Chris Hedges's Blog, page 188

U.S. to Test New Weapon as Arms Treaty With Russia Dies

WASHINGTON—The United States plans to test a new missile in coming weeks that would have been prohibited under a landmark, 32-year-old arms control treaty that the U.S. and Russia ripped up on Friday.

Washington and Moscow walked out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty that President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed in 1987, raising fears of a new arms race. The U.S. blamed Moscow for the death of the treaty. It said that for years Moscow has been developing and fielding weapons that violate the treaty and threaten the United States and its allies, particularly in Europe.

“Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement released on Friday.

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Russia pointed a finger at America.

“The denunciation of the INF treaty confirms that the U.S. has embarked on destroying all international agreements that do not suit them for one reason or another,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement Friday. “This leads to the actual dismantling of the existing arms control system.”

Exiting the treaty, however, could have an upside for the United States. Washington has complained for years that the arms control playing field was unfair. U.S. officials argued that not only was Russia violating the treaty and developing prohibited weapons, but that China also was making similar non-compliant weapons, leaving the U.S. alone in complying with the aging arms control pact.

Now, the U.S. is free to develop weapons systems that were previously banned. The U.S. is planning a test flight of such a weapon in coming weeks, according to a senior administration official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the weapons development and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

The current Pentagon budget includes $48 million for research on potential military responses to the Russian violations of the INF treaty, but the options do not include a nuclear missile.

The official downplayed the test and said it was not meant as a provocation against Russia. Because the United States adhered to the treaty for 32 years, the United States is “years away” from effectively deploying weapons previously banned under the agreement, the official said Thursday.

Arms control advocates still worry that America’s exit from the INF treaty will lead the two nations to also scrap the larger New START treaty, which expires in early 2021.

“Pulling out of this treaty leaves New START as the only bilateral nuclear arms agreement between the U.S and Russia,” said physicist David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. If President Donald Trump “pulls out of that treaty as well or allows it to lapse, it will be the first time since 1972 that the two countries will be operating without any mutual constraints on their nuclear forces.”

Trump hasn’t committed to extending or replacing New START, which beginning in 2018 imposed limits on the number of U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear warheads and launchers. Trump has called New START “just another bad deal” made by the Obama administration, and Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said in June that it’s unlikely the administration will agree to extend the treaty for five years, which could be done without legislative action in either capital.

The Trump administration thinks talks about extending New START are premature. The administration claims that with China’s growing arsenal of nuclear warheads, Beijing can no longer be excluded from nuclear arms control agreements. Trump has expressed a desire to negotiate a trilateral arms control deal signed by the U.S., Russia and China.

“We’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “I will say Russia would like to do something on a nuclear treaty and that’s OK with me. They’d like to do something and so would I.”

The administration official said the U.S. has had regular discussions with the Russians and Chinese about the possibility of a three-way arms control agreement. Trump wants the agreement to address not just intermediate-range weapons, but “all nuclear weapons,” the official said.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov urged the United States to observe a moratorium in using intermediate-range weapons.

“We invited the U.S. and other NATO countries to assess the possibility of declaring the same moratorium on deploying intermediate-range and shorter-range equipment as we have, the same moratorium Vladimir Putin declared, saying that Russia will refrain from deploying these systems when we acquire them unless the American equipment is deployed in certain regions,” he said in an interview with state news agency Tass.

European leaders are expected to react to Friday’s demise of the INF with disappointment and concern.

“With the end of the INF treaty, a bit of security in Europe is being lost,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said this week. “Now we call all the more on Russia and the U.S. to preserve the New START treaty as a cornerstone of worldwide arms control.

“Nuclear powers such as China must also face up to their responsibility on arms control — they have more weight in the world than at the time of the Cold War.”

Over its lifetime, the 1987 INF treaty led to the elimination of 2,692 U.S. and Soviet Union nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles. Until its demise, the treaty banned land-based missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (310 to 3,410 miles).

Pompeo said the U.S. first raised its concerns that Russia was violating the treaty in 2013 during the Obama administration. He said the U.S. tried for six years to prod Russia back into compliance.

In February, Trump determined that Moscow was in material breach of the treaty and the U.S. suspended its own obligations under the agreement. That started a six-month clock to get Russia back into compliance — time that ran out on Friday.

“As it has for many years, Russia chose to keep its non-compliant missile rather than going back into compliance with its treaty obligations,” Pompeo said. “The United States will not remain party to a treaty that is deliberately violated by Russia.”

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Associated Press writers Geir Moulson in Berlin and Lorne Cook in Brussels and Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report.

Judge Recommends Firing Officer in Eric Garner’s Death

NEW YORK—An administrative judge recommended Friday firing the New York City police officer accused of using a chokehold in the 2014 death of an unarmed black man whose dying pleas of “I can’t breathe” became a rallying cry against alleged police brutality.

The judge’s findings in the disciplinary case of Officer Daniel Pantaleo were provided to his lawyer and the city agency that acted as a prosecutor at his department trial last spring.

Pantaleo’s lawyer will have about two weeks to submit responses before Police Commissioner James O’Neill makes a final decision on punishment.

“Today’s decision confirms what the Civilian Complaint Review Board always has maintained: Officer Daniel Pantaleo committed misconduct on July 17, 2014, and his actions caused the death of Eric Garner,” said Fred Davie, chairman of the review board that served as the prosecutor.

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The administrative judge, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemarie Maldonado, had been tasked with deciding whether Pantaleo used a banned chokehold to take Eric Garner to the ground during a tense confrontation on a Staten Island street. Pantaleo’s lawyers had argued he used an approved “seat belt” technique to subdue Garner, who refused to be handcuffed after officers accused him of selling untaxed cigarettes.

Videos taken by bystanders showed Garner crying out “I can’t breathe” at least 11 times before he fell unconscious. The medical examiner’s office said a chokehold contributed to Garner’s death.

Pantaleo’s lawyer, Stuart London, was scheduled to speak Friday afternoon along with union officials who have supported the officer.

Rev. Al Sharpton, appearing with two of Garner’s children, called on the police commissioner to “immediately and unequivocally accept the recommendation of the judge and do it right away.”

“The city should not have in its employ someone that would choke someone to death, in violation of police guidelines. Someone who heard someone say 11 times, ‘I can’t breathe,'” Sharpton said.

“This decision is a decision that is good for the citizens of the city, but make no mistake about it, this is not justice for the Garner family. Justice for the Garner family would have been a federal proceeding or a criminal proceeding in the local courts.”

Last month, the day before the fifth anniversary of Garner’s death, federal prosecutors announced they would not bring criminal charges against Pantaleo, 33, following a five-year civil rights investigation.

Pantaleo initially tried to use two approved restraint tactics on Garner, much larger at 6-foot-2 and about 400 pounds but ended up wrapping his arm around Garner’s neck for about seven seconds as they struggled against a glass storefront window and fell to the sidewalk.

The officer was stripped of his gun and put on desk duty after the incident but continued to draw a hefty salary since Garner’s death, with his pay peaking at more than $120,000 in 2017, according to city payroll records.

Garner’s death came at a time of a growing public outcry over police killings of unarmed black men that sparked the national Black Lives Matter movement. Just weeks later, protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, over the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

When a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo on state charges in December 2014, demonstrations flared in New York and several other cities.

Garner’s death has dogged Mayor Bill de Blasio since it happened in his first year in office.

His initial statements after the death were critical of the officers involved, and he talked publicly about having had to warn his own son, who is black, to be careful during any encounters with police. Then, as protests flared, a disturbed man angry about the Garner and Brown cases ambushed and killed two New York City police officers as they sat in their cruiser.

The head of the city’s largest police union said the mayor had “blood on his hands” over the killings. Police officers turned their backs on the mayor at the officers’ funerals.

De Blasio, now running for president, wound up infuriating police reform advocates, too, by allowing the department to wait for years to begin disciplinary proceedings against Pantaleo. The delay was due to the city’s desire to avoid interfering in the ongoing federal civil rights investigation.

Chants of “Fire Pantaleo” interrupted de Blasio at Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate in Detroit.

Saudi Arabia Allows Women to Travel Without Male Consent

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—Saudi Arabia on Friday published new laws that loosen restrictions on women by allowing all citizens — women and men alike — to apply for a passport and travel freely, ending a long-standing guardianship policy that had controlled women’s freedom of movement.

The new laws, a potential game-changer for Saudi women’s rights, are to go into effect by the end of the month.

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The kingdom’s legal system has long been criticized because it treated adult women as minors, requiring they have a man’s consent to obtain a passport or travel abroad. Often a woman’s male guardian is her father or husband, and in some cases a woman’s son.

The changes were widely celebrated by Saudis on Twitter, with many posting memes showing people dashing to the airport with luggage and others hailing the 33-year-old crown prince believed to be the force behind these moves. But the changes also drew backlash from conservatives, who posted clips of senior Saudi clerics in past years arguing in favor of guardianship laws.

Other changes issued in the decrees allow women to register a marriage, divorce or a child’s birth, and obtain official family documents, which could ease hurdles women faced in obtaining a national identity card and enrolling their children in school.

Women are now also allowed to be legal guardians of their children, a right previously held only by men.

Still in place, however, are rules that require male consent for a woman to leave prison, exit a domestic abuse shelter or marry. Women, unlike men, still cannot pass on citizenship to their children and cannot provide consent for their children to marry.

Under the kingdom’s guardianship system, women essentially relied on the “good will” and whims of male relatives to determine the course of their lives. There were cases, for example, of young Saudi women whose parents are divorced, but whose father is the legal guardian, being unable to accept scholarships to study abroad because they did not have permission to travel.

Amnesty International said Friday a lot remains to be done for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia but that the new laws could ease the guardianship system. Guardianship laws have “been a stifling system in the daily lives of women in Saudi Arabia,” said Lynn Malouf, Mideast’s research director at Amnesty.

“These reforms really are a testament to the work of the brave activism and the suffering and the ordeals” Saudi women and men fought for in their calls for reform, she added.

Saudi women fleeing domestic abuse and the guardianship system occasionally drew international attention to their plight, as 18-year-old Rahaf al-Qunun did before Canada granted her asylum. The stories of runaway women have created a flurry of negative headlines for the kingdom.

To leave the country, some Saudi women say they had to hack into their father’s phone and change the settings on a government app to allow themselves permission to leave the country. There were calls in Washington for Google and Apple to block access to the app entirely.

In a lengthy study of Saudi male guardianship laws in 2016, Human Rights Watch criticized it as “system that was ripe for abuse.”

The new rules, approved by King Salman and his Cabinet, allow any person 21 and older to travel abroad without prior consent and any citizen to apply for a Saudi passport on their own.

The decrees, issued Wednesday, were made public before dawn Friday in the kingdom’s official weekly Um al-Qura gazette. The government said Friday the new rules would be in effect by the end of August.

A number of sweeping changes have been promoted by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as he drives an ambitious economic reform plan that encourages more women to enter the workforce. He was behind lifting the ban on women driving last year, loosening rules on gender segregation and bringing concerts and movie theaters to the country.

He has also led a simultaneous crackdown on activists, including detaining the country’s leading women’s rights activists who had demanded an end to the very male guardianship rules now being curtailed. The women, among them Loujain al-Hathloul, are facing trial and allege they were tortured in prison.

The crown prince continues to face widespread international criticism over the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last year. Saudi Arabia has denied any involvement by the prince but its own investigation acknowledged the operation was planned by two of the prince’s top aides.

Saudi newspaper Arab News noted that in the segment on travel, the new decree were written in gender-neutral language rather than outright stating that women no longer need male consent.

News of the changes had been teased in state-linked Saudi media for weeks, possibly to ready the public and gauge reaction.

The way the decrees were announced and the language used signal how sensitive these moves are among conservatives in the country. For years, state-backed preachers told the Saudi public that women should not travel longer than a night alone, claiming this was rooted in Islamic practice.

Other Muslim countries, however, don’t have similar restrictions on women’s travel. Still, Saudi clerics have supported the imposition of male guardianship based on a Quran verse that states men are the protectors and maintainers of women.

Other Islamic scholars argue this misinterprets fundamental Quranic concepts like equality and respect between the sexes.

___

Associated Press writer Fadi Tawil in Beirut contributed to this report.

Will Hurd Joins GOP Quit Parade; N.C. Gerrymander Case a Game-Changer?

Campaign Cocktail: News and notes from the 2020 election race.

House Republicans Rush for the Exits

Don’t hang around the doors of Congress this fall—you might just get trampled. The current wave of Republican retirements has party strategists bracing for an exodus that could tighten the Democrats’ grip on the House in 2020.

On Thursday, Will Hurd of Texas became the ninth GOP Congress member to decide not to seek re-election next year. On Wednesday it was nine-term congressman and fellow Texan Mike Conaway. They joined Paul Mitchell of Michigan, Martha Roby of Alabama, Pete Olson of Texas, Rob Bishop of Utah, Susan Brooks of Indiana, Rob Woodall of Georgia. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania retired in January. Two more, Bradley Byrne of Alabama and Greg Gianforte of Montana, are running for different offices.

Hurd is the lone black House Republican. Roby and Woodall are among only 13 female GOP representatives in the House.

The planned departures are variously ascribed to today’s hyperpartisan political climate, the frustration of being the minority party and the struggle to respond to President Trump’s more divisive comments.

A similar flock of GOP quitters presaged the Democratic Blue Wave in last year’s midterms, and we can expect the pace to pick up after the August recess. The Hill reports:

“There are going to be a lot more [retirements] to come,” said one consultant who works for House Republicans. “Between people finding themselves having to actually work hard for the first time in their long, lazy careers and members who came in in the majority and now hate life in the minority, it’s just getting started.”

N.C. Common Cause Takes On Gerrymandering’s ‘Michelangelo’

Oral arguments in a case that could affect the 2020 election wrapped up last week in one of the first state-level challenges to voter district maps since the Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision in June.

Truthdig correspondent Chris Storm reports that North Carolina’s Common Cause chapter led the charge in Raleigh, N.C., advocating against redrawn district maps enacted by the state Assembly in 2017.

Common Cause presented a remarkable piece of evidence found in the hard drives of the late Thomas Hofeller, once called “the Michelangelo of the modern gerrymander.” Hofeller, a Republican operative, conducted a study the Assembly allegedly used to create the 2017 maps. Expert witnesses for Common Cause testified that the maps on his hard drive are identical to those of the Legislature, and that racial and partisan data were used in determining the district boundaries.

A victory in the case could lead to newly drawn House and Senate district maps in time for the 2020 election, which could affect election results. “I believe this will be the most consequential case in the history of the state,” said Bob Phillips, Executive Director of Common Cause North Carolina.

Post-trial briefs are due to the North Carolina Superior Court by Aug. 7. A ruling is expected later this year.

 

Will Hurd Joins GOP Quit Parade; ‘Moscow Mitch’ Is Mad

Campaign Cocktail: News and notes from the 2020 election race.

House Republicans Rush for the Exits

Don’t hang around the doors of Congress this fall—you might just get trampled. The current wave of Republican retirements has party strategists bracing for an exodus that could tighten the Democrats’ grip on the House in 2020.

On Thursday, Will Hurd of Texas became the ninth GOP Congress member to decide not to seek re-election next year. On Wednesday it was nine-term congressman and fellow Texan Mike Conaway. They joined Paul Mitchell of Michigan, Martha Roby of Alabama, Pete Olson of Texas, Rob Bishop of Utah, Susan Brooks of Indiana, Rob Woodall of Georgia. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania retired in January. Two more, Bradley Byrne of Alabama and Greg Gianforte of Montana, are running for different offices.

Hurd is the lone black House Republican. Roby and Woodall are among only 13 female GOP representatives in the House.

The planned departures are variously ascribed to today’s hyperpartisan political climate, the frustration of being the minority party and the struggle to respond to President Trump’s more divisive comments.

A similar flock of GOP quitters presaged the Democratic Blue Wave in last year’s midterms, and we can expect the pace to pick up after the August recess. The Hill reports:

“There are going to be a lot more [retirements] to come,” said one consultant who works for House Republicans. “Between people finding themselves having to actually work hard for the first time in their long, lazy careers and members who came in in the majority and now hate life in the minority, it’s just getting started.”

A nickname with staying power: ‘Moscow Mitch’

A retired Kentucky schoolteacher has pierced the seemingly impenetrable political hide of his state’s most powerful lawmaker.

In an April 24 column for his hometown newspaper, the Murray Ledger & Times, Marshall Ward is credited with coining the moniker “Moscow Mitch” for his state’s senior senator, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Ward charged that McConnell “helped open up the floodgates of Russian influence, which harmed our democracy.” A political talk show host picked up the nickname, and it went viral on Twitter.

The tag has infuriated the normally unflappable McConnell. He took to the Senate floor Monday with a bitter complaint: “I was called unpatriotic, un-American and essentially treasonous.”

McConnell has been under fire since January for his role in blocking a congressional attempt to maintain sanctions imposed last year on Russian aluminum giant Rusal and other companies owned by oligarch Oleg Deripaska. McConnell denies any connection between that political position and his support for a new aluminum plant in his home state—which is backed by a $200 million investment from Rusal.

Then, despite intelligence warnings and special counsel Robert Mueller’s July 24 testimony that foreign governments are still trying to penetrate the U.S. political system, McConnell refused to allow a Senate vote on a House bill that would have authorized $775 million to help protect the integrity of state elections.

That set off MSNBC talk show host Joe Scarborough, who claimed that “Moscow Mitch” is “aiding and abetting [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s ongoing attempts to subvert American democracy.” Almost simultaneously, a #MoscowMitch hashtag started trending on Twitter. And on Wednesday, The Assoicated Press reports, Kentucky Democrats launched a web store selling “Just Say Nyet to Moscow Mitch” merchandise.

The thickness of McConnell’s skin will be tested again Saturday. According to the AP, he is scheduled to attend “the state’s leading political event—the Fancy Farm picnic in western Kentucky. There, prominent politicians regularly take turns taking digs at their rivals, while shouting partisans try to rattle the speakers.”

Walloped by Heat Wave, Greenland Sees Massive Ice Melt

BERLIN — The heat wave that smashed high temperature records in five European countries a week ago is now over Greenland, accelerating the melting of the island’s ice sheet and causing massive ice loss in the Arctic.

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a semi-autonomous Danish territory between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans that has 82% of its surface covered in ice.

The area of the Greenland ice sheet that is showing indications of melt has been growing daily, and hit a record 56.5% for this year on Wednesday, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute. She says that’s expected to expand and peak on Thursday before cooler temperatures slow the pace of the melt.

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More than 10 billion tons (11 billion U.S. tons) of ice was lost to the oceans by surface melt on Wednesday alone, creating a net mass ice loss of some 197 billion tons (217 billion U.S. tons) from Greenland in July, she said.

“It looks like the peak will be today. But the long-term forecast is for continuing warm and sunny weather in Greenland, so that means the amount of the ice loss will continue,” she said Thursday in a telephone interview from Copenhagen.

The scope of Wednesday’s ice melt is a number difficult to grasp. To understand just how much ice is being lost, a mere 1 billion tons — or 1 gigaton — of ice loss is equivalent to about 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the Danish Meteorological Institute said. And 100 billion tons (110 billion U.S. tons) corresponds to a 0.28 mm (0.01 inch) rise in global sea levels.

Mottram said since June 1 — roughly the start of the ice-loss season — the Greenland ice sheet has lost 240 gigatons (240 billion metric tons) this year. That compares with 290 gigatons lost overall in the 2012 melt season, which usually goes through the end of August.

A June 2019 study by scientists in the U.S. and Denmark said melting ice in Greenland alone will add between 5 and 33 centimeters (2 to 13 inches) to rising global sea levels by the year 2100. If all the ice in Greenland melted — which would take centuries — the world’s oceans would rise by 7.2 meters (23 feet, 7 inches), the study found.

The current melting has been brought on by the arrival of the same warm air from North Africa and Spain that melted European cities and towns last week, setting national temperature records in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Britain.

In Russia, meanwhile, forest fires caused by hot, dry weather and spread by high winds are raging over nearly 30,000 square kilometers (11,580 sq. miles) of territory in Siberia and the Russian Far East — an area the size of Belgium. The smoke from these fires, some of them in Arctic territory, is so heavy it can easily be seen in satellite photos and is causing air quality problems in towns and some cities, including Russia’s third-largest city, Novosibirsk. Residents want the Russian government to do more to fight the blazes.

Greenland has also been battling a slew of Arctic wildfires, something that Mottram said was uncommon in the past.

In Greenland, the melt area this year is the second-biggest in terms of ice area affected, behind more than 90% in 2012, said Mark Serreze, director of the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, which monitors ice sheets globally. Records go back to 1981.

A lot of what melts can later refreeze onto the ice sheet, but because of the conditions ahead of this summer’s heat wave, the amount of ice lost for good this year might be the same as in 2012 or more, according to scientists. They noted a long build up to this summer’s ice melt — including higher overall temperatures for months — and a very dry winter with little snow in many places, which would normally offer some protection to glacier ice.

“This is certainly a weather event superimposed on this overall trend of warmer conditions” that have increasingly melted Greenland ice over the long term, Serreze said.

Compounding the melt, the Greenland ice sheet started out behind this year because of the low ice and snow accumulation, said Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Twila Moon.

With man-made climate change, “there’s a potential for these kind of rates to become more common 50 years from now,” Moon said.

Heat waves have always occurred, but Mike Sparrow, a spokesman for the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, noted that as global temperatures have risen, extreme heat waves are now occurring at least 10 times more frequently than a century ago. This year, the world saw its hottest month of June ever.

“These kind of heat waves are weather events and can occur naturally but studies have shown that both the frequency and intensity of these heat waves have increased due to global warming,” Sparrow said in a telephone interview from Geneva.

He noted that sea ice spread in the Arctic and Antarctic are both currently at record lows.

“When people talk about the average global temperature increasing by a little more than 1 degree (Celsius), that’s not a huge amount to notice if you’re sitting in Hamburg or London, but that’s a global average and it’s much greater in the polar regions,” he said.

Even though temperatures will be going down in Greenland by the end of this week, the ice melt is not likely to stop anytime soon, Mottram said.

“Over the last couple of days, you could see the warm wave passing over Greenland,” she said. “That peak of warm air has passed over the summit of the ice sheet, but the clear skies are almost as important, or maybe even more important, for the total melt of the ice sheet.”

She added that clear skies are likely to continue in Greenland “so we can still get a lot of ice melt even if the temperature is not spectacularly high.”

___

Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Southern Pines, North Carolina

Trump Says He’ll Put 10% Tariffs on Remaining China Imports

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump intensified pressure Thursday on China to reach a trade deal by saying he will impose 10% tariffs Sept. 1 on the remaining $300 billion in Chinese imports he hasn’t already taxed. The move immediately sent stock prices sinking.

The president has already imposed 25% tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese products, and Beijing has retaliated by taxing $110 billion in U.S. goods.

U.S. consumers will likely feel the pain if Trump proceeds with the new tariffs. Trump’s earlier tariffs had been designed to minimize the impact on ordinary Americans by focusing on industrial goods. But the new tariffs will hit a vast range of consumer products from cellphones to silk scarves.

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The president’s announcement via Twitter came as a surprise, in part because the White House on Wednesday had said Beijing confirmed that it planned to increase its purchases of American farm products. That word came just as U.S. and Chinese negotiators were ending a 12th round of trade talks in Shanghai, which the White House called “constructive.”

Though the negotiations concluded without any sign of a deal, they are scheduled to resume next month in Washington.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had been up nearly 300 points earlier in the day, was down nearly 200 points after Trump’s tweets announcing the new tariffs. The Dow closed for the day down 280 points — more than 1 percent.

Trump has long said he was preparing to tax the $300 billion in additional Chinese tariffs. But he had suspended the threat after meeting with President Xi Jinping in Osaka, Japan, in June.

It isn’t clear when American consumers are likely to feel the impact of the additional tariffs, but higher prices could show up in stores this fall.

“Attention all Target & Wal-Mart shoppers … the price on the goods you buy ahead of the holidays are going up due to trade policy,” tweeted Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at the consultancy RSM.

Besides announcing the additional tariffs on Chinese imports, Trump tweeted that “we look forward to continuing our positive dialogue with China on a comprehensive Trade Deal, and feel that the future between our two countries will be a very bright one!”

The president accused Beijing of failing to follow through on stopping the sale of fentanyl to the United States or on purchasing large quantities of farm goods such as soybeans. Speaking to reporters Thursday at the White House, Trump complained that President Xi is “not moving fast enough.”

Trump said he scheduled the additional tariffs to begin Sept. 1 to give exports already en route from China time to get to the United States — a journey that can take three or four weeks. By setting the import taxes at 10%, he has leeway to ratchet them higher if necessary to further increase pressure on Beijing.

“Until such time as there’s a deal,” Trump said, “we’ll be taxing them.”

The world’s two biggest economies are locked in a trade war over U.S. allegations that Beijing uses predatory tactics — including stealing trade secrets and forcing foreign companies to hand over technology — in a drive to overtake American technological dominance.

Talks had broken down in May after the United States accused the Chinese of reneging on earlier commitments.

“The fact that this tweet comes after only one meeting with the Chinese delegation following the resumption of talks is extremely concerning,” said Rick Helfenbein, president of the American Apparel & Footwear Association.

Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator who is now vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said: “These talks are not getting any easier. I don’t expect the Chinese to sit by … The combination of these latest tariffs, with Chinese counter-retaliation, is going to take a heavy toll on U.S. consumers, workers, farmers and businesses.”

Trump’s trade war and its consequences were a key factor in the Federal Reserve’s decision Wednesday to cut interest rates in an otherwise healthy U.S. economy. During a news conference, Chairman Jerome Powell pointed repeatedly to the uncertainty caused by Trump’s pursuit of trade wars on multiple fronts as a reason for the rate cut.

The president’s decision to impose a 10% tax on an additional $300 billion of Chinese imports might have been predicated, in fact, on his confidence that Powell’s Fed stands ready to cut rates again. The bond market signaled its belief in that theory Thursday, with Treasury yields dropping sharply after Trump’s announcement.

And according to the CME Group, market traders now foresee a roughly 70 percent likelihood of another rate cut when the Fed next meets in September. Before Trump’s announcement, the likelihood was pegged at under 50 percent.

Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Fed board member, has warned that Fed rate cuts could embolden Trump to escalate trade battles for that very reason.

In the meantime, the additional Trump tariffs risk further souring the relationship between the world’s two largest economies.

“The stage is now set for a further escalation of trade tensions between China and the U.S.,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economist and former head of the China division at the International Monetary Fund. “It has become clear that there is no clear path to a resolution of the trade dispute in the coming months, and China might choose to live with a trade war while waiting out the Trump presidency.”

Trump has insisted that the tariff war is hurting China but not the United States. He tweeted two days ago: “Trumps got China back on its heels, and the United States is doing great.”

But his administration is providing $16 billion in aid to American farmers — on top of $11 billion last year — to offset sales lost after China imposed retaliatory tariffs on soybeans and other U.S. farm products.

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AP Business Writer Marcy Gordon contributed to this report.

Truthdiggers of the Month: Puerto Rican Protesters Who Toppled a Corrupt Governor

When Ricardo Rosselló, soon to be the former governor of Puerto Rico, stepped off a plane in San Juan on July 11, nearly 100 people were waiting for him. They were neither fans nor supporters, but members of multiple activist groups chanting “Ricky Renuncia”—a demand for him to resign.

The protest was organized by the feminist group Colectiva Feminista en Construcción after Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism published almost 900 pages of leaked chats and messages between the governor, his top aides and cabinet members. The chats were filled with homophobic, misogynistic and threatening comments directed at politicians, celebrities and members of the media.

As Colectiva Feminista member Shariana Ferrer told The New York Times, “We went to the airport so that he would see the country that he was coming back to. This wasn’t just about words. This wasn’t because they called us whores. This was a governor who abused his power.”

What started as a small demonstration at an airport morphed into a series of massive protests, possibly the biggest in the island’s history. Within two weeks, pressured by the protests, the governor agreed to resign.

Ed Morales, writing in The Nation, highlighted another coalition involved in coordinating the mass protests, Victoria Ciudadana, whose membership includes former gubernatorial candidates. Morales, however, stresses that this was a movement of all Puerto Ricans, not just longtime activists.

What makes the Puerto Rican protests so inspiring, aside from their sheer scale and sustained action, is their clear, specific goal of the governor’s resignation, and the diversity of tactics used to accomplish it. Within eleven days, nearly the entire island went on strike.

As Lilliam Rivera wrote in The Washington Post, demonstrations were held involving yoga, live readings of the leaked messaging, and, in the great tradition of Latin American protests, a cacerolazo (people banging pots, pans, and utensils) occurred every night. Rivera, who is originally from Puerto Rico, believes Americans can learn from the protests, writing, “This isn’t an isolated incident happening on our island. It is a blueprint that can easily be translated here in the States—the spark needed to ignite change.”

There were songs and dancing and support from celebrities like pop singer Ricky Martin and reggaeton star Bad Bunny, as well as former MLB player Carlos Delgado and a host of others. Bad Bunny and rapper Residente recorded a protest song, “Afilando los Cuchillos” (Sharpening The Knives).

“We’re writing history,” Juan Carlos Rivera Ramos, an activist, told Morales. “Our people, in all their diversity of colors and flavors, ideological plurality, are expressing dignity on the streets. My eyes are tearing.”

While the feminist group may have organized the airport demonstration, Ferrer maintains the protests were a collective action. “Nobody can claim credit for this moment, because there are no leaders in this movement. This is an organic movement,” she explained to the Times.

She was adamant that even if the leaked chats and prior arrests of two government officials by the FBI were the immediate spark for the mass protests, they reflected years of anger and organizing. “It’s not spontaneous,” Ferrer told the Times. “This is the culmination of years of grass-roots work, community work, and social political organizations.”

Activists are continuing that work as Rosselló’s term ends. With Puerto Rico’s future leadership still uncertain, and no replacement for governor yet, protests continue. Customarily, the Secretary of State would be the next in line, but Luis G. Rivera Marín, who last held that position, resigned following the chat scandal. Justice Secretary Wanda Vázquez is in line after him, but has turned down the governorship.

Alexandra-Marie Figueroa Miranda, a campaign and activism coordinator at Amnesty International in Puerto Rico, told NBC News, “We’re at a strange moment because there’s no clear sense of what comes next. There’s a panorama of uncertainty.”

Puerto Ricans may be skeptical, but that hasn’t stopped them from fighting. For their sheer commitment and energy, and for weeks of sustained protests that their mainland counterparts could easily learn from, the Puerto Rican protesters are our Truthdiggers of the Month.

A Movement Against Charter Schools Helped Oust Puerto Rico’s Governor

As Americans lament the current sorry state of democracy in Washington, D.C., government by the will of the people was very much alive recently in Puerto Rico, where a prolonged general strike that virtually shut down the island forced Governor Ricardo Rosselló to announce his resignation.

During the strike, huge crowds mobbed the governor’s mansion around the clock, closed highways in the capital of San Juan, and persuaded some presidential candidates in the Democratic Party to join in calling for the governor to resign.

Protesters had multiple grievances, but a “final straw” seems to have been a series of text messages leaked to an independent news organization in which the governor and his closest associates insulted political opponents and allies, members of the news media, and the LGBTQ community. Another notable target for insults in the text exchanges were the island’s public school teachers, whom the governor’s chief financial officer at the time, Christian Sobrino, called “terrorists.” (Sobrino and other top officials participating in the chats have resigned since the messages went public.)

Puerto Rico’s school teachers have been a constant nemesis to the Rosselló regime, and the island’s largest teachers’ union, the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (AMPR), united with other labor unions on the island to organize the general strike. Randi Weingarten, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, which AMPR is an affiliate of, joined in the calls for Rosselló’s resignation.

The teachers’ disagreements with Governor Rosselló started long before the release of the insulting texts.

“People in Puerto Rico felt betrayed by the governor,” says Myrna Ortiz-Castillo in a phone conversation. Ortiz-Castillo is a third-grade teacher and serves as finance secretary at the AMPR local in Bayamon. She insists, “He is supposed to be the person who takes care of the people. Instead he took care of his friends.”

One of the “friends” Ortiz-Castillo is referring to is the charter school industry. During his tenure, Rosselló pushed through the first law allowing charter schools on the island, and after the bill passed, he continued to press for opening more charters. Now it seems his ousting, and the legacy of corruption he leaves behind, will likely damage prospects for the charter industry in Puerto Rico for some time.

‘Friends’ of Charters Take Charge

Much of the teachers’ disillusion with Rosselló goes back at least to December 2016 when then Governor-elect Rosselló appointed Julia Keleher to be the Puerto Rico secretary of education.

Keleher, a native of Philadelphia who barely speaks Spanish, was effectively already on the government payroll, as her firm Keleher & Associates had been awarded almost $1 million in contracts to consult on the island’s education system. Her outsized salary—$250,000 to oversee a system where the average teacher pay is only $27,000—also created controversy.

Shortly after taking office, Keleher pushed for a plan to close nearly 200 public schools across the island, which would have led to thousands of teachers losing their jobs. She also pledged to decentralize the school system and delegate school services, terms often used to introduce the idea of charter schools and other forms of public-private education partnerships.

Keleher’s proposals drew immediate pushback from multiple political factions on the island, but barely nine months into her tenure, she got the perfect opportunity to turn her proposals into policies when Hurricane Maria slammed the island. The storm inflicted $142 million in damages to schools, and 40 days after the storm, only 109 of Puerto Rico’s 1,100 schools had reopened.

Keleher repeatedly referred to the catastrophe as an “opportunity.”

A New Orleans-Style Agenda

While Keleher worked the policy channels to introduce charter schools to the island, teachers were in communities delivering aid and comfort.

Ortiz-Castillo recalls being a first-line responder to the widespread destruction. In her phone call to me, she describes traveling to devastated communities as part of the union’s outreach effort to use its extensive membership network to identify where parents and their children were struggling and advise where to direct supplies, food, and drinking water. Many schools became, essentially, relief centers.

Keleher seemed to have other priorities.

As Education Week’s correspondent on the ground in Puerto Rico reported, she was “diving deep into the lessons of loss and opportunity in previous natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005.”

In a tweet, Keleher said New Orleans should be a “point of reference; we should not underestimate the damage or the opportunity to create new, better schools.”

After Katrina, a state-appointed board shut down New Orleans schools, fired over 7,000 teachers, and deposed the school board. Today, 100 percent of schools in New Orleans have been converted to privately operated charter schools.

With nearly a third of Puerto Rico’s schools still without power and hundreds more plagued with crumbling walls, leaky roofs, and spotty internet, Rosselló announced a new fiscal plan that included closing nearly 300 schools and introduced a new bill legalizing charter schools on the island.

Rachel Cohen, writing for the Intercept, described the bill as “vague,” a weakness that could invite the types of fraud and corruption that have dogged charter schools wherever they go. Cohen also noted Keleher had sought the advice of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, a charter school advocate, to help craft the bill.

Analysts at the National Education Association had similar concerns, saying the law “left unanswered” whether for-profit companies would be allowed to manage charter schools and whether charter schools would have to serve students with disabilities—services needed by 40 percent of the island’s students.

Teachers registered their opposition to the bill by holding a one-day strike that shut down schools across Puerto Rico.

The bill passed nevertheless.

Public Funds to Private Pockets

“Teachers have had big problems with the education secretary the governor hired,” says Ortiz-Castillo. “We suggested from the very start that she be investigated. We could see that money intended for school children wasn’t arriving in the classroom.”

Teachers had good reasons to be suspicious.

After justifying her call for closing schools by claiming a savings of $7 million, Keleher signed a $16.9 million contract with the California-based Josephson Institute of Ethics to teach “values” in Puerto Rican schools—an addition to the curriculum teachers believed was not needed, especially at a time when students didn’t have adequate supplies of basic materials and textbooks.

After the storm, Keleher barnstormed the island in a relentless marketing campaign to promote charter schools at a time when, according to a survey conducted by the teachers’ union, dozens of schools still had moldy classrooms, leaky roofs, unusable bathrooms, and rat infestations.

Keleher’s intention to redirect education funds to private enterprises seemed all the more obvious when the island opened its first new charter, a comparatively gleaming facility where teachers had smaller class sizes but were being paid $13,000 more than average teacher salaries. The fact that much of the school’s funding was being provided by a nonprofit did nothing to offset the resentment many teachers felt.

“Bringing charter schools to Puerto Rico is not a good thing,” says Ortiz-Castillo. “Charter schools are a way for politicians to redirect money to their friends. The money for the school should go to the school and to the children.”

Corruption Comeuppance

The backroom collusion between the Rosselló administration and those connected with charter schools continued even when Keleher decided to resign earlier this year.

As part of her departure, her consulting company received a contract to work with a law firm assisting parties interested in participating in the establishment of charter schools in Puerto Rico. The firm also employs Governor Rosselló’s brother Jay Rosselló, who serves as “contact person” to receive the requests for advice.

The law firm’s relationship with Keleher dates back to 2017 when the Puerto Rico Education Department under her leadership hired it for legal advice and technical assistance in education policy.

Keleher’s apparent propensity to steer public dollars to friends, however, seems to have finally caught up with her.

Days before the general strike would shut down the island and force out the governor, news outlets reported Keleher had been arrested for steering $13 million of education federal money to unqualified, politically connected contractors. She is alleged to have bypassed official bidding procedures to award contracts to her friends and to have committed money laundering and fraud.

In her statement calling on Rosselló to resign, Weingarten declared, “Rossello and Keleher ignored repeated requests from the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico and the AFT to use federal recovery money to fund and restore public education on the island” and instead “diverted much-needed funding from public schools to start charter schools.”

A Lesson About Democracy

Though Keleher is out of office and Rosselló is likely heading that way, Puerto Rico’s teachers are not about to let up.

According to Ortiz-Castillo, teachers intend to meet with the new secretary of education and demand to hear what changes are being planned for the schools. They also participated in protests against a possible successor to Rosselló, Justice Secretary Wanda Vásques, who has since expressed some reluctance to occupy the position. Rosselló has recently inserted another possible successor into the mix, the island’s former representative to the U.S. Congress Pedro Pierluisi, and it’s not clear, as of press time, how teachers would receive his nomination.

But what Ortiz-Castillo and her fellow teachers want people to understand most is the teachers “demonstrated that, without guns and violence, we can hold politicians accountable to the will of the people. Now, we want voters to be more aware of who they are voting for. Candidates need to demonstrate they’re going to do what’s best for all the people and not just what’s good for themselves or their friends. We also want people to understand they should never give up.”

That seems like a lesson all Americans can benefit from.

This article was produced by Our Schools , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Joe Biden Proves That There’s Nothing Moderate About ‘Moderates’

The comedian George Carlin liked to marvel at oxymorons like “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence.” Now, as the race for the Democratic presidential nomination intensifies, reporters and pundits at corporate media outlets are escalating their use of a one-word political oxymoron—“moderate.”

As a practical matter, in the routine lexicon of U.S. mass media, “moderate” actually means pro-corporate and reliably unwilling to disrupt the dominant power structures.

“Moderate” is a term of endearment in elite circles, a label conferred on politicians who won’t rock establishment boats.

“Moderate” sounds so much nicer than, say, “enmeshed with Wall Street” or “supportive of the military-industrial complex.”

In the corporate media environment, we’re accustomed to pretty euphemisms that fog up unpretty realities—and the haze of familiarity brings the opposite of clarity. As George Orwell wrote, language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

If Joe Biden is a “moderate,” the soothing adjective obscures grim realities. The framing was routine hours after the debate Wednesday night when the front page of The New York Times began its lead story by reporting that Biden “delivered a steadfast defense of his moderate policies in the Democratic primary debate.”

But how are policies really “moderate” when they perpetuate and increase extreme suffering due to vast income inequality? Or when they support U.S. wars causing so much death and incalculable anguish? Or when they refuse to challenge the fossil-fuel industry and only sign onto woefully inadequate measures in response to catastrophic climate change?

Biden’s record of words and deeds is “moderate” only if we ignore the extreme harm that he has done on matters ranging from civil rights and mass incarceration to student debt and the credit card industry to militarism and war.

Although Biden again tangled with Kamala Harris during the latest debate, she is ill-positioned to provide a clear critique of his so-called “moderate” policies. Harris has scarcely done more than he has to challenge the systemic injustice of corporate domination. So, she can’t get far in trying to provide a sharp contrast to Biden’s corporate happy talk on the crucial issue of healthcare.

Harris began this week by releasing what she called “My Plan for Medicare for All.” It was promptly eviscerated by single-payer activist Tim Higginbotham, who wrote for Jacobin that her proposal would “further privatize Medicare . . . keep the waste and inefficiency of our current multi-payer system . . . cost families more than Medicare for All . . . continue to deny patients necessary care” and “fall apart before it’s implemented.”

In keeping with timeworn rhetoric from corporate Democrats, Harris repeatedly said during the debate that she wants to guarantee “access” to healthcare—using a standard corporate-friendly buzzword that detours around truly guaranteeing healthcare as a human right.

No matter whether journalists call Harris “moderate” or “progressive” (a term elastic enough to be the name of a huge insurance company), her unwillingness to confront the dominance of huge corporations over the economic and political life of the USA is a giveaway.

Whatever their discreet virtues, 18 of the 20 candidates who debated this week have offered no consistent, thoroughgoing challenge to corporate power. Among the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, only Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are providing a coherent analysis and actual challenge to the realities of corporate power and oligarchy that are crushing democracy in the United States.

Norman Solomon is cofounder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.