Tom Roche

Harding - Coolidge - Hoover

Under the Teapot Dome

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Felix is joined by Stef aka @iwrite4jacobin to discuss his investigation into Argentina’s AMIA bombing. The 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires has generated much speculation as to who the perpetrators actually were, accusations of irregularities in the investigation, suspicions of cover-ups, connections with intelligence agencies, and the probable suicide of a prosecutor related to the case. Stef takes us through the whole story and its implications for relationships between America, Israel, Iran and Argentina.

Find Stef’s series of essays on the incident on Substack, starting with Part 1 here: https://whitesiadbarre.substack.com/p/interpreting-the-amia-i-peronism

And follow him on twitter here: https://twitter.com/iwrite4jacobin

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This episode, i had the opportunity to interview early Iberian medievalist Roger Collins. We get into whether or not the word Reconquista is a useful term, the legacy of the Visigoths and some Patreon member questions!

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In this final episode of this year’s Ghoulvie Screamset, Will & Hesse take a look at Michael Wadleigh’s “Wolfen” (1981) and Bernard Rose’s “Candyman” (1992). Two films taking advantage of real urban environments the horrors of city life, from the intrusion of primordial natural evil in Wolfen, to manifesting the everyday horror of urban poverty in Candyman. 

Thanks for listening to our second outing of Movie Mindset! Will & Hesse will be back next year with a full season 2 of the series. Stay watchin’ everybody.

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The full gang talks about some news around the continent

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Russia wanted to sign a peace deal with Ukraine in March 2022, but NATO countries sabotaged it, according to Germany's former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the parliamentary faction leader of Zelensky's political party, Davyd Arakhamia. Journalist Ben Norton reviews the evidence. VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TkpKx6oMN0s Check out our related report from 2022 - "West killed peace proposal to end Ukraine war, Russia supported negotiated settlement": https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/09/03/west-peace-proposal-ukraine-russia

Ed Harris is a senator with presidential ambitions. Diane Keaton is the love of his life, but uncomfortable in politics. And with the White House in his grasp, his campaign is about to be rattled by a very, very stupid revelation from her past. We discuss Michael Lindsay-Hogg's RUNNING MATES (1992), a movie that emerged straight from the primordial ooze of the 1992 election cycle. Join us on Patreon for an extra episode every week - https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus

Our friend and host of The Age of Napoleon podcast Everett Rummage returns to the show (after 700 episodes!) to discuss Ridley Scott’s new historical epic Napoleon. Was Napoleon really that sprung for Josephine? (yes) Did (x) from the movie really go down like that? (mostly no) Did getting blown up by a cannon ball suck? (god yes) We delve in to Napoleon the man, the movie, and the enduring resonance of the Napoleonic age. Plus, of course, a final round of kiss offs to the departed Dr. Kissinger.

Find Age of Napoleon wherever you get podcasts, and all things about the show here: https://ageofnapoleon.com/

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Upon his death we had to convene the four Späti hosts to talk about about the life and times of Henry Kissinger. From his beginnings in Germany, fleeing the third reich to his prestigious career as a US diplomat. Regular episodes will be out later this week.

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Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis present the week via topical stand-up and sketches. They are joined by Ken Cheng who uses air fryers to help explain his frustration with the housing market, Helen Bauer arguing why school uniforms need to remain affordable, and Rachel Parris gives her musical take on what truly scares us at Halloween.

The show was written by the cast with additional material from Cameron Loxdale, Tasha Dhanraj, Jules Garnett and Cody Dahler.

Voice actors: Roisin O'Mahony & Ed Jones

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A BBC Studios Production for Radio 4

The old saying goes that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," but it helps if the men are very, very stupid. We discuss Martin Scorsese's KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, in which the architect of a Native American genocide finds an easy pawn in one of the lowest-IQ protagonists in movie history. Join us on Patreon for an extra episode every week - https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus

Co-hosts Gary Brecher & Mark Ames

Co-hosts Gary Brecher & Mark Ames

TrueAnon’s Brace Belden returns to the show as the crew continues discussing the war in Palestine. We look at Israel’s military shortcomings, the IDF’s penile obsession, the domestic propaganda war, and some measures Biden could take we might actually support. We also touch on Gavin Newsom’s vetoing of an anti-Caste based discrimination law, and a Ron DeSantis aide who apparently willed himself to death.

Catch Will at the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s 2024 Moby-Dick Marathon: https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/moby-dick-marathon-2024/

And keep an eye on TrueAnon’s feed for an upcoming announcement that will “end politics as we know it”.

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Like many self-imagined “free-traders,” the Washington Post editorial board cannot even conceive of free trade when it comes to prescription drugs. They demonstrated this fact yet again in discussing ways to deal with the high price of effective weight-loss drugs like Wegovy. These drugs carry price tags of more than $1,000 a month, making them costly for insurers, governments, or individuals who have to pick up the tab themselves.

The Post throws out a couple of ideas that could allow for a lower price, but never considers the fact that these drugs would be cheap without the government-granted patent monopolies that prevent generic manufacturers from entering the market. The monopolies are of course to provide an incentive to undertake the research, but there are other mechanisms for providing incentives, like paying people.

We did this when we wanted Moderna to develop a Covid vaccine, paying the company almost a billion dollars to develop and then test the vaccine. In the standard for our government, we then gave Moderna control over the vaccine, creating at least five Moderna billionaires. (Tell me again how conservatives want less government.) If we adopted the policy of only paying for research once, we would have both had the vaccine and low prices, since it likely could be manufactured and distributed for around $4 or $5 a shot.

In the case of Wegovy and other weight loss drugs, it’s likely the case that we would be talking about a cost of $20 or $30 a month in the absence of the patent monopoly. In this case, the monopoly is raising the price by a factor of 30 or 40, the equivalent of a tariff of 3,000 or 4,000 percent.

While the WaPo would usually go on the warpath over a tariff of 10 or 25 percent, it is apparently just fine with this much larger tariff that keeps drug prices high. Needless to say, we would not be debating how to cover the cost if Wegovy was selling for $30 for a month’s dosage.

We should also recognize this is real money. We will spend over $600 billion this year (almost $5,000 per family) on drugs that would likely cost less than $100 billion in a free market. This dwarfs the money at stake in tariffs on items like cars or steel, but it goes unmentioned at the Washington Post and in polite circles more generally.

In addition to lower prices, there is a second very important reason we should want free trade in prescription drugs. As the Post mentions, there are serious questions about the long-term side effects of Wegovy and other weight-loss drugs.

It would be good to have honest assessments of these side effects. While the researchers doing studies of these side effects may all be doing credible research, it is likely that there will be some ambiguities in the results. The billions of dollars on the table, in the form of prospective profits, puts a very big thumb on the scale towards minimizing negative side effects.

We would likely get a more honest scientific debate, and better outcomes for patients, if there wasn’t so much money on one side of this issue. For that reason also, we should want to see a free market for weight-loss drugs and drugs more generally.

The post When It Comes to Prescription Drugs, the Washington Post Can’t Even Conceive of Free Trade appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

This is the coolest thing. Charles Choi—who contributions I’ve written about several times—has a really surprising post on turning Org tables into ad hoc SQL tables. There are a couple of things that make this a worthwhile endeavor:

1. It’s easy to do
2. SQL queries that you make on the SQL table are output as a RESULTS block just like any other Org Babel invocation.

If you’re used to using SQL to query a database table and generate new tables or other results, this a a really handy thing. Choi has an example of a query on a simple table that would hard to do otherwise. The SQL table is held in memory and no actual database is generated, just a table corresponding to the Org table but you can make normal SQL queries on that table and export the results to your Org file.

For those who are familiar with SQL spells this is a tremendous capability. You can operate on “normal” Org tables in the same way you do on SQL database tables. Take a look at Choi’s post and his example to see how handy this can be.

Roosevelt - Taft - Wilson

Speech: Soft, Stick: Big, Trusts: On Sight

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Cleveland - Harrison - Cleveland - McKinley

Let's link and gild, fam.

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Johnson - Grant - Hayes - Garfield - Arthur

Uh, can anyone find another General from Ohio?

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Pierce - Buchanan - Lincoln - Johnson

What's so civil about war, anyway?

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Harrison - Tyler - Polk - Taylor - Fillmore

Failed attempts to fix America's plumbing.

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Jackson - Van Buren

A Dutch guy invents the Democrats.

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Adams - Jefferson - Madison - Monroe - Quincy Adams

The first party system comes crashing down on JQA's nerdy shoulders.

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Constitution - Washington

Get in the Presidency, George.

Chris and Matt's Hell of Presidents series comes to the Patreon. Over the next weeks, we'll be posting the entire series here to be permanently available for all subscribers.

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Ciaran, Julia and Nick reflect on the new German constitution, the Bild manifesto.

This bonus was originally released Nov 4th. For more bonus episodes like this, support us on Patreon to get an extra episode a week.

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Krystal sits down with political scientist, author, and activist Norman Finkelstein to discuss the conflict in Israel Palestine.

BP Holiday Merch LIVE NOW (Use code BLACKFRIDAY for 15% off Non-Holiday Items): https://shop.breakingpoints.com/collections/breaking-points-holiday-collection

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Extremist Javier Milei won Argentina's presidential election on a far-right platform, pledging to abolish most government ministries, abandon monetary sovereignty, and adopt the US dollar, while cutting ties with China and withdrawing from BRICS. Ben Norton explains how a history of debt and colonialism keeps the South American nation trapped in seemingly endless crisis. VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FN6hoIb-QqA Check out our article "How Argentina has been trapped in neocolonial debt for 200 years: An economic history": https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/12/18/argentina-neocolonial-debt-history Our related video "Global debt is unpayable: How Wall Street traps poor countries, profiting rich ones": https://youtube.com/watch?v=WRkhWQ0sRn4 Judicial coup in Argentina: Corrupt judges conspire with media oligarchs to ban Cristina Kirchner from office: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/12/08/judicial-coup-argentina-cristina-kirchner TOPICS 0:00 Meet Javier Milei 7:54 History of debt traps 13:38 Sergio Massa and Peronists 19:27 Economist Ha-joon Chang on dollarization 22:27 Cut ties with China and Brazil? 24:51 Far-right "libertarianism" 27:55 Inflation, IMF, and foreign debt 30:46 Alberto Fernández surrenders to IMF 33:58 Investocracy: Rule by foreign investors 38:09 Exports and imports 39:35 Dependency theory 43:09 Protectionism and kicking away the ladder 46:28 Past failed dollarization schemes 52:56 Outro

 

 

This week on CounterSpin: The new president of Argentina opposes abortion rights, casts doubt on the death toll of the country’s military dictatorship, would like it to be easier to access handguns and calls climate change a “lie of socialism.” Many were worried about what Javier Milei would bring, but, the Washington Post explained: “Anger won over fear. For many Argentines, the bigger risk was more of the same.”

But if you want to dig down into the roots of that “same,” the economic and historic conditions that drove that deep dissatisfaction, US news media will be less helpful to you there. Milei is not a landslide popular president, and thoughtful, critical information and conversation could help clarify peoples’ problems and their sources, such that voters—in Argentina and elsewhere—might not be left to believe that the only way forward is a man wielding a literal chainsaw.

We’ll learn about Javier Milei and what led to his election from Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy.

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at FAIR’s recent study on the Sunday shows’ Gaza guests.

 

The post Mark Weisbrot on Argentina’s Javier Milei appeared first on FAIR.

 

Media coverage of the Canadian Parliament’s standing ovation in September for Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian who fought for the Nazis in World War II, has included egregious Holocaust revisionism.

On September 22, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to the Canadian parliament, Canada’s then–Speaker of the House Anthony Rota introduced Hunka:

We have here in the chamber today a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today.

Rota went on to call Hunka “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service” (Politico, 9/24/23). Parliamentarians of all political parties gave Hunka two standing ovations, and Zelenskyy raised his fist to salute the man (Sky News, 9/26/23).

Then the New York–based Forward (9/24/23) pointed out that Hunka had fought for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, also known as the Galicia Division, of the SS. (The SS, short for Schutzstaffel, “Protection Squadron,” was the military wing of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.)

‘A complicated past’

Covering the subsequent controversy, the CBC (9/28/23) ran the headline, “Speaker’s Honoring of Former Nazi Soldier Reveals a Complicated Past, Say Historians.” In the context of the Holocaust, “complicated” functions as a hand-waving euphemism that gets in the way of holding perpetrators accountable: If a decision is “complicated,” it’s understandable, even if it’s wrong.

Digital reporter/editor Jonathan Migneault, who wrote the piece, soft-pedaled the Galicia Division in other ways too. He said that some of the Ukrainians who joined it did so “for ideological reasons, in opposition to the Soviet Union, in hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state.”

That’s quite a whitewashing of the ideological package that goes with signing up for the SS, leaving out that this vision for an “independent Ukrainian state” included the extermination of Jewish, LGBTQ, Roma and Polish minorities. As far as the “hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state” alibi, the Per Anders Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that “there is no overt indication that the unit [of Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits] in any way was dedicated to Ukrainian statehood, let alone independence.”

‘Caught between Hitler and Stalin’

Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) also used the word “complicated” to diminish Nazi atrocities, and mock the Polish government’s interest in having Hunka extradited for war crimes:

Funny, they’ve had 73 years to ask Canada for him. It’s almost as if Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism but that’s crazy talk….

Rota should have understood how complicated history is, how, post-Holodomor, a Ukrainian caught between Hitler and Stalin made a fatal choice.

We can hate Hunka for that now. I do.

But would every Canadian MP have made immaculate choices inside Stalin’s “Bloodlands” in 1943? Of course you and I would have been heroic, joined the White Rose movement, been executed for our troubles. But everyone?

Mallick refers to Ukraine as “Stalin’s ‘Bloodlands,’” citing the Holodomor, the 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians, as well as millions in other parts of the USSR. Yet her link takes readers to a review of the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which—its own flaws notwithstanding (Jacobin, 9/9/14)—discusses the killings in Ukraine and elsewhere by Stalin and, on a significantly more egregious scale, Hitler. Acknowledging that the phrase she’s borrowing refers to both Soviet crimes and the Nazis’ genocides would have made the choice of joining the Nazis seem rather less sympathetic.

Meanwhile, Mallick’s baffling comments about Poland erase the Nazis’ systematic killing of Polish people. Polish history has indeed been marred by horrific antisemitism, with many Polish people complicit in the Holocaust, as she glibly references; this does not erase the fact that the Nazis also murdered 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, or negate Poland’s desire to see their killers brought to justice. As Lev Golinkin (Forward, 9/24/23) pointed out, the Galicia Division that Hunka belonged to

was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler, who spoke of the soldiers’ “willingness to slaughter Poles.” Three months earlier, SS Galichina subunits perpetrated what is known as the Huta Pieniacka massacre, burning 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive.

The non-Nazi SS

An old cliché uses the analogy of gradually boiling a frog to explain how fascism takes hold in societies, but readers of Keir Giles’ intervention (Politico, 10/2/23) will feel like they are eyes-deep in a bubbling cauldron.

Giles, who said the relevant history is “complicated” four times and “complex” twice, wrote an article entitled “Fighting Against the USSR Didn’t Necessarily Make You a Nazi.” That’s a dubious claim in a piece focused on World War II, when the Soviet Union was the main force fighting Nazi Germany, and thus fighting the Soviets made you at least an ally of Nazis.

More to the point, the unit Hunka belonged to was a formal division of the SS, trained and armed by Nazi Germany (Forward, 9/27/23), which “fought exclusively to serve Nazi aims” (National Post, 9/25/23).

Giles, however, opened by writing:

Everybody knows that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.

And the ongoing turmoil over Canada’s parliament recognizing former SS trooper Yaroslav Hunka highlights one of the most important reasons why.

Something that’s untrue but simple is far more persuasive than a complicated, nuanced truth….

In the case of Hunka, the mass outrage stems from his enlistment with one of the foreign legions of the Waffen-SS, fighting Soviet forces on Germany’s eastern front.

Setting aside that Giles omits “and butchering innocent people” when he describes Waffen-SS activities as “fighting Soviet forces,” his suggestion that calling Hunka a Nazi is a “lie” does not withstand even minimal scrutiny. For instance, Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that, from August 29, 1943, onward, Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits were sworn in with the following oath:

I swear before God this holy oath, that in the battle against Bolshevism, I will give absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler, and as a brave soldier I will always be prepared to lay down my life for this oath.

Vowing “absolute obedience” to Hitler, and swearing that you’re willing to die for him, makes you as root and branch a Nazi as Rudolf Hess or Hermann Göring.

‘Simple narratives’

After drawing these bogus distinctions between the Nazis and their units, Giles moved on to genocide denial:

The idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide….

Repeated exhaustive investigations—including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities—led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit.

Giles doesn’t name any investigations by British or Soviet officials, so it’s unclear what he’s talking about on those points, but he’s lying about Nuremberg. The Nuremberg Tribunals did not specifically address the Galicia Division (Guardian, 9/25/23), but found that the combat branch of which they were a part, the Waffen-SS, “was a criminal organization”:

In dealing with the SS, the Tribunal includes all persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS, including the members of the Allgemeine SS, members of the Waffen-SS, members of the SS Totenkopfverbaende, and the members of any of the different police forces who were members of the SS.

Giles asserted that “simple narratives like ‘everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes’ are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp”—but everybody in the SS was, quite literally, guilty of war crimes.

Heavily censored report

The Canadian investigation Giles refers to is a 1986 Canadian government report that claims that membership in the Galicia Division did not in and of itself constitute a war crime. This conclusion is highly suspect when read against the Nuremberg tribunal’s judgment, and the report also has to be understood in the broader context of Canadian state investigations into Nazis in the country. As the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese (9/27/23) explained:

The federal government has withheld a second part of a 1986 government commission report about Nazis who settled in Canada. In addition, it has heavily censored another 1986 report examining how Nazis were able to get into Canada. More than 600 pages of that document, obtained by this newspaper and other organizations through the Access to Information law, have been censored.

Neither Giles nor any other member of the public knows what the Canadian government is hiding about its investigation, or why it’s concealing this information, so it’s disingenuous for him to present the fraction of the government’s conclusions to which he has access as if it is the final word on the Galicia Division or anything else.

As to Giles’ jaw-dropping complaint that people are “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide,” the Nuremberg Trial concluded that the SS carried out

persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied territories, the administration of the slave labor program, and the mistreatment and murder of prisoners.

Perhaps the public is “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide” because the SS carried out genocide.

As disconcerting as it is that authors like Giles are writing fascist propaganda—and that Mallick veers perilously close to the same—it’s even more alarming that editors at outlets like the Star, CBC and Politico deem such intellectually and morally bankrupt material worthy of publication.

The post Media Holocaust Revisionism After Canada’s Standing Ovation for an SS Vet appeared first on FAIR.