Review of ‘Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution’ by Don Fitz

by STAN COX COUNTERPUNCH

Don Fitz’s new book Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution was going to press at Monthly Review in early spring, as the pandemic was ramping up, so he had just barely enough time to slip in a postscript teasingly titled, “How Che Guevara Taught Cuba to Confront COVID-19.” The postscript puts an exclamation mark on the medical history of Cuba that Fitz takes us through in the 240 compelling pages that come before. Based on that history, one would have expected Cuba to take early, decisive actions to stem the pandemic, and Fitz says that’s exactly what happened.

The government quickly converted school-uniform factories to manufacture medical masks. They sacrificed their crucial tourism industry in order to bar all non-resident travel. They locked down hotspots, ensuring that their residents were well provisioned and that medically vulnerable people were checked frequently. They did plenty of testing and contact tracing. Medical students walked through all neighborhoods regularly, checking in on residents. All of this, Fitz writes, was no more than what Cubans would have expected of their nation in a time of such danger. He adds, “The Cuban people would not tolerate the head of the country ignoring medical advice, spouting nonsensical statements, and determining policy based on what would be most profitable for corporations.” Indeed, their pandemic response is only the latest of countless ways in which the Cuban medical system has proven superior to the US system.

The medical system that Cuba’s revolutionaries inherited from the old regime—more like a non-system—was a mess. Millions of Cubans, disproportionately rural and Black, has no access to health care at all. In the 1960s, the government began building a national system of outpatient polyclinics (policlínicos integrales) designed, in Fitz’s words, to “unify preventive and curative medicine” in communities. Each polyclinic was staffed, at a minimum, with “a general practice physician, nurse, pediatrician, OB/GYN, and social workers.” The polyclinics provided a single point of entry for each patient. They were highly successful, Fitz says, because they were established not in isolation but in the context of other developments: Cuba’s famously successful literacy campaign, land reform, improved farm incomes, improved diets, pensions, improved water supplies, schools, and housing, along with others. Having status within the national system equal to that of the country’s major hospitals, polyclinics had a high degree of independence. In the mid-1970s, the polyclinics began doing health risk assessments, incorporated specialist care, and made house calls a major part of the system. A decade later, single doctor-nurse teams began establishing small neighborhood consultarios, each tied to a polyclinic.

Internationally, Cuba’s health professionals are most well-known for their numerous, extensive missions to provide medical care and training in underserved or war-torn regions. The international work began in 1962 with a mission to Algeria, followed by other African nations, but it really ramped up with Cuba’s involvement in the Angola war that began in 1975 and dragged on into the 1980s. Fitz provides a richly detailed story of Cuban troops’ support for the Angolans’ fight against U.S.- and apartheid South Africa-supported rebels backed by South African mercenaries. The number of Cuban fighters in Angola reached a peak of 36,000 in 1976. Between 1975 and 1991, Cuba also sent more than 43,000 aid workers; among them, the number of Cuban medical workers in the country at any given time was as high as 800. Fitz relates some fascinating personal stories of doctors who served in the country, some of them for years. Cuban medical missions remained in Angola until 1991.

The Angola mission is the most celebrated, but Cuba’s service to Africa was far more widespread. Fitz list two dozen of the continent’s countries who collectively hosted tens of thousands of Cuban aid missions, primarily medical. They spanned the continent and the alphabet, from Benin to Guinea-Bissau to Mali to Uganda to Zambia. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuban doctors also went to serve the revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada. In the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, the Cuban government flew in 25,000 victims, mostly children, for treatment. In all, 164,000 medical professionals have served in 154 countries. Cuba provided medical teams in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, which hit Central America in 1999, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and other disasters. They assembled a team to go to the US after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but George W. Bush rejected the offer.

Fitz relates the Cuban medical system’s long struggle with HIV/AIDS. The disease had become serious on the island by 1986, but its cause still mysterious enough that the health system began sending AIDS patients to be quarantined in a network of sanitoria previously established for patients with highly infective diseases. Most of the quarantined were soldiers returning from Africa, so there was little notice within Cuba. The United States, always on the lookout for a club to beat Castro with, denounced Cuba for abusing the human rights of gay men. In fact, the majority of infected troops were heterosexual. The quarantine was lifted in 1989, once the disease became better understood. Cuba eventually made good progress on AIDS. The medical journal The Lancet declared Cuba’s AIDS program “among the most effective in the world.” But Cuba’s enemies continued to throw out the anti-gay trope, Fitz believes, “to distract attention from the fact that Cuba had implemented a program to combat HIV/AIDS that was better than most countries’, and, in particular, superior to US efforts.”

Fitz discusses how the collapse of the Soviet Union—which, combined with the continuing US embargo, ushered in the severe economic stresses of Cuba’s “Special Period” —placed an unprecedented burden on the superior health-care system the country had built up over three decades. The most serious health problems were a deeply inadequate food supply and shortages of drugs and medical equipment. Despite fiscal strains, writes Fitz, no hospitals were closed during the Special Period, and all regions, even in the countryside, had access to medical care. He also presents a table showing that infant mortality continued its longstanding, steady decrease through the hard years of the 1990s, and that since 2000, Cuba’s infant mortality rate has been significantly lower than that of the United States. Also in this period, the country’s huge increase in urban and small-scale food production was widely celebrated.

Over the past decade, Fitz has done much on-the-ground reporting on Cuba’s medical education system, led by its Latin American School of medicine (ELAM), and here he provides a detailed history of the system and its achievements, enlivened by extensive firsthand interviews with faculty and profiles of more than a dozen medical students.

A chapter comparing the US and Cuban medical systems features some eye-popping cost numbers: hospital stay, $1900 in US and $5 in Cuba; hernia surgery, $12,000 in US and $14 in Cuba; hip fracture, $14,000 in US and $72 in Cuba. In 2018, when the US was spending $8300 per person per year on medical care, Cuba was spending a little over $400. Fitz points out the reasons the US medical economy is so broken: insurance for profit, not health; overdiagnosis, overtreatment, over-prescribing of drugs, and overpricing; treatments that create problems requiring more treatment; the excessive salaries received by doctors and administrators; and excess profits going to owners and investors. The result: a health-care system that achieves worse performance than a highly effective one that costs 5 percent as much.

Finally, Fitz lists ten lessons to be drawn from the Cuban health-care experience, writing that “They form the basis of what I call the New Global Medicine.” Among those lessons are that health care need not be dependent on costly technology; doctors must live in the communities where they work; the medical system must be evolving and unique to each community; international medical aid must be adapted to the political climate of the host country; doctors must put healing above personal wealth; and “the new global medicine is a microcosm of how a few thousand revolutionaries can change the world.”

As the question of how to fix the US health care system resurges in the coming year, before the Covid-19 has yet passed and before new medical emergencies arise, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution should be read as widely as possible—by lawmakers and their staffs, yes, but more importantly, by those of us who elect those lawmaker 

Stan Cox is the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond : Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (City Lights, May, 2020) and one of the editors of Green Social Thought, where this piece first ran

s.

Liberal Establishment Promotes

 “HERD IMMUNITY-lite”

by ELIZABETH KEYES  COUNTERPUNCH

(Of course it doesn’t work that way, but it sounds “lesser evil”!)

 SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Human lives are cheap in a capitalist society, particularly for members of the working class.

The ruling class is obviously willing to play “Russian roulette” with the very lives of the working class.

Some of the doomed, early “victim-players” will be (and have already been) teachers and students as both corporate parties recklessly (homicidally) endorse premature school reopenings. But the Democratic Party, like with its wars, will put a humanitarian spin on it. “The poor children desperately need their educational environments be returned to them.” As if the quality of life of the children of the working class seriously matters to our ruling class elites.

The “poor children” … pawns in the capitalistic game of getting the working parents back to the workplace to grind out profits for the rich elites who incidentally just enjoyed another obscenely large windfall bailout thanks to their donor-loyal, bipartisan DC politicians at the struggling US taxpayer’s expense.

The “hybrid” (“lesser evil” sounding) NYC school reopening plan of part-time, alternating and/or partial attendance, a futile liberal establishment attempt to thwart a vicious coronavirus, I hear was particularly pitched by AFT union president Randi Weingarten (salary of $500,000 a year and a member of the DNC).

How long are we as citizens going to keep minimizing inhumane policies promoted by the liberal establishment – its politicians, media, union leaders, et al. – simply because they are not directly endorsed by the admittedly and gobsmackingly repellent and fascistic Donald Trump and his immediate cabal?

“Lesser evilism” has jumped the proverbial shark at this point in “killer-capitalism America”! It is long past time to acknowledge that.

Here is a compelling statement about Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s K-12 public school reopening policy from the newly organized The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee posted on the wsws.org website entitled, “New York City educators launch safety committee to halt the reopening of schools.”

“The opening of schools for more than 1 million students directly places the lives of educators, school workers, students and the broader community at grave risk for the sake of corporate profit.

“The criminal decision promises to re-infect the population of the largest metropolitan region in the US with a population of 20 million people. The horrific scenes from March, April and May, when mass graves were dug on Hart Island, when hospitals were overwhelmed and healthcare infrastructure was brought to the verge of collapse, will soon be repeated unless we mobilize the working class to put an end to these homicidal policies. The city alone has lost nearly 24,000 people to the virus, the majority of whom were working class residents.”

Another compelling statement from Alberto Escalera in an article entitled Mounting opposition to school reopenings as 55 New York City teachers test positive for COVID-19:

“By imposing a school reopening with in-person classes in New York City, with a student population of 1.1 million, de Blasio is attempting to normalize death among teachers and children. He spelled this out in a press conference Monday morning, stating “Some people will test positive … We have to remember that for the very small percentage of the people who test positive for the Coronavirus, it is a very temporary reality.

“In pressing for the resumption of in-person learning in New York City, the ruling class aims to set a precedent to follow for reopenings in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, and every other district across the country that is starting their semester with online instruction.”

Mr. Escalera declares:

“The explosion of COVID-19 cases among teachers across the city was entirely predictable given the widespread outbreaks that have taken place in K-12 districts and college campuses across the United States during the past month.”

This is an inconvenient reality for the entire capitalist establishment, of course, as desperate teachers across the country are organizing against resumed in-person school reopenings.

To whom can teachers turn for help in saving their very lives and those of their students and fellow employees?

Certainly not the corporate Democratic Party, nor the Republican one, of course.

How about turning to their fellow citizens who too often remain ignorant of the particular horrors of the plights of special sections of American society, often because of our corporate-enabling media, or because too many citizens are simply too morally lazy in a culture of “Meh… it could be worse. It could be happening directly to me” – so naively and coldly detached in their narcissistic comfort zones?

So many decades of foreign innocents dying from US imperialism with the enabling ignorance and/or indifference of our American society.

Now arrives the decade of mass American deaths from US capitalism on our own turf. Will the numbness — the obtuseness — of the citizenry continue on?

Mr. Escalera explains that a “deal” was made between Democratic Party NYC Mayor de Blasio and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) on September 8, BEHIND THE BACKS OF THE RANK AND FILE NYC TEACHERS, not to resume in-person instruction of K-12 public school classes until September 21. The deal was struck to “derail” an anticipated teachers’ strike.

Apparently the postponement gave oxygen to the political bullshit that the New York City mayoral and school administrations and unions could adequately address all safety issues in all schools for all teachers, students and staffers. 1,800 facilities.

Let me know if you are interested in purchasing a bridge that extends from Manhattan to Brooklyn — cheap.

The assurances of safety issues being earnestly pursued and accomplished by the say-anything politicians and their puppet union officials unsurprisingly have amounted to pathetic half-measures or straight-out lies.

Except now we are talking about people’s very lives being at stake from this criminal irresponsibility. We are talking about collusion to commit mass, negligent homicide.

Of course, in a capitalist society, this heinous crime escapes accountability! Profits over human lives. Thanks to our amoral politicians pimped out to their corporate donors and to an equally amoral corporate media owned by said corporate donors, justice is not a priority. It is often the enemy of maximum profit-making for the obscenely rich and powerful.

I attended an on-line meeting of the newly organized The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee on Wednesday night and my already concern for premature NYC school reopenings was intensified. During the meeting, many frustrated school employees expressed anecdotal evidence that there is in no way adequate preparation for the NYC school reopenings being accomplished. Not by a long shot.

I learned that even before this imminent September 21 reopening, in 56 district schools teachers and school staff have already tested positive for COVID-19. The classes haven’t even officially started yet. These people were required to show up for preparation duty before they had even received their COVID-19 test results, which length of time fell far short – or rather “long” – of the promises of the lying city and union officials.

I learned of reports from school custodians that the PPE equipment they have been provided with is seriously inadequate. Due to budget cuts, some custodians sometimes have to cover two buildings. How can they possibly cover “extra measures” for safety – “deep cleaning” – when they already are so far stretched?

There are reports of hundreds of cases of inadequate ventilation in the 1,800 school facilities involved. 1000s of safety hazards have been reported.

But the Department of Education (DOE) has greenlighted every facility for the September 21 reopenings.

Alberto Escalera describes one NYC school, Murry Bergtraum Campus located in lower Manhattan.

“Among the many unsafe conditions within the building, educators highlight that none of the windows are functional and only 50% of the 225 offices and classroom spaces within the facility are “operational.” The building, which has a student population of approximately 1,000, has no unit ventilators and only two usable bathrooms that must be shared by students and staff. Despite these conditions, the DOE has deemed the building ready to receive students for in-person classes on September 21.”

One call-in, 20-year serving, female school bus driver lamented that she had been informed she now is responsible for disinfecting her own bus, and without being provided with cleaning supplies. Also, she explained that if she pulls up to a stop of 20 students, some without masks, she is expected to jam them all onboard.

I learned during this meeting that apparently there will be a DOE “situation room” which will make all executive decisions related to the school reopening scenario. What could possibly go wrong there in terms of slowness of response time and/or indifference to emergencies from afar?

The DOE along with the de Blasio administration both participated in the scandalous minimization of the pandemic and urgency to close schools at the beginning of the year, when the reality of the grave danger of the pandemic (what Woodward’s new book has confirmed) was already buzzing about in the inner circles of political power (and not just Trump’s!).

One of the speakers at the meeting stressed that once the New York City model of premature school reopenings is established – and the deaths of teachers and children “normalized” as Escalera accuses — online instruction will soon enough be ended in cities across the country.

Many, many more people will die, unless this new premature reopening policy is successfully combatted now.

Another speaker mentioned how students at the University of Michigan were striking against the school reopening despite the lack of corporate media acknowledgement. This strike is resonating with college students across the country. Of course, the establishment is ever ready to scapegoat college students as being reckless in not honoring social distancing, and any inevitable upticks in coronavirus statistics among them will be blamed directly on them, rather than the perpetrators of the homicidal reopening, this same speaker pointed out.

One teacher mentioned that it was due to some teachers taking Christmas vacations abroad last year that they became seriously aware while in other countries (that were not suppressing the coronavirus danger as the USA was) of what they were up against upon their return to their thankless and capitalism, cannon-fodder roles as US teachers.

Teachers in NYC and elsewhere are taking heroic risks such as protesting outside their schools, organizing petitions and rank and file committees, and doing whistleblowing about the grim reality of the pandemic threat in our schools, all of which can have dire economic consequences for them. They are in a desperate situation of fighting for their very lives and the lives of their students along with the networks surrounding them, which ultimately, to any critical thinking American, includes us all.

The on-line meeting was launched with eight proposals submitted by The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee.

I have to admit, as radicalized and socialistic as I have become, my jaw dropped that these proposals could even be expressed in our capitalism “learned helpless” and beaten-down anti-social and anti-economic justice society. I immediately imagined a hungry Oliver Twist extending his bowl “for more” to an astonished but brutal authority figure.

The Committee is right to demand such profound socialistic changes, because trying to reform psychopathic capitalism is a non-starter.

We need to say and to hear what we deserve as US citizens, not what the oligarchy avariciously demands we put up with.

We, as exploited Americans, all need to start asking for a lot more.

We need to call out the gobsmacking degree of uncivilized policies against the working class in America by BOTH corporate donor-driven parties.

The Committee’s proposals include:

Suspending all in-person course school instruction and providing adequate and free computer hardware and high speed wifi access to all students.

Full income protections and security to all workers in NYC. Income protections to parents ensuring their children’s participation in online school processes.

The freezing of college tuition and the abolishment of student debt. Free campus housing with meals. Protections and accommodations for international college students now in America dealing with the issues of the pandemic.

Full protection and support for all undocumented workers and their children. A halt to their imprisonment and deportation.

Democratically-made decisions on educational policies with all parties involved, especially teachers, parents and students.

A halt to all non-essential production. Advanced safety precautions must be provided for all essential workers.

A demand for the retro-fitting of all classrooms in terms of ventilation and air purification.

This last cost, among any others included above, should come from the profits of the oligarchy, the proposal insists.

IMAGINE THAT????????

Who will defend our teachers and students? Who will defend the working class? Who will curb the outrageous injustices perpetrated by the oligarchs and their pimped out political and media puppets?

Well, I signed up to support The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee by emailing educators@wsws.org. I recommend you do the same!

The clock is ticking. 200,000 Americans have died since the beginning of the year. Are we really heading for 400,000 deaths by the end of it? (At the current exponential rate, so it would seem. Someone should explain the math to the amiably and willfully obtuse NYC Mayor de Blasio!)

I want to be part of the solution to stop these mass, gratuitous deaths, not contribute to the deadweight (pun bitterly intended) of the problem!

I want to be on the right side of history.

I want a country where I am not, on a daily basis, distracted from life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by the goal of avoiding death, along with the passive enabling of it for tens of thousands of innocent others!

Vaccines for the Rich

by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI 

 SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Self-interest speaks all sorts of tongues, and plays all sorts of roles, even that of disinterestedness.

– François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections    

It was a disappointing headline, but it didn’t come as much of a surprise. It appeared in the Wall Street Journal on September 1, 2020.  It was short and to the point.  “Nations With Wealth Tie Up Vaccine Doses.” That which could be considered a harbinger of the headline, insofar as the United States is concerned, had occurred almost four months earlier.

On May 18, 2020, the trump told  the World Health Organization Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,  that if the WHO didn’t make “major substantive improvements” within 30 days the United States would permanently withhold future funding and withdraw from the organization. Always eager to follow through on threats, and by nature, impatient,  the trump concluded he could not wait the full 30 days.  On May 29^th he announced that he was terminating the relationship with the WHO immediately and was withholding all future funding.  He did not address what arrangements he planned to make for the United States to pay the $203 million it owed for 2020 and previous years.

Although this was not addressed in the withdrawal announcement, we have now learned that in addition to saving money by no longer participating in the WHO, the trump is declining to participate in the WHO’s efforts to find a vaccine to treat the pandemic. One hundred seventy-two nations have signed up to be part of a global effort led by the WHO to develop, manufacture and equitably distribute a coronavirus vaccine known as the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) Facility. The critical word in that description is “equitable.”  The undertaking  is a joint effort and when a vaccine is found that is effective and safe, all the participants in the project will be promised enough vaccine to cover 20% of their populations.  The vaccine will first be distributed to the high-risk segments of the population of each participating country. It is hoped that there will be 2 billion doses available by the end of 2021.

The WHO project is important for all the participants, but it is especially important for the small nations that are unable to develop or acquire a developed vaccine on their own. By not permitting the United States to participate,  the trump is depriving the WHO effort of funding it desperately needs to develop the vaccine.  It is also letting it be known that since it is a project of the WHO, the trump doesn’t  care what happens to those who will suffer if the project sponsored by the WHO is unsuccessful because of its lack of funding.

Trump’s refusal to participate is not, as one might suppose, the result of mindless truculence.  His refusal was eloquently explained by a spokesman for the White House who said: “The United States will continue to engage our international partners to ensure we defeat this virus, but we will not be constrained by multilateral organizations influenced by the corrupt World Health Organization and China.”

By taking this approach the trump is betting on the United States coming up with its own vaccine before those working with the WHO.  Should the WHO win the race, the United States  would not be entitled to share in the vaccines developed by the WHO. That is not terribly worrisome for the trump.  That is because the trump, the European Union, Japan and the UK have already entered into contracts with Western drug makers to purchase 3.7 billion doses of vaccine even though the vaccines have not yet been developed. The purchase agreements include options to buy additional doses.  The assumption is that the companies which have  contracts will be successful in developing vaccines before the consortium led by the WHO.

Developing countries have reason to be concerned as the WSJ headline suggests.  If the consortium led by the United States beats the WHO to the punch, the less developed countries will be left out. As the assistant director-general at the WHO said, when discussing the upcoming competition to develop the vaccine:   “Next year is a year of scarce resources.  Whatever we have, it won’t be enough to vaccinate everyone.  It is in everybody’s self-interest to collaborate globally because we need this pandemic controlled in all countries.”  The trump and his cronies are oblivious to this need.  In a press briefing in June, an administration official said:  “Let’s take care of Americans first.  To the extent there is surplus, we have an interest in ensuring folks around the world are vaccinated.”

As with so many trumpian statements and actions, the trump and his cronies have shown us yet another way the trump is making America great again.  And it gives us all the rest of us cause to pause and consider whether we want to continue to live in a country the greatness of which is being defined by a man of no character and puny intellect.

Reducing CO2 Emissions to Reverse Global Warming

by MANUEL GARCÍA, JR. COUNTERPUNCH

 

 SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

We know that Global Warming can be reduced during the years of the century ahead of us if we — our civilization — steadily reduces its emissions of carbon dioxide gas (CO2) into the atmosphere.

Given a specific rate for the reduction of anthropogenic (our CO2) emissions:

+ how long will it take to return Earth’s average temperature to its unperturbed pre-industrial level?, and

+ how much higher will Global Warming (Earth’s temperature) become before it begins to decrease?

Answering these questions is the subject of my recent study. This work is based on a Carbon Balance Model, which I described in an earlier report. [1]

That model has been further refined in order to address these questions, and the details of that refinement are described in a technical report. [2]

Prior to the buildup of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in the air, the fluxes of CO2 released by the respiration of Life-on-Earth; and the fluxes of CO2 absorbed from the air by photosynthesis, the surface waters of the oceans, and rock weathering chemical reactions; were in balance. That balance is known as the Carbon Cycle.

As the rate and buildup of anthropogenic emissions increased (after ~1750, but particularly from the mid-20th century), the Carbon Cycle was perturbed out of balance, and the magnitude of that imbalance is determined by the difference between two effects: Anthropogenic Sources, and Stimulated Sinks.

The Anthropogenic Sources are:

+ the CO2 emissions by the human activities of fossil-fueled energy generation and industry, and

+ the CO2 emissions from land use changes (deforestation and its attendant increase of wildfires).

The Stimulated Sinks are the additional absorption of CO2 by photosynthesis and the surface waters of the oceans, because of higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2. At a sufficiently high level of atmospheric CO2 concentration, both these sinks will saturate — stop absorbing CO2. What that “sufficiently high level” is remains uncertain.

The work summarized here includes more realistic (more complicated) models of these source and sink terms in the rate equation for the change of the Carbon Balance over time.

Now I am able to quantitatively link specific rates of the reduction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, to consequent projected histories of the slowing and then reversal of Global Warming.

Such quantitative linkages have long been featured in the super-computer models of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, by the major Climate Science institutes; but now I have my own quantitative version of this correlation, which is analytical (expressed as math formulas, and enumerated with a hand calculator and basic home computer).

Anthropogenic CO2 emissions in year 2020 are 42.2GtCO2/y (42.2 giga-metric-tons of CO2 per year = 42.2*10⁺¹² kilograms/year). This magnitude of total anthropogenic emissions, E, is the addition of our fossil-fueled and land use emissions.

I considered three cases of the intentional steady reduction of annual human-caused CO2 emissions, which are defined to decrease exponentially. The characteristic decay time of each case is: 40 years (CASE 1, a 2.5% annual reduction), 100 years (CASE 2, a 1% annual reduction), and 200 years (CASE 3, a 0.5% annual reduction).

Hietkamp Trends C (2020-2120)

Emissions would be reduced to half their initial rate in 28 years for CASE 1; in 69 years for CASE 2; and in 139 years for CASE 3.

If each of these reduction plans were alternatively initiated in the year 2020, then:

CASE #1, ∆t=40y:

This trend reaches a peak of 449ppm and +1.32°C in year 2048 (in 28 years); it remains above 440ppm and +1.25°C over the years 2032 to 2064 (between 12 to 44 years from now); then descends to 350ppm and +0.56°C in year 2120 (in 100 years); and 300ppm and +0.18°C in year 2140 (in 120 years).

CASE #2, ∆t=100y:

This trend reaches a peak plateau of 485ppm and +1.6°C over the years 2078 to 2088 (between 58 and 68 years from now); it remains above 480ppm and +1.56°C during years 2066 to 2100 (between 46 and 80 years from now); it descends to 350ppm and +0.56°C in year 2202 (in 182 years); and 300ppm and +0.18°C in year 2225 (in 205 years).

CASE #3, ∆t=200y:

This trend reaches a peak plateau of 524ppm and +1.9°C over the years 2125 to 2135 (between 105 and 115 years from now); it remains above 500ppm and +1.72°C between years 2075 and 2190 (between 55 and 170 years from now); and descends down to 360ppm and +0.64°C in year 2300 (in 280 years).

Hietkamp Trends T (2020-2120)

Message to the Humans

The singular challenge for the progressive political and social elements of our civilization is to awaken the rest of the world — and particularly the “developed” and “developing” high-emissions nations — to a full commitment (demonstrated by action) to steadily and significantly reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions for the rest of human history.

The sooner such reduction programs are initiated, and the greater the vigor with which they are implemented, the sooner we will begin slowing the advance of Global Warming and its continuing erosion of the habitability of Planet Earth, which humans have enjoyed for over 2 million years, and particularly since the end of the Ice Ages (~11,000 year ago).

With decades to a century of discipline applied to this purpose, we can even reverse Global Warming. The longer we wait to do this, the worse the consequences we will have to suffer through, and the longer it would take to extricate our species — and so many other wonderful forms of Life-on-Earth — from the Hell-on-Earth we are creating by our willful and destructive ignorance.

I can only imagine such major programs of CO2 emissions reductions being synonymous with the economic, political and social uplift of the vast majority of people, because Global Warming is directly caused by the unbounded economic, political and social exploitation of the many by the few.

The fact is that we all live on the same planet, and whatever happens to it — whether worsening conflagration and flooding in the now, or eventual cooling and restoration by human commitment — will affect everybody. There is no guaranteed escape.

The CO2 accumulation model that I have described here is just this old scientist’s way of saying: We can do so much better for ourselves, and our children deserve that we try.

NOTES

[1] A Carbon Balance Model of Atmospheric CO2

11 September 2020, [PDF file]

https://manuelgarciajr.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/a-carbon-balance-model-of-atmospheric-co2.pdf

[2] Trends for Reducing Global Warming

15 September 2020, [PDF file]

https://manuelgarciajr.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/trends-for-reducing-global-warming.pdf

Manuel Garcia Jr, once a physicist, is now a lazy househusband who writes out his analyses of physical or societal problems or interactions. He can be reached at mangogarcia@att.net

Germany: 

US Nuclear Weapons Shamed in Nationwide Debate

by JOHN LAFORGE

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

 

Photograph Source: antony_mayfield – CC BY 2.

We need a broad public debate … about the sense and nonsense of nuclear deterrence.

—Rolf Mutzenich, German Social Democratic Party Leader

Public criticism of the US nuclear weapons deployed in Germany bloomed into a vigorous nationwide debate this past spring and summer focused on the controversial scheme known diplomatically as “nuclear sharing” or “nuclear participation.”

“The end of this nuclear participation is currently being discussed as intensely as was, not so long ago, the exit from nuclear power,” wrote Roland Hipp, a managing director of Greenpeace Germany, in a June article for the newspaper Welt.

The 20 US nuclear bombs that are stationed at Germany’s Büchel Air Base have become so unpopular, that mainstream politicians and religious leaders have joined anti-war organizations in demanding their ouster and have promised to make the weapons a campaign issue in next year’s national elections.

Today’s public debate in Germany may have been prompted by Belgium’s Parliament, which on January 16 came close to expelling the US weapons stationed at its Kleine Brogel airbase. By a vote of 74 to 66, the members barely defeated a measure that directed the government “to draw up, as soon as possible, a roadmap aiming at the withdrawal of nuclear weapons on Belgian territory.” The debate came after the parliament’s foreign affairs committee adopted a motion calling for both the weapons’ removal from Belgium, and for the country’s ratification of the International Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Belgium’s lawmakers may have been prompted to reconsider the government’s “nuclear sharing,” when on February 20, 2019 three members of the European Parliament were arrested on Belgium’s Kleine Brogel base, after they boldly scaled a fence and carried a banner directly onto the runway.

Replacement Fighter Jets Set to Carry US Bombs

Back in Germany, defense minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer raised an uproar April 19 after a report in Der Spiegel said she had emailed Pentagon boss Mark Esper saying that Germany planned to buy 45 Boeing Corporation F-18 Super Hornets. Her comments brought howls from the Bundestag and the minister walked back her claim, telling reporters April 22, “No decision has been taken (on which planes will be chosen) and, in any case, the ministry can’t make that decision—only parliament can.”

Nine days later, in an interview with daily Tagesspiegel published May 3, Rolf Mützenich, Germany’s parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD)—a member of Angela Merkel’s governing coalition—made a clear denunciation.

“Nuclear weapons on German territory do not heighten our security, just the opposite,” they undermine it, and should be removed, Mützenich said, adding that he was opposed to both “prolonging nuclear participation” and to “replacing the tactical US nuclear weapons stored in Büchel with new nuclear warheads.”

Mützenich’s mention of “new” warheads is a reference to US construction of hundreds of the new, first-ever “guided” nuclear bombs—the” B61-12s”—set to be delivered to five NATO states in the coming years, replacing the B61-3s, 4s, and 11s reportedly stationed in Europe now.

The SPD’s co-president Norbert Walter-Borjähn quickly endorsed Mützenich’s statement, agreeing that the US bombs should be withdrawn, and both were immediately criticized by Foreign Minister Heiko Mass, by US diplomats in Europe, and by NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg directly.

Anticipating the backlash, Mützenich published a detailed defense of his position May 7 in the Journal for International Politics and Society, [1] where he called for a “debate about the future of nuclear sharing and the question of whether the US tactical nuclear weapons stationed in Germany and Europe increase the level of safety for Germany and Europe, or whether they have perhaps become obsolete now from a military and security policy perspective.”

“We need a broad public debate … about the sense and nonsense of nuclear deterrence,” Mützenich wrote.

NATO’s Stoltenberg hastily penned a rebuttal for the May 11 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, using 50-year-old yarns about “Russian aggression” and claiming that nuclear sharing means “allies, like Germany, make joint decisions on nuclear policy and planning …, and “give[s] allies a voice on nuclear matters that they would not otherwise have.”

This is flatly untrue, as Mutzenich made clear in his paper, calling it a “fiction” that the Pentagon nuclear strategy is influenced by US allies. “There is no influence or even a say by non-nuclear powers on the nuclear strategy or even the possible uses of nuclear [weapons]. This is nothing more than a long-held pious wish,” he wrote.

Most of the attacks on the SPF leader sounded like the one May 14 from then US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, whose op/ed in the newspaper De Welt urged Germany to keep the US “deterrent” and claimed that withdrawing the bombs would be a “betrayal” of Berlin’s NATO commitments.

Then US Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher went round the bend with a May 15 Twitter post, writing that “if Germany wants to reduce its nuclear sharing potential …, maybe Poland, which honestly fulfills its obligations … could use this potential at home.” Mosbacher’s suggestion was broadly ridiculed as preposterous because the Nonproliferation Treaty forbids such nuclear weapons transfers, and because stationing US nuclear bombs on the Russia border would be a dangerously destabilizing provocation.

NATO “nuclear sharing” nations have no say in dropping US H-bombs

On May 30, the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, confirmed Mützenich’s position and put the lie to Stoltenberg’s disinformation, releasing a formerly “top secret” State Department memo affirming that the US will alone decide whether to use its nuclear weapons based in Holland, Germany, Italy, Turkey and Belgium.

Moral and ethical shaming of the nuclear weapons in Büchel has recently come from high-ranking church leaders. In the deeply religious Rhineland-Pfalz region of the airbase, bishops have begun demanding that the bombs be withdrawn. Catholic Bishop Stephan Ackermann from Trier spoke out for nuclear abolition near the base in 2017; the Peace Appointee of the Lutheran Church of Germany, Renke Brahms, spoke to a large protest gathering there in 2018; Lutheran Bishop Margo Kassmann addressed the annual church peace rally there in July 2019; and this August 6, Catholic Bishop Peter Kohlgraf, who heads the German faction of Pax Christi, promoted nuclear disarmament in the nearby city of Mainz.

More fuel kindled the high-profile nuclear discussion with the June 20 publication of an Open Letter to the German fighter pilots at Büchel, signed by 127 individuals and 18 organizations, calling on them to “terminate direct involvement” in their nuclear war training, and reminding them that “Illegal orders may neither be given nor obeyed.”

The “Appeal to the Tornado pilots of Tactical Air Force Wing 33 at the Büchel nuclear bomb site to refuse to participate in nuclear sharing” covered over half a page of the regional Rhein-Zeitung newspaper, based in Koblenz.

The Appeal, which is based on binding international treaties that forbid military planning of mass destruction, had earlier been sent to Colonel Thomas Schneider, commander of the pilots’ 33rd Tactical Air Force Wing at Büchel air base.

The Appeal urged the pilots to refuse unlawful orders and stand down: “[T]he use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law and the constitution. This also makes the holding of nuclear bombs and all supporting preparations for their possible deployment illegal. Illegal orders may neither be given nor obeyed. We appeal to you to declare to your superiors that you no longer wish to participate in supporting nuclear sharing for reasons of conscience.”

Greepeace Germany inflated its message balloon just outside the Büchel air force base in Germany (in photo in background), joining the campaign to oust the US nuclear weapons stationed there.

Roland Hipp, a co-director of Greenpeace Germany, in “How Germany makes itself the target of a nuclear attack” published in Welt June 26, noted that going non-nuclear is the rule not the exception in NATO. “There are already [25 of the 30] countries within NATO that have no US nuclear weapons and do not join in nuclear participation,” Hipp wrote.

In July, the debate partly focused on the colossal financial expense of replacing the German Tornado jet fighters with new H-bomb carriers in a time of multiple global crises.

Dr. Angelika Claussen, a psychiatrist a vice president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, wrote in a July 6 posting that “[A] significant military build-up in times of the coronavirus pandemic is perceived as a scandal by the German public … Buying 45 nuclear F-18 bombers means spending [about] 7.5 billion Euros. For this amount of money one could pay 25,000 doctors and 60,000 nurses a year, 100,000 intensive care beds and 30,000 ventilators.”

Dr. Claussen’s figures were substantiated by a July 29 report by Otfried Nassauer and Ulrich Scholz, military analysts with the Berlin Information Center for Transatlantic Security. The study found the cost of 45 F-18 fighter jets from the US weapons giant Boeing Corp. could be “at a minimum” between 7.67 and 8.77 billion Euros, or between $9 and $10.4 billion—or about $222 million each.

Germany’s potential $10 billion payout to Boeing for its F-18s is a cherry that the war profiteer dearly wants to pick. Germany’s Defense Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer has said her government also intends to buy 93 Eurofighters, made by the France-based multinational behemoth Airbus, at the comparably bargain rate of $9.85 billion—$111 million each—all to replace the Tornadoes by 2030.

In August, SPD leader Mützenich promised to make the “sharing” of US nuclear weapons a 2021 election issue, telling the daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, “I am firmly convinced that if we ask this question for the election program, the answer is relatively obvious…. [W]e will continue this issue next year.”

John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.

The Difference Between the U.S. and China’s Response to COVID-19 is Staggering

by VIJAY PRASHAD – JOHN ROSS COUNTERPUNCH

 SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

Photograph Source: Walter Grassroot – CC0

In Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, he reports on interviews he did in February and March with U.S. President Donald Trump about the coronavirus. Trump admitted that the virus was virulent, but he decided to underplay its danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump said, “because I don’t want to create a panic.” Despite months of warnings from the Chinese authorities, Trump and his health secretary Alex Azar completely failed to prepare for the global pandemic.

The United States continues to have the largest total number of cases of COVID-19. The government continues to flounder as the number of cases escalates. Not one state in the country seems immune to the spread of the disease.

Meanwhile, in China, ever since the virus was crushed in Wuhan, the government merely has had to contain small-scale localized outbreaks; in the last month, China has had zero domestically transmitted COVID-19 cases. Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times on March 31 that China was successful in “bringing the disease under control in Hubei and halting its spread across China.” There was never a pan-China outbreak. It is more accurate to call it a Hubei outbreak.

Measuring People’s Lives

While Trump lied to his own citizens about the disease, China’s president Xi Jinping said that his government would be “putting people first.” China hastily subordinated its economic priorities to the task of saving lives.

As a consequence of a science-based approach, China’s government broke the chain of infection very quickly. By early September, this country of 1.4 billion had 85,194 COVID-19 cases and 4,634 deaths (India, with a comparable population, had 4.8 million cases and 80,026 deaths; India is losing more lives each week than the total deaths in China).

The United States, meanwhile, has suffered from 198,680 deaths and 6.7 million cases. In absolute numbers, the U.S. deaths are about 43 times China’s and the case number is about 79 times higher.

The U.S. government, unlike the government in China, hesitated to properly craft a lockdown and test the population. That is why, in per capita terms, U.S. deaths are about 186 times higher than those in China and the cases are about 343 times higher.

Trump’s racist attempt to pin the blame on China is pure diversion. China contained the virus. The U.S. has totally failed to do so. The enormous number of U.S. deaths were ‘Made in Washington,’ not ‘Made in China.’

Measuring the Economy

In the first quarter of 2020, the Chinese gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 6.8 percent compared to a year earlier. Due to the fast elimination of domestic transmission of the virus, economic recovery in China has been rapid. By the second quarter, China’s GDP has been up 3.2 percent compared to the same period in 2019. The International Monetary Fund projects that China will be the only major economy to experience positive growth.

How did China’s economy rebound so fast? The answer is clear: the socialist character of the economy. By July, China’s state investmentwas 3.8 percent above its level of a year ago, while private investment is still 5.7 percent below 2019. China has used its powerful state sector to boost itself out of recession. This illustrates the macro-efficiency of the state sector.

In mid-August, the Communist Party of China’s theoretical journal Qiushi (Seeking Truth) published a speech by Xi Jinping, in which he said, “The foundation of China’s political economy can only be a Marxist political economy, and not be based on other economic theories.” The main principles of this are “people-centered development thinking.” This was the foundation of the government’s response to the pandemic and the economy in its context.

Trump, meanwhile, made it very clear that his administration would not conduct anything near a national lockdown; it seems his priority was to protect the economy over American lives. As early as March, when there was no sign that the pandemic could be controlled in the United States, Trump announced, “America will again and soon be open for business—very soon.”

Disaster in the United States

Inefficient policies in the United States resulted in runaway COVID-19 infection rates. The basic protocols—masks, hand sanitizer—were not taken seriously. And the impact on the U.S. economy has been catastrophic.

The U.S. made it clear that it was not going to pursue anything near a people-centered approach. Trump’s entire emphasis was to keep the economy open, largely because he remains of the view that his election victory will come via the pocketbook; the human cost of this policy is ignored. The U.S. only had half a lockdown, and little testing and contact tracing.

The GDP of the United States in the second quarter fell by 9.5 percent as compared to a year earlier. There is no indication of strong improvement. The IMF estimates that U.S. economic contraction will be about 6.6 percent for the year. The “risk ahead,” writes the IMF, “is that a large share of the U.S. population will have to contend with an important deterioration of living standards and significant economic hardship for several years to come.” The disruption will have long-term implications. These problems are laid out clearly by the IMF: “preventing the accumulation of human capital, eroding labor force participation, or contributing to social unrest.” This is the exact opposite of the scenario unfolding in China.

It is as if we live on two planets. On one planet, there is outrage about the hypocrisy in what Trump said to Woodward, and outrage about the collapse of both the health system and the economy—with a harsh road forward to rebuild either. On the other planet, the chain of infection has been broken, although the Chinese government remains vigilant and is willing to sacrifice short-term economic growth to save the lives of its citizenry.

Trump’s attack on China, his threats to decouple the United States from China, his racist noises about the “Chinese virus”—all this is bluster designed as part of an information war to delegitimize China. Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has focused on “dual circulation,” which means domestic measures to raise living standards and eliminate poverty, and on the Belt and Road Initiative; both of these will lessen Chinese dependence on the United States.

Two planets might begin to drift apart, one moving in the direction of the future, the other out of control.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

John Ross is a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He was formerly director of economic policy for the mayor of London.