At Foreign Policy, Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist Laurie Garrett writes—Trump’s Battle Against Breastfeeding Is a Small Part of a Wider War:
At the turn of the century, I published a book called Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, in which I argued that population health rises or falls based on trust established between citizens and governments. If the people lose faith in government, science, and each other, the entire public health house of cards can quickly collapse. In the following years, the momentum behind globalization inspired the creation of public health initiatives such as the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the Global Fund, and hundreds of smaller nongovernmental health groups.
Today, trust and solidarity between nations, and within them, are yielding to what some have characterized as modern tribalism. And, unsurprisingly, the edifice of global public health is starting to come down with it. This is nowhere more visible than in the United States under the influence of President Donald Trump, whose nationalist agenda has amounted to a multifront war on global public health.
Last week, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration attempted to block passage of a resolution at the May World Health Assembly in support of breast milk. At issue was language meant to strengthen the 1981 International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes, aimed at stopping false claims that powdered formula is equal to, or even superior to, mothers’ milk. Experts argue that formula made by the 800 million people in 2018 having no access to safe drinking water contributes to the deaths of 820,000 babies annually. Moreover, there is plentiful evidence that breast milk contains components of the immune system and mother’s microbiome that protect infants from disease and promote healthy growth.
At the World Health Assembly, the Ecuador delegation sought to strengthen the 1981 code, planning to introduce a resolution favoring breast milk as the best for feeding infants. The U.S. delegation threatened to revoke some military aid and cut trade with Ecuador, acting in defense of the $70 billion baby formula industry. And Trump tweeted, “We don’t believe women should be denied access to formula.” Ecuador dropped its resolution, and global health leaders were appalled, viewing the attempt to protect the formula industry as placing U.S. companies’ profits above the health and survival of babies.
The Trump administration is also seeking to put U.S. pharmaceutical industry profits back in the driver’s seat in global pricing schemes. [...]
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QUOTATION
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
~~Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2003—Iraq war WAS about the oil:
File this under "holy shit": there's a reason Cheney was so adamant about keeping the deliberations of the Energy Task Force secret. It wasn't about Enron or ANWAR (although I'm sure they surely had their role), it was about divvying up Iraq's oil fields. It really was about the oil.
Judicial Watch, the conservative legal group that bedeviled the Clinton Administration has effectively done the same for Cheney and Bush:
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.”
So were such documents used for truly innocent purposes? It'll be interesting to see the administration's and its backers' tortured explanations as to why the Task Force would have pondered over who held the contracts to Iraq's oil wealth.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: The treason continues apace, and it's Greg Dworkin and Joan McCarter's turn to comment on it. Also, Brett Kavanaugh's bizarro "legal" theories that seem designed to ... further facilitate Trump's treason, and the GOP election-funding machine. Weird!
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