Chris Hedges's Blog, page 311

Canada’s No-Sex, No-Money Scandal Could Topple Trudeau

TORONTO — There’s no money, no sex and nothing illegal happened. This is what passes for a scandal in Canada.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been engulfed in allegations involving possible collusion with Russia and secret payments to buy the silence of a porn star. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing a controversy that seems trivial by comparison, but it could topple him in elections later this year.

Two high-profile women ministers in Trudeau’s Cabinet, including Canada’s first indigenous justice minister, resigned in protest, and his top aide and best friend quit too.

The former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, says Trudeau and senior members of his government pressured her in a case involving a major Canadian engineering company accused of corruption related to its business dealings in Libya. Trudeau reportedly leaned on the attorney general to instruct prosecutors to reach the equivalent of plea deal, which would avoid a criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, because he felt that jobs were at stake.

“People south of the border would be astonished to think that this is the type of scandal that they have in Canada,” said Eddie Goldenberg, a former adviser to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

Many countries would be jealous of a scandal that went no further than a prime minster asking another minister to do something she is legally entitled to do, Goldenberg said.

“I just don’t really see it as a scandal,” he said. “There is a political correctness here. Nobody wants to go after an indigenous woman minister. It’s become politically incorrect to question the former minister.”

Trudeau has said he asked Wilson-Raybould to revisit her decision not to instruct prosecutors and said she agreed to consider that. He denied applying any inappropriate pressure, saying he and his officials were only pointing out that prosecution could endanger thousands of jobs.

SNC-Lavalin has pleaded not guilty to fraud and corruption charges related to allegations it paid about $35 million (CA$47 million) in bribes to public officials in Libya between 2001 and 2011.

“It’s a pseudo-scandal. It’s crap. What the hell? You are doing business in Libya and you are not bribing?” said Robert Bothwell, a professor of Canadian history and international relations at the University of Toronto. “It does suggest to me that the director of public prosecutions … is also nuts. And so is Wilson-Raybould. These people are delusional.”

Wilson-Raybould was demoted from her role as attorney general and justice minister in January as part of a Cabinet shuffle by Trudeau. She has testified that she believes she lost the justice job because she did not give in to “sustained” pressure to instruct the director of public prosecutions to negotiate a remediation agreement with SNC-Lavalin.

That solution would have avoided a potential criminal conviction that would bar the company from receiving any federal government business for a decade. The company is a major employer in Quebec, Trudeau’s home province. It has about 9,000 employees in Canada and more than 50,000 worldwide.

The company publicly led the lobbying charge for a law that allows for deferred prosecution agreements as a way to resolve the criminal charges it faces. The new attorney general has not ruled out approving a settlement.

Wilson-Raybould has said herself that the pressure from Trudeau and others was not illegal and that she was not explicitly instructed to do a remediation agreement.

Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s former principal secretary and best friend who resigned, said nothing inappropriate was alleged until after Wilson-Raybould left the Cabinet, suggesting she felt sour grapes about losing her dream job.

Opposition Conservative Andrew Scheer leader has demanded that Trudeau resign, saying he tried to interfere in a criminal prosecution. Canadian media have covered the story as intensely as American networks have covered Trump, noted Nelson Wiseman, a professor at the University of Toronto.

“Trudeau would not be able to get away with what Trump does because the political cultures and the state of political polarization of the two countries are still quite different,” Wiseman said.

The differences among Canadian media outlets, for example, are “relatively narrow compared to the chasms between Fox and MSNBC or CNN. The American media are reporting on two different worlds. The Canadian media are reporting on the same Wilson-Raybould-Trudeau story,” Wiseman added.

Daniel Beland, a politics professor at McGill University in Montreal, said Trudeau has framed himself differently than Trump. Trump said sympathetic things about Russia during the campaign and was elected despite that and other controversies, giving him “the sense that he can do anything and his base will still follow him.”

Trudeau, meanwhile, promised transparency while describing himself as a feminist who was also determined to right the wrongs against Canada’s indigenous people. Women make up half of his cabinet.

“He depicted himself as a feminist, as someone who believes in indigenous reconciliation, and then you have two of his top female Cabinet ministers resign, and they are depicting him in a very different light,” Beland said.

Trudeau said he tried to foster an environment where his lawmakers can come to him with concerns, but one of his female Liberal party colleagues, Celina Caesar-Chavannes, took issue with that, tweeting, “I did come to you recently. Twice. Remember your reactions?”

“When you add women, please do not expect the status quo. Expect us to make correct decisions, stand for what is right and exit when values are compromised,” she also tweeted.

Caesar-Chavannes, who is not running for re-election, has issued messages of support for Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, a respected Cabinet minister who said she lost confidence in how the government has handled the affair.

“It is a fundamental doctrine of the rule of law that our Attorney General should not be subjected to political pressure or interference regarding the exercise of her prosecutorial discretion in criminal cases,” Philpott wrote in the resignation letter to Trudeau.

Other Liberal lawmakers have expressed confidence in Trudeau. The federal election is in October.

Antonia Maioni, McGill University’s dean of arts, said citizens of every democracy will look at the Trump scandals and say everything else is small potatoes.

But, she added, “I’m not sure Trump is a good reference point here. Leaders fall in parliamentary systems for many other reasons beyond personal scandal.”

Trump Donor Claimed She Could Offer Access to the President

PALM BEACH, Fla. — A company run by a donor to President Donald Trump claimed it could provide Chinese clients with a chance to mingle and take photos with the president, along with access to his private club in Palm Beach, Florida.

It remains unclear how much Li Yang charged for the services and whether she was ever hired to provide them.

But the company’s claims and other eyebrow-raising activity, which were first reported by The Miami Herald and Mother Jones, mark the latest in a litany of complications and ethical issues stemming from Trump continuing to own and operate a private club where dues-paying members and their guests rub shoulders with the president of the United States and his family, friends, White House staff and members of his Cabinet.

The Associated Press has previously reported that aides who accompany the president on frequent trips to the club are always on alert for club members and guests with nearly unlimited access who like to buttonhole the president. They raise pet projects, make policy suggestions and share oddball ideas ranging from the benefits of nuclear-powered cars to personal plans for Mideast peace.

Former administration officials have described the lengths to which aides have gone to try to run interference, including reserving the dinner table next to Trump’s to keep as close an eye on him as possible and scanning guest lists for visitors who might prove problematic.

Yang appears to be a relative newcomer to Palm Beach’s political scene. GY US Investments LLC, a company she registered in 2017, according to Florida state documents, describes itself on a now-defunct, mostly Chinese website as an international business consulting firm.

The firm “provides public relations services to assist businesses in America to establish and expand their brand image in the modern Chinese marketplace,” according to a translation of the page accessed through an internet archive service.

That has included, the website claims, access to presidential dinners and roundtables, White House events, photo opportunities and “VIP” activities including the “opportunity to interact with the president, the Minister of Commerce and other political figures.”

The site also featured numerous photographs, including a picture of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and photographs of Yang with Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and former White House aide Sebastian Gorka.

Yang is described on the website as the company’s “Founder CEO,” as well as a member of a “Presidential Fundraising Committee” and a “Presidential club member.”

Yang and the company did not respond to messages seeking comment, nor did the Trump Organization, Mar-a-Lago club or the Republican National Committee.

Christian Ziegler, vice chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, played down the significance of the webpage and photos Yang has posted of herself with the president and other prominent Republican politicians.

“Anyone can buy tickets to any event and I’m assuming that is what she had done,” Ziegler said. “I’ve never met the lady and I could never pick her out of a police lineup.”

He added: “I know the media, Democrats, the left is going to try to do everything to connect her with us, but she had zero role with us. It just looks like she attended some events and took some pictures.”

In China, however, pictures can be an end unto themselves, giving an appearance of influence. Pictures with famous people are especially valued in the country, where personal relationships and connections carry special weight in business and politics.

Mother Jones on Saturday detailed Yang’s efforts to provide Chinese clients access to Trump and his circle.

The Miami Herald on Saturday reported that Yang arranged for a large group of Chinese business executives to attend a paid fundraiser for Trump in New York City at the end of 2017. Only citizens and permanent residents are allowed to donate to U.S. political campaigns, and it would be illegal for foreign nationals to pay back a U.S. citizen who had purchased their tickets to a fundraiser.

A Republican fundraiser told the AP on Sunday that patrons attending a Republican National Committee dinner at Mar-a-Lago last year noticed a large contingent of Chinese attendees. There was a discussion afterward about making sure they were vetted, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The Herald on Friday also published a photo of Yang with Trump at a Super Bowl party at his West Palm Beach country club and reported on the link between Yang and the spa where New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was charged with soliciting prostitution. Yang was a former owner of the spa.

Yang wasn’t charged in a multiagency anti-human trafficking operation that resulted in 25 arrests, including Kraft’s, and shut down 10 Asian day spas in South Florida last month. None of the spas is registered to Yang or her family. She sold the Jupiter spa to Hua Zhang around 2013. Zhang was charged with racketeering and running a house of prostitution and has pleaded not guilty.

Yang’s family still owns several South Florida spas.

___

Schneider contributed from Orlando, Florida. Associated Press writer Zeke Miller in New York contributed to this report.

Israel’s Stranglehold on American Politics

The Israel lobby’s buying off of nearly every senior politician in the United States, facilitated by our system of legalized bribery, is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. The lobby’s campaign of vicious character assassination, smearing and blacklisting against those who defend Palestinian rights—including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine—is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. Twenty-four state governments’ passage of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. The shameless decision in 2014 by all 100 U.S. senators, including Bernie Sanders, to pass a Soviet-style plebiscite proposed by the Israel lobby to affirm Israel’s “right to defend itself” during the 51 days it bombed and shelled homes, water treatment plants, power stations, hospitals and U.N. schools in Gaza, killing 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children, is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. The U.S. refusal, including in the United Nations and other international bodies, to criticize Israel’s apartheid state and routine violation of international law is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. The well-funded campaigns by the Israel lobby, which works closely with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, to discredit any American politician or academic who even slightly deviates from Israeli policy is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. (One infamous example of a U.S. politician kowtowing was the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement.) The massive interference in our internal affairs by Israel and the Israel lobby, far exceeding that of any other country, including Russia or China, is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact.

Israel’s lackeys in the political class, along with bankrupt courtiers in the U.S. press, including former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employee Wolf Blitzer, are making a serious mistake, however, in refusing to acknowledge Israel’s outsized, transparent and often illegal meddling in the American political system and Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestinians. It is too obvious and too egregious to hide. The longer the ruling elites ignore this reality and censor and attack those such as Rep. Ilhan Omar who have the temerity to name this interference and the human rights abuses perpetrated by Israel, the more it gives credence to the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and white hate groups, many rooted in the Christian right, who are the real anti-Semites. Israel and its lobby, rather than protecting Israel and Jews, are steadily nullifying their moral and ultimately political force.

Criticism of Israel and the ideology of Zionism is not anti-Semitic. Criticism of Israel’s influence and control over U.S. foreign policy, and of Israeli efforts to silence those who champion Palestinian rights, is not anti-Semitic. Criticism of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians or its dangerous campaign to orchestrate a war with Iran is not anti-Semitic. The more Israel and the Israel lobby abuse the charge of anti-Semitism, a charge the Israel lobby has leveled against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, among many others, the more they lose their effectiveness against the dangerous anti-Semites whose ranks are growing within the far right and across the Muslim world.

Israel and its lobby do not care if its political allies, including those in the Christian right and the Trump White House, possess warped and racist attitudes about Jews. The Christian right and many of those in the White House, while embracing Zionism, are also anti-Semitic. President Donald Trump has called neo-Nazis “very fine people” and once tweeted an illustration of Hillary Clinton against a background of hundred-dollar bills and with the Star of David superimposed near her face. The sole criterion of Israel and the Israel lobby in determining who to support and who to demonize is identifying who backs the far-right agenda of the apartheid state of Israel and who does not. Genuine anti-Semitism is irrelevant. For Israel, the world is divided along the fault line of Palestinian rights. Stand up for the Palestinians and you are an anti-Semite. Cheer their marginalization, oppression and murder and you are a friend of the Jews. Have Jewish leaders forgotten their own history? Anti-Semitism is wrong and dangerous not only because it is bad for the Jews, but because the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred, used by Israel and the lobby against critics, are bad for everyone, including the Jews and the Palestinians. You open this Pandora’s box of evils at your peril.

The interference by Israel in the American political system is amply documented, including in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby,” which Israel and its supporters managed to block from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy of which can be watched on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use huge cash donations to control the American electoral process and political system. The Israel lobby, lacking any plausible deniability, has remained stunningly silent about the film. The corporate press, in the face of pressure by the lobby, has ignored the documentary.

The series exposes the various machinations of the Israel lobby.

“We made sure that there were people [agents of the lobby] in every single congressional district,” M.J. Rosenberg, a former editor of the AIPAC policy journal Near East Report and now a critic of AIPAC, said in the film in an on-the-record interview with Al-Jazeera. “You call [politicians] and say, ‘I’m calling from AIPAC in Washington.’ I did these calls. ‘We hear you’re good friends with Congressman So and So.’ ‘Oh my God, yes, we’ve been friends with so and so.’ ‘Well, what does he think about Israel?’ ‘I never talked to him about Israel.’ ‘Well, can I come down and talk to you? And help you figure out a way to talk to him about Israel?’ ‘No, just tell me. What should I say? I’ll just tell him.’ ”

Craig Holman, who campaigns for lobbying reform with Public Citizen, is another participant in the film who denounced the Israel lobby’s fundraising practices.

“Right now our current [federal] contribution limit from any person to a candidate is $2,700,” Holman says. “That’s a lot of money. It can certainly buy … some gratitude with a lawmaker. But if you really want to add punch to that type of buying of favors, what you do is you get 50 or 100 people together at an event like this, all chipping in $2,700 and then you bundle it all together and hand the total amount to the lawmaker. At that point, we’re talking anywhere around a quarter-million dollars. So suddenly you’ve got a group of people with the same demand they want from the lawmaker, handing over a quarter of a million dollars. That buys a lawmaker.”

One of the fundraising events captured in the film was for Anthony Brown, a Democrat who successfully ran for Congress in Maryland in 2016.

“You strategically pick the ones who are in close races and [whom you] want to build relationships with,” David Ochs, the founder of HaLev and an activist for Israel, says in the documentary. “We want the Jewish community to go face to face in this small environment—50, 30, 40 people, and say, ‘This is what’s important to us.’ ”

“They’re actually buying these officeholders,” Public Citizen’s Holman says in the documentary. Speaking from the lobby’s point of view, he says “we’re chipping in all this money so we can hand over $100,000 or $200,000 to the officeholder so we can buy them.”

“What [the] group is doing to avoid that [federal] disclosure requirement is it isn’t taking money and putting it in its own account and then handing it over to the officeholder,” Holman says of the Israel lobby. “It’s just collecting credit card information and turning that over directly to the candidate. Therefore, it’s not violating the earmarking law and they’re not reporting this. All we can see on the campaign finance reports are the individuals who contributed. But there are no records on those campaign finance reports that they weren’t together in a bundling group who are all at this event. All we’d know is Person A gave $2,700; Person B gave $2,700. And we’d have no idea they’re working in tandem with each other.”

The Israel lobby also flies hundreds of members of Congress, often with their families, to Israel every year for lavish junkets at expensive resorts. These Congress members run up individual bills that frequently exceed $20,000. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 attempted to restrict lobbyists from offering paid trips lasting more than one day to members of Congress. But AIPAC, which has never been forced to register as a foreign agent, used its clout to insert a clause in the act to exclude so-called educational trips organized by charities that do not hire lobbyists. AIPAC is affiliated with such a charity, called the American Israel Education Foundation.

“It doesn’t have an office,” Holman says about the foundation. “It doesn’t have any employees. It’s just a tax form they [Israel lobby agents] file. Gives some dinners, gives some wonderful resorts to stay at, entertainment, all of which is packed up into one of these trips. It’s a very, very effective tool at influence peddling.”

The investment by Israel and is backers is worth it. The United States Congress in 2018 authorized a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade and has spent over $5.6 trillion during the last 18 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East.

“If you wander off the reservation and become critical of Israel, you not only will not get money, AIPAC will go to great lengths to find someone who will run against you,” John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” says in the documentary. “And they support that person very generously. The end result is you’re likely to lose your seat in Congress.”

The film focuses in part on former Rep. Jim Moran, who was in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1991 to 2015 and who was an open critic of the Israel lobby.

“They have questionnaires,” Moran says about AIPAC in the film. “Anyone running for Congress is [presented with a demand from AIPAC] to fill out a questionnaire. And they evaluate the depth of your commitment to Israel on the basis of that questionnaire. And then you have an interview with local people. If you get AIPAC support, then more often than not you’re going to win.”

“You are told that ‘Israel continues to be under siege from hundreds of millions of its neighbors who are Muslims and they hate Israel and Jewish people,’ ” Moran says. “You’re told, ‘They have only survived because of the United States, because of American politicians like you who support us.’ ”

“You realize it’s not just the money,” he goes on. “A number of concerned activists will send out postcards, make phone calls, they’ll organize. That’s the democratic process. They understand the democratic process.”

“They threaten,” M.J. Rosenberg says of the Israel lobby leaders’ response to elected officials who become critical of Israel. “They immediately threaten. Even if [politicians] know AIPAC can’t defeat them, AIPAC can make their lives more difficult. They can make sure that their next town meeting or something, some members of the Jewish congregation jump up and say, ‘But you’re anti-Israel!’ ”

Moran was targeted by the Israel lobby because he raised questions about the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Act, which authorized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Moran told a Jewish constituent at a town hall meeting in his district that “if the Jewish community was opposed to the war, I think that would make a difference” in whether the United States would invade Iraq. He was immediately accused by the Israel lobby of being an anti-Semite and fostering the belief that there was a Jewish conspiracy to push America into war.

“There was a conservative rabbi in my district who was assigned to me, I assume, by AIPAC,” Moran says. “He warned me that if I voiced my views about the Israeli lobby that my career would be over, and implied that it would be done through the [Washington] Post. Sure enough, The Washington Post editorialized brutally. Everyone ganged up.”

The film shows a screen shot of a 2003 headline in The Washington Post: “Sorry, Mr. Moran, You’re Not Fit For Public Office.” In following years there were a number of other negative commentaries.

In the film, Eric Gallagher, then with The Israel Project, tells the undercover reporter that AIPAC has a close relationship with the Washington Post editorial board.

Moran says, “The principal editorial board of the Post itself has been a very effective instrument because they have been able to maintain their credibility. It’s a great paper in every other way. Because they have such credibility, they’re extremely effective.”

“Both of my daughters married Jewish men,” Moran says. “My grandchildren are Jewish. Anybody who considers me an anti-Semite is ignorant.”

AIPAC, while it presents itself as an impartial supporter of Israel, has long been an arm of the Israeli right. It vehemently opposed the Oslo Accord and the peace process with the Palestinians engineered by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It poured money and resources into the 1992 Israeli election campaign to back Rabin’s political opponents in the Likud party. Rabin did not invite the leaders of the Israel lobby to his inauguration and, according to an aide in his office, referred to the leaders of the Israel lobby as “scumbags.” He repeatedly denounced the lobby as an impediment to Israel’s security and democracy.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz characterized Rabin’s remarks to American Jewish leaders during a visit to the United States as “brutal.” “You have hurt Israel,” the newspaper quoted Rabin as saying. “I will not allow you to conduct my dealings with the [U.S.] administration.”

Washington Jewish Week reported that Rabin told the AIPAC leadership, “You failed at everything. You waged lost battles. … You caused damage to Israel. … You’re too negative. … You create too much antagonism.”

The Israel lobby, after Rabin’s assassination in 1995 by a right-wing Jewish fanatic and the 1996 electoral victory by Likud under the leadership of Netanyahu, returned to the good graces of the Israeli government. The lobby, as Israel has lurched further and further to the right and adopted ever more overtly racist policies toward the Palestinians under Netanyahu, has become more intrusive in American political life. Israel’s apartheid state, racism and murderous assaults on unarmed Palestinians increasingly alienate many of its traditional supporters, including young American Jews. Israel, unable to justify its human rights abuses and atrocities, has opted for harsher forms of control including censoring, spying on and attacking its critics. It has pressured the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. It spreads the hate talk of Islamophobia, including by sponsoring the showing of the racist film “Unmasked Judeophobia” on college campuses on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The film argues that Muslims embrace a Nazi-like anti-Semitism and are seeking to carry out another holocaust against Jews. Nearly all American Muslims targeted by law enforcement since 9/11 were singled out for their outspokenness about Palestinian rights. Most of those arrested had no connection to al-Qaida, Hatem Bazian, lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies at UC Berkeley, says in the film—“no relationship whatsoever to what is called transnational terrorism.”

There are fractures in the Democratic Party, evidenced when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi faced a revolt by younger, more progressive members of the House over her proposal to pass an anti-Semitism resolution pushed by the Israel lobby and designed to shame Rep. Omar. A reworded resolution, one that did not please the lobby, was passed, condemning anti-Muslim bias and white supremacy and citing “African-Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, immigrants and others” victimized by bigotry.

Israel’s dominance of the Democratic Party is eroding. It is losing legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Israel’s tactics, for this reason, will become more vicious and underhanded. Its interference in the democratic process will be characterized less by an attempt to persuade and more by the use of money to ensure fealty to its policies, censorship, the enforcement of legally binding oaths in favor of Israel to blunt the BDS movement, and the kind of racist hate talk it unleashed against Rep. Omar. The lobby, as Rabin understood, was never a true friend of Israel.

Trump Budget Sets Up Another Battle Over Wall Funding

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is reviving his border wall fight, preparing a new budget that will seek $8.6 billion for the U.S-Mexico barrier while imposing steep spending cuts to other domestic programs and setting the stage for another fiscal battle.

Budget documents are often seen as just a starting point of negotiation, but fresh off the longest government shutdown in history Trump’s 2020 proposal shows he is eager to confront Congress again to reduce domestic spending and refocus money on his priorities. It calls for boosting defense spending and making $2.7 trillion in nondefense cuts.

Trump’s proposal, titled “A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First” and set for release Monday, “embodies fiscal responsibility,” said Russ Vought, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Vought said the administration has “prioritized reining in reckless Washington spending” and shows “we can return to fiscal sanity.”

Two administration officials confirmed that the border wall request was part of Trump’s spending blueprint for the 2020 budget year, which begins Oct. 1.

That document, which sets the stage for negotiations ahead, proposes increasing defense spending to $750 billion — and standing up the new Space Force as a military branch — while reducing nondefense accounts by 5 percent, with cuts recommended to safety net programs used by many Americans.

The plan sticks to budget caps that both parties have routinely broken in recent years and promises to come into balance in 15 years, relying in part on economic growth that may be uncertain.

The officials were not authorized to discuss budget details publicly before Monday’s release of the plan and spoke on condition of anonymity.

While pushing down spending in some areas, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the proposal will seek to increase funding in others to align with the president’s priorities, according to one official.

The administration will invest more than $80 billion for veterans services, a nearly 10 percent increase from current levels, including “significant” investments in rehabilitation, employment assistance and suicide prevention.

It will also increase resources to fight the opioid epidemic with money for prevention, treatment, research and recovery, the administration said. And it seeks to shift some federal student loan costs to colleges and universities.

By adhering to strict budget caps, Trump is signaling a fight ahead. The president has resisted big, bipartisan budget deals that break the caps — threatening to veto one last year — but Congress will need to find agreement on spending levels to avoid another federal shutdown in fall.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Trump’s budget “points a steady glide path” toward lower spending and borrowing as a share of the nation’s economy. He also told “Fox News Sunday” that there was no reason to “obsess” about deficits, and expressed confidence that economic growth would top 3 percent in 2019 and beyond. Others have predicted lower growth.

The border wall, though, remains a signature issue for the president and is poised to stay at the forefront of his agenda, even though Congress has resisted giving him more money for it.

Leading Democrats immediately rejected the proposal.

“Congress refused to fund his wall and he was forced to admit defeat and reopen the government. The same thing will repeat itself if he tries this again,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York. They said the money “would be better spent on rebuilding America.”

In seeking $8.6 billion for the wall, the budget request would more than double the $8.1 billion already potentially available to the president after he declared a national emergency at the border last month in order to circumvent Congress — although there’s no guarantee he’ll be able to use that money if he faces a legal challenge, as is expected. The standoff over the wall led to a 35-day partial government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history.

Along with border wall money, the proposed budget will also increase funding to increase the “manpower” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Customs and Border Patrol at a time when many Democrats are calling for cuts — or even the elimination — of those areas. The budget also proposes policy changes to end sanctuary cities, the administration said.

The budget would arrive Monday as the Senate readies to vote this week to terminate Trump’s national emergency declaration. The Democratic-led House already did so, and a handful of Republican senators, uneasy over what they see as an overreach of executive power, are expected to join Democrats in following suit. Congress appears to have enough votes to reject Trump’s declaration but not enough to overturn a veto.

Trump invoked the emergency declaration after Congress approved nearly $1.4 billion for border barriers, far less than the $5.7 billion he wanted. In doing so, he can potentially tap an additional $3.6 billion from military accounts and shift it to building the wall. That’s causing discomfort on Capitol Hill, where even the president’s Republican allies are protective of their power to decide how to allocate federal dollars. Lawmakers are trying to guard money that’s already been approved for military projects in their states — for base housing or other improvements — from being shifted to build the wall.

The wall with Mexico punctuated Trump’s campaign for the White House, and it’s expected to again be featured in his 2020 re-election effort. He used to say Mexico would pay for it, but Mexico has refused to do so.

___

Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in Palm Beach, Florida, contributed to this report.

Tape Appears to Show R. Kelly Sexually Abusing Girls

NEW YORK — A man who said he was cleaning out an old videotape collection found what he thought was a recording of R&B singer R. Kelly in concert, but instead turned out to show a man who appeared to be Kelly sexually abusing girls, he and his attorney said Sunday.

The man then turned the tape over to law enforcement, according to attorney Gloria Allred. She and her client, Gary Dennis, would not discuss the specifics of the tape during a news conference in New York. But Allred said it appears to show a separate incident from the 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse that Kelly faces in Chicago, though she acknowledged she could not be “100 percent certain” that the man in the tape is Kelly.

Steve Greenberg, an attorney for Kelly, noted that lack of certainty.

“The doubt here is self-evident, with reporting that the man on the tape kinda, sorta looks like R. Kelly,” Greenberg said Sunday in an email. “That doesn’t make it him. It is not him.”

The lawyer also said Kelly “denies that he is on any tape with underaged girls.”

“It is obviously now just open season on R. Kelly,” Greenberg said.

Dennis, an assistant at a nursing home, said he was cleaning out a box of old VHS tapes in his Pennsylvania home recently when he found the footage, on a tape that was labeled with Kelly’s name. Dennis said he has never met Kelly and doesn’t know how the tape came to be in his possession. He said that because the tape also has a sports game on it, he believes it may have come from a friend.

“To my shock and surprise, R. Kelly appeared to be on the tape, but not in concert,” Dennis said. “Instead he was sexually abusing underaged African-American girls.”

“I was disgusted and horrified when I saw that,” Dennis said.

Allred said they assume the girls in the video were underage because they didn’t appear to have developed.

The charges Kelly faces in Chicago are in connection to three girls and one woman. Prosecutors have said they have video of Kelly sexually abusing one of the girls.

Kelly has been trailed for decades by allegations that he victimized women and girls, and he was acquitted of child pornography charges in 2008 related to a tape that prosecutors said showed him having sex with a girl as young as 13. He and his attorneys have repeatedly denied allegations of sexual misconduct, and he has pleaded not guilty to the charges filed last month in Chicago. In an interview that aired Wednesday and Thursday on “CBS This Morning,” Kelly pleaded with viewers to believe that he never had sex with anyone under age 17 and never held anyone against their will.

Allred, who represents women who say they were abused by Kelly, said the tape from Dennis was turned over to law enforcement in the federal Eastern District of New York. She didn’t say why it went to that venue. A representative for the office declined to comment.

Allred encouraged anyone who was in possession of similar tapes to come forward, either to her or to law enforcement.

A Chicago police spokesman referred questions about Allred’s news conference to the prosecutors handling the case. That office did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

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Associated Press writer Corey Williams contributed to this story from Detroit.

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Check out the AP’s complete coverage of the investigations into R. Kelly.

The New York Times Has Been Sandbagging Bernie Sanders for Years

The New York Times (3/1/19) depicts Bernie Sanders making decisions for his own presidential campaign as a “desire for control.”

While the New York Times has been sandbagging Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.–Vermont) for years (Rolling Stone, 3/15/16), a recent headline: “Bernie Sanders Is Making Changes for 2020, but His Desire for Control Remains” (3/1/19) is a particularly overt example.

Unless one reads past the headline, which most Americans don’t, one is left wondering about what exactly Sanders desires to “control.” Is it the country? The media? When one actually digs into the Times’ article, written by Sydney Ember and Jonathan Martin, one quickly discovers that what Sanders desires to control is his own campaign, and that his oppressed victims were his highly paid media consultants, who quit because Sanders was “not willing to empower them.”

Left unreported by the Times were statements by the consultants themselves (CNBC, 2/26/19)  claiming that they were leaving on a “very positive note” over “differences in a creative vision,” and that they would be happy to assist his campaign again in the future. In the Times version, instead, we’re given anonymous sources described as “Democrats directly familiar with the episode” who give the impression the consultants were “enraged” over their “humiliation.”

It is difficult to see what the problem is here. Are campaigns controlled by media consultants necessarily better than those controlled by the candidates themselves? Why should bending to “the wishes of his current advisers” be considered a good thing? The Times doesn’t explain, perhaps hoping readers will just take away the hint that Sanders’ “controlling” nature might itself be deemed disqualifying.

Another theme throughout the Times report is the implied notion that Sanders’ candidacy is redundant. When the corporate media aren’t busy undermining Sanders’ popular political agenda by claiming that it’s too “radical” and “expensive,” they also try to undermine his candidacy from the opposite angle, claiming that Sanders is now hard to distinguish from other candidates because numerous other Democratic candidates “support the same policies that made him unique in 2016.” The financial industry, though, doesn’t seem to have much difficulty distinguishing Sanders from most other Democratic candidates, as reported by Politico (1/28/19):

Wall Street executives who want Trump out list a consistent roster of appealing nominees that includes former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California. Others meriting mention: former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, though few really know his positions.

Funny–Wall Street does not seem to have any trouble distinguishing between Bernie Sanders and most of his 2020 competition (Politico, 1/28/19).

Bankers’ biggest fear: The nomination goes to an anti-Wall Street crusader like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or Sanders. “It can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders,” said the CEO of another giant bank. “It has to be someone centrist and someone who can win.”

Though some other Democratic contenders have endorsed some of Sanders’ proposals,  such as Medicare for All, it’s not always clear what such endorsements mean. A report in The Hill (2/7/19) noted that while Booker and Warren are co-sponsors of Sanders’ Medicare for All bill, they are “also touting less drastic alternatives.” Harris as well said “she also supports smaller steps,” though Medicare for All is her “preference.”

While several candidates, including Sanders, have declared that they would not take corporate PAC money, most of these candidates are still heavily reliant on wealthy contributors: 62 percent of Gillibrand’s funding over a five-year period came in donations 0f $200 or more, as did 65 percent of Harris’s and 72 percent of Booker’s. In contrast, only 17 percent of Sanders’ campaign chest (and 30 percent of Warren’s) came from such large donations (Intercept, 4/27/18).

Perhaps we should worry less about Bernie Sanders’ “desire for control” over his own campaign, and worry more about corporate media’s desire for control over our political perceptions.

Norway’s Extremely Ambiguous Relationship to Oil

Norway is an extremely ambiguous actor when it comes to hydrocarbons. The Scandinavian country is Europe’s biggest oil producer, and some 20% of its national income derives from oil sales. At the same time, Norway recognizes the dangers of the climate crisis, and has moved to ban coal and promote electric vehicles.

Norway puts its oil income into a national sovereign wealth fund, one of the world’s major investors, with $1 trillion in assets. And the sovereign wealth fund has decided to pull its investments from oil exploration companies.

The fund will sell $7.5 billion in shares in 134 energy companies.

Despite the denials of Finance Minister Siv Jensen (who after all does not want to crash the value of the oil on which Norway still depends), this move is clearly a vote of no-confidence in the petroleum industry going forward. That is, petroleum will still be fueling automobiles and buses for another decade and a half and so has not suddenly become completely worthless. But the Norwegian investment officials are clearly signaling that there is no point in investing money in finding and developing new petroleum fields, and investing in these activities bears a large exposure to risk.

Norway itself puts huge tariffs on imported gasoline cars but not on electric vehicles, so that many Norwegians have bought Leafs and Teslas. As a new generation of affordable and longer-range EVs comes on line over the next few years, Norway will go entirely to electric transportation, ironically undercutting its own petroleum industry. About fifty percent of all new cars bought in Norway last year were electric or plug-in hybrids. By 2025, Norway’s government wants allnew cars to be zero emissions.

Since the government understands that going electric is around the corner, it also understands that looking out over the next decade to decade and a half, there is likely to be a crash in oil demand. And that crash will hit exploration companies first and foremost. Looking for new petroleum fields, including shale oil and fracking fields, five years from now will be like looking for Blockbuster video stores to invest in.

The refiners and distributors will be shrinking and looking to wind up operations, and to put their money into green energy instead. Not only will electrification of transportation kill oil but also governments will increasingly legislate against its uses, as the world’s climate emergency accelerates. Four years ago, I called investing in hydrocarbons for long-term income the Blockbuster Trap, and that is what the Norwegian fund is forestalling.

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First Time in Baghdad: Iran’s President to Visit Iraq

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s president is making his first official visit to Iraq this week as he faces mounting pressure from hard-liners at home in the wake of the Trump administration’s unraveling of the nuclear deal.

Hassan Rouhani’s trip — billed as “historic and noble” by his foreign minister — is meant to solidify ties between Shiite power Iran and Iraq’s Shiite led-government, a strong Tehran ally. It is also Iran’s response to President Donald Trump’s snap December trip to Iraq and the American president’s comments that U.S. forces should stay in Iraq to keep an eye on neighboring Iran, with which Iraq shares a 1,400-kilometer-long (870 miles) border.

At the time, Trump slipped into Iraq at night, without stopping in Baghdad, to greet U.S. service members at a base far from the Iraqi capital where he extolled the American troops’ fight against the Islamic State group.

Rouhani later mocked Trump’s visit, asserting that flying into Iraq under the cover of darkness meant “defeat” for the U.S. in Iraq and asking the U.S. president why he didn’t make an “open and official visit.”

“You have to walk in the streets of Baghdad … to find out how people will welcome you,” Rouhani said at the time.

Rouhani’s visit to Iraq will provide an opportunity for reaching “serious understandings” between the two neighbors, Iran’s top diplomat, Mohammad Javad Zarif told the official IRNA news agency from Baghdad, where he was preparing for Rouhani’s three-day visit that starts on Monday.

After meeting with Zarif, Iraq’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Ali al-Hakim in a press conference that the Iraqi and Iranian delegations discussed a series of memorandums of understanding that will be signed tomorrow in the fields of oil and gas, land transport, railways, agriculture, industry, health and regarding the central bank.

We hope that these understandings will lead to the reconstruction of Iraq.”

Al-Hakim also said that they’d discussed the Syrian conflict and Syria’s access to the Arab League, without elaborating.

Rouhani, who had visited Iraq privately before becoming president, had planned an official visit in 2016 but it was cancelled over unspecified “executive” problems.

This time, Rouhani, who is on a second four-year-term, is particularly vulnerable because of the economic crisis assailing the Iranian rial, which has hurt ordinary Iranians and emboldened critics to openly call for the president’s ouster.

Tehran sees the U.S. military presence at its doorstep in Iraq as a threat — one that could also undermine Iran’s influence over Baghdad.

Zarif alluded to that on Sunday, saying that any country which tries to interfere with the good Iran-Iraq relations would “be deprived of opportunities for itself.”

Iran also sees Iraq as a possible route to bypass U.S. sanctions that Trump re-imposed last year after pulling the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers.

Last year, Iran’s exports to Iraq amounted to nearly $9 billion. Tehran hopes to increase the roughly $13 billion volume in trade between the two neighboring countries to $20 billion. Also, some 5 million religious tourists bring in nearly $5 billion a year as Iraqis and Iranians visit Shiite holy sites in the two countries.

Under former dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq waged an eight-year war in the 1980s against Iran, a conflict that left nearly 1 million killed on both sides.

The Trump Administration’s Recklessness Knows No Bounds

Here’s the foreign policy question of questions in 2019: Are President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, all severely weakened at home and with few allies abroad, reckless enough to set off a war with Iran? Could military actions designed to be limited — say, a heightening of the Israeli bombing of Iranian forces inside Syria, or possible U.S. cross-border attacks from Iraq, or a clash between American and Iranian naval ships in the Persian Gulf — trigger a wider war?

Worryingly, the answers are: yes and yes. Even though Western Europe has lined up in opposition to any future conflict with Iran, even though Russia and China would rail against it, even though most Washington foreign policy experts would be horrified by the outbreak of such a war, it could happen.

Despite growing Trump administration tensions with Venezuela and even with North Korea, Iran is the likeliest spot for Washington’s next shooting war. Years of politically charged anti-Iranian vituperation might blow up in the faces of President Trump and his two most hawkish aides, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, setting off a conflict with potentially catastrophic implications.

Such a war could quickly spread across much of the Middle East, not just to Saudi Arabia and Israel, the region’s two major anti-Iranian powers, but Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the various Persian Gulf states. It might indeed be, as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani  last year (unconsciously echoing Iran’s former enemy, Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein) the “mother of all wars.”

With Bolton and Pompeo, both well-known Iranophobes, in the driver’s seat, few restraints remain on President Trump when it comes to that country. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, President Trump’s former favorite generals who had urged caution, are no longer around. And though the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution last month calling for the United States to return to the nuclear agreement that President Obama signed, there are still a significant number of congressional Democrats who believe that Iran is a major threat to U.S. interests in the region.

During the Obama years, it was de rigueur for Democrats to support the president’s conclusion that Iran was a prime state sponsor of terrorism and should be treated accordingly. And the congressional Democrats now leading the party on foreign policy — Eliot Engel, who currently chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Bob Menendez and Ben Cardin, the two ranking Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — were opponents of the 2015 nuclear accord (though all three now claim to have changed their minds).

Deadly Flashpoints for a Future War

On the roller coaster ride that is Donald Trump’s foreign policy, it’s hard to discern what’s real and what isn’t, what’s rhetoric and what’s not. When it comes to Iran, it’s reasonable to assume that Trump, Bolton, and Pompeo aren’t planning an updated version of the unilateral invasion of Iraq that President George W. Bush launched in the spring of 2003.

Yet by openly calling for the toppling of the government in Tehran, by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement and reimposing onerous sanctions to cripple that country’s economy, by encouraging Iranians to rise up in revolt, by overtly supporting various exile groups (and perhaps covertly even terrorists), and by joining with Israel and Saudi Arabia in an informal anti-Iranian alliance, the three of them are clearly attempting to force the collapse of the Iranian regime, which just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

There are three potential flashpoints where limited skirmishes, were they to break out, could quickly escalate into a major shooting war.

The first is in Syria and Lebanon. Iran is deeply involved in defending Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (who only recently returned from a visit to Tehran) and closely allied with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite political party with a potent paramilitary arm. Weeks ago, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu openly boasted that his country’s air force had successfully taken out Iranian targets in Syria. In fact, little noticed here, dozens of such strikes have taken place for more than a year, with mounting Iranian casualties.

Until now, the Iranian leadership has avoided a direct response that would heighten the confrontation with Israel, just as it has avoided unleashing Hezbollah, a well-armed, battle-tested proxy force.  That could, however, change if the hardliners in Iran decided to retaliate. Should this simmering conflict explode, does anyone doubt that President Trump would soon join the fray on Israel’s side or that congressional Democrats would quickly succumb to the administration’s calls to back the Jewish state?

Next, consider Iraq as a possible flashpoint for conflict. In February, a blustery Trump told CBS’s Face the Nation that he intends to keep U.S. forces in Iraq “because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is the real problem.” His comments did not exactly go over well with the Iraqipolitical class, since many of that country’s parties and militias are backed by Iran.

Trump’s declaration followed a Wall Street Journal report late last year that Bolton had asked the Pentagon — over the opposition of various generals and then-Secretary of Defense Mattis — to prepare options for “retaliatory strikes” against Iran. This roughly coincided with a couple of small rocket attacks against Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone and the airport in Basra, Iraq’s Persian Gulf port city, neither of which caused any casualties.  Writing in Foreign Affairs, however, Pompeo blamed Iran for the attacks, which he called “life-threatening,” adding, “Iran did not stop these attacks, which were carried out by proxies it has supported with funding, training, and weapons.” No “retaliatory strikes” were launched, but plans do undoubtedly now exist for them and it’s not hard to imagine Bolton and Pompeo persuading Trump to go ahead and use them — with incalculable consequences.

Finally, there’s the Persian Gulf itself. Ever since the George W. Bush years, the U.S. Navy has worried about possible clashes with Iran’s naval forces in those waters and there have been a number of high-profile incidents. The Obama administration tried (but failed) to establish a hotline of sorts that would have linked U.S. and Iranian naval commanders and so made it easier to defuse any such incident, an initiative championed by then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, a longtime opponent of war with Iran.

Under Trump, however, all bets are off. Last year, he requested that Mattis prepare plans to blow up Iran’s “fast boats,” small gunboats in the Gulf, reportedly asking, “Why don’t we sink them?” He’s already reinforced the U.S. naval presence there, getting Iran’s attention. Not surprisingly, the Iranian leadership has responded in kind. Earlier this year, President Hassan Rouhani announced that his country had developed submarines capable of launching cruise missiles against naval targets.  The Iranians also began a series of Persian Gulf war games and, in late February, test fired one of those sub-launched missiles.

Add in one more thing: in an eerie replay of a key argument George Bush and Dick Cheney used for going to war with Iraq in 2003, in mid-February the right-wing media outlet Washington Times ran an “exclusive” report with this headline: “Iran-Al Qaeda Alliance may provide legal rationale for U.S. military strikes.”

Back in 2002, the Office of Special Plans at Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, under the supervision of neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, spent months trying to prove that al-Qaeda and Iraq were in league. The Washington Times piece, citing Trump administration sources, made a similar claim — that Iran is now aiding and abetting al-Qaeda with a “clandestine sanctuary to funnel fighters, money, and weapons across the Middle East.”  It added that the administration is seeking to use this information to establish “a potential legal justification for military strikes against Iran or its proxies.” Needless to say, few are the terrorism experts or Iran specialists who would agree that Iran has anything like an active relationship with al-Qaeda.

Will the Hardliners Triumph in Iran as in Washington?

The Trump administration is, in fact, experiencing increasing difficulty finding allies ready to join a new Coalition of the Willing to confront Iran. The only two charter members so far, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are, however, enthusiastic indeed. Last month, Prime Minister Netanyahu was heard remarking that Israel and its Arab allies want war with Iran.

At a less-than-successful mid-February summit meeting Washington organized in Warsaw, Poland, to recruit world leaders for a future crusade against Iran, Netanyahu was heard to say in Hebrew: “This is an open meeting with representatives of leading Arab countries that are sitting down together with Israel in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran.” (He later insisted that the correct translation should have been “combating Iran,” but the damage had already been done.)

That Warsaw summit was explicitly designed to build an anti-Iranian coalition, but many of America’s allies, staunchly opposing Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear accord, would have nothing to do with it. In an effort to mollify the Europeans, in particular, the United States and Poland awkwardly renamed it: “The Ministerial to Promote a Future of Peace and Security in the Middle East.”

The name change, however, fooled no one. As a result, Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo were embarrassed by a series of no-shows: the French, the Germans, and the European Union, among others, flatly declined to send ministerial-level representatives, letting their ambassadors in Warsaw stand in for them.  The many Arab nations not in thrall to Saudi Arabia similarly sent only low-level delegations. Turkey and Russia boycotted altogether, convening a summit of their own in which Presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with Iran’s Rouhani.

Never the smoothest diplomat, Pence condemned, insulted, and vilified the Europeans for refusing to go along with Washington’s wrecking-ball approach. He began his speech to the conference by saying: “The time has come for our European partners to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.” He then launched a direct attack on Europe’s efforts to preserve that accord by seeking a way around the sanctions Washington had re-imposed: “Sadly, some of our leading European partners… have led the effort to create mechanisms to break up our sanctions. We call it an effort to break American sanctions against Iran’s murderous revolutionary regime.”

That blast at the European allies should certainly have brought to mind Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s disparaging comments in early 2003 about Germany and France, in particular, being leaders of the “old Europe.” Few allies then backed Washington’s invasion plans, which, of course, didn’t prevent war. Europe’s reluctance now isn’t likely to prove much of a deterrent either.

But Pence is right that the Europeans have taken steps to salvage the Iran nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In particular, they’ve created a “special purpose vehicle” known as INSTEX (Instrument for Supporting Trade Exchanges) designed “to support legitimate trade with Iran,” according to a statement from the foreign ministers of Germany, France, and Great Britain. It’s potentially a big deal and, as Pence noted, explicitly designed to circumvent the sanctions Washington imposed on Iran after Trump’s break with the JCPOA.

INSTEX has a political purpose, too. The American withdrawal from the JCPOA was a body blow to President Rouhani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, and other centrists in Tehran who had taken credit for, and pride in, the deal between Iran and the six world powers (the United States, France, Germany, Britain, Russia, and China) that signed the agreement. That deal had been welcomed in Iran in part because it seemed to ensure that country’s ability to expand its trade to the rest of the world, including its oil exports, free of sanctions.

Even before Trump abandoned the deal, however, Iran was already finding U.S. pressure overwhelming and, for the average Iranian, things hadn’t improved in any significant way. Worse yet, in the past year the economy had taken a nosedive, the currency had plunged, inflation was running rampant, and strikes and street demonstrations had broken out, challenging the government and its clerical leadership. Chants of “Death to the Dictator!” — not heard since the Green Movement’s revolt against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection in 2009 — once again resounded in street demonstrations.

At the end of February, it seemed as if Trump, Bolton, and Pompeo had scored a dangerous victory when Zarif, Iran’s well-known, Western-oriented foreign minister, announced his resignation. Moderates who supported the JCPOA, including Rouhani and Zarif, have been under attack from the country’s hardliners since Trump’s pullout.  As a result, Zarif’s decision was widely assumed to be a worrisome sign that those hardliners had claimed their first victim.

There was even unfounded speculation that, without Zarif, who had worked tirelessly with the Europeans to preserve what was left of the nuclear pact, Iran itself might abandon the accord and resume its nuclear program. And there’s no question that the actions and statements of Bolton, Pompeo, and crew have undermined Iran’s moderates, while emboldening its hardliners, who are making I-told-you-so arguments to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.

Despite the internal pressure on Zarif, however, his resignation proved short-lived indeed: Rouhani rejected it, and there was an upsurge of support for him in Iran’s parliament. Even General Qassem Soleimani, a major figure in that country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the commander of the Quds Force, backed him. As it happens, the Quds Force, an arm of the IRGC, is responsible for Iran’s paramilitary and foreign intelligence operations throughout the region, but especially in Iraq and Syria. That role has allowed Soleimani to assume responsibility for much of Iran’s foreign policy in the region, making him a formidable rival to Zarif — a tension that undoubtedly contributed to his brief resignation and it isn’t likely to dissipate anytime soon.

According to analysts and commentators, it appears to have been a ploy by Zarif (and perhaps Rouhani, too) to win a vote of political confidence and it appears to have strengthened their hand for the time being.

Still, the Zarif resignation crisis threw into stark relief the deep tensions within Iranian politics and raised a key question: As the Trump administration accelerates its efforts to seek a confrontation, will they find an echo among Iranian hardliners who’d like nothing more than a face-off with the United States?

Maybe that’s exactly what Bolton and Pompeo want.  If so, prepare yourself: another American war unlikely to work out the way anyone in Washington dreams is on the horizon.

Will the Corporate Media Retract Its Venezuela Lies?

The New York Times published a video on Saturday that disproves reporting by the U.S. establishment media that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s forces had set ablaze trucks filled with humanitarian aid. While U.S. officials and media parroted the story as a provocation of war, some independent journalists have argued for weeks that the story was false.

The claim that Maduro had burned aid on the Francisco de Paula Santander International Bridge on Feb. 23 was repeated and used as a way to catalyze support for further U.S. involvement in Venezuela. More politicians began to speak out in support of regime change. And as national security adviser John Bolton made clear, the U.S. is interested in Venezuela’s oil.

“U.S. news stars and think tank luminaries who lack even a single critical brain cell when it comes to war-provoking claims from U.S. officials took a leading role in beating the war drums without spending even a single second to ask whether what they were being told were true,” wrote Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept.

The detailed video published by The New York Times aligns with an earlier independent report. On Feb. 24, the day after the fire, The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal used several photographs and videos to show a “total lack of evidence of Venezuelan culpability.” The Times has now reported that opposition protesters accidentally lit a truck on fire with a Molotov cocktail.

Blumenthal rebutted the claim that Venezuelan forces had started the fire with tear gas: “I have personally witnessed tear gas canisters hit every kind of vehicle imaginable in the occupied Palestinian West Bank,” he wrote, “and I have never seen a fire like the one that erupted on the Santander bridge.”

At the same time, mainstream news outlets spread the lies. CNN reported that some of their journalists “saw incendiary devices from police on the Venezuelan side of the border ignite the trucks.” One of the reporters who worked on Saturday’s Times story, Nick Casey, tweeted on Feb. 24: “I think the more simple explanation is the right one: The oppo threw the rocks and the govt burned the trucks.”

The NY Times confirms my @GrayzoneProject reporting on the Venezuelan opposition burning US aid trucks & shows how everyone from @marcorubio to @AmbJohnBolton lied about it.

Read @ggreenwald on the twisted deception. (Unlike NYT, Glenn cited our work)https://t.co/SAU5CGnKnS

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 10, 2019

Greenwald pointed out that in the hours following the incident, other people “who use their brains to critically evaluate what the U.S. Government says when it’s trying to start a new war, rather than mindlessly recite those claims as Truth, as U.S. media stars do—used the exact same evidence cited by the NYT last night to show that it was anti-Maduro protesters, not Maduro troops, who set the trucks on fire.”

It’s also useful to consider what was at stake in the incident. The bigger picture here is that humanitarian aid—said to help a country put into poverty in part by U.S. sanctions—is a tool for military intervention. Last month, Adam Johnson explained for Truthdig how U.S. weapons have been disguised previously:

Since the Spanish-American War, the U.S. has used humanitarian concerns as a shield against criticism or skepticism, and it has more or less worked every time. It’s why “aid” organizations like Air America used food transports to ship guns to anti-Communists in Indochina in the 1960s and ’70s. (Weapons were code-named “hard rice.”) And it’s why Elliott Abrams—the current quarterback of this latest affair in Venezuela—used humanitarian aid shipments to smuggle weapons to Nicaragua’s Contras in the ’80s. Ultimately, these shipments allow for massive military buildups, without anyone in the media or Congress asking too many questions. After all, what kind of monster is opposed to helping starving people?

It’s impossible to know if the current shipments to Venezuela are being used to transport weapons, although Venezuelan authorities say they have intercepted American arms shipments. But given the history of the U.S. (to say nothing of Abrams’), and the fact that the Trump administration is openly calling for Maduro’s ouster while amassing forces along the Colombian border, it’s not exactly a long shot. Still, our political press dismisses the possibility as tin-foil hat stuff, at least in part because mocking wacky Latin American ‘conspiracy theories’ is a mark of one’s seriousness in foreign policy circles.