The US economic war on China

By Korea Herald
Published : 2023-08-31 

Jeffrey D. Sachs

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

China’s economy is slowing down. Current forecasts put China’s GDP growth in 2023 at less than 5%, below the forecasts made last year and far below the high growth rates that China enjoyed until the late 2010s. The Western press is filled with China’s supposed misdeeds: a financial crisis in the real-estate market, a general overhang of debt, and other ills. Yet much of the slowdown is the result of US measures that aim to slow China’s growth. Such US policies violate World Trade Organization rules and are a danger to global prosperity. They should be stopped.

The anti-China policies come out of a familiar playbook of US policy-making. The aim is to prevent economic and technological competition from a major rival. The first and most obvious application of this playbook was the technology blockade that the US imposed on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was America’s declared enemy and US policy aimed to block Soviet access to advanced technologies.

The second application of the playbook is less obvious, and in fact, is generally overlooked even by knowledgeable observers. At the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the US deliberately sought to slow Japan’s economic growth. This may seem surprising, as Japan was and is a US ally. Yet Japan was becoming “too successful,” as Japanese firms outcompeted US firms in key sectors, including semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automobiles. Japan’s success was widely hailed in bestsellers such as Japan as Number One by my late, great colleague, Harvard Professor Ezra Vogel.

In the mid-to-late 1980s, US politicians limited US markets to Japan’s exports (via so-called “voluntary” limits agreed with Japan), and pushed Japan to overvalue its currency. The Japanese Yen appreciated from around 240 Yen per dollar in 1985 to 128 Yen per dollar in 1988 and 94 Yen to the dollar in 1995, pricing Japanese goods out of the US market. Japan went into a slump as export growth collapsed. Between 1980 and 1985, Japan’s exports rose annually by

7.9 percent; between 1985 and 1990, export growth fell to 3.5 percent annually; and between 1990 and 1995, to 3.3 percent annually. As growth slowed markedly, many Japanese companies fell into financial distress, leading to a financial bust in the early 1990s.

In the mid-1990s, I asked one of Japan’s most powerful government officials why Japan didn’t devalue the currency to re-establish growth. His answer was that the US wouldn’t allow it.

Now the US is taking aim at China. Starting around 2015, US policy-makers came to view China as a threat rather than a trade partner. This change of view was due to China’s economic success. China’s economic rise really began to alarm US strategists when China announced in 2015 a “Made in China 2025” policy to promote China’s advancement to the cutting edge of robotics, information technology, renewable energy, and other advanced technologies. Around

the same time, China announced its Belt and Road Initiative to help build modern infrastructure throughout Asia, Africa and other regions, largely using Chinese finance, companies, and technologies.

The US dusted off the old playbook to slow China’s surging growth. President Barrack Obama first proposed to create a new trading group with Asian countries that would exclude China, but presidential candidate Donald Trump went further, promising outright protectionism against China. After winning the 2016 election on an anti-China platform, Trump imposed unilateral tariffs on China that clearly violated WTO rules. To ensure that WTO would not rule against the US measures, the US disabled the WTO appellate court by blocking new appointments. The Trump Administration also blocked products from leading Chinese technologies companies such as ZTE and Huawei and urged US allies to do the same.

When President Joe Biden came to office, many (including me) expected Biden to reverse or ease Trump’s anti-China policies. The opposite happened. Biden doubled down, not only maintaining Trump’s tariffs on China but also signing new executive orders to limit China’s access to advanced semiconductor technologies and US investments. American firms were advised informally to shift their supply chains from China to other countries, a process labeled “friend-shoring” as opposed to offshoring. In carrying out these measures, the US completely ignored WTO principles and procedures.

The US strongly denies that it is in an economic war with China, but as the old adage goes, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. The US is using a familiar playbook, and the Washington politicians are invoking martial rhetoric, calling China an enemy that must be contained or defeated.

The results are seen in a reversal of China’s exports to the US. In the month that Trump came into office, January 2017, China accounted for 22 percent of US merchandise imports. By the time that Biden came into office in January 2021, China’s share of US imports had dropped to 19 percent. As of June 2023, China’s share of US imports had plummeted to 13 percent. Between June 2022 and June 2023, US imports from China fell by a whopping 29 percent.

Of course, the dynamics of China’s economy are complex and hardly driven by China-US trade alone. Perhaps China’s exports to the US will partly rebound. Yet Biden seems unlikely to ease trade barriers with China in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

Unlike Japan in the 1990s, which was dependent on the US for its security, and so followed US demands, China has more room for maneuver in the face of US protectionism. Most importantly, I believe, China can substantially increase its exports to the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, through policies such as expanding the Belt and Road Initiative. My assessment is that the US attempt to contain China is not only wrongheaded in principle, but destined to fail in practice. China will find partners throughout the world economy to support a continued expansion of trade and technological advance.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator and global leader in sustainable development. ― Ed.

Lisa Doi: Pilgrims sustain the memory of Japanese American detainment

A descendant of prisoners at World War II camps dedicated her doctoral research to how the Japanese American community commemorates its forebears' experience.

Part of a line waiting for lunch outside the mess hall at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in Manzanar, Calif., on July 1, 1942.

 Photo by Dorothea Lange/NARA/Creative Commons

August 31, 2023
By  Joshua Stanton, Benjamin Spratt


(RNS) — Two months after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing 120,000 Japanese Americans, Japanese immigrants and their relatives living in the United States to leave their homes and take up residence in prisonlike camps in sparsely populated areas in seven states. In 1942, polling indicated that nearly 60% of Americans supported this decision, even though two-thirds of the relocated people were American citizens. An even higher majority supported the incarceration of immigrants who had not yet attained citizenship.

Only in 1988 did Congress pass the Civil Liberties Act, which compensated the unjustly incarcerated Japanese and Japanese Americans, giving each surviving detainee $20,000. President Ronald Reagan offered a semblance of a formal apology, acknowledging that the incarcerations had been a “mistake.” In the years since, despite a growing number of memoirs, histories and documentaries, the government-sanctioned violation of civil rights that traumatized an entire population is little spoken of.

The willful forgetting redoubles the pain for the descendants of those who faced incarceration. With fewer and fewer survivors of the camps still alive, how to commemorate their suffering in their absence is a growing dilemma.

Lisa Doi, a doctoral student in American studies at Indiana University, has dedicated her research to a form of commemoration that has become increasingly widespread among the Japanese American community, of which she is a part: visiting the detainment camps as an act of pilgrimage.

RELATED: In WWII, Japanese Americans’ faith came under suspicion and helped them survive their incarceration

Lisa Doi. Courtesy photo

Historically, pilgrimages are religious journeys — rituals that channel often arduous physical treks into mystical rites of passage. Pilgrimages for the survivors of the detainment camps and their offspring are instead a search for the past for a community rooted in a common history of pain and loss.

For Doi, this ritual is both of professional interest and deeply personal: Two of her grandparents and their families were incarcerated at Rohwer War Relocation Center in McGehee, Arkansas, a few miles west of the Mississippi River in the southeast corner of the state. In 2019, Doi and her mother went on a pilgrimage to Rohwer and a nearby camp at Jerome, Arkansas.

Doi had hoped the encounter would yield “some kind of insight into what this experience was like for my grandparents and great-grandparents” — notably for one of her great-grandmothers, who died while detained in a place far from home.

Instead, Doi found the pilgrimage to be a challenge, emotionally and intellectually. The intense “feeling of place,” she said, brought home the reality of what her forebears had been through.

That initial pilgrimage was only the start of Doi’s journey. For the past four years she has sought to better understand the history and the communal and spiritual impact of the pilgrimages, working to draw attention to the movement and participating as a descendant of the people who were incarcerated.

Vehicles enter the Rohwer War Relocation Center in southeast Arkansas during World War II. Photo via AState.edu

After returning from Arkansas, she sought out the founder of the first pilgrimage to a detainment camp, Warren Furutani. Born in 1947 in Los Angeles to survivors of Manzanar, a camp three hours from Los Angeles in the Sierra Nevada, Furutani was a leader of an early group of activists who organized a pilgrimage to Manzanar in 1969, finding out only later that a Buddhist priest, Sentoku Mayeda, and a Christian minister, Shoichi Wakahiro, had been visiting Manzanar yearly since the camp was closed.

The following year, Furutani was a key force in the effort to make the site a national landmark. He was later elected to the California State Assembly and was instrumental in establishing Asian American and other ethnic studies programs at UCLA and other schools.

In their initial forays to Manzanar, Furutani and the other pilgrims uncovered the remains of the camp in what they termed “a very shallowly buried grave.” After the war, Doi said, the War Relocation Authority had “sold off as much as they could,” then pushed “these giant trash piles” of everything that remained into “a giant hole in the ground.” It was a literal cover-up of the mistreatment of Japanese Americans, relegating the history of the place to the memories of the victims and the perpetrators.

In a small group session of the annual Manzanar Pilgrimage, former Manzanar prisoner Wilbur Sato, far right, relates his experiences behind the barbed wire to a group of visitors in April 2007 during a Manzanar At Dusk program. 

Photo by Gann Matsuda/Wikipedia/Creative Commons

Since the 1969 pilgrimage to Manzanar, it has become an annual event that draws many from Los Angeles’ large Japanese American community. The practice has spread to other camps as well, brimming with intergenerational vibrancy and the chance to share memories, cultural norms and ideas across cohorts increasingly pushed to assimilate. Pilgrimages fill up months in advance and are capped between 200 and 450 people, depending on the area and the availability of hotel accommodations.

At Manzanar each year, a memorial service is held just outside the camp’s cemetery, where the pilgrims gather at a stone monument known as the Ireito, once the only visible sign that the camp had existed. People offer incense and flowers. Activists, political leaders and academics usually speak. Afterward, Japanese American Christian ministers, Buddhist priests of multiple traditions and Shinto ministers preside at an interfaith service.

Doi said the service at the Ireito affirms Japanese Americans’ tendency to respect “hybrid” forms of religion, “with more of a community-driven, organic kind of spiritual practice,” she said.

Indeed, Doi said that the pilgrimages to Manzanar and the other camps echo the Buddhist model often followed in Japan, in which people visit temples throughout Japan, one that had not previously been a significant feature of Japanese American practice. It could also be a new kind of tradition, created by third-generation Japanese Americans seeking to reconnect with their identities.

Mount Williamson looms in the background as workers from the Manzanar War Relocation Center tend a farm in Manzanar, Calif., in 1943.

 Photo by Ansel Adams/LOC/Creative Commons

Pilgrimage is also a direct response to what Doi terms the “forced assimilation” of Japanese Americans, of which wartime detainment was a part.

RELATED: An awakening is coming to American religion. You won’t hear about it from the pulpit.

As fewer people with direct experience in the camps remain, the sense of urgency to remember grows. Doi believes that thousands more would attend if more lodging and other infrastructure existed in the areas surrounding the camps. Yet for every individual who attends, dozens or hundreds more hear of their experiences, the stories they heard, their reclamation of memory and the affirmations of identity.

This article is one in an ongoing series focusing on contemporary faith-based leaders reinventing American faith. Read others in the series here.

 

Christie’s cancels auction of jewelry bought by billionaire with Nazi past

The auction house planned to sell jewelry from the collection of Heidi Horten, whose husband built a fortune at the expense of Jews during the Nazi years.

Heidi Horten, left, wearing the Briolette of India diamond necklace. A Bulgari diamond, sapphire and emerald necklace, right, was one of the items to be auctioned by Christie’s. Photos © Heidi Horten Foundation, courtesy Christie's

September 1, 2023

By 

Yonat Shimro

(RNS) — Under pressure from Holocaust survivors, Christie’s auction house on Thursday (Aug. 31) canceled a sale of jewelry from the collection of an Austrian heiress whose husband built a fortune at the expense of Jews under the Nazi regime.

A prior sale in May from the collection of Heidi Horten generated a record $202 million from diamonds, emeralds and sapphires but brought intense criticism from Jewish organizations, chiefly the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA.

Horten’s husband, Helmut Horten, a former Nazi Party member, expanded his department store chain at a time when Jewish businesses were forced to sell, and, in some cases, stripped and looted their merchandise as part of the Nazi’s Aryanization campaign. In one case, Horten was reported to have purchased a major textile manufacturer at a discount from its Jewish owner who then fled for his safety.

Helmut Horten died in 1987, leaving his wife nearly a billion dollars. Heidi Horten died last year at age 81. Her jewelry collection is being sold off to help finance a foundation that she created to support medical research and an art museum she founded in Vienna.

Holocaust survivors decried the auction house’s plan for the second sale, saying that Christie’s was profiting from the gains of a Nazi businessman.

“We are appalled that Christie’s is conducting an auction of jewelry from the estate of Heidi Horten, perpetuating a disgraceful pattern of whitewashing Holocaust profiteers, justifying commerce and ‘charity,'” a May 8 letter to Christie’s from the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation said.

In 2020, Heidi Horten commissioned a historian to investigate her late husband’s wealth. The resulting report concluded that her husband had undoubtedly benefited from the Nazi campaign against the Jews but was not himself necessarily motivated by antisemitism. 

Pressure on Christie’s also came from Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, which rejected a proposed donation from Christie’s. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art canceled an event on restitution organized by Christie’s that had been scheduled to take place in December.

Auction house officials told The New York Times that none of the jewels for sale had been bought from, or confiscated from, Jews. It was the source of Horten’s wealth that raised Holocaust survivors’ ire.

The auction house declined to answer questions about its decision to cancel the sale, which was scheduled for November in Geneva.

“The sale of the Heidi Horten jewelry collection has provoked intense scrutiny,” Christie’s president, Anthea Peers, said in a statement to The New York Times. “The reaction to it has deeply affected us and many others, and we will continue to reflect on it.”

David Schaecter, president of Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA and a survivor himself who lives in Miami, said in a statement: “We are glad that they recognized the great pain additional sales of Horten art and jewelry would cause Holocaust survivors.”

Most US dog owners skeptical of routine vaccines

Experts say the skepticism could cause infectious diseases to spread in canines and humans.


Photo by: Carolyn Kaster / AP

By: Elina Tarkazikis
Posted Aug 30, 2023

The majority of U.S. dog owners are skeptical about vaccinating their pooches.

This is according to a study published in the medical journal Vaccine, which found that 53% of dog owners show skepticism about the safety and efficacy of routine vaccinations.

This includes concern with common shots like the rabies vaccine.

The skepticism is defined as Canine Vaccine Hesitancy (CVH), which the study claims could pose health risks.

"CVH is problematic not only because it may inspire vaccine refusal – which may in turn facilitate infectious disease spread in both canine and human populations – but because it may contribute to veterinary care provider mental/physical health risks," the study said.

The study said it finds that CVH is associated with rabies non-vaccination, and opposition to evidence-based vaccine policies.

In up to 99% of cases, domestic dogs are responsible for the transmission of the rabies virus to humans, according to the World Health Organization.

Results of the study come amid human vaccine concerns in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Xi hails China-U.S. friendship in reply letter to late General Joseph Stilwell's grandson

, 31-Aug-2023
CGTN


The family of former U.S. General Joseph Stilwell plant a tree commemorating the 140th birthday of the general, organized in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, August 8, 2023. /CFP

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday replied to a letter from John Easterbrook, grandson of Joseph Stilwell, a late U.S. general who helped the Chinese people during China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.

In the letter, Xi thanked Easterbrook for sharing the stories of Stilwell and his family's friendly exchanges with China for several generations.

The president also noted that commemoration events were recently held in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality to mark Stilwell's 140th birthday. He said he is pleased to see that the cause of China-U.S. friendship has been passed down to the fifth generation of the Stilwell family.

Looking back, Xi said that China and the United States fought side by side against Japanese fascists and for world peace. Looking into the future, the two countries have every reason to help each other achieve success and common prosperity, he said.

The foundation of China-U.S. relations lies in the people, and the source of strength lies in the friendship between their peoples, he added.

The two peoples should strengthen exchanges, enhance understanding and expand cooperation to continuously inject new impetus into the development of bilateral relations, Xi said, expressing his hope and belief that Easterbrook and other members of the Stilwell family would continue to contribute to the development of friendship between the two peoples. Xi also invited the Stilwell family to visit China often in the future.

Recently, Easterbrook wrote a letter to Xi, recalling Stilwell's exchanges with China and the Chinese people, introducing the efforts by the Stilwell family and his descendants to enhance cultural and people-to-people exchanges between the United States and China, paying tribute to Xi's long-term support in this regard. He also extended gratitude toward the Chinese government and people for not forgetting old friends and expressed the Stilwell family's wish and determination to promote cultural and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.

(With input from Xinhua)

 

Top prosecutors from 14 states back compensation for those sickened by US nuclear weapons testing

Susan Montoya Bryan, The Associated PressAug 30, 2023 

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez and top prosecutors from 13 other states are throwing their support behind efforts to compensate people sickened by exposure to radiation during nuclear weapons testing.

The Democratic officials sent a letter Wednesday to congressional leader, saying “it’s time for the federal government to give back to those who sacrificed so much.”

The letter refers to the estimated half a million people who lived within a 150-mile (240-kilometer) radius of the Trinity Test site in southern New Mexico, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945. It also pointed to thousands of people in Idaho, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Montana and Guam who currently are not eligible under the existing compensation program.

The U.S. Senate voted recently to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act as part of a massive defense spending bill. Supporters are hopeful the U.S. House will include the provisions in its version of the bill, and President Joe Biden has indicated his support.

"We finally have an opportunity to right this historic wrong,” Torrez said in a statement.

The hit summer film “Oppenheimer” about the top-secret Manhattan Project and the dawn of the nuclear age during World War II brought new attention to a decadeslong efforts to extend compensation for families who were exposed to fallout and still grapple with related illness.

It hits close to home for Torrez, who spent summers visiting his grandmother in southern New Mexico, who lived about 70 miles (110 kilometers) from where the Trinity Test was conducted. She used rainwater from her cistern for cooking and cleaning, unaware that it was likely contaminated as a result of the detonation.

The attorneys in their letter mentioned the work of a team of researchers who mapped radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests in the U.S., starting with the Trinity Test in 1945. The model shows the explosions carried out in New Mexico and Nevada between 1945 and 1962 led to widespread radioactive contamination, with Trinity making a significant contribution to exposure in New Mexico. Fallout reached 46 states as well as parts of Canada and Mexico.

“Without any warning or notification, this one test rained radioactive material across the homes, water, and food of thousands of New Mexicans,” the letter states. “Those communities experienced the same symptoms of heart disease, leukemia, and other cancers as the downwinders in Nevada.”

The letter also refers to an assessment by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which acknowledged that exposure rates in public areas from the Trinity explosion were measured at levels 10,000 times higher than currently allowed.

U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, the New Mexico Democrat who has been leading the effort to expand the compensation program to include New Mexico's downwinders and others in the West, held a listening session in Albuquerque last Thursday. Those exposed to radiation while working in uranium mines and mills spoke at the gathering about their experiences.

Luján in an interview called it a tough issue, citing the concerns about cost that some lawmakers have and the tears that are often shared by families who have had to grapple with cancer and other health problems as a result of exposure.

“It's important for everyone to learn these stories and embrace what happened,” he said, “so that we can all make things better.”

Susan Montoya Bryan, The Associated Press

ICYMI

Europe’s biggest oil company quietly shelves radical plan to shrink carbon footprint

Shell has ended the world’s biggest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets, designed to 

counteract the warming effects of carbon dioxide emissions. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG

UPDATED

 

AUG 31, 2023, 

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LONDON - Six months after becoming the chief executive at Shell, Mr Wael Sawan quietly ended the world’s biggest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets, the environmental projects designed to counteract the warming effects of carbon dioxide missions.

In an all-day investor event in June, Mr Sawan laid out an updated strategy for the European oil major that included cutting costs and doubling down on profit drivers such as oil and gas.

As important was what he omitted: Any mention of the company’s prior commitment to spend up to US$100 million (S$135 million) a year to build a pipeline of carbon credits, part of a promise to zero out its emissions by 2050.

Those goals for the offsets programme have been retired, the company confirmed, along with the plan to harvest a whopping 120 million carbon credits annually by the end of the decade from projects that sequester carbon with trees, grasses or other natural resources, many of which Shell would develop itself.

That would have accounted for 10 per cent of the company’s emissions. It has not made public any new targets for developing offsets or specified how it now plans to deliver on its future climate commitments.

The pullback reflects both Mr Sawan’s renewed commitment to the oil and gas business that generates most of Shell’s profits, and an admission that the prior goals were simply unattainable.

Over the past two years, Shell barely made a dent.

It spent US$95 million, less than half of its initial budget, to build or invest in a portfolio of carbon projects from Western Africa to the Brazilian Amazon to Australian farmlands. They have generated few if any offsets, and Shell has struggled to find projects that meet its standards for quality.

It is a newly damning indictment of offsets, which have become an important if controversial “climate solution” for most big companies: Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates the voluntary carbon market, which totals around US$2 billion today, could grow as high as US$950 billion by 2037.

Ms Flora Ji, a 17-year Shell veteran, has run the company’s nature-based solutions operations since 2021. In an interview before Mr Sawan scrapped the official 120 million-offsets-per-year target, she said everyone knew it was a big number, a reach.

Meanwhile, the carbon market had not expanded rapidly enough to meet rising demand, she said. “It didn’t have that kind of huge, exponential growth we expected.” 

Offsets, even of the highest quality, were never intended to be the only solution for Shell or anyone else. The Science Based Targets initiative, a UN-backed agency that evaluates companies’ net-zero goals, recommends offsetting no more than 10 per cent of emissions, and then only after making every other possible cut.

Ms Ji said that has been Shell’s long-term approach, first to avoid emissions, then to reduce and finally to offset.

“Shell’s sustainability and climate targets remain,” a company spokesman said.

Still, Mr Sawan has softened some of his predecessor’s environmental priorities.

Along with ending the carbon offsets target, he eliminated a goal to increase power sales and vowed to be more selective with investments in renewable power, the backbone of the transition away from oil and gas. Shell also silently ditched a target to reach 500,000 electric vehicle charge points by 2025 and to have at least 10 per cent share of global clean hydrogen sales.

“The company has flipped to the short-term focus, to profit maximisation,” said Mr Adam Matthews, chief responsible investment officer at the Church of England Pensions Board. “They are no longer aligned with trying to navigate the transition in the same way that we had previously perceived.”

In spite of what Mr Matthews and others see as a significant shift, Shell has yet to adjust its long-term climate target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

And Shell has not abandoned its offsets efforts, yet its backup plan is revealing. Ms Ji said the company can also use offsets it acquires on the market to bolster its supplies. And, of course, that exposes Shell to the lower quality credits it was trying to avoid in the first place. 

BLOOMBERG

Naming suicide in obits was once taboo. Changing that can help loved ones grieve

Deborah Blum holds a photo of her teen, Esther Iris, at home in Los Angeles. Blum and her husband, Warren, lost Esther Iris to suicide in 2021. When it came time to write the death notice, Deborah Blum was open and specific about the mental health struggles that led to her child’s death.

 (Lauren Justice for KFF Health News/TNS)

By TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE
PUBLISHED: August 30, 2023
Debby Waldman | (TNS) KFF Health News

When Deborah and Warren Blum’s 16-year-old died by suicide in November 2021, they went into shock. For two days, the grief-stricken Los Angeles couple didn’t sleep.

But when it came time to write a death notice, Deborah Blum was clearheaded: In a heartfelt tribute to her smart, funny, popular child, who had recently come out as nonbinary, she was open and specific about the mental health struggles that led to Esther Iris’ death.

“Esther’s whole thing was that people should know and talk about mental health and it shouldn’t be a secret,” Deborah Blum told KFF Health News. “The least I could do was to be honest and tell people. I think being embarrassed just makes it worse.”

While it was once unheard-of to mention suicide as a cause of death in news obituaries and paid death notices, that has been changing, especially in the past 10 years, said Dan Reidenberg, a psychologist and managing director of The National Council for Suicide Prevention. High-profile suicides — such as those of comic actor Robin Williams in 2014, fashion designer Kate Spade in 2018, and dancer Stephen “tWitch” Boss in 2022 — have helped reduce the stigma surrounding suicide loss. So has advertising for depression and anxiety medications, which has helped normalize that mental illnesses are health conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic also drew attention to the prevalence of mental health challenges.

“The stigma is changing,” Reidenberg said. “There is still some, but it’s less than it used to be, and that’s increasing people’s willingness to include it in an obituary.”

While there’s no right or wrong way to write death announcements, mental health and grief experts said the reluctance to acknowledge suicide has implications beyond the confines of a public notice. The stigma attached to the word affects everything from how people grieve to how people help prevent others from ending their own lives.

Research shows that talking about suicide can help reduce suicidal thoughts, but studies have also found that spikes in suicide rates can follow news reports about someone dying that way — a phenomenon known as “suicide contagion.” The latter is an argument people make for not acknowledging suicide in obituaries and death notices.

However, Reidenberg said, the subject can be addressed responsibly. That includes telling a balanced story, similar to what Deborah Blum did, acknowledging Esther Iris’ accomplishments as well as their struggles. It means leaving out details about the method or location of the death, and not glorifying the deceased in a way that might encourage vulnerable readers to think dying by suicide is a good way to get attention.

“We don’t ever want to normalize suicide, but we don’t want to normalize that people can’t have a conversation about suicide,” Reidenberg said.

Having that conversation is an important part of the grieving process, said Holly Prigerson, a professor of sociology in medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and an expert on prolonged grief disorder.

“Part of adjusting to the loss of someone is coming up with a story of what happened and why,” she said. “To the extent that you can’t be honest and acknowledge what happened if it’s a death due to suicide, that will complicate, if not impede, your ability to fully and accurately process your loss.”

People close to the deceased often know when a death was by suicide, said Reidenberg, particularly in the case of young people. “Being honest can lead to information and awareness, whereas if we keep it shrouded in this big mystery it doesn’t help,” he added.

A study about caregiver depression that Prigerson recently conducted identified avoidance as an impediment to healing from grief. “Not acknowledging how someone died, denying the cause of death, avoiding the reality of what happened is a significant barrier to being able to adjust to what happened and to move forward,” she said.

Researchers are increasingly seeing bereavement as a social process, Prigerson said, and as social beings, people look to others for comfort and solace. That’s another reason the stigma attached to suicide is harmful: It keeps people from opening up.

“The stigma is based on the perception that others will judge you as being an inadequate parent, or not having done enough,” Prigerson said. “This whole thing with obituaries is all about others — it’s about how people are going to read what happened and think less of you.”

Stigma, shame, and embarrassment are among the reasons grieving family members have traditionally avoided acknowledging suicide in obituaries and death notices. It’s also why, if they do, they may be more likely to address it indirectly, either by describing the death as “sudden and unexpected” or by soliciting donations for mental health programs.

Economics can also factor in — sometimes people are secretive because of life insurance plans that exclude payouts for suicides. Sometimes they’re trying to protect reputations, theirs as well as those of the deceased, particularly in religious communities where suicide is considered a sin.

Sometimes they’re operating under what Adam Bernstein, the obituary editor at The Washington Post, sees as “a mistaken belief” that an obituary is a form of eulogy that should speak to the highest memories of a person, and suicide doesn’t fit that agenda. People don’t include the word in paid death notices for the same reason. Bernstein, who is also president of The Society of Professional Obituary Writers, said that at the Post, obituaries mention suicide when the reporter can confirm it as a cause of death.

Avoiding the word suicide doesn’t necessarily mean someone is in denial. In the days after a loss, which is when most obituaries and death announcements are written, it’s often profoundly difficult to face the truth, especially in the case of suicide, according to Doreen Marshall, a psychologist and former vice president at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Even when people can admit the truth to themselves, they might have trouble expressing it to others, said Joanne Harpel, a suicide bereavement expert in New York who works with mourners through her business, Coping After Suicide. In the support groups she runs, she said, people vary in how open they are willing to be. For example, in the group for mothers who have lost a child to suicide, everyone acknowledges that reality — after all, that’s why they’re there — but they don’t all do so the same way.

“Some of them will refer to ‘when this happened’ or ‘before all this,’” Harpel said, cautioning against holding all mourners to the same standard. “They’re not pretending it was something else, but using the word ‘suicide’ is so confronting and so painful that even in the safest context it’s very, very hard for them to say it out loud.”

——-

___

(KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2023 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Critical Minerals: Insights from a Recent Workshop

Resources - innovative ideas and engaging stories in environmental economics

BEIA SPILLER AND MICHAEL A. TOMAN

NAMLONG NGUYEN / SHUTTERSTOCK

Date
AUG. 30, 2023

Insights for how the United States can approach secure and affordable access to the critical minerals that are needed for electric vehicle production, from a recent workshop held at Resources for the Future.

As the move to electrify the vehicle fleet picks up steam, concern has been growing that critical minerals, the key inputs into electric vehicle (EV) batteries, will become a bottleneck. Copper, recently identified as a critical material, also will be needed for the charging infrastructure.

Several questions have moved to the forefront of discussion around vehicle electrification: Will critical mineral shortages restrict battery production? Will the costs of critical minerals rise so much that batteries, and thus EVs, become too expensive? How might environmental, social, and geopolitical concerns associated with these minerals be mitigated?

In July 2023, Resources for the Future held a closed-door workshop with over 20 stakeholders from government, nongovernmental organizations, academia, and the mineral and automotive industries to discuss many of these challenges, uncover areas of agreement and disagreement on these issues, and identify questions that need more research. The workshop covered topics such as supply chains, security, permitting, policies for promoting the supply of domestic critical minerals, and strategies for improving the flexibility of demand for critical minerals. In this blog post, we discuss some high-level takeaways from the meeting.

Data Availability

Data will be necessary for researchers to study these issues, yet data on critical minerals—particularly around their supply chains—are sparse. The US Geological Survey National Minerals Information Center (USGS NMIC) is the most comprehensive and reliable source of publicly available information on non-fuel minerals. For more than 80 different mineral commodities, NMIC publishes domestic and international information on a multitude of issues such as mineral reserves, processing, demand, prices, and ownership. Yet, more information is needed to adequately understand mineral markets and supply chains. To address these needs, past National Research Council committees have recommended that NMIC be organized in a similar way as the US Energy Information Agency, with comparable resources, authority, and autonomy.

Further, although the US government knows and reports the amounts of minerals that are extracted from state lands, an information gap exists for federal lands because royalties are collected from state lands but not federal lands. This knowledge gap limits an understanding of the potential future supply of critical minerals on federal lands—an important consideration for addressing permitting issues.

Ownership of mines and processing facilities worldwide also is important for evaluating the global market power of large suppliers that co-finance and co-own international and domestic sources of critical minerals. As mentioned above, USGS tries to track this information, but ownership changes rapidly, so the data are incomplete.

Sergii Chernov / Shutterstock

The pricing of critical minerals also is difficult to unravel. Although some spot transactions happen, China plays a large role in pricing, given that China is the origin of most of the global supply of processed minerals for EV batteries. Because pricing is not transparent, it is difficult to judge how competitive pricing might be and how changes in supply or demand would affect prices.

Finally, publicly available data on permitting are sparse, which makes it hard to construct and assess policies to improve the permitting process. Workshop participants agreed that long wait times are involved in fully permitting and setting up a mine in the United States, but what proportion of that time is due to the permitting process itself remains unclear. Several agencies at different levels of government are involved in permitting, and comprehensive data on permitting processes have not been compiled. Although anecdotes suggest that the United States takes longer to permit mines than other comparable countries, the data on wait times are too limited for us to draw any firm conclusions. Some participants thought that these permitting issues are not unique to the United States but also arise in other developed countries that enact significant protections for the environment and communities.

Accelerating Domestic Supplies of Critical Minerals

Workshop participants agreed that increasing the domestic capacity for extracting and processing critical minerals is an important goal. However, views differed on the extent to which that ramp-up could significantly increase the availability of cost-competitive supplies. Two key issues underlie the disagreements among participants.

First, the United States currently produces very small amounts of the critical minerals that are needed for EV batteries, and USGS statistics show only limited available quantities of critical mineral reserves. The small supply raises questions about US capability to significantly ramp up production in the near to medium term. Participants who disagreed with that perspective argued that US reserves could be much larger if mining exploration were less impeded by federal land use regulations, a perspective that was contested by other participants.

Second, even if more domestic resources were discovered, many participants thought that existing policies will have only a limited effect on increasing domestic extraction. For example, the EV tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act require the minerals in the batteries to come from domestic sources or from countries with which the United States has free trade agreements; however, several workshop participants thought that these credits were not a very powerful incentive for new critical mineral exploration and mining in the United States.

The workshop participants agreed that stakeholder opposition has been a major part of the delays in permitting and opening new mines in the United States. Recent research has demonstrated that the majority of domestic reserves are located within 35 miles of Native lands. This observation underscores that any successful ramp-up in critical minerals exploration and extraction will require early, consistent, credible, transparent, and equitable community and stakeholder engagement. Understanding the concerns of local communities and ensuring that community members are part of the planning process will be key to developing plans that reduce impacts and achieve equitable outcomes. Additional objective data on the mining sector’s uptake of best practices for community engagement in advance of new projects also would be useful.

Nontraditional opportunities to increase domestic supplies exist, such as increasing the recovery of critical minerals as byproducts of other mining activity, extracting from existing wastes, and expanding recycling. However, at present, these options are not cost-competitive. Moreover, the volumes of material currently available for recycling are too small relative to the large initial capital costs necessary for setting up recycling. Investments in research and development (R&D) that reduce the costs of accessing these sources would be valuable for increasing domestic capacity.

Insecurity of Critical Mineral Supplies

USGS data show that China currently has a significant market share in extracting and a dominant share in processing the critical minerals that are used in EV batteries. Workshop participants agreed that this market concentration poses risks to the ability of the United States to secure affordable and reliable critical mineral supplies for expanded battery production. For example, China recently withheld graphite exports to Sweden, and workshop participants suggested that this sanction was a geopolitical strategic response to Sweden’s decision to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Officials in China have threatened to withhold or ban exports of rare earth elements to the United States in retaliation against sanctions; China took a similar action in 2010 in response to a territorial dispute with Japan, which caused prices to increase steeply.

A mining facility in Australia. Alf Manciagli / Shutterstock


Workshop participants suggested policies to deal with such insecurity, though each potential solution has its own challenges. For example, the United States and other large importers could jointly limit dependence on imports from “countries of concern.” However, this approach would create a similar upward price pressure as export restrictions. The US government alternatively could subsidize domestic processing, to establish an alternative to Chinese processing of critical minerals. Subsidies likely would be needed to attain cost-competitiveness with China. However, the subsidies might need to continue for an extended period, which would be costly and could stifle technical innovation in the sector. Moreover, the United States faces workforce scarcities for these activities. As noted, nontraditional sources could be tapped for critical minerals, but those options likely will require significant R&D spending to make them cost-competitive.

Given the various obstacles to addressing critical mineral insecurity through supply-side measures, a crucial consideration will be to leverage technological innovation to diversify EV battery designs, especially designs that economize on critical minerals that are more scarce or less reliably supplied. A current example is the increased use of batteries without cobalt (though such batteries have lower range). Having more battery design options increases the flexibility of demand for critical minerals, thus reducing US vulnerability to shortages or high prices. In the short term, flexibility is limited, particularly given the need for vehicle manufacturers to make commitments on vehicle design to accommodate particular battery technologies. However, R&D funding could be used to diversify battery chemistries, thus providing EV and battery manufacturers with additional options for addressing possible disruptions in the supply of specific critical minerals. The cost of the necessary R&D needs to be weighed against the benefits of having a larger number of options available for battery chemistry that depend less, or not at all, on critical minerals that are scarcer or more unreliably supplied.

Implications

Ensuring a smooth transition to an electrified vehicle fleet will require a significant effort to overcome the potential bottlenecks created by critical minerals. As we learned in our recent workshop, these challenges are complex and will require coordinated attention from a variety of stakeholders, including federal and state policymakers, business leaders, academics, and nongovernmental organizations. New policies will need to be developed, and existing policies revisited, to diversify the supply of critical minerals, increase options for EV battery design, reduce risks, keep costs down, and spur innovation.

Another clear conclusion is that the United States can’t do this alone. Overcoming the challenges will require international cooperation. This cooperation can include coordination on R&D policies and on policies for promoting more competitive and transparent markets for critical minerals. In addition, by working to improve environmental and labor outcomes from critical mineral mining and processing in friendly nations (e.g., through the Minerals Security Partnership), and increasing the number of countries with which it has free trade agreements, the United States can promote lower-cost, more secure, and environmentally and socially friendly supply chains for the critical minerals that are used in EV batteries.

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Man charged with hate crime for destroying LGBTQ Pride flags at Stonewall National Monument

Claire Thornton
USA TODAY

A Colorado man has been arrested for allegedly removing and destroying LGBTQ Pride flags at New York City's Stonewall National Monument, which commemorates iconic uprisings in the struggle for LGBTQ+ civil rights.

Patrick Murphy, of Denver, was charged with a hate crime and "criminal mischief" after he allegedly removed and "broke" multiple transgender Pride flags that were displayed on the fence surrounding Christopher Park, New York Police Department Detective Ronald Montas told USA TODAY. Murphy, 25, was arrested Monday, Montas said.

The attack, one of several police are investigating, happened during LGBTQ Pride month, which occurs every year in June to commemorate the Stonewall Inn uprisings for LGBTQ rights, which began on June 28, 1969.

Murphy pleaded not guilty, according to court records.

"It is preposterous to conclude that Patrick was involved in any hate crime," Robert C. Gottlieb, Murphy's attorney, told USA TODAY. "The evidence will clearly show that whatever happened that night involving Patrick was not intended to attack gays or their symbol, the gay Pride flag."


Murphy's arrest comes after several other attacks on LGBTQ Pride flags this year in New York. In February, a woman was arrested and charged with multiple hate crimes after she allegedly torched an LGBTQ Pride flag hanging from a restaurant. In April, a man was caught defecating on a Pride flag in Manhattan.

This month in California, a woman was shot and killed by a 27-year-old man who ripped down a Pride flag hanging outside her clothing shop

.

What is the Stonewall National Monument?

The Stonewall National Monument encompasses Greenwich Village's historic Stonewall Inn gay bar, Christopher Park and the surrounding streets and sidewalks where the 1969 Stonewall uprisings against police occurred, according to the National Park Service.

The monument was designated by President Barack Obama in 2016.

The fence surrounding Christopher Park, a public city park, is adorned with different LGBTQ Pride flags, some of which are placed there by U.S. park rangers. The area also includes a photo exhibit showing images of police raids, which were common at bars where LGBTQ people were suspected of gathering. At Stonewall, patrons and LGBTQ advocates rioted against police for days, demanding they be given the same treatment under the law as non-LGBTQ New York residents.

The monument commemorates "a milestone in the quest for LGBTQ+ civil rights," the park service says on its website.

Attacks against LGBTQ Pride flags on the rise

Authorities across the country have been responding this summer to a growing number of attacks targeting LGBTQ flags.

Sarah Moore, an extremism analyst with the Anti-Defamation League and GLAAD, recently told USA TODAY she has tracked incidents across the country where people damage, burn or steal Pride flags hanging outside private residences, restaurants and other businesses. Earlier this year, there was an online hate campaign using a hashtag that advocated for a destroy-the-Pride-flag challenge, she said.

“There's definitely been an increase in attacks against Pride flags," Moore said.

Just in August, Moore has tracked attacks on Pride flags in Newtown, Connecticut; Capitola, California; Hamtramck, Michigan; Seattle and Houston.

"We need allies more than ever," Moore said.