Chris Hedges's Blog, page 260

Liberals’ Dangerous Love Affair With the U.S. Military

This piece was originally published by The American Conservative.

The two-star army general strode across the stage in his rumpled combat fatigues, almost like George Patton—all that was missing was the cigar and riding crop. It was 2017 and I was in the audience, just another mid-level major attending yet another mandatory lecture in the auditorium of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The general then commanded one of the Army’s two true armored divisions and had plenty of his tanks forward deployed in Eastern Europe, all along the Russian frontier. Frankly, most CGSC students couldn’t stand these talks. Substance always seemed lacking, as each general reminded us to “take care of soldiers” and “put the mission first,” before throwing us a few nuggets of conventional wisdom on how to be good staff officers should we get assigned to his vaunted command.

This time, though, the general got to talking about Russia. So I perked up. He made it crystal clear that he saw Moscow as an adversary to be contained, checked, and possibly defeated. There was no nuance, no self-reflection, not even a basic understanding of the general complexity of geopolitics in the 21st century. Generals can be like that—utterly “in-the-box,” “can-do” thinkers. They take pride in how little they discuss policy and politics, even when they command tens of thousands of troops and control entire districts, provinces, or countries. There is some value in this—we’d hardly want active generals meddling in U.S. domestic affairs. But they nonetheless can take the whole “aw shucks” act a bit too far.

General It-Doesn’t-Matter-His-Name thundered that we need not worry, however, because his tanks and troops could “mop the floor” with the Russians, in a battle that “wouldn’t even be close.” It was oh-so-typical, another U.S. Army general—who clearly longs for the Cold War fumes that defined his early career—overestimating the Russian menace and underestimating Russian military capability. Of course, it was all cloaked in the macho bravado so common among generals who think that talking like sergeants will win them street cred with the troops. (That’s not their job canymore, mind you.) He said nothing, of course, about the role of mid- and long-range nuclear weapons that could be the catastrophic consequence of an unnecessary war with the Russian Bear.

I got to thinking about that talk recently as I reflected in wonder at how the latest generation of mainstream “liberals” loves to fawn over generals, admirals—any flag officers, really—as alternatives to President Donald Trump. The irony of that alliance should not be lost on us. It’s built on the standard Democratic fear of looking “soft” on terrorism, communism, or whatever-ism, and their visceral, blinding hatred of Trump. Some of this is understandable. Conservative Republicans masterfully paint liberals as “weak sisters” on foreign policy, and Trump’s administration is, well, a wild card in world affairs.

The problem with the vast majority of generals, however, is that they don’t think strategically. What they call strategy is really large-scale operations—deploying massive formations and winning campaigns replete with battles. Many remain mired in the world of tactics, still operating like lieutenants or captains and proving the Peter Principle right, as they get promoted past their respective levels of competence.

If America’s generals, now and over the last 18 years, really were strategic thinkers, they’d have spoken out about—and if necessary resigned en masse over—mission sets that were unwinnable, illegal (in the case of Iraq), and counterproductive. Their oath is to the Constitution, after all, not Emperors Bush, Obama, and Trump. Yet few took that step. It’s all symptomatic of the disease of institutionalized intellectual mediocrity. More of the same is all they know: their careers were built on fighting “terror” anywhere it raised its evil head. Some, though no longer most, still subscribe to the faux intellectualism of General Petraeus and his legion of Coindinistas, who never saw a problem that a little regime change, followed by expert counterinsurgency, couldn’t solve. Forget that they’ve been proven wrong time and again and can count zero victories since 2002. Generals (remember this!) are never held accountable.

Flag officers also rarely seem to recognize that they owe civilian policymakers more than just tactical “how” advice. They ought to be giving “if” advice—if we invade Iraq, it will take 500,000 troops to occupy the place, and even then we’ll ultimately destabilize the country and region, justify al-Qaeda’s worldview, kick off a nationalist insurgency, and become immersed in an unwinnable war. Some, like Army Chief General Eric Shinseki and CENTCOM head John Abizaid, seemed to know this deep down. Still, Shinseki quietly retired after standing up to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Abizaid rode out his tour to retirement.

Trump Scores, Breaks Generals’ 50-Year War Record
Afghanistan and America’s ‘Indispensable Nation’ Hubris

Generals also love to tell the American people that victory is “just around the corner,” or that there’s a “light at the end of the tunnel.” General William Westmoreland used the very same language when predicting imminent victory in Vietnam. Two months later, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong unleashed the largest uprising of the war, the famed Tet Offensive.

Take Afghanistan as exhibit A: 17 or so generals have now commanded U.S. troops in this, America’s longest war. All have commanded within the system and framework of their predecessors. Sure, they made marginal operational and tactical changes—some preferred surges, others advising, others counterterror—but all failed to achieve anything close to victory, instead laundering failure into false optimism. None refused to play the same-old game or question the very possibility of victory in landlocked, historically xenophobic Afghanistan. That would have taken real courage, which is in short supply among senior officers.

Exhibit B involves Trump’s former cabinet generals—National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelley, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis—whom adoring and desperate liberals took as saviors and canonized as the supposed adults in the room. They were no such thing. The generals’ triumvirate consisted ultimately of hawkish conventional thinkers married to the dogma of American exceptionalism and empire. Period.

Let’s start with Mattis. “Mad Dog” Mattis was so anti-Iran and bellicose in the Persian Gulf that President Barack Obama removed him from command of CENTCOM. Furthermore, the supposedly morally untainted, “intellectual” “warrior monk” chose, when he finally resigned, to do so in response to Trump’s altogether reasonable call for a modest troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria. Helping Saudi Arabia terror bomb Yemen and starve 85,000 children to death? Mattis rebuked Congress and supported that. He never considered resigning in opposition to that war crime. No, he fell on his “courageous” sword over downgrading a losing 17-year-old war in Afghanistan. Not to mention he came to Trump’s cabinet straight from the board of contracting giant General Dynamics, where he collected hundreds of thousands of military-industrial complex dollars.

Then there was John Kelley, whom Press Secretary Sarah Sanders implied was above media questioning because he was once a four-star marine general. And there’s McMaster, another lauded intellectual who once wrote an interesting book and taught history at West Point. Yet he still drew all the wrong conclusions in his famous book on Vietnam—implying that more troops, more bombing, and a mass invasion of North Vietnam could have won the war. Furthermore, his work with Mattis on Trump’s unhinged, imperial National Defense Strategy proved that he was, after all, just another devotee of American hyper-interventionism.

So why reflect on these and other Washington generals? It’s simple: liberal veneration for these, and seemingly all, military flag officers is a losing proposition and a formula for more intervention, possible war with other great powers, and the creeping militarization of the entire U.S. government. We know what the generals expect—and potentially want—for America’s foreign policy future.

Just look at the curriculum at the various war and staff colleges from Kansas to Rhode Island. Ten years ago, they were all running war games focused on counterinsurgency in the Middle East and Africa. Now those same schools are drilling for future “contingencies” in the Baltic, Caucasus, and in the South China Sea. Older officers have always lamented the end of the Cold War “good old days,” when men were men and the battlefield was “simple.” A return to a state of near-war with Russia and China is the last thing real progressives should be pushing for in 2020.

The bottom line is this: the faint hint that mainstream libs would relish a Six Days in May–style military coup is more than a little disturbing, no matter what you think of Trump. Democrats must know the damage such a move would do to our ostensible republic. I say: be a patriot. Insist on civilian control of foreign affairs. Even if that means two more years of The Donald.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major and regular contributor to Truthdig. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Tom Dispatch, and The Hill. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet.

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

Robert Reich: Trump Is Achieving His Primary Goal

Donald Trump’s goal is, and has always been, division and disunion. It’s how he keeps himself the center of attention, fuels his base and ensures that no matter what facts are revealed, his followers will stick by him.

But there’s another reason Trump aims to divide—and why he pours salt into the nation’s deepest wounds over ethnicity, immigration, race and gender.

He wants to distract attention from the biggest and most threatening divide of all: the widening imbalance of wealth and power between the vast majority, who have little or none, and a tiny minority at the top who are accumulating just about all.

“Divide and conquer” is one of the oldest strategies in the demagogic playbook: keep the public angry at each other so they don’t unite against those who are running off with the goods.

Over the last four decades, the median wage has barely budged. But the incomes of the richest 0.1 percent have soared by more than 300 percent and the incomes of the top 0.001 percent – the 2,300 richest Americans – they have soard by more than 600 percent.

This enormous imbalance is undermining American democracy.

Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern concluded a few years ago that “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” After analyzing 1,799 policy issues that came before Congress, they found that lawmakers only respond to the demands of wealthy individuals and moneyed business interests.

No secret here. In fact, Trump campaigned as a populist—exploiting the public’s justifiable sense that the game is rigged against them. But he hasn’t done anything to fix the system. To the contrary, his divide-and-conquer strategy as president has disguised his efforts to reward his wealthy donors and funnel more wealth and power to those at the top.

Trump’s tax cuts, his evisceration of labor laws, his filling his cabinet and sub-cabinet with corporate shills, his rollbacks of health, safety, environmental and financial regulations: all have made the super-rich far richer, at the expense of average Americans.

Meanwhile, he and his fellow Republicans continue to suppress votes. Senate Republicans have denounced Democratic proposals to increase turnout, even calling the idea of making election day a federal holiday “a power grab.” Of course, it’ s a power grab—for the people.

Trump and his enablers would rather opponents focus on the ethnic, racial and gender differences he uses to divide and conquer. Don’t fall for it. We must be united to take back our democracy.

Erdogan Defends Istanbul Vote Redo; Critics See Power Grab

ANKARA, Turkey—Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insisted Tuesday that rerunning the Istanbul mayoral vote that was won by the opposition will only strengthen democracy, while critics called the decision an “outrageous” move to eliminate dissent against his government.

Ruling in favor of Erdogan’s governing party, Turkey’s top electoral body on Monday annulled the results of the March 31 vote in Istanbul, which opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoglu narrowly won, and scheduled a re-run for June 23.

“The will of the people has been trampled on,” said Meral Aksener, leader of a nationalist party in Turkey that had backed Imamoglu.

The loss of Istanbul — and the capital of Ankara — in Turkey’s local elections were sharp blows to Erdogan and his conservative, Islamic-based Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

AKP had challenged the results of the vote, claiming it was marred by irregularities. Critics accuse the AKP of trying to cling to power in Istanbul, a city of 15 million people that is Turkey’s cultural and commercial hub, and of exerting heavy pressure on the country’s electoral body to cancel the outcome of the March 31 vote.

The controversial decision has increased concerns over democracy and the rule of law in Turkey, a NATO member that is still formally a candidate to join the European Union. Turkey is also a key Western ally in the fight against terrorism and in stemming of the flow of refugees to Europe.

The move is raising questions about whether Erdogan, who has consolidated power throughout his 16 years in power and is increasingly accused of authoritarianism, would ever accept any electoral defeat or relinquish power.

“This outrageous decision highlights how Erdogan’s Turkey is drifting toward a dictatorship,” Guy Verhofstadt, a European Parliament lawmaker and the leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, said on Twitter.

Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, described the decision on Istanbul as a “seismic event in Turkish history.”

“Turkey has been holding free and fair elections since the 1950s,” he told The Associated Press. “Never before has a party refused to accept the outcome of the election… This goes against 70 years of accepted tradition.”

“(Erdogan) is saying ‘let’s vote until the governing party wins,” he added.

Manfred Weber, the leading conservative candidate seeking to head the European Union’s executive branch, told n-tv television in his native Germany that he’d end EU membership negotiations with Turkey if he’s elected later this month.

Weber, the center-right European People’s Party candidate and front-runner to replace Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission, said Turkey’s decision on the Istanbul vote was “incomprehensible for many of us in Europe.”

“In the past years, Turkey has unfortunately alienated itself from the values of Europe,” he said. “For me, that means ending the accession talks between Turkey and the European Union.”

Turkish opposition newspaper Birgun branded the decision a “coup” and argued that justice in the country has “been suspended.”

The redo of the Istanbul vote also threatens to further de-stabilize the Turkish economy, which has entered a recession.

The Turkish lira crashed spectacularly last summer over investor concerns about Erdogan’s policies. It has been sliding again in recent weeks and on Tuesday it hit its lowest level since October.

Europe’s top human rights and democracy watchdog also expressed concerns about reports of pressure exerted by Erdogan’s government on the electoral body.

“We face the repeat elections in Istanbul with great concern and urge Turkish authorities to do their utmost to restore the safeguards of the electoral process,” said Anders Knape, president of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe.

Delivering a speech in Parliament on Tuesday, Erdogan reiterated that the vote was sullied by irregularities “we could not ignore.” He rejected opposition accusations that his party was trying to win back a key election that it had lost.

He said violations included the alleged improper entering of election data and the fact that thousands of officials overseeing the vote at ballot stations were bankers or teachers and not civil servants, as required by law.

“We see this decision as an important step in strengthening our democracy, which will enable the removal of the shadow cast over the Istanbul election,” Erdogan said.

The opposition, however, has complained about irregularities at Turkish elections in the past years, but their objections have been ignored.

Imamoglu arrived in Ankara on Tuesday for emergency talks with senior members of the opposition Republican Peoples’ Party, or CHP. Despite media reports about a possible boycott, CHP made clear that Imamoglu would run again in the Istanbul race.

“We extend our hand to all our citizens,” the party said. “We wholeheartedly believe that this extended hand will be held strong on 23 June, that it will strengthen our democratic struggle and that we will achieve a greater victory than on March 31.”

On the other side, Erdogan told reporters that former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim would again run as the ruling party’s candidate for mayor.

Also Tuesday, the Interior Ministry appointed Istanbul’s governor Ali Yerlikaya as acting mayor of the city. The Istanbul municipality immediately deleted all tweets posted by Imamoglu during his 20 days in office as mayor.

__

David Rising in Berlin contributed.

Will the U.S. Start a War Against Iran?

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

On Sunday, May 5, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton announced that the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and a bomber task force had begun to make their way from the Mediterranean Sea toward the coastline of Iran. Iran, Bolton said, had made “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings.” He was, characteristically, not specific. It was enough that Bolton—who has a history of making hazardous statements—had made these comments from the perch of the White House in Washington, D.C. “The United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime,” he said rather incredulously. After all, what is the arrival of a massive war fleet on the coastline of a country but a declaration of war?

On his way to Europe, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the “indications and warnings” included actions by the Lebanese political formation Hezbollah. Once more, Pompeo said he would give no evidence. “I don’t want to talk about what underlays it.”

The journey of the USS Abraham Lincoln through the Red Sea comes as the U.S. government tries to tighten its sanctions regime against Iran. Any country that buys Iranian oil, the United States now says, will be liable to have sanctions placed against it. The five countries most vulnerable to further U.S. sanctions are China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey. India, Japan, and South Korea have said that they would try and abide by the new, and harsh, U.S. sanctions. China and Turkey have made it clear that they will not follow the U.S.’ lead.

Iran’s Economy

Iran’s deputy oil minister Amir Hossein Zamaninia told Iranian state media that his ministry will oversee the sale of Iran’s oil into the “gray market.” The U.S. sanctions, Zamaninia said, are “illegal,” and therefore Iran is entitled to use all kinds of methods to circumvent them. The “gray market” includes loading tankers with Iranian oil—often sold at deep discounts—and then allowing them to alter their signals as they go out into open water. Congestion of tankers on the world’s waters makes it difficult to monitor which tanker has actually come from which port. But even if Iran sells oil on the gray market, the volumes will drop significantly, and this will impact Iran’s external revenues.

In April, the International Monetary Fund projected that Iran’s economy would likely slide downhill by 6 percent in 2019. The main reason for this continued slide is of course the U.S.-led sanctions that have whittled away at Iran’s budget and at the confidence of its people. Iran’s macroeconomic situation is hurt by large-scale budget deficits—projected to reach over $14 billion this year—and the flooding of the market with Iranian rials—so that money supplied grew by over 20 percent. Serious problems of capital flight and of tax evasion dog Iran’s prospects. Kazem Delkhosh, the deputy head of the Iranian parliament’s economic commission, estimates that about 40 percent of the country’s income is hidden from the tax authorities.

It did not help that last month Iran faced devastating floods in the country’s northeast and southwest. The damage is estimated to cost $2.5 billion. Countries that want to send financial support toward the flood victims cannot do so as a result of the U.S. sanctions on financial systems, says the Iranian Red Crescent Society. This is why in-kind aid has been the only thing that has been permitted into the country, with China sending tents and Austria sending blankets. But even in-kind aid, including from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was blocked due to the U.S. sanctions. Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif wrote on Twitter, “Iranian Red Crescent can’t receive any funds due to illegal US sanctions. US should own up to its ECONOMIC TERRORISM.”

Tensions

On Wednesday, May 8, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani will go on television and the radio to announce his country’s response to the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and to the harsh new sanctions’ regime.

The United States had permitted Russian and European firms to do work on Iran’s nuclear energy sector. Five waivers had been given to help four Iranian facilities—at the Bushehr nuclear power plant, the Fordow enrichment facility, the Arak nuclear complex and the Tehran Research Reactor. Pompeo allowed three waivers to be extended for 90 days (half the length of the previous waivers) but disallowed two. The two that were not renewed include one to Russia, which had swapped Iranian enriched uranium for Russian raw yellowcake, and one to companies that operate in Oman to store heavy water from Iran. Both Russia and Europe are not happy with this situation. Iran has refused to stop enrichment, which is essential to its nuclear energy program—legal under the terms of the 2015 agreement. It is likely that Rouhani will affirm Iran’s right to continue to enrich uranium for its power reactors.

Last month, Iran’s senior leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged his Iraqi counterparts to “make sure that the Americans withdraw their troops from Iraq as soon as possible because expelling them has become difficult whenever they have had a long military presence in a country.” Iran and Iraq have—since the U.S. war against Iraq in 2003—deepened their ties. Close economic links, including roadways and a potential train, have made both countries dependent on each other (Iraq, despite U.S. pressure, imports Iran’s oil). Khamenei referred to the 5,200 U.S. troops who remain in Iraq. Bolton has said that these troops are there to “watch Iran,” a phrase that has been widely mocked after Trump used it earlier this year.

The war of words has escalated into dangerous territory. In April, Trump’s government called Iranian military forces “terrorists.” In response, the Iranian parliament retaliated. Defense Minister General Amir Hatami put a bill forward that would allow Iran’s government to respond to the “terrorist actions” of U.S. forces. It was not clear how Iran would respond, although the bill suggested that the response could be political and diplomatic rather than military.

The U.S. government has said that Iran might target U.S. troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region. These are likely the “indications and warnings” of Bolton. There are tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Gulf. The U.S. military hardware that encircles Iran is lethal. Late last year, the Iranian government—feeling hemmed in by this military noose—proposed that it could strike U.S. forces at al-Udeid Air Base (Qatar), al-Dhafra base (United Arab Emirates) and Kandahar base (Afghanistan). “They are within our reach,” said Amirali Hajizadeh, who heads Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ air brigade. As if to provoke Iran further, in March of this year, the United States signed a deal with Oman to use its ports at Salalah and Duqm for military purposes.

Endless Wars

In his state of the union address, Trump said, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.” The United States has tried to push a new deal in Afghanistan and has tried to withdraw from the conflict in Syria. Neither of these withdrawals will be easy.

But if the United States strikes Iran, there is no doubt that the wars from Lebanon to the border of India will become endless. There is no question that Iran—much weaker militarily than the United States—will use its advantages to strike the United States inside Afghanistan and to urge its allies to strike U.S. forces in the Gulf and across North Africa. Iran’s population is deeply patriotic and would see any U.S. strike as one against the Iranian people and not just against the Iranian government. It is unlikely that the United States will find any significant allies amongst the Iranians. A war against Iran at this time would be a war against a stretch of the world that has seen too many wars in recent times, that would like to open the door to peace. Trump—with Bolton and Pence—seek to provoke a war. These are dangerous men with a dangerous agenda.

Mnuchin Denies Democrats’ Request for Trump Tax Returns

WASHINGTON—Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has made it official: The administration won’t be turning President Donald Trump’s tax returns over to the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

Mnuchin told Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal in a Monday letter that the panel’s request “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose.”

In making that determination, Mnuchin said he relied on the advice of the Justice Department. He concluded that the department is “not authorized to disclose the requested returns and return information.”

The move, which was expected, is sure to set in motion a legal battle over Trump’s tax returns. The chief options available to Democrats now are to subpoena the Internal Revenue Service for the returns or to file a lawsuit.

Neal originally demanded access to Trump’s tax returns in early April under a law that says the IRS “shall furnish” the returns of any taxpayer to a handful of top lawmakers, including the chair of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.

The White House and the president’s attorneys declined to comment on the deadline to turn over Trump’s returns.

Trump has privately made clear he has no intention of turning over the much-coveted records.

The president has told those close to him that the attempt to get his returns was an invasion of his privacy and a further example of what he calls the Democrat-led “witch hunt” — like special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe — meant to damage him.

Trump has repeatedly asked aides as to the status of the House request and has not signaled a willingness to cooperate with Democrats, according to a White House official and two Republicans close to the White House.

He has linked the effort to the myriad House probes into his administration and has urged his team to stonewall all requests. He also has inquired about the “loyalty” of the top officials at the IRS, according to one of his advisers.

Trump has long told confidants that he was under audit and therefore could not release his taxes. But in recent weeks, he has added to the argument, telling advisers that the American people elected him once without seeing his taxes and would do so again, according to the three White House officials and Republicans, who were not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

Democratic Elite Could Care Less About the Life of the Party

“When you go to other countries, the political divisions are so much more stark and wider; here in America, the difference between Democrats and Republicans—we’re fighting inside the 40-yard line.” —President Barack Obama, Nov. 20, 2013

Well, not anymore, President Obama.

Much has been written about the effect of Donald Trump in transforming the Republican Party over the past three years. The upcoming Democratic primary will illustrate the effect he had in changing the Democratic Party over the same time period. Trump has turned Obama’s Democratic Party into one in which the ideological playing field is much wider than before the 2016 elections.

The 2016 Republican primary proved how little credibility GOP leaders had with their rank-and-file voters. The 2020 Democratic primary will do the same for Democrats.

Trump widened the Democrats’ ideological playing field by humiliating its establishment with his victory in 2016, when it sold the candidacy of Hillary Clinton to its base by touting her supposed electability. More importantly, Trump has transformed the party by convincing its progressive base that there is no future for centrist politics in a country whose middle class is shrinking and whose working class is being pauperized.

What is important to understand is that the current contradictions between both sets of party leaderships and their voters is not as much about issues and ideology as it is about who has won and who has lost the economic and cultural struggles of the past 40 years. This divide is the most revealing fact of American life in our era.

Despite the vehemence of the fight between the elites of both parties, they have a lot more in common with each other than they would ever care to admit to their respective political bases. Life for the political elites on all levels has been very good and is getting better. Their children go to the same private schools and rarely serve in the endless wars their parents keep extending, while the political elites graduate from public office and join law firms and lobbying shops that make them millions.

At the same time, the ever-more expensive campaigns in the post-Citizens United world have made the entire election industry of consultants, pollsters and pundits on both sides very rich, no matter how reckless, incompetent or mediocre so many of them have been proved to be.

All of this is during an era in which, according to the Federal Reserve, the bottom 47% of American income-earners can’t come up with $400 in case of an emergency.

What the two sets of party elites also share is contempt for their parties’ base of activists, voters and non-donor constituencies. Aside from paying them lip service during election season, Republican elites have no use for their base of religious voters, anti-immigrant activists and small-business people. There is no better illustration than the fact that during the two years of united Republican Party control of the entire federal government, no wall was funded or built at the border, Planned Parenthood was not defunded and not a single piece of legislation favored by the party’s base of social conservatives or anti-immigration activists was passed into law. Instead, party leaders promptly passed budget-busting tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest 1% of Americans—hardly the reason most rank-and-file Republican voters supported Trump in 2016.

Similarly, Democratic Party leaders have no use for the priorities of their voters and activists, who by large margins support Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal and an end to our militarized foreign policy. The Democratic leadership rewards its voters, who handed it historic victories last November by dispatching Wendell Primus, the lead health adviser to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to meet with Blue Cross Blue Shield executives to reassure them that they should not worry about any legislation that would establish a Medicare-for-all program. This is done while it publicly ridiculed and then shelved the Green New Deal proposal and attacked Trump on such foreign policy issues as his proposed withdrawal of American forces from Syria.

The realization of how little the agendas of ordinary people matter to the elites of both parties has made it a lot more acceptable for their betrayed bases to look for alternatives, which would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In fact, this realization is the genesis of the populist moment in current American politics.

The vehemence of opposition to Trump over the past two years has hidden the internal struggle in the Democratic Party between what can be described as the new left, symbolically led by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with the united front of the Democratic establishment, which includes most former and current elected officials, think tanks, the donor classes, the liberal faction of establishment media and the Praetorian Guard of conventional political thinking: the Democratic consulting class.

What the Democratic establishment will be looking for in the 2020 elections is the restoration of Clinton- and Obama-era politics, which, despite the populist rhetoric, delivered war abroad and subservience to the financial elites at home. But what new left Democrats are looking for is peace abroad and war with the financial elites at home. These two sides are not compatible in the long run, and their collective opposition to Trump will only go so far in reconciling these contradictions.

What the Democratic Party’s new left needs to understand is that the establishment will fight far more viciously to prevent a new left victory than Republican Party elites did to defeat Trump in the 2016 primary because, putting aside all his anti-establishment rhetoric, the man’s basic political incoherence and fraudulent nature meant that he can be manipulated to serve elite interests while betraying his voters.

In comparison to Trump, the new left Democrats will be perceived as a far greater threat to party elites and the donor/owner classes of both parties. If any of the new left candidates win the Democratic Party nomination, many in Democratic establishment ranks, especially among its nonelected and institutional sections, will be open to lining up behind a “centrist” independent candidacy. This will guarantee four more years of Trump, a price many of them will be willing to pay if the alternative is a Democratic Party transformed into a genuinely social democratic alternative to the Republican Party.

What the entire American political establishment will learn over the next two years is that the political world that existed before the 2016 elections will not be put back together again. Trump, for all his endless faults, is merely the symptom, not the cause, of the crisis facing the United States. The cause of the crisis is an American elite that has for too long mistaken its cynicism for realism, hubris for wisdom, and the sending of other people’s children to fight wars lost long ago for patriotism.

Are Democrats Losing Their Enthusiasm? A New Poll Gives GOP the Edge

Democrats who are counting on the same “blue wave” of civic engagement that helped their party win a majority in the House of Representatives in 2018 may need to adjust their expectations. As NBC’s Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann report Monday, the party was propelled to victory based on two major factors: high enthusiasm among Democrats and support from independent voters. According to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, however, Democrats are losing ground when it comes to voter enthusiasm.

President Donald Trump in the poll still trails with independents—just 34% of those surveyed have a positive view of him. However, the independents surveyed don’t share Democrats’ appetite for Trump’s impeachment, as 45% believe Congress should not impeach the president.

Pollsters also found that “75% of Republican registered voters say they have high interest in the 2020 presidential election—registering a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale—versus 73% of Democratic voters who say the same thing.”

A two-percentage-point difference might not seem like a lot, but it’s a stark contrast from the 2018 midterm elections, when, as Todd, Murray and Dann point out, “Democrats held a double-digit lead on this question until the last two months before the election, when the GOP closed the gap but still trailed the Dems in enthusiasm.”

Those results, the NBC reporters caution, “should correct any Dem thinking that assumes—‘Hey, we have Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the bag because we won there in [the] 2018 [cycle]’—since GOP enthusiasm now is much higher.”

Another reason for Democrats not to rest on their laurels is the growing enthusiasm not only among the Republican poll respondents, but among wealthy GOP donors. As Politico reported in April, fundraisers who previously worked for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney who sat out the 2016 election are back to raising money for Trump in 2020.

On Tuesday, Julie Bykowicz writes in The Wall Street Journal, 200 Republican donors who declined to contribute to Trump’s first campaign “are set to gather…for a five-hour campaign pitch at the Trump International Hotel, down the street from the White House.”

Bykowicz reports the Trump campaign “has already raised well over $100 million and spent more than $92 million by the end of March on political rallies, digital advertising and other expenses, FEC records show.”

Overall enthusiasm for the 2020 election is high, with 69% of respondents across parties expressing a high level of interest. Such engagement with the election still more than 500 days away is a stark reminder that we are just at the beginning when it comes to this cycle, with countless more polls to come.

The Trump Administration Won’t Stop Destroying Migrant Families

When they arrived at the U.S. border June 1 seeking asylum, 5-year-old Esdras and the woman he called his “mamita” were split up by immigration officers.

“I cried so much,” Marta Alicia Mejia said. “I thought, ‘My God, why would they separate me from the boy?’ ”

Three weeks later, a federal judge ruled that the government must reunify the migrant families it separated at the border under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy between April and June 2018.

Mejia watched for weeks at a Texas detention center as parents were released while she stayed behind. That’s because only parents were being reunited with children. Even though Mejia has raised Esdras since he was born, she isn’t his mother. Esdras’ mother, court records state, became pregnant after she was raped at 18 and decided to give her son to Mejia, his great-grandmother.

The government isn’t reunifying all separated children because it’s treating legal guardians different from parents. The federal court case that forced the Trump administration to reunite families, Ms. L v. ICE, excludes legal guardians such as Mejia. It applies only to adoptive or biological parents.

More than 2,800 children were separated from parents last summer, and hundreds of family separations have been reported since then. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw recently expanded the Ms. L ruling to include any migrant parents and children torn apart in the past two years after a government report concluded that thousands more children were separated well before April 2018.

But it’s unclear how many legal guardians are affected. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about how many have been split up from their children.

Some lawyers say these families should get the same court protections afforded to parents and their children. Legal guardians have to find attorneys to file their own legal claims, which means they have to wait much longer to see their children again.

“They are the functional equivalent of parents,” said Joshua Toll, an attorney representing two legal guardians. “Because it’s the same trauma, we do believe they should be treated the same way.”

In a recent report by the Texas Civil Rights Project about ongoing family separations, lawyers noted that in at least five cases, “legal guardians and stepparents expressed frustration at government officials for failing to recognize the legal documentation they carry with them when they come to the United States.”

The report mentions a woman who had been detained and separated from her niece for more than six months “in large part because the government refuses to treat legal guardians as parents to keep families together.”

Mejia has raised Esdras since he was born. People in their neighborhood knew she took the boy in. Mejia, 61, sold tortillas in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, to make ends meet.

They fled when a local gang began threatening Mejia after she witnessed a robbery at a motorcycle repair shop in her neighborhood, court records state. She also was caught in the crossfire of a shootout between gang members and police.

After Mejia and Esdras were separated at the border, Esdras was placed with a foster family in New York City. When he later was released to Mejia’s son and his wife in Texas, he was tired and slept often, according to court records.

“When he wasn’t sleeping he acted shy and scared,” Rhina Martinez, Mejia’s daughter-in-law, said in a September court declaration. “He asks for her (Mejia) all the time and spends the nights crying about her. I’m very worried that it is harming (Esdras) psychologically to be without Marta for so long.”

Seven months and eight days would pass before Mejia would see her great-grandson again.

Lawyers from the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or RAICES, took on Mejia’s case and requested a stay of deportation on her behalf.

“Ms. Mejia was very distraught when we were working with her,” said Manoj Govindaiah, litigation director for RAICES. “She was very determined to pursue her case and be reunited with (Esdras). I think that was really driving her.”

Complicating matters in Mejia’s case is that she arrived at the border without papers confirming that she had custody of Esdras. That’s typical in a lot of cases, Govindaiah said.

“A lot of it is just social norms. You live in a small town and everyone knows who you are and everyone knows this is your grandchild,” he said. “Everybody just knows that Grandma has authority to do whatever for this kid.”

Legal guardians sometimes arrive with a “carta poder,” a document signed by a parent that gives them custody over the child. In others, they have court records appointing them as guardians.

After Esdras was released from foster care, Mejia’s lawyers obtained a notarized letter from her granddaughter that confirmed Mejia raised the child. They also have a letter from a neighborhood association president who said Mejia “has been responsible” for Esdras’s upbringing.

RAICES also requested a second credible fear interview for Mejia, which is the first step in the asylum process. Mejia failed the first one, her lawyers say in court records, because she was distraught after the separation from her great-grandson.

It’s the same argument lawyers made in the case that reunited hundreds of families and resulted in a settlement agreement granting parents new credible fear interviews.

In October, attorneys representing legal guardians filed two objections that sought to include their clients in the settlement.

Sabraw, the district judge, denied their objections but ordered the lawyers to meet with the government to resolve their claims. Toll, the guardians’ lawyer, said his team decided to pursue the cases separately. Both clients recently were released from detention.

In January, Mejia also was released and reunited with Esdras in Houston.

“When I entered this house, the first question he asked me was, ‘Why did you leave me behind?’ ” Mejia said. “I fought until the end for my boy.”

This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and Matt Thompson and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

Laura C. Morel can be reached at  lmorel@revealnews.org . Follow her on Twitter:  @lauracmorel .

North Korea Tests New Missile—and Trump’s Resolve

TOKYO — North Korea appears to have tested a new short-range missile — and President Donald Trump’s resolve to keep it from doing more of the same in the future.

The test early Saturday was quickly played down by Trump and his top advisers, who noted it was not the kind of long-range missile leader Kim Jong Un has refrained from launching since 2017.

But the sudden activity on the North’s east coast, complete with fiery photos of a purported bull’s eye out to sea, alarmed Washington’s regional allies and suggests that Kim’s missiles are improving even as the Trump administration wrestles with how to get him back to the negotiating table.

Kim personally supervised the test of what experts believe was a short-range ballistic missile first displayed by North Korea at a military parade early last year, along with a drill involving 240 millimeter- and 300 millimeter-caliber multiple rocket launchers.

There remains some uncertainty over what was tested.

South Korea’s military reported that various “projectiles” flew from 70 to 240 kilometers (44 to 149 miles) before splashing harmlessly into the Pacific. The activity prompted the 35th Fighter Wing at Misawa Air Base in northern Japan to tweet on its official account — in all capital letters — “MISSILE INBOUND.”

The tweet was soon followed by an all clear, and an “enjoy your Saturday.”

Trump moved quickly to minimize the significance of the test on his efforts to strike a nuclear deal with North Korea, tweeting that Kim “knows that I am with him & does not want to break his promise to me.”

Both leaders continue to claim they have a good personal relationship.

But tensions have grown since they failed to make any deals during their most recent summit, in Hanoi in February. Kim and senior North Korean officials have since expressed open frustration with what the North claims is an inflexible and unrealistic posture at talks by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton.

Kim suggested last month that he intends to give Washington until the end of the year to change its negotiating strategy. If it doesn’t, he has warned, he will seek a different path.

His position has created a dilemma for South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has tried to act as a middleman. Seoul called an emergency meeting Saturday of top officials at its presidential Blue House and urged North Korea to stop committing acts that would raise military tensions.

But such calls ring hollow in North Korea since the South has decided to go ahead with joint military exercises with the U.S. that the North sees as provocative. North Korea strongly condemned a drill of a South Korea-based THAAD air-defense system by U.S. troops just two weeks ago.

The North’s missile test also came just days after the United States tested its Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Base in California. Though such launches are planned well in advance and not directed at any specific country, they are seen by North Korea as highly provocative.

North Korea last conducted a major missile test in November 2017 when it flight-tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that demonstrated the potential capability to reach deep into the U.S. mainland.

During the diplomacy that followed those weapons tests, Kim said the North would not test nuclear devices or ICBMs. The latest missile, which the North’s media referred to only as a “tactical guided weapon,” fell well below that threshold.

It is believed to be modeled after Russia’s 9K720 Iskander mobile short-range ballistic missile system. The solid-fuel missile, first revealed in a military parade in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, in February last year, is designed to be maneuverable during flight to boost its accuracy and thwart interception.

Experts noted that despite its physical resemblance, the North Korean missile may be a less capable version of the Russian Iskander, which can carry a nuclear warhead and strike targets as far away as 500 kilometers (310 miles).

A less capable version is still a clear danger to U.S. allies and American troops stationed in the region.

The distance between Wonsan, where the launch was held, and the South Korean capital of Seoul is roughly 200 kilometers (124 miles). More than 20,000 U.S. troops are based in the South and another 50,000 in Japan. All are within range of the North’s short- or medium-range missile arsenal.

Trump tweeted Monday that he had spoken with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe “concerning North Korea and Trade.” He did not provide additional information, but said “Very good conversation!”

North Korea’s state-run media had a propaganda heyday with the launch.

The ruling party newspaper showed Kim supervising the drill from a camouflaged tent with a desk and computer screens monitoring a rocky offshore outcropping that was used as a target. One photo has him smiling broadly while a screen shows the top of the crag enveloped in a ball of flames.

It also showed the missile rising from a mobile launcher and stressed how the drill was “organized without an advance notice” to underscore the need for realistic combat readiness.

North Korea’s coverage of the developments over the past year presents a sharp contrast to the focus outside of the country on denuclearization.

The North’s media has centered its attention on the portrayal of Kim as a strong leader on the global stage seeking to free the country of what the North calls unjustified sanctions so that it can develop its economy. Denuclearization is almost never the main topic of its reports.

That was the official message yet again on Sunday.

In its report on the drills, the state media stressed the need for the military to be on high alert to “defend the political sovereignty and economic self-sustenance of the country … bearing in mind the iron truth that genuine peace and security are ensured and guaranteed only by powerful strength.”

Prince Harry, Meghan ‘Absolutely Thrilled’ About Birth of Baby Boy

WINDSOR, England—Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, gave birth to a healthy baby boy early Monday, a beaming Prince Harry announced to the world, declaring he’s “incredibly proud” of his wife.

The baby weighed 7 pounds, 3 ounces (3.26 kilograms) at birth and was born at 5:26 a.m. (0426 GMT; 12:26 a.m. EDT). Harry said their son was a little bit overdue and that had given the royal couple more time to contemplate names.

Harry said he was ecstatic about the birth of their first child and promised that more details — such as the baby’s name — will be shared in the coming days. The couple said earlier they weren’t going to find out the baby’s sex in advance.

“This little thing is absolutely to die for,” he said. “I’m just over the moon.”

The infant is seventh in line to the British throne and Queen Elizabeth II’s eighth great-grandchild. Harry is the younger son of Prince Charles, heir to the throne, and the late Princess Diana, who died in a Paris car crash in 1997.

The 34-year-old Harry, speaking before TV cameras on Monday afternoon in Windsor, said he was present for the birth.

“It’s been the most amazing experience I could ever have possibly imagined,” he said. “How any woman does what they do is beyond comprehension.

“We’re both absolutely thrilled and so grateful for all the love and support from everybody out there. It’s been amazing, so we just wanted to share this with everybody,” he gushed.

Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, was reportedly also with her daughter and said she is overjoyed, according to British media. Senior royals were informed of the birth, as was the family of Diana, Harry’s late mother, before he went before the cameras.

The couple’s Instagram account said: “It’s a boy! Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are overjoyed to announce the birth of their child.”

Harry said he planned to make another announcement, probably in two days’ time, “so everyone can see the baby.” It’s expected they will pose for a family picture at that point.

Crowds that had gathered in Windsor near the castle that is one of the queen’s favorite residences reacted with joy to the welcome news that the baby had been born. Some said it would provide a welcome respite from the continuing political stalemate over Brexit.

Londoners Pam and Keith Jonson said the news will provide a lift to peoples’ spirits.

“You can tell by people around,” Pam Jonson said. “Lifts everybody a bit. Definitely. With all that’s been going recently. It’s nice uplift actually.”

Prime Minister Theresa May congratulated the royal couple and wished them the best in a tweet.

The former Meghan Markle was an American TV star before retiring from acting to marry Harry at St. George’s Chapel on the grounds of Windsor Castle a year ago.

The child will be eligible for dual British-U.S. citizenship if Meghan and Harry want to go through the application process.

The birth of Britain’s latest royal baby marks the completion of Harry’s transformation from a boy whose mother died when he was just 12 to a sometimes-troubled teen, a committed military man, a popular senior royal, a husband and now to a proud father. He has long spoken of his desire to start a family.

He and his older brother, Prince William, along with their wives, are seen by many in Britain as the new, fresh faces of a royal family that had become stodgy and aged. They are raising the next generation of royals amid a genuine groundswell of British public support for the monarchy.

Meghan in particular represents a change for the royals.

At 37, she is older than Harry, had a previous marriage that ended in divorce and has strong feminist views. As the daughter of a black mother and a white father, she says she identifies as biracial.

Meghan also achieved considerable success in her own right before agreeing to a blind date with Harry that changed both of their lives. Meghan had an important role in the popular TV series “Suits,” pressed for increased women’s rights around the world and had a wide following even before she joined the world’s most famous royal family.

Harry and Meghan recently moved from central London to a secluded house known as Frogmore Cottage near Windsor Castle, 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of London. The move is seen in part as reflecting a desire for privacy as they raise their first child.

It also separates Harry and Meghan from William and his wife, Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, who had been living in the same compound at Kensington Palace in central London with their three children — Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis — the new baby’s cousins.

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Gregory Katz reported from London.