Robert Scheer's Blog, page 651

Stormy Daniels Beats Trump at His Own Game

The president who boasted of treating women like sex objects is being outplayed at his own tabloid-warfare game by a porn star. Maybe there’s justice in the world after all.

You might have missed it in the ceaseless fusillade of news, but on Wednesday the White House all but confirmed the story that actress and director Stormy Daniels is dying to tell: Shortly before the election she was paid $130,000 in hush money to keep quiet about an “intimate relationship” she had with Donald Trump in 2006, soon after Melania Trump had given birth to the couple’s son, Barron.

Daniels filed a lawsuit Tuesday arguing that she should be free to speak about the affair, since a nondisclosure agreement laying out the terms of the payment was never actually signed by Trump. Asked about the payment at a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump denies the allegations and that, in any event, “this case has already been won in arbitration.” She later added that “the arbitration was won in the president’s favor.”

Trump was reportedly “very unhappy” with Sanders’ performance, but come on, give her a break. How is she supposed to keep all the lies straight as they multiply, overlap and at times contradict? She’s good at it, but every once in a while, a little truth is bound to slip out.

What she inconveniently seemed to confirm is that Trump is a party to arbitration proceedings regarding a nondisclosure agreement involving Daniels. Obviously, there would be no such agreement unless there were something Trump wanted to hide. And if Daniels’ silence was worth $130,000, it must have been something Trump really wanted to hide.

The Daniels affair is of more than just prurient interest: It would appear that Trump may have violated federal campaign law by failing to disclose the payment on his reporting forms.

Any attempt by Trump to stick to his blanket denial—he claims all the women who say he harassed them, assaulted them or had affairs with them are lying—is now moot in the Daniels case, because in an appendix to her lawsuit she included the entire nondisclosure agreement. The filings offer a glimpse of how Trump is accustomed to operating—and suggest why special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly taken an interest in Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen.

The agreement—in which Trump and Daniels are identified by pseudonyms, “David Dennison” and “Peggy Peterson”—was negotiated at the end of October 2016, days before the election, when Trump’s campaign was reeling from the impact of the “Access Hollywood” tape. The $130,000 payment, which Cohen has said he “facilitated” with personal funds, was not reported as a campaign donation or expenditure.

Daniels says in her suit that in January of this year, when reports of the hush-money payment surfaced, Cohen used “intimidation and coercive tactics” to force her to sign a “false statement” denying any relationship with Trump. In the past week, according to the suit, Cohen has used “an improper and procedurally defective arbitration proceeding hidden from public view” in an attempt to keep her silent—an apparent reference to the arbitration that Sanders claimed had been “won in the president’s favor.”

The agreement, as appended to the lawsuit, shows that Cohen formed a company, Essential Consultants LLC, to make the payment to Daniels. It provides for arbitration in the case of disputes, and it requires Daniels to pay “David Dennison” $1 million per instance if she breaches the contract. It is signed by Daniels, using her legal name, Stephanie Clifford; and by Cohen, for Essential Consultants. The line for “David Dennison” to sign is indeed left blank.

Thanks to Daniels, her lawyer and an unforced error by Sanders, the story Trump has tried so hard to squelch is out. Take a minute and think about it.

The personal lawyer of the president of the United States, days before the election, paid $130,000 to apparently buy the silence of a porn star. Said porn star credibly describes an affair she had with the president and the ham-fisted attempts by his lawyer to keep her from talking about it. All of this unquestionably speaks volumes about the president’s character and morals.

Republicans who regarded Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky as the end of civilization as we know it are serenely untroubled. Evangelicals who rail against sin and cloak themselves in piety offer nothing but a worldly, almost Gallic shrug. Daniels has taught us much about their character and morals, too.

‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli Gets Seven-Year Sentence

NEW YORK—Martin Shkreli, the smirking “Pharma Bro” vilified for jacking up the price of a lifesaving drug, was sentenced Friday to seven years in prison for defrauding investors in two failed hedge funds.

The self-promoting pharmaceutical executive notorious for trolling critics online was convicted in a securities fraud case last year unconnected to the price increase dispute.

Shkreli, his cocky persona nowhere to be found, cried as he told U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto he made many mistakes and apologized to investors.

“I want the people who came here today to support me to understand one thing, the only person to blame for me being here today is me,” he said. “I took down Martin Shkreli.”

He said that he hopes to make amends and learn from his mistakes and apologized to his investors.

“I am terribly sorry I lost your trust,” he said. “You deserve far better.”

Prosecutors argued that the 34-year-old was a master manipulator who conned wealthy investors and deserved 15 years in prison. His lawyers said he was a misunderstood eccentric who used unconventional means to make those same investors even wealthier, and deserved 18 months or less in prison.

The judge insisted that the punishment was not about Shkreli’s online antics or raising the cost of the drug.

“This case is not about Mr. Shkreli’s self-cultivated public persona … nor his controversial statements about politics or culture,” the judge said, calling his crimes serious.

He was also fined $75,000 and received credit for the roughly six months he has been in prison.

The judge ruled earlier this week that Shkreli would have to forfeit more than $7.3 million in a brokerage account and personal assets including his one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album that he boasted he bought for $2 million. The judge said the property would not be seized until Shkreli had a chance to appeal.

Attorney Benjamin Brafman told Matsumoto Friday that he sometimes wants to hug Shkreli and sometimes wants to punch him in the face , but he said his outspokenness shouldn’t be held against him.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis said Shkreli deserved the stiffer sentence not because he is “the most hated man in America,” but because he is a criminal convicted of serious fraud. She said the judge had to consider his history and said he has “no respect whatsoever” for the law, or the court proceedings.

“I also want to make clear that Mr. Shkreli is not a child,” Kasulis said. “He’s not a teenager who just needs some mentoring. He is a man who needs to take responsibility for his actions.”

Unapologetic from the beginning, when he was roundly publicly criticized for defending the 5,000 percent price increase of Daraprim, a previously cheap drug used to treat HIV, Shkreli seemed to drift through his criminal case as if it was one big joke.

After his arrest in December 2015, he taunted prosecutors, got kicked off of Twitter for harassing a female journalist, heckled Clinton from the sidewalk outside her daughter’s home, gave speeches with the conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and spent countless hours livestreaming himself in his apartment.

He was tight-lipped when faced with a barrage of questions about the price hike from members of Congress a couple of months later, citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. After the hearing, he tweeted that the lawmakers were “imbeciles.”

Shkreli insisted he was being persecuted by prosecutors for being outspoken and confidently predicted after his conviction that he was unlikely to be sentenced to jail.

Things abruptly changed, though, last fall after he jokingly offered his online followers a $5,000 bounty to anyone who could get a lock of Hillary Clinton’s hair. The judge revoked his bail and threw him in jail, a decision that she defended Friday.

That didn’t tame Shkreli completely. He corresponded with journalists, ridiculing the personal appearance of one female reporter who asked him for an interview.

Before sentencing him, the judge said that it was up to Congress to fix the issue of the HIV price-hike. And she spoke about how his family and friends “state, almost universally, that he is kind and misunderstood” and willing to help others in need.

She said it was clear he is a “tremendously gifted individual who has the capacity for kindness.”

She quoted from letters talking about generous acts like counseling a rape victim, teaching inmates math and chess, and funding family members.

The defense had asked the judge to consider the letters in its case for leniency, including professionals he worked with who vouched for his credentials as a self-made contributor to pharmaceutical advances.

Other testimonials were as quirky as the defendant himself. One woman described how she became an avid follower of Shkreli’s social media commentary about science, the pharmaceutical industry, but mostly, about himself. She suggested that those who were annoyed by it were missing the point.

“I really appreciate the social media output, which I see on par with some form of performance art,” she wrote.

Another supporter said Shkreli’s soft side was demonstrated when he adopted a cat from a shelter — named Trashy — that became a fixture on his livestreams. Another letter was from a man who said he met Shkreli while driving a cab and expressed his appreciation at how he ended up giving him an internship at one of his drug companies.

In court filings, prosecutors argued that Shkreli’s remorse about misleading his investors was not to be believed.

“At its core, this case is about Shkreli’s deception of people who trusted him,” they wrote.

ACLU Sues Over Separation of Immigrant Families

HOUSTON—The American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit Friday accusing the U.S. government of broadly separating immigrant families seeking asylum.

The lawsuit follows action the ACLU took in the case of a Congolese woman and her 7-year-old daughter, who the group said was taken from her mother “screaming and crying” and placed in a Chicago facility. While the woman was released Tuesday from a San Diego detention center, the girl remains in the facility 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away.

Immigrant advocates say the mother and daughter’s case is emblematic of the approach taken by President Donald Trump’s administration. The lawsuit, which asks a judge to declare family separation unlawful, says “hundreds of families” have been split by immigration authorities.

The lawsuit also raises the case of a Brazilian woman who the ACLU says was separated from her 14-year-old son after they sought asylum in August. The ACLU says the woman was given a roughly 25-day sentence jail sentence for illegally entering the country and then placed in immigration detention facilities in West Texas, while her son was taken to a Chicago facility.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not announced a formal policy to hold adult asylum seekers separately from their children. But administration officials have said they are separating parents and children to deter others from trying to enter the U.S.

DHS acting press secretary Tyler Houlton, in a statement last week on the case of the Congolese woman and her daughter, said government officials have to verify that children entering the U.S. are not victims of traffickers and that the adult accompanying them is actually their parent.

In separate court papers filed Wednesday, the U.S. government said it is awaiting the results of DNA testing to confirm the woman is the girl’s mother.

“We ask that members of the public and media view advocacy group claims that we are separating women and children for reasons other than to protect the child with the level of skepticism they deserve,” Houlton said.

It’s hard to determine how often parents and children are placed in separate facilities after they seek asylum, which is granted to people who have a credible fear of persecution if they are forced to return to their home country.

Different government agencies are responsible for holding adults and children. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains adults accused of immigration violations, while the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cares for unaccompanied immigrant children.

Immigration advocates criticized President Barack Obama’s administration for opening new family detention facilities in Texas and called for parents and children to be released. The two Texas facilities that it opened were found by a federal judge in 2015 to violate a long-standing 1997 settlement requiring children be released or otherwise held in the “least restrictive setting” available.

That settlement set other standards for the detention of children. The Trump administration has called for ending the settlement as part of its demands for changes to immigration laws.

Top administration officials have said they believe the asylum process is overwhelmed and challenged by people making frivolous claims. Advocates have also accused border agents of unlawfully turning away people who are seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Michelle Brané, director of the migrant rights and justice program for the Women’s Refugee Commission, said that through attorneys and social service organizations, she had identified at least 426 immigrant adults and children who had been separated by authorities since President Donald Trump took office in January 2017. Brané said she did not have a comparable figure for Obama’s administration.

But Brané said since the new administration began, her office has received far more reports of adults being held in ICE facilities without knowing where their children are.

“A lot of these kids are already afraid because they’re fleeing something and they know they’re fleeing something,” Brané said. “And to have them pulled away, that can be devastating for a parent.”

Three Weeks After Parkland, Florida Backs Gun Restrictions

Update: Breaking with the National Rifle Association, Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Friday signed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act into law.

After three weeks of hearings, by a bipartisan vote of 67 to 50 the Florida House on Wednesday approved a bill imposing a three-day waiting period for most long-gun purchases, raising the minimum age for purchasing those weapons to 21, and banning the possession or sale of bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire more rapidly.

The vote came after the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people, most of them students.

The legislation, known as SB 7026 or the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, now heads to Gov. Rick Scott’s desk. The Washington Post reports that Scott supported most provisions of the bill but opposed arming teachers. Currently, the bill includes nearly $100 million to improve school security and $67 million to fund a new sheriff program that would allow school districts to voluntarily train and arm employees who pass 132 hours of law enforcement training, a background check and diversity training. The program would not arm employees who teach exclusively, or teacher’s aides.

“I am going to read the bill, and I am going to talk to parents,” Scott told reporters Wednesday. “My goal is that this never happens again to a parent in our state.”

Democratic and some Republican lawmakers in Florida have opposed the provision to arm school staff, which was also present in a previous version of the bill. In the hours before the House vote, several amendments Democrats put forward to remove the provision were voted down. The Miami Herald reports:

Under the amendment, proposed by Sen. Rene Garcia, R-Miami, classroom teachers would not be armed if a school district decides to participate in the so-called ‘school marshal’ program established in response to the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. However, other school personnel, including support staff who provide some instructional work, current or former servicemen or JROTC instructors, would be able to carry firearms.

Regarding arming teachers, NPR’s Greg Allen told “All Things Considered,” “A lot of districts like Miami-Dade and Broward County are not going to take part in it. They say they don’t want to do it. The sheriffs say they don’t want to. But some of the rural counties are already trying it out and I think it will go forward there, but not just with people who are exclusively classroom teachers.”

Here’s the portion of #SB7026 that relates to school safety. ‘Coach #AaronFeis Guardian Program’ does NOT apply to “individuals who exclusively perform duties as classroom teachers.” See exemptions below. @ActionNewsJaxpic.twitter.com/TP7YNkBXP3

— Russell Colburn (@RussellANjax) March 6, 2018

In a letter sent Tuesday, grieving families of the Parkland victims urged Florida lawmakers to approve SB 7026.

“You must act to prevent mass murder from ever occurring again at any school. This issue cannot wait. The moment to pass this bill is now,” the letter reads. “We must be the last families to suffer the loss of a loved one due to a mass shooting at a school.”

South Korea: Trump, Kim Jong Un to Meet ‘by May’

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump has accepted an offer of a summit from the North Korean leader and will meet with Kim Jong Un by May, a top South Korean official said Thursday, in a remarkable turnaround in relations between two historic adversaries.

The South Korean national security director, Chung Eui-yong, told reporters of the planned meeting outside the White House, after briefing Trump and other top U.S. officials about a rare meeting with Kim in the North Korean capital on Monday.

No serving American president has ever met with a North Korean leader. The U.S. and North Korea do not even have formal diplomatic relations. The two nations remain in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice and not a peace treaty.

Seoul had already publicized that North Korea had offered talks with the United States on denuclearization and normalizing ties, providing a diplomatic opening after a year of escalating tensions over the North’s nuclear and missile tests. The rival Koreas also agreed to hold a leadership summit in late April.

“He (Kim) expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible,” Chung said. “President Trump appreciated the briefing and said he would meet Kim Jong Un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization.”

Chung did not say where Trump would meet with Kim.

Trump took office vowing to stop North Korea from attaining a nuclear-tipped missile that could reach the U.S. mainland. He’s oscillated between threats and insults directed at Kim, and more conciliatory rhetoric. His more bellicose talk, and Kim’s nuclear and missile tests, have fueled fears of war.

Trump, who has ramped up economic sanctions on North Korea to force it to negotiate on giving up its nukes, has threatened the pariah nation with “fire and fury” if its threats against the U.S. and its allies continued. He has derided Kim by referring to him as “Little Rocket Man.”

After Kim repeated threats against the U.S. in a New Year’s address and mentioned the “nuclear button” on his office desk, Trump responded by tweeting that he has a nuclear button, too, “but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Zeke Miller, Catherine Lucey, Ken Thomas and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

Fake News Travels 6 Times Faster Than the Truth, Study Shows

WASHINGTON—Twitter loves lies. A new study finds that false information on the social media network travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people.

And you can’t blame bots; it’s us, say the authors of the largest study of online misinformation.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at more than 126,000 stories tweeted millions of times between 2006 and the end of 2016 — before Donald Trump took office but during the combative presidential campaign. They found that “fake news” sped through Twitter “farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” according to the study in Thursday’s journal Science .

“No matter how you slice it, falsity wins out,” said co-author Deb Roy, who runs MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines and is a former chief media scientist at Twitter.

Twitter funded the study but had no say in the outcome, according to the researchers.

The scientists calculated that the average false story takes about 10 hours to reach 1,500 Twitter users, versus about 60 hours for the truth. On average, false information reaches 35 percent more people than true news.

While true news stories almost never got retweeted to 1,000 people, the top 1 percent of the false ones got to as many as 100,000 people.

And when the researchers looked at how stories cascade — how they link from one person to another like a family tree — false information reached as many as 24 generations, while true information maxed out at a dozen.

Concern over bogus stories online has escalated in recent months because of evidence the Russians spread disinformation on social media during the 2016 presidential campaign to sow discord in the U.S. and damage Hillary Clinton.

Social media companies have experimented with using computer algorithms and human fact-checkers to try to weed out false information and abuse online. Twitter earlier this month said it is seeking help from outside experts to better deal with the problem. And Facebook this week announced a partnership with The Associated Press to identify and debunk false and misleading stories about the midterm elections.

“We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns and increasingly divisive echo chambers,” tweeted Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.”

The MIT study took the 126,285 stories and checked them against six independent fact-checking sites—snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com and urbanlegends.about.com—to classify them as true, false or mixed. Nearly two-thirds were false, just under one-fifth were true, and the rest were mixed.

The six fact-checking websites agreed with each other on classification at least 95 percent of the time, plus two outside researchers did some independent fact-checking to make sure everything was OK, said co-author Sinan Aral, an MIT management professor.

Lead author Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT data scientist, said the three false stories that traveled the farthest and fastest were about a Muslim guard called a hero in the Paris bombings of 2015; an Iraq war veteran finishing as runner-up to Caitlyn Jenner for an ESPN courage award; and an episode of “The Simpsons” that had a story line in 2000 about a Trump presidency. (It was in 2015.)

University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a co-founder of factcheck.org, had problems with the way the study looked at true and false stories. The MIT team characterized a story’s truth on a 1-to-5 scale, with 1 being completely false. Factcheck.org, Jamieson said, looks more at context and does not label something either true or false.

She also suggested that calling this bogus information “false stories” does not capture how malignant it is. She said it would “better be called viral deception. VD. And treated as analogous to venereal disease.”

The researchers looked at obvious bots — automated accounts — and took them out. While the bots tweeted false information at a higher rate than humans, it wasn’t that much of a difference, and even without bots, lies still spread faster and farther, Roy said.

David Lazer, a political and computer scientist at Northeastern University who wasn’t part of the study but wrote an accompanying report, praised the MIT research but said the scientists may have missed a lot of bots and cyborgs — sort of in-between humans. His ongoing, not-yet-published research has found that about 80 percent of false stories come from just one-tenth of 1 percent of users.

The researchers dug deeper to find out what kind of false information travels faster and farther. False political stories — researchers didn’t separate conservative versus liberal — and stuff that was surprising or anger-provoking spread faster than other types of lies, Aral said.

“Falsehood was significantly more novel than the truth,” Aral said. “It’s easy to be novel when you make things up.”

That fits perfectly with previous research on the psychology of fake information, said Yale University’s Dan Kahan and Dartmouth College’s Brendan Nyhan, scientists who study the phenomenon.

“The more strange and more sensational the story sounds, the more likely they are going to retweet,” Kahan said.

Nyhan and Lazer said that while more fact-checking and education of people on how to tell fake from real can be helpful, the more effective solution will have to come from the social media platforms themselves.

Roy said the study results reminded him of the often-cited quotation that essentially says a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots — or pants — on. It’s been attributed to Mark Twain and Winston Churchill. But that would be misinformation. Politifact traced a version of it back to Jonathan Swift in 1710.

A Populist Revolution?

The shambles left by last weekend’s Italian election, the chaotic dysfunction of American government under President Trump, and the attack on liberal democratic institutions in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and elsewhere—all of these are being blamed on the haunting specter of “populism.”

But is populism the villain here? Do we even agree on what the word means?

This is more than an abstract debate. How we respond to what most certainly is a crisis of liberal democracy depends a great deal on how we understand the reaction that’s aggravating it.

A purely negative verdict on populism is especially prevalent among elites. But I’d argue that while authoritarian forms of populism are dangerous and must be resisted, other forms can contribute to democracy’s well-being.

Further, too much focus on populism itself risks mistaking the symptom for the cause. Angry dissidence doesn’t arise by accident. It is typically a response to genuine failures and injustices. The best way to combat the populists’ excesses is to deal with the discontents to which they give voice.

The election in Italy offers instruction both on what we need to fear and on the costs of leaving problems to fester.

On the one hand, it is worrying that the opportunistic Five Star Movement and the far-right, anti-immigrant League party (formerly the Northern League) were seen as the two main victors with 32.2 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively. Both are sympathetic to Russia, could prove disruptive to the European Union, and lack a coherent approach to the country’s finances.

But the League’s strong showing owed in part to a rebellion among conservative Italians against the re-emergence of Silvio Berlusconi, the discredited 81-year-old former prime minister, as the chief center-right figure. Exceeding expectations, the League bested Berlusconi’s party to become the principal force on the right.

And for all its opportunism, Five Star swept southern Italy by speaking to the region’s frustration with its economic marginalization over many decades, the persistence of corruption and the continuing influence of organized crime.

The incumbent center-left Democrats were routed. Although they narrowly outpolled the League with 18.9 percent, they lost a quarter of their electorate. The League, by contrast, quadrupled its share. The Democrats deserved better than they got, having run a rather effective government that restored economic growth. But their leader, former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, squandered his popularity on a misguided constitutional referendum and split his party by pushing aside some of its traditional figures. (Memo to Democrats in the U.S.: Sectarian infighting is not conducive to a party’s health.)

The bottom line: Yes, there was a backlash against immigration, but above all, Italians were furious at politicians of the old parties and disheartened over the long-term economic decline of their country. Populism may well get Italy into a lot of trouble, but it’s not hard to see why Italians are sick of what they’ve had. Elites need to pay attention.

The sharpest critique of populism, articulated well by Princeton University’s Jan-Werner Muller, is that in defining “the people,” populists often exclude large segments of the population. They “treat their political opponents as ‘enemies of the people’ and seek to exclude them altogether.” These dangers are captured in the titles of two important new books, one by my Brookings Institution colleague William Galston, “Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy”; the other by Harvard scholar Yascha Mounk, “The People Vs. Democracy.”

The sort of populism Muller describes is indeed a threat to liberal values. For their part, Galston and Mounk in no way overlook the sources of disaffection that have led to populist advances. They take seriously the urgency of easing the social and economic crises that provoked the current upsurge.

Nonetheless, there should be no denying that other populist traditions (I’d insist that the American brand from the 1890s is one of them) maintain faith with democracy, push ruling elites to face up to injustices that undermine free institutions, and create the mass movements that social change requires.

The historian Richard Hofstadter was a critic of the populists, yet in his classic 1955 book “The Age of Reform,” he recognized that ruling classes can be pushed in two quite different directions. “One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time,” he wrote, “is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.”

Populism takes root when those in charge reject the second option.

Trump Announces Stiff Trade Tariffs, Exempts Canada and Mexico

WASHINGTON—Unswayed by Republican warnings of a trade war, President Donald Trump ordered steep new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to the U.S. on Thursday, vowing to fight back against an “assault on our country” by foreign competitors. The president said he would exempt Canada and Mexico while negotiating for changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The new tariffs will take effect in 15 days, with Canada and Mexico indefinitely exempted “to see if we can make the deal,” Trump said. NAFTA talks are expected to resume early next month.

“The American aluminum and steel industry has been ravaged by aggressive foreign trade practices. It’s really an assault on our country. It’s been an assault,” Trump said at the White House. He was joined by steel and aluminum workers holding white hard hats.

American steel and aluminum workers have long been betrayed, but “that betrayal is now over,” Trump said. The former real estate developer said politicians had for years lamented the decline in the industries, but nobody was willing to take action.

As he has indicated previously, Trump said he would levy tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum. But he said during a Cabinet meeting earlier in the day that the penalties would “have a right to go up or down depending on the country and I’ll have a right to drop out countries or add countries. I just want fairness.”

Business leaders, meanwhile, have continued to sound the alarm about the potential economic fallout from tariffs, with the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce raising the specter of a global trade war. That scenario, Tom Donohue said, would endanger the economic momentum from the GOP tax cuts and Trump’s rollback of regulations.

“We urge the administration to take this risk seriously,” Donohue said.

The president suggested in the meeting with his Cabinet that Australia and “other countries” might also be spared, a shift that could soften the international blow amid threats of retaliation by trading partners.

“We’re going to be very fair, we’re going to be very flexible but we’re going to protect the American worker as I said I would do in my campaign,” Trump said.

People briefed on the plans ahead of the announcement said all countries affected by the tariffs would be invited to negotiate with the administration to be exempted from the tariffs if they can address the threat their exports pose to U.S. manufacturers. The exemptions for Canada and Mexico could be ended if talks to renegotiate NAFTA stall.

The process of announcing the penalties has been the subject of an intense debate and chaotic exchanges within the White House, pitting hard-liners against free trade advocates such as outgoing economic adviser Gary Cohn.

The fight over tariffs comes amid intense turmoil in the West Wing, which has seen waves of departures and negative news stories that have left Trump increasingly isolated in the Oval Office, according to two senior officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions.

Congressional Republicans and business groups are bracing for the impact of the tariffs and the departure of Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who has opposed them.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, appearing at a session with Home Depot employees in Atlanta, said ahead of Trump’s announcement, “I’m just not a fan of broad-based, across-the-board tariffs.” He pointed to the store’s many products that rely on steel and aluminum.

More than 100 House Republicans wrote Trump on Wednesday, asking him to reconsider “the idea of broad tariffs to avoid unintended negative consequences” to the U.S. economy and workers.

Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican, said he plans to introduce legislation next week to nullify the tariffs though he has acknowledged that finding the votes to stop the president’s actions could be difficult.

The president has said the tariffs are needed to reinforce lagging American steel and aluminum industries and protect national security.

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Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Darlene Superville, Zeke Miller, Matthew Daly and Alan Fram in Washington and Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.

The Generals Are Failing Their Soldiers—and America

September 2006. Iraq was falling apart. Nearly 100 American troops were being killed each month. The war seemed hopeless, unwinnable (because it ultimately was). So the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace, convened a “council of colonels’ – purportedly some of the brightest minds in the military – to recommend new policies. Only three, reportedly, had any combat experience in Iraq, but still, these guys were sharp. The group debated endlessly and eventually reached an impasse. They had three separate proposals and the group generally divided along service lines. Some Air Force and Navy guys wanted a phased withdrawal – the “Go Home” option – but their ideas were promptly dismissed. Other (mostly Army and Marine officers) wanted to “engage in prolonged conflict – the “Go Long” option. Finally, the most prominent army officers – including America’s current National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster – wanted to “Go Big” and heavily reinforce the troops in Iraq with a “surge.” You can guess which side won out.

George W. Bush liked the can-do optimism of the “surge” team and doubled down. Violence briefly dropped, a couple thousand more American troops died, and the military promptly declared victory. We’re still dealing with the fallout.

That generation of colonels became today’s generals. The whole worldview of most senior officers is built on a fable, a myth: the surge worked. The reality is much messier. We’re still in Iraq (and Syria, and Afghanistan, and…everywhere). Still, our generals have a ready response. You see, the story goes, the problem is we didn’t go big enough or long enough and the damn liberals (like Obama!) pulled out the troops too soon. The “surge myth” provides our generals a comforting counterfactual, a road not taken, whereby the military could’ve-would’ve-should’ve won, but were denied victory.

So it stands, in 2018, that instead of a sensible “go home” option, America’s generals and civilian policymakers have handed us the worst of all worlds – a combo of “go big” and “go long.” Forever war.

Let’s be clear: most generals and admirals are “yes-men.” They’ve made a career of placating bosses and telling superiors exactly what they want to hear. After all, how do you think they got all those stars? Problem is: once they become senior flag officers, the “boss” is often a civilian Beltway insider in Washington, and those guys, well, what they want is more war, more bombs, and more endless interventions. And the generals? They’ve happily complied for coming up on 17 years now. Which would be all well and good if they were playing a board game (like Risk!) or a computer simulation, but these are real kids being shuttled from one indecisive theater to another like so many toy soldiers. No one wins, of course…except the military-industrial complex. There’s the tragedy.

Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and (ostensible) liberals alike, have stood at the helm of America’s post 9/11 forever wars. Neither mainstream party has the guts (or the compunction) to pump the breaks and pursue a less grandiose foreign policy. I, like so many others, bet big on Obama and, ultimately, lost a huge hand. The solutions aren’t in Washington, and, unfortunately, given the end of the draft and a castrated antiwar movement, the answers aren’t in the streets either.

Who, then, could put a stop to the madness? The generals, that’s who. This is a scary time for the republic, one that would have the Founders rolling in their graves, whereby Americans only trust the military among various public institutions. That ain’t healthy but it’s the reality we inhabit. So, basically, the American republic needs a whole bunch of generals to make known their dissent, slam their stars on someone’s desk, and threaten to resign if Washington doesn’t dial down these countless interventions and turn to Congress for a real declaration of war (or peace!). It’s a long shot, sure, but it just might be crazy enough to work.

Don’t count on it, though. Odds are the generals will carry on with their optimistic, can-do, delusional talk of “turning corners,” and “breaking stalemates” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and who knows where else. I’ve listened to one general after another speak to my soldiers since 2001, and they’ve all pretty much got one thing in common. There’s barely a hint of creativity or constructive critique in the whole bunch. Heck, this is a generation of generals who’ve known nothing but more war and more stalemate in perpetuity. They’ve been peddling the same tired old failed strategies to witless civilian policymakers for decades. It’s all they know!

Got a problem somewhere in the Greater Middle East? Well, the generals have a (distinctly military) recommendation for you: surge troops, advise and assist local forces, surge again, rinse and repeat! And when it doesn’t work out (it never does), have no fear – that general will have retired and grabbed a gig on the board of some defense contractor, and, guess what? Some slightly younger general, who just happened to previously work for the first guy, is now ready with the same advice: how ‘bout a surge?

The system of promotion and the very culture of America’s military is inherently flawed. Senior officers rarely ask questions because it hurts their careers to think critically. For all their protestations to the contrary (we want soldier-scholars), neither the military hierarchy nor civilian leadership want critical thinkers. Mark Perry, in his recent book, The Pentagon’s Wars, puts his finger on the core issue. “The inability [of generals] to act,” he claims, “flow[s] from a system where disagreement, or even reasoned dissent, [is] viewed as inappropriate, or worse.” Welcome to the U.S. Army!

Still, my fantasy isn’t completely unprecedented. Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Trump’s National Security Adviser, did his dissertation and even wrote a book – Dereliction of Duty – on the failure of senior officers to stand up to LBJ on the Vietnam War. McMaster, then just a middling major teaching (as I later would) in the West Point History Department, wrote of Vietnam that “the president was lying, and he expected the [Joint] Chiefs to lie as well or, at least, to withhold the whole truth.” McMaster concluded that the war was “lost in Washington;” which I find a dubious assertion since I’m quite sure the Vietnamese had something to do with it. Nevertheless, in pointing out the failings of the generals to speak truth to power, what he called their reinforcing failings of “arrogance, weakness, and lying in the pursuit of self-interest,” McMaster was dead on. He and I disagree about what the generals should have recommended – he thinks more troops might’ve done the trick, I’m certain the US should’ve never been in Vietnam – but we both feel the generals and admirals should’ve resigned in protest.

McMaster is a genuine scholar and one of the brightest officers the army has fielded in a generation. Still, a year into the Trump administration, the man, and his entire peer group of generals, utterly disappoint. The new National Security Strategy all but declares a new Cold War with Russia and China and ratchets up tensions with North Korea and Iran. The National Security Adviser, the Joint Chiefs, and senior theater commanders are now – at least according to every public statement we’ve seen – all in for expanded interventions, more mini-surges, and, frankly, indefinite war in countless locales. Therein lies the irony: a generation of flag officers read and, ostensibly, internalized the message of McMaster’s brave book. Yet now, 17 years into these failing, fruitless wars, not one has the courage to “call BS,” and turn in their stars.

Nor should we let these guys (and they’re mostly guys) off the hook. To a man, they know better. They’ve all attended the military’s various Command and General Staff and War Colleges. Some of the brighter bulbs even studied at the prestigious US Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). They’ve spent years reading about the strategy trinity. It even has a nifty formula for the knuckle draggers among them: Means + Ways = Ends. Simply put, in order to balance the proverbial three-legged stool, the Objective (Ends) must be achievable, and meeting that objective requires sufficient resources (means) combined with effective methods (ways). Makes sense, right?

Make no mistake, most of these generals know, I mean viscerally know, that the objectives set for the US military – “defeat terror,” “build democracy,” “stabilize Afghanistan,” and whatever else – are nowhere near achievable. They also know that the current all-volunteers force has neither the resources (like manpower) nor magical tactics (ways) to pull off the miraculous. And still they’re silent. So I ask again: where are the brave military voices ready to tell the one fundamental, if inconvenient, truth about today’s wars – the strategic trinity is bunk! The ends: unachievable and so much fantasy; the means: utterly insufficient; and, the ways: uncreative and lackluster at best.

So let me say it one last time: the generals and admirals – the sharper ones anyway – know this! They realize the “ends” don’t match the “means” and there aren’t any “ways” available to correct that stunning mismatch. Yet on they stagger, praising the (genuine) courage of their troops, maintaining a cordial, can-do cheerfulness, and shuttling more soldiers into unwinnable quagmires. Thus, they please their masters – Trump, Obama, Bush, it doesn’t matter who presides – and do what they do best: achieve the next promotion and feed personal ambition. Of course no one says that (even a shameless self-promoter like Petraeus wouldn’t be so blatant) out loud. We military men all share the same defect, the original sin of the soldier – self-righteousness. I’m guilty too. We’re told and tell ourselves we are special so often that we start to believe the mythos. We’re not ambitious, we’re selfless; we serve not ourselves, but our nation. Of course, the truth is far more complex and the motivations of human behavior rather gray.

Generals aren’t superheroes and, God knows, neither is this lowly, decidedly mediocre major. Still, we can and should expect better from our nation’s senior military advisors. My favorite general from this generation, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, demonstrated – in his own small way – what’s possible. Pressured by Republican hawks and even influential voices in the Obama administration, to do more and get involved in the Syrian Civil War, Dempsey ever so subtly served the nation’s best interests. He neither sad “no” outright, nor responded with a “yes, sir, can do,” but rather explained in writing the options available and the severe costs and acute risks of each escalation in Syria. His warning was persuasive, at least to some in Washington, and ultimately President Obama – at least briefly – avoid further interventions. Young men and women who would undoubtedly have died, didn’t! In part we can thank Martin Dempsey, the curious career soldier who once taught English Literature at West Point and regularly serenaded his troops with his tenor voice. He ain’t perfect – none of us are – but there’s a lesson in this man’s decisions.

Sadly, it’s unlikely any of Trump’s top generals will follow the Dempsey example or, more forcefully, publicly threaten resignation. There just aren’t very many courageous critical thinkers at the pinnacle of the military profession. The generals select their own, deciding which colonels join their exclusive club. This is a formula for nepotism and sycophancy, not creativity or intellectual diversity. Sure, some military dissenters and free thinkers populate the publishing world, but they almost exclusively wear the middling ranks of major or lieutenant colonel. More likely, they’ve already left the service. There’s a reason why such folks don’t wear general’s stars, and it comes down to a broken military culture.

Generals select their own; they also punish and promote internally. Captains, Lieutenants, and Sergeants take the fall for tactical or ethical errors in judgment. Generals, at worst, quietly retire or, sometimes, even get promoted. Back in the bad old days of 2007 Iraq, when Baghdad was on fire and no one, it seemed, had any solutions, one Lieutenant Colonel, Paul Yingling, had the gumption to publish a scathing article in the official Armed Forces Journal. “The intellectual and moral failures common to America’s general [officers]…constitute a crisis,” he wrote. As it stands, he concluded, “A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” That remains, with America now having lost or losing several wars, a staggering, discomfiting truth. Yingling made it to the rank of full colonel – itself a near miracle – and now teaches high school social studies for about one-third of his previous pay. Courage isn’t always rewarded.

And so, in 2018, after 17 years’ worth of generals who saluted, obeyed orders, promised victory, and delivered nothing of the sort, this author doubts anything substantial will change. It seems all that’s now on offer from our senior officers are the “go big,” option, the “go long” option, or some perverse hybrid of the two.

So the generals will fail us, as they tend to do, and the U.S. military will go big, go long, and go forever.

To where, you ask? Nowhere fast.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

We Are Teachers, Not Warriors or Heroes

“It was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter.”

— Emma Gonzalez, Senior, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Over the past three weeks, the impassioned voices and steadfast demands of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have resounded across social media and through the halls of the large suburban high school where I teach visual arts. A group of senior girls, spurred to action by the horrors of the Parkland massacre and emboldened by watching videos of its protesting students, organized a walkout of their own.  Though it was an uncharacteristically cold, snowy day in our part of Oregon, hundreds of students marched out of school, engaging in what was certainly, for many of them, their first act of civil disobedience.  I positioned myself near the back of the crowd, listening as they shouted their demands for safer schools and an end to fear in the classroom.  Standing on that icy sidewalk, I was overcome by waves of conflicting emotions.  Though deeply proud of them for raising their voices and insisting on being heard, I was also forced to confront a stark and brutal reality: neither my students nor I feel safe in our school.

I still remember the cold December morning in 2012 when I first heard about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  A colleague walked up to my desk, tears streaming down her face.  She then recounted the grisly details of those shootings: a classroom of first graders and their teachers murdered on what should have been just another routine school day.

At the time, my daughter was a preschooler.  In those school pictures that began appearing in the media of gap-toothed Sandy Hook first graders I saw her face.  I began to think about her future in such a world and it looked bleak.  From that moment on, I couldn’t bear reading the stories of what had transpired within those school walls and so found myself avoiding the impassioned, anguished speeches of the brave parents and teachers of those senselessly slaughtered children.  It hit too close to home. It was horror on a level I had previously thought unimaginable and in a school not that different from mine. Naively, I assumed things would have to change, that nobody could look at those tiny little people and callously advocate for the status quo. How wrong I was. And as we all know, the shootings just kept happening.

So what was it about the Parkland killings that tipped the scale?  Why hadn’t this happened after Columbine or Newtown?  These are among the questions we teachers have been asking one another at my school recently.  Perhaps what’s driving this moment is fear of the seeming inevitability, the not-if-but-when of it all.  As teachers, we are forced to wonder: When will it be our turn?  When will we bar the doors, fight, run, or hide?  When will despair be given a physical form in the shape of a teenager with a gun and our school turned into a shooting gallery for the deranged?

At this point, we’ve been practicing lockdown drills for years. We lock and block the doors, then huddle on the floor in the darkest corners of our classroom, 36 teenagers and one adult trying to be as quiet as possible. No phones, no talking, no movement. We wait for the rattle of the door handle, at least one of us cries, and then it’s over. The all-clear.

We turn on the lights, stretch our cramped limbs, and return to our seats.  I tell a joke, try to lighten the mood a bit, and resume class.  One grim effect of these drills and procedures, though, is to normalize the threat of an act so heinous, so abnormal it’s hard to take in.  We’ve essentially desensitized our entire school community to the true horror of what we’re playing out — a fight for our lives.  We expect the routines of the classroom to resume once the lights come back on, hoping that the students will have grasped the seriousness of the drill but won’t have internalized the fear.  That none of us will.  When my students voice the fear that sits inside them in that darkened room, when they give the despair space to breathe in the light, we’re all forced to confront the twisted reality of what we’re doing.

At the beginning of the semester, I gave my new students a questionnaire about their lives. One of them answered the question “What is one thing that really stresses you out?” by writing: “What really stresses me out is the fact that I might die in this building.”

I had no idea how to respond because, honestly, I feel the same way.  How do I convey what it feels like to walk into your workplace every morning wondering if today is the day you’ll die there?  How do I explain the trepidation I feel when I have to confront that student — the one who’s been making the disturbing art, doesn’t smile or interact with his peers, and whose parents won’t return my emails or calls — to tell him that he needs to tone down the violence in his work?  How do I share my deepest fear that this is the kid who will come back for me later, armed and ready to exact his revenge?

How do I express the complexity of the emotions I feel when I’m huddling in the dark with my students, thinking about what it would take for all of us to make it out of the building alive in a real version of the same situation? And how do I begin to think about the worst possible scenario, that the sixteen-year-old kid crouched next to me in the dark is the next school shooter?  In the heightened paranoia of my classroom, my students are now suspects.

Teachers as Martyrs?

I imagine every new teacher arrives with some version of the story of the triumphant teacher who takes a ragtag group of students from disarray to academic excellence playing in the back of his or her mind. That cinematic dreamscape is often discarded as the years go by. If you’re actually going to survive in the system, tough it out for the long haul, certain illusions must be shed. Almost a third of all new teachers jump ship by year three when the challenges of the profession — the long hours, the constant planning, the never-ending grading, and the worries about meeting the intellectual and emotional needs of our students — begin to seem unsustainable.

In my first years on the job, the enormity of the psychological task of caring for the wellbeing of my students and a creeping awareness that I would never be able to fully support and know all of them could reduce me to tears.  My commute home in the afternoon often felt like a therapy session sans therapist.  I’d replay every missed opportunity, every interpersonal challenge, and then I’d cry.  I knew that, despite what I’d been led to believe, the stark reality of the situation was that I couldn’t support all of my students.  Part of teaching would always be about failure: failure to connect, failure to notice, failure to address the nuanced and specific needs of every one of those students. It was a numbers game that I would always lose and that was a truth I had to embrace in order to become a more effective educator.

Nevertheless, the archetype of the teacher-martyr who toils late into the night, sacrificing her personal life in order to focus solely on her students, is one we’ve bought into as a culture.  The story we tell is that teachers are superhuman, capable of reversing any tide, remedying any hurt, and counteracting the problems of our society by sheer focus, persistence, and care. If I just devote myself more, put in longer hours, and implement a better curriculum, I’ll ultimately save them all.  Being this martyr is a badge of honor in the school itself, a symbol of who is doing the best work.  I can’t help but wonder, though: Isn’t martyring oneself by taking a bullet for our students the ultimate expression of this archetype? Isn’t this what is, post-Parkland, now being demanded of us?

This uniquely American myth of the teacher who provides salvation for each student is the one we’ve now ascribed to the teachers at Parkland who threw their bodies in front of bullets to save their students’ lives. And while I’m awed by their bravery, I’m still willing to question the motivations behind those, including the president of the United States, holding them up as icons.

Perhaps valorizing teachers as heroes is simply another way of continually refusing to honor and respect the profession in the ways that actually matter. Heroes don’t need smaller class sizes, benefits or adequate retirement accounts. The truth is, those teachers should never have had to put their lives on the line for their students. It wasn’t their job. We are not warriors, we are teachers. We are not heroes, we are teachers.

When Dreams Fail

My last year of classroom teaching has been the most demanding. Not only because of the subjects I teach, my class sizes, or workload, but because of the mounting stress I feel from my students. Our children are the canaries in our American coal mine (an image that has new meaning in the Trump era). When I ask them about their mental health, I’m always overwhelmed by how many of them admit to depression and anxiety. They’re constantly exhausted and stressed out.  So many of them express a simmering despair about their future. And how can I argue with that?  When you’re huddled in the corner of a dark classroom, practicing for your own death, it’s difficult to feel as if there’s any hope for a decent future.

I’m no longer naïvely dreaming of changing the lives of each of my students. My goals have narrowed: to get the kids to invest in learning, to be an advocate for them, to listen to them, to create a relevant curriculum, to turn the classroom into a vital and thriving place.  In any given semester, I make it a priority to quickly learn the names of my more than two hundred students, to check in with them as frequently as I can and attempt to attend to each of their unique and complex individual needs.

I try to put whatever extra energy and attention I have into working with my more marginalized students, knowing that, as a white, middle-class woman, they likely will see me as an agent of a system that reinforces preexisting layers of alienation.  However, I no longer feel as if I can save any of them.  I don’t even feel that that’s my job.  My job is to provide a space for inquiry and expression.

If I do that job well, I’ll at least assist my students in finding their own voices. But believe me, it’s a Sisyphean task.  They’re teenagers after all.  Their emotional landscapes change minute by minute, day by day. They walk into my classroom with 15 to 18 years of lived experience, products of their family dynamics and their community. The hours I spend with them, no matter how impactful, cannot out-compete those actualities. Some of them will feel seen and heard in my classroom, and some of them, no matter what I do, will feel invisible, unseen, and lost.

Pulling the Trigger

School is the place where adolescents experiment with the lofty promises of the American Dream.  We teachers deliver the message that you can be anything, do anything.  Study hard enough and you’ll make something of yourself in your life, no matter the challenges along the way.  Make friends, get yourself a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and you’ll climb that social ladder.  Find your path and your talent and the world will be yours for the taking.

As educators we know that there’s no one more passionate and engaged than a teenager doing what she or he loves.  Tap into that intensity and myopic focus and you have the potential for genuine pedagogical alchemy.  But what if all the promises that we (and so many others) implicitly or explicitly make prove remarkably out of reach and those same students are increasingly aware of that?  What if you’re a student of color or an undocumented student and the American Dream was never promised to you in the first place?  What if you don’t make friends easily? What if the emotional stresses you carry with you are too heavy and all school represents is a relentless reminder of them?  What if, like the society it’s part of, school becomes a place for failure, not possibility?

If teenagers excel at one thing, it’s sniffing out hypocrisy. Kids can see through the veneers of so many promises. And the kids any teacher now sees are likely to be wondering:  What’s really there for them in this world we’ve built?  What hurts have gone unnoticed, unattended?

Is it any wonder that the most disgruntled among them, those who feel most betrayed by the broken promise of that Dream, return to the place they feel failed them the most, the institution society promised would provide them with salvation and so obviously didn’t?  They bring with them their failed social and familial relationships, their realization that the Dream was never for them in the first place, and — in a rising number of cases — AR-15s or other deadly weaponry. They cash that voided check by pulling the trigger, decimating that illusion, and possibly ending the lives of students and teachers while they’re at it.

Shooting that gun is the last act of personal agency these boys — and so far they are boys — have to offer.  That myopia and total focus, which leads to death in our schools, reflects the despair and nihilism seen in many of these shooters.  It’s something that, at least at a lesser level, should be familiar to any classroom teacher these days. Think of the nameless, faceless frustration and despair that drives a child to pick up weapons of war and wantonly kill as the failure of the American Dream played out in blood.

Dear America: You’ve given me an impossible task and condemned me for my failure to perform it. Now, you — or at least the president, the NRA, and various politicians — assure me that I can redeem myself by holding a gun, firing back, and so blasting away the despair.  No, thank you: I do not want to hold that gun and cannot be that shield.  Neither figuratively nor physically can I save my students.

What we are asking of our children, our teachers, and our schools is unlike anything we ask of any individuals or any institution.  We are martyring our children on the altar of society’s failed promises and then we wonder why they keep coming back with guns in their hands.

Belle Chesler is a visual arts teacher in Beaverton, Oregon.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.