Chris Hedges's Blog, page 257

Ralph Nader: The Contented Classes Must Rise Up, Too

For all the rhetoric and all the charities regarding America’s children, the U.S. stands at the very bottom of western nations and some other countries as well, in terms of youth well-being. The U.S.’s exceptionalism is clearest in its cruelty to children. The U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate of comparable OECD countries. Not only that, but 2.5 million American children are homeless and 16.2 million children “lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis.”

The shamelessness continues as the youngsters increase in age. The Trump regime is cutting the SNAP food program for poor kids. In 2018, fewer children were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP than in 2017. To see just how bad Trump’s war on poor American children is getting, go to the web sites of the Children’s Defense Fund  and the Children’s Advocacy Center.

Trump brags about a robust economy—still, however, rooted in exploitation of the poor and reckless Wall Street speculation with people’s savings.

“Until the contented classes wake up and organize for change, history has shown, our country will continue to slide in the wrong direction.”

Trump’s pompous promises during his presidential campaign have proved to be a cowardly distraction. He claimed he would take on the drug companies and their price gouging. The hyper-profiteering pharmaceutical goliaths are quietly laughing at him. Worse, Trump continues their tax credits  and allows them to use new drugs developed with taxpayer money through the National Institute of Health free of charge—no royalties. Even though he talks tough, Trump lets these companies sell imported medicines manufactured in China and India with inadequate FDA inspections of foreign plants.

Torrents of Trump tweets somehow overlooked H.P. Acthar Gel, a drug produced by Mallinckrodt to treat a rare infant seizure disorder, which increased in price from $40 per vial to $39,000 per vial! Other drug prices are booming cruelly upward, while Trump blusters, but fails to deliver on his campaign promises.

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A Disney Heiress Reveals the 1 Percent's Worst-Kept Secret



by Ilana Novick

For years our country’s political and corporate rulers have saddled college students with breathtaking debt and interest rates. Student debt is now at $1.5 trillion. Both corporations and the federal government are profiting off of America’s young. In no other western country is this allowed, with most nations offering tuition-free higher education.

On May 2, 2019, The New York Times featured an article titled, “Tuition or Dinner? Nearly Half of College Students Surveyed in a New Report Are Going Hungry.”

When you read the stories of impoverished students, squeezed in all directions, you’d think they came out of third-world favelas. At the City University of New York (CUNY), forty eight percent of students had been food insecure in the past 30 days.

Kassandra Montes, a senior at Lehman College, lives in a Harlem homeless shelter. Montes  “works two part-time jobs and budgets only $15 per week for food… [She] usually skips breakfast in order to make sure that her 4-year-old son is eating regularly.” Montes said: “I feel like I’m slowly sinking as I’m trying to grow.”

When you don’t have a living wage, have to pay high tuition, are mired in debt, and live in rent-gouging cities, where do you go? Increasingly, you go to the community college or college food pantry. In a nation whose president and Congress in one year give tens of billions of dollars to the Pentagon more than the generals asked for, it is unconscionable that students must rely on leftover food from dining halls and catered events, SNAP benefits, and whatever food pantries can assemble.

The CUNY pantries are such a fixture in these desperate times that they are now a stop on freshman orientation tours.

As long as we’re speaking of shame, what about those millions of middle and upper middle class informed, concerned bystanders. They’re all over America trading “tsk tsks” over coffee or other social encounters. They express dismay, disgust, and denunciations at each outrage from giant corporations’ abuses, to the White House and the Congress’ failings. They are particularly numerous in University towns. They know but they do not do. They are unorganized, know it, keep grumbling, and still fail to start the mobilization in Congressional Districts of likeminded citizens to hold their Senators and Representatives accountable.

For Congress, the smallest yet most powerful branch of government, whose members names we know, can turn poverty and other injustices around and help provide a better life for so many Americans. These informed, concerned people easily number over 1 percent of the population. They can galvanize a supporting majority of voters on key, long-overdue redirections for justice. Redirections that were mostly established in Western Europe decades ago (For more details, see my paperback, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier than We Think).

These informed, concerned people—who don’t have to worry about a living wage, not having health insurance, being gouged by payday loans, and having no savings—were called “the contented classes” in The Culture of Contentment, a book by the late progressive Harvard economist John Kenneth Gailbraith. His main point—until the contented classes wake up and organize for change, history has shown, our country will continue to slide in the wrong direction. He said all this before climate disruption, massive money-corrupting politics, and the corporate crime wave had reached anywhere near their present destructive levels.

The question to be asked: Who among the contented classes will unfurl the flag of rebellion against the plutocrats and the autocrats? It can be launched almost anywhere they please. A revolution can start the moment they decide to prioritize the most marginalized people in this country over their comfort.

Facebook Co-Founder Calls for Social Media Giant to Be Broken Up

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes joined the growing group of tech experts, privacy advocates, and politicians publicly raising alarm about the “staggering” power of chief executive Mark Zuckerberg—and, in a lengthy New York Times op-ed published Thursday, called on the government to break up the social media behemoth.

Hughes, who left Facebook over a decade ago, is now a co-chairman of the Economic Security Project and a senior adviser at the Roosevelt Institute.

In the Times, Hughes described Zuckerberg as “a good, kind person” while also detailing how his former college roommate’s influence goes “far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government” and why that’s a problem.

He controls three core communications platforms—Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking, or copying it.

Zuckerberg doesn’t just dominate Facebook—he also wields nearly unparalleled influence across the media and digital landscapes more broadly. In Hughes’s mind, the “biggest mistake” of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was allowing Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp in recent years. The FTC is expected to soon fine Facebook up to $5 billion for privacy violations—which Hughes, like others, framed as “a slap on the wrist” for a company that earned $55 billion in revenue last year.

“When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology,” Hughes explained, outlining how the company has interacted with competitors such as YouTube or Snapchat.

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“We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American. It is time to break up Facebook,” wrote Hughes. “Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.”

Specifically, Hughes urged the FTC, Justice Department, and Congress to check Zuckerberg’s power by forcing Facebook to splinter into several companies, blocking future acquisitions, and creating new federal agency that will regulate tech companies to make them “more accountable to the American people” through privacy protections and speech guidelines.

In addition to the op-ed, the Times also put out a video version of Hughes’s argument, titled: “I Co-Founded Facebook. It’s Time to Break It Up.” Watch:

Hughes is far from alone in issuing such demands. In fact, as Fast Company put it on Wednesday, “the calls to rein in Mark Zuckerberg have never been louder.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—as Hughes acknowledged—put forth a plan in March, as part of her 2020 presidential campaign, to break up Facebook and other tech giants like Amazon and Google. Responding to the op-ed on Thursday, Warren tweeted: “Chris Hughes is right. Today’s big tech companies have too much power—over our economy, our society, & our democracy.”

I have a plan to make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition — and it starts with breaking up Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Learn more: https://t.co/2rWT0wJ8vD

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) May 9, 2019

The calls from Hughes, Warren, and others for the U.S. government to break up Facebook come amid other calls for changes at the company—from pressuring federal lawmakers “to attack the culture of lawlessness in the company and eliminate the motivation to collect data,” to ousting Zuckerberg.

Evan Greer of Fight for the Future made the latter demand in an op-ed for The Guardian Wednesday, listing 25 examples of his “failed leadership.” Greer wrote that while “hefty fines, civil rights audits, antitrust, data privacy legislation, shareholder activism, and employee organizing can all play a role” in fixing the problems that plague Facebook—and the tech industry more broadly—as she sees it, “Mark Zuckerberg must go.”

Greer’s op-ed came just two days after the groups Color of Change and Majority Action issued an advisory to Facebook shareholders encouraging them withhold their support for the nomination of Zuckerberg to the company’s board of directors at the annual shareholder meeting scheduled for May 30.

“However, Zuckerberg has structured the company so that he has more voting power than all other shareholders combined,” noted Greer. “It’s clear we need more than shareholders to make this happen.”

“We need an internet-wide vote of no confidence,” she added. “Zuckerberg’s resignation would send a message to tech workers, government regulators, advocates, and all who hold Silicon Valley accountable that leadership at these companies is a privilege, not a right.”

In a Twitter thread on Wednesday, Fight for the Future summarized Facebook’s recent bad behavior and shared a petition that demands Zuckerberg’s resignation.

THIS IS JUST IN THE LAST SEVEN MONTHS

These calls are escalating. Facebook can no longer ignore the need for fresh leadership to substantively address its massive problems w/privacy.

The same people who got us into this will not get us out.

Join us: https://t.co/qemAaIs43a

— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) May 8, 2019

What Europe Needs Is a New Revolution

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“Poetry From the Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement Is Our Civilization’s Last Chance”
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“Poetry From the Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement Is Our Civilization’s Last Chance”

A book by Srećko Horvat

Is anyone free to decide her own destiny? Or is the course of her life determined by prior events? Since so many of our decisions operate under constraints of various kinds — the imperative to do something or be somewhere at a fixed time — is free will an illusion? The question takes on added significance given the overwhelming economic imperative to survive in a vicious world. So much of what we desire nowadays is not so much “unthinkable” — we can always dream—as practically impossible. What hope is there of recovering possibility from a world in which the future has become as predictable as the next rent day?

Srećko Horvat’s task in his short philosophical work “Poetry From the Future” is to claw back this lost horizon. Decrying neoliberal capitalism’s “slow cancellation of the future,” Horvat advocates a “hope without optimism” for transcending this bad infinity: a philosophy for the front lines.

This approach is ingenious. The book begins by recalling an obscure BBC overseas radio broadcast from Yugoslavia during World War II, where the faction known as Partisans were fighting against the Axis Powers. “For reasons of secrecy, the reporter could not specify any location, name or rank. All the listeners know is that the broadcast is taking place somewhere in occupied Europe, in the Adriatic. All they can hear is the sound of liberation.”

Horvat uses this “forgotten broadcast” as the trope for a series of European dispatches from “occupied territory”: from the deceptive tranquillity of Vis (the island in the Adriatic where in 1944 the broadcast was made) to contemporary front lines: the Hamburg G20 protests of 2017; the refugee camps in Calais, northern France, and those on the Macedonian border; Athens in 2015 during its David-versus-Goliath struggle against the European Union’s austerity attack.

Horvat also has encounters away from the front lines, in the fault lines of the European Union — a political organization that has reneged on its own democratic project and is hostile to any politics that threatens the neoliberal settlement. Recovering a possible postwar future through which common struggle crystalizes in a democratic ideal — free peoples united and unrestricted by borders against the repulsive “fortress Europe” of today — is Horvat’s goal.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Poetry From the Future” at Google Books.

Horvat is a co-founder, along with Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister, of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), which, to paraphrase its manifesto, asserts that “the European Union was an exceptional achievement” that unified a diverse continent of peoples formerly divided by “murderous chauvinism, racism and barbarity.” The idea that Europe is capable of being reformed, or politically salvaged, provides both compass and article of faith for the author’s investigations of a traumatized continent.

The Vis of Partisan resistance stands in contrast to the island today, where tourists flock to a Hollywood film set — “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” and “Game of Thrones” have been filmed there — and foreign property speculators have chased the locals from their own villages. One needn’t look very far, Horvat argues, to detect Europe’s fault lines. The fractures exist in the practices of everyday life. This falsified Greek island has become a dyspraxia: a place of bad habits and misfortune, where the contemplative life arrives courtesy of “tourist occupation.”

So Horvat leaves. But what he discovers on the European mainland is no less a “surreal experience.” Hamburg in the summer of 2017 is a city in lockdown as G20 leaders assemble in pursuit of their doomsday agenda. Helicopters circle like alien invaders, and 20,000 armed police sweep the streets of citizens. The G20 is loath to permit any form of protest. Moreover its presence in a city with strong anarchist traditions feels like a provocation. The symbolic resistance of the protestors is met with the real, unjustified, and wholly disproportionate violence of the police. In the end, Europe’s leaders are shown up as hypocrites. In 2013, they condemned the brutal suppression of the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, while here, four years later, they resort to attacking their own people, making a mockery of the European Convention of Human Rights.

One wonders whether “Europe” as an invariant democratic ideal is as realistic as we’re often led to believe. One might observe that Europe, or the European Union, originates in a common market: the European Coal and Steel Community from 1952, then the European Economic Community from 1957. It was conceived as a trading bloc by executives to circumvent European democracy, and to cut the postwar gains of organized labor. What if the “forgotten broadcast” were a warning, an extraterrestrial signal that good Europeans were in the process of profoundly misinterpreting? Could we read between the fault lines?

“There are no islands anymore,” no insurgents holding out in liberated zones. Or aren’t there? On a visit to a Catalan commune, the author experiences an epiphany. The question, he suggests, is how such “islands outside capitalism” can be “scaled onto the rest of society,” before recognizing the legitimacy of the communalist experiment “with their social crypto-currencies and alternative economies.”

The CIC [Catalan Integral Cooperative] comprises more than 600 projects and businesses across Catalonia, including freelancers, companies, farms, residences and Calafou, a post-capitalist eco-industrial colony in the ruins of a 28,000-square-metre abandoned textile works just outside the village of Valbona.

The question is not, as David Harvey would argue, a problem of space, or of how surplus capital can expand in a world that is fast running out of it, not to mention time. If space and time have been colonized, then the challenge lies in reimagining their overdetermined dimensions, their spatio-temporal constraints, in “the here-and-now.” Through their patient resistance to the Mexican state, the Zapatistas are the inspiration for this non-chronological time, this winding down of the clock:

If mere presentism […] consists in the reproduction of the present by instant news, real-time politics, society of the spectacle, then the Jetztzeit, the here-and-now, consists in a deconstruction and destruction of the temporal totalitarianism which imposes and enforces a notion of time that necessarily narrows possibilities and potentialities. To act now means to create the conditions for our own future, not to follow the already written script from the past: it means to produce a crack in the present, a disruption in the imposition of capitalist temporality, the rhythm of power.

The time is out of joint. But how amenable is this deliberative method of reimagining the rhythms of everyday life to praxis? After all, reimagining time (“as an open and unfinished process”) sounds suspiciously like merely interpreting the world when the point is to change it. “[I]f the new social revolution,” Horvat responds, “has to draw its poetry from the future, the content of the future revolution can be made only out of the poetry which is at the same time poiesis and praxis.” A dialectical practice, in other words, which is doubly inventive, both productive and transformative of the present.

Marx’s “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” is the source of this poetry of the future, according to which hightailing revolutionaries, instead of channeling the “spirits of the past,” are enjoined by Marx to turn their backs on all past models of revolution: “[L]et the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.” If that sounds like an invitation to a leap in the dark, then it’s worth bearing in mind that Marx was writing about a period of French revolutionary history, not speculating on the future.

For Horvat, meanwhile, the future is thinkable, albeit on condition that we successfully join the dots between those seemingly chaotic events — from extreme weather to political disasters — that infringe on our present, in order to articulate the future as “a whole,” a finite and precious world full of promise, instead of an abyssal doomsday project.

The future, apart from being the source of courageous poetry, can equally be the source of repressive anxiety and allergic reaction. In a dialectical twist, couldn’t the deliberative deconstruction of time amount to the decision of not-deciding, of an anti-decision? Wasn’t this precisely what transpired in the landslide “No” vote of the Greek people in the 2015 referendum on the terms of Greece’s financial bailout by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF (the so-called “European troika”)? Wasn’t the vote against EU-engineered austerity less a vote for any positive course of action than a massive abstention, a refusal on the part of Greeks to decide their own future, and so dance to the EU’s tune? This could certainly be inferred from the outcome of the vote, since the Tsipras government unconditionally accepted the EU’s austerity package in any case, as if the vote had never happened. Did anyone really expect anything else?

Perhaps revolutionaries should draw this same lesson from the poetry of the future, and despite being aware of it it’s a lesson that may not sit comfortably with the author’s convictions. Any revolutionary who is prepared to exit the chronological time of “a succession of dates in the columns of a calendar” is also one who, by definition, must be prepared to exit the electoral cycle of parliamentary democracy. Such an exit ensures that all revolutionary poetry will be conducted with total indifference toward the state. Horvat might wish to consider whether such revolutionary indifference is in keeping with the reimagining of something called democracy in Europe.

Jason Barker is a professor of English at Kyung Hee University in South Korea and author of the novel “Marx Returns.”

Chelsea Manning Freed After Refusing to Testify in WikiLeaks Case

FALLS CHURCH, Va.—Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was released from a northern Virginia jail Thursday after a two-month stay for refusing to testify to a grand jury.

Manning spent 62 days at the Alexandria Detention Center on civil contempt charges after she refused to answer questions to a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

Her lawyers fear her freedom may be short-lived, though. She was released only because the grand jury’s term expired. Before she left the jail, she received another subpoena demanding her testimony on May 16 to a new grand jury.

Her lawyers say she will again refuse to answer questions and could again face another term of incarceration.

Manning served seven years in a military prison for leaking a trove of documents to WikiLeaks before then-President Barack Obama commuted the remainder of her 35-year sentence.

Earlier this week, Manning’s lawyers filed court papers arguing that she should not be jailed for civil contempt because she has proved that she will stick to her principles and won’t testify no matter how long she’s jailed.

Federal law only allows a recalcitrant witness to be jailed on civil contempt if there’s a chance that the incarceration will coerce the witness into testifying. If a judge were to determine that incarcerating Manning were punitive rather than coercive, Manning would not be jailed.

“At this point, given the sacrifices she has already made, her strong principles, her strong and growing support community, and the disgrace attendant to her capitulation, it is inconceivable that Chelsea Manning will ever change her mind about her refusal to cooperate with the grand jury,” her lawyers wrote.

Manning filed an eight-page statement with the court on Monday, outlining her resolve. She wrote that “cooperation with this grand jury is simply not an option. Doing so would mean throwing away all of my principles, accomplishments, sacrifices, and erase decades of my reputation — an obvious impossibility,” she wrote.

She also said she was suffering disproportionately in jail because of physical problems related with inadequate follow-up care to gender-reassignment surgery.

Crisis Point? High Stakes in Trump’s Showdown With Congress

WASHINGTON—Democrats call it a “constitutional crisis.” But is it?

Stunned by the extent of the White House’s blanket refusal to comply with oversight by Congress, the Democrats warn that the Trump administration is shattering historic norms and testing the nation’s system of checks and balances in new and alarming ways.

It’s not just the House’s fight with the Justice Department over the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. The standoff involves President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to engage with dozens of Capitol Hill probes of his tax returns, potential business conflicts and the running of the administration — from security clearances for his family to actions he’s taken on his own on immigration.

It’s a confrontation that’s only expected to deepen now that Mueller’s work is finished and the investigation focus shifts to Capitol Hill.

Trump derides the probes as “presidential harassment.” Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell tries to declare it all “case closed.” But Democrats warn that without the legislative branch staying on the case, keeping watch, any executive becomes more like a “monarchy” — or “tyranny” — that doesn’t have to answer to the representatives of all Americans.

“Will the administration violate the Constitution and not abide by the requests of Congress in its legitimate oversight responsibilities?” asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday.

“Every day they are advertising their obstruction of justice,” she said. “We’re not talking about isolated situations. We’re talking about a cumulative effect of obstruction the administration is engaged in, and the president has warned that he is not going to honor any subpoenas from Congress.”

Struggles between the executive and legislative branches are nothing new. The House voted to hold George W. Bush administration officials in contempt over an investigation into the firing of U.S. attorneys. Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, was found in contempt over an undercover gun-running operation.

But those were specific cases. The difference, say historians and legal scholars, is that Trump has announced he will essentially ignore all oversight requests from Congress.

Congressional experts say a big risk is setting a precedent that goes way beyond Trump. What happens, for example, if an administration stonewalls Congress on information it wants for an investigation of air or water quality rules — or anything else? Can the White House just say no?

“We have a big problem,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton University professor who studies history and public affairs.

Trump’s new stance, at the end of the Mueller investigation, comes as the president faces a divided Congress for the first time. Democrats talked of being a check on him when they took control of the House in January, upsetting the calm he enjoyed during two years of friendlier relations with Republicans in charge of both chambers.

Zelizer said with Trump “aggressively flexing power to shut down oversight capacity of another branch,” it’s “unclear who and how this is resolved, especially with Senate Republicans standing by their man.”

Asked if this is a constitutional crisis, Zelizer said, “I think we are looking at one.”

Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School expert on the Constitution, won’t go that far, but he said the Democrats are describing a real problem.

“There is a breakdown in constitutional norms that keep the republic going,” Balkin said. “In an ordinary world, you just have negotiations over subpoenas. It happens all the time. Congress and the president work it out.”

After talks broke down this week between the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department over the panel’s subpoena for the full Mueller report, the committee voted to recommend that Attorney General William Barr be held in contempt of Congress.

Lawmakers want to see a less fully redacted version of the publicly released 448-page document on Russian interference in the 2016 election. They say they need to know what’s in the hundreds of fully or partly blacked-out pages that were publicly released to better understand how to protect elections from future interference. Barr says he tried to accommodate the request as much as he could before asking Trump to invoke executive privilege to enable him to block it.

While there’s no direct oversight written in the Constitution, the House historical website says it’s implied in Article 1 that gives Congress “all legislative powers,” with investigations intended as a way to seek necessary information for that purpose.

Underscoring that, the Supreme Court ruled nearly 100 years ago that “the power of inquiry — with process to enforce it — is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function.”

Saikrishna Prakash, an expert on presidential power at the University of Virginia, said he doubts that Trump will carry out a total refusal to participate in congressional oversight.

“If you want to have an oversight hearing on EPA and a clean water rule, they’re probably going to send someone,” Prakash said. “The president doesn’t care about that. He cares about the Russia investigation and obstruction, and he cares about an investigation into his personal finances.”

The president’s advisers say part of Trump’s strategy is to slow-walk his legal battles with Congress in court, seeing an advantage for the 2020 campaign. His public arguments are more political than legal: He portrays the Democrats as “unhinged.”

Democrats, though, believe the public is on their side in pursuing oversight of Trump.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the White House is “stonewalling the American public from all information and this cannot be. We cannot have a government where all the information is in the executive branch.”

He said, “It’s an attack on the essence of our democracy and we must oppose this.”

Trump to Nominate Patrick Shanahan for Top Pentagon Post

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump on Thursday said he will nominate Patrick Shanahan to be his second secretary of defense, putting an end to months of speculation about the former Boeing executive’s standing in the administration.

Shanahan has been leading the Pentagon as acting secretary since Jan. 1, a highly unusual arrangement for arguably the most sensitive Cabinet position. He took over after Jim Mattis resigned.

“Acting Secretary Shanahan has proven over the last several months that he is beyond qualified to lead the Department of Defense, and he will continue to do an excellent job,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

Moments later, Shanahan spoke to reporters outside the Pentagon, saying he was very excited about the nomination and looking forward to a job he said requires him to “spin a lot of plates.”

“The biggest challenge is balancing it all. For me it’s about practicing selectful neglect, so that we can stay focused on the future,” Shanahan said, adding with a grin, “I called my mom. She was super happy.”

Indeed, in Shanahan’s tenure at the department he’s had to deal with a wide array of international hotspots, ranging from missile launches by North Korea to the sudden shift of military ships and aircraft to the Middle East to deal with potential threats from Iran.

The announcement comes close on the heels of an investigation by the Defense Department’s inspector general over accusations that Shanahan had shown favoritism toward Boeing during his time as deputy defense secretary, while disparaging Boeing competitors. The probe appeared to stall his nomination, but the IG wrapped up the investigation rapidly and cleared Shanahan of any wrongdoing.

The IG interviewed Shanahan as well as 33 witnesses under oath, including Mattis and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“We did not substantiate any of the allegations. We determined that Mr. Shanahan fully complied with his ethics agreements and his ethical obligations regarding Boeing and its competitors,” the report said.

Shanahan wields none of the star power of Trump’s first defense secretary. And that may be just the thing for a commander in chief who seemed to resent Mattis for his reputation in Washington as a superior strategist and a moderating influence on an impulsive president.

Two months before Mattis resigned, citing policy differences, Trump publicly questioned whether he was “sort of a Democrat.” After the former Marine general quit, Trump spoke more harshly, calling Mattis a failure, and insisted he had fired him, even though Mattis had resigned first.

Shanahan, 56, has a lifetime of experience in the defense industry but little in government. In more than four months as the acting secretary, he has focused on implementing the national defense strategy that was developed during Mattis’ tenure and emphasizes a shift from the resources and tactics required to fight small wars against extremist groups to what Shanahan calls “great power” competition with China and Russia.

The Shanahan nomination is not known to face any organized opposition in Congress, although some members have been lukewarm on him. Sen. James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has questioned why Trump was taking so long to seek the Senate’s consent but has indicated he would support Shanahan. Others have questioned whether Shanahan might be more willing to endorse plans or policies coming out of the White House.

This is only the third time in history that the Pentagon has been led by an acting chief. The last was William H. Taft, who served for two months in 1989 after President George H.W. Bush’s first choice to be defense secretary, John Tower, became mired in controversy and ultimately failed to be confirmed by the Senate. Dick Cheney, the future vice president under President George W. Bush, then was nominated and confirmed.

Presidents typically take pains to ensure the Pentagon is being run by a Senate-confirmed official, given the grave responsibilities that include sending young Americans into battle, ensuring the military is ready for extreme emergencies like nuclear war and managing overseas alliances that are central to U.S. security.

Shanahan, who grew up in Seattle, earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington and two advanced degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Boeing in 1986, rose through its ranks and is credited with rescuing a troubled Dreamliner 787 program. He also led the company’s missile defense and military helicopter programs.

Trump has seemed attracted to Shanahan partially for his work on one of the president’s pet projects — creating a Space Force. Trump also has publicly lauded Boeing, builder of many of the military’s most prominent aircraft, including the Apache and Chinook helicopters, the C-17 cargo plane and the B-52 bomber, as well as the iconic presidential aircraft, Air Force One.

Although a few members of the Senate have rhetorically roughed up Shanahan, he has not generated broad opposition during his months of auditioning for the nomination. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, butted heads with Shanahan over the administration’s Syria policy, but that confrontation quickly faded after the White House partially reversed course by agreeing to keep a few hundred troops in Syria rather than withdrawing all 2,000.

Shanahan was the deputy secretary of defense during Mattis’ two-year tenure. No one thought of him then as a potential No. 1 since he had never previously served in government and carried little political sway in Washington or in foreign capitals. Aides say that during his 17 months as deputy, Shanahan was deeply engaged in the full range of policy issues and briefed on military operations. He shares Mattis’s conviction that the Pentagon needs to shift its focus from fighting insurgent wars to preparing for and deterring armed conflict with big powers like China.

“China, China, China,” was his message to senior department officials the day he took over from Mattis, aides said.

Draconian Georgia Law Criminalizes Abortion After Six Weeks

On Tuesday, Georgia passed a so-called “heartbeat” bill, scheduled to take effect in January 2020, banning abortions as early as the sixth week of pregnancy, when, as anti-abortion activists argue, a fetal heartbeat can be detected. It’s a time before many women realize they are pregnant. Brian Kemp is the fourth governor to sign such a law in 2019, and the sixth overall, including the governors of Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa and North Dakota.

Georgia’s law, HB481, or the Living Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, is particularly extreme because it requires that the state “recognize unborn children as natural persons,” and that they “shall be included in population based determinations.” As Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate, because Georgia is a death-penalty state, absent any added limitations, the law “would subject women who get illegal abortions to life imprisonment and the death penalty.”

None of these laws have been enacted yet. The North Dakota, Arkansas, Iowa and Kentucky bills have so far been blocked in court, with the Mississippi ban also facing legal challenges. Georgia and Ohio, as Anna North writes in Vox, are also likely to face lawsuits. That doesn’t mean that women can rest easy.

As Emily Wax-Thibodeaux and Ariana Eunjung Cha write in The Washington Post, Kemp is one of a wave of conservative lawmakers “using new highly restrictive abortion laws to get abortion back in front of what they believe is the most friendly U.S. Supreme Court in decades.” Their goal is to challenge Roe v. Wade.

Tom McClusky, president of March for Life Action, a group that opposes abortion, told The Washington Post that these bills “lay the groundwork for pushing the envelope of life even farther,” adding, “what we’d like to do is change the culture so that no family facing this situation would think of the option of abortion.” The movement, Wax-Thibodeaux and Cha write, is hoping that Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh will be receptive to the anti-abortion cause.

Supporters of the Iowa bill were upfront about their aim to challenge Roe v. Wade. In 2018, Iowa State Rep. Shannon Lundgren told the Des Moines Register: “The science and technology have significantly advanced since 1973. … It is time for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue of life.”

Alabama also has a near-total abortion ban in the works. Last week, that state’s House of Representatives passed HB 344, the Human Life Protection Act, by a vote of 74-3. The bill would make abortion a Class A felony, meaning Alabama doctors who perform abortions could face up to 99 years in prison. The law passed the House without an exemption for cases of rape, although 28 representatives refused to vote. Thursday morning, the Senate also rejected the exemption, but delayed the vote on the bill until next week, according to The New York Times.

Pro-choice activists are already gearing up for legal challenges in Georgia. In a statement after Gov. Kemp signed the bill, Elisabeth Smith, chief counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the law “bafflingly unconstitutional.” She added, “Bans like this have always been blocked by courts. We will be suing Georgia to make sure this law has the same fate.”

U.S. Seizes North Korean Cargo Ship for Violating Sanctions

WASHINGTON — The U.S. said Thursday it has seized a North Korean cargo ship that was used to violate international sanctions, a first-of-its kind enforcement action that comes at a tense moment in relations between the two countries.

The “Wise Honest,” North Korea’s second largest cargo ship, was detained during an April 2018 stop in Indonesia and will be moved to American Samoa, Justice Department officials said.

Officials made the announcement hours after the North Korea fired two suspected short-range missiles toward the sea, a second weapons launch in five days and a possible signal that stalled talks over its nuclear weapons program are in trouble.

Justice Department lawyers laid out the case for confiscating the ship in a complaint filed in New York, arguing that payments for maintenance and operation of the vessel were channeled through U.S. financial institutions in violation of American law.

“This sanctions-busting ship is now out of service,” said Assistant Attorney General John Demers, the Justice Department’s top national security official.

The timing of the complaint was unrelated to the missile launch, U.S. officials said.

The 581-foot (177 meters) Wise Honest was used to transport North Korean coal to China, Russia and other countries, generating badly needed revenue to a country that is under U.N. sanctions because of its nuclear weapons program.

North Korea sought to disguise the ship’s operations by listing various other countries for its nationality and the origin of its cargo, according to the complaint.

Indonesian authorities intercepted and seized the Wise Honest in the East China Sea a month after it was photographed at the port of Nampo, North Korea, where it took on a load of coal.

The U.S. has prosecuted people and businesses for violating sanctions but has never before seized a North Korean ship. The country will have an opportunity to contest the seizure in court. If the U.S. prevails, it will be able to sell the vessel.

President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un held two summits focused on the North’s nuclear program but have made no discernible progress toward a deal that would eliminate its weapons.

Trump Administration Initiates Purge of White House Reporters

A number of journalists are expressing alarm over new White House rules limiting access to the Trump administration, but concern is being raised that the trade organization that represents those reporters has so far been silent on the matter.

Under the new rules, concocted by press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders after a review of reporters’ credentials, journalists will be required to work at the White House for 90 out of 180 days in order to hold “hard passes,” which allow easy access to the building for reporters who regularly cover the administration.

As Politico reported, the new guidelines don’t “consider that reporters are often out for weekends, vacations, campaign-trail reporting, or presidential trips abroad.”

Yet, as one critic noted on social media, the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA)—which claims to “ensure a strong free press and robust coverage of the presidency”—released no statement denouncing the administration for curtailing the free press’s right to report on Trump’s presidency. The group’s silence contrasted with its condemnation of comedian Michelle Wolf in 2018 when she delivered a blistering critique of Trump and other administration officials.

The White House Correspondents Association was quick to condemn comedian Michelle Wolf for her @whca dinner monologue last year.

Yet when Trump created arbitrary new rules that allow him to pick & choose which reporters are allowed to cover him?

“WHCA declines to comment.” pic.twitter.com/nwrsGcqLzt

— Dan Lavoie (@djlavoie) May 9, 2019

As of this writing, the WHCA has neither tweeted objections to the new rules nor issued any public statements.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote an op-ed Wednesday describing what he called the “mass purge” of reporters, arguing that the new rules were aimed at limiting the access of journalists who have been critical of the president.

“I strongly suspect it’s because I’m a Trump critic,” Milbank wrote. “The move is perfectly in line with Trump’s banning of certain news organizations, including The Post, from his campaign events and his threats to revoke White House credentials of journalists he doesn’t like.”

Although long-time White House reporters can apply for an exemption, Milbank was denied one, he wrote in The Post.

“There’s something wrong with a president having the power to decide which journalists can cover him,” the reporter wrote.

The White House’s latest effort to control the free press’s access to the Trump administration was denounced as a “hallmark of authoritarianism” by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).

Curtailing a free press and undermining the public’s access to government is a hallmark of authoritarianism & has no place in America. This purge of reporters is un-American and needs to be reversed ASAP. https://t.co/hFshJp7EKV

— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) May 8, 2019

Vermont Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy agreed, “This is what dictators do.”

This is what dictators do. https://t.co/w6ZnSeC0sO

— Sen. Patrick Leahy (@SenatorLeahy) May 8, 2019

Sanders’s new press guidelines come six months after CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, who has frequently butted heads with the press secretary during briefings, was temporarily banned from covering the White House following a combative press conference.

Arguing that Acosta’s First Amendment rights had been violated, CNN sought and was granted a court injunction. Federal Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, ruled that Acosta’s right to due process had been breached.

“Now,” wrote Mathew Ingram at the Columbia Journalism Review on Thursday, “the White House has a structure in place that could allow it to remove whoever it wishes to remove. That wouldn’t necessarily override First Amendment protection for press access (which Kelly didn’t rule on), but in the short term it gives the Trump administration new levers with which to control the press corps.”

Milbank noted in his op-ed that he was “not looking for pity.” More important than his press credentials, he wrote, “is that the White House is drastically curtailing access for all journalists. Briefings have been abolished in favor of unscheduled ‘gaggles’ (on the record, but impromptu, and haphazard) in the White House driveway.”

Other political journalists and legal experts also raised alarm about the new rules.

The White House is pulling press passes from veteran reporters and establishing unreasonable standards for obtaining credentials. If they keep this up, @PressSec Sarah Sanders will have to lie to herself.

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) May 8, 2019

Attendance ‘qualifications’ and a new system of hard passes mean reporters are more beholden to the whims of the WH https://t.co/k6k82qC0Po

— emily bell (@emilybell) May 9, 2019

To inoculate itself from facts & criticism, this White House has already killed off the daily press briefing. Now, it’s following thru on Trump’s “enemy of the people” rhetoric to turn WH press access into a kind of patronage system for favored reporters.https://t.co/GUkdbmEcgK pic.twitter.com/lQ9w305qRN

— Reed F. Richardson (@reedfrich) May 9, 2019

As of Thursday, Sanders has not held a press briefing in 59 days—a record for the White House. Some, including Milbank, noted that access to the White House under the Trump administration has had diminished value due to the president and other officials’ propensity for lying about policies.

In light of the administration’s latest attack on the press, Reed Richardson of Mediaite wrote, “The real question becomes: How does the White House press corps adapt to an on-the-ground reporting situation where its independence is increasingly compromised and so much of its coverage…has diminishing relevance?”

Red Sox’s Trip to White House Fraught With Political, Racial Tensions

WASHINGTON — For decades, championship teams have visited the White House in a moment of ritual and tradition. Athletic excellence is celebrated, lame jokes are told and the president is given yet another jersey bearing his name. Under President Donald Trump, though, the visits often have become politicized, featuring athlete protests and, in the case of the Boston Red Sox, raising questions about a racial divide.

The Red Sox, who steamrolled to a World Series crown last October, are poised to visit the White House on Thursday. Team manager Alex Cora announced last week he would not attend, citing his frustration with the administration’s efforts to help his native Puerto Rico recover from a devastating hurricane. Nearly a dozen players, including American League MVP Mookie Betts, have said they will also skip the ceremony.

All those bypassing the White House are players of color. Every white player on the team — as well as J.D. Martinez, who is of Cuban descent — was expected to attend.

The Red Sox have stressed that the clubhouse has not been divided on the issue; no player or coach was pressured to go, and players who have chosen not to attend have stressed there is no ill will toward those who will shake Trump’s hand.

Pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez, a Venezuelan native, offered his perspective before the team’s game Wednesday in Baltimore: “For me, it’s not a big deal. It’s your decision. Make a choice. I’ll respect it. I don’t think that’s a big deal. If you want to go or you don’t want to go, that’s your decision.”

A championship team’s coach rarely, if ever, misses the White House visit, a tradition that began in earnest in 1924 when Calvin Coolidge invited the Washington Senators. Cora had considered attending Thursday’s White House event to call attention to the plight of those in Puerto Rico, where it is estimated that Hurricane Maria caused nearly 3,000 deaths. But in the end, he opted not to go.

“Unfortunately, we are still struggling, still fighting,” Cora said in a statement. “Some people still lack basic necessities, others remain without electricity and many homes and schools are in pretty bad shape almost a year and a half after Hurricane Maria struck. I’ve used my voice on many occasions so that Puerto Ricans are not forgotten, and my absence is no different. As such, at this moment, I don’t feel comfortable celebrating in the White House.”

The racial disparity between the players who are attending and staying away received attention after a tweet from pitcher David Price, an African American who said he would not attend. Price retweeted longtime Boston sports columnist Steve Buckley, who had noted, “Basically, it’s the white Sox who’ll be going.”

Price, who has nearly 1.8 million followers on Twitter, added, “I just feel like more than 38k should see this tweet,” a reference to Buckley’s Twitter following of roughly 38,000. But while the retweet set off speculation that Price was angry about the players attending, the pitcher later said he was calling out Buckley’s observation, telling the Boston Globe that the columnist’s post “was an insensitive tweet that needs to be seen by more people.”

Those around the Red Sox locker room stressed that a player’s decision to attend was a personal choice and not, in many cases, political.

“Politically, it didn’t matter who was in the White House. If I have an opportunity to go to the White House and meet the president, I’m going to go,” relief pitcher Heath Hembree said Wednesday. “Nobody tried to persuade me. They have their reasons why not to go.”

For some players, it may be their only chance for a White House invite. It also reflects a larger trend across baseball: A number of players hail from Trump-friendly states like Texas and Florida, while the sport has also seen a surge in Latino players and a decline in African Americans.

Having also won World Series titles in 2004, 2007 and 2013, the Red Sox — who will also visit wounded veterans at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Thursday — have been honored at the White House under both Republican and Democratic presidents. And players on previous teams in all major sports have skipped White House visits under previous administrations. Basketball legend Larry Bird, famously, missed the Boston Celtics’ White House visit in 1984 by saying of Ronald Reagan, “If the president wants to see me, he knows where to find me.”

But the events have taken on sharp political overtones since Trump took office.

When the New England Patriots visited in 2017, Trump’s first year in office, far fewer players attended than when the franchise won a title under Barack Obama. After several players on the Philadelphia Eagles and Golden State Warriors publicly declared that they would skip White House ceremonies, Trump disinvited the teams. Trump has also instituted a new tradition for the ceremonies, scrapping gourmet meals in favor of offering plates of fast food to the athletes.

Moreover, the optics of the Red Sox visit are certain to receive additional scrutiny due to the history of racially charged moments for both the team and the city it calls home.

The Red Sox, infamously, held a failed tryout for Jackie Robinson before he broke the sport’s color barrier. They were the last team in the major leagues to integrate. And an Elks Club in the team’s former spring training home of Winter Haven, Florida, invited only white players to events, a practice that stopped only in the 1980s, when black players complained.

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Associated Press sports writers Jimmy Golen in Boston and David Ginsburg in Baltimore contributed to this report.

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Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire