Chris Hedges's Blog, page 130

Joe Biden Has Corporate Democrats in Panic Mode

The Democratic Party’s most powerful donors are running out of options in the presidential race. Their warhorse Joe Biden is stumbling, while the other corporate-minded candidates lag far behind. For party elites, with less than four months to go before voting starts in caucuses and primaries, 2020 looks like Biden or bust.

A key problem for the Democratic establishment is that the “electability” argument is vaporizing in the political heat. Biden’s shaky performances on the campaign trail during the last few months have undermined the notion that he’s the best bet to defeat Donald Trump. The latest polling matchups say that Biden and his two strong rivals for the nomination, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, would each hypothetically beat Trump by around 10 points.

As such realities sink in, the focus is turning to where the party’s entrenched power brokers don’t want it to go — the actual merits of the candidates in terms of political history, independence from big-money special interests, and longtime commitment to positions now favored by most Democrats.

With the electability claim diminished, Biden faces a steep climb on the merits of his record and current policy stances. The looming crisis for the Biden forces is reflected in the fact that his top campaign operatives have already publicly conceded he could lose the first two nomination contests, the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

And in an era when small donations from the grassroots are adding up to big financial hauls, Biden is so uninspiring that he’s losing the money race by a wide margin. Despite his relentless harvesting of big checks from hedge-fund managers, rich CEOs and the like, Biden’s campaign raised a total of only about $15 million in the last quarter, compared to around $25 million that Sanders and Warren each received. The New York Times noted that the duo’s fundraising totals are markers for “the collective enthusiasm in the party for progressive candidates pushing messages of sweeping change.”

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Joe Biden Unmasked



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Joe Biden Is Who We Thought He Was



by Jacob Sugarman

But Biden continues to greatly benefit from the orientations of corporate media outlets that loudly echo the concerns of corporate Democrats (often called “moderates” or “centrists”) and their kindred spirits in realms like Wall Street. Rarely inclined to dispel the longstanding myth of “Lunch Bucket Joe,” reporting has been sparse on his legislative legacy in service to such industries as credit-card companies, banks and the healthcare business.

Media affection for Biden is matched by the biases of corporate media that — for many years — have routinely spun coverage of Sanders in negative ways, amplifying the messages from people at the helm of huge corporations. Recent months have seen no letup of anti-Bernie salvos, with Sanders as a kind of “heat shield” for Warren, catching the vast majority of the left-baiting attacks that would otherwise be aimed at her. Yet, as Warren’s campaign gains momentum, she is becoming more of a prime target for wealthy sectors and their media echo chambers.

A CNBC article summarized on-air comments from network star Jim Cramer: “The financial community is really worried about the possibility of Sen. Elizabeth Warren becoming president.” A theme among corporate executives, he said, is that “she’s got to be stopped.”

Such rumblings have grown louder since that broadcast five weeks ago, as Warren has surged into virtual ties with Biden in national polls. In late September, CNBC reported: “Democratic donors on Wall Street and in big business are preparing to sit out the presidential campaign fundraising cycle — or even back President Donald Trump — if Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the party’s nomination.”

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders (who I actively support) is even more antithetical to the economic powers that be. He directly advocates for an end to the biz-as-usual that has propelled the rapacious rise of corporate power and widening economic inequality.

Sanders underscored that advocacy in an ABC interview that aired on Sunday: “What we need is, in fact — I don’t want to get people too nervous — we need a political revolution. I am, I believe, the only candidate who’s going to say to the ruling class of this country, the corporate elite: ‘Enough, enough with your greed and with your corruption. We need real change in this country.’”

And Sanders made explicit why — at the same time that Warren is loathed on Wall Street — he is even more feared and despised by champions of predatory capital. “Elizabeth considers herself — if I got the quote correctly — to be a capitalist to her bones,” he said. “I don’t. And the reason I am not is because I will not tolerate for one second the kind of greed and corruption and income and wealth inequality and so much suffering that is going on in this country today, which is unnecessary.”

Days ago, the Bernie 2020 campaign began wide distribution of a sticker that boldly says, “Billionaires Should Not Exist.” That kind of genuine progressive politics is an existential threat to the extremely wealthy, whose riches amid vast income inequality keep killing a lot of people.

Biden, speaking at the Brookings Institution in May 2018, was transparent about why corporate Democrats remain so enamored with him. “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders,” he said. “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble. . . The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

No wonder Dianne Feinstein — snubbing fellow California senator Kamala Harris — recently hosted a high-profile fundraiser for Biden and last week formally endorsed him as “a tireless fighter for hardworking American families.” Feinstein’s net worth is close to $100 million, and her investment-banker husband Richard Blum is a billionaire.

At this point, the shaky Biden for President campaign appears to be the only realistic hope for those who want a defender of corporate greed at the top of the Democratic ticket next year. While progressives who understand Biden’s actual record are determined to prevent him from becoming the presidential nominee, “the folks at the top” are doubling down on their best chance to win the nomination for someone who says they “aren’t bad guys.”

Ralph Nader: Trump’s High Crimes Go Way Beyond Ukraine

It is time for the House of Representatives to announce comprehensive articles of impeachment against the chronic outlaw and violator of the public trust—President Donald J. Trump who won the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote.

Six House Committees have been investigating and assembling for months the necessary evidence. Mr. Trump himself has taunted the House to impeach him. He has openly and brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas for documents and blocked subpoenaed witnesses from testifying. This obstruction of Congress is an ongoing impeachable offense—a grave one in the opinions of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the other framers of our Constitution, who knew the importance of critical separation of powers.

These committees are documenting his massive obstruction of justice, otherwise known as blocking law enforcement and the rule of law through intimidation, firings, and other forms of political coercion. They are filling in the details of the ten categories of obstruction described in the Mueller Report. They are cataloguing all the ways Trump is using his office to enrich his businesses—openly promoting his hotels before foreign governments and their agents.

Committee investigators are peeling off layer after layer of Trump’s demanding from Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine to investigate a possible opponent to his re-election—Joe Biden and his son, having suspended nearly $400 million in U.S. aid to Ukraine to pressure Mr. Zelensky.

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The Mass Media Is Poisoning Us With Hate



by Chris Hedges

















The Mainstream Media Can't Resist a Centrist Democrat



by

















The Deadly Mistake Corporate Media Keep Repeating



by

The “abuse of the public trust,” in Alexander Hamilton’s phrase is overflowing. Over ten thousand Trump lies mean cover-ups, secrecy in government, deceiving innocent citizens about the air, food, water, and workplace danger, megalomania, about drug prices and health insurance for all. Lies matter; they tell us something about the president’s mental instability, his detachment from reality, and the willingness of a large minority of the people to believe the fibs—even when they are about their own crucial livelihoods, health, and safety.

Being a serial sexual predator and earlier bragging about how he accosted women are a brutish model for youngsters.  Legislators like Senator Al Franken lost his position for doing one percent of Donald’s criminal and tortious acts. What would Hamilton also think of the commander in chief saying that if he is impeached, there might be a civil war? Incitation to mass violence for his political survival is not a minor matter.

Then there are the lawless uses of armed force abroad anywhere Trump wants, regardless of the absence of congressional appropriations or declarations of war. Dragnet enforcement without judicial warrants are a federal crime. The same for threatening registered federal whistleblowers.

The House of Representatives already has enough evidence of Trump spending money for purposes not authorized by Congress, such as shifting $3.5 billion from Pentagon schools and other services to building his porous wall. If he reads the Constitution, the “power of the purse” was exclusively given to Congress.

That previous presidents have done some of the latter offenses does not exonerate Trump’s violations. The Congress has to draw the line and stop the ever-faster drift under both parties toward executive tyranny in the White House.

The polls are moving over 50 percent in favor of impeachment. Other people wish Congress would focus on kitchen-table issues. They need to know that Trump’s impeachable offenses include wholesale taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat. He is making your air, water, food, and workplaces more hazardous by removing or weakening health and safety standards that save lives and diminish sicknesses. He’s allowing more greenhouse gases to be emitted, worsening the climate disruptions which he says is a “Chinese hoax.”

The Ukraine shakedown is important, but not sufficient to let people realize all the other things Trump is doing to them, their families, their Constitution, and their democracy.

Law enforcement to protect your family budget has reached a record low. The loan sharks, credit, insurance, and banking industries know that. Fines imposed on wrongdoers by Trump’s agencies have dropped precipitously (see Public Citizen’s report, “Corporate Impunity“). With Trump, you’re paying higher taxes as the wealthy classes get off and savor their large Trumpian tax escapes.

The foregoing is to urge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to deliver a full hand of serious impeachable offenses to the Congress and the American people. The Ukraine shakedown is important, but not sufficient to let people realize all the other things Trump is doing to them, their families, their Constitution, and their democracy.

The full, despicable portrait of Donald J. Trump must be revealed to provide the maximum possible public understanding. For over two and a half years, too many of his absurd tweets and assertions have gone without official rebuttals. His tactic is to dominate the news cycle every day as if his presidency is a reality show and he is the star.

The mass media is starting to wise up about being used and abused by Trump’s fulminations and incitements. It is time for the mass media, and its broadening coverage of the forthcoming, nationally televised House impeachment proceedings, to prove it too can expose Trump’s assault on both our Constitution’s law of the land and the citizenry.

Sanders Distinguishes Himself From Warren in No Uncertain Terms

White House hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders distinguished himself from Sen. Elizabeth Warren—another top competitor in the Democratic presidential primary—by highlighting their different beliefs on economic policy during an interview with ABC News chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl that aired Sunday.

After ABC‘s Karl suggested that Sanders (I-Vt.) and Warren (D-Mass.) have “pretty close to identical positions” on major issues, Sanders said that “Elizabeth Warren has been a friend of mine for some 25 years and I think she is a very, very good senator, but there are differences between Elizabeth and myself. Elizabeth, I think, as you know, has said that she is a capitalist [to] her bones. I’m not.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders tells @jonkarl that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a “very, very good senator,” but “there are differences between Elizabeth and myself.”

“Elizabeth, I think, as you know, has said that she is a capitalist through her bones. I’m not.” https://t.co/lAIleh47pV pic.twitter.com/pABeEeIKsa

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 13, 2019

Sanders, a democratic socialist, went on to detail his concerns about “the situation today that we face in this country.” Specifically, he called out major pharmaceutical companies for price fixing as well as the fossil fuel industry for profiting off of “destroying the planet.” The senator, a champion of Medicare for All, also pointed out that the United States fails to guarantee healthcare to all people in the country, unlike other developed nations.

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Bernie Sanders Is America's Beating Heart



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In 2020, Wall Street Wants Anyone but Sanders or Warren



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Bernie Sanders: There Should Be No Billionaires



by Ilana Novick

“I think business as usual and doing it the old-fashioned way is not good enough,” Sanders said. “What we need is, in fact—I don’t want to get people too nervous—we need a political revolution. I am, I believe, the only candidate who’s going to say to the ruling class of this country, the corporate elite: Enough, enough with your greed and with your corruption. We need real change in this country.”

Reiterating a key distinction between him and Warren on economic grounds, he said that “Elizabeth considers herself—if I got the quote correctly—to be a capitalist to her bones. I don’t. And the reason I am not is because I will not tolerate for one second the kind of greed and corruption and income and wealth inequality and so much suffering that is going on in this country today, which is unnecessary.”

Warren’s quote which Sanders repeatedly referenced is from a July 2018 event hosted by the New England Council. The Massachusetts Democrat was quoted as saying, “I am a capitalist to my bones.” During an interview about a week later, CNBC editor at large John Harwood asked Warren, “You don’t think capitalists are bad people?”

“I am a capitalist. Come on. I believe in markets,” Warren responded. “What I don’t believe in is theft, what I don’t believe in is cheating. That’s where the difference is. I love what markets can do, I love what functioning economies can do. They are what make us rich, they are what create opportunity. But only fair markets, markets with rules. Markets without rules is about the rich take it all, it’s about the powerful get all of it. And that’s what’s gone wrong in America.”

Sanders is currently third in national polls for the crowded 2020 primary race, behind Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden, who is back in the top spot after Warren briefly took the lead earlier this week, according to RealClearPolitics.

Reporters and political observers noted that Sanders’ comments during the ABC interview were “the biggest contrast” he has made with Warren in the race so far.

This is the biggest contrast Bernie Sanders has made with Elizabeth Warren to date: “I am … the only candidate who’s going to say to the ruling class,” and, “Elizabeth, I think, as you know, has said that she is a capitalist through her bones. I’m not.” https://t.co/KeDYlPAaHG

— Holly Otterbein (@hollyotterbein) October 12, 2019

The interview comes as Sanders has temporarily suspended campaign events to recover from a minor heart attack, which he also addressed Sunday.

“‘Heart attack’ is a scary word,” he told Karl. “What I had is a 45 to 50 minute procedure, two stents were placed in my heart, because I had a blocked artery. This is a procedure, as I understand it, done many, many hundreds of thousands of times a year. It’s a fairly common procedure, and people are back on their feet pretty soon, as is the case with me.”

NEW: “I’m feeling very well. I look forward to the debate. I look forward to getting back to a very vigorous campaign,” Sen. Bernie Sanders tells @jonkarl, adding that the campaign will release all of his medical records “as soon as we can” https://t.co/lAIleh47pV pic.twitter.com/EyxBuh2Rxe

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 13, 2019

Sanders’ campaign has said that he will participate in the upcoming Democratic primary debate co-hosted by CNN and The New York Times at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, which will air at 8 pm Tuesday. The campaign announced Saturday that Sanders will host a public “Bernie’s Back” rally at Queensbridge Park in New York City on the afternoon of Oct. 19.

Amid an emerging corporate media narrative that the heart attack dealt a devastating blow to Sanders’ chances of winning the White House, Common Dreams reported Thursday that “prominent campaign surrogates, advisers, and supporters in recent days have forcefully pushed back against that notion and argued Sanders—with his grassroots army as enthusiastic and motivated as ever—is well-positioned to compete for and ultimately win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.”

As RoseAnn DeMoro, former executive director of National Nurses United and prominent Sanders backer, told The Associated Press, “Heaven help the opposition.”

Britain Isn’t the Only Empire Headed for the Dustbin of History

Donald Trump may prove to be the ultimate Brexiteer. Back in August 2016, in the midst of his presidential campaign, he proudly tweeted, “They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!” On the subject of the British leaving the European Union (EU) he’s neither faltered nor wavered. That June, he was already cheering on British voters, 51.9% of whom had just opted for Brexit in a nationwide referendum. They had, he insisted, taken “their country back” and he predicted that other countries, including you-know-where, would act similarly. As it happened, Mr. “America First” was proven anything but wrong in November 2016.

Ever since, he’s been remarkably eager to insert himself in Britain’s Brexit debate. Last July, for instance, he paid an official visit to that country and had tea with the queen (“an incredible lady… I feel I know her so well and she certainly knows me very well right now”). As Politico put it at the time, “In just a matter of a few hours, he snubbed the leader of the opposition — who wants a close relationship with the EU after Brexit and if he can’t get it, advocates a second referendum on the options — in favor of meeting with two avid Brexiteers and chatting with a third.” Oh, and that third person just happened to be the man who would become the present prime minister, Brexiteer-to-hell Boris Johnson.

Since then, of course, he’s praised Johnson’s stance — get out now, no deal — to the heavens, repeatedly promising to sign a “very big” trade agreement or “lots of fantastic mini-deals” with the Brits once they dump the European Union. (And if you believe there will be no strings attached to that generous offer, you haven’t been paying attention to the presidency of one Donald J. Trump.) In Britain itself, sentiment about Brexiting the EU remains deeply confused, or perhaps more accurately disturbed, and little wonder. It’s clear enough that, from the economy to medical supplies, cross-Channel traffic snarl-ups to the Irish border, a no-deal Brexit is likely to prove problematic in barely grasped ways, as well as a blow to living standards. Still, there can be little question that the leaving option has been disturbing at a level that goes far deeper than just fear of the immediate consequences.

Remember, we’re talking about the greatest power of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, the country that launched the industrial revolution, whose navy once ruled the waves, and that had more colonies and military garrisons in more places more permanently than any country in history. Now, it’s about to fall into what will someday be seen as the subbasement of imperial history. Think of Johnson’s version of Brexiting as a way of saying goodbye to all that with a genuine flourish. Brexit won’t just be an exit from the European Union but, for all intents and purposes, from history itself. It will mark the end of a century-long fall that will turn Britain back into a relatively inconsequential island kingdom.

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Exiting the American Century

By now, you might think that all of this is a lesson written in the clouds for anyone, including Donald Trump, to see. Not that he will. After all, though no one thinks of him this way, he really is our own American Brexiteer. In some inchoate and (if I can use such a word for such a man) groping fashion, he, too, wants us out; not, of course, from the European Union, though he’s no fan of either the EU or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but from the whole global system of alliances and trade arrangements that Washington has forged since 1945 to ensure the success of the “American Century” — to cement, that is, its global position as the next Great Britain.

Not so long ago, when it came to Washington’s system of global power, the U.S. was the sun for orbiting allies in alliances like NATO, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, and the Organization of American States. Meanwhile, the U.S. military had scattered an unprecedented number of military garrisons across much of the planet. In the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States briefly seemed to be not just the next but potentially the last Great Britain. Its leaders came to believe that this country had been left in a position of unique dominance on Planet Earth at “the end of history” and perhaps until the end of time. In the years after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, it came to be known as “the sole superpower” or, in the phrase of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “the indispensable nation.” It briefly seemed to find itself in a position no country, not even the Roman or British empires, had ever been in.

Now, in his own half-baked, half-assed fashion, Donald Trump is promoting another kind of first: his unique version of “America First.” Two New York Times reporters, David Sanger and Maggie Haberman, evidently reminded him of that isolationist phrase from the pre-World War II era in an interview in March 2016 during his election run. They described the exchange this way: “He agreed with a suggestion [of ours] that his ideas might be summed up as ‘America First.’”

“Not isolationist, but I am America First,” he said. “I like the expression.” So much so that, from then on, he would use it endlessly in his presidential campaign.

Donald Trump has, of course, been something of a collector of, or perhaps sponge for, the useful past slogans of others (as well as the present ones of his right-wing followers in the Twittersphere). As any red baseball cap should remind us, the phrase that helped loft him to the presidency was, of course, “Make America Great Again,” or MAGA, a version of an old line from Ronald Reagan’s winning election campaign of 1980. He had the foresight to try to trademark it only days after Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency to Barack Obama in November 2012.

Both phrases would appeal deeply to what became known as his “base” — a significant crew in the heartland, particularly in rural America, who felt as if (in a country growing ever more economically unequal) the American dream was over. Their futures and those of their children no longer seemed to be heading up but down toward the subbasement of economic subservience. Their unions had been broken, their jobs shipped elsewhere, their hopes and those for their kids left in the gutter. In a country whose leadership class still had soaring dreams of global domination and wealth beyond compare, whose politicians (Republican and Democratic alike) felt obliged to speak of American greatness, they were — and Donald Trump sensed it — the first American declinists.

At the time, however, few focused on the key word in that slogan of his, the final one: again. As I wrote back in April 2016, with that single word, candidate Trump reached out to them, however intuitively, and crossed a line that would feel familiar today to someone like Boris Johnson in a British context. With it, he had, to put it bluntly, begun to exit the American century. He had become, as I commented then, “the first American leader or potential leader of recent times not to feel the need or obligation to insist that the United States, the ‘sole’ superpower of Planet Earth, is an ‘exceptional’ nation, an ‘indispensable’ country, or even in an unqualified sense a ‘great’ one.” He had, in short, become America’s first declinist presidential candidate, striking a new chord here, just as the Brexiteers would do in England.

As I also wrote then, “Donald Trump, in other words, is the first person to run openly and without apology on a platform of American decline.” This country, he made clear, was no longer “great.” In doing so (and in speaking out, after a fashion, against America’s forever wars of this century), he grasped, in his own strange way, the inheritance that the post-Cold War Washington establishment had left both him and the rest of the country.

After all, if Donald Trump hadn’t noticed that something was truly wrong, someone would have. As the planet’s sole superpower with a military budget that left every other nation (even bevies of them) in the shade, the U.S. had, since 2001, invaded two countries, repeatedly bombed many more, and fought conflicts that spread across much of the Greater Middle East and Africa. Those wars, when launched in 2001 (Afghanistan) and 2003 (Iraq), were visibly meant both to demonstrate and ensure American dominion over much of the planet. Fifteen years later, as Donald Trump alone seemed to grasp, they had done the very opposite.

Mr. Brexit!

By the time The Donald took to the campaign trail, the U.S. had not had a single true victory in this century. Not even in Afghanistan where it all began. In the years before he entered the Oval Office, the world’s only truly “exceptional” power had mainly proven exceptionally incapable (in ways that weren’t true in the Cold War years) of making its desires and will felt anywhere, except as a force for ultimate disruption and displacement.

Globally speaking, despite all its alliances, its unparalleled military power, and its loneliness at the top — Russia remained a nuclear-armed but fragile petro-state and China was visibly rising but not yet “super” — it looked distinctly like a great power in the early stages of decline. As not just Donald Trump’s but Bernie Sanders’s campaign suggested in 2016, there was clearly a kind of decline underway at home as well, a process of hollowing out that extended from the economy to the courts to the political system.

It was no mistake that, in January 2017, in a new age of plutocracy and degradation, a billionaire entered the White House — or that his first major domestic act (with a Republican Congress) would be a tax cut that only gave yet more to the already extraordinarily wealthy. Nor would it be strange that, for the first time, the 400 wealthiest Americans would actually have a lower tax rate than any other income group.

Though The Donald did insist that he would make this country great again, his presidency has proven a distinctly declinist one. However instinctively, however chaotically, however impulsively, he has, after all, been hard at work cracking open the American imperial system as it once existed and directing the country into a future ripe for candidates with yet redder hats and slogans.

If Boris Johnson is plugging for a Britain Last moment, Donald Trump, despite his bravado and braggadocio, has been treading a similar path for the greatest power on the planet. In his trade wars, he’s been intent on cracking open the American global economic system, whether in relation to the EU, China, or allies like Japan and South Korea. In his relations with such allies, he’s been hard at work undermining the alliances that once ensured American power and influence, even as he cozies up to autocrats and plutocrats the world over.

Of course, in October 2019, its forever wars and new trade wars notwithstanding, the United States remains the strongest military power on the planet, not to speak of the wealthiest one around. So no matter what President Trump may do, we’re not about to join Great Britain in that imperial subbasement any time soon. Still, as the Trump years should already have made clear, we are in at least the early stages of an American Brexit, globally and domestically.

When the Trumpian era ends, whether in 2020, 2024, or at some other unpredictable moment, count on this: the American global system will have been cracked open, the domestic political and judicial systems undermined further, and this country made even more unequal in a gilded age beyond compare, as well as split at least in two (“civil war”!) in terms of popular sentiment.

There is, however, a difference between a British and an American Brexit. While a British one could harm the European Union (and even perhaps the American economy), its effects (except on England itself) should be relatively modest. On our overheating orb, however, an American Brexit could take the planet down with it. We are, after all, on a world in decline.

Think of Donald Trump as the president of that decline or, if you prefer, as Mr. Brexit!

Graphically Violent Parody Video Shown at Trump Resort

WASHINGTON — A graphically violent parody video, shown at a meeting of President Donald Trump’s supporters at his Miami resort, depicted a likeness of the president shooting and stabbing his opponents and members of the news media in a church, The New York Times reported Sunday.

In the video, Trump’s critics and media members are portrayed as parishioners fleeing his gruesome rampage. The fake Trump strikes the late Sen. John McCain in the neck, hits and stabs TV personality Rosie O’Donnell in the face, lights Sen. Bernie Sanders’ head on fire and shoots or otherwise assaults people whose faces are replaced with news organization logos.

The video was shown last week at an American Priority conference at Trump’s Doral Miami resort, the newspaper said. Trump was not there. Event organizer Alex Phillips told the Times the video was played as part of a “meme exhibit” and was not associated with or endorsed by the conference “in any official capacity.” ″American Priority rejects all political violence,” he said, and is looking into the matter.

The video includes the logo for Trump’s 2020 campaign but Tim Murtaugh, spokesman for the re-election organization, told the Times the “video was not produced by the campaign, and we do not condone violence.”

The setting for the massacre is the “Church of Fake News,” capturing Trump’s familiar refrain about news stories and organizations that he considers to be fake news.

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The American Villain Who Gave Us Donald Trump



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In the video, Trump’s face is superimposed on a killer’s body as he shoots people in the face and otherwise assaults them. Among the targets: former President Barack Obama, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Rep. Adam Schiff, who as Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is leading the impeachment inquiry of Trump.

Late Sunday, the White House Correspondents Association issued a statement saying it was “horrified” by the video.

“All Americans should condemn this depiction of violence directed toward journalists and the President’s political opponents,” said Jonathan Karl, WHCA president. “We have previously told the President his rhetoric could incite violence. Now we call on him and everybody associated with this conference to denounce this video and affirm that violence has no place in our society.”

CNN, The Washington Post, BBC, PBS, NBC and Politico are among the news organizations depicted as victims of the fake Trump’s violent fury.

The White House declined immediate comment.

The Age of Radical Evil

Chris Hedges, an ordained Presbyterian minister, gave this sermon Sunday at the Claremont Presbyterian Church in Claremont, Calif.

Immanuel Kant coined the term “radical evil.” It was the privileging of one’s own interest over that of others, effectively reducing those around you to objects to be manipulated and used for your own ends. But Hannah Arendt, who also used the term “radical evil,” saw that it was worse than merely treating others as objects. Radical evil, she wrote, rendered vast numbers of people superfluous. They possessed no value at all. They were, once they could not be utilized by the powerful, discarded as human refuse.

We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction. They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms. They are orchestrating the growing social inequity, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs. They are destroying our democratic institutions, turning elected office into a system of legalized bribery, stacking our courts with judges who invert constitutional rights so that unlimited corporate money invested in political campaigns is disguised as the right to petition the government or a form of free speech. Their seizure of power has vomited up demagogues and con artists including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, each the distortion of a failed democracy. They are turning America’s poor communities into internal militarized colonies where police carry out lethal campaigns of terror and use the blunt instrument of mass incarceration as a tool of social control. They are waging endless wars in the Middle East and diverting half of all discretionary spending to a bloated military. They are placing the rights of the corporation above the rights of the citizen.

Arendt captured the radical evil of a corporate capitalism in which people are rendered superfluous—surplus labor as Karl Marx said—and pushed to the margins of society where they and their children are no longer considered to have value, value always determined by the amount of money produced and amassed. But as the Gospel of Luke reminds us, “what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.”

Who are those who would sacrifice us on the altar of global capitalism? How did they amass the power to deny us a voice, to insist that the earth is an inert commodity they have a right to exploit until the ecosystem that sustains life collapses and the human species, along with most other species, becomes extinct?

These architects of radical evil have been here from the beginning. They are the slaveholders who crammed men, women and children into the holds of ships and sold them in auctions in Charleston and Montgomery, rending families apart, taking from them their names, language, religion and culture. They wielded the whips, the chains, the dogs and the slave patrols. They orchestrated the holocaust of slavery, and when slavery was abolished, after a war that left 700,000 dead, they used convict leasing—slavery by another name—along with lynching and black codes, to carry out a reign of terror that continues today in our deindustrialized cities and our prisons. Black and brown bodies are worth nothing to our corporate masters when on the streets of our decayed cities, but locked in cages they each generate 50 or 60 thousand dollars a year. Some people say the system does not work. They are wrong. The system works exactly as it is designed to work.

These architects of radical evil are the white militias and Army units that stole the land, decimated the herds of buffalo, signed the treaties that were promptly violated and carried out a campaign of genocide against indigenous people, penning the few who remained in prisoner of war camps. They are the gun thugs, Baldwin-Felts and Pinkerton agents who gunned down, by the hundreds, American workers struggling to organize, forces of the kind that today oversee the bonded labor of workers in China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. They are the oligarchs, J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie, who paid for these rivers of blood, and who today, like Tim Cook at Apple and Jeff Bezos at Amazon, amass staggering fortunes from human misery.

We know these architects of radical evil. They are the DNA of American capitalism. You can find them on the commodity desks at Goldman Sachs. The financial firm’s commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. These traders buy up futures of rice, wheat, corn, sugar and livestock and jack up the commodity prices by as much as 200% on the global market so that the poor in Asia, Africa and Latin America can no longer afford basic staples, and starve. Hundreds of millions of people go hungry to feed this mania for profit, this radical evil that sees human beings, including children, as worth nothing.

These architects of radical evil extract the coal, oil and gas, poisoning our air, soil and water, while demanding huge taxpayer subsidies and blocking the urgent transition to renewable energy. They are the massive corporations that own the factory farms, egg hatcheries and dairy farms where tens of billions of animals endure horrendous abuse before being needlessly slaughtered, part of an animal agriculture industry that is one of the leading multifactorial causes of climate catastrophe. They are the generals and arms manufacturers. They are the bankers, hedge fund managers and global speculators who looted $7 trillion from the U.S. treasury after the pyramid schemes and fraud they carried out imploded the global economy in 2007-2008. They are the goons in state security who make us the most spied-upon, watched, monitored and photographed population in human history. When your government watches you 24 hours a day you cannot use the word “liberty.” This is the relationship between a master and a slave.

Corporate culture serves a faceless system. It is, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership.” It will stop at nothing. Anyone or any movement that attempts to impede their profits will be targeted for obliteration. These architects of radical evil are incapable of reform. Appealing to their better nature is a waste of time. They don’t have one. They have rigged the system, elections dominated by corporate money, the courts, the press a vast burlesque show for profit, which is why they spend so much time focused on Trump. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or Exxon, Shell, BP and Chevron, which along with the other top 20 fossil fuel corporations have contributed 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane emissions worldwide—480 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent since 1965.

We know these architects of radical evil. They have been and always will be with us.

But who are those who resist? Where do they come from? What historical, social and cultural forces created them?

They too are familiar. They are Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, John Brown, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. They are Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Chief Joseph. They are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Emma Goldman. They are “Big Bill” Haywood, Joe Hill and Eugene V. Debs. They are Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer. They are Andrea Dworkin and Caesar Chavez. They are those who from the beginning fought back, often to be defeated by this radical evil but knowing they were called to defy it, even at the cost of their own reputations, financial security, social standing and sometimes their lives.

The architects of radical evil are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because lives that do not swell their profits are considered superfluous. Let the sick die. Let many of the poor—41 million people, including children—go to bed hungry. Let families be tossed into the streets. Let the young graduate have no meaningful employment. Let the U.S. prison system, with 25% of the world’s prison population, swell. Let torture continue. Let assault rifles proliferate to fuel the epidemic of mass shootings. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures, the freak weather patterns, the monster cyclones and hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the wildfires, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems and the polluted air worsen until the species dies.

Many in the church are complicit in this radical evil, failing to name it and denounce it, just as we failed to see in the thousands of men, women and children who were lynched the very crucifixion itself, as James Cone pointed out. And this complicity and silence condemns us. It is why W.E.B. Du Bois called “white religion” a “miserable failure.”

“Black people did not need to go to seminary and study theology to know that white Christianity was fraudulent,” Cone wrote in “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” “As a teenager in the South where whites treated blacks with contempt, I and other blacks knew that the Christian identity of whites was not a true expression of what it means to follow Jesus. Nothing their theologians and preachers could say would convince us otherwise. We wondered how whites could live with their hypocrisy—such blatant contradiction of the man from Nazareth. (I am still wondering about that!) White conservative Christianity’s blatant endorsement of lynching as a part of its religion, and white liberal Christians’ silence about lynching placed both outside of Christian identity. I could not find one sermon or theological essay, not to mention a book, opposing lynching by a prominent liberal white preacher. There was no way a community could support or ignore lynching in America, while still representing in word and deed the one who was lynched by Rome.”

We have failed to denounce the Christian fascists who peddle a magic Jesus who will make us rich, a Jesus who blesses America above other countries and the white race above other races, a Jesus who turns the barbarity of war into a holy crusade, for the heretics they are. And we have failed, as well, to confront the radical evil of corporate capitalism. Let us not once again render our faith a miserable failure.

Defying evil cannot be rationally defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It refuses to place a monetary value on human life or the natural world. It refuses to see anyone as superfluous. It acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why, as Arendt points out, the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t do this.”

Those who come out of a religious tradition, any religious tradition, have a responsibility to fight this latest iteration of radical evil, which is swiftly ensuring that our species and many other species will not have a future on this earth. It is our religious duty to place our bodies in front of the machine, as many of us did in the protests organized by Extinction Rebellion last week around the globe.

“The law, as presently revered and taught and enforced, is becoming an enticement to lawlessness,” Dan Berrigan wrote. “Lawyers and laws and courts and penal systems are nearly immobile before a shaken society, which is making civil disobedience a civil (I dare say a religious) duty. The law is aligning itself more and more with forms of power whose existence is placed more and more in question. … So, if they would obey the law, [people] are being forced, in the present crucial instance, either to disobey God or to disobey the law of humanity.”

Let us not in this present historical period replicate our sins of the past. Let us affirm our faith by affirming our defiance, our willingness to engage in the acts of sustained civil disobedience against the forces of radical evil. Let future generations say of us that we tried, that we were not complicit through our collaboration or our silence. There will be a cost. History shows us that. All moral battles have a cost, and if there is not a cost then the battle is not moral. Accept becoming an outcast. Jesus, after all, was an outcast. We are called by God to defy radical evil. This defiance is the highest form of spirituality.

The U.S. Could Be Forcing the Kurds Into Assad’s Arms

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

A CNN exclusive by Barbara Starr and Ryan Browne reveals that Gen. Mazloum Kobani Abdi told the U.S., “I need to know if you are capable of protecting my people, of stopping these bombs falling on us or not. I need to know, because if you’re not, I need to make a deal with Russia and the regime now and invite their planes to protect this region.”

Gen. Abdi told William Roebuck, the deputy special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIL, “You have given up on us. You are leaving us to be slaughtered.”

A close reading of the Russian press, however, shows that a Russian no-fly zone against Turkey in northeast Syria is highly unlikely.

Although U.S. politicians and pundits keep saying that the Turkish invasion benefits Russia, in fact Moscow is clearly very uncomfortable with it. It may end up inadvertently aiding the major Russian ally in Syria, the government of Bashar al-Assad, if it forces the Kurds into Assad’s arms. But Russia hasn’t connived in it, and its benefits to Moscow are uncertain.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin called for all foreign militaries to leave Syria, according to Reuters: “Everyone who is illegitimately on the territory of any state, in this case Syria, must leave this territory. This applies to all states.”

Except we know that Putin was only talking about the United States and Turkey, not about his allies, Iran and Lebanon’s Hizbullah.

BBC Monitoring reports that the state-owned Rossiya 1 and NTV complained about the Turkish invasion placing civilians at risk, and were especially scathing about the Sunni Arab auxiliaries fighting alongside Turkish troops as disregarding civilian security. They did not go so far as criticize Turkey directly.

The Russian position is that the Turkish incursion is a legitimate way to safeguard Turkish security, as long as it doesn’t go too far.

Last week, Michael Jansen noted that Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, admitted that Russia recognizes “Turkey’s right to ensure its security,” but he cautioned Turkey’s government to “refrain from any actions that may create obstacles on the path of a Syrian [political] settlement.”

Russia has never controlled the Kurdish-dominated northeast, concentrating on helping the al-Assad regime reassert itself in the rest of the country. So Moscow does not have a dog in the fight in some ways.

Both networks interviewed war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny, who appears to take a pro-Putin line in his analysis. He says that the Syria Kurds are at least partially responsible for their own predicament. BBC Monitoring translated him as saying, “For the past few years leaders of Kurdish formations have been demonstratively ignoring the interests of Damascus.” He criticized Kurdish hyper-nationalism, saying that the Kurds insist they are fighting for their motherland.

He insisted, “the land is not theirs, but Syria’s.” He did not mention that Syria as far back as the mid-1960s had stripped citizenship from many Kurds, leaving them stateless and with little reason to invest their loyalties in Syria.

He also blamed them for subordinating themselves to the interests of Washington.

Hunter Biden to Resign From Chinese Board

NEW YORK—Facing intense scrutiny from President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, Hunter Biden announced on Sunday that he will step down from the board of directors of a Chinese-backed private equity firm at the end of the month as part of a pledge not to work on behalf of any foreign-owned companies should his father win the presidency.

Biden, the 49-year-old son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, revealed his plan in an internet post written by his attorney, George Mesires, who outlined a defense of the younger Biden’s work in Ukraine and China, which have emerged as one of Trump’s chief lines of attack against Hunter’s father despite no proof of impropriety.

“Hunter makes the following commitment: Under a Biden Administration, Hunter will readily comply with any and all guidelines or standards a President Biden may issue to address purported conflicts of interest, or the appearance of such conflicts, including any restrictions related to overseas business interests. In any event, Hunter will agree not to serve on boards of, or work on behalf of, foreign owned companies,” Mesires wrote.

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He continued: “He will continue to keep his father personally uninvolved in his business affairs, while availing himself as necessary and appropriate to the Office of the White House Counsel to help inform his application of the Biden Administration’s guidelines or standards to his business decision-making.”

Hunter Biden’s work overseas sits at the center of the House impeachment inquiry into Trump, who has admitted to asking foreign powers to investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings abroad.

The White House released a transcript of a call in which Trump asks Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to probe Biden’s family and Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election that put Trump in office. Trump has also encouraged China to dig into Hunter Biden’s work in that country, asserting without evidence that earned $1.5 billion from a “sweetheart” business deal there.

The president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, is also under increasing scrutiny for his efforts to dig into Hunter Biden’s business background. Late last week, two businessmen who played key roles in Giuliani’s efforts to investigate Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine were charged with federal campaign finance violations.

Still, Republicans reacted to news of Hunter Biden’s decision to step away from the Chinese-backed BHR Equity Investment Fund Management Company with deep skepticism.

“I think this is just another way to save a flailing campaign that’s going down. He knows he’s in trouble and this is just another way to try and detract attention,” Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

On the same show, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Hunter Biden “should have done this quite a while ago.”

“This is a part of how Donald Trump won in the first place saying that we’re going to get rid of these sweetheart deals, we’re going to make sure that we clean up the axis of power in a place like Washington, D.C., where someone like Hunter Biden get a $50,000 a month retainer for Ukrainian energy company when everybody knows that he doesn’t have that skill set.”

Mesires noted repeatedly that there is no evidence of wrongdoing against Hunter Biden, despite intensifying attacks from Trump ahead of the 2020 election.

“Despite extensive scrutiny, at no time has any law enforcement agency, either domestic or foreign, alleged that Hunter engaged in wrongdoing at any point during his five-year term,” Mesires said in his Sunday post of Biden’s experience in Ukraine.

The attorney wrote that Hunter Biden worked as an unpaid board member for BHR Equity Investment Fund Management Company “based on his interest in seeking ways to bring Chinese capital to international markets.”

“To date, Hunter has not received any compensation for being on BHR’s board of directors,” Mesires said. “He has not received any return on his investment; there have been no distributions to BHR shareholders since Hunter obtained his equity interest.”

One of Biden’s Democratic presidential rivals praised the move, noting that Trump’s children are openly trading on his name in business deals around the world while Trump occupies the Oval Office.

“I think it demonstrates the difference in standards relative to the White House,” said Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

“I mean, here you have Hunter Biden stepping down from a position in order to make sure, even though there’s been no accusation of wrongdoing, doing something just to make sure there’s not even the appearance of a conflict of interests, while, in the White House, the president of the United States is a walking conflict of interests,” he said.

California Blackouts Throw Spotlight on Disparity

When the nation’s largest utility warned customers that it would cut power to nearly 2 million people across Northern California, many rushed out to buy portable generators, knowing the investment could help sustain them during blackouts.

Others had the security of knowing they could rely on solar panels and batteries installed in their homes.

But many families impacted by the blackouts are struggling from paycheck to paycheck and don’t have the luxury of buying backup power.

The blackouts are highlighting a divide in a region with growing income disparity where access to electricity is increasingly available to those who can afford to pay.

Communities in the San Francisco Bay Area are already reeling from economic imbalance as the tech industry has drawn well-off workers to the region, pushing lower- and middle-income families farther away from pricey city centers.

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There are 1.7 million people in the Bay Area who don’t have the resources to meet their basic needs, according to Tipping Point, an organization that fights poverty in the region.

Generators and solar panels are the last things low-income families are thinking about during the blackout, said Mary Kuhn, spokeswoman for Catholic Charities East Bay. Many are struggling with lost wages because restaurants or other businesses that pay by the hour temporarily closed.

“They’re facing, what am I going to feed my kids if I can’t cook and this food is spoiled? And how will I feed my kids next week?” Kuhn said.

Meanwhile, solar companies are seeing a spike in interest from customers seeking alternatives for when the power fails.

Sunrun, which leases and sells solar energy systems, said traffic to its web page which explains how to power through blackouts with its solar and battery systems increased 1,500% over the past few days.

Retired firefighter Derek Krause, who lives in Oakland, leases solar panels and a battery from Sunrun for about $150 a month, which includes the cost of electricity.

Krause didn’t realize this week’s power outage had hit his neighborhood because his backup power kicked in when his neighbors’ lights turned off. PG&E’s promise to cut power more frequently was one of the reasons he decided to install the system in February.

“Having taught the public about self-sustainability during emergencies, it was important to me,” Krause said.

Buying a solar energy system that can run during a blackout can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Solar panels alone won’t do the trick; an internal switch turns the panels off during a power outage to prevent the panels from sending electricity to wires around the home. Having a battery solves that problem, but also adds to the cost.

In Paradise, the Northern California town that was decimated last year by wildfires that killed 85 people, many of the remaining residents have generators that they’ve tapped for power during several planned power outages that PG&E enacted there this year.

They often make light of the situation, posting pictures on social media of power cords winding through their homes, said Councilman Michael Zuccolillo.

Zuccolillo bought a $500 gasoline-powered generator from Costco and goes through two or three gallons of gasoline a day, using it to power his refrigerator, television, lights and phone chargers.

“In the morning, we have one cord, and we switch it around between the coffee pot and the toaster,” Zuccolillo said.

Many portable generators cost $1,000 or more, and permanent standby generators cost at least $2,000, with an installation price tag that can cost $10,000 or more, according to Consumer Reports.

Solar panels and generators aren’t necessarily an option for people who rent apartments.

“I think those are the last things people are thinking about when they’re on a limited income,” Kuhn said.

In Silicon Valley, many tech companies have backup power to ensure that critical servers or systems don’t go down. Some entrepreneurs who run tech companies out of their homes have uninterrupted power supplies, or standby generators fueled by natural gas, said Daniel Aldrich, director of the master’s program in security and resilience at Northeastern University. But many people simply can’t afford those options.

“Times like these, they always reveal what’s actually going on in society, or they accelerate the existing trends,” Aldrich said. “For the normal people in California, blue-collar people, people on nebulizers or oxygen machines … for the people who are vulnerable, those individuals, now their lives might be at risk.”

___

AP Writers Barbara Ortutay and Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco contributed to this report.

U.S. Begins Possible Full Withdrawal From Northern Syria

WASHINGTON—The United States appears to be heading toward a full military withdrawal from Syria amid growing chaos, cries of betrayal and signs that Turkey’s invasion could fuel a broader war.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Sunday that President Donald Trump had directed U.S. troops in northern Syria to begin pulling out “as safely and quickly as possible.” He did not say Trump ordered troops to leave Syria, but that seemed like the next step in a combat zone growing more unstable by the hour.

Esper, interviewed on two TV news shows, said the administration was considering its options.

“We have American forces likely caught between two opposing advancing armies and it’s a very untenable situation,” Esper said.

This seemed likely to herald the end of a five-year effort to partner with Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters to ensure a lasting defeat of the Islamic State group. Hundreds of IS supporters escaped a holding camp amid clashes between invading Turkish-led forces and Kurdish fighters, and analysts said an IS resurgence seemed more likely, just months after Trump declared the extremists defeated.

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The U.S. has had about 1,000 troops in northeastern Syria allied with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to combat IS. The Pentagon previously had pulled about 30 of these troops from the Turkish attack zone along the border. With an escalation of violence, a widening of the Turkish incursion and the prospect of a deepening conflict, all U.S. forces along the border will now follow that move. It was unclear where they would go.

The Pentagon chief did not say U.S. troops are leaving Syria entirely. The only other U.S. presence in Syria is at Tanf garrison, near Syria’s eastern border with Jordan. The U.S. and coalition troops there are not involved in the Kurd mission, and so it seems highly unlikely the 1,000 being moved from the north would go to Tanf.

Critics say the U.S. has betrayed the Kurds by pulling back in the face of Turkey’s invasion, but Esper said the administration was left with little choice once President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Trump a week ago that he was going ahead with a military offensive. Esper said the Kurds have been good partners, “but at the same time, we didn’t sign up to fight the Turks on their behalf.”

The Kurds then turned to the Syrian government and Russia for military assistance, further complicating the battlefield.

The fast-moving developments were a further unraveling of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Syria, and they highlighted an extraordinary breakdown in relations between the United States and Turkey, NATO allies for decades. Turkish troops have often fought alongside American troops, including in the Korean War and in Afghanistan.

Asked whether he thought Turkey would deliberately attack American troops in Syria, Esper said, “I don’t know whether they would or wouldn’t.”

He cited an incident on Friday in which a small number of U.S. troops fell under artillery fire at an observation post in the north. Esper called that an example of “indiscriminate fire” coming close to Americans, adding it was unclear whether that was an accident.

Esper disputed the notion that the U.S. could have stopped Turkey from invading in the first place. He said Erdogan had made clear he was going to launch his incursion “regardless of what we did.”

Strongly critical of the Turks, Esper said “the arc of their behavior over the past several years has been terrible.” He added: “I mean, they are spinning out of the Western orbit, if you will. We see them purchasing Russian arms, cuddling up to President Putin. We see them doing all these things that, frankly, concern us.”

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., said the U.S. and its NATO partners should consider expelling Turkey from the alliance. “How do you have a NATO ally who’s in cahoots with the Russians, when the Russians are the adversaries of NATO?”

In explaining Trump’s decision to withdraw from northern Syria, Esper cited two weekend developments.

“In the last 24 hours, we learned that they (the Turks) likely intend to expand their attack further south than originally planned — and to the west,” he said.

The U.S. also has come to believe that the Kurds are attempting to “cut a deal” with the Syrian army and Russia to counter the invading Turks, he said. As a result, Trump “directed that we begin a deliberate withdrawal of forces from northern Syria,” Esper said.

Trump, in a tweet Sunday, said: “Very smart not to be involved in the intense fighting along the Turkish Border, for a change. Those that mistakenly got us into the Middle East Wars are still pushing to fight. They have no idea what a bad decision they have made. Why are they not asking for a Declaration of War?”

Esper said he would not discuss a timeline for the U.S. pullback, but said it would be done “as safely and quickly as possible.”

The Pentagon had said before the operation began that the U.S. military would not support it, and the U.S. pulled about 30 special operations troops out of observation posts along the invasion route on the Syrian border to keep them out of harm’s way. The Turkish offensive initially covered an area along the border about 125 kilometers (77 miles) wide and about 30 kilometers (19 miles) deep. Esper said it has since grown wider and deeper.

Esper said he was aware of reports of hundreds of IS prisoners escaping as a result of the Turkish invasion and of atrocities being committed against Syrian Kurds by members of a Turkish-supported Syrian Arab militia.

“It gets worse by the hour,” Esper said. “These are all the exact things” that U.S. officials warned Erdogan would likely happen by ignoring U.S. urgings not to invade northern Syria.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin held out the possibility of quick action to impose economic sanctions on Turkey, a move that Trump has repeatedly threatened if the Turks were to push too far into Syria.

“If we go to maximum pressure, which we have the right to do — at a moment’s notice the president calls me up and tells me — we will do this,” Mnuchin said. “We could shut down all U.S. dollar transactions with the entire government of Turkey. … That is something we may do, absolutely.”

Esper was interviewed on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday.” Mnuchin appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and Engel was on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”