Chris Hedges's Blog, page 264

Ilhan Omar Won’t Be Cowed by Trump

Last Saturday, the final day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, 19-year-old white supremacist John T. Earnest allegedly walked into the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California, raised his AR-style assault rifle and began shooting. He reportedly killed congregant Lori Gilbert Kaye as she stood in front of her rabbi, Yisroel Goldstein, protecting him. Eyewitnesses said Earnest shot Goldstein twice, blowing off part of his finger, and injured two others, then fled. He was arrested a short time later. A manifesto surfaced, which he allegedly wrote and posted online, riddled with anti-Semitic language. In it, he also took credit for an attempted arson of a mosque in nearby Escondido a month earlier. A message left on the mosque parking lot referenced the massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 50 Muslim worshippers were gunned down. In his own manifesto, the New Zealand shooter described President Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity.”

On Saturday, Minnesota Democratic Congressmember Ilhan Omar tweeted: “My heart is breaking after today’s deadly shooting at Chabad Congregation in San Diego — on the last day of Passover and 6 months to the day after the Tree of Life shooting. We as a nation must confront the terrifying rise of religious hate and violence.” She ended with “Love trumps hate.”

Since taking office in January, Omar, one of the first two Muslim women ever elected to Congress and the first in Congress to wear a hijab, has been frequently targeted by Trump. Most recently, he tweeted a video alternating between images of Omar and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She has been targeted for her unabashed criticism of U.S. support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Death threats against her have spiked, and she’s been vilified by the right-wing media. Angered by the threats and vitriol, a group of prominent African American women rallied in front of the U.S. Capitol Tuesday, at a rally they called “Black Women in Defense of Ilhan Omar.”

“It is about time that we stepped up to defend those who represent our political vision on the front lines of struggle,” legendary activist, author and scholar Angela Davis said at the podium. “The attack against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, while it is clearly directed at her as an individual, is also designed to dissuade all of us from speaking out on issues that are considered controversial … the numerous threats of assassination from white nationalists and their supporters are a way of sending messages to other black women, to all who hold radical and progressive political views, that they, too, can be made into targets of vitriolic, violent racism: ‘Be quiet, or you will suffer the fate of Ilhan Omar.’”

Joining Angela Davis was historian Barbara Ransby, an adviser to the Movement for Black Lives. Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor spoke, as did Alicia Garza, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter. “From R. Kelly to Donald Trump, what we can no longer accept is the silencing of black women!,” said Ayanna Pressley, the first African American congresswoman ever elected from Massachusetts. Rashida Tlaib, the only other Muslim congresswoman, also spoke.

The crowd rose in a resounding ovation as Congressmember Ilhan Omar arrived. Her 17-minute speech was a damning indictment of Trump, saying he “and his allies are doing everything that they can to distance themselves and misinform the public from the monsters that they created, who are terrorizing the Jewish community and the Muslim community,” she said. “Because when we are talking about anti-Semitism, we must also talk about Islamophobia. It’s two sides of the same coin of bigotry.”

Trump said of Omar in a recent TV interview, “She is somebody that doesn’t really understand life, real life … she’s got a way about her that’s very, very bad for our country.”

Whether Trump likes it or not, “our country” is also Omar’s country. At the rally, she said: “I don’t only represent one marginalized voice, because in this country being black is enough of being marginalized. But I also happen to be a woman. That’s a second marginalization. I happen to be a Muslim. And I also happen to be a refugee and an immigrant … So, when [Trump] chooses to attack me, we know that that attack isn’t for Ilhan. [It’s] the continuation of the attacks that he’s leveled against women, against people of color, against immigrants, against refugees, and certainly against Muslims. We are collectively saying, ‘Your vile attacks, your demented views are not welcome here.’”

Ilhan Omar fled to the United States as a refugee from war in Somalia. “If I survived the militias,” she said, standing against the backdrop of the Capitol dome behind her, “I certainly can survive these people.”

The Pentagon Effectively Owns Trump Now

Donald Trump is a con man. Think of Trump University or a juicy Trump steak or can’t-lose casinos (that never won). But as president, one crew he hasn’t conned is the Pentagon. Quite the opposite, they’ve conned him because they’ve been at the game a lot longer and lie (in Trump-speak) in far biglier ways.

People condemn President Trump for his incessant lying and his con games — and rightly so. But few Americans condemn the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state, even though we’ve been the victims of their long con for decades now. As it happens, from the beginning of the Cold War to late last night, they’ve remained remarkably skilled at exaggerating the threats the U.S. faces and, believe me, that represents the longest con of all. It’s kept the military-industrial complex humming along, thanks to countless trillions of taxpayer dollars, while attempts to focus a spotlight on that scam have been largely discredited or ignored.

One thing should have, but hasn’t, cut through all the lies: the grimly downbeat results of America’s actual wars. War by its nature tells harsh truths — in this case, that the U.S. military is anything but “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” Why? Because of its almost unblemished record of losing, or at least never winning, the wars it engages in. Consider the disasters that make up its record from Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s to, in the twenty-first century, the Iraq War that began with the invasion of 2003 and the nearly 18-year debacle in Afghanistan — and that’s just to start down a list. You could easily add Korea (a 70-year stalemate/truce that remains troublesome to this day), a disastrous eight-year-old intervention in Libya, a quarter century in (and out and in) Somalia, and the devastating U.S.-backed Saudi war in Yemen, among so many other failed interventions.

In short, the U.S. spends staggering sums annually, essentially stolen from a domestic economy and infrastructure that’s fraying at the seams, on what still passes for “defense.” The result: botched wars in distant lands that have little, if anything, to do with true defense, but which the Pentagon uses to justify yet more funding, often in the name of “rebuilding” a “depleted” military. Instead of a three-pointed pyramid scheme, you might think of this as a five-pointed Pentagon scheme, where losing only wins you ever more, abetted by lies that just grow and grow. When it comes to raising money based on false claims, this president has nothing on the Pentagon. And worse yet, like America’s wars, the Pentagon’s long con shows no sign of ending. Eat your heart out, Donald Trump!

Eternal MADness

“So many lies, so little time” is a phrase that comes to mind when I think of the 40 years I’ve spent up close and personal with the U.S. military, half on active duty as an Air Force officer. Where to begin? How about with those bomber and missile “gaps,” those alleged shortfalls vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s? They amounted to Chicken Little-style sky-is-falling hoaxes, but they brought in countless billions of dollars in military funding. In fact, the “gaps” then were all in our favor, as this country held a decisive edge in both strategic bombers and nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs.

Or consider the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that served to authorize horrific attacks on Vietnam in retaliation for a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. Navy destroyers that never happened. Or think about the consistent exaggeration of Soviet weapons capabilities in the 1970s (the hype surrounding its MiG-25 Foxbat fighter jet, for example) that was used to justify a new generation of ultra-expensive American weaponry. Or the justifications for the Reagan military buildup of the 1980s — remember the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka “Star Wars”) or the MX ICBM and Pershing II missiles, not to speak of the neutron bomb and alarming military exercises that nearly brought us to nuclear war with the “Evil Empire” in 1983. Or think of another military miracle: the “peace dividend” that never arrived after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 and the last superpower (you know which one) was left alone on a planet of minor “rogue states.” And don’t forget that calamitous “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in 2003 in the name of neutralizing weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist or the endless global war on terror that still ignores the fact that 15 of the 19 September 11th terrorist hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.

And this endless long con of the Pentagon’s was all the more effective because so many of its lies were sold by self-serving politicians. Exhibit one was, of course, John F. Kennedy’s embrace of that false missile gap in winning the 1960 presidential election. Still, the Pentagon was never shy in its claims. Take the demand of the Air Force then for 10,000 — yes, you read that right! — new ICBMs to counter a Soviet threat that then numbered no more than a few dozen such missiles (as Daniel Ellsberg reminds us in his recent book, The Doomsday Machine).

To keep the Air Force happy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara settled on a mere 1,000 land-based Minuteman missiles to augment the 54 older Titan II ICBMs in that service’s arsenal, a figure I committed to memory as a teenager in the 1970s. And don’t forget that some of those missiles were MIRVed, meaning they had multiple nuclear warheads that could hit many targets. It all added up to the threat of what, in those years, came to be called “mutually assured destruction,” better known by its all-too-apt acronym, MAD.

And the Pentagon’s version of madness never ends. Think, for instance, of the planned three-decade $1.7 trillion “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear triad now underway, justified in the name of “overmatching” China and Russia, “near-peer” rivals in Pentagon-speak. No matter that America’s current triad of land-based, submarine-based, and air-deployed nukes already leave the arsenals of those two countries in the shade.

Reason doesn’t matter when the idea of a new cold war with those two former enemies couldn’t be more useful in justifying the through-the-ceiling $750 billion defense budget requested by President Trump for 2020. The Democrats have pushed back with a still-soaring budget of $733 billion that accepts without question the “baseline” minimum demanded by Pentagon officials, a level of spending Trump once called “crazy.” Talk about resistance being futile!

In other words, when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars, the Washington establishment of both parties has essentially been assimilated into the Pentagon collective. The national security state, that (unacknowledged) fourth branch of government, has in many ways become the most powerful of all, siphoning off more than 60%of federal discretionary spending, while failing to pass a single audit of how it uses such colossal sums.

All of this is in service to what’s known as a National Defense Strategy (NDS) whose main purpose is to justify yet more prodigious Pentagon spending. As Vietnam War veteran and professor at National Defense University Gregory Foster wrote of the latest version of that document:

“In the final analysis, the NDS is an unadulterated call for a new Cold War, with all its attendant appurtenances: more gluttonous defense spending to support escalatory arms races in all those ‘contested domains’ of warfare; reliance on bean-counting input measures (weapons, forces, spending) for determining comparative ‘competitiveness’; reinforcement and reaffirmation of the sacrosanct American way of war; and the reassuring comfort of superimposing an artificially simplistic Manichean worldview on the world’s inherent complexity and thereby continuing to ignore and marginalize actors, places, and circumstances that don’t coincide with our established preconceptions.”

Such a critique is largely lost on Donald Trump, a man who models himself on perceived tough guys like Andrew Jackson and Winston Churchill. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he did, at least, rail against the folly and cost of America’s wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. He said he wanted better relations with Russia. He talked about reinvesting in the United States rather than engaging in new wars. He even attacked costly weapons systems like the sky’s-the-limit $1.4 trillion Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter.

Suffice it to say that, after two-plus years of posing as commander-in-chief, strong man Trump is now essentially owned by the Pentagon. America’s wars continue unabated. U.S. troops remain in Syria and Afghanistan (despite the president’s stated desire to remove them). Relations with Russia are tense as his administration tears up the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty negotiated by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

What to make of the president’s visible capitulation to the Pentagon? Sure, he’s playing to his conservative base, which is generally up for more spending on weaponry and war, but like so many presidents before him, he’s been conned as well. The con-man-in-chief has finally met his match: a national security state that, when you consider its record, has had far greater success at lying its way to power than Donald J. Trump.

The Biggest Lie of All

Now, let’s take a hard look at ourselves when it comes to weaponry and those wars of “ours.” Because the most significant lies aren’t the ones the president tells us, but those we tell ourselves. The biggest of all: that we can continue to send young men and women off to war without those wars ever coming home.

Think again. America’s shock-and-awe conflicts have indeed come home, big time — with shocking and awful results. On some level, many Americans recognize this. PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is now a well-known acronym. A smaller percentage of Americans know something about TBI, the traumatic brain injuries that already afflict an estimated 314,000 troops, often caused by IEDs (improvised explosive devices), another acronym it would have been better never to have to learn. Wounded Warrior projects remind us that veterans continue to suffer long after they’ve come home, with roughly 20 of them a day taking their own lives in a tragic epidemic of suicides. Meanwhile, surplus military equipment — from automatic weapons to tank-like MRAPs — made for the mean streets of Iraq are now deployed on Main Street, USA, by increasingly militarized police forces. Even the campus cops at Ohio State University have an MRAP!

Here, Americans would do well to ponder the words of Megan Stack, a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who drew on her own “education in war” when she wrote: “You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done.” She was undoubtedly thinking about subjects like the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, torture at the CIA’s “black sites,” cities rubblized in the Greater Middle East, and refugees produced by the tens of millions. Somehow, sooner or later, it all comes home, whether we as Americans admit it, or even realize it, or not.

“Here is the truth,” Stack notes:

“It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don’t die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do… All of that poison seeps back into our soil.”

And so indeed it has. How else to explain the way Americans have come to tolerate, even celebrate, convenient lies: that, for instance, Tomahawk missile strikes in Syria could make a feckless figure like Donald Trump presidential or even that such missiles are beautiful, as former NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams once claimed.  Imagine if leading media and political figures boasted instead of taking on the Pentagon, reining in its ambitions, and saving taxpayers trillions of dollars, as well as countless lives here and overseas.

Ending the Pentagon’s Long Con

War is the ultimate audit and, as any American should know, the Pentagon is incapable of passing an audit. Sadly, even when Congress acts to end U.S. support for a near-genocidal war that has nothing to do with any imaginable definition of national defense, in this case in Yemen, President Trump vetoes it. Remember when Candidate Trump was against dumb and wasteful wars? Not anymore. Not, at least, if it involves the Saudis.

The best course for this country, unimaginable as it might seem today, is to fight wars only as a last resort and when genuinely threatened (a sentiment that 86% of Americans agree with). In other words, the U.S. should end every conflict it’s currently engaged in, while bringing most of its troops home and downsizing its imperial deployments globally.

What’s stopping us? Mainly our own fears, our own pride, our own readiness to believe lies. So let me list six things Americans could do that would curb our military mania:

1. Our nuclear forces remain the best in the world, which is hardly something to brag about. They need to be downsized, not modernized, with the goal of eliminating them — before they eliminate us.

2. The notion that this country is suddenly engaged in a new cold war with China and Russia needs to be tossed in the trash can of history — and fast.

3. From its first days, the war on terror has been the definition of a forever war. Isn’t it finally time to end that series of conflicts? International terrorism is a threat best met by the determined efforts of international police and intelligence agencies.

4. It’s finally time to stop believing that the U.S. military is all about deterrence and democracy, when all too often it’s all about exploitation and dominance.

5. It’s finally time to stop funding the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state at levels that outpace most of the other major military powers on this planet put together and instead invest such funds where they might actually count for Americans. With an appropriate change in strategy, notes defense analyst Nicolas Davies, the U.S. could reduce its annual Pentagon budget by 50%.

6. Finally, it’s time to stop boasting endlessly of our military strength as the measure of our national strength. What are we, Sparta?

The Pentagon will never be forced to make significant reforms until Americans stop believing in (and consenting to) its comforting lies.

Bernie Sanders Is Everything Joe Biden Is Not

They don’t get it.

Mainstream journalists routinely ignore the essential core of the Bernie 2020 campaign. As far as they’re concerned, when Bernie Sanders talks about the crucial importance of grassroots organizing, he might as well be speaking in tongues.

Frequently using the word “unprecedented” — in phrases like “our unprecedented grassroots effort to take on the powerful special interests and billionaire class” — Sanders emphasizes the vast extent of organizing necessary for him to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency next year. For an extraordinary campaign, that could be attainable. For mainline media, it’s virtually inconceivable.

The conformist political reporters are akin to inept topside oceanographers who stay away from the depths while scrutinizing the surface and speculating on future waves. Time and again, the sea changes that come from below take them by surprise.

Four years ago, the media wisdom was that the 2016 Sanders campaign would scarcely get out of single digits. Media savants dismissed him — and the political program that he championed — as fringe. In timeworn fashion, when reporters and pundits made reference to any policy issues, the context was usually horseracing, which is what most campaign coverage boils down to.

Yet policy issues — and the passions they tap into — are central to what propels the Sanders 2020 campaign, along with the powerful fuel of wide recognition that Bernie Sanders has not bent to the winds of expediency. That goes a long way toward explaining the strength of his current campaign.

Sanders has retained the enthusiastic support of a big majority of his delegates to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Last winter, when more than 400 of those delegates participated in a vote on whether to revive the independent Bernie Delegates Network, 95 percent said yes. (I’m a coordinator of the relaunched network.)

Unlike his “evolving” rivals who have blown hither and yon with political gusts, Sanders is not a wind sock. During 38 years as an elected official, he has remained part of progressive social movements to change the direction of prevailing winds. That orientation continues to inform his approach to elections.

“At the end of the day,” Sanders told a New York Times reporter in late April, “I believe now — and I’ve always believed — that grassroots activism is more important and more effective than 30-second television ads.” Such an outlook has been a perplexing concept for many political reporters, who routinely see the bottom-up activism of social movements as distinctly minor compared to the top-down mechanisms and poll-driven strategies that can boost a campaign to victory.

Right now, the conventional media wisdom is gaga over Joe Biden’s big lift in national polls since he announced for president a week ago. The former vice president was barely ahead of Sanders in polling before he formally threw his hat in the ring on April 25. The normal upward spike after a major candidate’s formal announcement rollout was made spikier by the lavish and largely reverential coverage from the many journalists who seem quite fond of him.

Retrospective looks at his treatment of Anita Hill during the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas that he chaired in 1991 caused Biden some bad media moments during the last week. But — surprise! — he got little corporate media flak for his high-dollar campaign kickoff fundraiser hosted by top executives at Comcast and Blue Cross, which epitomized his flagrant embrace of corporate power throughout a long political career.

“It is not remarkable in the least for Joe Biden to come right out of the gate by filling his coffers with money from telecom and health insurance executives,” Hamilton Nolan wrote for the Guardian. “Who is going to tell him that he shouldn’t? The lobbyists advising his campaign? The zillionaire media executives feting him in a Hollywood mansion? The superstructure of Obama administration functionaries who see him as the most established of the establishment brand names? For the people who matter, Joe Biden is doing just what he is expected to do.”

As he tries to gain support from liberal voters, Biden is benefiting from the ties that bind him to corporate power. So, he can be grateful that — as the media watch group FAIR has reported — the Comcast-owned MSNBC quickly showed itself to be “in the tank for Joe Biden’s presidential run.”

It’s likely that the Biden balloon will lose altitude as the burst of hot-air publicity fades — and as more information about his actual record comes to wider light. Biden vs. Bernie offers a huge contrast between a corporatist whose biggest constituencies can be found on Wall Street and in corporate media vs. a progressive populist whose biggest constituencies can be found among those being ripped off by Wall Street and discounted by corporate media.

While there’s a journalistic spirit of tolerance toward Biden on such matters as his vile Senate record of pandering to racism and his more recent indications of openness toward cutting Social Security and Medicare, corporate media are overall far more negative toward what Bernie Sanders has done and continues to advocate.

For instance, this sentence from the speech that Sanders gave for the launch of his campaign a few weeks ago at Brooklyn College conveys a bit of what is antithetical to the assumptions of many in mainstream media: “Today, we say to the military-industrial-complex that we will not continue to spend $700 billion a year on the military — more than the next 10 nations combined. We’re going to invest in affordable housing, we’re going to invest in public education, we’re going to invest in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure — not more nuclear weapons and never-ending wars.”

And Sanders’ next words also went against the grain of mainstream political assumptions. “Brothers and sisters: We’re going to win this election not because we have a super PAC funded by billionaires. We’re going to win this election because we will put together the strongest grassroots coalition in the history of American politics.”

A notable step toward the “unprecedented” goal came last Saturday, when about 5,000 house parties and other gatherings watched a video that featured talks from Sanders and campaign leaders who were both inspirational and practical, encouraging supporters to do methodical outreach in local communities. The process is now being aided by the campaign’s just-unveiled organizing app called Bern.

The elite-oriented atmosphere of media aversion to Sanders is in sync with media disregard for the power of community-based activism that could result in a Sanders presidency. For the establishment press corps, the idea of grassroots progressive populism as a pathway to the White House is very strange. But for people who want genuine progressive change, it’s the only path.

________________________________

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

Democrats Threaten to Hold Barr in Contempt

After Attorney General William Barr announced he will not show up for his scheduled hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday and refused to comply with a subpoena for the unredacted Mueller report, House Democrats said they plan to hold Barr in contempt if he continues to flaunt congressional demands.

“Compliance with congressional subpoenas is not optional,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “If good-faith negotiations don’t result in a pledge of compliance in the next day or two, the next step is seeking a contempt citation against the attorney general.”

As Common Dreams reported, Barr objected to Nadler’s proposal to let committee staff lawyers question the attorney general following the time allotted to members of Congress.

Speaking to reporters after Barr announced he would not show up for the House hearing, Nadler said the attorney general is “is terrified of having to face a skilled attorney.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—a member of the House Judiciary Committee—said Wednesday night that she will urge Nadler to move ahead with a contempt citation against Barr.

“Chairman Nadler just received a letter from Barr refusing to comply with our subpoena for the unredacted Mueller report and underlying materials. That is unacceptable,” Jayapal tweeted. “This is extremely dangerous behavior.”

In an appearance on CNN late Wednesday, Jayapal said Barr and President Donald Trump’s refusal to comply with congressional requests and subpoenas shows the White House has “no respect” for checks and balances.

“I think what we’re talking about is the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship,” Jayapal said.

Watch:

Tonight on @ac360, @andersoncooper and I discussed this administration’s lack of respect for Congress as a co-equal branch of government. Congress and the American people have a right to know what’s in the unredacted #MuellerReport. pic.twitter.com/yTTR0EgXJI

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) May 2, 2019

In a column on Thursday, The Week‘s Joel Mathis said “there’s a simple solution for the House to enact if Barr really doesn’t show up [for Thursday’s hearing]: Formally hold him in contempt of Congress, then send him to jail.”

Former labor secretary Robert Reich wrote this week that while no sitting Attorney General has ever been arrested, there were times in history when such a move was seriously considered:

When President Richard Nixon tried to stop key aides from testifying in the Senate Watergate hearings, in 1973, Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the Watergate select committee, threatened to jail anyone who refused to appear.

Congress hasn’t actually carried through on the threat since 1935—but it could.

According to Mathis, “Barr’s defiance of the committee isn’t happening in a vacuum: It’s part of a sweeping effort by President Trump’s administration to defy nearly all oversight by Congress.”

“There’s no point in using incremental half-measures to get him and his administration to do the right, lawful thing,” Mathis wrote. “It’s time to make a radical, unmistakable stand. If not, legislators will deserve the contempt Barr has so clearly aimed at them.”

Raid Threatens to Disrupt Trump-Kim Nuclear Talks

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

As U.S. marshals hunt for the alleged ringleader of an invasion of the North Korean Embassy in Spain, denuclearization talks between President Trump and Kim Jong Un hang in the balance.

The suspect, Adrian Hong Chang, should be considered “armed and dangerous,” according to a wanted poster released by the U.S. Marshals Service on Monday. The North Korean government has called the invasion a “grave terrorist attack.” But Hong Chang’s lawyer tells Fox News his client is a human rights activist who has been unjustly charged.

One co-defendant in the case, 38-year-old ex-Marine named Christopher Ahn, was arrested last week at Hong Chang’s home in Los Angeles. Ahn is being held without bail in Los Angeles. Spain has requested his extradition. Hong Chang is still at large.

The brazen invasion and resulting criminal charges have become an international incident that could affect whether Trump and Kim have a third summit after the collapse of the talks in Hanoi in February.

Spanish authorities depict the embassy invasion as a virtual strong-arm robbery aimed at obtaining information about Kim Hyok Chol, an adviser to Kim on nuclear issues who once served in the Madrid embassy.

Related Articles





North Korea's Kim Leaves Vietnam After Summit Breakdown



by

On February 22, Hong Chang gained access to the embassy and let in six fellow intruders, armed with knives, iron bars, machetes and imitation pistols, according to a warrant filed in Los Angeles on Friday. The men restrained and physically beat several embassy employees and held them captive for several hours before fleeing the compound with computer equipment and a mobile phone stolen from the embassy. Days later, Hong Chang, also known as Adrian Hong, gave the stolen material to the FBI in New York.

According to Reuters, a Spanish court said earlier this month that the FBI later handed the material over to Spanish authorities, who have since returned it to Pyongyang’s mission in Madrid.

Hong Chang’s lawyer, Lee Wolosky, formerly President Obama’s special envoy on Guantanamo, insisted that Chang was invited into the embassy.

“There was no attack,” Wolosky said. “There was no invasion. There was no assault.” Hong Chang’s group, known as Cheollima Civil Defense or Free Joseon (Free North Korea) has “set up an alternative government, a provisional government, to directly challenge and to take over from the Kim regime,” Wolosky said. “It’s an extraordinary development.”

As the Trump administration considers the possibility of a third summit, U.S. law enforcement is pursuing Hong Chang.

“Iimagine the North Koreans are delighted that the Department of Justice is pursuing Adrian Hong Chang,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (California), in an email.

“The North Koreans probably have some incentive to play nice in the hopes that the U.S. will do all the legwork in breaking up Cheollima Civil Defense for them,” said Lewis, who monitors the Korea negotiations.

As Hong Chang has advocated the overthrow Kim’s government, the Trump administration has edged closer to a denuclearization deal that might facilitate North Korea’s long-standing goal of ending U.S. military presence on the Korean peninsula.

Asked if Free Joseon is seeking to disrupt the Trump-Kim talks, Lewis replied, “I presume that is a goal, yes.”

Hong Chang’s work on North Korea was supported for several years by the TED Talk organization. Hong Chang was a TED fellow in 2009 and 2010. He organized TED Talks in San Diego in December 2011, and Libya in February 2012. In June 2013, he hosted a TED Talk video with North Korean defector Joseph Kim that has been viewed 2.3 million times.

Barr to Skip House Judiciary Committee Hearing

WASHINGTON — The Latest on Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee (all times local):

5:55 p.m.

Attorney General William Barr has told members of the House Judiciary Committee that he will not testify before their committee Thursday.

That’s according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press. The people weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The attorney general was asked to testify before the committee about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

Related Articles









Does Mueller's Angry Letter Prove Barr Lied to Congress?



by Juan Cole

His refusal to attend the hearing is likely to cause a further rift with congressional Democrats who have accused him of trying to spin Mueller’s report to favor the president.

Barr appeared Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

— Mary Clare Jalonick

__

3:45 p.m.

“Snitty.”

That’s the way Attorney General William Barr described a letter from special counsel Robert Mueller expressing concerns about his portrayal of the Russia probe.

Barr was testifying at the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday when Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut asked about the letter. Mueller wrote it March 27, but it was only disclosed publicly ahead of the hearing.

“The letter’s a bit snitty,” Barr said. He said he thinks it was probably written by someone on Mueller’s staff.

Barr said he called Mueller the next day and said: “What’s with the letter? Why don’t you just pick up the phone and call me if there was an issue?”

Blumenthal characterized the letter an “extraordinary act” of “rebuking the Attorney General of the United States” and “memorializing it in writing.”

__

2:30 p.m.

Attorney General William Barr says he didn’t exonerate President Donald Trump, because that’s not the job of the Justice Department.

Barr said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday that he simply decided the evidence gathered by special counsel Robert Mueller was not sufficient to prove that the president obstructed justice.

Barr said, “I didn’t exonerate. I said that we didn’t believe that there was sufficient evidence to establish an obstruction offense.”

The attorney general made the statement as he explained that the Justice Department’s job is to identify crimes and prosecute them but not to pass judgment on behavior that’s not illegal.

He says the report is now in the hands of the American people, and if they don’t like Trump’s conduct, there’s an election in 18 months.

___

2:25 p.m.

Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono has called on Attorney General William Barr to resign at a hearing to review special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

Hirono launched an aggressive line of questioning against the attorney general, asserting he hadn’t been honest with Congress and calling on him to resign.

Hirono also asked Barr if it was OK for a president to ask one of his aides to lie, referencing the report’s examination of whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice.

When Barr equivocated, Hirono grew angry, saying, “Mr. attorney general, please give us some credit for knowing what the hell is going on right now.”

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham shot back: “You have slandered this man from top to bottom.”

Barr himself chimed in, asking “How did we get to this point?”

___

12:25 p.m.

The House Judiciary Committee has voted to allow its staff to question Attorney General William Barr, throwing his scheduled testimony Thursday into question.

The Democrat-led panel voted to allow extra time for questioning. Barr was testifying in the Senate during the House panel’s vote Wednesday and has objected to the change. It’s unclear whether Barr will testify before Chairman Jerrold Nadler’s panel as scheduled.

Nadler speculated that Barr “is afraid” of testifying, adding, “he apparently does not want to answer questions.”

Republicans shot back that Democrats are conducting impeachment-like proceedings against President Donald Trump instead of legitimate oversight.

Barr on Wednesday defended his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s (MUHL’-urz) report. His testimony came after the release of a letter from Mueller expressing frustration about how Barr portrayed his findings.

___

12:05 p.m.

Attorney General William Barr says he saw no issue with his choice of words when he told Congress last month he believed “spying did occur” against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Barr testified Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee and said the word spying “does not have any pejorative connotation.”

Barr made the comment in April during testimony to the House Appropriations Committee. He provided no details about what “spying” may have taken place but appeared to be alluding to a surveillance warrant the FBI obtained on a former Trump associate.

Barr defended himself Wednesday, arguing it’s a common term in media reports to refer to lawful surveillance.

When pressed by Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse that the term is not commonly used by Justice Department officials, Barr responded: “It is commonly used by me.”

___

11:35 a.m.

Attorney General William Barr says he believes that if special counsel Robert Mueller felt he shouldn’t make a decision about whether or not the president obstructed justice then he “shouldn’t have investigated.”

Barr testified Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He says he isn’t totally sure why the special counsel did not reach a conclusion about whether the president obstructed justice. Instead, Mueller presented evidence on both sides of the question.

Barr says that if Mueller “felt he shouldn’t go down the path taking a traditional prosecutive decision” then he shouldn’t have investigated. He says, “That was the time to pull up.”

Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (ROH’-zen-styn) determined the evidence was insufficient to support an obstruction charge.

Mueller sent a letter saying that Barr’s four-page summary of his Russia report created “public confusion about critical aspects of the results.”

___

11:05 a.m.

Attorney General William Barr says special counsel Robert Mueller (MUHL’-ur) told him that Barr didn’t “misrepresent” Mueller’s Russia report in a letter summarizing the probe’s principal conclusions.

The attorney general testified Wednesday before Congress and responded to the release of a March 27 letter from Mueller complaining that Barr’s four-page letter about the report “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance” of the special counsel’s “work and conclusions.”

Barr says he called Mueller after receiving his complaints and Mueller told him “he was not suggesting that we had misrepresented his report.”

Barr says Mueller told him press reports were reading too much into Barr’s letter and Mueller wanted the public to see more of his reasoning for not answering the question of whether President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice.

Mueller’s letter says that Barr’s summary of his Russia report created “public confusion about critical aspects of the results.”

___

10:55 a.m.

Attorney General William Barr says he was surprised that special counsel Robert Mueller and his team did not reach a conclusion on whether or not President Donald Trump obstructed justice.

Barr said in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that Mueller told him of his team’s plans at a March 5 meeting.

A Justice Department legal opinion says sitting presidents cannot be indicted. Barr says Mueller told him he wouldn’t have recommended indicting the president even without that opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel.

Barr says Mueller told him that there may come a time when the Justice Department should consider revisiting that opinion but that this is not that case.

Mueller has written a letter saying that Barr’s summary of his Russia report created “public confusion about critical aspects of the results.”

___

10:45 a.m.

Attorney General William Barr is criticizing special counsel Robert Mueller (MUHL’-ur) for not identifying grand jury material in his Russia report when he submitted it.

Barr says the Mueller team’s failure to do that slowed down the release of the public version of the report.

Barr testified Wednesday about his handling of the Mueller report before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The testimony comes after the release of a letter from Mueller. That letter reveals the special counsel had prepared the summaries of his two-volume report for immediate public release but Barr chose not to release them.

Barr instead wrote his own letter summarizing Mueller’s findings. Mueller’s letter says that Barr’s summary created “public confusion about critical aspects of the results” of the Russia probe.

___

10:40 a.m.

The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee is requesting that the panel hold a hearing with special counsel Robert Mueller (MUHL’-ur).

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (FYN’-styn) said Wednesday in her opening statement at the committee’s hearing on Mueller’s Russia report that she had asked Chairman Lindsey Graham to invite the special counsel.

Graham has said he doesn’t think Mueller needs to testify. The South Carolina senator says he’s satisfied with hearing from Attorney General William Barr, who is appearing before the panel on Wednesday.

Graham said in his opening statement he’s ready to move on from the report. He says that for him “it’s over.”

___

10:05 a.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller (MUHL’-ur) told Attorney General William Barr that Barr’s summary of the Russia probe’s findings caused “public confusion about critical aspects” of the investigation.

A copy of Mueller’s letter to Barr was released Wednesday. In his letter, Mueller raised concerns about a letter that Barr sent to Congress detailing what he said were Mueller’s principal conclusions.

Mueller said Barr’s letter “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance” of the special counsel’s work and conclusions.

Barr’s letter was released just two days after the Justice Department received the special counsel’s report. It said Mueller hadn’t reached a conclusion on whether the president had obstructed justice despite presenting evidence on both sides of the question.

Mueller’s letter is likely to be a central focus at Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Barr.

Barr’s prepared testimony shows he plans to defend his handling of Mueller’s report.

___

9:50 a.m.

President Donald Trump is claiming “NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION” as Attorney General William Barr prepares to appear before Congress for the first time since releasing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report.

Barr’s testimony Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee comes amid new revelations that Mueller expressed frustration to Barr about how the report’s finding were being portrayed.

Trump tweeted: “NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION. Besides, how can you have Obstruction when not only was there No Collusion (by Trump), but the bad actions were done by the ‘other’ side? The greatest con-job in the history of American Politics!”

Mueller found no evidence of a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia in the 2016 election. Barr says he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein cleared Trump of obstruction of justice after investigators reached no conclusion on that question.

Barr’s prepared testimony shows he plans to defend his handling of Mueller’s report.

___

9:25 a.m.

Attorney General William Barr is defending his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation report.

Barr is to testify Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. His appearance comes hours after it was revealed that Mueller had sent the Justice Department a letter objecting to the way his findings were portrayed.

In prepared testimony released by the Justice Department, Barr says that Mueller finished his investigation without interference and that neither he nor any other Justice Department official overruled any proposed action.

Barr also will defend his decision to release the bottom-line conclusions of Mueller’s report. Barr will say he “did not believe that it was in the public interest to release additional portions of the report in piecemeal fashion.”

Barr initially issued a four-page statement that summarized what he said were the main conclusions of the Mueller report. He later released a redacted version of the report.

___

1:15 a.m.

Lawmakers have a new line of inquiry to pursue when Attorney General William Barr testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Barr has been expected in Wednesday’s hearing to defend his actions surrounding the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report.

But it emerged Tuesday night that Mueller has expressed frustration to Barr in a letter with how the conclusions of his investigation have been being portrayed.

The letter lays bare a simmering rift between the Justice Department and the special counsel about whether Barr’s summary of the report adequately conveyed the gravity of Mueller’s findings, particularly on the key question of obstruction.

The revelation is likely to sharpen attacks by Democrats who accuse Barr of unduly protecting the president and of spinning Mueller’s conclusions in Trump’s favor.

Climate Change Tied to Accelerating Economic Inequality

What follows is a conversation between Dr. Noah Diffenbaugh and Dimitri Lascaris of the Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

DIMITRI LASCARIS This is Dimitri Lascaris reporting for The Real News Network from Toronto, Canada. The rich get richer and the poor— well, they get climate change impacts. That in a nutshell is the conclusion of a new study by researchers at Stanford University. Entitled Global Warming has Increased Global Economic Inequality, it points to half a century of country-by-country global temperature data, overlaid with G.D.P. data for those same countries. The countries with the highest G.D.P., the study concludes, have more temperate climates and have in turn experienced less severe climate impacts, while consuming the bulk of the world’s fossil fuel resources. The opposite is true of countries with lower G.D.P. It’s increasingly understood that climate change will impact working class people of color around the world, first and foremost. That, even though they did the least to cause the climate crisis. But the new study enshrines the notion and backs it up with decades of fresh data. Here to discuss that data is none other than the report’s lead author, Noah Diffenbaugh. He is the Kara J. Foundation Professor and Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. His research focuses on how climate change could impact agriculture, water resources, and human health. Among other accolades, he has served as a lead author for the Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and he joins us today from Stanford, California. Thank you for coming on to The Real News, Professor Diffenbaugh.

DR. NOAH DIFFENBAUGH My pleasure.

DIMITRI LASCARIS So your article, Professor, was co-written with Stanford Professor Marshall Burke. In simple terms, what did you two determine to be the big picture takeaways from the research you did? What does it add to the body of knowledge on these interwoven topics of global climate change impacts?

DR. NOAH DIFFENBAUGH Well what we found is that global warming has already happened, historically. That’s about one degree Celsius of global warming to date. But that global warming has overall, reduced the per capita G.D.P. in a large swath of countries in the tropics and subtropics. These countries are warm or hot and that’s the primary reason that they’ve experienced these negative impacts from global warming. But they also, in many cases, have low per capita G.D.P., in many cases have large populations, and in most cases have contributed relatively little to the historical greenhouse gas emissions that have cause global warming. So overall, the net effect is that we find robust results to indicate that global warming has already reduced incomes in many poor countries and that even though inequality between the richest and poorest countries has decreased overall over the last half-century or so, global warming has slowed the rate of that progress.

DIMITRI LASCARIS Now in your study you talk about the parabola effect taking place in terms of temperatures in countries around the world and their G.D.P. For those who have not taken a geometry class for a while, what do you mean in this context by the parabola effect?

Related Articles









Humanity Is Committing Collective Suicide



by

DR. NOAH DIFFENBAUGH Well so my co-author, Marshall Burke, has led work over the last several years to understand and isolate how temperature fluctuations in different countries around the world affect their growth in G.D.P., their economic growth year-by-year. And so controlling for other factors, looking country-by-country, what they find is that overall colder countries, such as Norway, have experienced a bit faster economic growth in years that are warmer than normal for Norway. And on the other end of the temperature range, hot countries like India have experienced a bit slower economic growth in the years that are warmer than normal for India. And so overall, there is a hill-shaped function where cooler countries have tended to benefit historically in warm years. Warmer countries have tended to have a drag on their economic growth in warm years. And then in the middle, there’s a mathematical optimum in this relationship. The largest economies in the world— the U.S., China, and Japan— are right near that temperature optimum.

DIMITRI LASCARIS In the short-lived sci-fi show, Incorporated, a dystopian society which chronicled the combination of corporate power and climate impacts from the vantage point of the year 2074, a huge chunk of the world’s population flocks to Milwaukee, Wisconsin as climate refugees. Your paper does not get into the refugee discussion, but do you think the data drawn out within your research explains an impetus for why a nice, cold place like Milwaukee could prove an attractive destination a few generations from now? You specifically mentioned the case of Norway in your prior answer, and I know that you deal with Norway is a key case study in your paper. What do you envision is going to happen in terms of these colder climate countries becoming more attractive to increasingly desperate climate refugees?

DR. NOAH DIFFENBAUGH Well so there is empirical research using a similar framework to what we’ve used by other researchers asking that question about migration, this work by Wolfram Schlenker, a Professor at Columbia University. In that work, they’ve analyzed historical records of asylum claims in Europe and have linked back where the asylum claims at the destination country were, which country those migrants were leaving, and then what were the climate conditions in those countries that the migrants left. And they have found a robust increase in that migration during hot years in the country of departure, controlling for other factors. So they’ve used a very similar econometric framework, as what we’ve used in this paper, but specifically asked the question that you’re asking in terms of whether or not there is a contribution of climate shocks, climate conditions, to migration. Their results suggest that there has been historically, at least for European asylum claims.

DIMITRI LASCARIS Lastly, what do you hope your study achieves in the broader discourse about climate change solutions, in areas like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Why did you choose to release the paper on an open source basis?

DR. NOAH DIFFENBAUGH So those are two questions. In terms of the policy relevance, there are a couple of results that are relevant for ongoing policy discussions. As you mentioned earlier, it has been discussed for many, many years by many, many people— researchers, policymakers, treaty negotiators within the U.N. climate treaty framework. It’s been observed for a long time that the populations in countries that are most vulnerable to climate change, in general, have contributed relatively little to the total global greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global warming. What’s new about our paper is that we provide country-by-country estimates of the impact of that historical global warming on the economic outcomes at the aggregate level for each country. So I think that prior to our paper, if someone was making that statement about the asymmetry between vulnerability to climate change and responsibility for the greenhouse gas emissions, they would’ve been hard pressed to provide quantitative figures, quantitative numbers of what the magnitude of that disparity has been, and our paper provides that quantification.

DIMITRI LASCARIS And I realize I did ask two questions. The latter being, why did you choose to release the paper on an open source basis?

DR. NOAH DIFFENBAUGH Our research is relevant for the scientific community. It’s relevant for policymakers. Overall, my research program has been funded. I’ve been a principal investigator for more than 15 years, both at a public university, Purdue University, and now at Stanford at a private university. At both of those universities as principal investigator, I have received federal funding to support my research program. I certainly consider my responsibility to make the results of my research program accessible to the public.

DIMITRI LASCARIS Well we’ve been speaking to Professor Noah Diffenbaugh from Stanford University about a new study regarding the relationship between global inequality and climate change impacts. Thank you very much for joining us today, Professor.

DR. NOAH DIFFENBAUGH It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.

DIMITRI LASCARIS And this is Dimitri Lascaris reporting for The Real News Network.

Barr, Mueller Trade Barbs as Private Rift Goes Public

WASHINGTON — Private tensions between Justice Department leaders and special counsel Robert Mueller’s team broke into public view in extraordinary fashion Wednesday as Attorney General William Barr pushed back at complaints over his handling of the Trump-Russia investigation report and aimed his own criticism at the special counsel.

Testifying for the first time since releasing Mueller’s report, Barr said he was surprised Mueller did not reach a conclusion on whether President Donald Trump had tried to obstruct justice, and that he felt compelled to step in with his own judgment that the president had committed no crime.

“I’m not really sure of his reasoning,” Barr said of Mueller’s obstruction analysis, which neither accused the president of a crime nor exonerated him. “I think that if he felt that he shouldn’t go down the path of making a traditional prosecutive decision then he shouldn’t have investigated. That was the time to pull up.”

The airing of disagreements over the handling of the report was notable given the highly secretive nature of the special counsel’s investigation and the public appearance for at least most of the probe that the Justice Department and Mueller’s team were unified in approach. But Barr sought to minimize the rift by suggesting the special counsel’s concerns were largely about process, not substance.

Barr’s appearance Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee gave him his most extensive opportunity to explain the department’s actions, including his press conference held before the Mueller report’s release. It was also a forum for him to repair a reputation bruised by allegations that he’s the Republican president’s protector and by the emergence of a private letter from Mueller that criticized his handling of the report.

Democrats seized on the daylight between the two men to attack Barr’s credibility and accuse him of unduly spinning Mueller’s report in the president’s favor. They also pressed him on whether he had misled Congress last month when he professed ignorance about complaints from the special counsel’s team. Barr suggested he had not lied because he was in touch with Mueller himself and not his team.

Related Articles









Mueller Report Ends a Shameful Period for the Press



by Chris Hedges

“Mr. Barr, I feel your answer was purposely misleading, and I believe others do too,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

While Democratic senators bluntly questioned Barr’s actions, Republicans, in addition to defending Trump, focused on the president’s 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton’s email and campaign practices and what they feel is a lack of investigation of them.

Barr has also been invited to appear Thursday before the Democratic-led House Judiciary panel, but the Justice Department said he would not testify if the committee insisted on having its lawyers question the attorney general.

Neither side broke much ground Wednesday on the specifics of Mueller’s investigation, though Barr did articulate a robust defense of Trump as he made clear his firm conviction that there was no prosecutable case against the president for obstruction of justice.

He was asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s top Democrat, about an episode recounted in Mueller’s report in which Trump pressed White House counsel Don McGahn to seek the removal of Mueller on conflict-of-interest grounds. Trump then asked McGahn to deny a press report that such a directive had been given.

Barr responded, “There’s something very different firing a special counsel outright, which suggests ending an investigation, and having a special counsel removed for conflict — which suggests you’re going to have another special counsel.”

Barr entered the hearing on the defensive following reports hours earlier that Mueller had complained to him in a letter and over the phone about the way his findings were being portrayed.

Two days after receiving Mueller’s report, Barr released a four-page letter that summarized the main findings.

Mueller’s letter, dated March 27, conveys his unhappiness that Barr released what the attorney general saw as the bottom-line conclusions of the special counsel’s investigation and not the introductions and executive summaries that Mueller’s team had prepared and believed conveyed more nuance and context than Barr’s own letter. Mueller said he had communicated the same concern two days earlier.

“There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation,” Mueller wrote in his letter to Barr. “This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Barr appeared unmoved by the criticism. He said repeatedly that Mueller had assured him that the information in Barr’s letter of conclusions was not inaccurate but he simply wanted more information out. Barr said he didn’t believe a piecemeal release of information was beneficial, and besides, it wasn’t Mueller’s call to make.

Once Mueller submitted his report, his work was done and the document was “my baby,” Barr insisted defiantly.

“It was my decision how and when to make it public. Not Bob Mueller’s,” he said.

Barr also complained that Mueller did not, as requested, identify grand jury material in his report when he submitted it, slowing down the public release of the report as the Justice Department worked to black out sensitive information.

Barr noted that Mueller concluded his investigation without any interference and that neither the attorney general nor any other Justice Department official overruled the special counsel on any action he wanted to take. Barr also defended his decision to step in and clear the president of obstruction of justice after Mueller presented evidence on both sides but didn’t reach a conclusion.

Zero Percent of Elite Pundits Oppose Regime Change in Venezuela

A FAIR survey of US opinion journalism on Venezuela found no voices in elite corporate media that opposed regime change in that country. Over a three-month period (1/15/19–4/15/19), zero opinion pieces in The New York Times and Washington Post took an anti–regime change or pro-Maduro/Chavista position. Not a single commentator on the big three Sunday morning talk shows or PBS NewsHour came out against President Nicolás Maduro stepping down from the Venezuelan government.

Of the 76 total articles, opinion videos or TV commentator segments that centered on or gave more than passing attention to Venezuela, 54 (72 percent) expressed explicit support for the Maduro administration’s ouster. Eleven (14 percent) were ambiguous, but were only classified as such for lack of explicit language. Reading between the lines, most of these were clearly also pro–regime change. Another 11 (14 percent) took no position, but many similarly offered ideological ammo for those in support.

The Times published 22 pro–regime change commentaries, three ambiguous and five without a position. The Post also spared no space for the pro-Chavista camp: 22 of its articles expressed support for the end to Maduro’s administration, eight were ambiguous and four took no position. Of the 12 TV opinions surveyed, 10 were pro-regime change and two took no position.

(The Times and Post pieces were found through a Nexis search for “Venezuela” between 1/15/19–4/15/19 using each paper as a source, narrowed to opinion articles and editorials. The search was supplemented with an examination of each outlet’s opinion/blog pages. The TV commentary segments were found through Nexis searches for “Venezuela” and the name of the talk show during the same time period, in the folders of the corresponding television network: NBC News/CBS News transcripts, ABC News transcripts, and PBS NewsHour. Non-opinion TV news segments were omitted. The full list of items included can be found here.)

Corporate news coverage of Venezuela can only be described as a full-scale marketing campaign for regime change. If you’ve been reading FAIR recently (1/25/19, 2/9/19, 3/16/19)—or, indeed, since the early 2000s (4/18/02; Extra!, 11–12/05)—the anti-Maduro unanimity espoused in the most influential US media should come as no surprise.

This comes despite the existence of millions of Venezuelans who support Maduro—who was democratically elected twice by the same electoral system that won Juan Guaidó his seat in the National Assembly—and oppose US/foreign intervention. FAIR (2/20/19) has pointed out corporate media’s willful erasure of vast improvements to Venezuelan life under Chavismo, particularly for the oppressed poor, black, indigenous and mestizo populations. FAIR has also noted the lack of discussion of US-imposed sanctions, which have killed at least 40,000 Venezuelans between 2017–18 alone, and continue to devastate the Venezuelan economy.

Related Articles









America's Coup Efforts in Venezuela Enter Frightening New Phase



by

Many authors in the sample eagerly championed the idea of the US ousting Maduro, including coup leader Juan Guiadó himself, in the Times (1/30/19) and Post (1/15/19), and on the NewsHour (2/18/19).

The Times made its official editorial opinion on the matter crystal clear at the outset of the attempted coup (1/24/19): “The Trump administration is right to support Mr. Guaidó.” Followed by FAIR’s favorite Times columnist, Bret Stephens (1/25/19):

The Trump administration took exactly the right step in recognizing National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s constitutionally legitimate president.

It’s generally a nation’s supreme court that has the final say on who is constitutionally legitimate, but in this case they can apparently be overruled by a foreign government—or a foreign newspaper columnist.

The Post editorial board also joined Team Unelected President (1/24/19):

The [Trump] administration’s best approach would be to join with its allies in initiatives that would help Venezuelans while bolstering Mr. Guaidó.

The Times even produced an opinion video (4/1/19) with Joanna Hausmann, “a Venezuelan American writer and comedian,” as she is described in her Times bio. Between sarcastic stabs at Venezuela’s “tyrannical dictator” and cute animations of “Ruth Bader Ginsburg in workout clothes”—Hausmann’s self-described “spirit animal”—come more serious declarations about the nation’s political situation:

Juan Guiadó is not an American right-wing puppet leading an illegitimate coup, but a social democrat appointed by the National Assembly, the only remaining democratically elected institution left in Venezuela…. Let’s provide humanitarian aid and support efforts to restore democracy.

Odd that the Times didn’t find it necessary to note a blaring conflict of interest: Hausmann’s father is Ricardo Hausmann, Juan Guaidó’s  Inter-American Development Bank representative. Mint Press News (3/19/19) bluntly described him as the “neoliberal brain behind Juan Guaidó’s neoliberal agenda.”

It would be ludicrous to think the Times would withhold as blatant a connection to Maduro if one of his aides’ daughters made a snarky opinion video calling Juan Guaidó a would-be “brutal dictator”—even if our theoretical commentator was “an independent adult woman who has built a popular following on her own,” as Times opinion video producer Adam Ellick said in defense of the omission. Such a crucial relationship to a powerful Chavista politician would never go undisclosed—in the unlikely event that such a perspective would be tolerated in the opinion pages of an establishment paper.

These are just a few of many media pundits’ endorsements of Guaidó—someone whose name most of the Venezuelan population did not even recognize before he declared himself interim president. Put more accurately, they are endorsements of a US-backed coup attempt.

One of the more muddled regime change endorsements came from Rep. Ro Khanna’s Post op-ed (1/30/19), in which he says no! to military intervention, no! to sanctions, yet yes! to… “diplomatic efforts”:

The United States should lend its support to diplomatic efforts to find some form of power-sharing agreement between opposition parties, and only until fair elections can take place, so that there is an orderly transition of power.

“Diplomatic” is a reassuring term, until you realize that US diplomacy, as FAIR’s Janine Jackson explained on  podcast (3/20/19), is “diplomacy where we try to get other countries to do what we want them to do”—in this case, effecting a “transition of power” in another country’s government.

Francisco Rodríguez and Jeffrey D. Sachs (New York Times, 2/2/19) envision similar efforts for a “peaceful and negotiated transition of power,” and Khanna made sure to characterize Maduro as “an authoritarian leader who has presided over unfair elections, failed economic policies, extrajudicial killings by police, food shortages and cronyism with military leaders.”

In other words, Maduro the Dictator must be overthrown—but don’t worry, the US would be diplomatic about it.

Those that didn’t take explicit positions nonetheless wrote articles blaming all or most of Venezuela’s woes on Maduro and Chávez. Economics wiz Paul Krugman (New York Times, 1/29/19) gave his spiel:

Hugo Chávez got into power because of rage against the nation’s elite, but used the power badly. He seized the oil sector, which you only do if you can run it honestly and efficiently; instead, he turned it over to corrupt cronies, who degraded its performance. Then, when oil prices fell, his successor tried to cover the income gap by printing money. Hence the crisis.

Note that Krugman failed to mention the 57 percent reduction in extreme poverty that followed Chávez’s replacement of management of the state-owned oil industry (which has been nationalized since 1976, long before Chavismo). Nor does he acknowledge the impact of US sanctions, or any other sort of US culpability for Venezuela’s economic crisis.

Caroline Kennedy and Sarah K. Smith (Washington Post, 2/5/19) did not explicitly blame Maduro and Chávez for Venezuela’s “spiral downward,” but similarly ignored evidenced US involvement in that spiral. There are only so many places where you can point fingers without naming names.

Dictatorship-talk—writers lamenting the horrific and helpless situation under an alleged “dictator”—characterized many of the ambiguous and no-position articles. In the Post (1/24/19), Megan McArdle asked:

You have to look at Venezuela today and wonder: Is this what we’re seeing, the abrupt end of Venezuela’s years-long economic nightmare? Has President Nicolás Maduro’s ever-more-autocratic and incompetent regime finally completed its long pilgrimage toward disaster?

By simply describing the declining situation of a country (Times, 2/12/19, 4/1/19) and using words like “regime” (Times, 2/14/19), “authoritarian” (Post, 1/29/19) and, of course, “dictatorship” (Post, 1/23/19; Times,2/27/19) in reference to government officials, commentators create the pretext for regime change without explicitly endorsing it.

The Sunday talk shows and NewsHour also couldn’t find a single person to challenge the anti-Maduro narrative. They did find room, however, for three of the most passionate advocates of regime change in Venezuela: Sen. Marco Rubio (Meet the Press, 1/27/19), Donald Trump (Face the Nation, 2/3/19) and Guaidó himself (NewsHour, 2/18/19).

Other TV regime change proponents included Florida Sen. Rick Scott (Meet the Press, 2/3/19), 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls Peter Buttigieg (This Week, 2/3/19) and Amy Klobuchar (Meet the Press, 3/17/19), Sen. Tim Kaine (Face the Nation, 3/17/19), and Guaidó-appointed, Mike Pence-approved “chargé d’affaires” Carlos Vecchio (NewsHour, 3/4/19).

But leave it to Nick Schifrin of the NewsHour(1/30/19) to bring on “two views” of the US intervention question that are both pro-regime change and pro-US intervention. View No. 1 came from Isaias Medina, a former Venezuelan diplomat who resigned from his post in protest against Maduro. Medina made the unlikely claim that 94 percent of the Venezuelan population—or 129 percent of the population over the age of 14—support US intervention to overthrow the Maduro government:

Not only I, but 30 million people, support not only the US circumstance, but also the Latin American initiative to restore the rule of law, democracy and freedom in Venezuela.

View No. 2, the ostensibly anti-regime change take, came from Benjamin Gedan, who served on the Obama administration’s National Security Council as director for Venezuela and the Southern Cone. When asked if he supported Trump’s moves to sanction Maduro and possibly use US troops to oust him, Gedan responded:

I think both of those steps are problematic. I think the sense of urgency that the United States administration has shown is absolutely correct…. The question is, how can we assist the Venezuelan people [to] promote a peaceful transition in Venezuela, without harming the people themselves, or fracturing the coalition that we have built over two administrations?

In other words, how can we overthrow the Venezuelan government without destroying the country—or “fracturing the coalition we have built”? The US has many options on the table, but none of them involve not pursuing the overthrow of Maduro.

In the “no position” camp for TV news, New York Timeschief Washington correspondent David Sanger (Face the Nation, 1/27/19) noted that the problem with US support for Guaidó is one of  “both history and inconsistency”:

Our history in Latin America of intervening is a pretty ugly one, and the inconsistency of not applying the same standards to places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where the president has embraced strong men, I think may come back to make the United States look pretty hypocritical, not for the first time.

Sanger indulged in the popular “hypocrisy takedown”: The problem, as presented, isn’t that the US disrupts democracies, destroys economies and kills people, but rather that it does so inconsistently. While vaguely acknowledging the US’s horrific track record of Latin American interventions, and Trump’s cherry-picking of governments worthy of regime change, Sanger didn’t take the logical next step of calling for the US to keep its hands off Venezuela. Instead, he called Maduro’s supporters—defined as “China, Russia and Cuba”—“not a great collection,” and failed to push back against the claim that Maduro “fixed the last” election. Without a formal declaration, Sanger did all the ideological preparation for foreign-backed regime change.

That elite media didn’t find a single person to vouch for Maduro or Chavismo, and that almost all the opinions explicitly or implicitly expressed support for the ouster of Venezuela’s elected president, demonstrates a firm editorial line, eerily obedient to the US government’s regime change policy.

This isn’t the first time that FAIR (e.g., 3/18/03, 4/18/18) has found a one-sided debate in corporate media on US intervention. When it comes to advocating the overthrow of the US government’s foreign undesirables, you can always count on opinion pages to represent all sides of why it’s a good thing. And the millions of people who beg to differ? Well, they’re just out of the question.

May Day Activists Take to the Streets, in Paris and Beyond (Multimedia)

Update: 4:30 p.m. PST:

According to a media consortium in Paris, some 40,000 demonstrators had assembled in the city for the May Day demonstrations, including union members, “Yellow Vest” protestors and vandals. The New York Times noted that members of Black Bloc had put out calls on social media for a mass gathering in Paris, and several violent clashes were reported throughout the day. The French government deployed 7,400 officers to various centers of activity within Paris’ bounds.

PHOTO ESSAY | 3 photosView photos from Paris here

Near Paris’ Montparnasse train station, Black Bloc-affiliated protesters allegedly became aggressive, at times threatening other participants trying to film the day’s events. There was a significant contrast between the tone and actions of groups gathered at one end of that area to the other. One side of the march, toward the back, was a zone of heavy confrontation, violence and tear gas, while those in the front were mostly unharmed and kept the peace:

Paris police searched the bags of all those arriving at demonstrations, allowing marchers to keep their gas masks, which would come in handy for many that day.

Related Articles









Yellow Vest Protesters Go Global With Their Fight



by Donald Kaufman















Taking French Lessons: The Power of the 'Yellow Vests'



by Sonali Kolhatkar

According to local police reports, 250 people were arrested, mostly for offenses related to rioting.

President Macron attempted last week to appease the Yellow Vests and the greater French population when he promised to lower taxes and raise pensions, but his proposals have been largely rejected from those within the Yellow Vest movement.

The New York Times elaborated on Wednesday:

Nicole Courte, 56, a maid who was marching with Mr. Koucha, said Mr. Macron’s response to the movement had been: “I’ve heard you, but shut up, I won’t change anything.”

“I’ve been protesting since the first act, on Nov. 17, but I boycotted the so-called Great National Debate,” Ms. Courte said, referring to the national consultation initiated by Mr. Macron to quell the protesters’ anger.

Ms. Courte, who said she earned minimum wage in Saint-Avold, a village in Moselle, also criticized the millionaires and others who had donated to restore Notre-Dame cathedral, gutted by a fire last month. In such times, she said, donating for a building and not for the poor was “indecent, shameful.”

“How much housing for the poor and the homeless could we build with a billion euros?” she asked, referring to the amount raised for Notre-Dame in 10 days.

Cédric Topical, a 42-year-old baker, had come down from France’s north to demonstrate. “I’ve got two daughters, and I’m demonstrating for them, since the beginning,” he said. “By the 15th of the month I’ve got to tighten my belt and I only eat one meal a day. So how are they supposed to make it?”

6:46 a.m. PST:

May Day is a workers holiday with varied roots, as Truthdig’s Paul Street points out in his  piece, “The Many-Sided, Overlapping Meanings of May Day.” This year, as global inequality continues to soar to never-before-seen heights, protesters have taken to the streets in cities around the world to express their growing discontent, as well as to celebrate workers and hard-earned (though often beleaguered) labor rights. From Seoul to Seattle, protests were planned for Wednesday, and, in many places, officials drew up blueprints for addressing the mass demonstrations that were expected.

In Paris, a city that has been the site of the growing Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement, over 7,400 police officers were expected to be deployed. Early in the day, officers began to use tear gas against the demonstrators, according to The Independent:

Around 165 protesters have been arrested in Paris–some of them throwing stones, lighting fires and smashing vehicles, police said.

Police repeatedly used tear gas to try to control the crowd gathering near Montparnasse train station for the main protest. It wasn’t immediately clear how many people were injured.

One bandaged-up man with a head wound was helped away from the scene by paramedics.

The French protests were fueled in part by President Emmanuel Macron’s latest economic proposals, issued in response to Gilets Jaunes demands but which promise to continue to “liberalize the French economy” with measures that include wealth tax cuts.

The Gilets Jaunes protesters were joined on the streets of Paris and other French towns and cities by left-wing activists and trade unionists, as they were in protests over the weekend that were considered a dry run for Wednesday’s actions.  Truthdig’s Donald Kaufman was on the scene in Paris at the combined labor and climate marches, where he was able to record several videos, some of which you can watch below:

 

For more live updates from Paris, visit our Facebook page.