Want Faster Shipping? There’s an Illegal US War for That

BY EDWARD HUNT

  APRIL 5, 2024
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Photograph Source: kees torn – CC BY-SA 2.0

The United States is waging an illegal war in Yemen, where major shipping routes along the country’s coastlines have been disrupted by ongoing violence in the region.

Despite widespread understanding in Washington that U.S. military operations in Yemen violate U.S. law, U.S. officials continue to insist that they must continue their military campaign, which they say is necessary to saving time and money on commercial shipping through the Middle East.

“The U.S. economy relies on open sea lanes,” U.S. General Michael Kurilla, the commander of U.S. Central Command, said at a March 7 Senate hearing, after being asked about the growing U.S. military presence in the Red Sea. “By our national security strategy, we will not allow a state or non-state actor to affect the freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab al Mandeb, or the Suez Canal.”

Since January 11, the United States has been directing airstrikes and other military operations in Yemen. U.S. military forces have been targeting the Houthis, a militant group that has been launching missiles and other attacks against commercial vessels in the Red Sea, Bab al Mandeb, and Gulf of Aden.

For months, the Houthis’ attacks have disrupted commercial shipping. The Houthis have insisted that they will continue their attacks until Israel ends it military offensive in Gaza.

Although some of the Houthis’ attacks have caused casualties, the major concern in Washington has been the implications for the global economy. As U.S. officials have repeatedly noted, as much as 15 percent of global trade passes through the Red Sea, including 12 percent of the sea-based oil trade.

“The reason it’s so important there is this,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained earlier this year. “15 percent of commercial traffic is going through that strait every single day.” That includes “30 percent of the world’s container ships.”

Of particular concern to U.S. officials is the Bab al Mandeb, a narrow strait along the southwestern coast of Yemen that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. An estimated 8.8 million barrels of oil are shipped through the strait every day, making it one of the world’s “strategic chokepoints,” as Gen. Kurilla described it.

Although the White House has insisted that President Biden has the legal authority to take military action against the Houthis, several members of Congress have refuted its claims. At a Senate hearing in February, several senators called attention to the War Powers Resolution, which establishes that the president cannot continue hostilities for longer than 60 days without approval from Congress.

Regardless, Congress has failed to act, even now that the deadline has passed. March 12, the day that the White House was required to cease its military operations, “came, and went, in public silence,” as the Associated Press reported.

Even as the Biden administration and Congress move forward with an illegal war, there are alternatives to addressing the Houthi attacks on commercial shipping.

As some U.S. officials have acknowledged, the ideal and perhaps most obvious alternative would be to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza. After all, the Houthis continue to insist that they will not end their attacks until Israel ends its siege of Gaza.

“I am very keen to see that there is a ceasefire in Gaza,” U.S. Special Envoy to Yemen Timothy Lenderking said during a March 29 appearance on Washington Journal. “I do believe that we can use that moment to de-escalate some of these other crises, including the Red Sea. We must get to that moment.”

Absent a ceasefire, however, it remains possible for commercial ships to circumvent the Middle East. Data compiled by the International Monetary Fund indicates that maritime trade is being redirected around Africa. In other words, commercial ships are taking advantage of other options for reaching their destinations.

The Biden administration has opposed both approaches, however. Not only has the administration continued to support Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, despite its acknowledgment of the worsening “humanitarian catastrophe,” as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described it, but the administration remains unwilling to tolerate the longer shipping times that are associated with the route around Africa.

“If you’re talking oil that comes through, we’re seeing a diversion of that,” Gen. Kurilla said at the March 7 Senate hearing. “It goes around the Cape of Good Hope. What that’s going to do is bring products late to market and price increases as well.”

Indeed, the priority of U.S. officials is to keep the Red Sea open for shipping. Their determination to maintain faster shipping is leading them to move forward with a war in Yemen that they know is illegal, even as they come to recognize more sensible options.

The first step in getting to a “just settlement” in Yemen “is the ceasefire in Gaza,” Lenderking said. “I think we can use that diplomatically to de-escalate the situation in the Red Sea.”

This first appeared on FPIF.

Edward Hunt writes about war and empire. He has a PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.

Voting For a Man Who Called Black Mothers Bitches?

BY ISHMAEL REED

 APRIL 5, 2024
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The day Trump acknowledge Blacks for Trump in Sanford, Flordia.

An NBC poll shows 16 percent support for Donald Trump among Black voters. Is it because they haven’t studied how a Trump regime would affect Blacks?

Trump wanted to shoot those who were demonstrating under the Black Lives Matter banner. Even though FBI statistics show a decrease in crime, he’s threatened to use the army to combat crime, which means the occupation of Black neighborhoods, which is where the media locates crime even though there are higher crime rates in some Red States and contrary to Senator Tim Scott’s singling out New York and San Francisco as the centers of U.S. crime, crime has declined in both places.

A series of articles and reports have pointed to the inadequate treatment that Black men and women, especially women, receive from the health industry. Obamacare has improved the care that millions of Blacks and browns receive. Trump wants to eliminate Obamacare.

His and Senator McConnell’s Supreme Court’s anti-Abortion position is leading to the deaths of American women, particularly Black women, adding to thousands of Blacks who died as a result of Trump’s incompetent handling of the COVID crisis.

Thousands of Blacks who are civil servants will lose their jobs if Trump follows Steve Bannon’s demand that the administrative state be dismantled. We’re back to Woodrow Wilson, who rid the Civil Service of Blacks.

When Trump was incensed by Black football players taking the knee to protest injustice, he called them “sons of bitches.”

Maybe the Rappers with millions of followers who support Trump are comfortable with a rapist who calls Black mothers “bitches,” but I don’t think that things have changed since I was a member of the AME Zion Church.

The church broke away from the white Methodists over discrimination. More than Easter, the Sundays devoted to the celebration of mothers saw the highest church attendance. Calling Black mothers “bitches” in 2017, I believe began Trump’s unraveling. When Rappers are asked why they support Trump, they sound ignorant or unhinged. These Rappers receive enormous publicity from corporate media outlets like The New York Times because they draw youthful subscribers. As a result, they have replaced the traditional Black leadership as spokespersons for Blacks. Another bill that you have to pay if you are Black in America.

Some Black men support Trump because he is charismatic and exciting. Gail Collins wrote in the Times, “He’s fun to watch.” He has excited the country into a state of burnout. I know I’m tired.

Ishmael Reed’s latest play, “The Shine Challenge, 2024” will be Zoomed until April 15: info@nuyorican.org

Ishmael Reed’s latest play is “The Conductor.”

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Hypochondriacs Can Relax: 

Havana Syndrome Is Baloney

BY EVE OTTENBERG

 APRIL 5, 2024
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Photo by Natasha Connell

Havana Syndrome, it turns out, is a figment of lots of overheated imaginations. There are no death-ray microwaves aimed at American heads in the U.S. embassies in nations Washington doesn’t like. In March, the National Institutes of Health said so. NIH studies found neither vocational harm, nor brain injury, nor blood biomarkers, pace 60 Minutes. The whole thing was a massive hoax that started eight years ago, after which the ball really got rolling in 2017, as U.S. military and intelligence officers reported symptoms from India and China. According to Wikipedia: “The most recent studies of over 1000 reported cases of Havana Syndrome have ruled out foreign involvement in all but a couple dozen cases.” Now the NIH has presumably dismissed even those. The nefarious furren conspiracy to scramble American brains was just, well, a hallucination, suggesting some of those brains had already been scrambled due to prolonged exposure to the madness called U.S. foreign policy. Still, the hoopla wasn’t as loony as it could have been – no Havana Syndrome sufferers claimed twinges in their teeth due to electromagnetic messages zapping their fillings, though conceivably that could come next. In fact, the NIH study didn’t stop 60 Minutes from airing a story about Havana Syndrome being caused by the Russians. So there may well be more insanity in the pipeline.

It started in Havana in 2016. According to Spyscape, a U.S. embassy staff person “awoke to a loud, piercing sound in one ear, followed by acute nausea and vertigo. Within years, similar symptoms of the mysterious illness had been reported by hundreds – some say as many as 1,000 – U.S. spies, diplomats and defense officials in China, Russia, Austria, Serbia, the White House and beyond.” Sound like a mass paranoid panic attack by those with brains fried by Washington propaganda? If you said yes, you could be onto something.

“Theories range from some weapon attack to nerve agents and microwave death rays.” The CIA “hasn’t ruled out foreign involvement –including in cases that originated in the U.S. Embassy in Havana.” So the CIA basically straight up said the commies could have a death ray and are using it on us. Next those wicked reds will be hypnotizing us through our laptops to steal the formula for Preparation H and send it to Wikileaks.

Official U.S. government theories included pulsed, directed, radio-frequency attacks and microwave beams aimed at the U.S. embassy. One CIA officer who awoke in a Moscow hotel room with vertigo told Spyscape: “Of course I’m concerned about the adversaries behind this, because ultimately I believe it’s an act of war.” One Havana embassy staffer described himself as a “zombie;” all I can say is keep careful track of your body parts when in contact with these cannibals in the foreign service, since who knows what they might decide to chow down on. Nor was the foreign service the only branch of government affected. One National Security council staffer “described collapsing at the White House gates, convinced he was going to die.” My question is, would he then have risen from the dead and tried to eat the president? Clearly, it was not just a mass psychosis, but a highly contagious one, with serious meal-time ramifications that I hope the secret service carefully kept tabs on.

You’d think the belief that an illness is in reality an act of war perpetrated by a hostile foreign government would, prima facie, disqualify whoever made the charge from being taken seriously. You’d also think such a fantasy would be easy to refute, but apparently not. It took the American health bureaucracy eight years to rule out enemy death rays, and I’m sure many Havana syndrome sufferers still consider themselves targets of a deadly foreign conspiracy. Such convictions require a hefty dose of megalomania, but believing that your headache is a foreign enemy attack indicates that megalomania is not in short supply.

Nor is hysteria about contamination by foreigners, bringing to mind General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove and his obsession with the purity of his bodily fluids. Indeed, the 60 Minutes opus revealed that an FBI agent who interviewed a Russian for 80 hours experienced disorientation, among other Havana Syndrome symptoms, leading one to wonder why nobody asked about the possible health implications of  80 hours of interrogation. Disorientation, crippling or otherwise, would seem to be a logical result of such a marathon. Clearly contact with foreigners, life abroad, or a stint out of the country, has stimulated some rather bizarre ideation in our diplomats, spies and military men, ideation that lay not too far below the surface and just needed the slightest nudge to come roaring wildly into view.

Meanwhile, a Northeastern professor hypothesized a different cause: he blamed crickets, specifically the Indies short-tailed cricket. This bug, “has a chirp that’s extremely annoying to the point where it can harm you,” according to professor Kevin Fu. An advisory group working with the state department agreed. “The group performed a pulse repetition analysis,” according to Northeastern Global News June 13, 2023, “of audio captured in Cuba and audio of the crickets and found they were remarkably similar.” Reassuring to hypochondriacs everywhere, the CIA asserted in 2022 that “the mysterious illness was not caused by a ‘sustained global campaign by a hostile power.’” The CIA did not reveal if arthropods were to blame.

The 1980s were particularly rife with mass hysterical illnesses. There was the West Bank fainting epidemic of 1983, the Hollinwell fainting and nausea attacks of 1980, the U.S. navy breathing difficulty attack in San Diego in 1988, which led to evacuating 600 men from barracks. Other instances of mass hypochondriacal lunacy include the supposed poisoning of thousands of Kosovans by toxic gases in 1990, Pokemon shock, wherein thousands of Japanese children allegedly had seizures while watching Pokemon in 1997 and fever, nausea and walking difficulty for over 500 female adolescents in Mexico City in 2006. And one of the most unforgettable – an outbreak of twitching, headaches and dizziness at a Virginia high school in 2007. Twitching was a new and rather disturbing addition to the collection of odd psychologically-induced symptoms. The thought of a large group of high-schoolers, twitching uncontrollably, is not one you want to contemplate for long.

So Havana Syndrome has a long and illustrious pedigree in the annals of hypochondriacal phantasmagoria. As such, I predict we’re not done with it yet. CIA agents who believe the heirs to Fidel Castro focused death rays at their skulls and believe it with such conviction that they suffered vertigo, nausea and felt they were going to die and then rise from the dead to eat other government officials, will not willingly let go of their peculiar and addled pensees. To the extent that Havana Syndrome is projection, one has to wonder what our spooks have been up to – have THEY been testing sonic beams or microwaves that induce nausea in the floridly paranoid? We’ll never know. But given the outlandish CIA experiments on the human body and psyche down the years, it’s a good bet they have.

And of course, some experts say never say die. “Dr. David Relman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford… argued in an editorial…” CNN reported March 18, that while brain scans “appear to show that ‘nothing or nothing serious’ happened with these cases, coming to this conclusion ‘would be ill-advised.’ Earlier work found evidence of abnormalities, he said, and the same is true for the study that did a wider variety of tests.” Relman argues we need better medical tests that can detect “more specific blood markers of different forms of cellular injury.” And tests, I would like to add, to screen potential zombies out of the foreign service.

CNN rather unhelpfully adds that we still lack a clear definition of this syndrome (thus throwing fuel on the lunatic fire) – “or what the government terms ‘anomalous health incidents.’” It even cites an intelligence panel saying in 2022 that in some instances, the symptoms could “plausibly” have come from external “pulsed electromagnetic energy.” That nitwit conclusion’s not conspiratorial, is it? But hey, if you were in the intelligence community, you’d likely figure, well what would you do if you could, if the shoe was on the other foot? You’d aim a death-ray at the heads of diplomats from countries you didn’t like and then skedaddle before they dined on you, that’s what you’d do.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard People. She can be reached at her website.

Drugmakers OD on Insane Prices, Incessant Commercials

by Gerald E. Scorse / April 3rd, 2024

Prices for prescription drugs in America average almost three times as much as in other major nations around the world. Even more, the companies that set those prices are doing everything they can to make sure they stay in the stratosphere: they filed suit to overturn an upcoming reform, having Medicare negotiate the prices of some of the costliest and most commonly used drugs. While the suit has already been dismissed, other challenges are certain to follow.

The makers don’t think they need to explain themselves, either. If they hadn’t been threatened with subpoenas, their CEOs would never have showed up to waffle their way through a Senate hearing on drug pricing earlier this year.

Lastly, the companies argue that critics of high prices should instead be praising the industry for all the research it carries out to make the drugs available in the first place—failing to mention, of course, the critical role that government funding regularly plays in the development of new drugs.

A big contributor to insane drug prices is the billions spent on those incessant drug commercials. Hour after hour, eyes glazing over, TV watchers are bombarded with happy-time ads for Rinvoq, Skyrizi, Dupixent, Sanofi, Jardiance, on and on and then some.

Thank heaven for mute buttons; more to the point, thank heaven that the Biden Administration is leading the way to somewhat less insanity.

The President’s Inflation Reduction Act contained several provisions affecting drug prices, including three that began to take effect in 2023. The bill capped the price of insulin at $35 a month, made some vaccines free, and required drug companies that raised prices faster than the rate of inflation to pay rebates to Medicare.

Here’s Biden taking a victory lap during his State of the Union address:  “That’s not just saving seniors money, it’s saving taxpayers money. We cut the federal deficit by $160 billion because Medicare will no longer have to pay those exorbitant prices…”

Other cost-saving provisions are coming as well. Starting in 2025, out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for retirees covered under Medicare Part D will be capped at $2,000. Annual limits after 2025 will be adjusted based on inflation rates. Medicare-negotiated drug prices, mentioned earlier, have an effective date of 2026 (unless, of course, they get derailed by Big Pharma). Negotiations between Medicare and the makers are already underway for the first 10 covered drugs; all by themselves, those 10 accounted for over $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs in 2022.

Drug prices could fall even more sharply under the terms of the proposed 2025 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services. Instead of Medicare-negotiated prices for 10 drugs, the number would rise to 50 per-year.

Presidents also have the power to make things happen without Congressional legislation, and a Biden executive order could result in allowing states to import lower-cost drugs in bulk from Canada. The Food and Drug Administration approved Florida’s request early this year, and other states are hoping to follow. (Full disclosure: Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and former president Trump also pushed for FDA’s approval.)

Drug companies reflexively oppose lower drug prices, so, of course, they reflexively oppose imports from Canada. A statement from their trade association said they were “considering all options for preventing this policy from harming patients.”

If you wonder how patients could be harmed by lower drug prices, feel free to ask the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. Another question too: Ask if they could please, please, please cut down on those commercials (or better yet, just end them).Facebook

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Gerald E. Scorse helped pass a bill that tightens the rules for reporting capital gains. He usually writes on taxes. Gerald can be reached at: scorse@gmail.com. Read other articles by Gerald.