StephenKMackSD's Blog

How did this explanation of its funders, posted at Freedom House’s website, escape the attention of Mr. Ganesh?

Freedom House currently has fourteen offices and conducts programs in over thirty countries in all regions of the world. Primary funding for Freedom House’s programs comes in the form of grants from USAID and U.S. State Department, as well as from other democratic governments—Canada, the EU, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—and from private foundations, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

https://freedomhouse.org/programs/regional

Then there is this, what to name it?

The US and the wider west have just one consolation. Most of the crisis is not their fault. It follows that its alleviation is a task beyond them.

If Mr. Ganesh is looking to find ‘Crises’ of America’s making:

Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.

The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.

The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.

Ganesh’s essay attacks this government funded Think Tank, that doesn’t quite reach his exacting standards. That has been addressed, in the preceding sentences, of the above quoted paragraph:

Methodological snags abound here. Should “punitive” immigration tactics bring down the US score? And what’s all this about “exacerbated income inequality” in a civic review? Still, to the extent that values are quantifiable, the liberal style of government is in well-charted decline.

https://www.ft.com/content/e5276777-f70f-4f15-80bb-823a8e5e6c9b

The Freedom House essay by Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz is quoted in this Atlantic Council publication:

Who will organize the world? That’s what’s at stake in the Biden-Xi contest.

Inflection Points by Frederick Kempe dated March 7, 2021.

Who is going to organize the world? And what forces and whose interests will shape the global future?

Those were the underlying questions behind two events this past week, one in Washington and the other in Beijing, that set the stage for the geopolitical contest of our times.

The Washington piece was President Joe Biden’s release of the “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” which is unprecedented at this stage in a new administration. Biden’s purpose was to provide early clarity about how he intends to set and execute priorities in a fast-changing world.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid out the thinking behind the guidance in his first major speech since entering office. It was a compelling one, underscoring the urgent need to shore up US democracy and revitalize America’s alliances and partnerships.

“Whether we like it or not, the world does not organize itself,” Blinken said. “When the U.S. pulls back, one of two things is likely to happen: either another country tries to take our place, but not in a way that advances our interests and values; or, maybe just as bad, no one steps up, and then we get chaos and all the dangers it creates. Either way, that’s not good for America.”

Relations with China, which Blinken called “the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century,” are the wrench in this organizational thinking.

Said Blinken: “China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system—all the rules, values, and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.”

Biden’s biggest departure from former President Donald Trump’s approach to China is his emphasis on working with partners and allies. This week’s move by the United States and European Union to ease trade tensions, suspending a long list of tariffs related to the Airbus-Boeing dispute over government subsidies, underscores Biden’s seriousness of purpose.

…

Who will organize the world? That’s what’s at stake in the Biden-Xi contest.

From the evidence offered by these sources, the Party Line of the Biden Foreign Policy is taking shape. The Atlantic Council is the propaganda arm of NATO! Also, the reader might be able to detect, in the earliest stages of its evolution, what a Biden Foreign Policy critique will become?

Political Reporter

The Financial Times begins its Anti-Lula Campaign with this collection of the comments of ‘Free Marketeers’ , for want of a better term.

What might the reader think of Mr. Stott’s membership in the ‘Institute of The Americas’ ?

This on the Institute of the Americas web page:

For nearly 40 years, the Institute of the Americas has promoted sound public policy and fostered cooperation between public and private sector stakeholders across the hemisphere.

From the mission statement of this organization :

Our diverse programs emphasize innovation and technological advance as the key to building 21st century economies in the Americas.

To be a catalyst for promoting economic development and integration, emphasizing the role of the private sector, as a means to improve the economic and social well being of the people of the Americas.

…

We build bridges across the Americas — linking business leaders, policymakers, teachers, and students to advance education, share ideas, and facilitate opportunities. We help understand and catalyze innovation in core sectors, including: energy & sustainability, , life sciences & biotech, and the digital economy as it pertains to these core, productive activities.

Here is a selection from Mr. Michael Stott’s essay:

In a decision for which the adjective “surprise” hardly seems adequate, Supreme Court justice Luiz Edson Fachin ruled that the provincial court in southern Brazil which had convicted and imprisoned the leftwing icon on corruption charges in 2017 had no jurisdiction to try the case.

…

The shockwaves from the decision were immense: Lula’s fate has polarised Latin America’s biggest nation for years, bitterly dividing left-wingers who idolised him for his generous welfare policies from those on the right, who saw him and his Workers’ party, or PT, as the embodiment of mismanagement and corruption.

…

Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute in Washington, said she thought the surprise ruling quashing Lula’s convictions was likely to stand, not least because Bolsonaro had made so many enemies among the judiciary with his constant attacks on judges. “What I see happening is a reckoning with the fact that Bolsonaro is a massive threat to institutional stability,” she said. “The calculation thus is: ‘What is least destabilising?’”

https://www.ft.com/content/6d30406a-21d8-4d26-9784-8eabcbcc869f?list=intlhomepage

What might the reader think of this Los Angeles Times essay about Peterson and by extension his ‘Institute’?

Headline Unmasking the most influential billionaire in U.S. politics

Who’s the most influential billionaire business figure in national politics?

If you answered one of the Koch brothers (Charles or David) or George Soros, you’re wearing your partisan blinders. The former are known for their devotion to conservative causes, the latter to liberal. In either case, you’re wrong.

The most influential billionaire in America is Peter G. Peterson. The son of Greek immigrants, Peterson, 86, served as Commerce secretary under President Nixon, then became chairman and chief executive of Lehman Bros. Subsequently, he made his big money as co-founder of the Wall Street private equity firm Blackstone Group.

Peterson doesn’t attract venom from the left like the Koch family or bile from the right like Soros. In Washington, he’s treated with sedulous respect as a serious thinker about public policy willing to support earnest public discussion with cold cash. His money backs a large number of think tanks across the political spectrum; he has started a news outlet churning out articles about fiscal matters and is funding a high school curriculum aimed, according to its creators at Columbia University, at “teaching kids about the national debt.”

…

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-oct-02-la-fi-hiltzik-20121003-story.html

This reader fully understands that here is the central concern of Michael Stott, The Institute of the Americas, The Financial Times and Monica de Bolle.

Investors’ worries reflected not only the risk of a Lula victory but also the concern that, faced with an electoral challenge from his old nemesis, Bolsonaro would abandon any remaining pretence at market-friendly reforms and lean towards even more of the expensive populist giveaways than he has approved so far, straining the country’s dire finances further.

Bolsonaro’s ‘Market -friendly reforms’ are under threat from the possibility, the potentiality of a Lula victory.

Old Socialist

Looking for something else, I saw this essay by Perry Anderson: ‘High Jinks at the Plaza’ a review of three books.

The British Constitution Now 
by Ferdinand Mount.
Heinemann, 289 pp., £18.50, April 1992, 0 434 47994 2Constitutional Reform 
by Robert Brazier.
Oxford, 172 pp., £22.50, September 1991, 0 19 876257 7Anatomy of Thatcherism 
by Shirley Letwin.
Fontana, 364 pp., £6.99, October 1992, 0 00 686243 8

‘The New Few’ by Mr. Mount stares at me when I’ve opened my closet door, since 2012. As does his Jem (and Sam) Both ended on the Internet’s remainder shelves. Perry Anderson takes apart Mount’s British Constitution book, and books by Robert Brazier and Shirley Letwin with his wit and historical/political knowledge. That renders Mount and his temporary associates- note that Anderson gives credit where credit is due- yet he renders the intellectual/political poses of these authors null.

Here is a link to Edward B. Foley’s review of Mount’s ‘British Constitution’ of 1993.

Book Review: The British Constitution Now: Recovery or Decline? by Ferdinand Mount.

https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1307&context=concomm

Mr. Foley’s essay is of interest, in that it takes Mount’s book as an exercise of scholarship, rather than as an exercise of politics, in the guise of that scholarship. Anderson provides that indispensable dimension of the politics of Oakeshott and political fellow travelers:

This is, of course, why Michael Oakeshott is the garden god of its intellectual landscape. For his theory of the State was designed precisely to rope off popular government and purposive legislation from the proper conduct of rule. ‘Civil association’, as the framework of order, debarred collective aims or common consent from the structure of government. These were the features of another kind of activity, ‘enterprise association’, which had nothing to do with true governance. The confusion of enterprise association with civil association, when rulers undertook ‘managerial’ tasks – intervening in economic life or meddling in social affairs: in short, any programme for public welfare – was the path to servitude. Mount, closer to day-to-day realities, can see the difficulties of this stark dichotomy for the practical politician, and assures us that the two kinds of association are not mutually exclusive, and were ‘not really intended to be so’. The pious gloss is without consequence. For the burden of Mount’s argument is that the Constitution should indeed be seen, not in the way Bagehot envisaged it – as an ‘engine’ for purposeful government – but as a civil association: a form of living, he writes, as exempt from wilful shape or aim as South Kensington.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n20/perry-anderson/high-jinks-at-the-plaza

Old Socialist

His column takes the reader from Mr. Colvile, as reporter on the state of the NHS five years ago: 

‘When we talk about the NHS collapsing, we think of people being left to die in their homes. But the truth is subtler, and more corrosive. Five years ago I spent a week reporting from one of the country’s leading hospitals, the Queen Elizabeth in Birmingham. I was in A&E on the night the hospital went to the highest alert level for the first time in its history — a scenario the staff dubbed “Armageddon”. I watched as patients lay on wooden beds in the corridors, as ambulances delivered casualty after casualty even though there was no room at the inn.’

To Richard Murray of ‘King’s Fund’: 

At the same time, there are some silver linings from the pandemic. Richard Murray, head of the King’s Fund think tank, points out that it has resulted in a surge of innovation within the health service — consultations held over Zoom, trials for new Covid-19 treatments speeding through the system, greater co-ordination with care homes, an increased willingness to draw on the help of volunteers (including in the vaccination programme). The hope is that these can become permanent features, rather than temporary aberrations. Excess mortality is also likely to be lower in the coming years, because of the awful way Covid-19 picks off the most vulnerable.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/however-the-nhs-weathers-the-covid-hurricane-it-must-then-be-rebuilt-to-withstand-another-crisis-sv5nslb0x

On King’s Fund:

The King’s Fund is an independent think tank, which is involved with work relating to the health system in England. It organises conferences^[1] and other events.^[2]

Since 1997, they have jointly funded a yearly award system with GlaxoSmithKline. They reward small to medium-sized health charities who are improving people’s health.^[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King’s_Fund

I worked in Home Health Care from 1990 to 1999, and attended Patience Conferences for a large Los Angeles Hospital for 5 years: I am not a Doctor or Nurse, but like Colvile I can comment on the politics of HealthCare. He from the perspective of a Thatcherite Think Tank executive, whose self-presentation is about a would be riff on Smith’s Impartial Spectator, when it is,in fact, about Aron’s Committed Observer.

Old Socialist

I printed out this July 2020 interview, conducted by Eric Levitz, of Mr. Shor. Almost a full twenty pages long.  Mr. Levitz excels at soft-ball questions, inquiries. Perhaps in deference to Mr. Shor’s wunderkind status? ‘College Marxist’ is a demonstration of a once youthful flirtation?  

Mr. Shor assumes that his readership’s memory doesn’t go back as far as the Clinton’s ! Mine reaches back to The Kennedy presidency. Not to waste the reades time: Hillary Clinton is was and remains a Neo-Liberal. She was in 1964 a ‘Goldwater Girl’. So as a Party apparatchik, Mr. Shor presumes that the New York  Magazine’s readership meets his own callow historical/political standard. 

But the reader is made aware of Mr. Shor’s status as Political Technocrat.Whose business is the construction of winning  political strategies. His handbook is  Edward L. Bernays ‘Propaganda’ allied with more up to date methodologies of manipulation. Shor is the embodiment of the Lippmann Ideal of ‘Expert’, as a hedge against too much Democracy.

Both Mr. Levitz and Mr. Schor manage to provide a wobbly ‘seminar’ on winning strategies, or at least an attempt to construct them. Yet Mr. Shor is without the ability to construct a set of reasons why a voter would choose a  New Democrat, over a Republican Party, that even expelled their Jacobins, in favor of Trump. To resort to political metaphysics Mr. Shor is without either vision, charisma, or even in the most vulgar terms, dogmas. Neo-Liberalism is steeped in Free Market Dogmas. Even Bernie Sanders’ Left-Wing Social Democracy presents a Program.

Mr. Schor defensiveness about Neo-Liberalism is evident:  

             
…
So a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material interests of her donors.

…

Ah, right. People yell at me on Twitter about this. So working-class white people have an enormous amount of political power and they’re trending towards the Republican Party. It would be really ideologically convenient if the reason they’re doing that was because Democrats embraced neoliberalism. But it’s pretty clear that that isn’t true.
…

“Actually these working-class white people were betrayed by decades of neoliberalism and we just need to embrace socialism and win them back, we can’t trust people in the suburbs.”
…

You see Matt Stoller and Ryan Grim do this, where you try to pinpoint the moment in time when Democratic elites decided to turn their backs on the working class and embrace neoliberalism. Maybe it was the Watergate babies. Maybe it was the failure to repeal Taft-Hartley. Maybe it was Bill Clinton in 1992.

…

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-culture-2020-election-theory-polls.html#comments

Old Socialist

As always ‘The Rebellion Against the Neo-Liberal Elites’ that takes place regularly, in France, remains unreported, in this newspaper! Its ‘old news’. What takes the place of actual, but inconvenient news, is the ‘Culture War’ French Style: It devours everything else, its very purpose.
Which takes the place of any real commentary on Macron’s abandoned, indeed failed ‘Jupertarian Politics’ . The ‘conviction’ of Sarkozy, home detention, shines a light, not just on a single French pol, but on the whole of Western Democracies problem of utterly corrupt pols, a glaring example: Joe Biden!
Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/479ec0cb-f40d-4544-b78f-3d47f5504b13

__________________________________________

After Mr. Ganesh’s eulogy for ‘Daft Punk’ of February 26, 2021:

Daft Punk and the virtues of mystery

Business and politics could learn from the French duo’s reluctance to ‘engage’

https://www.ft.com/content/54fdadfe-7ea5-4278-8e0c-daf7039caf6e

This duo in tharl to Star Wars and Tron, and its penchant for Futuristic Drag: Helmets. I watched their final video, that evoked something like Kubrick’s 2001 opening sequence, featuring a barren landscape. This video expressed in its way a kind of nihilism, as both of them blew themselves up. Fin, The End . How will they manage a possible Farewell Tour? Or form a Reunion Tour ? ‘Daft Punk’ is about the long forgotten Harold Rosenberg’s ‘The Tradition of the New’ , published in 1959. Action Painting and Techno are connected!?

Here Mr. Ganesh comments on a ‘political fact’

Headline: Joe Biden’s popular stimulus reveals a changed America

Sub-headline: In attitude, if not reality, the US has become a social democratic country

Its ‘as if’ The New Deal never happened: Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway System in 1956 and a Tax Rate of 90%. Or that Kennedy and Roger Blough had a ‘disagreement’? Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts have been elided for American History. Nixon’s EPA of 1970 and his Health Care Plan of 1974. More examples of America’s Social Democratic Tradition, present themselves, as I just recall what comes to my memory!

The rise and triumph of Neo- Liberalism, Reagan’s catch-phrase of ‘Government is the problem’ & ‘I believe in State’s Rights’ , Bush The Elder of ‘a thousand points of light’ and Lee Atwater’s contribution to these ‘lights’, Willie Horton, The New Democrats, Bill Clinton of the willful destruction of Welfare & Aid to Dependent Children, and the economic catastrophe of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Bush The Younger who institutionalised Permanent War, built upon lies, and Obama and his adoption of Heritage Foundation Healthcare as his own, instead of Medicare for All. This is a partial history of the Neo-Liberal War against the Social Democratic Tradition, that now, in the face of The Pandemic, and its short and long term economic consequences, is reviving and remaking America, via one of its most valuable traditions.

One of the virtues of being Mr. Ganesh is that he needn’t worry about paying his rent, and the other imperatives, that bedevil tens of millions of Americans, in the face of The Pandemic: awaiting their $2,000 checks reduced to $1,400, Unemployment even after the ‘end’ of the pandemic, feeding themselves and their children, and awaiting vaccination, and the looming question of eviction or Foreclosure. Oh, I forgot School! All this while Mr. Ganesh address the hard problems!

Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/ffb8988f-ac8c-49e6-8e2a-c8f75294d07b

Mr. Jones, you are the master of political equivocation, not to speak of political conformity. That the Blairite Coterie manufactured the ‘Anti-Semitism of Corbyn’ as the political wager to ensure what? That Labour would lose to Boris? It was a political dispute between New Labour, and what is/was the actual Labour Party of Democratic Socialism.

The henchman for this were Jonathan Freedland, political fiction writer, Anthony Julius: both at full Tribalist Cry! In the ‘Left’ Guardian. With help of perennial Jewish Victim Margaret Hodge: Apartheid Profiteer! What is of most interest is that Corbyn has formed the Project for Peace and Justice. The Institutionalization of Corbanism?

Jeremy Corbyn: Why I’m Launching a Project for Peace and Justice

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/jeremy-corbyn-project-for-peace-and-justice-launch

Under the ‘leadership‘ of Starmer, Labour is hemorrhaging memberships at an alarming rate! Even Starmer’s call for a re-invigorated Patriotism, an echo of Posh Boy Cameron’s attack on Corbyn’s lack of ‘Patriotism’? has fallen flat!

Your wan attempt to steer the ‘middle course’ is hopeless! Yet you persist in an attempt to take the political temperature of the Jewish members of Labour, who are, if fact, the Blairite Neo-Liberals who long for a Restoration of this political toxin.

Old Socialist

What can the reader make of this paragraph of Mr. Robson’s interview with Josh Cohen?

“Can you imagine if you presented Freud to Jane Austen?” Cohen asked me recently, during a two-hour amble around Kensal Rise, near where he lives in north-west London. “She would think that it was both an absurd confection and so obvious that it’s not even worth remarking.” Cohen, who turned 50 last year, is compact and subtly scruffy. He has a boyish central parting, a salt-and-pepper beard, a serious mouth with mild guppy tendencies, and small dark eyes that project a tickled gleam from behind his black-rimmed glasses. His conversational style is at once forthright and soothingly sibilant as he expounds on the subjects to which he has devoted his life: post-romantic literature, 20th-century theory, the human mind. At times, he is reminiscent of his contemporary Louis Theroux, though he comes armed with a different sort of question, more searching, perhaps, or less confident about what it wants to provoke.’

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/02/can-you-imagine-if-you-presented-freud-jane-austen-josh-cohen-literature-and

Perhaps Mr. Cohen’s book is a successor to ‘Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst’ by Adam Phillips? My comment on this ‘biography’ :

On ‘Becoming Freud’ : Adam Phillips as incompetent Freudian Apologist/Propagandist. A comment by Philosophical Apprentice

On the question, rather conjecture, of what Jane Austen might think of Freud, is a rhetorical prop for Mr. Cohen’s rehabilitative project. On the vexing question of ‘what’ Jane Austen may have thought? in her time and political circumstance, is offered by Marilyn Butler’s invaluable ‘Jane Austen And The War of Ideas’.

Psychoanalysis was declared a ‘Science’ by Freud, that has been the subject to attempts at revisionism and rehabilitation: the Neo-Freudians, Psychoanalysis as Metaphysic, Jewish Emancipation, Jewish Story Telling. The whole of the rehabilitative project, sacrifices the rich vocabulary of The Master: Id, Ego,Super-Ego, The Oedipus Complex, Libido, Cathexis, Transference, Latent Homosexality,etc.. Trying to master this vocabulary was part of my young adult life, reading The New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-analysis , The Future of an Illusion, Totem and Taboo. When fist reading ‘The Lectures’, in the early 1970’s, I thought it was full of holes, yet I just kept that realization to myself.

For an example of the modish character of psycho-analysis on literary criticism, in an oblique, even almost a latent expression:

Tiny Alice

John V. Hagopian, Leo Skir, and Morris Belsnick, reply by Philip Roth

For a more nuanced evaluation of the ‘Literary Freud’ that doesn’t just eschew hagiography but dismantles the Freudian Myth, see John Farrell’s Freud’s Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion.

What is of interest in Mr. Cohen’s rehabilitative exercise, is that the ‘Literary’ is simply a garnish to his particular form of Freudianism, that remains out of reach of the reader, except for its Public Relations guise: the very point of this interview/review.

One final point: Frederick Crews of ‘The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute’ was published in 1995 as a New York Review Book, and subsequent essays on Freud in the tabloid itself ,and his biography of Freud was published in 2017: Freud:The Making of an Illusion. I read the TLS and New Statesman regularly, yet it appears that one of America’s important literary/political tabloids has not reached British readers?

Self-Emancipated Analysand

Headline:Joe Biden can save global migration from the deep freeze

Sub-headline: Through example and sheer numbers, an open US could bring an open world

…

‘This criminally undersells it. Whatever their content, previous reforms were of national or perhaps regional interest. This one, by dint of timing, could nudge the world into openness at a hinge moment in history.’

…

What can be wrong with this paragraph? Has Mr. Ganesh started reading John F. Kennedy’s ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ , probably ghosted by one of his Camelot Coterie? Recall ‘No Irish Need Apply’ ? Ganesh should read Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ in which the Mestizo Hordes are about to engulf ‘American Protestant Virtue‘. It’s focused his hysterical xenophobia.

Should the reader look to how America treated the Braceros, that picked crops beginning in WWII till 1964, as factual evidence of bad faith and mendacity.  America still owes these workers $500 Million , not updated to reflect today’s accumulation of interest. Most of these Guest Workers are dead, or near it, such is/are the quioxitic nature of America’s Legal/Moral obligations?

Trump campaigned on the ‘fact’ that Mexico would pay the cost of The Wall, the realization of Fortress America, on the Southern Border. No Wall for the Northern Border, because Canadians are not Mestizos. Slavery, the Concentration Camps for Japanese citizens, the Supreme Court decisions in Korematsu v. United States, and Hirabayashi v. United States- this an historical record that demonstrates xenophobia even against its own citizens, of different ethnicities/races.

What sense can the reader make of this New York Times report?  

Headline:At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.

The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.

The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.

That American Wars of Empire has produced a Refugee Crisis of World Historical proportions, in the last two decades, demonstrates what ‘Values’? Mr. Ganesh political intervention featuring Joe Biden as Political Redeemer will not do!

Angry Cosmopolitan 

https://www.ft.com/content/2b6a03a6-6b16-4888-9131-5ad29a91fd4a 

_________________________________

In reply to EdwardDeVere:

Thank you for your comment. Xenophobia is about Tribalism in its many iterations, permutations. The Reader need only look to Trump and Trumpism, and the Wall that never got built! Or in the world of respectable academia Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Clash’ and his ‘Who Are We’ are just examples of the toxic American Exceptionalism in extremis. 
‘Often it is very rational and you ignore it at your peril.’ The fear and hatred of ‘The Other’ is the murderous toxin, that has infected ‘Western Civilization’ since the Greeks and Romans. Aristotle and his defense of Slavery: The Politics Chapter 4 Slavery under the rubric of  the Association of the Household. 
Cicero and his xenophobia: ‘Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory’ by Ann Vasaly and ‘ Romans and Aliens‘ by J.P.V.D. Balsdon Chapters 2 through 4

Regards,

StephenKMackSD