Chris Hedges's Blog, page 276

Trump Tried to Seize Control of Mueller Probe, Report Says

WASHINGTON — Public at last, special counsel Robert Mueller’s report revealed to a waiting nation Thursday that President Donald Trump had tried to seize control of the Russia probe and force Mueller’s removal to stop him from investigating potential obstruction of justice by the president.

The report said that in June 2017, Trump directed White House Counsel Don McGahn to call the acting attorney general and say that Mueller must be ousted because he had conflicts of interest.

McGahn refused — deciding he would rather resign than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre of Watergate firings fame.

For all of that, Mueller said in his report that he could not conclusively determine that Trump had committed criminal obstruction of justice.

The Justice Department posted a redacted version of the report online Thursday morning, 90 minutes after Attorney General William Barr offered his own final assessment of the findings.

The two-volume, 448-page report recounts how Trump repeatedly sought to take control of the Russia probe.

Mueller evaluated 10 episodes for possible obstruction of justice, including Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, the president’s directive to subordinates to have Mueller fired and efforts to encourage witnesses not to cooperate.

The president’s lawyers have said Trump’s conduct fell within his constitutional powers, but Mueller’s team deemed the episodes deserving of criminal scrutiny.

Mueller reported that Trump had been agitated at the special counsel probe from its earliest days, reacting to Mueller’s appointment by saying it was the “end of his presidency.”

As for the question of whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, Mueller wrote, “While the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges.”

Mueller also said there wasn’t sufficient evidence to charge any campaign officials with working as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia.

The report included an appendix that contained 12 pages of Trump’s written responses to the special counsel. They included no questions about obstruction of justice, as was part of an agreement with Trump’s legal team.

Trump told Mueller he had “no recollection” of learning in advance about the much-scrutinized Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and a Russian lawyer. He also said he had no recollection of knowledge about emails setting up the meeting that promised dirt on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

He broadly denied knowing of any foreign government trying to help his campaign, including the Russian government. He said he was aware of some reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin had made “complimentary statements” about him.

Trump said that his comment during a 2016 political rally asking Russian hackers to help find emails scrubbed from Clinton’s private server was made “in jest and sarcastically” and that he did not recall being told during the campaign of any Russian effort to infiltrate or hack computer systems.

Trump’s legal team called the results “a total victory for the president.”

Read the report in its entirety here.

The Two Words That Capture Corporate Media’s Disdain for the Left

The Democratic primaries are heating up, and dozens of candidates representing all manner of political positions have entered the ring hoping to be the party’s 2020 presidential nominee. One notable feature of the race is the strong presence of progressive candidates, a sign of the rising influence of the left in the party.

This phenomenon has many in the establishment wing of the party worried. Barack Obama, the most recent Democratic president, recently decried the “purity tests” of the left, which he called an “obsessive” ideological fanaticism that is setting the party up for failure.  Obama told an audience in Berlin, Germany (HuffPost, 6/4/19):

One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States…is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, “I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,” and then we start sometimes creating what’s called a circular firing squad, where you start shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on the issues, and when that happens, typically the overall effort and movement weakens.

In the political world, the term “purity test” has a very specific meaning, largely used by elites to chastise and attack the left, or to gaslight them into supporting more centrist or right-wing policies. Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi (4/24/17), for example, bemoaned the ideological “activists” infiltrating the Democratic Party, undermining “more pragmatic party leaders everywhere” with their “purity tests.” She highlighted the supposed “danger” in “pushing the party too far to the left and imposing rigid orthodoxy,” warning that they are creating a “one-size party suitable only for zealots.”

An example Vennochi gave of an intolerable and self-defeating purity test was leftists’ pressure on Sen. Elizabeth Warren to change her mind about supporting Trump nominee Ben Carson to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Apparently opposing one of Trump’s most stridently right-wing appointees constitutes a “demand for ideological purity.”

Much has been written about Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ refusal to accept corporate donations for their presidential campaigns, with many outlets (Atlantic, 12/18/18; 3/5/19; Politico, 2/25/19; The Hill, 8/24/17) describing this as a new Democratic “purity test” to establish progressive credentials.

2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (CNBC, 2/5/16) scorned Sanders’ test, claiming, “Under his definition, President Obama is not a progressive because he took donations from Wall Street!” Some might argue that is accurate, particularly as Obama describes himself as a 1980s-style “moderate Republican.”

Another key issue in the primaries is healthcare. A lack of health coverage kills around 45,000 Americans yearly, and hospital bills drive the large majority of bankruptcies in America. Many Democratic candidates, including Warren and Sanders, support a European-style Medicare for All system. But corporate media have been resistant, even hostile.

Writing in the New York Times (3/21/19), Paul Krugman demanded that we “don’t make healthcare a purity test,” warning that Democrats who do not support a single-payer system may not be seen as progressive, or be viewed as a corrupt “shill” for the pharmaceutical industry. According to Krugman, this would be inaccurate. The Washington Post (2/11/19) was more scathing of the Medicare for All “purity test,” attacking the leftist “cranks” using “empty slogans instead of evidence-based policy.”

It is often made explicit that “purity test” is merely code for the Democratic base wanting more leftist policies, and being disgruntled with politicians who block them. The Denver Post (1/31/19) described Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper as a progressive, pragmatic and “moderate problem-solver” in favor of “bipartisanship,” under attack from the “hard-core” left who demand “drastic” change. Their “purity test,” wrote the Post, will destroy a candidate with perhaps the most “credible” chance to beat Trump.

In contrast, behavior or policies imposed on the left from establishment Democrats are rarely if ever framed as a “purity test.” For example, Sanders appointed Briahna Joy Gray as his press secretary, who had previously declared she voted for the Green Party’s Jill Stein in 2016. Instead of this being seen as the party expanding its appeal to third-party voters, it produced a scandal among liberals on social media. For many, it was proof, as they had been saying all along, that Bernie was not a real Democrat—in other words, it was an opportunity for them to excommunicate an ally for being insufficiently orthodox.

On this story, New York magazine (3/20/19) described Sanders’ campaign as an “irrational cult” of “left-wing factionalists” that were attempting to “split the party” by “intentionally misleading” voters. These kind of attacks are not seen as “purity tests,” however.

Neither was the anger generated by the decision of candidates like Sanders, Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke not to attend the AIPAC conference presented as such a test. Nor were corporate media demands that the left embrace Trump’s regime change strategy in Venezuela lest they be accused of supporting a “dictator” (FAIR.org, 3/5/19). When these things are imposed on the base from the top down, they are not framed as purity tests.

Instead, the left is browbeaten and cajoled into supporting business-friendly right-wing Democrats, and told their preferred policies are either unrealistic or unpopular. The Hill (8/24/17) warns us, “If Democrats want to destroy any chances of winning national office, establishing purity tests is the quickest way to do it.”

But this is demonstrably not the case. Seventy-five percent of Americans (and nearly two-thirds of Republicans) support Medicare for all. Three-quarters of the population support higher taxes on the wealthy, while tuition-free public college is popular even among Tea Party supporters. One can make a strong case that these policies would tend to attract rather than repel Trump voters to the Democratic cause.

The dichotomy between credible, pragmatic centrists and the fanatical, inward-looking left demanding ideological purity is a framing generally made in bad faith to shield corporate-backed candidates from criticism. FAIR (2/26/19) has already highlighted the “Republican best friend” trope, where Republicans offer supposedly selfless advice to the left on how to win next time—which turns out to be by doing and saying exactly what the right wants.

“Purity test” is a common talking point for these fake friends. The Associated Press (2/21/19) published an article from a Republican consultant who warned that applying “intense” leftist purity tests to “pragmatic” candidates capable of beating Trump was self-defeating: “As the Democratic presidential candidates move further to the left, it will make President Trump’s path to re-election clearer.”

Meanwhile, writing in Yahoo! News (3/19/19), conservative National Review writer David French claimed it would take a “brave person” to withstand the “attack” of the “vicious,” “scornful” and “toxic” left and their destructive purity tests. Proposing free healthcare, a Green New Deal or other popular left-wing policies would surely lead to Trump’s victory in 2020, he advised Democrats.

This purity test trope is so blatantly used to defend anyone in power it sometimes stretches credulity to the breaking point. In a Washington Post  op-ed (2/14/19) headlined “The Left’s Quest for Purity Could Destroy Potentially Worthy Leaders,” Carolyn Dupont bemoaned the purity tests of the “rigid, self-righteous and blind” left after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam was criticized for wearing blackface. The column compared this censure to the guillotines of the French Revolution that killed many “righteous” politicians for “small blemishes on their ideological purity,” describing Northam’s blackface as a “moment of imperfection.” The desire to have policies affecting people’s lives crafted by people who haven’t ritually ridiculed and devalued them, apparently, is another purity test.

Democrat Bill O’Neill, an Ohio Supreme Court justice, also made headlines after defending politicians Roy Moore and Al Franken (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 11/17/17). O’Neill decried the unreasonable “purity tests” for “sexual indiscretions” (multiple sexual assault charges, in Moore’s case, from some as young as 14) . He claimed those calling for Franken’s resignation were “dogs” involved in a “feeding frenzy,” chasing out good politicians (USA Today, 11/18/17).

The term is used much less frequently in reference to the right wing, but when it is, it is used in the same manner: to describe policies supported by a party’s base that corporate media disagree with. Many outlets (New York Times, 11/23/09; Wall Street Journal, 11/24/09; US News, 12/23/09) described the attempt to get party officials to endorse a ten-point bill, including opposition to abortion and firearms regulation, as a “purity test.”

When you hear the phrase “purity test” in the media, be on the alert. The phrase is code for elites being pressured in ways they don’t like, and is often a shield against legitimate criticism of corruption or dependence on corporate power.

Barr Gets in Last Word Before America Sees Mueller Report

WASHINGTON — After nearly two years of waiting, America is getting some Trump-Russia answers straight from Robert Mueller.

Eager to get in a first word ahead of the public release of the special counsel’s report, Attorney General William Barr on Thursday laid out in advance what he said was the “bottom line:” No collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government hackers.

While Mueller drew no conclusion about whether President Donald Trump had obstructed justice in the investigation, Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein personally had concluded that while Trump was “frustrated and angry” about the Mueller probe, nothing the president did rose to the level of an “obstruction-of-justice offense.” Barr said Mueller’s report examined 10 episodes pertaining to Trump and obstruction.

The Justice Department was to release a redacted version of the special counsel’s report later Thursday on Russian election interference and the Trump campaign, opening up months, if not years, of fights over what the document means in a deeply divided country.

Barr said at a news conference that the president did not exert executive privilege to withhold anything in the report. And he said the president’s personal attorney had requested and gotten a chance to review the report before its public release.

Barr said that he and deputy Rod Rosenstein disagreed with some of Mueller’s “legal theories” pertaining to obstruction of justice. But he said that didn’t influence their conclusion that Trump didn’t commit a crime.

He said they set their feelings on the matter aside and accepted Mueller’s “legal framework for purposes of our analysis” but still determined that the evidence gathered by Mueller was “not sufficient to establish” that Trump had violated the law.

Barr said that no one outside the Justice Department has seen the unredacted Mueller report. And he added that no redactions were either made or proposed outside of the small group of Justice staffers that pored over Mueller’s report.

The report’s release will represent a moment of closure nearly two years in the making and at the same time the starting bell for a new round of partisan warfare.

Even ahead of the report’s release, Democrats cried foul about Barr’s press conference, for “spinning the report” in the words of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“The process is poisoned before the report is even released,” he said.

And moments after Barr finished speaking, House Judiciary Chairman Nadler sent a letter requesting that Mueller himself testify before his panel “no later than May 23.”

Barr’s news conference ended abruptly after Barr bristled at the tone of some questions about how he handled the Mueller report.

The report was expected to reveal what Mueller uncovered about ties between the Trump campaign and Russia that fell short of criminal conduct. It was also to lay out the special counsel’s conclusions about formative episodes in Trump’s presidency, including his firing of FBI Director James Comey and his efforts to undermine the Russia investigation publicly and privately.

The report was not expected to place the president in legal jeopardy, as Barr made the decision that Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. But it is likely to contain unflattering details about the president’s efforts to control the Russia investigation that will cloud his ability to credibly claim total exoneration. And it may paint the Trump campaign as eager to exploit Russian aid and emails stolen from Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s campaign even if no Americans crossed the line into criminal activity.

Overall, Mueller brought charges against 34 people — including six Trump aides and advisers — and revealed a sophisticated, wide-ranging Russian effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. Twenty-five of those charged were against Russians accused either in the hacking of Democratic email accounts or of a hidden but powerful social media effort to spread disinformation online.

Five former Trump aides or advisers pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate in Mueller’s investigation, among them Trump’s campaign chairman, national security adviser and personal lawyer.

The 12 Biggest Myths About Raising Taxes on the Rich

Some politicians are calling for higher taxes on the rich. Naturally, these proposals have unleashed a torrent of opposition – mostly from…the rich. Here are the 12 biggest myths they’re propounding:

Myth 1: A top marginal tax rate applies to all of a rich person’s total income or wealth.

Wrong. It would only apply to dollars in excess of a certain level. The 70 percent income tax rate proposed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would apply only to dollars in excess of 10 million dollars a year. The 2 percent wealth tax proposed by Elizabeth Warren would apply only to wealth in excess of 50 million dollars.

Myth 2 : Raising taxes on the rich is a far-left idea.

Baloney. 70 percent of Americans – including 54 percent of Republicans – support raising taxes on families making more than 10 million dollars a year.  And expecting the rich to pay their fair share is a traditional American idea. From 1930 to 1980, the average top marginal income tax rate was  78 percent. From 1951 to 1963 it exceeded 90 percent – again, only on dollars in excess of a very high threshold. Even considering all deductions and tax credits, the very rich paid over half of their top incomes in taxes.

Myth 3: A wealth tax is unconstitutional.

Rubbish. Most locales already impose an annual wealth tax on the value of peoples’ homes – the main source of household wealth for most people. It’s called the property tax. The rich hold most of their wealth in stocks and bonds, so why should these forms of wealth escape taxation?  Article I Section 8 of the Constitution gives “Congress [the] power to lay and collect taxes.”

Myth 4: When taxes on the rich are cut, they invest more and everyone benefits, when taxes on the rich are increased, economic growth slows.

Utter baloney. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke. Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all cut taxes on the rich, and nothing trickled down. There’s no evidence that higher taxes on the rich slows economic growth. To the contrary, when the top marginal tax rate has been high – between 71 to 92 percent – growth has averaged 4 percent a year. But when top rate has been low – between 28 and 39 percent – growth has averaged only 2.1 percent.

Myth 5: When you cut taxes on corporations, they invest more, and create more jobs.

Wrong again. After Trump and the Republicans lowered the corporate tax rate in 2018, America’s largest corporations cut more jobs than they created. They used their tax savings largely to increase their stock prices by buying back their own shares of stock – enriching executives and wealthy investors but providing no real benefit to the economy.

Myth 6: The rich already pay more than their fair share in taxes.

This is misleading, because it focuses only on income taxes – leaving out the large and growing tax burden on lower-income Americans; payroll taxes, state and local sales taxes, and property taxes take bigger bites out of the pay of lower-income families than higher-income.

Myth 7: The rich shouldn’t be taxed more because they already pay capital gains taxes.

Misleading. Rich families avoid paying capital gains taxes by passing their wealth on to their heirs. In fact, the largest share of big estates transferred from generation to generation are unrealized capital gains that have never been taxed.

Myth 8: The estate tax is a death tax that hits millions of Americans.

Baloney. The current estate tax, which only applies to assets in excess of 11 million dollars, or 22 million dollars for couples, affects fewer than 2,000 families.

Myth 9: If taxes are raised on the wealthy, they’ll find ways to evade them. So very little money is going to be raised.

More rubbish. For example, a 2 percent wealth tax, as proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, would raise around 2.75 trillion dollars over the next decade with very little tax evasion, according to research. A 70 percent tax on incomes over 10 million would raise close to 720 billion dollars over 10 years.

Myth 10: The only reason to raise taxes on the wealthy is to collect revenue.

No. Although these proposals would generate lots of revenue – and help us reduce the national debt while investing in schools, roads, and all the things we need – another major purpose is to reduce inequality, and thereby safeguard democracy against oligarchy.

Myth 11: It’s unfair to raise taxes on the wealthy.

Actually, it’s unfair not to raise taxes on the rich.  For the last 40 years, most Americans have seen no growth in their incomes at all, while the incomes of a minority at the top have skyrocketed. We’re rapidly heading toward a society dominated by a handful of super-rich, many of whom have never worked a day in their lives. More than 60 percent of wealth in America is now inherited.

Myth 12: They earned it. It’s their money.

Hogwash. It’s their country, too. They couldn’t maintain their fortunes without what America provides – national defense, police, laws, courts, political stability, and the Constitution. They couldn’t have got where they are without other things America provides – education, infrastructure, and a nation that respects private property. And to argue it’s “their money” also ignores a lot of other ways America has bestowed advantages on the rich – everything from bailing out Wall Street bankers when they get into trouble, to subsidizing the research of Big Pharma.

So the next time you hear one of these myths, know the truth.

What Might a Green New Deal Look Like?

“Before we can win a Green New Deal, we need to be able to close our eyes and imagine it. We can be whatever we have the courage to see.”

That was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) expressing one of the messages behind an urgent video on climate change released Wednesday by The Intercept.

The video, “A Message From the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” was produced by The Intercept‘s Naomi Klein. Narrated by Ocasio-Cortez, the short film is presented as a look back to the present day from a future in which the Green New Deal passed Congress and reshaped America and the planet for the better.

The video features art from Molly Crabapple and was written by Ocasio-Cortez and Avi Lewis. It was co-directed by Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt.

“Despite all the horrors of climate change that we have seen and continue to see,” said Crabapple, “we can save ourselves, accomplish brave, beautiful, and world-changing things.”

Klein pointed to the hope the video could give to people interested in working to change the planet for the better.

“This beautiful film helps us imagine a different version of ourselves, and a future in which we decided to come together in the face of crisis, rather than surrender and fall apart,” said Klein.

Watch the video here:

Trump Cracks Down on Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela

CORAL GABLES, Fla. — The Trump administration on Wednesday intensified its crackdown on Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, rolling back Obama administration policy and announcing new restrictions and sanctions against the three countries whose leaders national security adviser John Bolton dubbed the “three stooges of socialism.”

“The troika of tyranny — Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — is beginning to crumble,” Bolton said in a hard-hitting speech near Miami on the 58th anniversary of the United States’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion of the island, an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government.

The measures seem likely to hit hardest in Cuba, which is at a moment of severe economic weakness as it struggles to find cash to import basic food and other supplies following a drop in aid from Venezuela and a string of bad years in other key economic sectors.

Bolton announced a new cap on the amount of money that families in the United States can send their relatives in Cuba. The Obama administration had lifted limits on remittances, but the new limit will be $1,000 per person per quarter. Remittances to Cuba from the United States amounted to $3 billion in 2016, according to the State Department.

Washington also moved to restrict “non-family travel” after a broad loosening of so-called purposeful visits under Obama led to soaring numbers of American trips for cultural and educational exchanges. Details on the restrictions were not immediately clear, but tourism is a key lifeline of hard currency for Cuba. Bolton called such visits “veiled tourism.”

Cuban officials met the announcements with defiance.

“Nobody will snatch away from us, neither through seduction nor force, ‘the Fatherland that our parents won for us by standing up,’” President Miguel Díaz-Canel said via Twitter. “We Cubans will not surrender.”

Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez called it an attack on international law, Cuban sovereignty and countries that would do business with the island: “Aggressive escalation by (hashtag)US against Cuba will fail. Like at Giron, we will be victorious,” he tweeted, referring to a Bay of Pigs beach where invaders landed.

“We will always be willing to have a dialogue based on absolute respect, but if the U.S. government has chosen a confrontational path we will not hesitate to defend the gains of the revolution at any cost,” Rodríguez later said on state television.

On Venezuela, Bolton said Washington was sanctioning the country’s Central Bank, which the Trump administration says has been instrumental in propping up the embattled government of President Nicolás Maduro. The sanctions do not bar humanitarian aid or private remittances and aim to ensure reliability of debit and credit card transactions, which have become essential amid skyrocketing inflation and a shortage of cash notes.

Maduro called the move the latest example of “imperialist aggression.” In a nationally broadcast TV appearance, he said any nation’s central bank is “sacred” and deserves respect.

“I see imperialism as crazy, desperate,” Maduro said.

Bolton also announced sanctions against financial services provider Bancorp, which he claimed is a “slush fund” for Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

“The United States looks forward to watching each corner of this sordid triangle of terror fall: in Havana, in Caracas, and in Managua,” Bolton said in South Florida, which is home to many thousands of exiles and immigrants from the three countries.

He said Obama administration policies had given the Cuban government “political cover to expand its malign influence” across the region, including in Venezuela. Cuba has trained Venezuelan security forces to repress civilians and support Maduro, Bolton said, calling Maduro “quite simply a Cuban puppet.”

Bolton’s pledge to “never, ever abandon” the people of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua in their fight for freedom also might ring hollow in light of the historical events he sought to highlight at the event hosted by the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association.

Many Cuban Americans to this day resent the late President John F. Kennedy for not deploying American troops at a critical moment in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Meanwhile, with the high stakes of the Cold War a fading memory, some critics of U.S. policy toward Venezuela worry the Trump administration’s stance that all options are on the table, including a military one, to oust Maduro is an empty threat that will only serve to ignite the streets and geopolitical tensions with Russia, compounding the misery of Venezuelan citizens.

“Honoring one of U.S.′ greatest military fiascos from 60 years back suggests U.S. policy to Latin America owes more now to a perverse Cold War nostalgia than practical benefits for people of the region,” said Ivan Briscoe, the Latin American director for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank.

Collin Laverty, president of Cuba Educational Travel, said in a statement that the measures on remittances and travel threaten the economic survival of Cuban families and the viability of thousands of independent small businesses allowed to operate since 2010 under reforms implemented by former President Raúl Castro.

“The only winners here are a handful of members of Congress and those stuck in the past that support them,” Laverty said. “The losers are millions of Cubans on and off the island and the overwhelming majority of Americans that support engagement with Cuba.”

Many of the 400 or so who paid $100 to attend Bolton’s speech at the Biltmore in South Florida were of Cuban descent. Rafael UsaTorres, a member of the 2506 Brigade that worked for the CIA at the time of the invasion, said he has faith the measures will bring down Díaz-Canel’s government, though he wished it had been done sooner.

“Today is a big day,” the 78-year-old said. “But I feel very sad — too many years waiting.”

Others said Washington isn’t going far enough. Manuel Menendez-Pou, 79, said the Cuban government had confiscated some $63 million in property from his family, once one of the wealthiest on the island, mainly in the sugar industry.

“The problem is not the money,” Menendez-Pou, also a former member of the brigade, said minutes before the speech. “They stole our life.”

In Havana, homemaker Odalis Salazar worried about the future of remittances she receives from two children living abroad, including one in the United States.

“It hurts everyone and Trump is absolutely criminal, because he knows that … (the remittances) help us a lot,” Salazar said. “We Cubans have families there and we get by largely with that help that they send us.”

Pompeo’s decision on allowing lawsuits lets Americans, including Cubans who became naturalized citizens, sue companies that operate out of hotels, tobacco factories, distilleries and other properties nationalized after Fidel Castro took power.

Pompeo said he would not renew a bar on litigation that has been in place for two decades, meaning lawsuits can be filed starting May 2, when the current suspension expires.

The Justice Department has certified roughly 6,000 claims as having merit, said Kimberly Breier, the top U.S. diplomat for the Americas. Those claims have an estimated value of $8 billion: $2 billion in property and $6 billion in interest, she said.

An additional 200,000 uncertified claims could run into the tens of billions of dollars, she said.

Breier said there would be no exceptions to the policy, but foreign companies “will have nothing to worry about if they are not operating on properties taken from Americans.”

Nonetheless, companies in the European Union and Canadian companies stand to lose tens of billions in compensation and interest, and the decision prompted stern responses and vows to protect businesses from lawsuits.

In a statement, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland called the decision to remove the longstanding waivers “regrettable” and said it “can only lead to an unnecessary spiral of legal actions.”

In Spain, which has large investments in hotels and other tourism-related ventures on the island, a senior government official said Madrid would ask the EU to mount a challenge at the World Trade Organization.

“The extraterritorial application of the U.S. embargo is illegal and violates international law,” said Alberto Navarro, EU ambassador to Cuba.

___

Associated Press writers Michael Weissenstein in Miami, Andrea Rodríguez in Havana and Aritz Parra in Madrid contributed to this report.

A Climate Rebellion in Downtown New York

On Wednesday, more than 100 activists from the New York chapter of Extinction Rebellion descended on City Hall to protest the extraction of fossil fuels and raise awareness about a crisis that threatens the very survival of humankind. Patch reports that police have arrested 62, with demonstrators laying down in the streets and climbing light poles to unfurl banners declaring a climate emergency. According to an April 14th press release, Extinction Rebellion has planned to “disrupt business as usual” in 80 cities across 33 countries, from India to Australia and throughout Europe and the U.S.

Truthdig’s Michael Nigro reports from downtown New York:

Does the TSA Discriminate Against Black Women?

“It happens with my natural Afro, when I have braids or two-strand twists. Regardless,” said Wanzer, who lives in Washington, D.C. “At this point in my life I have come to expect it, but that doesn’t make it any less invasive and frustrating.”

Wanzer, who had her hair patted down by Transportation Security Administration officers two weeks ago while she flew home from Raleigh, North Carolina, said she feels singled out when she is asked to step aside.

“When you find yourself in that kind of situation, it makes you wonder,” Wanzer said. “Is this for security, or am I being profiled for my race?”

Black women have been raising alarms for years about being forced to undergo intrusive, degrading searches of their hair at airport security checkpoints. After a complaint five years ago, the TSA pledged to improve oversight and training for its workers on hair pat-downs.

But it turns out there’s an issue beyond the screeners: the machines themselves.

The futuristic full-body scanners that have become standard at airports across the United States are prone to false alarms for hairstyles popular among women of color.

In a request to vendors last summer, the TSA asked for ideas “to improve screening of headwear and hair in compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.” That law bars federally funded agencies and programs from discriminating — even unintentionally — on the basis of race, color or national origin.

Two officers interviewed by ProPublica said the machines’ alarms are frequently triggered by certain hairstyles.

“With black females, the scanner alarms more because they have thicker hair; many times they have braids or dreadlocks,” said a TSA officer who works at an airport in Texas and asked not to be named. “Maybe, down the line, they will be redesigning the technology, so it can tell apart what’s a real threat and what is not. But, for now, we officers have to do what the machine can’t.”

A government report in 2014 found that the machines also “had a higher false alarm rate when passengers wore turbans and wigs.”

Asked about the false alarms, the TSA said in a statement to ProPublica that the agency “is reviewing additional options for the screening of hair.” (Read the agency’s full statement.)

A senior TSA official said in an interview that hair pat-downs are not discriminatory and are done when a body scanner indicates that a passenger has an object in his or her hair. “I get a hair pat-down every time I travel. I’m a white woman,” said the official, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that she not be named.

“Procedures require that if there is an alarm on the technology, the pat-down [must] be conducted,” the official said. She added that the agency has found no evidence of discrimination in hair pat-downs or any pattern that pointed to a particular airport.

The TSA advises passengers to remove all items from their hair before going through airport security and warns on its website that “wearing a hairpiece, extensions or a wig as well as a ponytail, a hair bun or braids” may trigger an alarm.

The TSA would not say if it had ever found a weapon in a passenger’s hair. Its website says: “You’d be surprised what can be hidden in hair. The most notable things we’re looking for in hair are explosives and improvised explosives device components.”

The false alarms affect more than the passengers whose hair is searched. The government report from 2014 noted that patting down passengers slows security lines and may increase costs by requiring extra screeners.

Full-body scanners — millimeter wave machines — have become standard at airports over the past decade. The TSA accelerated their installation after failed “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a flight on Christmas Day 2009 from Amsterdam to Detroit with plastic explosives inside his pants.

The scanners are made by L3 Technologies. A government report said they cost about $150,000 each, and that the TSA spent more than $100 million deploying the machines. An L3 spokesperson declined to comment on the machines, and pointed us to the company’s website.

Unlike metal detectors, the scanners can detect nonmetallic items. But they can’t tell what objects are — or, apparently, if it’s just thick hair. That requires humans.

Last month, ProPublica asked people to share their experience with hair searches at airports. We received 720 responses. More than 90% were from women. Of the respondents overall, 313 identified as white only, 311 as black only and 96 as other ethnicities such as Latino, Asian American, Middle Eastern, American Indian or Alaskan Native, or mixed.

Most black women and other women of color we heard from described the hair pat-downs as intrusive and disrespectful. They said they felt singled out during the process.

“I get TSA workers have a job to do, which is to keep us safe,” said Wanzer, the Washington, D.C., resident who frequently has her hair searched. “But there needs to be a level of sensitivity about how different people perceive these kinds of searches.”

Black women have long been discriminated against for wearing their hair as it grows naturally or for sporting hairstyles mostly associated with black culture, like braids, two-strand twists, cornrows and locks. Natural black hair has been deemed unhygienic, unprofessional and radical, and it has been policed for centuries.

Most white women we heard from said they didn’t mind the searches or considered them a minor annoyance.

Toni Moss, who is white, said she travels by plane about four times a month. Moss said she is occasionally flagged for a hair search. The searches happen only when she keeps her short, voluminous hair in its naturally curly state. When Moss straightens her hair before traveling, she doesn’t get a hair pat-down, she said.

“It isn’t really something that I mind. I just find it funny when it happens but, then, it doesn’t happen every time I travel,” said Moss, whose hair was searched most recently in January while going through security at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas.

“The last time it happened I was joking with TSA [officers],” Moss said. “I told them, ‘Sorry you didn’t find a pork chop in my head.’ And they laughed.”

The agency has said that even if the machines don’t sound an alarm, agents can still choose to do hair pat-downs if “an individual’s hair looks like it could contain a prohibited item or is styled in a way an officer cannot visually clear it.”

That discretion enables profiling, said Abre’ Conner, a lawyer with the ACLU of Northern California, which filed the complaint against the TSA in April 2014. “When that discretion comes into play, unless there is explicit- and implicit-bias training, that can play out in a way that harms people of color, black people,” Conner said.

When Jazzmen Knoderer traveled by plane for the second time in her life, in 2012, TSA officers at Dayton International Airport in Ohio asked her to step aside for a full-body pat-down. It happened again the next time she took an airplane and went through security, at an airport on the Hawaiian island of Maui in 2013. And again, for her fourth plane trip in 2014, at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

The first time Knoderer’s hair was searched, it was short and styled in two-strand twists. The second time, she had an Afro. The third time, her Afro was no more than 3 inches long, she said.

Knoderer said she didn’t go through a body scanner or metal detector before she was searched.

“It doesn’t feel random when it happens three times in a row. It doesn’t feel random when you see that all the people around you, who don’t look like you, aren’t asked to step aside,” Knoderer said. “I don’t want to change the way my hair grows out of my head.”

The number of complaints filed with the TSA by passengers alleging racial discrimination in hair pat-downs rose from 73 in 2017 to 105 in 2018.

It’s not clear what has caused that increase. One reason may be growing scrutiny of the issue, in particular a powerful story in Cosmopolitan last year in which the writer recounted her own experiences and those of others. Most people we heard from said they had not known they could file a complaint.

The TSA is one of the most diverse agencies in the federal government. One-quarter of the nation’s 46,000 airport screeners are black and 23% are Hispanic, according to Office of Personnel Management data.

Conner, the ACLU lawyer, said black airport screeners seem just as likely to conduct hair pat-downs as white screeners. The only difference is that a black screener “doesn’t necessarily leave my hair as messed up,” she said.

Thomas Frank is a journalist in Washington, D.C., and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2012.

Nearly 100,000 Pentagon Whistleblower Complaints Have Been Silenced

I don’t know if I’d have the nerve to be a whistleblower. I’d like to think I would. We all like to think we would, just like we all like to think we could catch the game-winning touchdown, triumph on “America’s Got Talent,” and fold a fitted sheet quickly and without cursing.

But to blow the whistle on a huge organization with a lot of power, likely drawing that power to come crashing down on your head—that takes some serious spine-age. Now, imagine the organization you’re calling out is arguably the largest, most powerful, most secretive and most violent organization on planet Earth. I’m speaking, of course, of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Yet thousands, even tens of thousands, of people have taken that step over the past five years. (More on this in a moment.)

All the while our organized human murder machine continues its work around the world. Every day. Every hour. Never a moment of rest. Never pausing to clip their toenails or scratch their ass. Bombs dropped. Buildings blown up. People killed or imprisoned. No end in sight.

By the way, that’s the term I like to use instead of “military”—Organized Human Murder Machine.

It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? “Mili-tary” sounds too boring, too banal. Sounds like a super-lame couple you met at a party. “Yeah, Millie and Terry over there are accountants. If I have to hear one more joke about capital gains taxes, I’m gonna kill myself.”

But that’s not what the military is. The military is a gigantic organized human murder machine, and even if you “support” every action our military has ever taken, you can still acknowledge it’s an organized human murder machine. (You would just bizarrely argue that all the murder has been just and sound and pure.)

Eleven months ago I covered $21 trillion of unaccounted-for adjustments at the Pentagon over the past 20 years. Don’t try to think about the number $21 trillion because you’ll pass out and hit your head on the desk. If your salary is $40,000 a year, in order to earn $21 trillion, it would take you 525 million years. (At which point you can’t even enjoy the new jet ski you just bought with all your money because you’re almost certainly a brain in a jar … though a nice embroidered jar that only the rich brains can afford.)

Over the past year there has been a little more coverage of the utterly preposterous amount of money unaccounted for at our human murder machine. The Nation magazine, Forbes and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all covered it. Then the white blood cells of the military-industrial complex kicked into action in order to destroy the “infection.” The New York Times and Vox both claimed the $21 trillion is merely the result of large-scale misdocumentation and therefore doesn’t matter at all. Of course, the idea that tens of TRILLIONS of dollars of unaccountable adjustments don’t matter and couldn’t mask any fraud, abuse or corruption is an assertion that makes Charlie Sheen’s statement that he runs on tiger blood seem downright levelheaded.

Probably the best article to date on the $21 trillion was written a few weeks ago by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone.

Point is, even though most of the mainstream media won’t get near this subject (or worse yet—actively attack those who do), the word is getting out: There is a giant sucking sound in the center of the Pentagon, and whatever’s down there feeds on trillions of secretive dollars, then shits out incalculable death and destruction. (It’s the Death Star if officials at the Death Star spent $10,000 on a toilet seat.)

A month ago the Government Accountability Office came out with a report showing the total number of whistleblower complaints over the past five years at the Department of Defense. It’s nearly 100,000. Here’s the only part of the report that references that number:

The Department of Defense Inspector General identified 8 substantiated violations of whistleblower confidentiality between fiscal years 2013 and 2018, representing approximately .01 percent of the 95,613 contacts handled by the Inspector General during that time….

95,613 whistleblower complaints over five years.

Sadly, the Government Accountability Office was trying to brag in that sentence. They were proudly stating, “We only breached the confidentiality of .01 percent of our 95,000 whistleblower complaints. Aren’t we heroes?!”

It’s kind of like saying, “Of the 10,000 dolphins I’ve killed, not a single one has accidentally been a human.” The sane response is, “Well, I’m glad to hear that, but did you say you killed 10,000 dolphins?”

To try to get the 95,000 number to make a little more sense, that averages out to a whistleblower every six minutes of every weekday for five straight years. (That waiting room must be truly nuts. I bet all the good magazines were claimed years ago.)

But maybe I’m looking at this all wrong. Perhaps the number 95,613 shouldn’t be all that shocking, and I need to roll my tongue back up and store it back within my mouth. When you have $21 trillion of unaccounted-for adjustments, it means a seizure-inducing amount of money, parts, pieces, bombs, missiles, manpower and devices are flying around with no accountability—likely creating loads of fraud, which would probably create loads of whistleblowers. Hence, maybe we all should have expected this number of whistleblowers rather than being shocked.

For example, there’s the time in 2003 when the U.S. flew $12 billion in cash to Iraq and promptly lost track of it. As the Guardian makes clear in this article, this was not an instance of hackers on a computer system stealing a bunch of ones and zeroes. This was giant pallets of cash money vanishing without a trace. In fact, it was 281 million $100 bills, weighing in at 363 tons. That’s not really the type of thing you can just smuggle away in your sweatshirt while humming “She’ll be comin’ ‘round the mountain.”

Or here’s another example journalist David DeGraw highlights from the Government Accountability Report:

… according to a Department of Defense official, during an initial audit, the Army found 39 Blackhawk helicopters that had not been recorded in the property system. [$819 million in value] Similarly, the Air Force identified 478 buildings and structures at 12 installations that were not in the real property systems. …

The Army lost and then found 39 helicopters.

The Air Force lost and then found 478 buildings.

How does one lose a goddamn building? Unless you just had a bad breakup with David Copperfield, there’s no explanation for losing a building. (Side note: It must suck divorcing David Copperfield. “Really, honey? You think you’re gonna take the house?? PAFOOMPF! What house?!”)

Ya see, this madness stems from the fact that the Pentagon has a standard operating procedure of simply making up numbers to fill their books—which for normal human beings is termed “fraud.” But in the case of the Pentagon, it’s termed, “We get to make shit up because … ummm… national security.”

Here’s more from a 2013 Reuters article:

“Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the Department of Defense’s accounts. … but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions”—in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called “plugs,” to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s.”

Have no fear, patriotic Americans, this is not “lying to the American people, stealing their money, and using it for war,” this is just “unsubstantiated change actions.” Try that on your next tax return. Put in $10,000 marked “Unsubstantiated change actions.” I’m sure they’ll love that.

So let’s sum this up, shall we? The Pentagon sucks up 55% of all the discretionary tax money we pay to our government (thanks to our bought-off Congress who receive more Christmas cards from weapons contractors than they do from relatives). Those who work at the Pentagon have no idea where or how the money is spent. They make up many of the numbers resulting in tens of trillions of dollars of unaccounted-for adjustments. They lose helicopters, buildings and, in a few instances, even nuclear warheads. There is an unimaginable amount of fraud and corruption at every level and literally thousands of whistleblowers have tried to come forward every single year—one every six minutes. When they do take that incredibly brave action, over 90% of the claims are dismissed without even being investigated.

You would think, in this topsy-turvy world, if there were one organization we could trust with a trillion dollars a year of our taxpayer money, it would be the Department of Unauthorized Highly Secretive Mass Human Murder.

—

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

We Are All Complicit in America’s War Machine

We have to fight “them” (read: “terrorists”) there so we won’t have to fight them here!

You’ve probably heard that tired old trope. Whenever someone dares suggest that after eighteen years of fruitless wars perhaps it’s time for Uncle Sam’s losing war machine to de-escalate in the Greater Middle East, you can expect some version of the worn out platitude of “here” and “there” justification. Utterly simplistic and regularly debunked by existing evidence, the cliché remains ever so pervasive and (for some) persuasive. As a facile, fear-based rationalization it’s rather effective. It’s very superficiality seduces a populace that is utterly apathetic towards U.S. foreign policy – and make no mistake, the owners of this country count on that indifference to wage profitable (for shareholders and CEOs) forever wars in places few Americans could find on the map.

Still, with three more US Marines killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan – all reservists from a Massachusetts-based unit (so much for that one weekend a month deal) – its time to tear down the intellectually dishonest rationalizations for America’s longest war. The Taliban – which is really a coalition of impoverished young nationalists dedicated to drive out the American occupier – simply is not heading to the US to kill your family anytime soon. There were no Afghans on the 9/11 planes and even though the Taliban regime had harbored Osama Bin Laden no Afghans had directly attacked America.

The September 11th attack was a singular event. The catastrophic outcome – the towers collapsing – doubtlessly surprised even the Al Qaeda organization. Critical was America’s militarized response, the original sin of the war on terror, especially the decision to maintain the occupation of Afghanistan once the Taliban was deposed. Shifting gears from counter-terror to counterinsurgency and nation-building was the true turning point, the moment when any sort of American “victory” became impossible. (As if it ever truly was!)

That decision was based upon a series of lies. The lie that if done “right” counterinsurgency can remake whole societies (faux military “intellectuals like that one in particular); that Afghanistan could be transformed into a Jeffersonian republic at the point of a foreign bayonet; that trapped inside every Afghan there’s an American just dying to escape. But the biggest lie is the notion that if the US doesn’t transform that country or keep our military in place indefinitely, the result would be another 9/11. Taliban fighters – think scruffy farm boys really – are highly unlikely to travel to America and attack our cities. They can’t read, hardly afford to travel, and inhabit a narrow world centered on village and district life. Their goals have always been much more circumscribed and limited to ruling Afghanistan. Anything else is grandiose fantasy. Taliban does not equal Al Qaeda, or ISIS, and it never has.

Make no mistake, the Taliban movement is largely abhorrent and brutal. Still, this doesn’t mean they present a existential strategic threat to the Homeland. Nor does this mean they’re easily beatable since, like it or not, the Taliban is popular in large swaths of the country. That inconvenient fact must drive any sober assessment of the costs and benefits of perpetual US military intervention in Afghanistan. Is the US presence in the country making us any safer? What if our foreign occupation actually generates a nationalist backlash and drives young men into the ranks of the Taliban? These are the sorts of hard questions that sober strategists must consider before asking another young American soldier to fight and potentially die in a war with no end in sight.

To its credit, the Trump administration is now attempting to negotiate with the Taliban, but such peace attempts have dragged on before (during the late Obama years) and, frankly, the Taliban holds the stronger hand. Don’t be surprised, then, if the Taliban ends up getting most of its demands, especially if the peace process is protracted. Which is a scary notion – because we’ve seen this before, in Vietnam.

There, President Nixon, like Mr. Trump, inherited a losing war. Trying to save face, Nixon refused to accept most North Vietnamese demands and kept American soldiers fighting, training, and bombing for long four years. Then, in the end, Tricky Dick went ahead and conceded to the biggest North Vietnamese demand and allowed the communists to keep their military forces within South Vietnam. Some two years later the South fell to those same North Vietnamese troops. The tragedy is that Nixon could have essentially taken the same deal four years before. If he had, 20,000 American troops would not have been killed; neither would perhaps a million Vietnamese. Nixon had only prolonged the inevitable.

In Afghanistan, no matter what deal Trump ends up making (if he does!) it will be amenable to the ascendant Taliban. American fighting, killing, and dying in the interim since Trump took the helm – or even when Obama ran the show – is unlikely to garner Taliban concessions. When America folds and negotiates a weak deal, or once the Taliban again marches on Kabul, all the casualties suffered in the intervening years will have been a tragic waste.

There’s little left for the US military to do in Afghanistan besides to kill, die, and, ultimately, lose the whole war. A massive troop surge under Obama couldn’t “defeat” the Taliban; training and advising the Afghan Army hasn’t worked either – allied Afghans are dying at unsustainable rates and can’t be replaced indefinitely. Rather than admit this fact, the Trump administration simply classified it! Then there’s the Afghan economy, which utterly reliant on foreign aid. Kabul can’t even fund its own security forces. The Taliban control a larger proportion of the country than at any time since 2011. If the mission is hopeless, then, one wishes the US government would at least admit as much; but it won’t.

Trump’s only “new” plan was to keep the American troops in place (against his “instincts” mind you) and simply increase the bombing, including removing civilian casualty restrictions of the Obama years. The result: an 87% annual increase in strikes, five times as many as American airpower unleashed n 2015. Nonetheless, the bombing bonanza has had nearly no effect on the strategic situation in the country. Sure, many more civilians were killed in the strikes – but who really cares about dead brown folks anyway? They’re not people; they’re “collateral damage.”

Listen very carefully: so long as the Taliban maintains the support (or fear) of the people in the South and East of the country; a finds safe-haven across the Pakistani border; and possesses the fervent determination to resist foreign occupation, the US military will not succeed – whatever that means anymore – in Afghanistan unless it commits a near genocide of the people or invades and occupies nuclear-armed and heavily populated Pakistan in perpetuity. There are so-called Islamist terror groups across the Greater Middle East from West Africa to South Asia, so why undertake indefinite ground combat in Afghanistan? It defies logic. Maybe that’s the whole point; the sunken costs, corporate profits, and militarized diplomacy that keeps the US at war is intrinsically absurd.

We’re through the looking glass, Alice. Our country no longer fights for any tangible, measurable goal. Wars aren’t linked to discernible threats. Fear sells wars which are fought based on the twin demons of the military welfare state and a toxic martial cult infusing our politics. We don’t fight in Afghanistan because we must, but because we can; the Taliban doesn’t fight in Afghanistan they hate us, but because we are there. It is the perfect formula for forever war. Through it all, the US is not winning. No amount of bombs or troops or time seems capable of altering that uncomfortable truth. This much I know: if I were sitting at peace table – I’d want to hold the Taliban’s hand!

The shame is that someone’s son or daughter will be the last American to die for a mistake, for a lie. And some number of the dead will have been killed long after it mattered and well after it gained negotiators any leverage. For that reason, and especially for our collective apathy, we are all complicit in a great crime against the troops we so celebrate – yet another contradiction in a nation now defined by them!

This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.comHe served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen