Chris Hedges's Blog, page 246

Abortion Bans Are Backfiring Spectacularly Across the U.S.

In Texas, if state Rep. Tony Tinderholt had his way, women who have an abortion could get the death penalty. Fortunately, his bill didn’t make it out of committee. But in Alabama, a bill that sentences doctors who perform abortions to life in prison did pass and was signed into law by the governor. If it stands, it goes into effect in six months.

Dr. Yashica Robinson, the medical director of the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives, responded to the draconian law on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, saying, “I will have to choose between my freedom and staying out of jail and doing what is best for my patients … as a women’s health provider, I understand how important abortion access is.” The only exception in the ban is when the life of the mother is at stake. This, Dr. Robinson says, “puts us in a Catch-22 … we could be forced to let patients get near death, get very sick or ill, and potentially be harmed before we could proceed comfortably with doing what’s best for women.”

A rash of extreme anti-abortion bills like these are being pushed through state legislatures across the country, banning abortions or making them almost impossible to obtain. Abortion is a legal procedure in the United States, and state governments aren’t allowed to ban it. But anti-choice crusaders in states with Republican-controlled governments, like Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Missouri, are passing the laws anyway. Proponents of the laws are anticipating court challenges, hoping that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will provide their long-sought swing vote to overturn the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.

This epidemic of unconstitutional legislation has ignited a firestorm of opposition. While a majority of state legislatures have passed restrictions on abortions, the majority of Americans are pro-choice. A national day of action to defend a woman’s right to choose a safe, legal abortion was held Tuesday, with over 500 events in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. More than 80 groups collaborated in the organizing effort, including Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the American Civil Liberties Union and smaller, grassroots groups like All* Above All and Georgia-based SPARK Reproductive Justice Now.

“First, Trump and Pence filled the courts with judges willing to give politicians power and control over women’s bodies. And we are looking at you, Brett Kavanaugh,” Planned Parenthood President Dr. Leana Wen said to hundreds in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Then, she added, “they passed extreme bans in order to overturn Roe. Are we going to stand for that?” The crowd thundered “No!” in unison.

Elizabeth Nash of the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute laid out the scale of the assault on abortion rights Wednesday, writing: “Between January 1, 2019, and May 20, 2019, 378 abortion restrictions have been introduced across the nation, and 40% of them have been abortion bans. … A total of 17 bans have been enacted across 10 states so far this year.” Alabama’s is perhaps the most egregious, banning abortion in almost all cases, including for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape.

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America's Reproductive Slaves



by Chris Hedges

“By signing this bill, the governor and her colleagues in the state legislature have decided to waste millions in Alabama taxpayer dollars in order to defend a bill that is simply a political effort to overturn 46 years of precedent that has followed the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. We will not allow that to happen, and we will see them in court,” Randall Marshall, executive director of the ACLU of Alabama, stated. “Despite the governor signing this bill, clinics will remain open, and abortion is still a safe, legal medical procedure at all clinics in Alabama.”

It is ironic that the Republican Party that decries “big government” is the one passing laws that force women to bear a child against their will — in Alabama, it would force them to carry the child of their rapist. Also ironically, most of these laws are written by, debated, voted on and signed into law by men. Alabama’s governor is a woman, but in the Alabama Senate, the vote was 25 to 6 – 25 white men.

On Wednesday, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, responding to the wave of anti-abortion laws sweeping the nation, put it simply: “Guys, guys, guys, just white guys … I say we don’t agonize, we organize.”

And that is what people are doing, nationally, from the largest cities to the smallest towns: organizing to ensure that we don’t return to the unsafe, back-alley abortions that killed so many women before Roe v. Wade. Never again.

Joe Biden’s Racist Dog Whistles Will Haunt Him

In a party that officially condemns dog-whistle appeals to racism, Joe Biden is running on Orwellian eggshells. Whether he can win the Democratic presidential nomination may largely depend on the extent of “doublethink” that George Orwell described in 1984 as the willingness “to forget any fact that has become inconvenient.”

It is an inconvenient fact that Biden has a political history of blowing into dog whistles for racism. More than ever, the Democratic electorate is repelled by that kind of pitch. If his dog-whistling past becomes a major issue, the former vice president and his defenders will face the challenge of twisting themselves into rhetorical pretzels to deny what is apparent from the video record of Biden oratory on the Senate floor that spanned into the last decade of the 20th century.

Biden is eager to deflect any prospective attention from his own history of trafficking in white malice and racial division. When he tweeted this week that “our politics today has become so mean and petty — it traffics in division and our president is the divider in chief,” Biden was executing a high jump over the despicably low standards set by Donald Trump.

A key question remains: Does it matter that Biden was a shrill purveyor of tropes, racist stereotypes and legislation aimed at African Americans? During pivotal moments in the history of race relations in this country, from the 1970s to the 1990s, Biden’s hot air manifested as pitches to white racism. From the outset of his career on Capitol Hill, he even stooped to reaching out to some of the worst segregationist senators from the South to advance his legislative agenda against busing.

As Adolph Reed and Cornel West noted this month in the Guardian, Biden began his racially laced approach to lawmaking soon after arrival in the Senate, when he “earned sharp criticism from both the NAACP and ACLU in the 1970s for his aggressive opposition to school busing as a tool for achieving school desegregation.”

That was no fluke. “In 1984,” Reed and West recount, Biden “joined with South Carolina’s arch-racist Strom Thurmond to sponsor the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior. He and Thurmond joined hands to push 1986 and 1988 drug enforcement legislation that created the nefarious sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine as well as other draconian measures that implicate him as one of the initiators of what became mass incarceration.”

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Joe Biden Unmasked



by Tangerine Bolen

It’s likely that no lawmaker did more to bring about the mass incarceration of black people during recent decades than Joe Biden. In an understated account last week, The Hill newspaper reported that Senator Biden “was instrumental in pushing for the [1994] crime bill, which critics have said led to a spike in incarceration, particularly among African Americans.”

Yet Biden is now eager to project an image as a longtime ally of people of color. In short, journalists Kevin Gosztola and Brian Sonenstein wrote recently, he is in a race between his actual past and his PR baloney.

As the leading advocate for what became the infamous 1994 crime bill, Biden stood on the Senate floor and declared: “We must take back the streets. It doesn’t matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn’t matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re the victims of society. The end result is they’re about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons.”

And Biden proclaimed with fervor that echoed right-wing dogma: “I don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don’t care why someone is antisocial. I don’t care why they’ve become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society.”

Paste writer Shane Ryan pointed out the unsubtle subtexts of Biden’s speechifying: “This is the language of demonization, and even without the underlying racial element, it would be offensive to describe Americans this way, and to brush aside the societal conditions that lead to violent crime as though they’re irrelevant. But, of course, the racial element is not just present, but profound. It’s impossible to read these remarks, complete with dehumanizing rhetoric, without coming to the conclusion that Biden is, in fact, talking about black crime.”

At the time, even some of the members of Congress who ended up voting for the crime bill loudly warned about its dangerous downsides. One of them was Bernie Sanders (who I actively support in his run for president). While swayed by inclusion of the Violence Against Women Act in the bill, Sanders said in an April 1994 speech on the House floor: “A society which neglects, which oppresses and which disdains a very significant part of its population — which leaves them hungry, impoverished, unemployed, uneducated, and utterly without hope — will, through cause and effect, create a population which is bitter, which is angry, which is violent, and a society which is crime-ridden. And that is the case in America, and it is the case in other countries throughout the world.”

In 2016, Biden was continuing to defend his key role in passage of the landmark crime bill. During recent months, gearing up for his current campaign, Biden acknowledged some of the law’s negative effects while still defending it and denying its huge impacts for mass incarceration. And Biden has avoided copping to — much less expressing remorse for — the toxic, racially laced rhetoric that he used to promote the bill. He simply refuses to renounce the Senate-floor oratory that he deployed to propel the legislation to President Clinton’s desk.

Unfortunately for Biden, online video is available that conveys not only his words but also the audibly arrogant tone with which he delivered them.

What does all this add up to? Anyone who doubts that Biden methodically mined racist political shafts for decades should read the well-documented New York magazine piece “Will Black Voters Still Love Biden When They Remember Who He Was?” It’s devastating.

The New York article, by journalist Eric Levitz, begins with the tip of a very cold white iceberg: “Biden once called state-mandated school integration ‘the most racist concept you can come up with,’ and Barack Obama ‘the first sort of mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.’ He was a staunch opponent of ‘forced busing’ in the 1970s, and leading crusader for mass incarceration throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Uncle Joe has described African-American felons as ‘predators’ too sociopathic to rehabilitate — and white supremacist senators as his friends.”

Such clear overviews of Biden’s racial behavior in politics have been rare. And news media have not illuminated what all this has to do with “electability.” Turnout from the Democratic Party’s base will be crucial to whether Trump can be defeated in November 2020. Biden’s record of dog-whistling is made to order for depressing enthusiasm and turnout from that base, especially among African Americans.

Apt to be a big political liability among voters who normally vote Democratic in large numbers, Joe Biden’s historic dog-whistling for racism is an incontrovertible reality. Denial of that reality could help him win the party’s nomination — and then help Donald Trump get re-elected.

The U.S. Stands to Lose Much More Than a War With Iran

After much back-and-forth posturing by the Trump administration, book-ended by national security adviser John Bolton accelerating the planned deployments of an aircraft carrier battle group and a B-52 bomber task force to the Middle East, and President Trump commenting, “I hope not” when asked whether there would be a war, the American commander in chief threatened to destroy Iran on Sunday. “If Iran wants to fight,” Trump tweeted, “that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!”

Trying to pinpoint what prompted Trump to communicate what amounts to a genocidal threat is like reading tea leaves—more art than science. But after seeing his effort to isolate Iran diplomatically rejected by a united Europe, and learning from military leaders that a war with Iran would be far costlier and much more problematic than he originally thought, the president reverted to character, lashing out with apocalyptic fury against a nation that has frustrated his administration from its inception.

Trump has backed himself into a corner. The self-imagined dealmaker sincerely believed that by applying economic pressure on Iran, backed up with the threat of force, the Iranian government would come to the negotiation table and agree to a nuclear deal that denied it everything it had achieved through diplomacy with the Obama administration. Trump believed he could bully America’s allies in Europe to go along with him. And, in the end, when he asked his military leaders to provide him with options to forcefully compel Iran to bend to his will, Trump was told that nothing short of an all-out war, involving more than 500,000 troops, could provide the outcome he sought, and even then only at great cost. Trump had run on a platform that promised an end to costly wars of choice in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. If he pulled the trigger on Iran, his chances of reelection in 2020 would be all but eliminated.

The heart of Trump’s frustration lies with the military options he has been presented with, namely “OPLAN 1002.” Short for “operations plan,” OPLAN 1002 is the U.S. war plan for major military conflict in the Persian Gulf. If the current state of heightened tension with Iran were to explode into a military confrontation, it would be OPLAN 1002, or some iteration thereof, that U.S. military commanders would use to guide their operations, which could include neutralizing Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and securing the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which about 18 million barrels of oil, which is 20% of global production, transits every day.

The issue of Iran’s nuclear capability has moved front and center after Trump’s fateful decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal last year and reimpose U.S. sanctions, including those on the sale of oil, Iran’s economic lifeblood. As a result, Iran has suspended certain aspects of the nuclear deal concerning the storage of heavy water and enriched uranium and is threatening to resume the enrichment of 20% enriched uranium, restart a heavy-water nuclear reactor and install advanced centrifuges. Moreover, if the U.S. moves to impede Iran’s ability to export oil, Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic. For its part, the U.S. has promised to keep the Strait of Hormuz open through military action.

Vice Admiral Jim Malloy, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet, embodies the arrogance that infects senior American military leadership when it comes to the issue of securing the Strait of Hormuz. His command recently assumed operational control of the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group, diverted to the Middle East as part of America’s military buildup against Iran. Addressing the question of whether the carrier battle group would remain in the Arabian Sea, where it currently operates, or if it would transit the strait and operate in the Persian Gulf, Malloy told reporters, “If I need to bring it inside the strait, I will do so. I’m not restricted in any way, I’m not challenged in any way, to operate her anywhere in the Middle East.”

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by Gareth Porter

Except he is, even if he won’t admit it. In the event of an all-out war with Iran, the USS Abraham Lincoln has about an 80% chance of survival while operating in the Arabian Sea provided its neither launching nor recovering aircraft at the time. (Iran could still locate and target the carrier group using its own surveillance assets and ballistic missiles, although the freedom of movement afforded by the Arabian Sea offers a measure of protection from attack.)

Operating inside the Persian Gulf is a whole different ballgame. Iran would overwhelm the Abraham Lincoln’s battle group with swarms of small boats, submarines, drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, the carrier’s maneuverability and operational flexibility limited by its exposure to Iran’s lengthy coastline and the Gulf’s shallow waters. Such an operation would reduce the battle group’s odds of survival to about 20%; its chances of sustaining combat operations against Iran while operating in the Persian Gulf are virtually nil.

The vulnerability of the USS Abraham Lincoln and its eponymously named battle group is ultimately part and parcel of the larger issue of America’s ability to project military power in the region today. The threat posed by Iran’s military is unlike anything the U.S. has had to confront since the end of the Cold War; it most certainly has not faced anything like it in terms of sophistication and capacity during the 18-year global War on Terror that has dominated military planning since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. OPLAN 1002 was designed for a major military conflict involving modern combined arms operations. And yet, for the past two decades, the U.S. has been involved exclusively in low-intensity counterinsurgency warfare, fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as Shi’a militia, Sunni tribesmen and the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria.

The U.S. Marine Corps, which bears the brunt of the responsibility for securing the Strait of Hormuz through its amphibious warfare capability, is no longer capable of conducting the kind of forcible entry operations required to fulfill this mission. In short, the requirements set forth by OPLAN 1002 are unattainable for much, if not all, of the U.S. military today. Any conflict with Iran based upon the assumptions and requirements set forth in OPLAN 1002 would most probably result in an American defeat brought about not by Iran prevailing militarily, but by the U.S. being unable to accomplish its objectives, leaving Iran intact and defiant.

OPLAN 1002 is a war plan that has been decades in the making. When I entered active duty with the Marine Corps in 1984, the U.S. had just transitioned from the Carter-era Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, formed in 1980 to secure the Persian Gulf from a Soviet attack or subversion and insurrection conducted by a Soviet proxy or regional ally, to a dedicated combat command known as U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM. I was assigned to the 7th Marine Amphibious Brigade, which operated as the Marine Corps component of the Rapid Deployment Force, in which my first assignment was to update the intelligence annex to OPLAN 1002. That summer, I participated in a major command post exercise conducted by I MAF (First Marine Amphibious Force), the higher headquarters for 7th MAB, in which we put OPLAN 1002 into practice, inserting (via a map-based study) a large Marine combat force into Iran for the purpose of moving inland and engaging an invading Soviet force.

Among the first things that struck me were the limitations on U.S. forcible entry capability. One of our planning assumptions was that Iran would be a passive partner in our operations, meaning we would be able to make entry to the port cities of Chah Bahar (on the Arabian Sea coast) and Bandar Abbas (astride the Strait of Hormuz) unopposed. In preparing the intelligence annex, I had noted it was highly unlikely the Iranians would behave in such a manner, and that we should be prepared to conduct full-scale forcible entry operations. The problem was that we didn’t have the capacity to project and sustain meaningful military power ashore in a contested environment, and even if we did, our combat power would be so depleted by dealing with the Iranian threat that there would be nothing left to confront an invading Soviet force. Since our mission was to deter Soviet aggression, we manufactured planning assumptions such as a passive Iranian host to make the exercise possible.

Even with the Iranians standing by, the logistical challenges of moving personnel and equipment ashore were astronomical. Simply put, we had to artificially slow down the Soviet advance, and limit Soviet interdiction operations, so we could off-load the ships. Even then, we ignored real-world issues such as narrow shipping lanes, congestion, lack of port facilities, etc. Had this been a real-world contingency, our shipping would have experienced a traffic jam into the Iranian ports that would have made them a sitting duck for any determined opponent; any sabotage or successful attack on the port itself would have made transitioning personnel, equipment and material from ship to shore impossible.

In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the U.S. was called upon to implement OPLAN 1002, this time in response to a regional threat in the Arabian Peninsula. In this iteration, however, the U.S. was able to make extensive (and exclusive) use of friendly Aerial and Sea Ports of Debarkation (i.e., airfields and ports under the control of friendly forces), which allowed for the uncontested and unimpeded flow of personnel and material into the Persian Gulf and ashore in Saudi Arabia. Even under these permissive conditions, it still took months to get enough combat power deployed into the Persian Gulf to make offensive operations feasible.

For the Marine Corps, and to a lesser extent the Navy, the battleplan adopted by General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of CENTCOM, was a disappointment. There would be no amphibious assaults against Iraq. Rather, two Marine divisions and accompanying Marine air wings would be deployed ashore in a manner that mimicked the employment of U.S. Army and Air Force assets. Moreover, the assignment given to the Marines—assaulting the teeth of the Iraqi defenses to “fix” them in place while the U.S. Army conducted a sweeping flanking operation—was considered suicidal. General Al Gray, the commandant of the Marine Corps, created a special “ad hoc study team,” reporting to Maj. Gen. Matthew Caulfield, the commander of the Marine Corps Warfighting Center, in Quantico, Virginia, to develop alternative courses of action for the employment of Marine combat units. Because of my experience with 7th MAB, I was assigned to the team as its intelligence officer.

After considering several options, the team settled on a bold division-sized amphibious assault on the Al Faw peninsula, which would advance inland and seize the Iraqi logistics hub of Az Zubair. One of the more innovative aspects of this plan, known by the code name “Operation Tiger,” was the employment of existing roll-on, roll-off (Ro-Ro) shipping as improvised causeways, allowing for the rapid transfer of combat-ready forces from ship to shore. This bypassed the need for the kind of port infrastructure usually required to offload a division-sized assault force. OPLAN 1002 called for a division-sized force being able to be projected ashore at D-Day plus 12 (i.e., 12 days after the initial assault); Operation Tiger envisioned a division-sized force ashore at D-Day plus one, with Az Zubair captured by D-Day plus 4.

While Operation Tiger received the enthusiastic endorsement of Caulfield, Gray and Headquarters Marine Corps, its unconventional approach to amphibious operations proved too much for  Schwarzkopf and his CENTCOM planning staff, who were married to their operational concept. There would be no amphibious forcible entry operations during Operation Desert Storm. (As a footnote, I was approached by the chief of staff of CENTCOM Special Operations Command to adapt aspects of Operation Tiger so that Arab coalition forces could be rapidly moved into Kuwait City; concerns over Iraqi mines and casualties ended this effort as well.)

The next adaptation of OPLAN 1002 came in 2003, when U.S. forces were deployed to the Persian Gulf (again, using friendly aerial and seaports of debarkation in Kuwait) to participate in the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. The forces deployed in support of the Iraqi invasion (192,000 U.S. forces, accompanied by 45,000 British and a few thousand other coalition forces) were considerably less than the 750,000 U.S. forces deployed during Operation Desert Storm. Even so, it took several months for these forces to be assembled and equipped for combat operations under permissive conditions. (Of note, the only amphibious assault conducted during the invasion was done by the British, who took four days to secure the Al Faw peninsula using two battalions of Royal Marines facing light resistance.)

Despite the massive size of its annual budget, the U.S. military today is but a shadow of its former self when it comes to amphibious operations. The U.S. Marines are not able to conduct brigade-sized forcible entry operations except under ad hoc conditions, and even then, only against a lightly held objective. Any notion of landing Marines on a contested shore in Iran is suicidal. And yet any plan to secure the Strait of Hormuz would require the seizure of Iranian-held islands located in the strait, the port city of Bandar Abbas, and the entire Iranian coastline along the strait inland to depths of up to 50 kilometers. This mission far exceeds the operational capacity and capability of the Marine Corps. Airpower alone cannot accomplish this objective either; as previously discussed, the U.S. aircraft carriers will be operating under duress, reducing effectiveness, and U.S. airbases in the region will be under near continuous Iranian ballistic missile attack, resulting in their closure or reduced effectiveness.

The biggest threat facing any U.S. force assembled in the region will come from Iran’s ballistic missiles. During the Gulf War, I was involved in the campaign to hunt down and destroy Iraqi ballistic missiles that were being fired at targets in Israel and the Arabian Peninsula. We enjoyed virtual air supremacy and were able to dedicate thousands of sorties in support of the counter-missile campaign. Special operations teams were inserted on the ground inside Iraq to assist in this effort. At the end of the day, not a single Iraqi missile launcher was destroyed by coalition forces. Today, in Yemen, the Houthi rebels use ballistic missiles to attack Saudi Arabian targets. Again, the Saudi Air Force, operating with total impunity (and supported by U.S. intelligence, which provides targeting support), has been unable to prevent the Houthi from launching missiles. Mobile relocatable targets such as the vehicle-mounted ballistic missiles employed by Iran will be virtually impossible to stop; any operation against Iran can anticipate continuous attacks from Iranian ballistic missiles for the duration of the conflict.

The version of OPLAN 1002 being discussed at the Pentagon today is a limited-scope operation involving some 120,000 troops. This force would have minimal forcible entry capability, and instead be geared toward conducting an air campaign designed to neutralize Iran’s nuclear infrastructure while securing the Strait of Hormuz; as such, most of the forces involved would be deployed to regional airbases and aboard U.S. Navy ships. As has already been discussed, this force will not be able to accomplish its mission of securing the Strait of Hormuz, which means that all oil shipments transiting the strait will be halted. Moreover, the Houthi drone attack against Saudi oil pumping stations (using Iranian drones) has shown that the totality of the oil-producing infrastructure in the region is vulnerable to interdiction. As such, any military operation against Iran will result in the near total shutdown of oil exportation from the Gulf Arab states, which will have a devastating impact on the economy of the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world.

This modified OPLAN 1002 will most likely make heavy use of airpower, including both air- and sea-launched cruise missiles. While the U.S. can launch several hundred cruise missiles a day against Iranian targets, this number is virtually meaningless. Iran has spent decades preparing for a war with the U.S. and has studied American weaponry to a degree that is perhaps unappreciated in the West. Iran has in its possession intact examples of U.S. cruise missiles recovered from battlefields in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as from scores of missiles that flew off course and landed on Iranian soil.) Russia has shared with Iran radar and electronic intelligence on the U.S. cruise missiles, and Iran’s air defenses are prepared to engage. Likewise, Iran has been carefully monitoring U.S. air operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and has collected similarly in-depth intelligence on U.S. aircraft and air-delivered munitions. The successful Iranian operation to hijack an American RQ-170 stealth drone over Afghanistan and divert it to Iran, where it was taken under control and reverse-engineered by Iranian scientists, stands as an example of Iran’s capabilities in this regard.

It will take the U.S. weeks, if not months, to deploy enough air power into the region to sustain a meaningful air campaign against Iran. During this time, Iran will disperse its forces to remote sites, many of which are underground and impervious to attack. U.S. cruise missiles, costing some $1.4 million each, will be destroying empty buildings, while U.S. aircraft will have to fly in contested airspace for the first time this century, decreasing operational efficiency while suffering casualties in terms of downed aircraft and aircrew that could very well prove to be unsustainable. Any attempt to militarily engage Iran with a force level of 120,000 troops would be sheer folly and doomed to fail. This does not mean Iran will escape destruction—far from it. U.S. aircraft will reach their targets, and U.S. munitions will be employed with great effect. Iran’s civil and industrial infrastructure will be devastated, and tens of thousands of Iranian civilians would be killed. But the U.S. air campaign will not defeat the Iranian military, which will not only defend Iranian territory but also strike out against U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region, as well as military and industrial targets, including oil and gas infrastructure, of any nation providing assistance to the American war effort.

The bottom line is that any military engagement of Iran based upon the force structure supported by the 120,000-troop figure cited by the media cannot, and will not, result in a victory for the United States. Moreover, by initiating an armed conflict with such limited resources, the U.S. could very well be setting itself up for defeat. Iran has the capability to sink U.S. naval vessels, shoot down U.S. aircraft and destroy airbases supporting U.S. air operations. Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq could very easily overrun U.S. military bases in those two countries, annihilating the garrisons based there. U.S. airpower that would normally be employed to defend these garrisons would be tied down in supporting operations over Iran.

President Trump has dismissed the reports citing the plan to deploy 120,000 U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf as “fake news,” noting that if he were to engage Iran militarily, he would use “a hell of a lot more troops than that.” This is closer to the truth. OPLAN 1002, in its current iteration (which is derived from realistic calculations regarding actual force availability), probably envisions up to 500,000 U.S. troops for any full-scale war with Iran. This number would support an actual invasion of Iran, which would probably be conducted from bases in Azerbaijan and from a beachhead established at Chah Bahar, on the coast of the Arabian Sea.

There are three major problems with any “massive intervention” operation against Iran. First and foremost, it would effectively denude U.S. forces worldwide, meaning the U.S. would lack any meaningful military capacity to respond to crises in Europe or the Pacific. Second, it would require significant regional support, including from Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan, which is highly problematic. Even here there would be no guarantee of an American victory. Iran was behind the successful resistance of Hezbollah against Israel in August 2006, and there is every reason to believe Iran has prepared a defense designed to lure any invading force deep into its territory, and then cut it off and destroy it. While the defeat of the U.S. military on the battlefield is an unlikely outcome, denying the U.S. an outright victory is a distinct possibility.

This is the reality that confronts Trump as he wrestles with the consequences of his hyper-aggressive policy posture toward Iran. Having embraced a policy of “maximum pressure” designed to compel Iran into foregoing its nuclear program, Trump is now confronted with the harsh fact his policy has failed, and the consequences of this failure could very well mean an Iran with increased nuclear capability, with the U.S. unable to build a coalition capable of reining it in. Trump has, for the moment, put the brakes on any precipitous rush toward war with Iran, instructing the Defense Department not to provoke a confrontation. However, he still must deal with European anger over the U.S. policy of economic sanctions targeting Iran and the detrimental impact of his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

In the spring of 2018, Trump ignored the advice of his then-secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster to stick with the Iran nuclear deal. Instead, he replaced both with Mike Pompeo and John Bolton respectively, each of whom advised Trump to withdraw from that agreement, thereby setting the U.S. on its current policy course regarding Iran. Trump ran for president on a platform he would not only get the U.S. out of its seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but avoid any similar misadventures. He could easily be facing Joe Biden in the 2020 election, and the last thing he wants to do is offset the former vice president’s politically damaging support for the Iraq war by getting the U.S. bogged down in a similarly disastrous conflict in Iran—especially one so clearly a product of Trump’s own political miscalculations.

There remains the possibility Trump will back away from his threat to eliminate Iran as a nation state and instead focus his efforts on sustaining the current economic boom upon which his bid for reelection hinges. Iran is not looking for a fight, but neither is it willing to accede to the unrealistic demands placed on it by the Trump administration regarding its nuclear program and regional presence. By raising the specter of an all-or-nothing confrontation, however, Trump is creating the conditions for a self-fulfilling prophecy, one in which he will get the war he claims not to want while costing him the second term he claims he does. But the demise of Donald Trump’s political ambition is the least of the casualties of such a policy. A war with Iran will cost America tens of thousands of casualties, while killing or wounding hundreds of thousands of Iranians. Any U.S. victory would be pyrrhic in nature, crippling the U.S. and global economies while further diminishing America’s already diminished position in the world.

But, perhaps most important, it would be a war that, if America’s experience with OPLAN 1002 tells us anything, we may not win—at least not in a conventional sense. The prospect of an American invasion force stalled in the deserts of Iran, surrounded by a hostile population and under continuous attack, is very real, and meets the “extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its allies and partners” threshold for the employment of nuclear weapons as set forth in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review published by the Department of Defense.

It is this reality that may have prompted Trump’s threat to “end” Iran—a madman’s lashing out in frustration at a world that refuses to behave as he desires, and therefore must be destroyed as a result.

 

They’re ‘Booksmart,’ Clueless and Utterly Hilarious

Molly and Amy are budding academic overachievers who revere Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Elizabeth Warren and Malala Yousafzai. (“I’m calling a Malala” is their code for “Get me outta here.”)

Molly is so Type-A that she corrects the spelling of graffiti scrawled on the walls of her high school’s unisex bathroom. Amy is such a social justice warrior that she plans to volunteer in Botswana, where she will help women make their own tampons. Personifications of all work and no play, these scholastic Brahmins and social Untouchables are thisclose to making it through their senior year.

In “Booksmart,” the euphoric, lightning-paced comedy that marks the directorial debut of actress Olivia Wilde, these best friends and know-it-alls get schooled in the 24 hours between the last day of their senior year and commencement.

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) have had their noses buried in books so long that they assumed their classmates didn’t care about school. In the hours before graduation, the besties belatedly realize that unlike them, their peers did care—but not only about school. This epiphany bursts their bubble of superiority, both literally and figuratively, and is accompanied by their getting hit by water-filled condoms that explode in their faces. Both actresses are marvelous, as is the supporting cast that includes Jason Sudeikis, Will Forte, Jessica Williams and Billie Lourd.

Typical of Molly’s and Amy’s social cluelessness is that they have fake IDs purchased not to buy liquor but to go to a 24-hour library. (Yes, there are all-night libraries, but they tend to be at colleges and medical schools. In any event, this is a farce, and there is a startlingly funny scene set in an all-night library.)

How is it that their classmates got into top-tier colleges and had social lives, too? Molly, the alpha of the two BFFs—and high -school valedictorian, natch—unilaterally declares to the timid Amy that on graduation eve they should party as hard as they have studied. Interestingly, Our Heroines don’t live on social media or for the Internet; they use both as informational tools.

It’s an R-rated movie, which means there is profanity and sexual candor. But despite Molly’s longing looks at a Sk8er Boi and Amy’s at a Sk8er girl, the sex-positive film conspicuously lacks human nudity and sexual objectification.

There is, however, a bit of Barbie-type objectification. After the girls’ ubiquitous classmate, Gigi (Lourd, daughter of Carrie Fisher), slips our heroines psychedelic-infused strawberries, the young women hallucinate they possess the endless legs and centerfold proportions of the popular dolls. And that they know they shouldn’t be OK with it, but they are.

This is a droll way of satirizing political correctness and being PC, too, making for perhaps the most hilarious sequence in a recent movie comedy. It is also the result of four female screenwriters and a female filmmaker having some fun with received ideas about the idealized female body. And nota bene: The film earned the “Gender-Balanced” stamp of approval from ReFrame, the advocacy group dedicated to gender parity on the screen and behind the camera.

Since its premiere at South by Southwest in March, observers have described “Booksmart” as a fem-centric version of “Superbad.” The two films do have a family connection in that Jonah Hill, one of the high school seniors in the latter film, is the real-life elder brother of Feldstein. Seems to me, though, that “Superbad” was about bros out to lose their virginity, and “Booksmart” about besties out to gain social savoir-faire. Anyhow, I need to see it again, stat, because I was laughing so hard that I missed a few jokes.

It’s a bit beside the point to compare “Booksmart” to “Superbad.” Wilde’s film is super-good.

 

 

Michael Avenatti Charged With Defrauding Stormy Daniels

NEW YORK—Michael Avenatti, the attorney who rocketed to fame through his representation of porn star Stormy Daniels in her battles with President Donald Trump, was charged Wednesday with ripping her off.

Federal prosecutors in New York City say Avenatti used a doctored document to divert about $300,000 that Daniels was supposed to get from a book deal, then used the money for personal and business expenses. Only half of that money was paid back, prosecutors said.

Daniels isn’t named in the court filing, but the details of the case, including the date her book was released, make it clear that she is the client involved.

Avenatti denied the allegations on Twitter.

“No monies relating to Ms. Daniels were ever misappropriated or mishandled. She received millions of dollars worth of legal services and we spent huge sums in expenses. She directly paid only $100.00 for all that she received. I look forward to a jury hearing the evidence,” he wrote.

Avenatti added in a later tweet that his agreement for representing Daniels “included a percentage of any book proceeds.”

The charges pile on top of previous allegations of legal misconduct by Avenatti, who represented Daniels when she sued to be released from a nondisclosure agreement involving an alleged tryst with Trump. The president denies an affair took place.

Avenatti was previously charged in New York with trying to extort up to $25 million from Nike by threatening to expose claims that the shoemaker paid off high school basketball players to steer them to Nike-sponsored colleges. And in Los Angeles, he’s facing a multicount federal indictment alleging that he stole millions of dollars from clients, didn’t pay taxes, committed bank fraud and lied during bankruptcy proceedings.

Avenatti has denied the allegations against him on both coasts, saying he expects to be exonerated. The Los Angeles charges alone carry a potential penalty of more than 300 years in prison.

“I look forward to a jury hearing all of the evidence and passing judgment on my conduct,” Avenatti wrote in a text message to The Associated Press.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, initially hired Avenatti to handle a lawsuit she filed last year in which she sought to invalidate the nondisclosure agreement she’d signed with Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen in exchange for $130,000.

The money was supposed to buy her silence during Trump’s run for president about an alleged affair between the two. In August, Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws in connection with the payment.

In announcing the new charges Wednesday, prosecutors said that Avenatti sent a “fraudulent and unauthorized letter” to Daniels’ literary agent, instructing the agent to send payments not to Daniels but to a bank account Avenatti controlled. They said he used the stolen funds to pay employees of his law firm and pay for hotels, airfare, dry cleaning and his Ferrari.

“Far from zealously representing his client, Avenatti, as alleged, instead engaged in outright deception and theft, victimizing rather than advocating for his client,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in news release.

Avenatti “blatantly lied” and stole to maintain his “extravagant lifestyle,” Berman said.

Daniels raised concerns with Avenatti about late payments around the time her book, “Full Disclosure,” was published in October, according to the indictment.

“When is the publisher going to cough up my money,” she asked Avenatti in early December, according to the indictment.

Avenatti responded that he was “working them and threatening litigation,” prosecutors said, but he did not tell Daniels he had already received the money.

Daniels began publicly raising concerns about Avenatti’s conduct in November. In a statement, she said Avenatti had launched a fundraising effort to raise money for her legal case without telling her. She also said he had filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump, on her behalf, against her wishes.

“For months I’ve asked Michael Avenatti to give me accounting information about the fund my supporters so generously donated to for my safety and legal defense. He has repeatedly ignored those requests,” she said. “Days ago I demanded again, repeatedly, that he tell me how the money was being spent and how much was left. Instead of answering me, without my permission or even my knowledge Michael launched another crowdfunding campaign to raise money on my behalf. I learned about it on Twitter.”

At the time, Avenatti responded that he was still Daniels’ “biggest champion.”

He said that under his retention agreement, she had agreed to pay him just $100 for his services, and he was entitled to keep all the money he raised for her legal defense to defray what he said were substantial costs of her case.

The defamation case initiated by Avenatti against Trump backfired, with a judge ordering her to pay the president’s legal bills.

When Avenatti was first charged with defrauding other clients and extorting Nike in March, Daniels said she was “saddened but not shocked.”

She added on Twitter that she had fired Avenatti a month earlier after “discovering that he had dealt with me extremely dishonestly.”

___

Associated Press writer Tom Hays contributed to this report.

Federal Judge Refuses to Block Trump Bank Subpoenas

NEW YORK — The Latest on President Donald Trump’s efforts to block congressional subpoenas seeking records from his banks (all times local):

4 p.m.

A federal judge in New York is refusing to block congressional subpoenas seeking financial records from two banks that did business with President Donald Trump.

U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos said during a hearing Wednesday that Trump and his company were unlikely to succeed in a lawsuit arguing that the subpoenas were unlawful and unconstitutional.

Democrats in Congress have sought the information from Deutsche Bank and Capital One.

Deutsche Bank has lent Trump’s real estate company millions of dollars over the years.

The lawyers for the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees say they need access to documents from the banks to investigate possible “foreign influence in the U.S. political process.”

___

1:33 a.m.

A judge is poised to hear oral arguments Wednesday over President Donald Trump’s effort to block congressional subpoenas seeking financial records from two banks.

The hearing occurs after congressional Democrats sought the information from Deutsche Bank and Capital One.

Trump, his family and his company contend in a Manhattan federal court lawsuit that the subpoenas are unlawful and unenforceable.

Lawyers for the congressional Democrats responded by saying ruling in Trump’s favor would undermine the constitutional separation of powers and impede congressional probes.

Deutsche Bank has lent Trump’s real estate company millions of dollars over the years.

Prior to the hearing before Judge Edgardo Ramos, Trump’s lawyers say the judge should temporarily block Congress from obtaining the records. They say they want enough time to fully litigate the subpoenas’ legality.

18 Ways Julian Assange Changed the World

Julian Assange is a dick. It’s important you understand that.

Assange and WikiLeaks revealed the American military’s war crimes, the American government’s corruption and the American corporate media’s pathetic servile flattery to the power elite. So, if you’re a member of our ruling class, you would view those as textbook examples of dickery.

In a moment I’m going to list all the ways Julian Assange changed the world by being a dick.

In an evolved and fully realized society, the oligarchy would see Assange as a dangerous criminal (which they do), and the average working men and women would view him as justice personified (which they don’t). We would celebrate him even as the mass media told us to hope for his downfall—like a Batman or a Robin Hood or an Ozzy Osbourne (the early years, not the cleaning-dog-turds-off-his-carpet years).

But we are not evolved and this is not Gotham City and average Americans don’t root for the truth. Many Americans cheer for Assange’s imprisonment. They believe the corporate plutocratic talking points and yearn for the days when we no longer have to hear about our country’s crimes against humanity or our bankers’ crimes against the economy. Subconsciously they must believe that a life in which we’re tirelessly exploited by rich villains and know all about it thanks to the exhaustive efforts of an eccentric Australian is worse than one in which we’re tirelessly exploited by rich villains yet know nothing about it.

“Ignorance is bliss” is the meditative mantra of the United States of America.

Julian Assange has been arrested and is now locked away in British custody. The U.S. government wants to extradite him, regardless of the official version, for the crime of revealing our government’s crimes. Nearly every government on our third rock from the sun despises the man for bringing transparency to the process of ruling the unwashed masses. (The level of wash has, however, increased thanks to aggressive marketing campaigns from a variety of shampoo brands.)

It is politically inconvenient at this time for the screaming corporate news to remind our entire citizenry what exactly WikiLeaks has done for us. So you won’t see the following list of WikiLeaks’ accomplishments anywhere on your corporate airwaves—in the same way the mainstream media did not begin every report about Chelsea Manning’s trial with a rundown of the war crimes she helped reveal.

And Chelsea Manning’s most famous leak is arguably also WikiLeaks’ most famous leak, so it’ll top this list:

1) That would be the notorious Collateral Murder video, showing U.S. air crew gunning down unarmed Iraqi civilians with an enthusiasm that couldn’t be matched by an eight year-old winning a five-foot-tall stuffed animal at the country fair. They murdered between 12 and 18 innocent people, two of them Reuters journalists.

Zero people have been arrested for the collateral murders. Yet Julian Assange has been arrested for revealing them.

2) WikiLeaks brought us the Guantanamo Bay “Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures”—showing that many of the prisoners held on the U.S. military detention facility were completely innocent, and that some were hidden from Red Cross officials. (Because when you’re torturing innocent people, you kinda want to do that in peace and quiet, away from prying eyes. It’s very easy to get distracted, and then you lose your place and have to start all over again.)

None of the soldiers torturing innocent people at Gitmo have been arrested for it. Yet Julian Assange has been arrested for revealing it.

3) Not content with revealing only war crimes, WikiLeaks in 2008 came out with the secret bibles of Scientology, which showed that aliens, um, run the world or … aliens are inside all of us or … aliens give us indigestion. I can’t really remember.

But no one has ever been arrested for perpetrating that nutbag cult. Yet Julian Assange has for revealing it.

Many people believe WikiLeaks has unveiled only crimes of the American government, but that’s completely false. The U.S. corporate media doesn’t want average Americans to understand that WikiLeaks has upped the level of transparency around the world.

4–9) WikiLeaks posted videos of Tibetan dissidents in China fighting back, videos which were not allowed to be viewed in China. They revealed the Peru oil scandal, and that Russia was spying on its citizens’ cell phones, and the Minton Report on toxic dumping in Africa, and the Syria Files—showing the inner workings of the Syrian government. And WikiLeaks displayed to the global audience a secret Australian supreme court gag order that stopped the Australian press from reporting on a huge bribery scandal that involved the central bank and international leaders.

Assange is hated by governments around the world. As much as they may like transparency, when it comes to other countries (specifically the United States), they don’t want their own particular pile of shit on full display. It’s kinda like when most people laugh heartily after an up-skirt photo of a celebrity is published in the tabloids, but at the same time, none of us want up-skirt photos of us all over the web. (I know I don’t because I haven’t shaved up there since Carter was in office.)

As far as I know, none of the political figures involved in these scandals have gone to prison for participating in them. Yet Julian Assange has for revealing them.

10)  Let’s not forget the Iraq War logs—hundreds of thousands of documents relating to America’s illegal invasion of Iraq, which we called a “war,” but I think a war needs to have two sides. Iraq’s elite Republican guard turned out to be three guys and a donkey … and the donkey didn’t even have good aim.

So far as I can tell, no one committing the war crimes evidenced in the Iraq War logs has been locked up for them. Yet Julian Assange has for revealing them.

11) WikiLeaks showed us the highly secretive Bilderberg Group meeting reports. The Bilderberg Group is made up of incredibly powerful men and women who get together and decide how to rule over all of us street people, all the while sitting on thrones made from the bones of the babies of nonbelievers. They’re often accused of being lizard people, but really they’re just regular ol’ sociopaths with lizard skin they purchased from a plastic surgeon in Malibu for half a million dollars.

I don’t think anyone from the Bilderberg Group is being tortured in solitary confinement right now. Yet Julian Assange is for revealing who they are.

12) The Barclays Bank tax avoidance scheme netted Barclays one billion pounds a year.

While it was ordered to pay 500 million pounds in lost taxes, no one was arrested for that theft from citizens. Yet Julian Assange was for revealing it.

13) The Afghan War Diaries consisted of 92,000 documents related to our destruction of Afghanistan. They detailed friendly fire incidents and civilian casualties. According to WikiLeaks, the diaries showed that “When reporting their own activities U.S. Units are inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay the number of people killed or otherwise make excuses for themselves.”

It’s tough to read this without being floored at the comedy routine that our military actions have become. I picture this scenario happening every day in Afghanistan:

U.S. Soldier #1: This guy we just killed was an insurgent.

U.S. Soldier #2: How do you know?

U.S. Soldier #1: Because we killed him.

U.S. Soldier #2: Why’d we kill him?

U.S. Soldier #1: Because he’s an insurgent.

U.S. Soldier #2: How do you know?

U.S. Soldier #1: Because we killed him.

(Repeat until lightheaded.)

I am unaware of anyone locked away for these war crimes. Yet Julian Assange is locked away—for revealing them.

14) WikiLeaks also unveiled hundreds of thousands of U.S. State Department cables that showed more clearly than ever how our secretive government rules its empire with little to no input from the American people. Among many other things, the cables revealed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered diplomats to spy on French, British, Russian and Chinese delegations at the U.N. Security Council. It also showed that Arab nations urged the U.S. to strike Iran, and much more.

Our ruling elite of course view this as a massive breach of national security. That’s understandable. But that world view comes into play only if you think the elites are the only ones who should know how our nation is run. To answer this question for yourself, do the following experiment. Pull up a photo of Donald Trump—a really close-up image of his blister-colored, bulbous face. Now, look at it intensely for five minutes. … After you’ve done that, tell me you want the ruling elite to be the only ones who know what the fuck is going on. Go ahead and try it—I’ll wait.

Ostensibly, the concept of our government was that the ruling class would be accountable to us, the average Americans. To you and me. To the workers and the number crunchers. To the single moms and the cashiers and the street sweepers and the fluffers on the porn sets. We’re supposed to vote based on our knowledge of how our government is functioning. But if the entirety of our representatives’ criminal behavior is labeled top secret for national security purposes, then we aren’t really an informed populace, are we?

So for all that was unveiled in the State Department cables, no one has been locked up. But Julian Assange has been for revealing them.

15) The Stratfor emails—this was millions of emails that showed how a private intelligence agency was used by its U.S. corporate and government clients to target activists and protesters.

No one at Stratfor is currently locked away. But Julian Assange is for revealing the truth.

16) Then there’s the trade deals. TPP, TISA and TTIP—all three amount to one of the largest attempts at corporate takeover ever conceived. All three were more secretive than Donald Trump’s taxes. Government officials and corporate lawyers and lobbyists wrote every word in private. Not even Congress saw the Trans-Pacific Partnership until very late in the process. The only organization to show the American citizens (and European citizens) some of those documents before they were made into law? WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks made us aware of the corporate restraints that were about to be placed on us, and that’s what allowed activists to pressure Trump to pull out of the TPP.

None of those secretive corporate titans are imprisoned for their attempted power grab, but Julian Assange is for revealing it.

17)  The DNC emails. I’ll explain for those of you who have been living in a cave that is itself inside a yellow-and-blue-makes-green sealed Tupperware container. The Democratic National Committee’s emails gave us proof concerning just how rigged the Democratic primaries really are. They proved the media was in bed with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. They even showed that Obama’s entire first-term cabinet was selected by Citibank. Yes, Citibank. (I would find it less offensive if his cabinet had been decided by a rabid raccoon, or the pus oozing out of Darth Vader’s face or Vince McMahon’s concussed frontal lobe.)

Whatever election integrity movement exists right now, it owes a lot to these revelations by WikiLeaks. After being sued over this matter, the DNC’s lawyers admitted in court that the DNC has no obligation to have a fair primary election. It’s their right to rig it.

But don’t try to get angry about this, because if you do, the CIA has a myriad ways to fuck up your life.

18) In 2017 WikiLeaks posted a trove of CIA documents called “Vault 7.” It detailed their capabilities, including remotely taking over cars, smart TVs, web browsers and smartphones.

After I found out about that, for a solid two weeks I thought, “Screw it. I’m going full Amish. One hundred percent. Let’s see the CIA hack my butter churn. Are they going to use backdoor software to get inside my rustic wooden bow-saw? Even if they could, what are they going to listen to—my conversation about how mee bobblin fraa redd up for rutschin’ ’round. Say no more! Schmunzla wunderbar!”

So is anybody at the CIA chained up for violating our privacy in every way possible? No, but Julian Assange is for revealing it.

By thrusting the truth upon the people of earth, WikiLeaks helped create movements worldwide like the Arab Spring and Occupy. And don’t forget, at first WikiLeaks and Assange were celebrated for their amazing work. In 2011 even Amnesty International hailed WikiLeaks as one of the Arab Spring catalysts. The Guardian said: “The year 2010 may well be remembered as a watershed year when activists and journalists used new technology to speak truth to power and, in so doing, pushed for greater respect for human rights. … It is also the year when repressive governments faced the real possibility that their days were numbered.”

So why have so many outlets and people turned against Assange and WikiLeaks? Because it turned out he wasn’t revealing only repressive Arab regimes. He also revealed U.S.-backed coups and war crimes around the world. He exposed the criminality and villainy of the American ruling elite.

Nothing published on WikiLeaks has ever been proven untrue. Compare that record to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News or any mainstream outlet. Assange has been nominated for multiple Nobel Peace Prizes, and nearly every respected media outlet has used source material from WikiLeaks in their reporting. Yet after all this and after seven years in captivity, the man who laid bare our criminal leaders and showed each one of us our chains is not receiving parades and accolades. He and those who helped him reveal the truth are the only ones endlessly punished.

We are all Julian Assange. As long as he’s imprisoned, we can never be free.

—

If you think this column is important, please share it. Also you can join Lee Camp’s free email newsletter here .

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “ Redacted Tonight .”

Trump Stalks Out on Democrats, Demands End to Russia Probes

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump abruptly stalked out of a meeting with congressional leaders Wednesday with a flat declaration he would no longer work with Democrats unless they drop all investigations in the aftermath of the special counsel’s Trump-Russia report.

Democrats said the walkout seemed scripted. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it all “very, very, very strange” and said she was praying for Trump and the nation.

After turning and leaving the three-minute non-meeting with the Democratic leaders, scheduled for a discussion of U.S. infrastructure problems, Trump strode to the Rose Garden where aides had gathered reporters and TV cameras for his demand that Congress drop its investigations that are increasingly leading to talk of what he called the “i-word” — impeachment.

Trump assailed Pelosi in particular for her comment earlier in the morning on Capitol Hill that she believed the president was engaged in a “cover-up” of the Russia probe.

Trump said, “I walked into the room and I told Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi I want to do infrastructure,” referring to the top Democratic senator, New York’s Chuck Schumer.

“But you know what we can’t do it under these circumstances,” Trump said. “So get these phony investigations over.”

The president didn’t shake anyone’s hands or take a seat, but spent three minutes contending he had been prepared to work on infrastructure, trade and other issues but now he couldn’t because Pelosi said “something terrible,” according to an administration official and another person familiar with what happened in the room. Trump then left before anyone else could speak.

Pelosi said to those still in the room — no Republican lawmakers were there — that she had known the president was not serious about infrastructure and would find a way out, according to another person familiar with the meeting.

Back on Capitol Hill, Pelosi said Trump “just took a pass” on working on national infrastructure problems.

Pelosi, flanked by Schumer and other House and Senate leaders, said the Democrats had gone to the White House “to give this president the opportunity to have a signature infrastructure initiative.” She said she would be praying for the president.

Trump tweeted back: “and Nancy, thank you so much for your prayers. I know you truly mean it.”

The meeting at the White House had been set weeks ago, after Trump and the Democratic leaders agreed to talk further about a possible $2 trillion infrastructure proposal. Trump was due to provide the Democrats his ideas on how to pay for it. Schumer said when Trump “was forced to say how he would pay for it, he had to run away.”

Despite the sudden turn of events, the outburst followed a familiar script of Trump convening leaders at the White House only to try to turn the tables and refocus attention. He has stormed out of previous sessions.

Earlier Wednesday, Pelosi told reporters after a private meeting of House Democrats that Trump is “engaged in a cover-up,” even as she tried to tamp down some Democrats’ rush toward an impeachment inquiry in their showdown with the White House.

Pelosi and five of her top investigative committee leaders spoke with fellow Democrats after an increasing number called for the beginning of an impeachment inquiry following special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia election meddling and contacts with the Trump campaign.

Those Democrats say the move would not necessarily be aimed at removing the president, but instead to bolster their position in court as Trump has broadly stonewalled their investigations. Some two dozen House Democrats have signed on.

With her leadership team, Pelosi, who has resisted pressure to impeach, pointed rank-and-file Democrats toward the legal battles that she said have already found success in forcing Trump to comply with investigations.

“We do believe it’s important to follow the facts,” Pelosi told reporters afterward. “We believe that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States, and we believe that the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up — in a cover-up.”

A growing number of Democrats, incensed by former White House counsel Don McGahn’s defiance Tuesday of a House panel’s subpoena for testimony, have confronted Pelosi and pushed her and other leaders to act.

Pelosi has said she believes Trump is “goading” Democrats into impeachment as a political tactic. And Trump appeared to relish the Democratic division in a Wednesday tweet: “The Democrats are getting ZERO work done in Congress.”

Democrats leaving the meeting appeared to be taking Pelosi’s words into consideration. Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen, who called for the impeachment inquiry on Tuesday, said he could see both sides.

Of leaders’ reluctance, Cohen said, “It’s a political concern rather than an actual constitutional one.”

Rep. Katie Hill, a freshman from a California swing district, said she wants to let court actions play out a bit, and is undecided on starting an impeachment inquiry.

The more Trump “defies us, the more that it’s becoming an inevitability,” she said. “But I don’t think that the caucus as a whole is there yet.”

Some Democratic leaders, while backing Pelosi, also are signaling that a march to impeachment may become inevitable.

“We are confronting what might be the largest, broadest cover-up in American history,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters Tuesday. If a House inquiry “leads to other avenues including impeachment,” the Maryland Democrat said, “so be it.”

But South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, counseled caution. A majority of Democrats would support impeachment, he said, “just not now.” He told CNN the House should follow a methodical process to get to the facts about Trump’s actions.

Amid the impeachment talk and despite Trump’s pledge to stonewall, there was one rate example of detente between House Democrats and the administration — intelligence committee Chairman Adam Schiff postponed a meeting to enforce a subpoena against the Justice Department after the department agreed to turn over a cache of documents related to Mueller’s report.

Schiff said the department “will begin turning over to the committee 12 categories of counterintelligence and foreign intelligence materials as part of an initial rolling production.”

Still, Democrats are continuing to escalate their requests for information. The House Judiciary Committee recently voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress after negotiations broke down with the department over similar materials.

On Tuesday, House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler issued subpoenas for more Trump administration officials — former White House communications director Hope Hicks and Annie Donaldson, a former aide in the White House counsel’s office — for documents and testimony. The committee is expected to vote on contempt against McGahn in June.

McGahn is the most-cited witness in Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation report, recounting the president’s attempts to interfere with the probe. And that makes his silence all the more infuriating for Democrats.

“Our subpoenas are not optional,” Nadler said. “We will not allow the president to stop this investigation.”

Democrats are also encouraged by an early success in the legal battles, a Monday ruling by a federal judge against Trump on in a financial records dispute with Congress. Trump’s team filed a notice of appeal on Tuesday.

With a 235-197 Democratic majority, Pelosi would likely find support for starting impeachment proceedings, but it could be a tighter vote than that margin suggests. Many lawmakers come from relatively conservative districts where Trump also has support.

___

Associated Press writers Laurie Kellman, Alan Fram, Matthew Daly, Michael Balsamo, Jonathan Lemire, Eric Tucker and Mark Sherman contributed to this report.

Donald Trump’s Sneak Attack on Social Security

Donald Trump’s recent budget proposal included billions of dollars in Social Security cuts. The proposed cuts were a huge betrayal of his campaign promise to protect our Social Security system. Fortunately for Social Security’s current and future beneficiaries, he has little chance of getting these cuts past the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Democrats.

So Trump and his budget director/chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who has long been hostile to Social Security, are trying another tactic to cut our earned benefits. They are pursuing a long game to reach their goal. In a divide-and-conquer move, the focus is not Social Security. At least, not yet.

Last week, the Trump administration revealed that it is planning to employ the so-called chained Consumer Price Index (CPI) in a way that does not need congressional approval. “Chained CPI” might sound technical and boring, but anyone who has closely followed the Social Security debate knows better. It has long been proposed as a deceptive, hard-to-understand way to cut our earned Social Security benefits.

Trump plans to switch to the chained CPI to index the federal definition of poverty. If he succeeds, the impact will be that over time, fewer people will meet the government’s definition of poverty—even though in reality, they will not be any less poor. The definition is crucial to qualify for a variety of federal benefits, including Medicaid, as well as food and housing assistance. The announcement was written blandly about considering a variety of different measures, but anyone who knows the issue well can easily read the writing on the wall.

So, what does this have to do with Social Security? Like the poverty level, Social Security’s modest benefits are automatically adjusted to keep pace with inflation. If not adjusted, those benefits will erode, slowly but inexorably losing their purchasing power over time. These annual adjustments are already too low, but they are better than no adjustment at all. The chained CPI would make these adjustments even less adequate. The top line of the following chart shows what a more accurate adjustment would look like. The line below it shows what the current adjustment does to benefits, and the bottom line shows what the stingier chained CPI would do:

Proponents of the chained CPI say that it is better at measuring “substitution,” but don’t be fooled. The current inadequate measure already takes into account substitution of similar items. This is the idea that if the price of beef goes up, you can substitute chicken. In contrast, the chained CPI involves what are called substitutions across categories. If your planned vacation abroad goes up, you can stay home and buy a flat screen television and concert tickets instead.

Of course, neither form of substitution is much help to seniors and people with disabilities whose health care costs are skyrocketing. There’s no substitution for hospital stays and doctor visits. Those who propose the chained CPI are apparently fine with letting seniors who can’t afford even chicken substitute cat food.

The idea of substitution within or across categories makes no sense for people with no discretionary income. If all of your money goes for medicine, food and rent, how does substitution make sense? If you are so poor that your children go to bed hungry, how do you substitute?

Back in 2012, President Barack Obama proposed a so-called Grand Bargain to cut Social Security using the chained CPI, in return for Republicans agreeing to increase taxes on the wealthy. The goal of this Grand Bargain was ostensibly to reduce the deficit, despite the fact that Social Security does not add a single penny to the deficit.

Grassroots activists around the country fought back, and Obama ultimately realized his error. He removed the chained CPI from his budget proposals and endorsed expanding, rather than cutting, Social Security’s modest benefits. Social Security expansion is now the official position of the Democratic Party.

Yet Republicans have still continued to push Social Security cuts, including the chained CPI. Back in December 2017, they passed a massive tax cut for corporations and the super-wealthy. Afterwards, they used the predictable deficits their tax cuts caused as an excuse to call for cutting Social Security. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans made well-publicized statements about the so-called “need” to cut Social Security. What was much more secret was a provision in the tax bill which replaced the measure used to index the tax brackets with the chained CPI.

Now, Trump wants to apply the chained CPI to the calculation of poverty rates. This will directly hurt many seniors and people with disabilities by making it more difficult to qualify for Medicaid and other programs many of them rely on, including food and housing assistance. It is also a long-term threat to Social Security itself.

The strategy is clear: Trump and his Republican supporters in Congress plan to apply chained CPI everywhere else, and then say that it is only common sense and indeed fair that we apply it to Social Security as well. We should be consistent, right?

Trump thinks that he can get away with executing this long-game attack on Social Security quietly, while the media and public are focused on his tweets, name calling, and scandals. But we must not be distracted. If we do not stop this attack in its tracks, our earned benefits will be next.

If you want to forestall another fight over cutting Social Security through the chained CPI, call your members of Congress, write to your local paper, and tell your friends: No chained CPI! No chained CPI for our earned benefits! No chained CPI for the most vulnerable among us!

This quiet effort to embed the chained CPI is a fight Trump does not want to have, certainly in an election year. But it is one we will bring to him. Grassroots activism defeated the chained CPI before. This time it will be harder because Trump can substitute the chained CPI without legislation. That means we have to simply fight harder. If we stick together, we surely will win. And we must. All of our economic security depends on it.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Ocasio-Cortez Won’t Be Endorsing Joe Biden Any Time Soon

The youngest member of Congress in history could play a huge role in another upcoming historical event—the 2020 election. According to several news outlets, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement could be a president-maker during the upcoming Democratic primaries, with one writer even calling it “the AOC primary.” Just look at a recent piece by Politico, which attempts to guess which of the many Democrats running will receive her sought-after endorsement:

Ocasio-Cortez’s work on [Sen. Bernie] Sanders’ 2016 campaign—and the fact that several staffers from that bid went on to work for her and the pro-Ocasio-Cortez group Justice Democrats—suggest the Vermont senator has the inside track for her coveted endorsement. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren is making an aggressive pitch for Ocasio-Cortez’s nod, too: She’s met with her privately and wrote a gushing essay about her for Time magazine. An aide to Warren said their teams have been in touch.
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“She is excited about both of their campaigns and the ideas they are putting forward,” said Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez. He added that the congresswoman isn’t planning to endorse soon.

[Rep. Ro] Khanna put it similarly: “I know [Ocasio-Cortez] has very strong positive feelings toward Sen. Sanders. I know she also has positive feelings toward Sen. Warren.”

Sanders and Warren aren’t the only candidates wooing AOC. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro have also made overtures to the first-term phenom.

“I think it’s one of the most important endorsements in America right now,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive consultant who advised Cynthia Nixon’s left-wing gubernatorial campaign in New York. “AOC has captured the imagination of so many young people, so many women and so many nonpoliticos who really see her as a ray of light.”

This month, CNN also reported that AOC (as she is widely known) is leaning toward Sanders or Warren. Ocasio-Cortez has teamed up with both leading progressives on a number of efforts, including a recent proposal she drafted with Sanders to cap credit card interest rates. While she still hasn’t given an official endorsement, her preferences have been clear for some time now.

“What I would like to see in a presidential candidate is one that has a coherent worldview and logic from which all these policy proposals are coming forward,” she told CNN. “I think Sen. Sanders has that. I also think Sen. Warren has that.”

According to The Guardian, part of AOC’s influence can be traced back to her social media following.

Ocasio-Cortez is also a social media sensation. She has in excess of 3 million followers on Twitter with more engagement than Donald Trump, Barack Obama or Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Last week a video clip in which she quizzed ethics experts about government corruption became the most-watched political video ever posted on Twitter with 37.5m views. It was another demonstration of astonishing clout.

Neil Sroka, communications director of the progressive group Democracy for America, said: “She’s built a profile with a savvy way beyond her years, but she also has an agenda that feels right for the moment. AOC does not exist without the bold, inclusive, populist agenda she’s pushing. The vitriol she has inspired speaks to how afraid everyone is; Republicans see her as representing a country they don’t even know how to speak to.”

Despite comments about her interest in both Sanders and Warren, it is largely believed that fellow Democratic socialist Sanders is still her favorite for the presidential nomination. But as Joe Biden climbs in the polls ahead of both the senators, many are wondering whether the influential New York Democrat would be willing to throw her support behind the former vice president. The answer, apparently, is probably not, at least not during the primary.

“I’m not close to an endorsement announcement anytime soon,” she told the Guardian on Tuesday. “I’m still trying to get a handle on my job. It seems like ages but I’m just five months in and we have quite some time. The debates are in the summer and our first primary election for the entire country isn’t until next year.”

Asked if she would consider endorsing Biden, widely seen as a centrist, Ocasio-Cortez replied: “I’d be hard pressed to see that happen, to be honest, in a primary.”

Partly, The Guardian piece suggests, her reluctance toward Biden has to do with his comments about finding a “middle-ground” approach to climate change. But given AOC’s radically progressive approach to politics as a whole—on everything from economics and immigration to women’s rights and climate change, her record places her firmly to the left of most Democrats in power—it’s unlikely she’s interested in endorsing more centrist, “middle-ground” politicians that have had their hand in furthering the broken political system that brought us Donald Trump.