James van Luik

As the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan approach in two weeks, one major poll shows that Americans, in a historical switch, now appear about equally divided on the decision to use the bomb.

Polling by the Associated Press, announced today, found that 24% of Americans "strongly approve" dropping the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and another 24% "somewhat approve." But 23% "somewhat disapprove" and 24% "strongly disapprove." Another 6% are not sure.

Polls in past years have generally shown strong majority support for the use of the bomb, although the "pro" count has slowly subsided over the years.

The poll of 1,000 adults in the United States was conducted for the AP by Ipsos, an international polling company, from July 5-10. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The polling, and a separate survey in Japan carried out by Kyodo, also found that more Americans than Japanese expect another world war in their lifetime. Most people in both countries believe the first use of a nuclear weapon is never justified, although nearly half of the Americans obviously make an exception for the 1945 examples, which killed at least 200,000, the vast majority of them civilians.

Japan surrendered within days of the use of the atomic weapons, but historians differ on whether that country would have given up, in the same time frame, even if the bombs had not been used, due to the Russians' entry into the war against them and other factors.

3. CHINA FLOATS, AMERICA SINKS
(Yuan Kicks Dollar Butt By Rejecting "Free Market")

GREG PALAST

In case you haven't the least idea what the heck it means for China to "float" its currency, let me put it in the language we economists use: China's float don't mean squat.

Yet our President, a guy whose marks in Economics 101 are too embarrassing to publish here, ran out to hail the fact that buying Chinese money will now cost more dollars.

The White House line to the media, swallowed whole, is that by making Chinese money (yuan) more expensive to buy with dollars, Americans will buy fewer computers and toys from China -- and US employment will rise.

This will happen when we find Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Economics Lesson #1: You can't change the value of goods by changing the value of the currency on the price tag. As my comrade Art Laffer wrote me, "If cheap currency makes your products more competitive, all automobiles would be made in Russia." Driven a Lada lately?

Economics Lesson #2: Don't take economics lessons from George Bush. Or Milton Friedman. Or Thomas Friedman. What that means, class, is don't believe the big, hot pile of hype that China's zooming economy is the result of that Red nation's adopting free market economic policies.

If China is now a capitalist free-market state, then I'm Mariah Carey. China's economy has soared because it stubbornly refused the Free – and Friedman-Market mumbo-jumbo that government should stop controlling, owning and regulating the industry.

China's announcement that it would raise the cost of the yuan covered over a more important notice: China would bar foreign control of its steel sector. China's leaders have built a powerhouse steel industry larger than ours by directing the funding, output, location and ownership of all factories. And rather than "freeing" the industry through opening their borders to foreign competition, the Chinese, for steel and every other product, have shut their borders tight to foreigners except as it suits China’s own industries.

China won't join NAFTA or CAFTA or any of those free-trade clubs. In China, Chinese industry comes first. And it's still, Mssrs. Friedman, the Peoples’ republic. Those Wal-Mart fashion designs called, chillingly, "New Order," are made in factories owned by the PLA, the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army.

In an interview just before he won the Nobel Prize in economics, Joe Stiglitz explained to me that China's huge financial surge -- a stunning 9.5% jump in GDP this year -- began with the government's funding and nurturing rural cooperatives, fledgling agricultural and industry protected behind high, high trade barriers.

It is true that China's growth got a boost from ending the bloodsoaked self-flagellating madness of Mao's Cultural Revolution. And China, when it chooses, makes use of markets and market pricing to distribute resources. The truth is, Chinese markets are as free as my kids: they can do whatever they want unless I say they can't.

Yes, China is adopting elements of "capitalism." And that's the ugly part: real estate speculation in Shanghai making millionaires of Communist party boss relatives and bank shenanigans worthy of a Neil Bush.

It is not the Guangdong skyscrapers and speculative bubble which allows China to sell us $162 billion more goods a year than we sell them. It is that China's government, by rejecting free-market fundamentalism, can easily conquer American markets where protection is now deemed passé.

And that is why the yuan has kicked the dollar's butt.

America’s only response is to have Alan Greenspan push up real interest rates so we can buy back our own dollars the Chinese won in the export game. The domestic result: US wages drifting down to Mexican maquiladora levels.

Am I praising China? Forget about it. This is one evil dictatorship which jails union organizers and beats, shackles and tortures those who don't kowtow to the wishes of Chairman Rob -- Wal-Mart chief Robson Walton. (Funny how Mr. Bush never mentions the D-word, Democracy, to our Chinese suppliers.)

Class dismissed.

4. ON CHINA AT LEAST, NIXON WAS RIGHT

ROBERT SCHEER

"China will never make it economically."

That's what I was told four decades ago, during my days as a graduate fellow at UC Berkeley's Center for Chinese Studies. That widely shared pessimistic view was based on the notion that the Chinese economy, plagued by scarce resources and massive overpopulation, would never take off, no matter what ideology dominated.

Everyone knows those experts were wrong. China, despite having almost a billion more mouths to feed now and being far more dependent on foreign resources, is frightening not because of the prospect of its economic failure, but because of its success. You could smell panic over China's offer to buy Unocal.

Sadly, the prospect of hundreds of millions of people being lifted from abject poverty seems to alarm even leading Democrats in Congress, who claim to be driven by a standard of social justice. And many Republicans, who tend to trumpet the virtues of free trade when it involves the domination of world markets by U.S. businesses, are also raising the protectionist flag against the prospect of Chinese ownership of a single mid-size American-based oil company.

The signals we send to China have always been bizarrely mixed: Play in the capitalist ballpark but not so well that you become one of the big stars. It is a message that, as with the Japan-bashing of the 1980s, is at best paranoid and at worst racist. We in the West can be trusted with enormous economic power, but not the children of a lesser god.

The contradictions in U.S. policy were on full display last week when China untied its currency from the dollar, a move long demanded by American China-bashers. The upward valuation of the yuan was welcomed by those concerned about the U.S.-China trade imbalance; it also caused shivers of fear that China might not continue to lavishly invest in U.S. Treasury securities.

Of course, if you believe the protectionists, the trade imbalance with China is a reflection not of the hard work of the Chinese people but rather trickery on the part of China's leaders. Such irrationality is finding broad bipartisan congressional support. The House voted, 398 to 15, to condemn a sale of Unocal to the Chinese, alleging it would "threaten to impair the national security of the United States."

"Trade should be mutually beneficial, and it is certainly not with China," Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) said.

Tell that to the American consumers storming Costco and Wal-Mart to buy affordable Chinese-made goods, or the millions who have benefited from low-interest mortgages made possible by the Chinese subsidization of our huge budget deficits under President Bush.

And why isn't it a good thing that China is seeking access to Unocal's cleaner-burning natural gas as a substitute for coal, thereby lessening the danger of global warming?

The fear-mongering must be confusing to Asians, who've been hectored by the West for two centuries about the ineffable beauty of free trade. Americans, for instance, don't think that Asians should feel in the least bit threatened because of Unocal's ownership of natural gas fields on their continent. That's just the market in action.

Upon examination, the national security argument against Chinese ownership is absurd. Access to oil is determined by the international market, and the only nation with the military power to implement or prevent a worldwide blockade of this or any other vital resource is the United States.

And consider the hypocrisy: The Senate that authorized the "preemptive" conquering of the nation with the second-largest oil reserves on the planet is now challenging China's right to use dollars it earned exporting legal products to buy a U.S.-based multinational company.

The Bush administration, led on this issue by Treasury Secretary John Snow, has managed to bring some reason to the congressional debate, and for the moment thwarted the wilder suggestions to dramatically increase tariffs on Chinese goods. But that hasn't silenced the protectionist demagogues lurking in the political shadows eager to once again scapegoat the "yellow hordes" of China as an alternative to facing our serious, but domestically rooted, economic problems.

The protectionists must be defeated and U.S. policy should stay rooted in the wisdom of Richard M. Nixon —a prosperous China is good for us all.

5. TIME FOR HEALTH CARE FOR ALL ON MEDICARE'S 40^TH ANNIVERSARY

HOLLY SKLAR

When Medicare and Medicaid were signed into law on July 30, 1965, former President Harry Truman received the first Medicare card. He would be shocked that 40 years later, more than 45 million Americans have no health coverage, half of all personal bankruptcies are health-related, and lack of universal insurance is increasingly hurting our economy as well as our health.

Truman proposed national health insurance for all Americans in 1945. He said, "By preventing illness, by assuring access to needed community and personal health services...and by protecting our people against the loss caused by sickness, we shall strengthen our national health, our national defense and our productivity."

If Americans without health insurance were a nation, the population would be bigger than Canada -- plus Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire and Vermont. Canada, like other industrialized nations besides ours, provides universal health coverage.

Contrary to myth, the United States does not have the world's best health care. It has the costliest.

In the words of Dr. Christopher Murray of the World Health Organization (WHO), "Basically, you die earlier and spend more time disabled if you're an American rather than a member of most other advanced countries."

The United States is just No. 29 in the WHO healthy life expectancy ranking. We lag Canada by nearly three years and Japan by nearly six.

The United States does worse than 36 countries in child mortality under age five -- well behind South Korea and Singapore.

The United States is No. 1 in spending. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports the United States spent 15 percent of its Gross Domestic Product on health in 2003 compared to an average 8.6 percent in 30 OECD countries.

The United States has fewer physicians, nurses and hospital beds per person, and fewer MRI and CT scanners than the OECD average. Health Affairs reports that Americans had more difficulty making appointments with physicians quickly than people in Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, and were more likely to delay or forgo treatment because of cost.

Lack of health insurance is killing many more Americans than terrorism. As the Institute of Medicine documents, uninsured Americans get about half the medical care of those with insurance. They receive too little care, too late, get sicker and die sooner. For example, uninsured women with breast cancer have a 30 percent to 50 percent higher risk of dying than insured women. Uninsured car crash victims receive less care in the hospital and have a 37 percent higher mortality rate than privately insured patients.

One out of three Americans below age 65 -- 85 million people -- lacked private or public health insurance for all or part of 2003-2004. Millions more are underinsured.

Average family health insurance premiums will reach a projected $14,545 in 2006, more than double the 2001 average.

Much health spending is squandered on the mountainous red tape, profits and executive pay of private insurance and drug companies. As Dr. Marcia Angell explains in "The Truth About the Drug Companies," the highly profitable pharmaceutical industry relies heavily on taxpayer-funded research.

The National Coalition on Health Care, an alliance of about 100 corporations, pension funds, medical associations, insurers, unions, consumer and religious organizations, says, "Comprehensive health care reform is long overdue. Every year that reform is delayed, tens of millions of Americans live in peril, without health insurance; millions are harmed, and hundreds of thousands die needlessly, because of sub-standard care."

"The crisis in health care is the central economic problem facing America -- adversely affecting living standards, job creation and retention, wage growth, the adequacy and viability of pension benefits" and the global competitiveness of American business, says Coalition president Henry Simmons.

The Coalition calls for "health care coverage for all." It offers four different scenarios for universal coverage: employer and individual mandates and subsidies; expanding Medicare and other public health insurance; creating a new public program modeled on the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan; and establishing a universal single payer, publicly financed program.

The first three scenarios would net $320 billion to $370 billion in savings over the first ten years; the fourth scenario would save $1.1 trillion.

Like untreated cancer, the health care crisis is spreading throughout our families and economy. It's time for health care for all.

6. LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY: 'JUST PUT DOWN THAT LAW SUIT, PARDNER, AND NO ONE GETS HURT'

BY

GREG PALAST

There are 200 million guns in civilian hands in the United States. That works out at 200 per lawyer. Wade through the foaming websites of the anti-Semites, weekend militiamen and Republicans, and it becomes clear that many among America's well-armed citizenry have performed the same calculation. Because if there is any hope of the ceasefire that they fear, it will come out of the barrel of a lawsuit.

And that is why a shoot-to-kill coalition in the Senate, led by Wild Bill Frist (R-Tenn) and his simpering sidekick, Scary Harry Reid (D-Nev), voted yesterday to grant immunity from law suits to gun makers.

First, the score. Gunshot deaths in the US are way down - to only 88 a day. Around 87,000 lucky Americans were treated for bullet wounds last year; 32,436 unlucky ones died, including a dozen policemen by their own weapons.

For Americans, America remains more deadly than Iraq.

In one typical case, a young man, Steven Fox, described feeling pieces of his brain fly from his skull after a mugger shot him. He is permanently paralyzed.

But, hey, that's business for you. And what a business it is. Guns, ammo and accessories are a $6 billion-a-year honey pot for several corporations: Glock, Smith & Wesson, Colt and too many others.

But, the gun-o-philiacs say, what does po' widdle Smith & Wesson have to do with a mugger who uses its gun in an unsocial manner?

This cop-out drives Elisa Barnes crazy. Barnes is the lawyer who brought the groundbreaking lawsuit against handgun manufacturers which, for the first time, were found negligent in abetting a criminal.

It's lawyers like Barnes -- and victims like Fox -- that the Senate went gunning for.

Barnes thought it was just too convenient for gun makers to blame the criminal alone. Through investigation and statistical analysis she concluded that sales to criminals are a much-valued - if unpublicized - market segment sought out and provisioned by these upstanding manufacturers.

Her calculations are compelling. Gun companies dumped several million weapons into outlets in states with few curbs on purchases, super-saturating the legal market so that excess would flow up the "Iron Pipeline" to meet black market demand in New York and other big cities.

Like the company that sells cigarette rolling papers in quantities far outstripping sales of legal tobacco, gun manufacturers have a nod-and-wink understanding of where their products end up. Their market models cannot account for half the gun sales in loose-law states such as Georgia.

Nor can industry executives fail to have noticed the 800,000 requests to them from the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agency to trace guns recovered from crime scenes.

The Fox case jury found a dozen gun makers guilty of negligent distribution. The shooter's gun was never found. Unable to determine which company made the gun that fired the bullet into Fox's head, the jury ordered all the makers of .25 caliber weapons in the case to pony up $5 million for Fox's care and pain.

Fox's victory burst the dam. Several hundred lawyers - including the Costanza group, the combine of firms that mangled the tobacco industry - filed suits to make sure the gun industry feels our pain. New Orleans was the first of thirty cities in court demanding that gun purveyors pay the cost of gathering the wounded off the streets, and the cost of arming the municipal police force in self-defense. The legal profession might have finally accomplished what a cowering Congress dare not consider: shutting down firearms sales at source.

The NAACP weighed in with a massive class-action suit on behalf of thousands of the wounded and dead, based on yet another theory: product liability. I spoke to one of their counsel, Mike Hausfeld, just after he returned from beating Hitler in a US courtroom.

Fifty years after WWII, Hausfeld's firm brought a suit against Mercedes-Benz, Siemens, BASF and others who used slave labor from concentration and prison camps under the Nazi regime. The defendants agreed to create a $1.2 billion compensation fund.

Hausfeld concedes the companies were acting under orders of the Reich, but points out: "Contemporary industrial empires were made from those profits. In 1938 Henry Ford received a medal from the Führer, and his German plants continued to provide Ford income through 1942. Those profits belong to the victims."

Hitler's manufacturers finally coughed up their blood money when the defense, "We were only taking orders," failed to impress US judges.

Glock's profits belong too its victims as well. But as soon as our President signs the new immunity law, "We were only taking orders" (for more guns) will be a Bush-blessed defense.

Republican Majority Leader Frist makes a big deal about being a doctor. He must believe the Hippocratic Oath changed from, "First, do no harm," to "Shoot first, then run for President."

It's not nice to say, but there's only one way to stop Doctor Death. In 2008, I hope to see the headline, "Senator Frist Slain in a Hail of Ballots."

7. CANCER EPIDEMIC CAUSED BY U.S. WMD

(M.D. Says Depleted Uranium Definitively Linked)

CHRISTOPHER BOLLYN

A growing number of U.S. military personnel who are serving, or have served, in Iraq or Afghanistan has become sick and disabled from a variety of symptoms commonly known as Gulf War Syndrome. Depleted uranium (DU) weapons have been blamed for many of the symptoms.

“Gulf war vets are coming down with these symptoms at twice the rate of vets from previous conflicts,” said Barbara A. Goodno from the Department of Defense’s Deployment Health Support Directorate.

A recent discovery by American Free Press that nearly half the soldiers in one returned unit have malignant growths has provided the scientific community with “critical evidence,” experts say, to help understand exactly how DU affects humans.

One of the first published researchers of Gulf War Syndrome, Dr. András Korényi-Both, told AFP that 27 percent to 28 percent of Gulf War veterans have suffered chronic health problems, more than five times the rate of Viet Nam vets and four times the rate of Korean War vets.

Korényi-Both said his son had recently returned from Iraq, where he had been part of the initial Gulf War II assault from Kuwait to Baghdad. From his unit of 20 men, eight now have “malignant growths,” Korényi-Both said.

Korényi-Both is not an expert on DU but has written extensively about how the fine desert sand blowing around Iraq and the Arabian peninsula provides an ideal vehicle for toxins, increasing the range and effect of atomic, biological and chemical (ABC) agents, such as DU, that attach themselves to the particles.

Korényi-Both described how, during the 1991 Gulf War, he and others had inhaled large quantities of sand dust that could have been laden with ABC agents. The dust “destroyed our immune systems,”he said.

FULK’S THEORY

Marion Fulk, a former nuclear chemical physicist at the Lawrence Livermore lab, is investigating how DU affects the human body. Fulk said that eight malignancies out of 20, in 16 months, “is spectacular—and of serious concern.”

The high malignancy rate found in this unit appears to have been caused by battlefield exposure to DU weapons.

According to Fulk, when DU, consisting mainly of uranium-238, decays, it transforms into two short-lived and “very hot” isotopes of thorium and protactinium, then undergoes further decay to another uranium isotope, giving off high-energy radiation at each stage of the process.

Scientist Leuren Moret said: “We can expect to see multiple cancers in one person. These multiple unrelated cancers in the same individual have been reported in Yugoslavia and Iraq in families that had no history of any cancer. This is unknown in the previous studies of cancer,” she said, “a new phenomenon.”

Goodno questioned Korényi-Both’s report that eight of 20 recently returned soldiers from one unit had experienced malignant growths. Goodno and Korényi-Both did agree, however, that Iraqi ABC agents had not played a role in the 2003 invasion.

This is significant because three factors have generally been blamed for causing Gulf War Syndrome: Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, the cocktail of vaccinations given to coalition soldiers and DU. The absence of any detectable Iraqi ABC agents during the 2003 invasion of Iraq narrows the potential factors for delayed illness or disability among veterans to prewar vaccinations and DU.

While the number of disabled vets from previous wars is decreasing by about 35,000 per year, since the “war on terror” began in 2001, the total number of disabled vets has grown to some 2.5 million—“more than ever before,” Brad Flohr of the Department of Veterans Affairs said. Asked if there are more disabled vets now than after World War II, Flohr said he believed so.

Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs told AFP that current statistics indicate that more than half a million veterans of the 14-year-old Gulf War I era are now receiving disability compensation. During this period, some 7,035 soldiers are reported having been wounded in Iraq.

With 518,739 disabled “Gulf War I era veterans” currently receiving disability compensation, according to Jemison, the number of veterans disabled after the war is more than 73 times the number of wounded, in and out of combat, from the entire 14-year conflict with Iraq.

DEPLETED URANIUM WEAPONS

Last December, Dr. Asaf Durakovae, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted uranium, examined nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police Company of New York and found that four of the men had absorbed or inhaled DU.

Several of the men had traces of another isotope, U-236, which is only produced in a nuclear reactor.

“These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the battlefield,”Durakovae said.

“Due to the current proliferation of DU weaponry, the battlefields of the future will be unlike any battlefields in history,” Durakovae, then chief of Nuclear Medicine for the Veterans Administration, said after Gulf War I, in which he served.

Since 1991, the U.S. military has used DU in munitions as penetrating rods, which destroy enemy tanks and their occupants, and as armor plating on U.S. tanks. When DU penetrating rods strike a hard target some of the radioactive and toxic uranium is vaporized into ultra-fine particles that are easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin.

According to a survey of 10,051 Gulf War I veterans, conducted between 1991 and 1995 by Vic Sylvester and the Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm Association, 82 percent of veterans reported having entered captured Iraqi vehicles. “This would suggest that 123,000 soldiers have been directly exposed to DU,” Durakovae said.

“Since the effects of contamination by uranium cannot be directed or contained, uranium’s chemical and radiological toxicity will create environments that are hostile not only to the health of enemy forces but of one’s own forces as well,” Durakovae said.

“Because of the chemical and radiological toxicity of DU, the small number of particles trapped in the lungs, kidneys and bone greatly increase the risk of cancer and all other illnesses over time,” said Durakovae, an expert of internal contamination of radioisotopes.

According to Durakovae, other symptoms associated with DU poisoning are: emotional and mental deterioration, fatigue, loss of bowel and bladder control, and numerous forms of cancer. Such symptoms are increasingly showing up in Iraq’s children and among Gulf War I veterans and their offspring, he said.

“Although I personally served in Operation Desert Shield as unit commander,” Durakovae said, “my expertise of internal contamination was never used because we were never informed of the intended use of DU prior to or during the war.”

“The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse,” Robert C. Koehler of the Chicago-based Tribune Media Services wrote in his March 25 article on DU weapons, “Silent Genocide.”

“DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe it or touch it; the substance also alters one’s genetic code,” Koehler wrote. “The Pentagon’s response to such charges is denial, denial, denial. And the American media is its moral co-conspirator.”