History of the Iraq War, Part III: American Economic Decline

Private Profit Rate over the Keynesian-Neoliberal Shift (Duménil and Lévy, 2001)

Financial versus Non-financial Profit Rates over the Keynesian-Neoliberal Shift (Duménil and Lévy, 2001)

Why, then, does neoliberalism continue in the face of its disastrous consequences? Duménil and Lévy (2001, p. 578) argue that “neoliberalism is the ideological expression of the return to hegemony of the financial fraction of the ruling classes.” American economic decline may explain the dramatic shift towards neoliberalism. A number of metrics indicate that American economic power is in decline, which leads to a profit squeeze for capitalists (Wallerstein, 1996, pp. 90-91). As with the Netherlands and Britain in earlier centuries, American capitalists facing diminishing profits due to increased competitor productivity initiated neoliberal financial reforms (Zakaria, 2008). Due to the explosion of finance, “a new upward trend of the profit rate is apparent after 1982” (Duménil & Lévy, 2001, p. 589) (Figure 1a and 1b).

For much of the past forty years, America has faced trade deficits, which have increased significantly as a percentage of GDP since 1991.The balance of trade is just one aspect of the broader index of balance of payments. Since 1991, America has also faced rapidly growing balance of payment deficits, which indicate that net capital is flowing out of the country. Theoretically, large balance of payments deficits cannot continue indefinitely. Eventually creditors will lose confidence in American solvency and drive up interest rates and inflation. When that may happen is a matter of great dispute and rhetorical bluster.

Trade deficits can be partially mitigated through the operation of currency markets. Since 1945, the dollar has been the global reserve currency (Wallerstein, 2003), which has resulted in immense benefits for United States financiers and detriment to domestic industry via increasing valuation of the dollar relative to other currencies. In times of crisis, the United States has been protected from capital flight and has instead enjoyed relatively high capital inflows as nervous central banks, institutions and investors buy Treasury bonds. Because of increased demand, these bonds can be sold at lower interest rates during global or regional recessions, which thus create future profits for the United States government. Indeed, “using a conservative estimate of 10 percent as the average percent difference between [social development returns and bond yields], the actual cost to developing countries of holding the reserves [in Treasury bonds] is in excess of $300 billion per year” (Stiglitz, 2006, pp. 245-250).

Paradoxically, artificially high valuation of the dollar exacerbates trade deficits, as exports from the United States become comparatively more expensive and imports relatively less so (Leahy, 1998, p. 814). The difference, then, is in whom the policies effect: bondholders and financiers, in the case of the benefits, and domestic (particularly, manufacturing) labor, in the case of the harms.

American manufacturing profitability is consequently waning. In addition to artificially high dollar valuation, three other factors contribute to the shift from manufacturing to finance for profits (Wallerstein, 2000, pp. 261-262). First, technology disseminates from the United States to the other core members and, eventually, the semi-periphery. Since other countries can pirate intellectual property (something TRIPS is designed to address) and do not need to invest as heavily in research and development, their products may be cheaper than those from the core, especially in the absence of protectionist barriers. Secondly, domestic social welfare programs, including the minimum wage, decrease comparative advantages in industry through higher labor costs. Finally, more stringent environmental laws similarly squeeze profits.



References

Duménil, Gérard and Dominique Lévy. Winter, 2001. “Costs and Benefits of Neoliberalism: A Class Analysis.” Review of International Political Economy 8(4), pp. 578-607.

Leahy, Michael. 1998. “New Summary Measures of the Foreign Exchange Value of the Dollar.” Federal Reserve Bulletin 84, pp. 811-819.

Stiglitz, Joseph. 2006. Making Globalization Work: The Next Steps to Global Justice. W.W. Norton.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1996. Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization. Verso.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. “The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy,” pp. 253-262 in The Essential Wallerstein. New Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. April 1, 2003. “The End of the Beginning.” Commentary 110.

Zakaria, Fareed. May/June, 2008. “The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest.” Foreign Affairs 87(3), pp. 18-43.

History of the Iraq War, Part II: American Economic Background (1945-present)

Keynesianism, 1945-1973

The postwar era has also been marked by a shift from Keynesian to neoliberal economic ideas. Keynes viewed unregulated capitalism as a system that benefited society’s wealthiest to the detriment of the poorest (Meier & Seers, 1984:152-154). In order to mitigate capitalism’s destructive economic bubbles, inequality and insufficient demand during economic downturns, Keynes argued that governments must institute countercyclical economic policies, including deficit spending (Quiggin, 2010, pp. 86-89).  In addition to state investment, Keynes called for investment from private foreign and domestic sources (Toye, 2005, p. 127) and rejected the fanciful notion that unemployment in a market economy was voluntary (Krugman, 2009). 

As Keynes was primarily concerned with the First World (Toye, 2005, p. 123), Keynesianism reflects the interests of theorists’ own nations. In other words, in order to enrich their own nations, Keynesians seek to place their group at the top of the capitalist pyramid, albeit in a more stable and equitable way than in neoliberalism.  Keynesianism is associated with the period circa 1945-1973, a.k.a. the Bretton Woods system (Hossein-Zadeh, 2006, pp. 60-61).  The end of this era is also associated with the removal of the United States from the gold standard (Quiggin, 2010, p. 80), stagflation (Palley, 2004), the ascendance of an intellectually “pure” and “beautiful” school of neoclassical economics backed by politicians and moneyed interests (Krugman, 2009), a backlash against the Great Society (Peet, 2009, p. 12) and the OPEC oil shocks, which led American policymakers to push the World Bank to invest in petroleum exploration and technology (Hossay, 2006, p. 86). For all of these reasons, neoliberal economics began to affect Bretton Woods policies.

Neoliberalism, 1973-present

Neoliberalism provides a counterexample to Keynesianism and is characteristic of American foreign policy since the early 1970s. John Williamson, who coined the phrase Washington Consensus (1990), argues that neoliberalism has come to mean implementation of the following market-oriented economic policies: 1) fiscal discipline; 2) lower social spending; 3) flat tax rate; 4) financial liberalization; 5) floating exchange rate; 6) trade liberalization; 7) unregulated foreign direct investment; 8) privatization; 9) deregulation; and 10) property rights (2000, pp. 252-255).  Neoliberal reforms have traditionally been carried out in the Third World by the successors of Bretton Woods: the IMF, World Bank and WTO.

The United States essentially controls the IMF and operates it to its own advantages. The US holds 17% of the votes at the IMF, while an 85% supermajority is required to make substantial changes to rules or governance (Vreeland, 2006, pp. 39-42). Consequently, “the Managing Director has been reported to rarely act against the will of the US.” IMF reforms involve offering developing countries large loans with attached economic reforms (Dreher and Jensen 2007:105-106). Countries receiving loans must move towards:

1. Privatization of state industries;
2. Deregulation of foreign capital flows;
3. Dismantling of social safety nets;
4. Floating their currency; and
5. Dismantling regulations designed to inhibit the negative effects of business activities.
   
The World Bank is similarly dominated by the United States (Peet, 2009, pp. 127-128; Stiglitz, 2006, p. 13). We will see how American policymakers in Iraq implemented neoliberalism.

Considering that “property and markets rest on government and law” (Hacker and Pierson, 2010, p. 82), neoliberal anti-government fervor is more myth than reality. As Peet and Hartwick (2009, pp. 47-48) maintain, proponents of neoliberalism argue that “there are relatively limited instances when government should intervene to promote economic ends, other than encouraging market competition, providing adequate schooling, and encouraging savings and investment” and economic growth. In Chomsky’s view (1997), development policies reflect neoliberal values only when they benefit the ruling class in dominant countries. Then, the victims of neoliberalism are blamed by its proponents on some deviation from pure market discipline (Quiggin, 2010, p. 53).

In the early 1970s, neoliberalism began to be foisted on other countries. Nixon was a fine exemplar of this attitude, both orchestrating the violent Chilean coup that installed the neoliberal cabal of so-called “Chicago boys” (on the “other 9/11” – September 11, 1973) and famously claiming at home that “we are all Keynesians now” – echoing Milton Friedman, of all people (Klein, 2007, pp. 104, 133). Ultimately, the lessons of Keynesianism fell by the wayside as previous depressions and asset bubbles were re-characterized as consequences of insufficient adherence to market fundamentalism (Quiggin, 2010, p. 60).

These facts are illustrated within the WTO, which dictates the terms of international trade favoring rich countries (Stiglitz, 2006, pp. 94-107). Agricultural subsidies in rich countries, which lower the prices that farmers in the Third World receive for their goods, exceed all of the foreign aid to the Third World combined.  The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of International Property Rights (TRIPS) was orchestrated in 1994 to stem the loss of comparative advantage and increase profit drain from poor countries. TRIPS effectively extends American patent laws worldwide (Delgado 2002, pp. 297-298). Under TRIPS “the advanced industrial countries could at last use trade sanctions to legally enforce intellectual property rights” (Stiglitz, 2006, p. 117). Now, fines can be leveled on countries or corporations that violate TRIPS rules. TRIPS are but one example of how corporations can use the WTO’s nearly global legal regime to compel countries to nullify laws that decrease profits.

Neoliberal theory has a profound sway over contemporary journalists and scholars. One popular pundit in this vein is Pulitzer Prize-winning propagandist Thomas Friedman, who argues that the rich countries became so through embracing a form of state capitalism involving austere property laws, governmental restriction of labor flows, opening of markets to foreign competition and cuts in social services (i.e., neoliberalism) (2000, p. 102). For the richest perhaps ten percent of people in the world, on whom Friedman bases his book, undoubtedly globalization can feel this way. But for the vast majority, globalization is primarily a process of economic and military subservience to power, tracing the confines already outlined. Mainstream leftist scholarly literature is similar. In his celebrated work The Bottom Billion (2005), Oxford economist Paul Collier calls for expansion of foreign aid (p. 100) and neoliberal-style markets (p. 88), while dismissing the possibly relevant facts that “aid indeed makes a coup more likely” (p. 105) and “the exodus of capital from the bottom billion [people in the poorest countries] was only phase one of the global integration of the bottom billion. Phase two will be an exodus of educated people” (p. 94). He claims that practitioners of development should resist the temptation to focus on “photogenic social priorities – health and education” (p. 108) in favor of infrastructure projects like roads and ports and, if citizens resist, should utilize “military intervention” (p. 124).

If we reject these vulgarizations, we see that “almost all recent cases of collapses into anarchy were preceded by heavy World Bank and IMF involvement” (Easterly, 2006, p. 67) and every developed country became so through state protection of industry (Chang, 2007, pp. 15-16; Peet & Harwick, 2009, pp. 50-51) with the critical support of colonial violence (Chomsky, 1999, pp. 7-11). The brutal consequences of these policies for poor people have been recorded in detail (Chomsky, 2003; Birdsall & Subramanian, 2004; Chang & Grabel, 2004; Porrit, 2005; Easterly, 2006; Rodrik, 2006; Stiglitz, 2006; Chang, 2007; Klein, 2007; Lines, 2008) and are currently being faced by the Iraqi people.
Neoliberalism is a doctrine to foist on other countries, while American policymakers prefer to stick to a more Keynesian model at home. The underlying economic, military, and diplomatic factors driving the shift to neoliberalism from the Keynesianism characteristic of the Bretton Woods system will be reviewed in the following sections. We will see the tensions between neoliberalism abroad, Keynesianism at home and neocolonial violence in later discussion of the Iraq War.





References

Birdsall, Nancy and Arvind Subramanian. July/August, 2004. “Saving Iraq from Its Oil.” Foreign Affairs.

Chang, Ha-Joon. 2007. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Bloomsbury Press.

Chang, Ha-Joon and Ilene Grabel. 2004. “Reclaiming Development from the Washington Consensus.” Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics 27(2), pp. 273-291.

Chomsky, Noam. May, 1997. “The Passion for Free Markets.” Z Magazine.

Chomsky, Noam. 1999. Year 501: The Conquest Continues. South End Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 2003. Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Seven Stories Press.

Collier, Paul. 2005. The Bottom Billion. Oxford University Press.

Delgado, Gian Carlo. 2002. “Biopi®acy and Intellectual Property as the Basis for Biotechnological Development: The Case of Mexico.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 16(2), pp. 297-318.

Dreher, Axel and Nathan M. Jensen. 2007. “Independent Actor or Agent? An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of U.S. Interests on International Monetary Fund Conditions.” The Journal of Law and Economics, 50, pp. 105-124.


Easterly, William. 2006. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin.

Friedman, Thomas. 2000. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Macmillan.



Hacker, Jacob S. and Paul Pierson. 2010. Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Simon & Schuster.

Hossay, Patrick. 2006. Unsustainable: A Primer for Global Environmental and Social Justice. Zed Books.


Hossein-Zadeh, Ismael. 2006. The Political Economy of US Militarism. Palgrave MacMillan.

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books.

Krugman, Paul. September 6, 2009. “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” New York Times Magazine.

Lines, Thomas. 2008. Making Poverty: A History. Zed Books.

Meier, G and Seers, Dudley. 1984. Pioneers in Development. Oxford University Press.

Palley, Thomas. 2004. “From Keynesianism to Neoliberalism: Shifting Paradigms in Economics,” in Deborah Johnston and Alfredo Saad-Filho (eds.) Neoliberalism – A Critical Reader. Pluto Press.

Peet, Richard. 2009. Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO. 2nd ed. Zed Books.

Peet, Richard and Elaine Hartwick. 2009. Theories of Development: Contentions, Arguments, Alternatives. 2nd ed. Guilford.

Porrit, Jonathon. 2005. Capitalism as if the World Matters. Earthscan.

Quiggin, John. 2010. Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us. Princeton University Press.

Rodrik, Dani. 2006. “Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion?” Harvard University Manuscript.

Stiglitz, Joseph. 2006. Making Globalization Work: The Next Steps to Global Justice. W.W. Norton.

Toye, Richard. 2005. “The Trials of a Biographer: Roy Harrod’s Life of John Maynard Keynes Reconsidered” in Gottlieb, Julie and Toye, Richard (eds.). 2005. Making Reputations: Power, Persuasion and the Individual in Modern British Politics. IB Tauris.

Vreeland, James. 2006. The International Monetary Fund: Politics of Conditional Lending. New York: Routledge.

Williamson, John. 1990. “What Washington Means by Policy Reform.” In John Williamson, ed., Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics.

Williamson, John. 2000. “What Should the World Bank Think about the Washington Consensus?” The World Bank Research Observer 15(2), pp. 251-264.

History of the Iraq War, Part I: American Miltary Background (1945-present)

The United States has been the dominant geopolitical power since 1945. A brief discussion of American foreign policy aims will provide context for the recent aggression in Iraq.

Background: American Economic and Military Hegemony

    The American people possessed approximately half of the world’s wealth after World War II. In addition, America was by far the largest creditor (White, 1999, p. 172). This economic power, coupled with insurmountable military advantages, gave America immense advantages. In order to dictate the postwar new world order, America instituted three programs. The Bretton Woods system and the Marshall Plan were set up to facilitate American economic dominance, while National Security Council directive 68 (NSC-68) provided a military blueprint. The capital flows facilitated by the economic regime and backed by state violence spurred the further integration of many countries and their people into a worldwide capitalist system (Wallerstein, 1996, pp. 13-14).

    At Bretton Woods, New Jersey, in 1944, the Allied powers convened an economic summit that gave rise to many of the institutions that would dominate the world’s financial systems. The IMF was created as an alliance, ostensibly to finance the reconstruction of Europe’s industrial economies. Also founded were the predecessors to the World Bank, an agency similar to the IMF, and the WTO, which dictates the legal terms of international trade. To the present, each of these organizations represents the interests of the most powerful countries that run them (Birdsall, 2003, p. 3).

    The Marshall Plan set up a triangular trading system (Rostow, 1997) similar to that of the former Atlantic slave trade. Excess American dollars flowed first to Western Europe (and Japan) in exchange for manufactured goods. Western European nations provided these dollars to their colonies or former colonies in exchange for the natural resources critical for Western Europe’s reconstruction. The colonies or former colonies, as economies more and more devoted to export foods and raw materials, sent dollars to American agribusinesses, whose subsidized foods were vital to colonial survival. Thus, manufactured goods accrued in America and Western European nations were able to reconstruct their industries, to the detriment of exploited countries at the periphery of the economic system.

    NSC-68 divided up the globe into regions that would be influenced in different ways by the American military (Layne & Schwarz, 1993, pp. 5-6). The Western Hemisphere, falling under American dominion since the 19th century, could be more extensively exploited. Africa and other former colonies were to serve as resource bases for reconstructing Western Europe and Japan. The Middle East’s vast energy resources were to be controlled unilaterally by America through the imposition and support of autocratic regimes. If necessary, American military force could be brought to bear on nations unwilling to participate in this system. The Soviet Union and its satellites, nuclear-armed and resistant to American domination, would be strangled by American military and economic warfare. The history of the past sixty years proves the staying power of these designs.

References

Birdsall, Nancy. 2003. “Why It Matters Who Runs the IMF and the World Bank. Working Paper Number 22.” Center for Global Development. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1109073.

Layne, Christopher and Benjamin Schwarz. Autumn, 1993. “American Hegemony: Without an Enemy.” Foreign Policy 92, pp. 5-23.

Rostow, Walt. May/June, 1997. “Marshall Plan Commemorative Section: Lessons of the Plan: Looking Forward to the Next Century.” Foreign Affairs.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1996. Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization. Verso.

White, Donald W. 1999. The American Century. Yale University Press.

Virginia's Standards of Learning Indoctrinate Public School Students

Early in 2009, commentators excoriated President Barack Obama for his motivational speech to students, which was feared for its propaganda value. Their anxieties were partly correct, but we indoctrinate children through more overt methods. I looked through Virginia's public school curriculum, the Standards of Learning, for examples of what many professors would call propaganda.
The journey starts in kindergarten, when "students should learn basic concepts related to history, patriotism (and) national symbols."

First graders "will recognize the symbols and traditional practices that honor and foster patriotism in the United States by ... demonstrating respect for the American flag by learning the Pledge of Allegiance."

Our country does much that should make us proud and much that should make us ashamed. But the SOLs implant unquestioned love for the country, for which people are willing to do anything. In "Who Rules America?" author William Domhoff maintains that politicians manipulate these symbols in order to control the public.

We could think of other doctrines to teach young children who are too young to defend themselves intellectually. For example, we could mandate that they learn hurting people is wrong, famously articulated by Jesus Christ, but this may be too liberal or politically correct.
Third graders learn more substantive information about "the exploration of the Americas," including "the }accomplishments of Christopher Columbus."

In "A People's History of the United States," Howard Zinn analyzes Samuel Morison's work on Columbus. Halfway through his book, Morison writes, "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide." As for his concluding paragraph: "He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great - his indomitable will, his superb faith in God, and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities - his seamanship."

Most American schoolchildren can name the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria but only a few know that the Reagan administration sponsored terrorist wars in Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador (Google the Nicaragua v. U.S. court case, Battalion 3-16 death squad and El Mozote massacre).
High school students must learn about the Nazi genocide while describing "how early European exploration and colonization resulted in cultural interactions between Europeans, Africans and American Indians."

"No doubt the warfare, enslavement and forcible takeover of indigenous lands is absent from such discussions of 'cultural interactions,'" said international affairs professor Wilma Dunaway. She runs a Web site for teachers dedicated to an accurate view of Appalachian history at http://filebox.vt.edu/users/wdunaway/publications/diversity.htm.

Teaching these elementary truths would break one of the goals of the SOLs: to "instill in students a thoughtful pride in the history of America."

Third graders also learn that producers use natural, human and capital resources ("soil," "people" and "machines") "to produce goods and services for consumers." Removing its own agency, our government mandates that students learn "how physical features and climate influenced the movement of people westward." Furthermore, the history SOLs do not mention global warming, while the science SOLs sanitize it to "potential atmospheric compositional changes due to human, biologic and geologic activity."

Political science professor Richard Rich noted, "It is stunning to me that we can consider people to be 'educated' when they do not understand the basic facts of the global ecosphere on which we all depend for our very lives. How can we have any chance of ceasing to destroy the earth life-support systems if we do not know either how badly we have done this already or what forces led us to do so?"

Their history of the Civil War deviates from preferred methodologies; it is the only war when students are made to look at the perspectives of soldiers from both sides. Why not a South Vietnamese, Dominican, Haitian, Guatemalan, Iraqi, Cuban, Cambodian, Laotian, Filipino perspective?

In "The Curious Case of American Hegemony," David Hendrickson writes, "That messianic and Manichean perspective makes us blind to the misgivings and fears of others, incapable of understanding how our way of war generates intense resentment and hatred, and as ready to misread enemy intentions as to view contemptibly the advice of friends."

Underlying cultural assumptions manifest our indoctrination. In "Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto," which topped the bestseller charts this year, Mark Levin writes, "The Founders believed, and the Conservative agrees, in the dignity of the individual; that we, as human beings, have a right to live, live freely and pursue that which motivates us." Levin objects to "Statists" who teach the fact that our country was founded upon slavery.

Or, as David Brooks wrote in the New York Times last Friday, "Jefferson advocated 'a wise and frugal government' that will keep people from hurting each other, but will otherwise leave them free and 'shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.'"

Similarly, last month I wrote that we should be horrified our government is violating some of the Nuremberg Principles, which were enshrined after World War II explicitly to prevent countries from committing the crimes of fascist Germany and Japan. Judd Smith, a senior political science major, wrote a letter to the editor saying he was "thoroughly disgusted," not that our country is violating Nuremberg Principles, but that someone pointed it out.

The history SOLs stop in 1991. How much relevance can a study of history have without knowledge of current events?

A graduating student would be obedient to nationalism, indoctrinated to a cleansed history, and unaware of current events. This brainwashing is probably internalized in the test makers as objectivity or benevolence. The system is working exactly as it was designed.

Sociology professor Joyce Rothschild said, "If K-12 schools simply parrot the nonsense and talking points that are on TV, then it is hard to see where children might gain any real insight into the history and causes of the important challenges we face as a nation and as one world."

In George Orwell's "1984," government censors throw incriminating news clippings into trash chutes called memory holes, which connect to an incinerator. Censorship is much more open in Virginia.

Journeys of the Heart ADOPTION SCANDAL in Marshall Islands

From 2007-8, I lived in the Marshall Islands, an isolated Pacific island nation. The day before I left, my host uncle came to me in private. "Seven years ago, my daughter was born in the capital. When my wife and I were raising her, an American came to me asking for our baby. Because it is our culture, we agreed. Do you know when she will come back?"

He gave me the name and address of the adoption agency, Journeys of the Heart, whose agent had taken his child. When I returned to the United States I began contacting agency personnel, who did not respond. Each time I wrote, I clearly described the tragic details of the story and asked them to forward my requests for information to the adoptive family. Finally, I received an e-mail from the executive director, Susan Tompkins. She wrote: "Journeys of the Heart does not provide family contact information, as this would be illegal and unethical." I replied that kidnapping was unethical.

In 2002, seven U.S. adoption agencies were working in the Marshall Islands. After a law was passed to prevent corrupt adoption practices, the only agency to receive a license was Journeys of the Heart. Its Web site proudly advertises "Marshall Island (sic) Child Adoption Going Strong." It continues, "The birth mother and her family generally welcome any contact including visits, phone calls or the required letters." As for visits, the island I lived on receives a boat that offloads food every two and a half months. Anybody who has been to the Marshall Islands knows that the majority of people do not have any access to telephones or mail. But for kidnappers, the facts are of no consequence.

The agency's main goal is to get "as many of the world's children out of harm's way as possible." By this logic, it is harmful simply to live in poor countries, which apparently can't approach our own moral and cultural superiority. Thus, any baby living in a poor country is a legitimate target of such supposedly progressive ideals. We can be reminded of a similar humanitarian vision stated by Christopher Columbus: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending (to Spain) all the slaves that can be sold." It seems the worst aspect of colonialism is still our manifest destiny.

For carrying, bearing, beginning to raise and giving up their infant, the young mother and father received nothing. The reason is simple: for adoption companies, giving birth parents nothing is more profitable than giving them something. This is what happens when children become commodities, and agents are paid based on commission.

 I was hoping that what happened in the Marshall Islands was an anomaly. But instead, the conditions are generalizable. The practice of concealing the "illegal and unethical" adoptions behind the front of legitimate agencies is called child laundering.

 In 2008, the Hague Adoption Convention entered into force in the United States. The Preamble reads in part that "each State should take, as a matter of priority, appropriate measures to enable the child to remain in the care of his or her family of origin." However, this law is not followed in practice. David Smolin, the foremost expert on child laundering, argues in "Wayne Law Review" that in most cases, adoptive parents "spend thousands of dollars (or tens of thousands of dollars) to arrange an intercountry adoption, when aid of less than a thousand dollars would have kept the child with their birth family." But no law requires that this option be offered. Ethan Kapstein notes in "Foreign Affairs" that the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) states "that the placement of children should not result "in improper financial gain for those involved in it.'" Unfortunately, the United States and Somalia are the only United Nations members not to ratify the CRC. Thus, paying commissions per child is legal, with predictable consequences.

Last year more than 4,100 children were adopted from Guatemala, America's top baby "supplier." But for the last six years, the country has failed to meet its obligations under the Hague Adoption Convention; thus, as of March 9, 2009, the U.S. stopped accepting adoptive babies from Guatemala. This ban is part of a larger cycle. Smolin contends that in the past 20 years "40 percent of those significant sending nations have virtually dropped out of the intercountry adoption system, apparently due largely to scandals related to child" laundering. Therefore, it is possible that the majority of international adoptions are thefts (I couldn't find statistics).

An April 4, 2009, New York Times article notes that our demand for babies from China, the second-biggest (and soon to be biggest) child "supplier," contributes to a lucrative market in abducted children that may number in the "hundreds of thousands." Some parents "post fliers in places where children are often sold and travel the country to stand in front of kindergartens as they let out." Tragically, in the future we should expect that an adoption scandal will rock the Chinese market as well.

Anecdotally, recent news of celebrity adoptions has spurred interest in international adoptions. Those who support this trend may want to take a closer look. Madonna's recent move to circumvent Malawi's strict adoption laws resulted in a court ruling on Friday banning her adoption of another child. To do so, she must fulfill the country's 18 month residency requirement, designed to prevent child laundering. Ironically, the court allowed her to keep the first child she adopted from Malawi, which she reportedly obtained through donating $3 million to the child's orphanage. I have no doubt that international adoption is often a loving and sublime experience for all parties involved. But the other day I wrote my host uncle's urban relatives a letter: "Please tell him his baby will never come back."

NYT Mind Readers Discuss Obama's Principles and Santa Claus - Headline: "Secret 'Kill List' Tests Obama's Principles"

NYT Headline: "Secret 'Kill List' Tests Obama's Principles" How do the New York Times mind readers know what Obama's principles are? This reflects the standard position: 'principles' are the focus group-tested platitudes politicians mouth every four years, while what they actually do boils down to inexplicable deviation from principles and 'values.' In other words, the folks who delude us with toothpaste and fast food advertisements also sell us canned candidates, and if one of them happens to have the peculiar habit of running assassination squads out of the Oval Office, well, he's still pretty much a nice guy. Or, “the rhetoric of American foreign policy protects us against reality, that is, against the claim on our attention that any event or fact makes by virtue of its existence.” P. Wander, “The Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70/4 (1984), pp. 339-361. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=1&hp&pagewanted=all See also, 'Santa Claus Exists, Despite Evidence.'

Traditional Marriage Is between a Man and His Rib

There are a number of reasons to oppose traditional marriage. For one thing, it's impossible to turn a rib into a person.