Chris Hedges's Blog, page 296

Egyptian Mediators in Gaza for Talks With Hamas

JERUSALEM — The Latest on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (all times local):

8:05 p.m.

Palestinian border authorities say Egyptian mediators have arrived in the Gaza Strip for talks with the territory’s Hamas rulers.

The delegation of Egyptian officials crossed into Gaza on Wednesday, as an unofficial cease-fire between Israel and Hamas appeared to hold after a round of heavy cross-border fighting.

Palestinian media reported the mediators planned to offer Hamas economic incentives for the group’s commitment to halt its weekly demonstrations along the Gaza-Israeli border.

There was no immediate comment from Hamas.

Even as mediators arrived, Hamas resumed its regular night-time protests at the security fence. Palestinian protesters detonated loud explosives, burned tires and flashed lasers at Israeli soldiers.

Demonstrations are expected along the frontier Saturday to mark the anniversary of the rallies in which nearly 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire.

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7:35 p.m.

The World Health Organization has condemned the killing of a Palestinian medic by Israeli forces in the West Bank.

Gerald Rockenschaub, director of WHO for the West Bank and Gaza, said Wednesday that “health workers provide critical care and save lives,” and “their protection must be ensured.”

He added: “Health care is not a target.”

Sajed Mizher, an 18-year-old emergency medical worker, was shot Wednesday while in uniform, tending to Palestinians wounded during clashes with the Israeli army in Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem.

Mizher was hit in the abdomen and rushed to the hospital, where he was later pronounced dead, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

The ministry said Israeli soldiers shot Mizher after stones were thrown at them during an arrest raid. The Israeli army had no immediate comment.

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4:25 p.m.

Israel says that more than 2,000 violent incidents have emanated from the Gaza Strip since Hamas-orchestrated weekly border demonstrations erupted a year ago.

An Israeli statistical review published Wednesday found that Palestinians launched 1,233 rockets from Gaza, hurled 94 explosive devices and 600 Molotov cocktails across the security fence and committed 152 acts of arson against Israeli forces.

The report said rocket fire killed one Israeli and injured 126. Palestinian attacks on the security fence killed one Israeli soldier and wounded 16.

It said incendiary kites have torched thousands of acres of Israeli farmland, inflicting over $9.5 million in damage.

Israel has come under criticism for using disproportionate force against unarmed protesters. Over the past year, nearly 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire.

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3:30 p.m.

Hamas’ supreme leader has made his first public appearance since a new round of cross-border violence with Israel this week.

Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday visited the rubble of his Gaza City office, which was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike.

Haniyeh had been in hiding during the two-day flare-up of violence, which ended with an unofficial Egyptian-brokered cease-fire.

The fighting broke out after a rocket fired from Gaza struck a home in central Israel and wounded seven people. Israel responded with dozens of airstrikes in Gaza, while Palestinian militants fired dozens of rockets into Israel.

Haniyeh says: “The Israeli occupation got the message.”

He also urged Gazans to participate in mass protests along the Israel-Gaza frontier on Saturday marking the first anniversary of a movement aimed at ending an Israeli-Egyptian blockade.

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11 a.m.

The Palestinian Health Ministry says an 18-year-old has been shot dead in West Bank clashes with Israeli troops.

The ministry says Israeli soldiers shot Sajed Mizher after stones were thrown at them early Wednesday during an arrest raid in the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem. It says two others were wounded in the clashes, which come amid an uptick in West Bank violence.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment. It often carries out pre-dawn arrest raids.

Since 2015, Palestinians have killed over 50 Israelis in stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks in the West Bank. Israeli forces have killed more than 260 Palestinians in that same period. Israel says most of the Palestinians killed were attackers, but clashes between protesters and soldiers have also turned deadly.

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10 a.m.

An unofficial cease-fire appears to be holding between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers despite limited exchanges of fire.

Schools reopened in southern Israel on Wednesday after late-night rocket attacks from Gaza set off air-raid sirens, breaking a daylong lull. The Israeli military struck back against additional Hamas targets but there were no reports of casualties on either side.

Israel and Hamas have fought three wars and dozens of skirmishes since the Islamic militant group seized control of Gaza in 2007. The latest round was triggered by a Gaza rocket fired early Monday that slammed into a house in central Israel and wounded seven people.

Large Gaza protests are expected this weekend, marking the anniversary of weekly rallies in which nearly 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire.

Israel’s Merciless Bombing of the Gaza Strip

The bombs start again. Israel, as if on a timer, begins to pulverize Gaza. The bombs strike from one end of the country to another, a warning against the protests that have been ongoing for a year. There is a shudder from Gaza, phone calls to friends who say that they are fearful that this bombing run will escalate. Nothing is beyond Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who will use these bombs as an advertisement for his campaign to be reelected as Israel goes to the polls on April 9. The phone lines carry the sound of scared children and anxious adults, a building demolished, the warplanes shrieking overhead.

Abu Artema’s Birds

In January of last year, the Palestinian journalist Ahmed Abu Artema sat at his computer in his home in Rafah (Gaza, Palestine). He had just returned home from a walk in this 365-square-kilometer (141-square-mile) enclave that sits on the Mediterranean Sea. There is a hint of paradise in Gaza—the sea on one side, the citrus groves on the other. But the entire piece of land—populated by 2.2 million Palestinians—is hemmed in by the Israeli occupation. The land is dotted with barbed wire fences and ditches, with armed guards on alert to shoot where and when they will, and the sea is patrolled by Israeli naval vessels, which routinely stop and arrest Palestinian fishermen. Paradise is encircled by barbed wire and gunboats. Abu Artema decided to write a plea.

“No one stopped the birds,” he thought during his walk as he saw a flock of birds fly across the perimeter fence. The Israeli occupation, he felt, “clips my wings” and “disrupts my evening walks.” What if a Palestinian from Gaza decided to “see himself as a bird and decides to reach a tree beyond the fence,” he mused? “If the bird was Palestinian, he would be shot.”

So, this journalist—a father of four young children—wrote the following simple question: “What would happen if thousands of Gazans, most of them refugees, attempted to peacefully cross the fence that separated them from their ancestral lands?” The answer, plainly, was that they would be shot.

Land Day

In 1976, the Israeli government announced the seizure of 20,000 dunams of land in the Galilee. The government declared a curfew so that it could proceed with the land theft without protest. It miscalculated. Pressure grew from below, so Tawfiq Ziad—the mayor of Nazareth (the largest Palestinian city inside Israel’s 1948 lines)—called for a general strike. The strike on March 30, 1976, was almost total, with the Israeli State reacting to it with ferocity. The land was seized, but March 30 became a monumental day, Land Day, an annual commemoration of the struggle against the Israeli occupation.

Abu Artema’s plea made in January 2018 became real on March 30, 2018, when the Great March of Return began. The initial plan was to start the protests on Land Day and then continue until May 15, the day to commemorate the Nakba or the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. But the energy opened up by the Great March of Return could not be contained. This protest, held each Friday, began with 30,000 Palestinians on Land Day in 2018 and continues with tens of thousands of Palestinians each week.

Suffocation

When Abu Artema took to his Facebook page, he would not have been able to drink water—even if boiled—from his tap. That month, the Palestinian Water Authority warned that 97 percent of Gaza’s water was undrinkable because of high levels of sewage and salinity. It was lucky that Abu Artema was able to get on Facebook. Gaza only gets power for about four hours per day. The Israelis blame the Hamas government in Gaza for these problems. Such a story is only possible for someone with no memory.

In each of the punctual bombings of Gaza since Operation Hot Winter (2008), Israel has targeted Gaza’s power plant and its water sources (wells, water towers, sewage pipelines and sewage treatment plants). Millions of dollars of damage are done to Gaza’s infrastructure, which then cannot be repaired because Israel prevents materials from entering the enclave. Because of the Israeli bombings and Israeli embargo, Gaza, the United Nations has found, will become “uninhabitable by 2020.”

It is no wonder the Great March of Return has seen such large crowds, so many people—including children—coming to the fence each week despite the Israeli snipers and the tear gas. Palestinians set up tents out of range of the snipers so that they could feed the protesters and heal them. The destruction of infrastructure put a heavy burden on Palestinian women, which deepened their political commitment and brought them to set up and work in these encampments.

Medical personnel and journalists would be on hand, thinking that their professions gave them immunity. It did not. The Israeli snipers fired at them: two journalists were killed, 184 journalists injured; three medics were killed, 181 medics injured. Hind Khoudary, a journalist, said that her work has been “more than [a] nightmare. I would have never imagined I would see people shattered into pieces.”

War Crimes

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 196 people have been killed by the Israeli armed forces, while 11,427 people have been wounded (over 500 of them are in serious condition, with at least 300 having had at least one leg amputated). The United Nations office in Palestine (OCHA) says that the number of injured is double this—23,603 from March 30 to the end of December 2018.

Last year, as the violence by Israel on the Gaza perimeter fence escalated, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council set up a panel of inquiry (comprised of Argentina’s Santiago Canton, Bangladesh’s Sara Hossain and Kenya’s Kaari Betty Murungi). On March 18, the panel submitted its report. Israel’s government, which did not cooperate, rejected the report. The report found that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers shot at journalists, health workers, children and persons with disabilities, knowing they were clearly recognisable as such.” The Chair of the panel, Santiago Canton, went further, saying that the panel “has reasonable grounds to believe that during the Great March of Return, Israeli soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of these violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity and must be immediately investigated by Israel.”

Israel

So, there it stands. The international community’s panel says that war crimes were committed, but the legal framework stops at the borders of Israel. Must be immediately investigated by Israel. But Israel will do no such thing. It has rejected the panel and its findings. There will be no investigation of the war crimes beyond what the panel has found. Instead, Israel has begun to bomb from the sky.

Israel will hold an election on April 9, a little more than a week after the first anniversary of the Great March of Return. On the anniversary itself, tens of thousands of Palestinians are expected to walk towards the perimeter. Last Friday, on March 22, Israeli soldiers killed Nedal ’Abdel Karim Ahmed Shatat (age 29) and Jihad Munir Khaled Hararah (age 24). Israeli tear gas canisters flew into the medical field station at Bureij Refugee Camp. About 181 Palestinians were injured on that day. This shows that neither the Palestinian protesters nor the Israeli soldiers will back down.

Israel’s government is undaunted by the UN findings. The Palestinians have no choice but to protest. The confrontation will escalate on the first anniversary of the March. The Israelis will be harsh, harsher to give Benjamin Netanyahu the kind of muscular response that allows him to bully his way back to power.

Abu Artema’s birds—perhaps they are terns or gulls—continue to fly back and forth. They emerge out of the poems of Mahmoud Darwish, the poem that asks, Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky? Palestinians will remain in this vast congested open-air prison called Gaza, hemmed in and forgotten, bombed once more, mercilessly.

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

Recording Reveals Oil Industry Execs Laughing About Access to Trump

Gathered for a private meeting at a beachside Ritz–Carlton in Southern California, the oil executives were celebrating a colleague’s sudden rise. David Bernhardt, their former lawyer, had been appointed by President Donald Trump to the powerful No. 2 spot at the Department of the Interior.

Just five months into the Trump era, the energy developers who make up the Independent Petroleum Association of America, or IPAA, already had watched the new president order a sweeping overhaul of environmental regulations that were cutting into their bottom lines – rules concerning smog, hydraulic fracturing and endangered species protection.

Dan Naatz, the association’s political director, told the audience of about 100 executives that Bernhardt’s new role meant their priorities would be heard at the highest levels of the department.

“We know him very well, and we have direct access to him, have conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species, to a lot of issues,” Naatz said, according to an hourlong recording of the June 2017 event in Laguna Niguel provided to Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

The recording gives a rare look behind the curtain of an influential oil industry lobbying group that spends more than $1 million per year to push its agenda in Congress and federal regulatory agencies. The previous eight years had been dispiriting for the industry: As IPAA vice president Jeff Eshelman told the group, it had seemed as though the Obama administration and environmental groups had put together “their target list of everything that they wanted done to shut down the oil and gas industry.”

But now, the oil executives were almost giddy at the prospect of high-level executive branch access of the sort they hadn’t enjoyed since Dick Cheney, a fellow oilman, was vice president.

“It’s really a new thing for us,” said Barry Russell, the association’s CEO, boasting of his meetings with the Environmental Protection Agency chief at the time, Scott Pruitt, and then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. “For example, next week, I’m invited to the White House to talk about tax code. Last week, we were talking to Secretary Pruitt, and in about two weeks, we have a meeting with Secretary Zinke. So we have unprecedented access to people that are in these positions who are trying to help us, which is great.”

In that Ritz-Carlton conference room, Russell also spoke of his ties to Bernhardt, recalling the lawyer’s role as point man on an association legal team set up to challenge federal endangered species rules.

“Well, the guy that actually headed up that group is now the No. 2 at Interior,” he said, referring to Bernhardt. “So that’s worked out well.”

Now, Bernhardt is in line for a promotion: The former oil industry lobbyist has been nominated by Trump to be the interior secretary. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a confirmation hearing Thursday. Bernhardt has been running the department since early January, when Zinke resigned amid an ethics scandal. The post gives Bernhardt influence over regulations affecting energy production on millions of acres of public lands, deciding who gets to develop it, how much they pay and whether they are complying with the law.

Interior Department spokeswoman Faith Vander Voort said: “Acting Secretary David Bernhardt has had no communication or contact with either Barry Russell or Dan Naatz.”

The IPAA executives were not available to comment on this story, a spokeswoman said.

At the meeting, the association’s leaders distributed a private “regulatory update” memo that detailed environmental laws and rules it hoped to blunt or overturn. The group ultimately got its way on four of the five high-profile issues that topped its wish list.

Trump himself was a driving force behind deregulating the energy industry, ordering the government in 2017 to weed out federal rules “that unnecessarily encumber energy production.” In a 2017 order, Zinke called for his deputy secretary – Bernhardt – to make sure the department complied with Trump’s regulatory rollbacks.

The petroleum association was just one industry group pushing for regulatory relief – the American Petroleum Institute, U.S. Oil and Gas Association and Western Energy Alliance also were active. But since IPAA created its wish list, the Interior Department has acceded to nearly all its requests:

Rescinded fracking rules meant to control water pollution. Fracking involves pressure-injecting water and chemicals into the ground to break up rock and release oil and gas. In 2015, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management moved to minimize water pollution caused by fracking, setting standards for well construction and proper management of fracking fluids. For the first time, the new rule also required federal permits for fracking, a costly and time-consuming process, the industry complained.

The IPAA sued, contending the rule was not needed because fracking already was regulated by states. Under Trump, the Interior Department sided with the energy industry, and in 2017, the rule was rescinded.

Withdrawn rules that limit climate change-causing methane gas releases. An oil strike can release clouds of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. When producers lack the means to capture methane and sell it as natural gas, they either burn it or release it into the air. To fight global warming, the BLM in 2016 issued a rule sharply limiting these practices and imposing a royalty fee on operators that wasted natural gas on public lands.

The IPAA sued, complaining producers would face huge financial losses. Trump’s Interior Department sided with the industry and in 2018 rescinded key provisions of the rule.

Abandoned environmental restoration of public land damaged by oil development. To offset the harm of oil production, the BLM often required producers to pay for restoration projects as a condition of their permits. This practice of “compensatory mitigation” is used by many government agencies. In 2015, President Barack Obama ordered the Interior Department to set a goal of “no net loss for natural resources” when issuing development permits.

The IPAA pushed back hard against the “no net loss” standard, arguing that developers might be saddled with exorbitant mitigation costs. In 2017, Trump ordered the repeal of the mitigation rule. Zinke attacked the concept as “un-American.”

Ended long-standing protections for migratory birds. Every year, millions of migratory birds are killed when they fly into power lines, oil waste pits and other energy development hazards, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says. Since the 1970s, the service has promoted industrial safety practices to protect birds from accidental harm – and has prosecuted and fined energy companies responsible for the deaths of these birds.

The IPAA complained it was unfair to prosecute energy companies engaged in legal activities that unintentionally harmed birds. In 2017, Trump’s Interior Department halted prosecuting companies for the “incidental” bird deaths. Bernhardt played an important role in crafting the legal opinion that gutted these protections, emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show.

“The IPAA’s wish list was granted as asked, in the executive order and in the actions taken by the Department of the Interior,” said Nada Culver, senior counsel for the Wilderness Society environmental group, who reviewed the document for Reveal. “It pains me to say it.”

***

Bernhardt began his career as an aide to then-Rep. Scott McInnis, a Colorado Republican elected in 1992. In 1998, he quit to work at the powerhouse Washington lobbying firm of Brownstein Hyatt & Farber.

After President George W. Bush took office, Bernhardt returned to government as a political aide to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, a fellow Coloradan. He worked on the administration’s push to reverse a congressional ban on oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In 2006, he was promoted to solicitor, the department’s top lawyer.

After Trump was elected, Bernhardt served on the new administration’s transition team, then was named Zinke’s deputy. A coalition of 150 environmental groups opposed Bernhardt’s appointment, calling him a “walking conflict of interest” because so many of his former clients were subject to Interior Department regulations.In 2009, he rejoined the Brownstein firm and became head of its natural resources department. Over the years, Bernhardt lobbied or provided legal advice to about 40 clients, many of them companies seeking to block the force of environmental regulations administered by the Interior Department. Among his clients were 18 energy concerns, including offshore oil drillers, frackers and operators of coal-fired power plants. His federal ethics report showed he had worked for the IPAA since at least 2015.

Bernhardt’s Senate confirmation hearings were roiled when a collection of his emails, reported by Reveal, showed he had continued to give political advice to the Westlands Water District, a California agribusiness concern, for months after he told Congress he had quit lobbying.

Bernhardt promised to follow the Interior Department’s ethics rules, which call for him to recuse himself for up to two years on matters involving former clients.

“I believe that public trust is a public responsibility and that maintaining an ethical culture is important,” he told senators, and the Senate confirmed his appointment. At the department, to remind himself of conflict-of-interest concerns, Bernhardt carries a wallet-sized card listing former clients covered by his ethics recusals, The Washington Post reported.

Interior Department lawyers say Bernhardt is permitted to work on matters affecting his former clients, such as the petroleum association, as long as the issues affect a broad group of players, not just the one client. But the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center has filed a complaint accusing Bernhardt of ethics violations for working on California water issues favored by Westlands, his former lobbying client.

Bernhardt’s recusal concerning the petroleum association expires in August, and his official calendars do not reflect any meetings to date with IPAA officials.

The oil lobby has had ready access to top administration officials, both inside the Interior Department and out, according to public records and the lobby leaders themselves. Since Bernhardt began work at the department, the IPAA has spent more than $1.3 million lobbying the department and other federal agencies, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

In April 2018, an IPAA contingent led by Naatz, the political director, met with Bernhardt’s top aide, Todd Willens, concerning two issues from the wish list: migratory birds and mitigation. Hours later, Willens met with Bernhardt, but a copy of Willens’ calendar doesn’t state the topic of their meeting.

***

It was the kind of access the group had begun to marvel at the year before in the plush confines of their Southern California resort. In the recording, Russell, the IPAA’s CEO, described an extended meeting he had already had with Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general and climate-change doubter whose tenure at the EPA would be cut short by ethics scandals. What started as a simple meet-and-greet became an invitation to critique the EPA’s air pollution regulations, the oil executive said.

“Scott Pruitt – he came from Oklahoma, and we have a lot of friends in common, and I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. We did that for about three minutes,” Russell said. “And then he started asking very technical questions about methane, about ozone … and if Scott Pruitt thought he was going to go deep nerd …”

The audience began laughing.

“And what was really great is there was about four or five EPA staffers there, who were all like, ‘Write that down, write that down,’ all the way through this,’’ Russell continued. “And when we left, I said that was just our overview.”

The audience laughed again.

“So it’s really a new world for us and very, very helpful.”

Naatz predicted Bernhardt actually would run the department while Zinke would play a ceremonial role.

“What secretaries of interior do is go out to Yellowstone (National Park), go out to Tetons … have big vision for what they’re going to do,” he said. “David is going to be the COO. David’s going to move the pieces. David’s going to be part of that, and we know him well.”

He also warned of what could go wrong in the Trump era.

Trump was slow to make mid-level appointments at the regulatory agencies to carry out the pro-industry policies he ordered, Naatz contended. Without supervision, career federal employees might well slow-walk or resist the sweeping regulatory changes the industry favors, he said.

“If you don’t have the politicals pushing down, bureaucracy is going to take over and push up,” Naatz said.

Another problem was what he called “the gorilla in the room.” The investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia was “hampering everything that is going on,” he said. He groused about Trump’s “inane tweets that come out after midnight” and faulted the entire White House for lack of focus.

“They have got to be better on message because they are going to lose the opportunity, ” he said. “It’s an unbelievable opportunity – you have Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the administration – and so they need to get their act together and start to move.”

When “you are talking about issues that are important to you, the Republicans win,” he continued. “If you are talking about Michael Flynn and Russia, you are going to lose. And so it’s really important to carry that narrative on energy, on infrastructure, on all these issues.”

Watch Ocasio-Cortez Raze Republicans’ Attacks on the Green New Deal

After House Republicans on Tuesday derided the Green New Deal as a policy that would only serve “rich liberals,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded with a powerful call for bold climate action as families across the nation suffer from record flooding, lead-poisoned water, and polluted air.

“This is not an elitist issue, this is a quality of life issue,” said the congresswoman from New York. “You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist? Tell that to the kids in the south Bronx which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country. Tell that to the families in Flint.”

“People are dying,” she continued. “This is serious. This should not be a partisan issue. This is about our constituents and all of our lives.”

Watch every second of this… @AOC is so incredibly spot on. pic.twitter.com/ESP4dC5TTo

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) March 27, 2019

Addressing concerns about the costs of implementing a Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez said, “We’re going to pay for this whether we pass a Green New Deal or not.”

“Because as towns and cities go underwater, as wildfires ravage our communities, we’re going to pay,” she added. “And we are either going to decide if we’re going to pay to react, or if we are going to pay to be proactive.”

“We talk about cost—we’re going to pay for this whether we pass a Green New Deal or not. Because as towns and cities go underwater, as wildfires ravage our communities, we’re going to pay. And we have to decide whether we’re going to pay to react, or pay to be proactive.”

–@AOC pic.twitter.com/akp2xPYeof

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) March 27, 2019

The Bottomless Cruelty of the U.S-Mexico Border

Borders are cruel. I know this because I’ve been studying the U.S.-Mexico border for more than 40 years. It features prominently in two of my books, written in different decades. It keeps pulling me back. Every time I cross that border, I say to myself that this is no big deal — I’m used to it. And every time, I feel that familiar fear-or-flight jolt of adrenaline and hear the inner warning: Watch out! Things go wrong here.

The border is cruel because it gives some people what they want and denies the needs of almost everybody else. Still, the hopeful come, lately in swelling numbers. Sadly, the cruelty of the border has ratcheted upward. It didn’t have to. U.S. policies have added unnecessary meanness to the innate hurt of the dividing line we share with Mexico. Here are a dozen “realities” of the border that I try to keep in mind while mulling the latest disasters.

1. Nothing will “fix” the border, not a wall, not troops, not presidential bombast

Some of the thousands of families from Central America now streaming to the border and surrendering themselves to U.S. authorities are desperate because crop failure and poverty have denied them the means of subsistence. Others are desperate because the gangs that now control large portions of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador threaten them with murder, extortion, and persecution. In many cases the families are desperate for both reasons.

This is an immigration phenomenon of recent vintage, but it belongs to an old tradition. Steep differences in wealth, opportunity, and political security divide the societies on either side of the border and, as long as those differences exist, have-nots on the poorer side will keep trying to join the haves on the other.

Unsolvable predicaments like this require management — continuous care, if you will — in the same way that chronic disease or steadily rising sea levels require it. Our efforts to manage the situation can be wise or stupid, mostly benign or downright sadistic, cost-effective or absurdly wasteful, realistic or hallucinatory. The task facing this country is to make it less awful and more humane than we have so far shown much talent for doing.

2. Donald Trump’s “Great Wall” is about gratification, not immigration

For every complex problem, there exists a simple solution — which is completely wrong. In the case of the U.S.-Mexico border, Exhibit A is the president’s proposal to build a 30-foot-high (or 55-foot-high), 1,900-mile (or 1,000-mile) wall — the president’s numbers vary with the moment — to provide security. The imperative behind his fixation arises from his boisterous, demagogic, and chronically over-counted political rallies. More than Fox News, more than the sycophants who surround him, the rallies are the mirror before which he preens. They are his political Viagra, a drug that takes effect when the crowd begins to chant. Even two years into his presidency, Trump can’t stop talking about Hillary Clinton and, when he mentions her, his admirers rock the rafters, yelling “Lock her up!” It’s the MAGA mob’s way of reconfirming that he hates who we hate, which is the DNA of Trump’s appeal.

Another chant at every rally is invariably “Build the Wall!” Its origins are instructive. The problem the border wall was initially intended to address was candidate Trump’s lack of mental discipline. It began as a mnemonic. Advisers Roger Stone and Sam Nunberg wanted to ensure that Trump pushed the hot button of immigration at his campaign rallies. They correctly thought that the simple, monosyllabic notion of a wall would help him remember to do so.

The Trump campaign soon learned that invocations of a wall embraced a larger range of prejudices. Like yelling about Hillary, it indulged the visceral enjoyment of hatred. It celebrated keeping people out and putting them in their place. It was racist, but more than that as well. The incantation “Build the wall!” conjured up walling out and excluding everything that was threatening — dark-skinned people, scary ideas, social and economic change, even complexity itself. Trump’s present desire is not so much to build an actual wall as to keep the chant going or, even better for purposes of the 2020 election, to morph it into “We built the wall!”

3. Support for a border wall decreases the closer you get to the actual border

People who live on the border know that walls don’t work. Instead, wall construction diverts money from more pressing needs, while damaging land and communities. In sleepy Columbus, New Mexico, which jarred to full wakefulness in 1916 when Mexican revolutionaries set the town on fire, opinion runs 90% to 10% against Trump’s border wall. All nine congresspersons representing districts along the border similarly oppose the wall. The same may be said of most local governments in the borderlands.

It’s not that local officials don’t want to address border problems. It’s just that they would rather see federal money applied to strengthen law enforcement, improve vehicle inspections, and speed traffic through busy ports of entry. These are the places where, as seizure statistics show, the vast majority of hard drugs actually pass from Mexico into the U.S. Even less publicized is the reality that official ports of entry are also where the preponderance of illegal arms, as well as considerable amounts of cash from drug revenues, pass in the other direction, from this country to Mexico.

4. Drugs underlie the crisis at the border, but not the way Trump says

The U.S. imports drugs because people want them. Appetites for hard drugs here are the driving force behind a significant portion of the global traffic in illegal substances, whose value is estimated in the trillions of dollars. The cash spent by American citizens in the pursuit of getting high is sufficiently astronomical to corrupt governments and destabilize nations. The rise of gang rule in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador partly results from those countries serving as conduits for moving Colombian cocaine and other drugs into this country. Put simply, the U.S. imports drugs and exports anarchy. That anarchy, in turn, puts people in motion.

5. The identity of border crossers has changed — again

In the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration launched Operation Gatekeeper and began building walls to curb illegal entry, the typical migrant was a Mexican male seeking work in the U.S. The idea behind Gatekeeper was that, by walling off the border in urban centers like San Diego/Tijuana and El Paso/Juarez, migrants would have to cross through desert so inhospitable that they would desist. Of course, they didn’t. Crossing just became more arduous and expensive because a migrant now needed a guide — a coyote — to find his way through harsh terrain and reach contacts on the other side.

An unintended consequence of this policy was to curtail the “circularity” of migration. Because border crossing had become more difficult and costly, workers couldn’t regularly go home to see their families and return to jobs in el norte. So they called for their families to join them. This triggered a shift in the identities of the migrantes. Women and children began to make up a growing proportion of the “illegals” entering the U.S.

In recent years, the mix of migrants shifted again, with an increasing proportion consisting of asylum-seekers, often whole families, fleeing the destabilization of Central America. They sometimes travel in caravans hoping that the strength of numbers will protect them from gangs that they are trying to escape. Their intention is not to sneak across the border but to get to the border and ask for asylum.

So here’s the rub: the infrastructure of the border is designed to deal with young Mexican men seeking work, not families, including young children, who arrive destitute and often sick. Although the border agreement that ended the recent government shutdown authorized upwards of $400 million for new facilities — the total is debated, with some Republicans arguing that as much as $750 million might be available — adequate structures don’t yet exist. And so people, often children, have been held in cages in jury-rigged, overcrowded, and distinctly punitive facilities.

6. But asylum seekers shouldn’t need to be detained

Ports of entry could be equipped and staffed to process asylum requests quickly and in volume instead of the “metered” trickle that is current practice — sometimes 10 or less a day. The immigration court system also needs to be fully staffed (funding exists for 107 more judges than the 427 currently serving), as well as expanded. The effect of this bottleneck, in an echo of Operation Gatekeeper, is to force groups of refugees into the desert where they cross the border illegally and at great risk (meanwhile distracting Border Patrol officers from legitimate law enforcement duties). Once in the U.S., they surrender themselves so that their cases will have to be addressed.

Another alternative is to allow prospective immigrants to apply for asylum at U.S. embassies and consulates in their home countries, as was the case for certain foreigners under an Obama-era policy that the Trump administration curtailed. (The administration recently took yet another step backward by ordering the closure of all U.S. immigration offices abroad.) A third alternative, presently applied in limited fashion, would be to release asylum seekers in this country under the sponsorship of third parties while their cases are pending.

7. The cruelty business

The hurt inflicted at the border increases when people behave like… well, people. Every job has frustrations, and border work has more than most. Maybe an officer twisted his knee working double shifts or got scared one night when he thought he saw a narco with a gun. So he roughs up a few people or tightens their handcuffs until they hurt. To be sure, U.S. Border Patrol officers commit many acts of mercy in their work, but they also sometimes deny or delay medical treatment for people in need or slash life-saving water jugs set out by humanitarians to aid migrants crossing the desert (and sometimes federal attorneys then prosecute the humanitarians).

Even harder to understand is the cranked-up air conditioning in Customs and Border Protection facilities. For good reason the detainees call the holding centers hieleras (iceboxes). Most migrants have no jackets or extra clothing. They receive a flimsy foil or paper “blanket,” one for each person, and then must sleep on cold slab floors for days at a time. Many a mother will double wrap her baby and shiver on her own until she and her child are released. This is what happened to Deña, a Salvadoran asylum seeker who spoke to a friend of mine in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in January. She came out of the hielera sick, a frequent result of the widespread and needless refrigeration of detainees.

The most extreme cruelties, however, come from the highest levels. The forcible separation of young children from their parents, when carried out by civilians, is called kidnapping. When carried out by the Trump administration, such barbarity fell under the rubric of “zero-tolerance.” The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that thousands more children than the 2,737 identified in a 2018 court case have been involved. Scandalously, the Department of Homeland Security and other responsible agencies failed to keep thorough records so that, even after the policy was reversed, no one could be sure that all of the children were properly reunitedwith their families. Moreover, separations, without the sanction of policy, apparently continue.

At the top of the cruelty list as well are the deaths from exposure, heat stroke, and dehydration caused by wall construction that drives migrants to undertake longer treks through ever more inhospitable terrain. The NGO Humane Borders has cataloged and mapped 3,244 migrant fatalities since 1999 in Arizona alone, but the actual number of deaths is acknowledged to be considerably higher, as many bodies remain undiscovered and unrecorded. What’s going on in the desert these days is not a war, but it’s producing war-level suffering and casualties.

8. Both Republicans and Democrats have built sections of the border wall

But until Trump came along, both parties ran from the semantics of calling it a “wall.” Officially, it was a border fence. The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations feared castigation for applying a second-century technology to a twentieth- and twenty-first-century problem. The optics of being identified with other famous wall-builders — Roman Emperor Hadrian (122 CE), China’s Ming Dynasty (14th-17th centuries), the USSR (Berlin, 1961), or even contemporary Israel — were considered unappealing. Of course, President Trump not only embraced the negative connotations of wall construction, but pretended that the 654 miles of barriers, including approximately 354 miles of wall, erected by his predecessors did not exist.

9. If Trump gets his way, the steel in his border wall will contain a high percentage of irony

The U.S. went to war in 1846, ostensibly to assert that its southern border was the Rio Grande and not the Nueces River, as Mexico claimed. Trump’s campaign for a border wall, however, puts the U.S. in retreat, sovereignty be damned, because it effectively returns to Mexico some of the land conquered in the Mexican War.

Let me explain: you can’t build a wall in the middle of a river. The river will eventually wash the wall away, or it will make a new channel where no one wants it. It is also inadvisable to build a wall in the floodplain adjacent to the river, because, well, it floods. Moreover, a wall designed to keep humans out can’t have big gaps or people will get through, and in a flood small drainage gaps quickly clog with debris, backing up flows, causing property damage, and undermining the wall itself. (Even away from the river, the wall causes flooding and damage in places like downtown Nogales, Sonora, where its design ignored local drainage.)

Because the Rio Grande is a low-volume river with big-river storm flows, new sections of wall are nowadays sited on high ground out of the flood zone and some distance from the main river channel. This means the border will effectively be moved back from its internationally agreed placement in the middle of the river. No deed will change hands, but this de facto relocation of the southern boundary of the U.S. is tantamount to a cession of land to Mexico. One wonders if this matter has received the attention of America’s chest-thumper-in-chief.

10. As usual, the environment takes a blow

The Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge encompasses a significant chunk of floodplain and adjacent ground where Trump’s great wall is to be built. So does the chain of protected areas constituting the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) National Wildlife Refuge, as well as other nature preserves held by private non-profits. Past wall construction has already fragmented portions of the area. Additional wall construction will decimate it. At stake is vital habitat for the last ocelots existing in the U.S., as well as for scores of other species.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calculates that planned wall segments will negatively affect 60%-75% of the LRGV’s lands. The wall would also plow through the National Butterfly Sanctuary like a superhighway.

Across the borderlands, the roster of species detrimentally affected by Trump’s wall amounts to a who’s who of southwestern fauna — from jaguars, Mexican gray wolves, pronghorn antelopes, and bison (yes, there is a wild herd in the Chihuahuan desert) to cactus ferruginous pygmy owls (which fly close to the ground and so can’t cross the wall), leopard frogs, and lesser long-nosed bats. The Center for Biological Diversity reports that “a minimum of 93 species at risk of extinction will be further imperiled by construction of Trump’s border wall, including impacts to critical habitat for 25 of these species.”

11. Defense-in-depth works better

An excellent book on the border is the late Jefferson Morganthaler’s The River Has Never Divided Us. Morganthaler explains that, from the Spanish colonial era forward, defending the border as a hard barrier has rarely been an effective strategy. It “seduces us into establishing our own Maginot Line. It lures us into attempting the impossible… and distracts us from more promising solutions.” The most appealing alternative, applied in the eighteenth century by Spain’s Teodoro de Croix, was defense in depth: addressing “problems at their source and destination, rather than trying to dam them up somewhere in the middle.” Accepting amnesty applications at U.S. facilities in the applicants’ countries of origin would be a modern adaptation of such a policy.

12. Get ready for the problems of migration to worsen

The president and just about all the members of his administration believe in walls but not in climate change, a guarantee of disaster. It’s possible that refugees now appearing at the southern border, who say that the corn they planted last year failed to produce a harvest, are lying or are bad farmers. It’s far more likely, however, that they are climate-change refugees. One thing is certain: as climate change intensifies, it will displace ever more people. Subsistence agriculture is always a gamble. When the weather changes so radically that subsistence farmers can’t bring in a crop, they have to move. At least in the short term, the vigor and diversity of the U.S. economy will buffer most of its citizens against the full effects of climate disruptions. There will be no such buffer for people hoeing milpas in Central America. This is not a matter of speculation and one consequence is clear. People who lack the means of subsistence will pick up and move. Wall or no wall, a fair portion of them will head northward.

Maybe the best borderland novel of recent years is Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, in which an early scene pretty well sums up future prospects for the southern border, especially if current policies persist. A sheriff and his deputy are near the Rio Grande, inspecting the aftermath of a shootout between narco gangs. They walk past smoldering vehicles and gory corpses. The deputy says, “It’s a mess, aint it sheriff?”

And the sheriff replies, “If it aint it’ll do till a mess gets here.”

N.Y. County Bans Unvaccinated Kids in Public as Measles Spreads

ALBANY, N.Y.—A county in New York City’s northern suburbs declared a state of emergency Tuesday over a measles outbreak that has infected more than 150 people since last fall, hoping a ban against unvaccinated children in public places wakes their parents to the seriousness of the problem.

“It’s an attention grab, there’s no question about it,” Rockland County Executive Ed Day said at a news conference, noting that he didn’t believe such a drastic step has ever been tried in the U.S. before.

Day said he was taking the action in hopes of reversing a recent uptick in cases amid disturbing reports that health workers were encountering resistance when investigating cases. Rockland’s outbreak has most heavily affected Orthodox Jewish communities, in which vaccination rates tend to be lower.

Under the declaration, which lasts for at least 30 days, anyone under 18 who is not vaccinated against measles is barred from public gathering places, including shopping malls, civic centers, schools, restaurants and even houses of worship. Those in violation could be charged with a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail.

But Day acknowledged that there will be no concerted enforcement effort and that the intent is not to arrest people but to emphasize the seriousness of the situation.

“There will not be law enforcement or deputy sheriffs asking for vaccination records. That is ridiculous,” Day said. “However, parents will be held accountable if they’re found to be in violation of this emergency declaration.”

The county is experiencing New York state’s longest measles outbreak since the disease was declared officially eliminated from the United States in 2000. Health officials say the best way to stop the disease’s spread is a vaccination rate in the community of 92 to 95 percent. Day said only 72.9 percent of people under 18 have been vaccinated against measles in Rockland County, which has more than 300,000 residents.

Civil rights attorney Michael Sussman, who represents the parents of 44 unvaccinated children who were barred from a Waldorf School in the county, said he would discuss a possible challenge to the emergency declaration in a meeting with his clients Tuesday night.

“It’s irrational,” Sussman said. “You’re punishing people who don’t have the illness rather than quarantining people who are sick.”

Sussman said a quarantine of measles patients and those close to them would quickly stop the disease’s spread.

This month, a federal judge, citing the “unprecedented measles outbreak,” denied the parents’ request to let unvaccinated children return to the Waldorf School. The lawsuit said the county’s order banning unvaccinated children from schools regardless of religious or medical exemptions violated their constitutional rights.

The outbreak began in the Rockland area when seven unvaccinated travelers diagnosed with measles entered the county last October. There have been 153 cases to date, Day said. In the early days of the outbreak, people were cooperating with health officials and getting children vaccinated, he said, but that has changed.

“Our health inspectors have been hung up on and told not to call again. They’ve been told, ‘We’re not discussing this, do not come back,’ when visiting the homes of infected individuals as part of their investigations,” Day said. “This type of response is unacceptable and frankly irresponsible.”

On the same day as the federal judge’s ruling on the school children, pediatric organizations expressed support for state legislation that would allow minors to get vaccinated without parental consent.

The state legislation’s Democratic sponsors said too many parents believe unsupported claims that vaccines are unsafe and cause autism or other conditions. Day echoed that message, noting celebrities who have spoken out against vaccines.

“If you’re going to People magazine and Jenny McCarthy and Robert De Niro for your medical advice, you need to re-evaluate your life,” he said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists six measles outbreaks, defined as three or more cases, around the country in 2019, including Rockland County’s. The CDC said the outbreaks are linked to travelers who brought the disease back from other countries, such as Israel and Ukraine, where large measles outbreaks are occurring.

There have been 181 confirmed cases of measles in Brooklyn and Queens since October, most of them involving members of the Orthodox Jewish community, according to the CDC.

Day said the emergency order was timed with the upcoming religious holidays of Easter and Passover in mind.

“We want people to be able to celebrate,” he said. “We don’t want to see a repeat of how this outbreak started when we saw people gathered together and then fall ill last fall.”

The CDC says 15 states have had at least one case of measles confirmed in 2019, for a total of 314 cases to date. In 2014, 667 cases were confirmed nationwide and there were 372 cases in 2018.

Is Pete Buttigieg the Future of the Democratic Party?

Pete Buttigieg is having a moment.

With a bio as unique as his name, the progressive mayor from South Bend has jumped to third place in the latest Emerson poll of the 2020 Democratic Iowa caucus, Salon reports. Buttigieg (pronounced BOOT-edge-edge, according to his official Twitter bio) is a 37-year-old Afghanistan war veteran, Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar, who has taught himself Norwegian—see his response last weekend in South Carolina to a question from a Norwegian journalist here—and is conversant in several other languages. He is vying to become the first openly gay presidential nominee from a major political party.

According to Emerson’s findings, 11 percent of likely Democratic Iowa caucus-goers say they would vote for Buttigieg to be their 2020 presidential nominee. Vice President Joe Biden, who has not yet entered the race, received the support of 25 percent of poll respondents, while 24 percent of likely caucus-goers said they would choose Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The only other candidate to receive double-digit support was Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who was favored by 10 percent of respondents.

Buttigieg’s newfound momentum was not lost on Spencer Kimball, director of the Emerson Poll, who said in a statement:

The biggest surprise in this poll is Mayor Pete. Last week, we saw him inching up in our national poll, and now he’s in double digits in Iowa. America is going to be asking, “Who is Mayor Pete?”

The South Bend mayor polled at 0 percent in Emerson’s January Iowa poll, conducted before many candidates had joined the 2020 race. He has since formed an exploratory committee but has not officially declared his candidacy.

“It remains too early to tell whether Buttigieg can maintain this momentum going into the debate season,” writes Vanity Fair’s Tina Ngyuen. “But he certainly appears to have cross-categorical appeal. Buttigieg speaks the language of the heartland and the identity-politics of progressives, while balancing centrist sensibilities (keeping some aspect of private insurance, for instance) with Twitter-friendly galaxy-brain policy proposals (like packing the Supreme Court). If he can stay on the radar of an easily distracted media without any obvious gaffes, the Buttigieg boomlet may have staying power.”

Buttigieg garnered attention over the weekend when he urged Democratic voters not to cede the term “freedom” to the right. He told a crowd in Rock Hill, S.C.:

They [conservatives] care about a specific kind of freedom—freedom from regulation—as though government was the only thing that could make us unfree. … If they’re telling you who you ought to marry, the county clerk is making you unfree. You’re not free if you’re afraid to start a small business because leaving your job would mean losing your health care. You are not free if there is a veil of mistrust between you as a person of color and the officers who are sworn to keep you safe. You’re not free if your reproductive choices are being dictated by male politicians in Washington.

Don’t let anybody tell you that the other side is the side that’s got a handle on freedom. We are the party of freedom and we shouldn’t be afraid to go out there and say it. pic.twitter.com/2lTcEtoaah

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) March 24, 2019

Buttigieg’s atypical background makes it tough to remember he’s just 37 years old. As a teenager, he won a Profile in Courage award for an essay he wrote about then-U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders, bemoaning the “cynicism” of politics and calling Sanders an example of “public integrity,” NBC News writes.

As a graduate from Harvard University, his early political work reflects those Massachusetts ties: He was a summer intern for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and worked for Democratic Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004.

Buttigieg was elected mayor of his hometown of South Bend at age 29, becoming the youngest to hold that office in a mid-size U.S. city. In a profile for the Washington Post titled “Could Pete Buttigieg Become the First Millennial President?“, Bob Moser writes that while serving as mayor, Buttigieg:

[V]olunteered for active duty in Afghanistan, … came out as gay in the local newspaper, married a schoolteacher live on YouTube, turned heads in a dark-horse bid to lead the Democratic National Committee, and had the New York Times’ Frank Bruni gushing about him as potentially the “‘First Gay President’— all by age 36.

In 2017, he ran for Democratic National Committee chair with an emphasis on rebuilding the Democratic Party from the ground up in every community.

Salon reports that Buttigieg’s strong performance in the Emerson poll was bolstered by placing second among 18- to 29-year-olds with 22 percent. Sanders led that category with 44 percent. Kimball notes that: “If Buttigieg is able to maintain his momentum, his candidacy appears to be pulling from the same demographic of young voters as Sanders, and that could become a problem for Sanders.”

Family That Made Millions on Opioids Gave to Anti-Muslim Groups

In March of 2018, a shower of pill bottles descended on The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, labeled, as Hyperallergic reported, “prescribed to you by the Sackler family, major donors of the Met.” The Sackler family are the owners of Purdue Pharma, the makers of Oxy-Contin, often described as a key culprit in the opioid crisis, and the bottles were part of the first in a still-ongoing series of protests designed to raise awareness of how family members, who have donated millions to arts organizations across the world, have also benefited from the opioid crisis.

Last week, art museums including the Guggenheim in New York and the Tate in London, announced they would no longer accept gifts from the Sacklers. Efforts by family members to paint themselves as arts philanthropists are well-known, but the Sacklers’ philanthropy had another less prominent beneficiary: anti-Muslim organizations.

Richard Sackler first made his views known in 2008, Christopher Glazek pointed out in Esquire in 2017, when he “wrote a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal denouncing Muslim support for suicide bombing, a concern that seems to persist.” According to Esquire and Sludge’s reporting, the foundation donated to several anti-Muslim groups over a three-year period.

Alex Kotch in Sludge explains: “From 2014-16, the Richard and Beth Sackler Foundation made donations to three nonprofits considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be anti-Muslim hate groups,” referencing Esquire’s earlier reporting.

Further research from Sludge reveals that during that same time period, the foundation donated to groups not on SPLC’s list, but still considered to be explicitly Islamophobic:

From 2014-16, the Richard and Beth Sackler Foundation donated $7,700 to Middle East Forum, in addition to $150 in 2009. Middle East Forum is “at the center” of an Islamophobia network, according to the Center for American Progress. The forum “promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects Western values from Middle Eastern threats” and “protects the freedoms of anti-Islamist authors,” according to its website.

Other anti-Muslim groups Sludge found the Richard and Beth Sackler Foundation also gave to in that time period are Jihad Watch, American Freedom Defense Initiative and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The American Freedom Defense Initiative, formerly known as Stop Islamization of America, was founded by Robert Spencer, who Kotch calls an “anti-Muslim hate figure” and “noted Islamophobe” Pamela Gellar.

The Middle East Forum’s activities include funding anti-Muslim rallies in London in 2018. Daniel Pipes, its founder, was previously on the board of the Clarion Project, which according to Kotch, produces “anti-Muslim propaganda films.”

The Middle East Forum’s board and fellows have included multiple other anti-Muslim figures, including Stephen Emerson, whose Investigative Project on Terrorism received $250 from the Richard and Beth Sackler Foundation in 2012 and $7,000 in 2015. Emerson, as FAIR reported back in 1999 has said that Islam “sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.” Kotch adds that “He even submitted fake FBI documents to news outlets tying mainstream American Muslim groups to terrorist organizations.”

Even though the SPLC does not explicitly label Middle East Watch a hate group, it has monitored Pipes’ activities. “Pipes is one of the biggest purveyors of anti-Muslim ideas in the U.S.,” Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, explained to Sludge.

The foundation is not quoted in Sludge’s coverage. A family spokesperson told Esquire in 2017 “It was never Richard Sackler’s intention to donate to an anti-Muslim or hate group.”

Democrats’ Russiagate Fixation Has Obscured Trump’s True Crimes

What follows is a conversation between author Gerald Horne, Truthdig contributor Jeff Cohen and Paul Jay of the Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay.

So the Mueller report has been handed over to the attorney general, who handed over his memo to Congress. And we’re expecting, sooner or later, some real parts of the Mueller report will be handed over to the Congress. Of course, they’re asking for everything. But as everyone knows by now, the report found no collusion with the Russians and the interference in the elections.

Here’s Trump sitting next to Prime Minister Netanyahu from Israel, and Trump’s obviously pleased. Here’s a clip of that.

SPEAKER: Mr. President, so did this not turn out to be a witch hunt after all? Do you think Robert Mueller did a [crosstalk].

DONALD TRUMP: It’s been a long time, we’re glad it’s over. It’s 100 percent the way it should have been. But what they did, it was a false narrative, it was a terrible thing. We can never let this happen to another president again. I can tell you that. I say it very strongly. Very few people I know could have handled it. We can never ever let this happen to another president again.

PAUL JAY: And of course, sitting next to him is Netanyahu, who’s just dreaming that he’s going to get out of his own corruption crisis that he’s in up to his eyeballs, hoping “oh wow, if Trump can get away with everything, maybe I can too.” Anyway, various people, Democratic Party leadership and many people in the media and such who have been carrying the collusion can for all this time, just hoping Mueller would come out and sink Trump over this issue, were not very happy. Here’s Bill Maher.

BILL MAHER: I must say, I don’t think it looks good. No further indictments, which means not Don Jr., even after “I love it” memo, really? Did the Democrats put too much trust in the Mueller report? Because I don’t need the Mueller report to know he’s a traitor. I have a TV.

PAUL JAY: Did the Democrats put too much trust in Mueller? Well, how about you, Bill Maher? Maybe you put too much trust in the Democrats and Mueller. And anyone knows Mueller’s history. As Larry Wilkerson said, he’s been a cleanup man for the Republican Party since after 9/11, if not before. I don’t know why they expected anything else. At any rate, I personally didn’t care much whether Trump colluded, I don’t care much whether he didn’t collude. But we’ll get into all this.

But first of all, let me introduce our guests. First of all, joining us is Gerald Horne. Gerald teaches at the University of Houston and he’s the author of many books, including Storming the Heavens and The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism. Also joining us is Jeff Cohen. He’s co-founder of RootsAction.org and founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and his books include Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. Thank you both for joining us.

JEFF COHEN: Great to be with you.

PAUL JAY: So Gerald, let me start with you. What was your reaction to all of this drama?

GERALD HORNE: Well, first of all, I’d like to recommend the piece online by Matt Taibbi, who in exhaustive detail goes over the missteps with regard to the Democrats creating this so-called Russiagate scandal. And secondly, interestingly enough, in the New York Times, which I usually use to line my birdcage, there is a piece by Farhad Manjoo which suggests that the Democrats, in the wake of their astonishing loss to Donald Trump in November 2016, were looking for excuses and alibis, and they pointed the finger of accusation at Moscow in order to understand how Trump got 63 million votes.

They did not necessarily seek to understand why it is, for decades, the Democrats have lost the vote defined as white, sometimes at a rate at 9 to 1 in Dixie. And rather than do that kind of agonizing reappraisal, they came to the conclusion that Moscow was the culprit. They did not seek to explain or understand or comprehend how it is that black voters, for example, who use social media, managed to vote against Trump 9 to 1.

Likewise, I think that the so-called Russiagate scandal was part of a conflict at the highest ranks of the U.S. ruling elite. That is to say, how do you maintain hegemony and dominance? The Democrats thought that you should go after Russia first. Mr. Trump and those around him are putting the pressure on China. Mr. Trump won the electoral argument in November 2016, and that has led to an uproar, not least since so many in this country are heavily dependent upon an anti-Moscow psychosis to make a standard of living that they consider to be comfortable. And voila, out of that stew comes this 22 month investigation involving subpoena and witnesses and documents and all the rest.

And now, of course, some, in particular in the media, are left with egg on their face. I’d like to recommend the words of Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, who points the finger of accusation particularly at MSNBC and their multimillion dollar journalists, including Rachel Maddow, who made quite a living by beating the drums about Russia’s alleged interference in the internal affairs of the United States while downplaying not only Mr. Trump’s corruption, but also the fact that the United States has interfered in the internal affairs of virtually every nation on planet Earth.

PAUL JAY: Jeff?

JEFF COHEN: Yeah, I think Gerald has hit on something in that there’s been this emphasis in the mainstream media, especially MSNBC and CNN that are allied with the corporate Democratic Party leadership. And it’s been this obsessive focus on Russiagate to the exclusion of issues that might actually resonate with the U.S. voting public, like Trump’s corruption.

And what’s concerned me all along as a political analyst is the Democratic leadership, whenever anyone over the last two years would bring up impeachment–and there are so many provable, in light of day, done in public actions by Trump against sectors of the U.S. public, against the Constitution, against democratic process, whether it’s his refusal to divest his business interests which leads to financial conflicts of interest, that’s unconstitutional, the Muslim ban, you can’t discriminate against people based on religion, abuse of the pardon power with Joe Arpaio, politicizing federal prosecutions, attacks on the media coupled with threatening to use federal agencies to go after journalists that you don’t like. This kind of thing is unprecedented in modern presidential history and goes beyond Nixon.

And yet, all you got from Pelosi and other leaders when they were asked about these abuses and “what about impeachment,” they’d say, “We’re waiting for the Mueller report.” Those were some of the stupidest words ever uttered by a political leadership. And they did it for months and months, over and over, “We’re waiting for Mueller.” Well, Mueller was investigating this very narrow thing, did Trump’s associates conspire with Russia? And it was just very bad politics to put all their eggs in that basket. And this month, USA Today did a poll well before two days ago, and 50 percent plus a little bit more said they saw the Mueller probe as a witch hunt. If the polls are taken tomorrow, it’s going to be even bigger. So this whole strategy on the part of the Democratic Party leadership, sort of marginalizing the big issues of corruption and attacks on the constitution, pushing them to the side while waiting for Russia, Russia, Russia collusion and Mueller, that turns out to be, I think, a big political error.

PAUL JAY: And of course, the biggest issues one would think we’d go after Trump for, climate change denial being by far the most important, and then all the way down from what’s been happening in the Department of Justice and Department of Energy, the most reactionary set of policies that could possibly be imagined.

But Gerald, the Democrats have a deep, long-term investment in this kind of Russophobia. I mean, the House of Un-American Activities Committee, McCarthyism, was all under the Truman administration Democrats. There’s something about the Democrats that they don’t want to look weak on anything. But they particularly want to show their strength when it comes to Russia, so they’ve got this long-term narrative right in their DNA, that when under pressure, when you want to try to hit the Republicans, prove that the Democrats are even more anti-Russian, or anti-Soviet back in those days, than even the Republicans could be. Gerald?

GERALD HORNE: Well, I think that you’re on to something. And I think that Democrats felt that during the Cold War era, they were bashed. That is to say, the liberals were bashed because they were seen as uncomfortably close to socialist and communist, which meant that they were in bed with Moscow. And they decided that they could flip the script on the Republicans by suggesting that it’s actually the Republicans who are in bed with Moscow.

What they didn’t count on is that the Republican Party base, 63 million strong, is not necessarily concerned with ideological consistency. They’re concerned with maintaining power, domination, and hegemony by any means necessary. And if that means consorting with a candidate such as Donald J. Trump who conflicts, allegedly, with their moral compass in terms of being a profane, obscene, thrice married billionaire, well they’ll change their policies, they’ll change their principles. As the comedian Groucho Marx says, “If you don’t like these principles, don’t worry, I have others.” And I think that that should be a lesson that we take away from this debacle known as Russiagate, which is that it does not work to try to use Republican Party tactics to destabilize a Republican Party president, because the Republican Party constituency is going to stick with their president no matter what.

PAUL JAY: Yeah, my uncle had a line like that, which was, “If you don’t like what I said, it’s not exactly what I meant.” And now, the Democrats, after putting so much into this collusion argument, are now going to have to switch gears and move to the corruption argument. Whereas Jeff said, if they’re going to go after Trump on the other, not on the most important issue, but if you’re going to just attack him, you would have been on the corruption issue all the way along. Now going on the corruption issue is going to look like sour grapes after you lost on the collusion. Jeff?

JEFF COHEN: Yeah, it’s bad strategy. I mean, in November, there were exit polls November 2018, and they found that virtually no voters cast their vote based on the Russia investigation. However, if the Democrats and MSNBC, which was all the while Russiagate, imagine if they had focused on Trump’s greed and self-interest and self-dealing and violations of the Constitution’s clauses that you can’t accept a financial benefit if you’re in office, if you’re the president. So it turns out to be a bad strategy. The good news is, and Aaron Mate, who used to be on Real News Network and wrote all these important articles for The Nation as well, a skeptic of the Russiagate narrative, he said the good news is now the resistance can turn to the big issues, the real issues that were often marginalized by this strategy of waiting for Mueller.

PAUL JAY: Yeah, I actually don’t agree with that. Because the issue of collusion, yes, maybe Mueller put that away. But the fundamental issue that the bogeyman is the Russian interference in the election, the Mueller report reinforces, as far as I understand it, the Mueller report is going to confirm that the Russians did interfere in the elections. And it’s the underlying assumption that this is such a horrendous thing that’s the real problem. The collusion was secondary. The real issue was the Russophobia. Because even if the Russians did any of what they’re accused of doing–and I think what’s in the public domain, one can still remain skeptical of that. But even if they did, this is just normal stuff that big competitive countries do with each other. And I mean, the United States, we know, interferes in every election on Earth, as Gerald said.

Even Canada, as I’ve told this story before on The Real News, in the 1961 election, Kennedy actually sent the pollster Lou Harris up to Ottawa, and out of the basement of the U.S. Embassy ran Lester Pearson’s election campaign and framed the arguments based on what was then very modern polling methods. Lou Harris kind of invented all this stuff. And they defeated Diefenbaker. Why? Because he wouldn’t let nuclear missiles into Canada. So this goes on all the time. Why raise it to such a crazy level?

Well, I think it’s partly connected with in very beginning, as Gerald said, China was the Trump administration’s target, and of course Iran, we should never forget that. And they wanted to kind of have a sort of detente with Russia, not only to focus on China and Iran, but Tillerson had a big energy play, former Secretary of State and former head of Mobil Oil. They were going to make a deal with Putin to have a major investment into getting into Russian oil reserves. So there was even a whole level of kind of corruption going on there. So the underpinnings of all of this didn’t serve the underlying narrative of the Democratic Party, the Russophobia, and especially the underlying narrative of the military industrial complex that absolutely needs the Russians to be the existential enemy. Gerald?

GERALD HORNE: Well, I think basically, U.S. imperialism is now facing the worst of both worlds from its point of view. It has China clearly in the crosshairs, but it’s not clear as to whether or not that anti-Beijing strategy will work. And it’s also managed to alienate Russia. That is to say that Mr. Trump, because perhaps of pressure from the Democrats, has been arming the fascists in Ukraine, has come almost face to face and nose to nose with Russian troops in Syria, has been pressuring Berlin to ditch the gas deal with Russia as well. And so, instead of the Henry Kissinger-like strategy, which he enunciated for Mr. Trump in the pages of The Financial Times just last year, whereby he suggested that Washington needs to pivot towards closer relations with Moscow in order to bludgeon a rising China, the flip side of what he managed to execute in the early 1970s when he leaned towards Beijing in order to undermine Russia or undermine the Soviet Union, now the United States is faced with both antagonists, not to mention a resurgent Iran.

PAUL JAY: Jeff?

JEFF COHEN: Yeah, I’ll get back to the origins on the part of the Democrats. They had a lousy candidate for president. She was seen as corrupt, she was seen as the status quo. And as has been said earlier by you guys, there was an interest on their part to say, “It wasn’t us, we didn’t do anything wrong, it was the Russians,” or “it was Comey’s intervention.” So the origins of this is partly to blame someone else. I believe, and this is what the Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Mate critique is, that the mainstream media coverage of this has been abominable. And almost anything said about Russia–and I’m no friend of Putin–but almost anything said about Russia in the last two years, could be said, didn’t have to be true, and so much of what they said turned out to be false.

You had NBC and CNBC saying the Russians used this supersonic microwave technology to attack U.S. diplomats in Cuba turn out to be a crock. You had the Washington Post reporting that the Russians had hacked into the grid, the electric grid, the utility in Vermont. You had one of these stories after another, and a lot of it was very McCarthyite. And the most dangerous of them all was the Washington Post report which was hyped by its editor in a Tweet, Marty Baron, which took this obscure–I think it’s out of business now–this obscure alleged research firm that had, according to the Washington Post, a list–if that doesn’t sound McCarthyite enough–a list of 200 websites that were disseminating Russian propaganda throughout the 2016 election. And the Washington Post ran this garbage. And if you looked at the list, you found organizations like truthdig.com, a very solid journalistic outfit, Truthout.org, Black Agenda Report.

So you have, I think, in the mainstream media, a lot of this Russia-baiting which ended up being McCarthyite. And you had Glenn Greenwald was accused of being pro-Russian and an apologist for Trump. It never ends. It’s very dangerous. I am a critic of Putin, I see him as a right wing nationalist, anti-gay sexist, causing mischief in certain places, as is obvious, the U.S. has caused far more mischief in far more countries. So I’m no fan of Putin, but this was like, in the mainstream media, on MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post, was just old fashioned Russia-bashing, even when they had to concoct stuff. And remember, the big stories about Russian propaganda, Russia hacking into utilities, that was big news. The retractions were always smaller and many people don’t know those stories were retracted.

PAUL JAY: Gerald, just to finish up. So now we’re going to head into hearings, investigations. Mostly, I think, they’re going to focus on the corruption side of Trump.

JEFF COHEN: I hope so.

PAUL JAY: And one would hope the hearings start to focus on actually what policies that will solve the problems facing the people will look like. So this isn’t all just wound Trump, although I have to say to some extent, I welcome to see a bloodbath there. What do you think, Gerald?

GERALD HORNE: Well, there’s an old saying that “if you go after the king you should succeed, because if you don’t, the king will come after you.” And I think that Mr. Trump is now baying for blood, as are Republicans on Capitol Hill. Senator Lindsey Graham has already announced that he’s going to turn the tables and begin to investigate Democrats, investigate the Hillary Clinton campaign, their alleged connection to the so-called Steele Dossier, which I think should open the door to other kinds of foreign interference in the internal affairs of United States, including by British intelligence, including by the Saudi Arabians and the UAE via Thomas J. Barrack, the Arab American billionaire who was one of Mr. Trump’s closest comrades, including by Israel, which has a demonstrated record of interfering in the internal affairs of the United States.

But I’m not sure if either the Democrats or Republicans are interested in going down that path. But I do think that someone should examine the national security establishment of the United States, particularly Jim Clapper, a commentator on CNN who’s been responsible for a lot of mischief and misinformation, not to mention John Brennan, his comrade, who is a commentator on MSNBC who is similarly implicated. So it seems to me, rather than look into climate change, the Democrats and Republicans are going to be investigating each other.

PAUL JAY: Well, at least the leadership, the corporate Dems and the leadership of the two parties. I do want to correct both of you on one thing. I think whenever you use the word “mischief,” we should substitute the word “war crimes.” Are you guys all right with that?

JEFF COHEN: In many cases–

GERALD HORNE: Say that again?

PAUL JAY: I want to substitute your uses, both of you, your use of the word “mischief” and substitute the word “war crimes.”

GERALD HORNE: Oh, sure.

PAUL JAY: I assume you’re OK with that. Jeff, last word to you.

JEFF COHEN: In many cases, you can make that substitution. I think that the Democrats, if there was a progressive leadership in the Democratic Party, they would be focusing on all these other assaults, the corruption of Trump. But the progressives are not in power. Gerald raised the point I want to finish on, which is one of the few Russiagate stories that didn’t get the coverage it deserved was the guilty plea of Mike Flynn, who was briefly the National Security Chief. And a month before Trump took the White House, he pleaded guilty about lying to the FBI during that period a month before the White House when Obama had broken from the Israel right or wrong lobby and he made it clear that he was not going to veto at the United Nations a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

And in the guilty plea documents, you look at the court documents, it wasn’t really collusion with Russia so much as it was collusion with Israel. Because what’s described as a very senior Trump official directed Flynn, while Obama’s still the sitting president, to contact the Russian Ambassador to the U.S., Kislyak, and ask Kislyak if the Russians would block the Israel resolution a the United Nations. And they apparently also reached out to Egypt to block it. So I mean, you had some real interesting evidence of collusion, but it was sort of the Trump transition team colluding with Israel. And it just never got the attention, it was one of the few Russiagate stories that got very little attention.

PAUL JAY: All right. Thank you both for joining us.

GERALD HORNE: Thank you.

JEFF COHEN: Thank you.

PAUL JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Why Is the Romanian Prime Minister Staying at Trump’s D.C. Hotel?

The prime minister of Romania stayed at President Donald Trump’s hotel during her trip to Washington over the weekend. She is the first foreign government leader known to have booked a room at the property in more than a year.

The stay at the Trump International Hotel by Viorica Dancila, who is attending the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, provides the latest piece of evidence that Trump’s company continues to do business with foreign officials. Such payments could violate the Constitution’s anti-corruption provisions, which prohibit the president from accepting gifts or “emoluments” from foreign governments.

Dancila was seen Friday night inside the hotel’s atrium surrounded by a group of about eight people after leaving the hotel’s BLT Prime restaurant. She made her way to one of the building’s elevators, which are operated with room keys of hotel guests. She was seen again on Sunday, entering an elevator shortly after 6 p.m. On Monday she tweeted a picture of herself meeting with Vice President Mike Pence at AIPAC.

Trump still owns the hotel through a trust from which he can draw money at any time. Trump’s lawyers have rejected the idea that a hotel visit from a foreign official can be construed as an emolument, saying instead that it is a “fair value exchange” not addressed in the Constitution. Trump faces several lawsuits over the emoluments issue, filed by the attorneys general of the District of Columbia and Maryland, Democratic lawmakers and a government watchdog.

The Trump Organization has pledged to donate all profits from foreign governments to the U.S. government. As of February 2019, the company had provided the Treasury Department with more than $340,000. The company has not explained how it calculates foreign profits or disclosed if those figures were audited by an independent party.

Glad to meet Vice-president Mike Pence @VP, in #WashingtonDC.