Chris Hedges's Blog, page 294

Puerto Ricans Struggle to Buy Food as Federal Aid Dwindles

BAYAMON, Puerto Rico—Iraida Vargas can no longer afford the two kinds of insulin her aging mother needs and has stopped buying fresh fruit and vegetables as billions of dollars in federal funds that help Puerto Ricans buy food, get medical treatment and recover from Hurricane Maria dwindle despite pleas from the U.S. territory that Congress take action.

Vargas and her family are among the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans feeling the sting of what the territorial government says are insufficient federal funds to help the island recover from the Category 4 storm amid a 12-year recession. Her 83-year-old mother is enrolled in a supplementary nutritional assistance program that saw a one-time infusion of $1.27 billion that Congress approved after the Category 4 storm hit in 2017, but the money has since run out, forcing Puerto Rico’s government to start cutting benefits this month.

“Elderly people here are not living with dignity,” Vargas said, noting that her mother has had to stop taking one of the two insulin products she needs to control her diabetes because there is no money to pay for it. She’s also on a minimum payment plan with the island’s utilities so they don’t cut her electricity and water, and can only afford an emergency phone that connects to 911 and does not accept incoming calls.

The additional food stamp funds allowed Puerto Rico’s government to help an additional 279,000 people previously not covered by a program that serves 1.3 million people on the island of 3.2 million, as well as increase the benefits of those already enrolled. Gov. Ricardo Rossello has asked Congress to approve another $600 million for the program, but it is unclear whether that will happen. The House approved a bill authorizing that amount and it is now before the Senate, which could approve it as early as next week, although Democrats also want money for Medicaid and more generous terms for receiving disaster aid.

U.S. President Donald Trump recently said that he supports the $600 million to cover Puerto Rico’s food stamp shortfall after initially calling the aid “excessive and unnecessary,” but he opposes more generous terms involving disaster aid funds, according to Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York demanded more help for Puerto Rico as he criticized Trump on Thursday.

“Puerto Rico is still struggling to recover,” Schumer said. “What the president is doing is unacceptable, and un-American. I urge my Republican colleagues to … help us pass a disaster package that addresses the needs, not of some, but of all disaster survivors.”

Many in the U.S. territory are closely watching what happens in Washington as they fret about how to cover costs in upcoming months with less money.

Francisca Matias, a 61-year-old cardiac patient whose daughter is diabetic, said they both depend on food stamps and were extremely relieved when the additional funding increased their benefits for a time.

“When that money arrived, it came with the glory of God,” she recalled, adding that her benefits doubled from $200 to more than $400.

She said she was able to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, something she hasn’t been able to afford since the benefits were reduced.

The request for additional food stamp funding comes as Rossello’s administration is also seeking a higher Medicare Advantage reimbursement rate for island residents, noting it is more than 40 percent below the U.S. national average. Overall, more than 580,000 people in Puerto Rico rely on the program and more than 40 percent of them live below the poverty line, Rossello said.

Among them is Carmen Santos, a 68-year-old retired public school cafeteria worker who has lupus and also was hit with a reduction in food stamp benefits.

“How are we elderly people supposed to live?” she asked, adding that she worries about the state of the island’s health care system, which has been hit by an exodus of doctors and has led to almost yearlong waits for certain specialists. “What they’re doing is an injustice.”

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Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.

Brexit Dithering Stuns Europeans

BRUSSELS—The date for the U.K.’s departure from the European Union was seemingly chiseled in stone — March 29, 2019. When it finally arrived with no Brexit, Europeans could only shake their heads in frustrated disbelief.

They saw three years of bluster on how Britain would leave the EU on its own terms dissolve Friday with the last of three votes in Parliament that failed to approve Prime Minister Theresa May’s divorce deal, leaving an uncertain course.

“There was no game plan. Well, no strategy,” Philippe Lamberts, a key member of the European Parliament’s Brexit steering group, said of the British approach in an interview with The Associated Press.

Few in Britain would disagree.

For decades, the bloc was the target of ridicule in Britain for what was perceived as European hubris and an inefficient bureaucracy. But on Friday, there was very little gloating on the continent as May failed to get the deal through the U.K. Parliament, sending London deeper into the Brexit morass.

“We have resisted the temptation to position the (EU) Commission in terms of sentiments,” said EU spokesman Margaritis Schinas. “We don’t do that.”

The EU called another emergency summit for April 10, two days ahead of a new withdrawal date. A chaotic “no-deal” departure scenario is expected to be costly to U.K. businesses and inconvenient at its border. May said there would be “grave” implications.

The EU doesn’t want to inflame passions even more, because it also stands to suffer, with hundreds of billions of euros and tens of thousands of jobs at stake for a U.K. exit without transitional measures in place.

“In Brexit, everybody loses,” said Ewa Osniecka-Tamecka, a vice rector of the College of Europe, speaking at a branch in Natolin, Poland. “Brexit diminishes both the EU and the U.K.”

There was frustration among EU officials who felt that they and their star negotiator Michel Barnier did their part and Britain didn’t.

Even Nigel Farage, a British driving force behind Brexit and staunch EU opponent, has nothing but admiration for Barnier who kept 27 nations aligned as one while Britain, as one, crumbled into chaos.

“Oh, in terms of doing his job. Goodness gracious me. Look, you know, I wish he was on my team and not their team,” Farage, a member of the European Parliament, told the AP.

Almost three years after the June 23, 2016, Brexit referendum, the British government and Parliament seem to be still at a loss over what they really wants from the EU.

“Britain is at a dead end,” said Nathalie Loiseau, who was France’s Europe Minister until she resigned this week to run in the May 23-26 EU elections. “Europeans have other priorities than having to wait until the U.K. takes a decision.”

What also is in tatters is a European admiration of Britain as a symbol of a well-run parliamentary democracy, with its sometimes brilliant discourse and vigorous debate.

Lamberts said he was stunned at how May’s Conservative Party as well as those in the Labour Party seemed to act in their own interests, rather than the needs of the country.

“It’s the inability to build compromise,” Lamberts said. “That’s it. Party above country, in the most brutal sense of the word.”

Manfred Weber, a European lawmaker from Germany and center-right candidate to head the European Commission, said the repeated rejection of the deal highlighted “a failure of the political class in Great Britain — there’s no other way to describe it.”

Some saw Friday’s events as another blow to Britain’s international standing.

“The British have given the world a great deal, from modern parliamentarism to the world title in the discipline of ‘muddling through,'” historian Michael Stuermer wrote in a front-page commentary in German daily Die Welt.

Now, however, “the damage to the country’s reputation is unmistakable.”

___

Associated Press writer Geir Moulson in Berlin and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Has the GOP Rattled

Hillary Clinton is no longer the most targeted Republican foe—that dubious honor, ahead of the 2020 election, belongs to freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The New York Democrat’s rise to prominence in the GOP mind was on full display Thursday evening in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where President Donald Trump held a “rambling and lie-filled rally,” as Common Dreams reported early Friday.

Before the president took the stage, however, his son Donald Trump, Jr., warmed up the crowd by taking potshots at Ocasio-Cortez.

“Think about the fact that every mainstream, leading Democratic contender is taking the advice of a freshman congresswoman who three weeks ago didn’t know the three branches of government,” Jr. said, referring to the Green New Deal. “I don’t know about you guys, but that’s pretty scary.”

Those comments were met with a chant of “AOC sucks” from the pro-Trump crowd.

“You guys, you’re not very nice,” said Jr. “And neither is what that policy would do to this country.”

Washington Post reporter Isaac Stanley-Becker noted that Ocasio-Cortez may be replacing Clinton as the president’s party’s primary foe heading to 2020. Chants about the New York Democrat “testified to the first-term congresswoman’s rapid ascent to GOP public enemy No. 1, a position that took Clinton slightly longer to reach,” said Stanley-Becker.

Ocasio-Cortez’s place at the top of conservative horror stories is due in part to a concerted campaign in right wing media against the freshman Democrat. In a piece on the rise of the New York Democrat to the front of the right wing mind, Washington Postanalyst Philip Bump put it simply:

Ocasio-Cortez is polarizing and vocal. So Fox News and conservatives make her the “face of the Democratic Party” and focus their rhetoric on her. As a result, Republicans are more likely to know who she is. And what they know, they don’t like.

The congresswoman, on Twitter, wryly noted the push by the right to attack her.

“It’s almost as though there is a directed + concerted far-right propaganda machine with a whole cable news channel, and a dark-money internet operation propped up by the Mercers et al dedicated to maligning me & stoking [national] division, reported on by @JaneMayerNYer or something,” said Ocasio-Cortez.

It’s almost as though there is a directed + concerted far-right propaganda machine with a whole cable news channel, and a dark-money internet operation propped up by the Mercers et al dedicated to maligning me & stoking nat’l division, reported on by @JaneMayerNYer or something https://t.co/HChBp04c8W

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 29, 2019

Other commentators noted the right wing obsession with Ocasio-Cortez and questioned where it comes from.

“Wow @realDonaldTrump really hates women,” tweeted Oregon writer Nick Jaynes.

‘AOC sucks!’ chant breaks out at Trump’s Michigan rally against @AOC. Wow @realDonaldTrump really hates women. https://t.co/eowhu6C5Jh

— Nick Jaynes (@NickJaynes) March 29, 2019

“So terrified of a 29 year old Latina,” observed political analyst Andy Ostroy.

So terrified of a 29 year old Latina… https://t.co/uQRtcxoxuc

— Andy Ostroy (@AndyOstroy) March 29, 2019

But, as reporter Colby Itkowitz pointed out, the focus on Ocasio-Cortez didn’t mean that Clinton was completely forgotten.

“It’s going to be a long 19 months,” said Itkowitz.

To recap Trump’s rally last night: crowd chanted “AOC sucks,” “lock her up” (still about Clinton), Trump claimed “total exoneration,” warned of a deep state coup, mocked asylum seekers… It’s going to be a long 19 months… https://t.co/KuSF44YYQp

— Colby Itkowitz (@ColbyItkowitz) March 29, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez will deliver her defense of the Green New Deal at 8pm ET this evening on MSNBC’s Tonight With Chris Hayes.

Chelsea Manning Has Sacrificed Everything Twice

Few can endure the mental anguish of solitary confinement, or what prisons more insidiously refer to as “administrative segregation.” Fewer still can endure multiple stretches of “ad seg” occurring months and years apart. Former United Nations expert Juan Mendez has said that such detention can amount to torture, yet that’s precisely what whistleblower Chelsea Manning has braved in her pursuit of transparency and justice.

Since returning to prison on March 8, Manning has spent 22 hours each day in total isolation at William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center in Alexandria, Va., according to the advocacy group Chelsea Resists. “Chelsea can’t be out of her cell while any other prisoners are out, so she cannot talk to other people, or visit the law library, and has no access to books or reading material,” the group wrote in a statement last week. “She has not been outside for 16 days. She is permitted to make phone calls and move about outside her cell between 1 and 3 a.m.”

Manning is currently incarcerated for refusing to testify before a grand jury in an ongoing federal investigation of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Judge Claude Hilton of Federal District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia has ordered that she remain detained until she decides to testify or the grand jury completes its work. In a statement of motion, her attorneys have raised the possibility that her subpoena was an act of reprisal, arguing that “[t]he President of the United States himself tweeted that Ms. Manning ‘should never have been released.’ ” Manning has pledged to fight the secrecy of the court’s proceedings and to “exhaust every legal remedy available.”

This is not the first time Manning has put her physical and psychological health at risk on behalf of the American public. In 2010, the intelligence officer who then identified as Bradley was found guilty under the Espionage Act after turning over upward of 750,000 classified or otherwise sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks. Those documents revealed, among other atrocities, that it was official U.S. policy to ignore torture in Iraq, and that the majority of inmates at Guantanamo Bay are either innocent or low-level operatives. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison but served just seven and a half after receiving a commutation from Barack Obama shortly before he left office.

The trauma had been inflicted. Manning announced her desire to transition from male to female shortly before her sentencing and was repeatedly denied gender-affirming medical care during her time in prison. (The military eventually acceded to providing her treatment but continued to hold her in a men’s facility.) In July 2016, she tried to commit suicide (it would not be her sole attempt). Two months later, she announced via WikiLeaks that she was undertaking a hunger strike to protest the bullying of prison authorities and the U.S. government.

Daniel Ellsberg, who risked a life sentence to leak the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times as an analyst at the Rand Corp., believes that Manning is nothing less than an American hero. “Manning knowingly risked her freedom then for truth-telling and actually suffered seven and a half years in prison,” he recently told Truthout’s Marjorie Cohn. “I admire her for what she is doing, risking and enduring right now.”

That she is willing to withstand prison a second time, despite being granted immunity for her testimony, is a testament to her courage. In a statement before her hearing earlier this month invoking her First, Fourth and Sixth Amendment protections, Manning expressed grave concern about how grand juries can be weaponized against social activists. As Chip Gibbons observes in Jacobin, “Manning’s reservations appear to be well founded.”

“While the grand jury’s target may be officially a secret, anonymous officials confirmed to the Washington Post that the inquiry was related to a secret indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange,” he writes. “Press freedom groups have long warned about the ramifications of the US government pursuing charges against Assange for publishing the information that Manning leaked. … Regardless of what one thinks of Assange, such a move would be an unprecedented blow to press freedom. No one has ever been prosecuted in the US for publishing classified information, in part because most assume it would be unconstitutional. Even the Obama administration—which essentially normalized the practice of charging whistleblowers under the Espionage Act—balked at prosecuting Assange or WikiLeaks as a bridge too far.”

With a Trump administration that has aggressively pursued leakers and is now threatening to crack down on journalists in the wake of the Mueller report, the stakes could not be higher. Indeed, after Reality Winner received a five-year sentence for the unauthorized release of a government report on Russian hacking during the 2016 election—the longest ever imposed by a federal court for such a crime—it seems all but certain that the government is now attempting to make an example of a prominent public figure. Manning’s lawyers had asked that she be confined to her home for refusing to comply with a grand jury; Judge Hilton sent her to prison instead.

During a recent conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald put Manning’s heroism in perspective:

The media in the United States has spent two years screaming about the threat that Trump poses to press freedoms because he says mean things about the media on Twitter or insults Wolf Blitzer and Chuck Todd, and yet here we have what is really a grave threat to press freedom: the attempt to make it a felony to publish classified material—which is what WikiLeaks did. Even the anti-press freedom Obama administration said this was a bridge too far for us.

And while most reporters are mute on this scandal, on this controversy, and while a lot of Democrats are supportive of it, because they still hate WikiLeaks so much from the 2016 election that they’re happy to see Julian Assange go to jail, even if it means standing behind the Trump administration, Chelsea Manning is not just opposing it, she’s opposing it to the point where she refuses to participate in it, even if it means, as it now does, that she’s going to be jailed for being in contempt of court for refusing to comply with a subpoena. We all owe our immense gratitude to Chelsea Manning for everything she’s done over the last decade, but even more so now.

Prior to his order, Manning told Hilton that she will “accept whatever you bring upon me.” That has meant re-entering prison without knowing when she might be released, along with weeks on end under dehumanizing conditions. For her remarkable bravery, for her willingness to defy a U.S. government that seems to grow more hostile to whistleblowers with each successive administration, Manning is our Truthdigger of the Month.

Trump Openly Mocks Asylum-Seekers Fleeing Violence

During a rambling and lie-filled rally Thursday night in Grand Rapids, Michigan, President Donald Trump mocked asylum-seekers fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries, suggesting they are not actually afraid for their lives.

“You have people coming up. You know they’re all met by the lawyers,” Trump said. “And they come out, they’re all met by the lawyers, and they say, ‘Say the following phrase: I am very afraid for my life. I am afraid for my life.'”

“And then I look at the guy. He looks like he just got out of the ring. He’s the heavyweight champion of the world,” the president said to laughter from the crowd. “He’s afraid for his life. It’s a big fat con job, folks.”

Trump’s remarks came amid outrage over migrant treatment in El Paso, Texas, where hundreds of people—including many women and young children—are being detained in what some described as “concentration camps.”

Trump mocks immigration lawyers and asylum seekers pic.twitter.com/ekYhGcFLpa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2019

Critics were appalled—though not surprised—by Trump’s mockery of asylum-seekers, condemning the president’s comments as “evil,” “cruel,” and “sickening.”

One observer pointed to reporting showing that many asylum-seekers who have been turned away at the border have been killed or severely persecuted upon returning to their home countries.

“Literally the single most powerful person on the planet mocking some of the most vulnerable people on the planet,” tweeted Daniel Balson, Europe and Central Asia advocacy director at Amnesty International.

This stuff always plays in the press like bad manners or a confounding lapse of Presidential decorum but he’s the actual literal boss of the actual literal goons hunting people down and throwing them into prison camps right now https://t.co/Yvm5I51IJC

— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) March 29, 2019

Genuinely one of the worst human beings in the history of US public life. https://t.co/8uA1V6rUoI

— David Roberts (@drvox) March 29, 2019

“Big fat con job”? Sounds like Trump just found his new campaign slogan.

The con ends in 2020. Americans deserve so so so much better. #NotMeUs https://t.co/zRhrCXmun9

— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) March 29, 2019

Trump also used his Michigan rally to launch an insult-laced tirade against Democratic lawmakers—such as “little pencil-necked Adam Schiff“—and lie about the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which have not yet been released to the public.

As Vox‘s Aaron Rupar pointed out, it took the president just 90 seconds to lie about the Mueller report.

According to the summary of the two-year probe’s conclusions by Attorney General William Barr, Mueller did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice.

Addressing his fans in Michigan Thursday night, Trump asserted that the report did precisely that.

“The special counsel completed its report and found no collusion and no obstruction,” the president said.

Watch:

We’re one minute in and Trump has already blatantly lied about the Mueller report. (Mueller did not exonerate him of obstruction.) pic.twitter.com/AnFvt8KQuY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

Three Generations of Women in China

“Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China”

A book by Karoline Kan

Karoline Kan, at only 30 years old, is an eloquent, restrained and gripping writer, a “dancer in chains,” which is how she describes a long-ago teacher who prompted her cautiously to think for herself. In her compelling memoir, “Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China,” Kan tells the story of her family’s tumultuous history and how it has intertwined with China’s turbulent past.

Kan works and lives in Beijing, where she is an editor for China Dialogue. The act of writing a memoir is still an act of subversion in mainland China, where the collectivist spirit reigns, heightened by paranoia and fear. We can hear Kan’s wariness as she assures us how much she loves China and her people, adding, “It is easier to blame China than to understand it; it is easier to judge Chinese people than to get to know them.” But her patriotic fanfare feels forced, and the stories she tells contradict her cheeriness. Her family, a poor one from the rural provinces, is littered with broken people barely able to endure the travesties that have been inflicted upon them.

Kan writes movingly about her troubled relationship with her father, a sad and haunted figure. She describes him as a broken man who rarely spoke at all except when he was intoxicated; then, bitter words flowed from him, unimpeded by his usual timidity. She remembers the last two lines of a poem he once wrote while drunk: “Don’t have the courage to look back twenty years/ In my dreams the scent of books cut me dead.” Kan’s father had been an exceptionally gifted child whose dreams were shattered by the Cultural Revolution. Kan had always been bothered by her father’s disinterest in her school life or her friends, and it is only when she learns about his own tortured history that we see her suppressed anger dissipate into tenderness.

Kan’s mother was a powerhouse of strength and daring. She fought incessantly with her in-laws over matters large and small, and, radically, demanded sovereignty over her own body. When she became pregnant with a second child after already having given birth to a son, she hid the pregnancy so the child would not be aborted by the government authorities. The one-child policy was firmly in place at the time. After a tense nine months, Karoline Kan was born. Her mother’s rebellious act brought considerable consequences. Large fines were levied against her. Bribes had to be paid in order for Karoline to receive the identity card required to get health care, go to school, work and marry. When the government came later on to sterilize her mother, her mother threatened the doctor chosen to perform the surgery until he finally relented and left her alone. When they placed an intrauterine device inside of her mother, she found another physician to remove it. When her relationship with her in-laws became intolerable, Kan’s mother moved her family to her maternal village in Caiyun, and soon afterward when Kan was 7, moved the family to Lutai, a larger village where she and her husband ran an elementary school. Kan’s mother knew that in a bigger village, her children’s chances would be better. She was devoted to their success.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Under Red Skies” at Google Books.

Kan was teased at school and called “Second Child”—a derogatory slur. Like her father, Karoline Kan was excellent in school and focused on college. She had her mother’s ambition and her father’s intellect. When she is given the opportunity to attend university in Beijing, she is disappointed that she has been slotted to study finance, a topic she finds intolerably boring. At that point, Kan already wanted to be a writer, but recognized the difficulty of trying to do so in a country that employs 2 million of its citizens to scan the internet for subversive content. Still, she was not deterred.

Kan was mesmerized by the freedoms Beijing offered her. She got her own apartment and began her first serious relationships with men. But she noticed things in Beijing that disturbed her, particularly how the government discarded those it no longer needed. She found a job writing for a magazine. Her mother and father were horrified by what they saw as her recklessness, her refusal to stay in a field—finance—that would have secured her future.

Kan confesses that she had always been seen by the village neighbors as a strange child, who spent hours listening to the elders talk. She writes, “Some of the stories were mysterious, as though from a book of fairytales. Weasels danced and imitated humans by singing in the village temple. River ghosts enticed villagers to jump to their deaths in a stream. Broom spirits held lanterns to light the way for people walking in the dead of night. The older women used spirits and ghosts to explain things they could not understand.”

Kan struggled to win the trust of her relatives after deciding to write her family memoir. She was afraid of what she would uncover: “My family’s past was like a rusted box locked in a corner, covered with dust. It was so heavy and worn that nobody wanted to touch it. I knew what to expect inside; endless pain. Yet, it was only by opening it that I could understand my family and myself.” Kan treats each of her relative’s stories as separate entities and dismisses the interconnectedness that infuses many Western style memoirs. One senses that this reflects her worldview: Each of us must bear our sorrow privately.

Kan speaks with her uncle, a Red Guard during China’s Cultural Revolution. He still believes that Mao was trying to give power and authority to ordinary people like himself. He defends his actions, which he confesses were often brutal. He tells her about her own great-grandfather who was forced to stand on a stage and renounce his love of Peking Opera and Confucius. Today, her uncle lives on a small pension in the suburbs of Tianjin.

The 1913 Qing Dynasty spared her grandmother’s feet from being bound. Kan learns her grandmother lost two babies, who were known as “little ghosts.” At the time, many believed that babies who died shortly after birth did so as punishment for crimes their parents committed in a past life.

Her maternal grandfather, now 80, tells Kan how he is being harassed by neighbors due to his infatuation with Falun Gong, a meditative practice now banned by the Communist Party. She doesn’t understand why something that has given her aging grandfather solace needs to be taken from him.

Kan remembers the cruelty of her paternal grandmother, who would berate her when her mother was at work teaching. She thinks about a boy who had a crush on her in high school whom she shunned. She remembers the fissures that flowed through her parent’s tense marriage. But she has trouble expressing strong feelings. She is, in so many ways, despite her rebelliousness, a product of the system she has rebelled against.

Kan’s rebellion is tempered by the political and social realities that run throughout China. There are lines she cannot cross. And these lines often change without warning. Her memoir is the first from a Chinese millennial to be published in America. It reveals her to be a bright and observant young woman, happy to be riding the waves of China’s explosive growth, fueled by her mother’s feistiness and her father’s poetic sensibilities, which are now her own.

On visits home to Lutai, she is filled with mixed emotions. We sense her exhilaration at having left, but feel her sadness too. We feel her gratefulness toward her parents, but also her irritation at their stodginess. She is upset by their refusal to accept her decision to become a writer, and her resistance so far to marrying. As she reconnects with old friends and neighbors, “I couldn’t decipher their gestures, facial expressions, and delicate tones.  Somewhere along the lines, we had become different. They could tell I was no longer the same. But Beijing also felt strange at times too, not quite ‘home’ either.”

Karoline Kan clearly wants change. She wants equality for women. But she also refuses to denigrate her memories or the suffering endured by her family. She wants to preserve the legacy that served as a springboard for her own liberation from the tyranny and drudgery of life in the rural provinces. All of us look back upon the past with some degree of anger and bewilderment, and, if we are lucky, some tenderness and love. It is this tension that animates Kan’s narrative and allows us to imagine her young life in China—which, despite our nationalistic protests to the contrary, mirrors our own.

 

Supreme Court Declines to Put Bump-Stock Ban on Hold

BOISE, Idaho—The largest supplier of bump stocks turned in its entire remaining inventory to be destroyed — some 60,000 devices. Washington state’s buyback program was so popular it ran out of money. One dealer held a “Viking funeral” for his last bump stock, pouring a can of beer on it and then melting it down with a flamethrower.

A nationwide ban took effect Tuesday on bump stocks, the attachment used by the gunman in the 2017 Las Vegas massacre to make his weapons fire rapidly like machine guns.

How many of the estimated half-million devices believed to be in circulation in the U.S. are still around is anyone’s guess, but in the weeks leading up to the ban, there were signs that many were destroyed or turned in as required.

Anyone in possession of a bump stock from now on can be charged with a federal offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives outlawed the attachments at President Donald Trump’s direction after the Las Vegas gunman rained fire from his high-rise hotel suite on concertgoers, killing 58 people in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court declined to put the ban on hold.

As the prohibition drew near, RW Arms in Fort Worth, Texas, featured a countdown clock on its website and heavily promoted last chances to buy the accessories. By the time the ban took effect, RW Arms was left with 60,000, probably worth millions, since they sell for around $150 to $250 each.

The company turned over crates of them to the ATF, and a video showed boxes being loaded onto a conveyer belt and fed into an industrial grinder.

Washington state set aside $150,000 to offer owners $150 for each device they turned in to police. Within weeks, the money had been used up.

The ATF declined to say how many people brought their bump stocks to an ATF office.

T.J. Kirgin, owner of a firearms tactical gear company in St. Peters, Missouri, said that in the weeks before the measure went into effect, he made one last sweep through his warehouse to make sure he didn’t have any more devices left.

And then he took his very last one and with some friends held a mock funeral for it, reducing it to a hunk of melted plastic embedded in a rock.

While gun control activists welcomed the end of the line for a device blamed for horrifying carnage, Kirgin called it not just the day bump stocks died but the day freedom died.

“If they can do this with a piece of plastic, then they’ll be able to do it with another piece of plastic and another piece of metal, another piece of plastic,” he said. “And it’s just systematically taking away Second Amendment rights.”

Facebook Finally Enacts White Nationalism Ban, but Can It Enforce It?

Starting Monday, posts on Facebook and Instagram that promote white nationalism and white supremacy will be removed, according to a statement issued by the social media network.

It’s an about-face for Facebook, whose operators have been hesitant to constrain user activity. “As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice,” founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told tech journalist Kara Swisher in a 2018 Recode interview.

Zuckerberg was defiant when Facebook was accused of allowing false information about the 2016 election to flourish on the platform. Just one day after Donald Trump won the presidency, Zuckerberg told attendees at the tech conference Technonomy that the claims were “pretty crazy,” The Verge reported in 2016.

When white nationalists held a rally in Charlottesville, Va., that resulted in the 2017 death of counterprotester Heather Heyer, Facebook “pushed to re-educate its moderators about American white supremacists in particular,” but made a distinction between white nationalism and white supremacy, as Motherboard revealed when it obtained leaked Facebook moderation training materials last year.

“We don’t allow praise, support and representation of white supremacy as an ideology,” a training slide reads. “We allow praise, support and representation of white nationalism.” The leaked documents said that white nationalism “doesn’t seem to be always associated with racism (at least not explicitly.)”

Citing multiple conversations with “more than 20 members of civil society,” Brian Fishman, Facebook’s policy director of counterterrorism, told Motherboard, “We decided that the overlap between white nationalism, [white] separatism, and white supremacy is so extensive we really can’t make a meaningful distinction between them.”

Next week, when users search for terms linked to white supremacy, they’ll see a link to Life After Hate, an organization that encourages people to leave hate groups.

But Facebook’s success in implementing its new policies depend not only on its stated commitment, but on its content moderation infrastructure, both human and automated. “Hate speech can be tricky to detect since it is context and domain dependent. Trolls try to evade or even poison such [machine learning] classifiers,” Aylin Caliskan, a computer science researcher at George Washington University  told Wired in September.

In his April 2018 congressional testimony, Zuckerberg expressed confidence that within five to 10 years, “We will have [artificial intelligence] tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging things for our systems.” As Louise Matsakis explains in Wired, however, “For that to happen … humans will need first to define for ourselves what hate speech means—and that can be hard because it’s constantly evolving and often dependent on context.”

As for Facebook’s human moderators, a February investigation by The Verge found that the 1,000 based in Phoenix (there are 15,000 worldwide) earn just $28,000 per year in an environment that workers told writer Casey Newton is “perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos.” Employees are required to watch thousands of violent videos and read countless hateful posts and “can be fired after making just a handful of errors a week,” Newton writes. “[T]hose who remain live in fear of former colleagues returning to seek vengeance. One man we spoke with started bringing a gun to work to protect himself.”

Fishman told Motherboard that Facebook’s new rules will be enforced partly through artificial intelligence and machine learning, but did not explain how those methods will work. Facebook’s announcement did not address whether it will hire additional moderators, or describe any new AI technology.

Activists and technology experts are divided on the ban’s prospects for success.

Becca Lewis, an affiliate researcher at Data & Society, which studies technology, told Wired, “I’m cautiously optimistic about the impact that it can have.”

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the groups Facebook consulted,  told CNN, “It took a lot of hard work to get Facebook to where they are today. But the hard work lies ahead, we will be watching closely how they implement the policy.”

Madihha Ahussain, a lawyer for Muslim Advocates, a civil rights group, told The New York Times that her group has questions. “We need to know how Facebook will define white nationalist and white separatist content,” she said, “For example, will it include expressions of anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ sentiment—all underlying foundations of white nationalism?”

Moving Beyond the Mueller Investigation

After nearly two years of investigations that spawned dozens of indictments and convictions of a significant number of Donald Trump’s close associates and colleagues, the special counsel’s inquiry into the 2016 election has come to a close. While the grand jury that Robert Mueller convened is continuing its work, and a number of ongoing investigations have emerged, Mueller’s final report has been delivered to the attorney general’s office as required. The new AG, William Barr, appears to have done what Trump hoped he would: spin the report’s findings as positively as possible. And now America is supposed to simply move on.

As the political battle over making Mueller’s report public plays out in the halls of Congress, another war is being fought on the left. Broadly speaking, there have been two schools of thought among liberals and leftists on the special counsel’s probe. Many felt that the investigation was a waste of time and that there was no point in placing faith in Mueller using the legal system to end the train wreck of Trump’s presidency. Additionally, this faction contended, the special counsel propagated unwarranted anti-Russian views and a new Red Scare. On the other, more centrist end of the spectrum was the idea that Trump is a Russian stooge, bought and paid for by Vladimir Putin, and that the Mueller investigation would save the nation from the treasonous figurehead.

The truth is a bit more complicated.

There is no doubt that Trump had business interests in Russia and was hoping to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. If anything is predictable about Trump, it is that he is driven by money and prestige. Trump has also made no secret of trying to impress Putin, which shouldn’t surprise us, given that he has had similar infatuations with other dictatorial figures, such as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte. There is also ample evidence that Russia attempted to influence the U.S. elections in 2016, resulting in Mueller’s indictments of more than a dozen Russian nationals and,  as Barr summarized, the special counsel found “two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.”

The major question that remains is whether Trump knowingly solicited help from Russians to win the presidency. According to his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, Trump knew about damaging information about his election rival that was, per Mueller’s assessment, obtained by Russian operatives and released through WikiLeaks (although Cohen admitted he did not have any direct evidence of collusion). But what Mueller found in answer to that question we don’t yet know. All we know is the quote that Barr chose to share in his four-page summary of Mueller’s report: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” And while Trump has gleefully interpreted that to mean “Complete and Total EXONERATION,” new polls (here and here) show that the majority of Americans have a different opinion. The only way to clear the air is to release in its entirety the report that was paid for by taxpayers. Indeed, if Trump and his Republican allies are so confident that the report exonerates the president, they should demand its release to prove their point—and most House Republicans apparently agree.

Perhaps the most egregious outcome of the Mueller investigation has been Trump’s reaction to the idea of being investigated. Not only did the president, on many occasions, publicly denounce the investigation as a partisan “witch hunt,” intended to politically hurt him, he took steps to try to curtail the investigation and install friendly overseers, and made almost no attempt to hide his efforts. As recently as a few weeks ago, he derided his former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from overseeing the special counsel investigation, saying, “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ ” And indeed, Trump fired Sessions and replaced him with an AG he could count on: William Barr—a man who has made his allegiance to presidential authority and power quite clear. Trump’s attacks on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and his firing of FBI Director James Comey also illustrated just how badly he wanted to end the investigation.

And yet Mueller reportedly did not find good enough reason to charge the president with obstruction. The specific quote from the report that Barr chose to share publicly was that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Indeed, reports emerged that Mueller indicated weeks ago to Justice Department officials that there were to be no charges of obstruction.

In an eloquent historical framing of this failure to charge on obstruction, The New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote, “Under the theory that Mr. Trump’s legal team advanced, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. work for the president and therefore a president can order investigations opened or closed, fire prosecutors, grant pardons or otherwise use his constitutional power even if it seems overtly self-interested or political.” Baker added that Mueller’s refusal to accuse the president of obstruction even when Trump brazenly threw up numerous rhetorical and political roadblocks means that a president has “almost complete leeway to thwart any effort by federal law enforcement authorities to scrutinize his actions, almost as if he were a king.”

The Mueller investigation should never have been considered the sole means by which the Trump presidency would be taken to task. Special counsel regulations are the product of government legislation aimed at exposing nefarious deeds by crooked presidents. They were never meant to address the underlying injustices and rotten political culture that have spawned the terrifyingly abusive executive branch we have today. The corrective to those injustices and that rotten culture lies in the realm of grassroots activism, concerted organizing and meaningful education to create a constructive cultural shift in our nation, so that we never again face a head of state like Trump.

Still, the Mueller investigation should have borne some fruit. If Richard Nixon represented the worst of American presidential hubris once upon a time, Trump has rewritten government’s standards for presidential behavior and redrawn the baseline of tolerance to such an extent that the checks and balances we once proudly touted are now meaningless. Perhaps there is some shred of substance in the actual report that we have yet to see. Barring that, what the Mueller debacle shows us is that our current political and legal system is incapable of ensuring that madness never rules the Oval Office.

‘The Brink’ Lays Bare the Banality of Evil in Steve Bannon

At a point early in Alison Klayman’s insightful new documentary, “The Brink,” Steve Bannon gushes over the architectural and organizational planning behind the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where 50,000 Jews were exterminated. His emphasis on the planning and details are reflective of what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil,” which could easily be the subtitle of the new film hitting theaters on Friday.

It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of Bannon’s daily life and peripatetic schedule from October 2017—mere weeks after he was fired by Donald Trump—through the November midterm elections. At first glance, we get what we might expect: the shuffling, unkempt figure familiar from news footage. What we don’t expect is the sheer mediocrity of his intellect. Sometimes amusing, sometimes irascible, when unchallenged, Bannon speaks with full-throated brio and a firm grasp of anecdotes and figures (often made up). But the moment he is met with pushback, he obviously and not very credibly resorts to evasion. Still, for someone who was often called Trump’s brain, a thin base of knowledge and a loose grasp of facts might be expected.

“I’ve spent a lot of time listening to him and watching him. He is quite fast to give a combative response, but I think his tactics are often to change the conversation, to distort facts, to lie, to make a joke,” Klayman said in an interview with Truthdig. Klayman was a 2012 Sundance Jury Prize winner for “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” which focused on the world-famous Chinese dissident artist. For “The Brink,” she shot most of the film single-handedly, alone in the room with Bannon and his alt-right peers.

Oddly insecure in various scenes, Bannon worries about people calling him Jabba the Hutt, or about the press noting his lavish hotel stays while doing what he calls “the Lord’s work.” He is surprisingly unctuous with a journalist after a confrontational interview in Venice, where another documentary about him—Errol Morris’ “American Dharma”—was premiering at the city’s celebrated film festival. “Even after Paul Lewis at ‘The Guardian’ goes after him really hard in the interview, he’s going to try to keep everything on this keel of ‘that was fun, right?’ I think he’s fairly easy to win over.”

In “The Brink,” Bannon’s big professional push is two-pronged. First, he’s focused on establishing his 501(c)4, COAR (Citizens of the American Republic), an organization that aims to boost Republican turnout despite Bannon having no formal ties with the party. Second, he’s founding The Movement with the goal of unifying nationalist, mostly racist, organizations across Europe. At an international convention scheduled for January (that didn’t end up taking place), participants were to hammer out a plan for the EU parliamentary election in May that would tip the whole continent to the right.

One of the movie’s most memorable scenes has Bannon meeting in a hotel room with alt-right leaders from throughout the continent. Present are Flemish Parliament member Filip Dewinter, an overt admirer of the SS, along with Sweden’s Kent Ekeroth of the Swedish Democrats, a party rooted in white nationalism, and Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, of the right-wing populist group Brothers of Italy. They do little more than express frustration, generally holding their tongues in the presence of Klayman’s camera. Then, in later encounters, Bannon denies meeting some of them, brushing questions off with a Trumpian answer: “We were at the same dinner event one time, but I don’t know him.”

“What he’s trying to say is he’s a messenger and he’s trying to shape the narrative according to his ideology,” Klayman said. “It’s part of a legitimization process to make hateful ideas into something that sound more practical and economical.”

Klayman and Bannon bicker in the movie over whether using George Soros’ name in speeches is a dog whistle to anti-Semites. But alt-right commentator (and Bannon’s former Breitbart colleague) Ben Shapiro contends that Bannon isn’t anti-Semitic, telling Slate, “I think Steve’s a very, very power-hungry dude who’s willing to use anybody and anything in order to get ahead. And that includes making common cause with the racist, anti-Semitic alt-right.”

“I don’t think there’s a distinction,” Klayman said, noting that Bannon is considered one of the main architects of Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban. “I would include pandering to racists in my personal definition of racism. He told me, ‘I don’t believe in structural racism.’ If he’s talking about blacks and Hispanics in the inner city as so horrible and [about] black crime, if he doesn’t think there’s anything structurally that creates that experience, the logical conclusion is that there’s something not right about them. There are many things that if you take what he says and it sounds safe and logical, you really end up in anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, xenophobic places.”

Producer worked as Bannon’s assistant for three years at Wellspring Media, a film distribution company. Once she got permission from him to make a movie, she turned to Klayman, with whom she had worked on the 2018 documentary, “On Her Shoulders.”

“I had never seen him as racist, as anti-Semitic, misogynist,” Guirgis said. “But the film shows what kind of a person he is. The work he is doing is promoting racism. The people he’s working with in Europe, some of them are actual neo-Nazis.”

As Klayman follows Bannon’s crusade to unite the right, a funny thing happens on the way to the revolution—the midterms. Since the crushing defeat of Republicans in the House of Representatives, many alt-right European leaders have spurned The Movement, funding for which Bannon says comes from anonymous European donors.

“I don’t even know if The Movement has a bank account and is a real entity. It seems like a bust,” Klayman said. “The question is, who is funding those projects and who is funding COAR, his (c)4?” Klayman noted that expenditures on European elections must, by law, come from European donors. “He claims he has connections to a lot of nationalists, Dubai, Qatar, [exiled Chinese billionaire] Miles Kwok, a lot of people. And my hope is that investigative reporters follow the money when they see this movie.”

In Rome last weekend to condemn a tentative economic agreement with China, Bannon told Yahoo.com that, following the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Trump would “come off the chains,” and that he is “going to go full animal” on his political opponents. He also suggested that Hillary Clinton would be the likely Democratic candidate in 2020, Brexit will end in a no-deal solution, and warned of Chinese hegemony.

“Everything he puts out into the universe has an impact,” says Klayman, who remains concerned about an empowered Bannon. “The fact is, these (alt-right) parties may still have success in the May 2019 elections that he’ll take credit for. And I think that’s a scary prospect.”