Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporters Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger called “Chemical Fallout.” These reporters, he claimed, relied on flawed studies by independent researchers and unfairly dismissed the industry-funded studies that found no harm. But the independent studies were not, in fact, flawed. Regulators just didn’t consider them useful, because, like many such academic studies, they didn’t measure toxicity but tested hypotheses about how BPA could alter living systems.

BPA trade groups have long insisted that the substance is metabolized too quickly to cause harm. Butterworth cites a 2009 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that measured BPA concentrations in newborns to make the same case. The study, he argues, “provides important evidence that infants — even those born prematurely — are able to detoxify BPA in the same way as adults.”

The CDC study he cited was designed to gauge exposure, not metabolism. BPA has been detected in the urine of nearly every American tested. Premature babies’ fragile systems make them particularly vulnerable to environmental contaminants. The researchers suspected that the use of plastic medical devices in neonatal intensive care units might expose premature infants to higher than average levels of BPA. And that’s exactly what they found: Average BPA concentrations in hospitalized premature babies were about 10 times higher than those measured in adults. The authors noted that although premature babies appear to have some ability to metabolize BPA, their detoxification pathways “are not expected to be functional at adult rates until months after birth.”

Butterworth ended his critique of what he called “the BPA is dangerous thesis” by suggesting that banning the chemical could result in greater harm: “What if some parents who turned to glass bottles for fear of … ‘leaching’ BPA drop and break them, causing injury to their babies?”

Butterworth’s arguments have reverberated across an echo chamber of free-market organizations, including Philip Morris’s product defense law firm, Koch-funded think tanks, chemical and food-packaging industry trade groups in Europe and the U.S., and an ostensibly neutral environmental health research foundation run by a chemical industry PR firm.

Reached by email for comment, Butterworth did not account for his questionable characterization of the CDC study. He said that his critique relied on the work of scientists from regulatory agencies involved in risk assessment, and that these scientists had criticized smaller studies that claimed adverse effects. He maintained that studies assessing the effects of low doses of BPA are inconsistent and unlikely to capture significant results because of methodological and statistical problems.

The year after Butterworth’s 2009 investigation, the anti-regulatory Donors Trust awarded STATS $86,000 for its “research efforts,” and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which belongs to the BPA Joint Trade Association, gave Lichter’s Center for Media and Public Affairs $10,000 for “research support.” Butterworth continued to defend BPA in news outlets and in 2013 made his case on a blog for Coca-Cola, another BPA Joint Trade Association member.

That year Coca-Cola gave more than $30,000 to Butterworth’s future partner, Sense About Science, which hosted a BPA forum the next year. (Since then, Sense About Science has not received corporate donations, which “represented less than 3 percent of our income,” Brown wrote in an email.) In the forum, a Q&A on social media, Sense About Science put forward a representative of the British Plastics Federation and a toxicologist whose longstanding ties to the chemical industry the organization did not disclose. Participants were assured that BPA posed no risk to human health. Several plastic industry trade sites praised the event. One welcomed Sense About Science’s efforts, reporting that “plastic packaging was stoutly defended.”

The tobacco industry pioneered tactics to fight regulations by manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that cigarettes kill. So it should be no surprise to encounter a strategy among defenders of the e-cigarette that also centers around doubt. If we don’t know for certain that a product is safe, we might urge caution. Sense About Science has argued the opposite: so long as we don’t know the product is unsafe, medical professionals have no business urging regulation.

E-cigarettes turn chemical solutions into a nicotine-filled mist, which consumers ingest without the added harm of tobacco tar. When the devices hit the American market in 2007, sales quickly took off. Tobacco companies increasingly dominate the industry, which is projected to be worth $54 billion by 2025. A recent national survey found a sharp rise in e-cigarette smoking among high school students — from 1.5 percent in 2011 to 16 percent last year.

The skyrocketing popularity of e-cigarettes among young people worries public health experts because so little is known about the devices’ safety. E-cigarettes are too new for scientists to have assessed their long-term health risks. British and American scientific bodies have reacted to this paucity of evidence with different views of the relative dangers.

Last year, Public Health England joined other British public health organizations in encouraging smokers to use e-cigarettes as an aid in quitting tobacco. The Royal College of Physicians effectively endorsed this view in April, when it argued against regulating a product that could help smokers quit.

But American public health officials worry that nicotine, which is as addictive as heroin and cocaine, will hook young smokers and cause lasting harm to their still-developing brains. Nicotine is linked to immunosuppression as well as cardiovascular, respiratory, and gastrointestinal disorders. There is evidence that it interferes with chemotherapies and may even play a role in cancer. Researchers are just beginning to study whether the more than 7,000 flavoring chemicals, which typically aren’t disclosed on e-cigarettes, are safe when inhaled.

Back in 2012, the British Medical Association called for a ban on the devices in public in order to “ensure their use does not undermine smoking prevention and cessation by reinforcing the normalcy of cigarette use.” BMA reaffirmed this judgment as recently as this past June, despite the opposing position of the Royal College of Physicians. Sense About Science reacted to BMA’s call for a ban by asking the association to produce evidence that e-cigarettes caused harm. “This move towards heavy regulation appears to be driven by the fear that e-cigs might be harmful or act as a gateway to conventional tobacco — despite little or no evidence for either claim,” the organization argued on its website in 2013, two years before Public Health England endorsed e-cigarettes as a tool to quit smoking. Such regulations, Sense About Science stated, could do more harm than good by inhibiting access to products that may help reduce harm from smoking tobacco cigarettes.

Although Sense About Science has demanded evidence that e-cigarettes cause harm, it seems poised to cast doubt on the evidence when it turns up. In August, the organization challenged the relevance of research presented that month at a cardiology conference showing that nicotine in e-cigarettes can stiffen arteries, an early indication of heart disease. Sense About Science’s expert dismissively compared the effects of nicotine documented in the research to those of “watching a thriller or a football match.”

Here in the United States, just this past May, the Food and Drug Administration moved to regulate e-cigarettes, including banning sales to those 18 and under. The CDC, too, takes the health risks of nicotine seriously. Last fall, the centers called for strategies to reduce the use of all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes. “The potential long-term benefits and risks associated with e-cigarette use are not currently known,” the CDC reported. “What is known is that nicotine exposure at a young age may cause lasting harm to brain development, promote nicotine addiction, and lead to sustained tobacco use.”

Having established itself as a credible voice in debates about science and industrial regulation in the United States and Britain, Sense About Science has set out for what may prove to be its most challenging assignment. In July, following Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, Sense About Science established an EU branch in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Commission, which has placed tighter restrictions on e-cigarettes, chemicals, and other potentially risky consumer goods than the United States has mustered. The new branch of Sense About Science plans to “monitor the use and abuse of scientific evidence in EU policy.”

Both Sense About Science and Sense About Science USA undertake some initiatives that serve the public interest. But the founder of the British organization worked with the architects of the tobacco industry’s disinformation strategy, and both groups have been known to promote science that favors private interests over public health. When an organization claims to serve as a neutral arbiter in high-stakes debates about science, it pays to do what Sense About Science does: ask for the evidence.

This article was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent nonprofit news organization.

The post How Self-Appointed Guardians of “Sound Science” Tip the Scales Toward Industry appeared first on The Intercept.

Democracy Now! 2016-11-15 Tuesday

• Headlines for November 15, 2016
• U.S. State Dept. Science Envoy on Trump's Climate Denialism & Why Sanders Could Have Beaten Him
• Climate Advocate: Trump's Racist, Anti-Science Worldview Will Make 1 in 30 People Worldwide Refugees
• The Pentagon Knows Climate Change is Real. Will Donald Trump Ignore the Science?
• What Action Can Obama Take Before a Climate Denier Replaces Him in the Oval Office?
• A Look at the Other Morocco: From Protests Against Austerity to Occupation of Western Sahara
• Nnimmo Bassey on the Catch-22 at COP 22: Rich Nations Continue to Pollute as Temps Keep Rising

Download this show

Author (Photo:The Triumph of Cicero by Franciabigio, painted in 1520, is an example of a history painting which demonstrates the technique of fresco, 580 x 530 cm. History paintings, considered the most prestigious genre by the French Académie de peinture et de sculpture, depict a moment in history rather than a specific, static subject, such as a portrait. They are often large in size and incredibly detailed. ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Dictator: A Novel by Robert Harris "At the age of forty-eight, Cicero—the greatest orator of his time—is in exile, his power sacrificed on the altar of his principles. The only way to return to Rome is to pledge his support to a charismatic and dangerous enemy: Julius Caesar. Harnessing his political cunning, unrivalled intellect, and the sheer brilliance of his words, Cicero fights his way back to prominence. Yet no public figure is completely safeguarded against the unscrupulous ambition of others. Riveting and tumultuous, Dictator encompasses the most epic events in ancient history, including the collapse of the Roman Republic, the murder of Pompey, and the assassination of Caesar. But its central question is a timeless one: how to keep political freedom unsullied by personal gain, vested interests, and the corrosive effects of ceaseless foreign wars. In Robert Harris’s indelible portrait, Cicero is a deeply fascinating hero for his own time and for ours." https://www.amazon.com/Dictator-Novel-Robert-Harris/dp/0307948137/ref=la_B000APBPA4_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479094127&sr=1-4

Led by a class of omnipotent central bankers, experts have gained extraordinary political power. Will a populist backlash shatter their technocratic dream?

When Barack Obama leaves the White House, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will almost certainly be elected Senate minority leader — and therefore become the highest ranking Democratic official in America.

That’s a terrible roll of the dice for Democrats, because Schumer might as well have been grown in a lab to be exactly the wrong face for opposition to Donald Trump:

• Schumer, who’s just about to turn 66, grew up in Brooklyn and went to the same high school as Bernie Sanders. Then their lives diverged: Schumer, the smartiest of the smartypants, got a perfect score on the SATs and then went to Harvard and Harvard Law School. He was elected to the New York State Assembly at 23, the U.S. Congress at 29, and the U.S. Senate at 47. He’s never had any adult job outside elected office.

• He possesses the same impressive political acumen as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, sagely explaining “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

• Schumer’s done more than anyone except Bill and Hillary Clinton to intertwine Wall Street and the Democratic Party. He raises millions and millions of dollars from the finance industry, both for himself and for other Democrats. In return, he voted to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and voted to bail out Wall Street in 2008. In between, he slashed fees paid by banks to the Securities and Exchange Commission to pay for regulatory enforcement, and eviscerated congressional efforts to crack down on rating agencies.

• Schumer has long been the Democrats’ point man in efforts to craft a bipartisan deal to slash taxes on multinational corporations.

• Schumer voted for the Patriot Act in 2001, and sponsored its predecessor, the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. During a Senate hearing, Schumer explained that “it’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you’re in the foxhole, it’s a very different deal.” In certain cases, he said, “most senators” would say “do what you have to do.” Schumer also defended the New York Police Department’s surveillance of Muslims across the region, which Trump has cited as a national model.

• In October 2002, Schumer voted for the Iraq War by giving George W. Bush authority to invade. In a speech explaining his vote, Schumer warned of Iraq’s imaginary yet “vigorous pursuit of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.”

• Schumer voted against Barack Obama’s deal to limit Iran’s ability to enrich uranium and potentially develop a nuclear weapons program.

• Perhaps worst of all, Schumer gave Anthony Weiner his start, first hiring him on his staff, then encouraging him to run for office and then endorsing Weiner in the race for Schumer’s seat when Schumer was running for the Senate in 1998. Thanks, Chuck.

Are there any positive things about Chuck Schumer? Well …  he did vote against NAFTA in 1993, and while he’s supported other trade deals since, he made negative noises about the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Also, he’s a talented matchmaker with as many as 11 marriages to his credit. And he’s the second cousin once removed of Amy Schumer, which you might see as good or bad, depending.

Top photo: Sen. Charles Schumer speaks to members of the media on May 14, 2015, at the Capitol in Washington, DC.

The post Chuck Schumer: The Worst Possible Democratic Leader at the Worst Possible Time appeared first on The Intercept.

In 1971, Marvin Gaye made a career left turn with the album What's Going On, adopting a socially conscious sound that addressed war, racism, and drugs. 45 years later, What's Going On remains as relevant as ever. Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot present a Classic Album Dissection of the iconic record. Then, they review a contemporary protest album from Common.

The NYT ran a piece with the headline, "Trump rides a wave of populist fury that may damage global prosperity." The headline is absolutely bizarre for the simple reason that we are not seeing anything that a serious person can call "global prosperity." Thanks to the austerity policies pursued across much of the across Europe, and to a lesser extent the United States, countries across the developing world have seen a decade of weak or even negative growth. The employment rate of prime age workers (ages 25-54) is still below its pre-recession level in many countries, including in the United States.

These points are actually a major point of the article itself, which emphasizes the poor performance of most economies as a trigger for populist sentiment. In this respect the headline effectively contradicts the point of the article. While the populist policies being advocated by politicians may not offer a good answer for economic problems, we do not have to worry that they somehow will ruin an economic golden age. The mainstream leaders designing economic policy already destroyed prosperity, which doesn't mean that some ill-designed populist policies couldn't make things worse.

One point where the article is mistaken is in dismissing the idea that some people in the UK might be benefited by Brexit.

"In northeastern England (something like the Rust Belt of Britain) people who voted to leave Europe speak openly about doing so to punish those who beseeched them to vote to stay — people like the exceedingly unpopular former prime minister David Cameron. The situation is so depressed, it cannot get worse, the logic runs. Any economic pain will fall on wealthy Londoners, people say.

"But that is almost certainly nonsense. A rupture of trade with Europe is likely to hit these industrial communities hardest. And if that happens, the people living there will be angrier than ever."

Actually there is a very plausible story under which Brexit may benefit left behind industrial communities, which comes directly out of standard economics. Brexit is likely to first and foremost hit the London financial center by denying it privileged access to the EU. This will lead to less exports of financial services, which lower the value of the pound, other things equal. That makes the goods produced by industry in the UK more competitive, increasing output and employment.

This is largely consistent with what we have seen in the months since the vote for Brexit. The pound has plunged against both the euro and the dollar. Also, we have seen a sharp decline in London real estate prices, while house prices have risen in the rest of the country.

While Brexit may not have been an ideal tool for the purpose (policy is never textbook ideal), it may actually provide an effective way to divert resources from the financial sector to the rest of the UK economy. It is certainly too early to pronounce the policy successful in this respect, but it is also too early to insist that it is a failure.

 

Behind the News, 11/10/16 - guests: Jodi Dean, Glen Ford, Alex Gourevitch - Doug Henwood

“The Struggle for Syria,” as Patrick Seale titled his 1965 classic, has escalated steadily since Britain seized the territory from Turkey in 1918. The British turned it over to France in 1920 and took it back from Vichy in 1942. Following nominal independence in 1946, Syria became a theater of Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The stream of military coups between 1949 and 1970 concluded with the Hafez al-Assad putsch that left Syria in the Kremlin camp. Assad, however, proved anything but subservient to his superpower benefactor. The struggle for Syria continued in desultory fashion as Syria irritated Moscow by flirting with the U.S. in Lebanon and sending troops to support the American reconquista of Kuwait in 1991. The U.S. soon reverted to form, labeling Syria a “terrorist state” and condemning both its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and its alliance with Iran. In 2011, the struggle became a war. The U.S. and Russia, as well as local hegemons, backed opposite sides, ensuring a balance of terror that has devastated the country and defies resolution.

The Russians, having lost Aden, Egypt, and Libya years earlier, backed their only client regime in the Arab world when it came under threat. The U.S. gave rhetorical and logistical support to rebels, raising false hopes — as it had done among the Hungarian patriots it left in the lurch in 1956 — that it would intervene with force to help them. Regional allies, namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, were left to dispatch arms, money, and men, while disagreeing on objectives and strategy.

Christopher Phillips’s brilliant analysis of the factors fueling the Syria war is a refreshing contrast to works by most ostensible experts, who are partis pris, ill-informed, or both. With his new book, “The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East,” published by Yale this month, Phillips joins a short list of writers, among them Joshua Landis, Patrick Cockburn, Fawaz Gerges, and the late Anthony Shadid, who have made original contributions to understanding the Syria war’s causes and consequences. “The Battle for Syria” makes a determined and successful stab at apportioning responsibility to all the countries whose lavish provision of weapons and money have prolonged the war far longer than Syria’s own resources would have permitted. The deaths of more than 500,000 and the dispossession of almost half of Syria’s estimated 22 million inhabitants testify to the lack of interest these outsiders have in Syria itself and the priority they place on their own competing goals.

“On the eve of civil war,” Phillips writes, “Syria and the Middle East appeared deceptively stable.” It turned out that the region was static rather than stable. Hints of imminent change were few, but not invisible. President Barack Obama intimated that the United States, like Britain 40 years before, was reducing its involvement in the region. America’s Iraq invasion, like the Suez fiasco for the British and French in 1956, had stretched American resources and made similar adventures less appealing. Obama admitted to a Cairo audience in 2009, “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.” While this should have opened space for public participation in Arab governance, it instead left the impression of a vacuum to be filled.

Tunisia led the way, when popular demonstrations forced the exit of a Western-backed Arab head of state whose corruption and brutality were on a par with those of his colleagues elsewhere the Arab world. That success kindled hope that revolution was a viable option and made France in particular wary of further identification with untenable if hitherto compliant tyrants. The virus spread to other Arab countries, but it played out differently in every infected state. In Bahrain, the Saudis and the local royal family crushed the protestors. In Egypt, a dictator departed, the voters elected and then disowned a religious fanatic, and another military dictator restored the old order in a more vicious form. In Libya, unrest led to bloodshed and NATO intervention that replaced a dictatorship with virulent chaos.

Despite the failure of revolution everywhere but Tunisia, outside powers seized with alacrity on Syrian dissent to bring down a regime whose cardinal sin was its affiliation with Shiite Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia. While Syrian protestors sought relief from a security system that inhibited their basic rights, the outsiders who rallied to them, notably Saudi Arabia and Qatar, hardly stood as models of freedom and elected government. Syrian activists at first demanded reforms within the system and later a change of leadership without destroying, as the U.S. had done in Iraq, the state itself. The sheikhs of Riyadh and Doha, however, wanted to replace Bashar al-Assad with someone from the majority Sunni community who would enforce a style of dictatorship closer to their own Wahhabi beliefs and hostile to Iran.

By mid-2012, Phillips writes, the opposition was divided into no fewer than 3,250 armed companies. All attempts at unifying them failed, in part because local warlords sought loot rather than national victory and the outsiders refused to coordinate their policies. The traditional invaders of the Mideast — Britain, France, and the U.S. — became, in Phillips’s words, “prisoners of their own rhetoric.” Phillips accuses the U.S. of a “significant historical knowledge gap on Syria” and brands as “inexcusable” Obama’s reticence to consider contingency plans when his belief in Assad’s imminent demise did not come to fruition. Saudi Arabia, in Phillips’s view, overestimated the rebels’ strength while underestimating Assad’s. Saudi Arabia was not alone in that miscalculation. Yet, Phillips argues, Obama resisted the arguments of those, like Hillary Clinton, urging direct American military action even at the risk of war with Russia.

Whenever Assad’s back is against the wall, Russia and Iran pitch in with more help. When the rebels retreat, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey send more fighters and weapons. If Hillary Clinton becomes commander in chief on January 20, 2017, her promise of an American-patrolled no-fly zone will lead to direct confrontation between Russian and American warplanes and draw the U.S. deeper into a war that Phillips believes Obama was right to avoid. She should read this book first.

The post The U.S. and Russia Ensure a Balance of Terror in Syria appeared first on The Intercept.

Episode 2 Country Professor Appiah explores the history of the idea, born in the 19th century, that there are peoples who are bound together by an ancient common spirit and that each of these nations is entitled to its own state.

The recent years since the 2008 recession have seen a growth of protest movements. Sarah Jaffe’s book, Necessary Trouble, describes how people have been fighting back against bank bailouts, budget […]

Australian history is full of shonks and charlatans - otherwise known as our national heroes.

Chinese children must endure years of stress and impossible expectations preparing for their final school exam. The students who do best can look forward to glittering careers and even good marriage prospects. But for the less successful, the system is brutal

Jarosław Kaczyński has convinced Poland that it is threatened by a shadowy leftwing cabal – and become the country’s most powerful man

We increasingly let computers fly planes and carry out security checks. Driverless cars are next. But is our reliance on automation dangerously diminishing our skills?

Episode 1 Creed Professor Appiah begins with the complexities of his own background, as the son of an English Anglican mother and a Ghanaian Methodist father.

Britain’s vote to leave the EU was the grand finale of a 25-year campaign by a lonely sect of true believers. Daniel Hannan wrote the script