For centuries, war and opium have been entwined in Asia – sometimes assisted by the US

In an excerpt from the book Killer High, author Peter Andreas lays out how the opium poppy has been funding political parties and conflict for generations, often with the CIA’s tacit approval

Peter Andreas Published: 14 Feb, 2020 

By the early 1930s, China was estimated to be the source of seven eighths of the world’s narcotics supply, which reached international markets via Hong Kong, Macau and Shanghai. British journalist H.G.W. Woodhead described the situation in a detailed investigation: “In general it may be stated that throughout China today with the exception of isolated instances, no effort is or can be made by the National Government to control the sale or smoking of opium. It can be purchased without difficulty, in practically every town and village of any size throughout the country. And the traffic is controlled by the military and big opium rings.”


The government also illicitly exported narcotics to the United States and elsewhere to generate foreign exchange to pay for military supplies, including major aircraft purchases. Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang used opium suppression as a tool to attack rivals, especially targeting areas of com­munist activity. In June 1934, Chiang announced the Six Year Opium Suppression Plan, with the stated aim of total eradication of the drug within six years. The new military-enforced prohibition policy included the execution of thousands of drug offenders.

The Six-Year Plan was a means to ensure that the government would exercise complete control over the opium economy while simultaneously depriving regional political rivals in the southwest of opium funds. The Japanese occupation of Shanghai, in August 1937, diminished but did not end Kuomintang influence over the opium trade, and its alliance with the criminal underworld remained as strong as ever.

Having used opium to help finance their revolution, after taking power on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong’s triumphant communists quickly moved to eradicate it. On February 24, 1950, the new government issued its General Order for Opium Suppression, which begins: It has been more than a century since opium was forcibly imported into China by the imperialists. Due to the reactionary rule and the decadent lifestyle of the feudal bureaucrats, com­pra­dors and warlords, not only was opium not suppressed, but we were forced to cultivate it; especially due to the Japanese systematically carrying out a plot to poison China during their aggression, countless people’s lives and prop­erty have been lost. Now that the people have been liber­ated, the following methods of opium and other narcotic suppression are specifically stipulated to protect people’s health, to cure addiction, and to accelerate production.

Opium smokers joke around and pose in their “den” in Shanghai, in 1898. Photo: Getty Images

Chinese anti-drug rhetoric was wrapped up in the larger revolutionary cause – to be against opium was to be against foreign imperialism and capitalist decadence. The post-revolution movement targeting “capitalist vices” included rounding up and executing thousands of drug dealers and forcing addicts to choose between treatment or imprison­ment. In 1952 alone, the crackdown generated 82,000 arrests, 35,000 prison sentences and 880 public executions. The Central Committee told local authorities that “it is easier to get people’s sympathy by killing drug offenders than killing counter-revolutionaries. So at least 2 per cent of those arrested should be killed”.

By 1953, China’s post-revolution exit from the opium trade prompted a fundamental reconfiguration of the political economy of narcotics in the region. Major traffickers, including the Shanghai underworld leadership, fled the country, with many of them relocating to Hong Kong – master chemists who would turn the colony into the world’s leading high-grade heroin laboratory.

Opium production also shifted. Along with Nationalist forces, opium cultivation was pushed south – out of China and into remote borderland areas of Burma, Laos and Thailand, which would later be called the Golden Triangle. An area that until the 1950s produced only modest amounts of opium would in the next decade become the world’s single largest supplier of the drug. By the end of that decade, it would produce about 700 tonnes of raw opium annually – about half of the world’s supply.

The rugged, isolated hills and mountains of northern mainland Southeast Asia were already populated by tribes with knowledge of opium production, including the Hmong, who had fled southern China a century earlier after rebelling against Chinese rule. The terrain, located far from the reach of central government authorities, was ideal for an expansion of opium poppy cultivation. Secretly backed by the US’ Central Intelligence Agency starting in the early 1950s, the retreating Chinese Nationalists, already adept at using dope money to fund their military cause, now turned again to opium to carry out their anti-com­munist military operations along the southwestern Chinese border.

To fight you must have an army and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opiumGeneral Tuan Shi-wen, Nationalist commander

These rebel remnants of the Kuomintang, operating in exile in Burma’s Shan State, not only received clandes­tine mili­tary supplies from the CIA-owned Civil Air Transport (later renamed Air America) but also used this politically protect­ed fleet of small aircraft as a cover for drug shipments. The force soon swelled to a 12,000-strong guerilla army, the leaders of which served as de facto rulers over the area – an area that happened to be Burma’s main source of opium. The strategic importance of opium was not difficult to understand. “To fight you must have an army,” said General Tuan Shi-wen, a veteran Nation­alist commander in Burma, “and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opium.

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While the Chinese Nationalists failed to realise their dream of retaking China – their multiple invasions of Yunnan province were easily driven back by the Red Army – they succeeded in turning the Golden Triangle into the world’s largest opium-poppy-growing area by the early 1960s. In 1960-61, Chinese and Burmese military cam­paigns drove many of the exiles to neighbouring Laos and Thailand, and from there, they continued to move opium out of the Shan State via mule caravans, controlling nearly one-third of world opium supplies by the early 1970s.

They also enabled the emergence of local opium warlords, most notably Khun Sa, who would use his own private army to dominate much of the trade in later years. Military rulers in neighbouring Thailand also facilitated and profited from the opium boom, with Bangkok providing not only a consumer base but also serving as a regional distribution centre and outlet to the rest of the world

Having occupied Shan State during World War II, Thai leaders had already built close ties to local warlords and the Kuomintang across the border. So when the war came to an end, the Thai government already had the requisite relations to engage in the opium business, which it would use to help bankroll its armed forces.

After taking power in an opium-financed coup in 1947, the country’s military rulers and subsequent military regimes financed themselves through the opium trade. General Phao Sriyanond, the head of the CIA-trained and -supplied national police force, was also the de facto head of the opium trade, and helped to create and protect the Kuomintang’s Burma-Bangkok opium-smuggling route. According to historian Alfred McCoy, by the mid-1950s, Phao’s police had become the biggest opium-trafficking organisation in the country. The CIA provided Phao with the vehicles used to transport his dope from field to port.

An undated picture of an opium den in IndoChina. Photo: Getty Images

The CIA became more deeply entangled in the region’s drug trade after the French military defeat in Indochina in 1954. Colluding with Corsican traffickers who shipped opium from Indochina to Marseille, the French intelligence service had used opium funds to covertly pay local hill tribe leaders and warlords as part of its counter-insurgency cam­paign. Earlier, French colonial administrators had run an opium monopoly, with some 2,500 opium dens and retail shops serving more than 100,000 consumers in Indochina by the start of World War II.

The French monopoly was closely associated with colonial rule, and it was therefore a favourite target of nationalist anticolonial voices. Ho Chi Minh effectively exploited popular resentment against the French opium monopoly in his propaganda. To compensate for the cutting off of foreign opium supplies and opium revenue during World War II, the French encouraged the Hmong hill tribes of Laos and the Tonkin people of northwest Indochina to boost opium poppy cultivation, offering them political support in exchange for their cooperation. Production shot up 800 per cent, from fewer than eight tonnes in 1940 to more than 60 tonnes in 1944.

When French colonial administrators formally ended their opium monopoly after the war, French military intelligence informally took it over to finance their covert campaign in the first Indochina War of 1946-1954. This secret revenue stream from what came to be known as “Operation X” was especially needed after the French Assembly cut back its funding in the midst of dwindling public support at home for an unpopular distant military campaign. Opium funding helped the French slow down Viet Minh advances even if it ultimately failed to revive a dying empire and change the outcome of the war.

When the French withdrew after their defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the CIA simply stepped in and took their place, building on the inherited opium trade relation­ships and infrastructure. This included supporting the same Hmong-based secret army in Laos headed by General Vang Pao, whose soldiers provided intelligence and battled Laotian communists near the North Vietnam­ese border. In exchange the CIA helped ship their opium out of the remote and difficult-to-access region. The covert war in Laos required only a handful of CIA advisers, with the cost of supporting 30,000 Hmong troops (and a tribe of 250,000 to replenish battlefield losses with new recruits) cushioned by opium sales.

The battle at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, precipitated the collapse of French colonial rule in Indochina. Photo: Getty Images

Senior US officials back at the CIA’s Washington head­quarters were not inclined to pay too much attention as long as Hmong loyalty was secured and the operation was producing results. As American intervention escalated and the war in Vietnam dragged on, CIA-backed anti-commu­nist allies in the region increasingly profited from opium and its derivatives, with the Cold War context providing the necessary political cover. As McCoy documents in detail in his classic book The Politics of Heroin (1972), the CIA was complicit not through corruption or direct involvement, but rather through what he describes as a radical prag­matism that tolerated and even facilitated drug trafficking by local allies when it served larger Cold War goals.

By 1970, more than two-thirds of the world’s opium came from the Golden Triangle, and the region would retain this status of top producer until the end of the Cold War. The region’s drug trade received an additional boost from the presence of American GIs, who in the early 1970s developed a serious heroin habit.


With the help of master chemists brought in from Hong Kong, by the late 60s Golden Triangle laboratories were for the first time produc­ing fine-grain No 4 heroin (the classification for drugs of 80 to 99 per cent purity). Previously, production had mostly been confined to refined opium or the lower quality No 3 heroin (20 to 40 per cent purity). Politically protected traffickers, including senior Laotian and Vietnamese military officials, supplied the American troops in Vietnam, who numbered half a million at the peak of the conflict. Some of these soldiers in turn helped to smuggle thousands of kilos into the US through conveyances ranging from GI care packages to body bags.

Most of the heroin was flown from the remote reaches of the Golden Triangle into Vietnam on Lao and South Vietnamese military aircraft, overseen by corrupt senior officials. Later, the head of the Vietnamese navy, General Dang Van Quang, would use his fleet to ship heroin from Cambodia. It was easy to reach consumers. As historian Martin Booth notes, “Heroin was available at roadside stalls on every highway out of Saigon, and on the route to the main US military base at Long Binh, as well as from itinerant peddlers, newspaper and ice-cream vendors, restaurant owners, brothel keepers and their whores and domestic servants employed on US bases. No barracks was without a resident dealer.”

Most soldiers preferred to smoke rather than inject the drug, a method of ingestion made possible by high purity levels. In mid 1971, US Army medical officers estimated that some 10 to 15 per cent of the deployed rank-and-file troops were heroin addicts. In 1973, the Pentagon estimated that one-third of American servicemen in Vietnam used heroin.

American troops arrive in Vietnam, in 1965. Photo: Getty Images

Following earlier patterns in Southeast Asia, Washington looked the other way when CIA-backed Afghan insurgents battling the Soviets in the 1980s cultivated and smuggled opium to help fund their cause. In the CIA’s biggest covert operation since Vietnam, the opium trade was once again one of the biggest winners. As McCoy summarises, “To fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA, working through Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelli­gence, backed Afghan warlords who used the agency’s arms, logistics and protection to become major drug lords.”


US officials were apparently well aware of the situation but turned a blind eye in pursuit of larger geopolitical goals. “We’re not going to let a little thing like drugs get in the way of the political situation,” explained a Reagan admini­stration official at the time. “And when the Soviets leave and there’s no money in the country, it’s not going to be a priority to disrupt the drug trade.” When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, opium cultivation was a marginal activity compared with later years.

Opium had long been present in what came to be known as the Golden Crescent – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, had written about using opium when he sacked Kabul in 1504, and the drug was being consumed socially across the region by the mid-16th century. But until the late 1970s the market was mostly self-contained, supplying local and regional customers and largely disconnected from the global heroin trade. All this changed thanks to the war-ravaged years of the 1980s and beyond, with Afghanistan eventually coming to dominate world opium production.

The Soviet Union’s scorched-earth strategy in the Afghan countryside, designed to starve the mujahideen resistance and force rural populations into more easily controllable urban centres, destroyed much of the infra­structure for food production. In addition to creating millions of refugees who fled to neighbouring Pakistan and Iran, an unintended consequence of this strategy was to push the local population to grow opium to survive.

Compared with many other crops, the hardy opium poppy could adapt to varied terrain and required little irrigation and fertilisation. Opium production increased by more than twofold between 1984 and 1985 – from an estimated 140 tonnes to 400 – and then doubled again the next year. By 1987, overall agricultural production was only one-third of 1978 levels, but opium cultivation had boomed. Mujahideen commanders became increasingly enmeshed in the opium trade.

Opium harvest in Burma in March 1982. Picture: Getty Images

This involvement ranged from taxing and protecting crops to imposing road tolls on traders at checkpoints to smuggling opium out of the country through the same channels used to smuggle in arms supplied by the CIA and Pakistan’s Directorate of InterServices Intelligence (ISI). Indeed, a fleet of trucks belonging to the Pakistani army’s National Logistics Cell was allegedly used to move CIA-provided arms into the country and then move opium and heroin out on the return trip. ISI documents assured those involved that the trucks would not be searched and seized by Pakistani police.

By 1988, there were as many as 200 heroin laboratories in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province’s Khyber district alone. The heroin was not only exported to Europe and elsewhere but fed Pakistan’s rapidly growing demand – a country that in the late 1970s did not have a serious heroin abuse problem soon had one of the largest addict popula­tions in the world, skyrocketing from about 5,000 in 1980 to more than 1.3 million in the middle of the decade.

Immediate military necessity overcame whatever religious qualms mujahideen leaders may have had about supporting the drug trade. “How else can we get money?” asked Mohammed Rasul, brother of the Helmand province warlord Mullah Nasim Akhundzada. “We must grow and sell opium to fight our holy war against the Russian non­believers.” The Akhundzada family not only taxed opium crops but set up a system of production quotas and loans to farmers to induce them to grow opium poppies. Some mujahideen became directly involved in morphine and heroin manufacturing along the Pakistani border. They included Akhundzada’s main rival, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an ISI protégé from the fundamentalist Hizb-i-Islami Party who received more than half of all CIA assistance to the anti-Soviet resistance.

“All the big traffickers in those days tended to be from Hizb-i-Islami and that was principally because Hekmatyar was a border person,” recalled Edmund McWilliams, a special envoy to the resistance between 1988 and 1989. “He was very much operating along the border because he was so dependent on Pakistani support.”

With CIA and Pakistani intelligence backing, Hekmatyar built up his small guerilla force into the largest Afghan resistance army. He simultaneously became the country’s most important drug trafficker, controlling half a dozen heroin laboratories in the Koh-i-Soltan district of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, where opium brought in from Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley was processed. American officials at the time preferred to look the other way because it was simply too politically inconvenient to do otherwise. “You have to put yourself in the mindset of the period,” McWilliams said. “Raising issues like Hekmatyar and the ISI’s involvement in the drug trade was on no one’s agenda.”

You have to put yourself in the mindset of the period. Raising issues like Hekmatyar and the ISI’s involvement in the drug trade was on no one’s agendaEdmund McWilliams, diplomat

In 1990, after the Soviets were gone and Afghanistan had lost its strategic importance, The Washington Post ran a front-page story detailing Hekmatyar’s heroin operations and reported that US diplomats had “received but declined to investigate” on-the-ground accounts that Afghan fighters and Pakistani intelligence agents were “protect[ing] and participat[ing]” in the heroin trade. The article indicated that the US had turned a blind eye “because of its desire not to offend a strategic ally, Pakistan’s military establishment”.

“One of my great frustrations at the time was that the CIA would not give us information on narcotics,” said former US ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley. “My belief was then and still is that they wanted to protect their contacts in Pakistani intelligence.” Afghan dependence on the opium trade only deepened as the Soviet Union with­drew in early 1989. Agricultural recovery in the countryside was most evident in the drug trade: “Much of this renewed production took the form of opium growing, heroin refining and smuggling; these enterprises were organised by combines of mujahideen parties, Pakistani military officers and Pakistani drug syndicates,” wrote prominent Afghan expert Barnett Rubin.

The labour-intensive opium business found easy recruits among the millions of desperate Afghan refugees repatriated from Pakistan. With US assistance drying up, the countryside devastated by a brutal decade-long counter-insurgency campaign, and no effective govern­ment authority, Afghanistan descended into civil war in the early 1990s. The Soviet-supported government of Mohammad Najibullah, which was never able to exercise much control beyond Kabul or win support beyond its own ethnic base in the northeast, fell in April 1992.

Replaying some of the dynamics of China’s early-20th century warlord era of extreme political fragmentation, former mujahideen commanders brutally competed with each other over terri­tory, especially the best opium land – except in this case, the market for the drug was external rather than internal, and there was no pretence of opium suppression. Mullah Nasim Akhundzada, for instance, oversaw most of the 250 tonnes of opium grown in the fertile Helmand Valley and was nicknamed the “King of Heroin”. He imposed an opium quota and insisted that peasant growers devote half of their land holdings to the cultivation of the opium poppy.

His competition with rival leader Hekmatyar intensified, and in April 1990 Nasim was gunned down by Hekmatyar-allied troops. He was replaced by his brother, Mohammed Rasul, who maintained the family’s grip on much of the Helmand Valley. These former mujahideen factions, more preoccupied with fighting each other over control of the opium economy and building up their own personal fiefdoms than in uniting and governing the country, ultimately proved no match for the Taliban, a Pakistan-backed ultraconservative movement originating in the Islamic academies (madrasas) of the Afghan-Pakistani frontier region.

Afghan anti-Taliban fighters in eastern Afghanistan, in 2001. Photo: AFP

Opium contributed to the Taliban’s rapid rise to power out of the chaos and violent predation of the early 1990s. In its campaign to pacify the country and impose an extreme interpretation of Islam, the Taliban initially sought to ban opium cultivation on religious grounds. But faced with intense popular resistance rooted in the livelihood the poppy provided to so many, the group reversed course and came to not only tolerate but promote the opium economy.

It banned the consumption of opiates, as well as alcohol and other drugs, but allowed the production and trading of opium. This generated not only revenue for the Taliban cause but, perhaps most importantly, much-needed popular support, given how important the opium economy was to local sustenance. Before capturing Kabul, the Taliban systematically conquered key opium-growing areas, including Kandahar and Helmand in the south in 1994 (the source of 56 per cent of the country’s opium), Herat in 1995, and Jalalabad and the eastern opium-growing region in 1996 (the source of 39 per cent of the country’s opium).


The Taliban’s primary rival, the Northern Alliance, was also involved in the opium trade (as well as other illicit trades, especially the smuggling of gemstones) but was disadvantaged by the fact that areas under its control represented only a small percentage of the country’s overall cultivation. Once in power, the Taliban regime not only continued to allow the cultivation of the opium poppy – and continued to systematically tax it (collecting a 10 per cent tax from farmers at the point of production and a 20 per cent tax on truckloads of opium at the point of export) – but provided some semblance of stability for the illicit trade to greatly expand.

While failing to provide some of the basic services of a full fledged state, the Taliban was able to impose its authority over most of the country’s roads, urban centres, airports and customs posts, and this modicum of security and stability benefited cross-border traders, including opium exporters.

By the end of the decade, Afghanistan had become the source of three-quarters of the world’s supply of opium, with areas under Taliban control in the south and east producing virtually all of the country’s poppy crop. Such flagrant support for the booming opium trade contributed to the Taliban’s growing international pariah status and reputation as a “narcostate”. And opium in turn helped to sustain a defiant Taliban in the face of growing internation­al isolation. Few countries recognised it as Afghanistan’s legitimate government. But it was the Taliban’s hospitality toward terrorists, not drug traffickers, that would ulti­mately bring it down – and it was opium that would help build it back up.

Afghan children sit along the edge of a poppy field in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan. Photo: AP

The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 in retalia­tion for the
September 11 terrorist attacks. The target was not only those responsible for bringing down the Twin Towers – Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda – but their hosts and protectors, the Taliban regime. While the US dropped bombs from the air, it paid a coalition of local warlords to lead the ground attack. This coalition, funded by the CIA, included both a group of Pashtun warlords near the Pakistani border and the Northern Alliance, a Tajik army with experience fighting the Soviets in the 1980s and the Taliban during the next decade. Both controlled opium-smuggling routes in their respective territories. In other words, following the old Cold War pattern, the US was once again more than willing to work with drug traffickers when it served larger strategic goals.

The Taliban collap­sed and scattered into the countryside while bin Laden disappeared into the jagged Tora Bora Mountains. Although the Taliban had implemented a sweeping opium ban during its final year in power – apparently to try to win international recog­nition and respect, but also perhaps to drive up drug prices and benefit from stockpiled heroin – opium produc­tion made a dramatic comeback in the aftermath of the invasion, making up an estimated 62 per cent of Afghani­stan’s gross domestic product in 2003. By the end of 2004, it was not only the drug trade but also the Taliban that was resurgent, and the two would become increasingly intertwined.

US officials initially paid little attention to the revival of the drug trade in Afghanistan but eventually came to push for an aggressive eradication campaign in the countryside. But by this time, opium cultivation was as entrenched in the rural economy as ever, and suppression efforts had the per­verse and unintended consequence of driving the dis­grunt­led local population right into the hands of the Taliban. Thus, the inescapable conundrum facing the US and its allies was not only that opium was funding the guerillas, but going after opium was creating new guerilla recruits.

By 2007, opium production had reached record levels, with the United Nations estimating that Afghanistan was the source of 93 per cent of the world’s illicit heroin supply. The UN also noted that the Taliban insurgents had “started to extract from the drug economy resources for arms, logistics, and militia pay”. In 2008 alone, “taxes” on the opium trade reportedly generated US$425 million for the Taliban.

To make matters worse, the US also found itself backing an extraordinarily corrupt government in Kabul, one that also had deep ties to drug trafficking. As had been the case during the Cold War, a pragmatic calculus meant Washington was willing to overlook such ties and perhaps even take advantage of them. For instance, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the new Afghan president, was widely suspected of ties to the heroin trade before he was assassi­nated, but he was also allegedly on the CIA payroll.

Commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan Scott Miller (right) with Afghanistan's acting defence minister Asadullah Khalid (centre), in 2019. Photo: AFP

The US also turned a blind eye to the appointment of Asadullah Khalid as the Afghani director of the National Directorate of Security. Khalid was a former governor of Kandahar and was widely accused of “abuses of power”, including murder, torture and drug trafficking. The US and its allies did not act on these allegations because, as Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on international organised crime, puts it, “whatever his accountability deficiencies, Khalid had a proven record of being tough on the Taliban”.

At the same time, the US faced blowback from its earlier backing of drug-dealing allies. This was embarrassingly evident in the case of the Haqqani network in Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose criminal activities included drug smuggling. This network had enjoyed covert CIA support while fighting Soviet forces in the 1980s, but in 2011 it was responsible for orchestrating a bold day-long attack on the American embassy in Kabul and was described as the most dangerous security threat to US forces in Afghanistan.

As one press report put it, in the 1980s the network had been supplied with US missiles; now it was the target of CIA missiles. Texas representative Charlie Wilson, whose support for the mujahideen was the subject of the film Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), had even described the elder Haqqani leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, as “goodness personified”.

Fifteen years after the US invasion of Afghanistan – with Washington having spent more than US$1 trillion and counting on military operations – the war had no end in sight. The Taliban’s control over the drug trade continued to grow, expanding to cover much of Helmand province, the heart of poppy cultivation in southern Afghanistan. But even in those Helmand districts where the government remained in charge, opium not only grew openly near mili­tary and police stations but was taxed by the local author­ities.

Despite the US spending billions of dollars on anti-drug efforts and billions more to curb corruption, local government officials had become so complicit in the drug trade that they were now apparently competing with the Taliban to profit from it. While the central government in Kabul repeatedly declared its commitment to fighting drugs and corruption, the reality on the ground in Helmand, as reported in The New York Times, was “a local narcostate administered directly by government authorities”.

Even though most of the drug profits may have stayed in the hands of local officials, payoffs reached up to the regional and national levels. Those complicit included key regional security and law enforcement commanders with ties to US military and intelligence officials. “Over the years, I have seen the central government, the local government and the foreigners all talk very seriously about poppy,” observed Hakim Angar, a former head of police in Helmand province. “In practice, they do nothing, and behind the scenes, the government makes secret deals to enrich themselves.”

The centuries-old relationship between opium and war has been first and foremost about generating revenue, whether to fund imperial expansion, prop up warlord ambitions or pay for insurgency and counter-insurgency campaigns. The shifting legal status of the drug, including its worldwide criminalisation in the 20th century, brought with it a more covert role as a funder of war. Consequently, the business of war and the business of crime became much more intertwined.

Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs, by Peter Andreas, is published by Oxford University Press.

Xi Jinping, Winnie the Pooh and the Canadian origins of the bear that’s banned in ChinaXi Jinping

Comparisons between the beloved character and the Chinese president might have gone viral, but few are aware that Winnie’s story began in Canada during World War I

Patrick Blennerhassett
Published: 30 Dec, 2019

While most are now familiar with satirical comparisons of Chinese President Xi Jinping and popular children’s cartoon character Winnie the Pooh, fewer may know that the lovable bear’s origins lead all the way to a heartland Canadian city during the first world war.
Now, for the first time since “

Xi the Pooh” took root in 2013 – leading to Winnie’s likeness being banned in China, whether as a stuffed toy, paper mask or social-media sticker – the author of two books on the bear’s history, and great-granddaughter of Winnie’s original owner, has spoken about the bear’s enduring worldwide popularity (except, you know, in that one place).

“It is so outrageous and absurd,” says Canadian Lindsay Mattick, whose award-winning children’s books are still available in China despite the controversy. “To ban something like Winnie the Pooh, one of the most loving, peaceful and happy stories of all time, is really quite sad.”

Lindsay Mattick, the great-granddaughter of Harry Colebourn, Winnie’s original owner, and author of the book Finding Winnie. Photo: Lindsay Mattick

In 1914, a trainload of military men pulled into White River, Ontario, on their way to training in Quebec before heading to the war in Europe. During the brief stop, a 27-year-old Canadian soldier, Harry Colebourn, originally from England, made a purchase from a trapper: a black bear cub.

The trapper had killed the mother but said he could not do the same to its cub. Smitten, Colebourn handed over some cash and dubbed the female cub Winnie, after his adopted hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Colebourn took Winnie to England, where she became the regimental mascot of the Canadian Army Veterinary Corps before, realising the severity of the fighting, he reluctantly gave her to London Zoo. Winnie went on to become a star attraction, catching the eye of a little boy called Christopher Robin Milne, who renamed his teddy bear Winnie in her honour.

His bear and other toy animals would inspire his father, author A.A. Milne, in 1926 to create Winnie-the-Pooh (“Pooh” was Christopher Robin’s name for a swan), one of the world’s most beloved children’s characters, appearing in four books and, half a century later, in Walt Disney’s world-famous animation

Mattick discovered her great-grandfather’s connection to the stories as a child, while reading his diary with her family. In 2015 she published the children’s picture book Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear, winner of the Caldecott Medal in 2016. The book tells the story of Winnie and Harry and then Winnie and Christopher Robin. (Her second book, Winnie’s Great War, was published in 2018.)


“She was at the London Zoo for 20 years,” Mattick says. “She had a very friendly, docile nature, which is not the norm for a bear. But I would like to think that she got off on the right foot with my great-grandfather, who really loved animals and cared for her.”

The cartoon version of Winnie the Pooh first appeared in 1977, in Disney’s The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, about the lovable bear and his animal friends – Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, Rabbit and Tigger.

For the next few decades, Winnie the Pooh and his cohort were universally beloved. Then in 2013, Mattick, who runs her own public relations company in Toronto, caught wind of a bizarre case of anti-Winnie-ism. A photo had surfaced online of Xi and United States president Barack Obama next to a picture of similarly positioned cartoon characters, likening Obama to Tigger and Xi to Winnie the Pooh.

The Reuters image of Chinese President Xi Jinping with then US President Barack Obama next to a picture of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger that went viral on Weibo in 2013. Photo: Xinhua

The Reuters photo of the two leaders was taken during a summit in Sunnylands, California, but the source of the split shot is unknown. It soon went viral on Weibo, China’s ersatz answer to Twitter. Pictures were quickly deleted by censors, who apparently did not appreciate the comparison of the Chinese president to a bashful, hapless, chubby yellow bear.

When Mattick heard the news, she had a tough time wrapping her head around it. She did not do any media interviews, but she did receive a lot of messages from friends and family about the rather odd news that the leader of a country could be so thin-skinned as to think Winnie the Pooh posed a threat.

China’s Winnie the Pooh ban has since extended to the release of
Christopher Robin , a 2018 film starring Ewan McGregor as the boy who fell in love with Winnie. While censoring the image in China is one aspect of the story, it has given the meme a life outside the mainland. Internet users continue to link images of Xi to Winnie the Pooh, including one in 2014 with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe filling in as Pooh’s melancholy donkey pal, Eeyore.

Of course, this is not the only thing the Chinese government has deemed unsuitable for its citizens. A long list of entertainment-related images, books, memes and shows have been banned over the years, the latest being the satirical US cartoon

South Park, after a recent episode took a dig at China.

The image of Eeyore and Winnie the Pooh that proliferated after comparisons were drawn between Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Xi and the two cartoon characters. Photo: Reuters

Vancouver-based University of British Columbia professor Florian Gassner, who specialises in the role of censorship in society, says Beijing’s actions have had both intended and unintended consequences. He says it is important to remember the target of this ban is internal, not external.

“And we should probably not forget that a lot of citizens in China support the Communist Party,” Gassner says. “When they see their government strike something down like this, it could be interpreted as the system working.”

It’s a trend Gassner has been seeing in authoritative countries where censorship has been taken to a new level, from India’s online troll armies to Russia’s state media. “The part that fascinates me is that governments are not capitulating, they are doubling down, doing their best to get all of this under control,” he says.

Mattick, who has held exhibitions about Winnie’s origins, says she hopes families in China can still enjoy the stories the bear has inspired, given their positive messages.

“I hope the Chinese population has the chance to not only read about the story but feel good about the story and feel proud about sharing it with their children without feeling like they are doing something subversive,” she says. “I feel sad that this particular chain of events has led to such a mixed perception that doesn’t seem in any way keeping with the spirit of the books and the stories.”




Patrick Blennerhassett is an award-winning Canadian journalist and four-time published author. He is a Jack Webster Fellowship winner and a British Columbia bestselling novelist. His work has been published in The Guardian, Reader's Digest, The Globe & Mail, Business Insider, MSN and his commentary has appeared on the BBC and the CBC.

Sanders & Socialism: Debate Between Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman & Socialist Economist Richard Wolff

As Bernie Sanders’s runaway win in Nevada cements his position as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, the Democratic Party establishment and much of the mainstream media are openly expressing concern about a self-described democratic socialist leading the presidential ticket. His opponents have also attacked his ambitious agenda. Last week during the primary debate in Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders addressed misconceptions about socialism. Invoking the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Sanders decried what he called “socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”

For more, we host a debate on Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism, featuring two well-known economists. Paul Krugman is a New York Times op-ed columnist and author of many books, including his latest, “Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future.” One of his recent columns is headlined “Bernie Sanders Isn’t a Socialist.” Richard Wolff is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and visiting professor at The New School. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and hosts the weekly national television and radio program “Economic Update.” He’s the author of several books, including “Understanding Socialism.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at Senator Bernie Sanders’ runaway victory in Nevada, which cemented his position as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. As Sanders’ bid for the Democratic nomination looks more and more likely, the Democratic Party establishment and much of the mainstream media are openly expressing concern about a self-described democratic socialist leading the presidential ticket. His opponents, including former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, are also on the attack.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Senator Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans.

JOE BIDEN: I ain’t a socialist. I ain’t a plutocrat. I’m a Democrat.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Joe Biden and, before that, Pete Buttigieg. They were speaking on Saturday night after the results from the Nevada caucuses rolled in. Well, last week, during the primary debate in Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders addressed misconceptions about socialism.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Let’s talk about democratic socialism. Let’s talk about what goes on in countries like Denmark, where, Pete correctly pointed out, they have a much higher quality of life in many respects than we do. What are we talking about? We are living, in many ways, in a socialist society right now. Problem is, as Dr. Martin Luther King reminded us, we have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: Wait a second.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: When Donald — let me finish. When Donald Trump gets $800 million in tax breaks and subsidies to build luxury condominiums, that’s socialism for the rich. When Walmart —

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: Wait a second.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: We have to subsidize Walmart’s workers, who are on Medicaid and food stamps, because the wealthiest family in America pays starvation wages. That’s socialism for the rich.

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: Business —

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: I believe in democratic socialism for working people —

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: OK, no.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: — not billionaires — healthcare for all, educational opportunity for all.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Bernie Sanders.

For more, we host a debate on Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism. With us in our New York studio is the Nobel Prize-winning economist, the op-ed columnist for The New York Times, Paul Krugman. His latest book is just out. It’s called Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future. One of his recent columns is headlined “Bernie Sanders Isn’t a Socialist.” Also with us in studio is Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, visiting professor at The New School here in New York. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and hosts a weekly national TV and radio program called Economic Update. Among his books, his latest is called Understanding Socialism.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Well, what do you make of what is happening right now, Paul Krugman, with Bernie Sanders so far the clear front-runner — 

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — but moving into South Carolina, and why that headline, “Bernie Sanders Is Not a Socialist,” what you were getting at?

PAUL KRUGMAN: OK. I mean, Bernie says he loves Denmark. I love Denmark. I think Denmark is an illustration of how decent a society can be. The Danes don’t think that they’re socialists. They think that they’re social democrats. They don’t use the word “socialist.” And it isn’t socialism as we’ve always used to understand it. It’s not government ownership of the means of production. It’s not seizing the commanding heights of the economy. It’s a really strong social safety net and a strong labor movement, all of which I support.

In Arguing with Zombies, I have a whole chapter called “Eek! Socialism!” which is about the Republican habit of playing three-card monte. You say that you’re for universal healthcare; they say, “That’s socialist.” You say you’re for universal child care; they say, “Think about how many people Stalin killed.” You know, it’s this crazy stuff. So, why use the word? Why describe yourself? I think it’s kind of self-indulgent to call yourself a socialist and give the Republicans unnecessary ammunition. I think, probably, we’re for the same — I’m for the same kinds of policies. I’m for universal healthcare, universal child care, all of these things. Why buy into the Republican effort to make this sound like something Stalin would do?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, he calls himself a democratic socialist, is that right?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, that’s cutting it way too fine. Why use the word?

AMY GOODMAN: Let me turn to a clip from the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas last week. First we hear from Bernie Sanders, then Mike Bloomberg.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: What we need to do to deal with this grotesque level of income and wealth inequality is make sure that those people who are working — you know what, Mr. Bloomberg? It wasn’t you who made all that money; maybe your workers played some role in that, as well. And it is important that those workers are able to share the benefits also. When we have so many people who go to work every day and they feel not good about their jobs, they feel like cogs in a machine. I want workers to be able to sit on corporate boards, as well, so they can have some say over what happens to their lives.

HALLIE JACKSON: Mayor Bloomberg, you own a large company. Would you support what Senator Sanders is proposing?

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: Absolutely not. I can’t think of a ways that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get re-elected than listening to this conversation. This is ridiculous. We’re not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism, and it just didn’t work.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there was Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, going after Bernie Sanders. Richard Wolff, you describe yourself as a socialist economist. Respond to what both Paul Krugman says and what Bloomberg is saying here.

RICHARD WOLFF: Sure. There is no agency, neither public nor private, that defines what a socialist is. If you follow the socialist movement for the last 150 years, you would discover that it has been a contested terrain from day one. There were different interpretations and different meanings. Bernie Sanders is perfectly in line with one of the traditions of what socialism is. It’s the government having a big role in offsetting some of the awful qualities of capitalism. But we also know that the kind of control that the government tries to operate is very difficult for it to succeed with. We once had a New Deal in this country. We lost most of it because we didn’t go beyond a government intervention to change the society.

What Bernie Sanders represents is an awareness that it’s time to have a conversation we should have had for 75 years about our capitalist system and whether we can do better. This is now a changed environment in which what was taboo in this country isn’t anymore. And Bernie has already achieved the breaking of a taboo in this country to talk about socialism, its strengths and weaknesses, its different interpretations, and compare them to capitalism, rather than running away because nasty conservatives call us various names. That’s not a profound reason. And for the young people of this country, it doesn’t carry much weight anyway. So I welcome the opening that Bernie achieves, that we can talk about socialism, its different interpretations and why we ought to explore them a lot more than we’ve been able to under the taboo of the last 75 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Krugman?

PAUL KRUGMAN: I actually agree that a lot of young people have reacted. I mean, we have a 60-year-long campaign of equating any attempt to make American lives better with socialism, and a fair number of young people have said, “Well, in that case, I’m a socialist.” The trouble is, you’re not going to win this election without a fair number of old people, too. And it just seems to me, again, it’s self-indulgent to go down this route. I wish he wouldn’t. I mean, if Sanders is the nominee, then Democrats are going to have to get behind him, and people like me are going to end up writing lots of things saying, you know, “Don’t be scared. He, yes, uses the word 'socialist,' but he doesn’t actually mean what Republicans think — want you to think he means.” But who needed this, this extra thing? So, I’m not sure that this is — I’m not sure I quite see what the point is. I mean, it seems to me that there’s — to make the argument that says, “I want social justice. I want a strong government safety net. I want worker empowerment,” you can say all of those things without having to give ammunition to people who want to make you sound like Stalin. So, I mean, I’m going to be spending, I expect — I expect Sanders will probably be the nominee, and I expect to spend a lot of the next year saying, “Look, he’s really talking about Denmark, not Venezuela.” But I shouldn’t have to be doing that.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard?

RICHARD WOLFF: I’m proud to be part of the socialist tradition. And I understand Paul’s difficulty. He’s having to defend now a centrism that’s being rejected by a large number of people. The stunning reality is that the majority of young people, at least age 35 and under, no longer think that “socialism” is a bad word, and they are immune to that. And the young people are the future of this country, which the older people know, too. And they are being asked to question — the older ones, by the younger ones — why this taboo, why we couldn’t talk about socialism, why we can’t embrace a socialism. And on electability? My goodness, if we’ve seen anything in the last few years, we’ve seen the center, whether it’s in Europe or this country, falling away, disappearing — center-left, center-right — for the extremes on the right and now an extreme on the left. I don’t find that frightening. I understand people who are centrists do. But I welcome that we can have an honest debate in this country. And there’s much in the socialist tradition that is well worth keeping. There are lessons of what we should do, just like there are lessons of what we shouldn’t do, which is true for capitalism, as well. So, we’re opening things up. And I think when it comes to electability, we have as much to argue that this is the way forward as anyone on the other side.

PAUL KRUGMAN: By the way, I don’t think — I don’t think the people who send me hate mail think — and I am the king of hate mail — think that I’m a centrist. Right? I’m for universal healthcare. I’m for deficit spending on infrastructure. I’m for universal child care. If that’s centrism, then, you know, let’s have it. By that standard, Denmark is centrist, right?

AMY GOODMAN: I want to — before we go to issues like Medicare for All, I want to turn to MSNBC and what’s been happening over the weekend, a kind of meltdown on MSNBC around the issue of Bernie Sanders clearly looking like he’s the front-runner. And chief among those melting down appears to be MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who this weekend compared Senator Sanders’ Nevada victory to Nazi Germany’s takeover of France.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I’m reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940. And the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, “It’s over.” And Churchill says, “How can it be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?” He said, “It’s over.” So I had that suppressed feeling. I can’t be as wild as Carvill, but he is damn smart, and I think he’s damn right on this one.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Bernie Sanders’ communications director, Mike Casca, responded to Matthews’ comment on Twitter, saying, quote, “never thought part of my job would be pleading with a national news network to stop likening the campaign of a jewish presidential candidate whose family was wiped out by the nazis to the third reich. but here we are.” A number of people are now calling for Chris Matthews to resign. Paul Krugman?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yes. I mean, far be it for me to defend Chris Matthews, who I think has been a malign influence on a lot of our political discourse. I don’t think he was actually calling Sanders a Nazi. He was just thinking of, this is what it looks like when you’ve lost. But it was stupid. It was stupid, and it was insensitive. And it was characteristic. I mean, if — that’s what centrism sounds like, this notion that calling for universal healthcare or stuff is some kind of extreme position. And, no, I mean, this is — it’s telling you something about where Matthews’s head is at, and not something good. And unfortunately, I don’t think it’s unique. The fact of the matter is, there’s a lot of — I mean, Lloyd Blankfein saying, “Oh, I might have to vote for Trump, if Sanders is nominated.”

AMY GOODMAN: And explain the significance of who Lloyd Blankfein is.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs. And, you know, for God’s sake, yeah, Trump might — Sanders might raise your taxes. That is not an important consideration. American democracy is on the line. So, there are a lot of people out there who are — I’m not sure how many there are. There are a lot of influential people out there who are horrified by the prospect of a strongly progressive candidate. And that should be condemned. You know, I just wish he wouldn’t call himself a socialist.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Wolff?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I think politics is shifting, and the centrists are having to discover that they are centrists because the politics has moved to the left. That’s what Bernie has accomplished. That’s what the young people around him have accomplished. It may be awkward and uncomfortable for people who used to think of themselves as the left to discover they’re not, that there’s a movement to their left. But we’re very proud that that has returned as a kind of sanity of balance in our political discourse.

And so, I’m not surprised that people like Matthews overreact, because they’re being outflanked on the left. They weren’t ready for it. I remember, in 2016, talking to a high official of the Democratic Party, assuring me that Bernie Sanders would never get more than 1 or 2% of any vote, anywhere, ever. And they didn’t know, and they didn’t understand. And it’s a little bit like the old Bob Dylan song, you know, “Wake Up.” There’s things going on that you didn’t foresee and that are shifting the ground on which you stand. But I want to be clear that many of us welcome this.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Chris Matthews has been on a tear. He recently said, “I remember the Cold War. I have an attitude toward Fidel Castro.” He added, “I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War, there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering,” suggesting, as he was talking about Bernie Sanders, that Bernie Sanders would be responsible for his execution in Central Park.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah. For me, this is — all that I hear in all of this is an anguished fear that the politics is moving to the left. These are individuals who made a commitment long ago in their lives not to go to the left, even if they had sympathies there, to stay in the middle, because it was the safe, the wise thing for their future, for the country and for their careers. And that’s no longer the case. And they are outraged, and out come these kinds of comments.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, then come back to this discussion. We’re talking to two economists. Richard Wolff has a new book out. It’s called Understanding Socialism. And the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has a new book out. It’s called Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “All Your Questions Answered” by McCarthy. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our debate on Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism with Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, has a new book out called Arguing with Zombies, and Richard Wolff, emeritus professor of economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, visiting professor at The New School. His book is called Understanding Socialism.

So, Paul Krugman, I wanted to go to your — one of your columns that you just wrote, headlined “Bernie Sanders Isn’t the Left’s Trump,” where you write, “I’m more concerned about … the electability of someone who says he’s a socialist even though he isn’t and … if he does win, whether he’ll squander political capital on unwinnable fights like abolishing private health insurance.” Your stance on Medicare for All?

PAUL KRUGMAN: If I could do it, if I could wave a magic wand, or if I had a time machine and could somehow go back to 1947, when we almost — almost — got single-payer healthcare, I would do it in a moment. It’s not the only way to do it. One thing you learn if you study healthcare systems is every other advanced country has universal healthcare, they do it in different ways. Some of them have government provision. Some of them have regulated private healthcare. Some of them have single payer. Single payer is not the only solution, but it’s fine.

The trouble is, there’s 160 million people in America who have private health insurance. You’re saying to those people, “We’re going to replace what you have with something completely different. Trust us. It’ll be better.” It will probably be true: For most of them, it would be better. But that’s a huge political lift. You’re asking people to make a huge leap of faith, whereas we can in fact get to universal coverage through a more — through a public option, through something like Medicare for America, something that lets people buy into Medicare and subsidizes it, without having to waste their time.

And there are so many — you know, that’s not — having the absolute best healthcare system is not the only priority. If I had to say what is the most — biggest gap in America is that we’re not doing enough to help children. And I would like to get another couple percent of GDP spent on helping children in a variety of ways. And I think that the drive for Medicare for All will kill that possibility.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, when you look at the polls in New Hampshire and in Nevada about what people care most about, in both places it’s the same. Number one is healthcare. Number two is climate change. Number three, I think it’s inequality.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Number four, it’s foreign policy. And especially in Nevada, Richard Wolff, what’s interesting is you had a very powerful union, the culinary union, where they were offering excellent health insurance to their workers, and yet their workers overwhelmingly, the rank and file, bucked the leadership and said, “Even if we’re getting great healthcare, we have family members who are not, loved ones who are not. And ultimately, we want Medicare for All.” So, explain this discrepancy. Paul Krugman is saying it’s not realistic.

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I think, again, the politics in America have changed. I don’t think the mass of Americans want to hear the details about what you might get and how careful we should be and what step we should — they want change. They wanted it from Obama, who promised hope and change. They wanted it even from Mr. Trump, who promised a change. We didn’t get the changes that they promised, neither the one nor the other. And so people now want something that will solve their problem, will not respect the old, centrist “Let’s go carefully, let’s do this, let’s not push too hard.” They want the opposite.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how do you get to Medicare for All immediately, or more rapidly than what Paul Krugman is suggesting can be done?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I agree with Paul, which surprises probably both of us. But the point is, there are plenty of models out there of countries that have, in a variety of ways, answered the basic human demand: “I want to be careful. I want to know that when I’m born and until I die, if something happens to me in the way of illness or injury, I am taken care of. Like I want a public park and I want public schools, I want public healthcare.” And they don’t want the details and the hesitance. They want that. And any of them would be a perfectly good basis.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s always interested me how people look to other countries to say what would be models, when we have the model right here at home. We have Medicare, one of the most of popular programs in this country.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, by all means.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Oh, yeah. We have socialized medicine for everybody over 65, and — although it’s interesting. If you look at it, we also do have private insurance. We have not abolished private supplemental insurance for older people in America. So, it is, in a way, a bit of a compromise system. The actually existing Medicare that we have for older Americans is not as radical as the Medicare that Bernie Sanders is proposing for everyone.

But look, yeah, the United States contains multitudes. We have pure socialized medicine. The Veterans Health Administration is actual government provision of healthcare, and it works. We have regulated private markets and Obamacare. I mean, people trash Obama a lot, but, you know, given the constraints he was under, he got 20 million people health insurance who didn’t have it before. I personally know people whose lives were saved by Obamacare. So let’s not dismiss it as nothing. And we have single payer. But, you know, that, in a way, is telling you that there are many ways to achieve it. And we should look at — every other country does it for everybody. The problem is, we have a safety net that’s got huge holes in it.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, this Yale study just came out in the medical journal Lancet. It said Medicare for All would save the U.S. $450 billion and prevent nearly 70,000 deaths a year. You have Bernie Sanders recently saying that he wants people in the movement to say, “I’m willing to fight for someone I don’t know.”

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I mean, I could match Paul’s argument in his little model of somebody whose life was saved by introducing him to people whose life was lost, or at least their relatives, because they didn’t have the coverage that Mr. Obama was unable to get.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Right.

RICHARD WOLFF: And for someone who kept saying, “I could do more, if only I had a groundswell of support,” we do have to remember that when that groundswell developed, called Occupy Wall Street, Mr. Obama wiped it out with his bulldozers in Zuccotti Park and everywhere else, undercutting the very groundswell he had earlier used as an excuse for not doing more.

But my response is, whether it’s healthcare or a decent college education for Americans that does not saddle them with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, the demand is now out there, and that’s what’s fueling Mr. Bernie Sanders’ support. They don’t want the middling bit, old, this change, that. They want these problems, that — Paul is right — have existed in this country for many years, they want it finally solved. And they want a politician who they can believe might actually do it, as opposed to those in the middle who have been saying it and promising it and belaboring the difficulties, and basically not getting it done.

AMY GOODMAN: One of your columns, Paul Krugman, you talk about — the headline is “Have Zombies Eaten Bloomberg’s and Buttigieg’s Brains?”

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain.

PAUL KRUGMAN: OK. That was mostly — so, my book is Arguing with Zombies. And one of the zombies is this obsession with public debt and the belief that we should be terribly scared of government debt, and we can’t do anything because of deficits. Eek! And that’s the way Buttigieg talks now, at that very moment when mainstream economics, if you like, centrist economics, has concluded, “Hey, these debt worries were way overblown.” You know, the president of the American Economic Association gave this presidential address saying debt is just not nearly the problem people think it is, and it’s not a constraint. And, of course, Republicans have pulled one of the greatest acts of policy hypocrisy in history. You know, deficits were an existential threat as long as Obama was in office; they don’t matter as soon as Trump is in office. So, I really don’t want to see — I mean, if we did get a Democratic centrist who bought into this deficit scaremongering, that would be a really bad thing. That would block any kind of initiative.

AMY GOODMAN: And as we begin to wrap up, there is a mayoral — there is a presidential debate coming up on Tuesday night in South Carolina. Two of the seven candidates are billionaires.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Wolff, your thoughts?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, for me, it is always an astonishment to observe this inequality getting worse and worse. I’m one of the people, even though I wasn’t alive then, who celebrated that during the 1930s we compressed the inequality in this country by means of an unusual president, whose politics are remarkably like that of Mr. Bernie Sanders these days, and we actually did something to lessen the inequality. And as soon as the war was over, we resumed, we undid the New Deal, and the inequality began to get to the crazy levels now. It is an abomination that one person — for example, Jeffrey Bezos — disposes of $100-plus billion deciding what is to be done with all those resources. That’s not democratic. That excludes the mass of people from the needs that could be met if that money was used differently. And he can hardly consume it himself. It’s an extraordinary critique of capitalism that it allows this kind of concentrated wealth, which, of course, protects itself by trying to control the politics of our country, so that they don’t have the power in Congress to undo the inequality in the first place. So, for me, declaiming against that, right on, Bernie Sanders.

PAUL KRUGMAN: I mean, I don’t think billionaires are inherently evil, but there is something wrong when two guys who really don’t have any kind of national political base are in this debate only because of their money. A peculiar thing is, of course, that Steyer may well make Bernie Sanders the nominee by drawing support away from Biden. But no, this is — I mean, as these guys go — 

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah. Bloomberg is not evil, but he shouldn’t be in this race.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to leave it there for the moment, but of course we will continue to cover all of this during this 2020 election year. We will be doing a five-hour special on Super Tuesday night, from 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time right through midnight. I want to thank Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, op-ed columnist for The New York Times. He is the author of numerous books. His latest, Arguing with Zombies. And thanks so much to Richard Wolff, author of the new book Understanding Socialism.

That does it for our broadcast. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much.

Canada government seeks to broaden law on medically assisted death
Reuters February 24, 2020

FILE PHOTO: Canada's Minister of Justice and Attorney 

General Lametti walks to a Liberal caucus meeting in Ottawa


OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's Liberal government on Monday proposed broadening a 2016 law on medically assisted death to include for the first time people who were not in immediate risk of dying.

Ottawa made the announcement after a court in the province of Quebec last September said part of the law on physician-assisted suicide was too limited and should therefore be considered unconstitutional.

The proposed changes would "remove the requirement for a person's natural death to be reasonably foreseeable in order to be eligible for medical assistance in dying," Justice Minister David Lametti said in a statement.

Canada is one of the few nations where doctors can legally help sick people die. There have been more than 13,000 reported medically assisted deaths in Canada.

When Parliament adopted the law in June 2016, the government had said it might broaden the criteria for accessibility.

The Quebec court ruled in favor of two people who were both in severe pain and had incurable medical conditions. The two argued the law was too restrictive given it limited access to those facing foreseeable death.

Lametti said the government would launch a review of medically assisted death later this year to consider applications from people who currently do not qualify.

These include advance requests for those newly diagnosed with a condition that could affect their decision-making capacity in the future, people suffering solely from mental illness as well those under 19 who doctors deemed capable of giving their consent.

The Liberals only have a minority of seats in the House of Commons and will need to rely on the support of opposition legislators to approve the legislation, a process that could take many months.




(Reporting by David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Berlinale study of slavery unearths the roots of modern Brazil

Reuters February 23, 2020


70th Berlinale International Film Festival in BerlinMore

BERLIN (Reuters) - Making films in a bitterly divided Brazil that is increasingly hostile to artistic freedom is an act of resistance in itself, the maker of a new drama about race relations in the years after the country abolished slavery said.

Speaking ahead of the Berlin premiere of "All the Dead Ones" on Sunday, director Caetano Gotardo said the dozens of Brazilian films being screened at international festivals was testimony to the power of art to resist oppression.

"There's an attempt to put a straitjacket on this expressive force," he told reporters at the Berlin Film Festival, known as the Berlinale. "We have to be present on the world stage and also in the domestic arena with commercial successes, because that shows the strength Brazilian art has."

Since taking office in 2019, right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of governing his country in an increasingly authoritarian manner and of making attempts to contain the expression of views that run against his course.

The former army captain, who was a congressman for 28 years before becoming president, has repeatedly been accused of making racist, misogynist and homophobic statements.

Dominated by four powerful female characters - the ex-slave Ina (Mawusi Tulani) and two sisters and a mother from a formerly wealthy bourgeois family brought low by the abolition of slavery in 1888, "All the Dead Ones" tackles all three prejudices head on.

Ina may no longer be a slave, but defining a role for herself and her son independent of her former owners is all but impossible, while gifted pianist Ana (Carolina Bianchi) stands on the cusp of the 20th century with no idea of what she should make of herself now she is no longer the scion of a landed white family.

"It is as if her body were part of the past," Bianchi said. "She is a character of the past and she sort of fades away, becoming whiter and whiter."

Salloma Salomao's score, mixing Ana's European art music and the African rhythms of Ina's Angolan heritage, emphasizes the chaos of a new society emerging, as does the cinematography, which lets Sao Paulo's modern high-rise skyline intrude into supposedly period shots.

"All of us, all the races, all the genders, who are together, the artists, we will win," said producer Sara Silveira, concluding with a shouted: "We resist."

Ban on heavy fuel oil in Arctic full of holes: environmental group

The Canadian Press February 21, 2020


The global body that regulates shipping is moving to eliminate a highly polluting fuel in the Arctic.

But environmental groups say the International Maritime Organization's proposal is so full of loopholes that heavy fuel oil will go on being burned for another decade.

"That's an extreme timeline for something that needs to happen immediately," said Andrew Dumbrille of the World Wildlife Fund.

On Friday, the IMO passed a draft regulation to ban the use of heavy fuel oil in the Arctic by 2024. But Dumbrille said the draft allows Arctic nations to exempt their own ships from following the ban for another five years.

Research by the International Council on Clean Transportation suggests most ships in the Arctic burn the fuel.

It's considered a major spill risk because it's so thick that it's very difficult to clean up. Impacts from a moderate spill in Russia in 2003 were still visible in marine mammals more than a decade later.

The fuel is also a major source of black carbon, a type of soot that settles on sea ice and snow, darkening it and hastening its melt. The same research by the clean transportation council found about two-thirds of black carbon emissions attributable to Arctic shipping in 2015 was from burning heavy fuel oil.

The fuel has long been banned in the Antarctic.

Canada supported the ban coming into force in 2024.

But Dumbrille, who was at the meetings in London, said the loophole was drafted to get Russia to sign.

"Russia wasn't going to sign on to the ban until the domestic waiver was put in place," he said.

Russian carriers used 56 per cent of heavy fuel oil burned in the Arctic in 2015, says the council. Canada comes next, at six per cent.

The ban is supported by Inuit organizations, despite fears that forcing shippers to use cleaner, more expensive fuel could increase costs for northern families by up to $649 a year. Those groups have asked for some kind of compensation to help reduce the expense — a move the federal government has said it will consider.

The IMO will consider final ratification of the ban at a meeting in October.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 21, 2020

Yellowknife renters unlikely to see changes from sale of city's biggest landlord

CBC February 21, 2020

A pair of southern investment firms could soon control a major portion of Yellowknife's real estate, including two dozen apartment buildings with hundreds of units and much of the big commercial buildings downtown.

Northview REIT, which has long owned a majority of rental properties in Yellowknife and others in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, could be sold for $4.8 billion to Starlight Investment and Kingsett Capital.

The pair of southern investment firms announced their offer to purchase Northview on Thursday. The deal still needs to be approved, but it involves thousands of properties across Canada and in the North.

In Yellowknife alone, Northview's 27 apartment buildings and 14 commercial buildings would be owned by Kingsett, a private equity firm based in Toronto that owns a number commercial spaces downtown, including the Bellanca Building.

The structure's not changing, the way they operate's not changing. - Rob Warburton, Cloudworks

If the deal does go through, two of the city's largest property owners would essentially become one, explained Rob Warburton, the owner and founder of Cloudworks, a local real estate investment company.

But tenants may not see any major changes on the ground as they're simply swapping one large corporate landlord for another.

View photos Alex Brockman/CBC

"This is share purchases, and corporate ownership structure changes, but the same buildings are doing the same things," Warburton said. "I'm not sure what kind of impact that would have — in the short term? Nothing.

"In the long term, the structure's not changing, the way they operate is not changing," he said. "These [commercial] properties have changed hands multiple times in the past decade with no noticeable change day-to-day."

Concentration of ownership downtown

Much of Yellowknife's downtown commercial buildings are owned by southern investors who've often come under fire for allowing buildings to sit empty.

Yellowknife North MLA Rylund Johnson expects that to only continue under the new ownership structure.

They're multi-billion dollar portfolios and Yellowknife is almost a rounding error for them. -Rylund Johnson, Yellowknife North MLA

"The more they own, the less relevant Yellowknife becomes to their portfolios," he said. "They're multi-billion dollar portfolios and Yellowknife is almost a rounding error for them.

"I can't think of a single benefit to this," he said. "Sometimes with mergers you can argue there's efficiencies, but that doesn't apply when [Kingsett has] consistently ignored their assets in Yellowknife and haven't invested capital."

View photos Alex Brockman/CBC

Johnson has previously complained to Canada's Competition Bureau about the amount of property Northview owned in Yellowknife, arguing they essentially hold a monopoly on rental properties.

"The market in Yellowknife is in desperate need of competition," he said.

Johnson expects the Competition Bureau to review this deal since it's so large and hopes some of the Yellowknife properties could be sold off as the deal works its way through being finalized.

"The Yellowknife assets aren't what this deal's about," he said.

Northview's board of trustees recommends shareholders approve the deal, which the companies say should be completed later this year. Northview also has until March 20 to find a better deal, according to a media release issued Thursday.

Through a spokesman, officials with Starlight Investment and Kingsett Capital declined an interview request from CBC News.