Chris Hedges's Blog, page 316

Facebook CEO Vows to Double Down on Privacy

SAN FRANCISCO—Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will start to emphasize new privacy-shielding messaging services, a shift apparently intended to blunt privacy criticisms of the company.

In effect, the Facebook co-founder and CEO promised to transform the service from a company known for devouring the personal information shared by its users to one that gives people more ways to communicate in truly private fashion, with their intimate thoughts and pictures shielded by encryption in ways that Facebook itself can’t read.

But Zuckerberg didn’t suggest any changes to Facebook’s core newsfeed-and-groups-based service, or to Instagram’s social network, currently one of the fastest-growing parts of the company. That didn’t sit well with critics.

“He’s kind of pulled together this idea that the thing that matters most to people is privacy between peers and one-to-one communication, ignoring completely the idea that people also value their privacy from Facebook,” said Forrester analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo.

Zuckerberg laid out his vision in a Wednesday blog post, following a rocky two-year period in which the company has weathered a series of revelations about its leaky privacy controls. That included the sharing of personal information from as many as 87 million users with a political data-mining firm that worked for the 2016 Trump campaign.

Since the 2016 election, Facebook has also taken flak for the way Russian agents used its service to target U.S. voters with divisive messages and for being a conduit for political misinformation. Zuckerberg faced two days of congressional interrogation over these and other subjects last April.

As part of his effort to make amends, Zuckerberg plans to stitch together its Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram messaging services so users will be able to contact each other across all of the apps.

The multiyear plan calls for all of these apps to be encrypted so no one could see the contents of the messages except for senders and recipients. WhatsApp already has that security feature, but Facebook’s other messaging apps don’t.

Zuckerberg likened it to being able to be in a living room behind a closed front door, and not having to worry about anyone eavesdropping. Meanwhile, Facebook and the Instagram photo app would still operate more like a town square where people can openly share whatever they want.

Creating more ways for Facebook’s more than 2 billion users to keep things private could undermine the company’s business model, which depends on the ability to learn about the things people like and then sell ads tied to those interests.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Zuckerberg said he isn’t currently worried about denting Facebook’s profits with the increased emphasis on privacy.

Sacramento Police Who Killed Stephon Clark Won’t Be Charged

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California’s attorney general announced Tuesday that he won’t charge two Sacramento police officers who fatally shot an unarmed black man last year, joining a local prosecutor in finding that the officers reasonably believed Stephon Clark had a gun as he moved toward them.

Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced the results of a nearly yearlong investigation after telling Clark’s mother privately. He acknowledged that it was not what Clark’s family wanted but said the evidence showed the officers had reason to believe their lives were in danger, though investigators found only a cellphone. SeQuette Clark did not comment Tuesday on Becerra’s findings.

“There is a lot of hurt in this community today and certainly in the home of the Clark family,” Becerra said. “Our investigation can’t change what has happened, but we can make every effort to deliver a fair, thorough and impartial review, which we promised this community.”

Clark, 22, was suspected of vandalism when he was shot seven times on March 18, 2018, and his killing prompted protests in California’s capital city and across the U.S.

New demonstrations followed Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert’s decision this weekend not to charge the officers, with 84 people arrested Monday. A reporter from The Sacramento Bee newspaper was briefly detained while live-streaming the protest, and clergy members were among those arrested. The police said the gathering in a wealthy Sacramento neighborhood was an unlawful assembly and that cars had been keyed.

People who had participated said at Tuesday’s City Council meeting that police were overly aggressive, pushing and sometimes striking protesters and ramming them with bikes. The Rev. Kevin Kitrell Ross said officers trapped protesters as they tried to leave before arresting them.

“We witnessed law enforcement trap us on a bridge as we raised our hands showing that we were in surrender,” he said.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg called for an independent investigation into police’s response to the protest, and police Chief Daniel Hahn said the department was reviewing body camera footage. Police spokesman Marcus Basquez said no protesters were taken to the hospital.

The City Council meeting grew tense as people shared their reactions to the arrests. Steinberg shut the meeting down for about 15 minutes amid shouting.

With the conclusion of the state and local investigations, U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott and Sean Ragan, who heads the FBI’s Sacramento office, said they and the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division will review the results to see whether the officers violated Clark’s civil rights. Such reviews are standard practice, Scott spokeswoman Lauren Horwood said.

Sacramento police said they will decide after Scott’s investigation concludes whether the officers violated any policies or procedures, which could result in their firings.

Officers Terrance Mercadal and Jared Robinet said they thought Clark was approaching them with a gun after he ran from them into his grandparents’ backyard.

The officers had been pursuing Clark after receiving calls about someone breaking car windows and an elderly neighbor’s sliding glass door. The attorney general and district attorney said the evidence showed Clark was advancing toward the officers holding what they thought was a gun when they shot him.

Clark could have kept fleeing through an opening at the other side of the backyard, Becerra said, but instead advanced from about 30 feet (9 meters) away from the officers to about 16 feet (5 meters) away before they opened fire.

Attorneys for Clark’s family say an autopsy they commissioned found that police shot Clark seven times from behind.

Becerra said his office hired the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office to conduct an independent review, which backed the official autopsy showing that Clark was most likely shot as he approached police.

The attorney general said he considered evidence that Clark had drugs and alcohol in his system and had been fighting with his fiancee in the days prior to the shooting.

But while the local district attorney highlighted those factors during her announcement Saturday, drawing protests that she was impugning Clark’s character, Becerra said they were not key to his decision.

Becerra, who called for changes in law enforcement practices to prevent other shootings, said there was plenty of evidence to support his conclusion. Still, he said it was not an easy decision.

“There’s a young man who’s no longer alive,” Becerra said. “Two sons who won’t have a father. Whose mother I just met is still grieving. Of course it was a tough call. These are all tough calls. It’s never easy.”

The case has led top state officials to support changes to California’s legal standard for when police can use deadly force.

Lawmakers have revived a measure introduced after Clark’s slaying that would make California the first state to allow police to use deadly force only when it’s necessary to prevent imminent and serious injury or death and if there’s no reasonable alternative, such as warnings or other methods.

Strong opposition from law enforcement agencies stalled it last year.

Becerra was vague about what reforms he would support but said change was needed. He did not endorse specific legislation.

“This incident reads like the bitterly familiar passages of a long, complicated and uninviting book,” he said. “We must all be willing to write the next chapters in this story of what we call American justice.”

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Associated Press writers Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento and Christopher Weber and Brian Melley in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Mind-Altering, Ketamine-like Drug OK’d for Severe Depression

WASHINGTON — A mind-altering medication related to the club drug Special K won U.S. approval Tuesday for patients with hard-to-treat depression, the first in a series of long-overlooked substances being reconsidered for severe forms of mental illness.

The nasal spray from Johnson & Johnson is a chemical cousin of ketamine, which has been used for decades as a powerful anesthetic to prepare patients for surgery. In the 1990s, the medication was adopted as a party drug by the underground rave culture due to its ability to produce psychedelic, out-of-body experiences. More recently, some doctors have given ketamine to people with depression without formal FDA approval.

The Food and Drug Administration approved Spravato as a fast-acting treatment for patients who have failed to find relief with at least two antidepressants. Up to 7.4 million American adults suffer from so-called treatment-resistant depression, which heightens the risk of suicide, hospitalization and other serious harm, according to the FDA.

The drug will cost between $590 and $885 depending on the dosage and before various insurance discounts and rebates.

There have been no major pharmaceutical innovations for depression since the launch of Prozac and related antidepressants in the late 1980s. Those drugs target the feel-good brain chemical serotonin, and can take weeks or months to kick in.

Ketamine and J&J’s version work differently than those drugs, targeting a chemical called glutamate that is thought to restore brain connections that help relieve depression.

When the drug works, its effect is almost immediate. That speed “is a huge thing because depressed patients are very disabled and suffer enormously,” said Dr. John Mann, a psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University. If the drug doesn’t work, physicians can quickly switch to other options, he noted.

The FDA approved Spravato, known chemically as esketamine, based on study results that showed patients taking the drug experienced a bigger improvement in their depression levels than patients taking a sham treatment, when measured with a psychiatric questionnaire.

The drug is designed to be lower-dose and easier to use than ketamine, which is normally given as an intravenous infusion.

Robin Prothro, 60, began taking antidepressants more than 20 years ago. But she says none of the five medications she tried relieved the depression that has stymied her personal and professional life.

Since enrolling in a Spravato trial two years ago, Prothro says her depression has lifted and she’s returned to hobbies she abandoned years ago, like gardening.

She takes the drug every two weeks at her psychiatrist’s office while reclining in a comfortable chair.

“You can feel it coming on, it’s a strong drug,” she said, describing colors and shapes that drift before her eyes. “I just let the drug work. I close my eyes and my mind is amazingly quiet.”

PSYCHEDELICS RECONSIDERED

The ketamine-like drug is the first of several psychoactive substances making their way through the U.S. regulatory process as physicians search further afield for new therapies. Researchers are conducting late-stage trials of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, and MDMA, a euphoria-inducing club drug, as potential treatments for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Substantially different agents are only rarely appearing from pharmaceutical companies or other laboratories,” said Dr. Paul Summergrad, a psychiatrist at Tufts University. “That’s prompting people to investigate other compounds.”

Unlike ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA have no legal medical use. Classified in the same category as heroin and LSD, they are tightly restricted by the federal government. But the FDA’s approval of esketamine could smooth their path.

BURDEN OF DEPRESSION

Depression is among the leading causes of disability in the U.S. and is being closely monitored by health authorities amid rising suicides nationwide. In 2017, the U.S. suicide rate rose to 14 deaths per 100,000 people, the highest rate in at least 50 years, according to federal records.

Government officials haven’t suggested an explanation for the trend, though academic researchers point to the nation’s widening income gap, financial struggles and divisive politics.

J&J’s drug will be subject to a number of restrictions due to its abuse potential, side effects and lingering safety questions.

The drug will only be given by accredited specialists who must monitor patients for at least two hours after administration, due to its trippy, disorienting effects. Additionally, all patients will be tracked in a registry to monitor long-term safety and effectiveness.

The immediate impact of ketamine is thought to last just four to seven days and there’s no consensus yet on how long patients can benefit from ongoing treatment.

Still, there are few other options for patients who fail to respond to antidepressants. The most effective treatment in such cases, electroshock therapy, requires patients to be fully sedated and can cause persistent memory loss.

Wall Street has high expectations for J&J’s medication, with analysts predicting more than $600 million in annual sales by 2022. But J&J will face competition in the marketplace.

A decades-old drug, ketamine is already used off-label to treat depression by some doctors. At least 150 clinics around the U.S. provide treatment with various forms of the drug, which is available as a low-cost generic. Patients often pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for intravenous infusions of the drug over several weeks or months. Such therapies are generally not covered by insurance because they haven’t been approved as safe and effective by FDA regulators.

Some doctors plan to offer both ketamine and the new J&J drug.

Dr. Steve Levine says having FDA-approved standards for dosing and administering the new drug should raise standards in the field and drive out some of the bad actors who are not qualified to treat depression.

“This is going to bring in some standards, regulation and it’s going to make it safer and more accessible to patients,” said Levine, who serves as vice president of the American Society of Ketamine Physicians, a group representing doctors, nurses and others using ketamine for treating depression or other nonapproved uses.

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AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner contributed to this story.

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Follow Matthew Perrone on Twitter at @AP_FDAwriter.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Colorado, Baker End Legal Spat Over Transgender Woman’s Cake

DENVER — A Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple on religious grounds — a stance partially upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court — and state officials said Tuesday that they would end a separate legal fight over his refusal to bake a cake celebrating a gender transition.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and attorneys representing Jack Phillips said they mutually agreed to end two legal actions, including a federal lawsuit Phillips filed accusing the state of waging a “crusade to crush” him by pursuing a civil rights complaint over the gender transition cake.

Phillips’ attorneys dubbed the agreement a victory for the baker. Weiser, a Democrat, said both sides “agreed it was not in anyone’s best interest to move forward with these cases.”

The agreement resolves every ongoing legal dispute between the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in suburban Denver and the state. Weiser’s statement said it has no effect on the ability of the Denver attorney who filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission to pursue her own legal action.

The attorney, Autumn Scardina, told the commission that Phillips refused last year to make a cake that was blue on the outside and pink on the inside for a celebration of her transition from male to female.

She asked for the cake on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would consider Phillips’ appeal of a previous commission ruling against him. In that 2012 case, he refused to make a wedding cake for same-sex couple Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the commission showed anti-religious bias when it sanctioned Phillips. The justices did not rule on the larger issue of whether businesses can invoke religious objections to refuse service to gays or lesbians.

Weeks later, the commission found probable cause that Phillips had discriminated against Scardina because she is transgender and ordered them to find a solution through mediation. Phillips then filed a federal lawsuit against the commission, citing his belief that gender “is given by God … and cannot be chosen or changed.”

Both sides notified a federal judge on Tuesday that Phillips’ lawsuit was being dropped and each party would pay for their own costs and attorney fees.

“We hope that the state is done going along with obvious efforts to harass Jack,” said Jim Campbell, an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom. “He shouldn’t be driven out of business just because some people disagree with his religious beliefs and his desire to live consistently with them.”

The conservative Christian nonprofit law firm represented Phillips in the U.S. Supreme Court case and the latest dispute.

Weiser said the commission unanimously voted to dismiss its administrative action against Phillips.

“The larger constitutional issues might well be decided down the road, but these cases will not be the vehicle for resolving them,” Weiser said in a statement. “Equal justice for all will continue to be a core value that we will uphold as we enforce our state’s and nation’s civil rights laws.”

It wasn’t immediately known if Scardina, the Denver attorney, planned further action involving Phillips. Telephone messages for Autumn Scardina and for Todd Scardina, an attorney representing Autumn in the civil rights commission proceedings, weren’t immediately returned Tuesday.

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Associated Press writers James Anderson and Colleen Slevin contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to reflect the Supreme Court ruling came in June, not July.

Global Warming Is Here—Just Ask Fishers

Global warming has already begun to affect fishing worldwide as fish flee warmer seas, a new study says.

In the last 80 years, there has been an estimated drop of more than 4% in sustainable catches for many kinds of fish and shellfish. That is the average. In some regions – the East China Sea, for instance, and Europe’s North Sea –  the estimated decline was between 15% and 35%.

In the course of the last century, global average temperatures have crept up by about 1°C above the average for most of human history, as a reaction to the unconstrained burning of fossil fuels. If the world continues to burn ever-greater volumes of coal, oil and natural gas, it could be 3°C warmer or more by the end of the century.

Last year was only the fourth warmest for air surface temperatures, but the warmest since records beganfor the world’s oceans.

“Fisheries around the world have already responded to global warming. These aren’t hypothetical changes some time in the future”

US researchers report in the journal Science that they looked at the impact of ocean warming in 235 populations of 124 species of fish, crustaceans and molluscs in 38 ecological regions between the years 1930 and 2010.

They then matched the world data on fish catches with ocean temperature maps to estimate what warming has done to the sustainable catch – that is, the biggest haul fishing crews can make without reducing breeding stocks for the seasons to follow.

“We were stunned to find that fisheries around the world have already responded to global warming,” said Malin Pinsky of Rutgers University, and one of the authors. “These aren’t hypothetical changes some time in the future.”

The researchers found that some species in some climate zones actually benefited from warming, and fish with faster life cycles sometimes responded well, sometimes badly to the temperature changes. Some responded by shifting their geographical range.

More climate losers

But overall, said Christopher Free, once of Rutgers and now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, “among the populations we studied, the climate losers outweigh the climate winners.”

And his colleague Olaf Jensen, also from Rutgers, said: “Fish populations can only tolerate so much warning, though. Many of the species that have benefited from warming so far are likely to start declining as temperatures continue to rise.”

Fishermen off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland, in the Baltic, the Indian Ocean and the northeast US shelf may have seen more productive hauls of fish. But the biggest losses were in the Sea of Japan, the North Sea, off the Iberian coast and the Celtic-Biscay shelf.

Many fish species are adapted to a precise range of temperatures: they flourish not just in specific marine ecosystems but in thermal niches as well. Once things begin to change, they swim away or perish.

Marauding invaders

Fishermen in the North Atlantic have repeatedly observed changes in the available catch, as the cod shift north and the sardines migrate from increasingly uncomfortable warm waters. Warming in Mediterranean waters creates enticing conditions for invaders from the Red Sea and further south, at huge cost to the resident species.

The lesson is that fish stocks must be carefully conserved, and ocean reserves protected. Researchers have consistently warned that global warming and climate change – especially when combined with changes in ocean water chemistry as a consequence of carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere – could soon start to constrain an important source of nutrition: an estimated 3.2 billion people rely on the sea for an estimated 20% of their animal protein, especially in East Asia.

“This means 15% to 35% less fish available for food and employment in a region with some of the fastest-growing human populations in the world,” said Dr Free.

“Knowing exactly how fisheries will change under future warming is challenging, but we do know that failing to adapt to changing fisheries productivity will result in less food and fewer profits relative to today.”

What Anti-Semitism Really Looks Like

Weeks ago, when the first accusations of anti-semitism were being leveled against Representative Ilhan Omar, I was deeply agitated.

Not long ago I saw her address these accusations at a local town hall. She reminded the world that, as a Black Muslim woman in America, she knows what hate looks like — and spends her life laboring against it. Her words were clear, bold, and unflinching.

When members of Congress not only continued to gang up and falsely smear Omar as anti-semitic, but even created a House Resolution painting her words as hateful, I wasn’t just agitated. I was absolutely disgusted.

Omar has criticized the U.S. government’s support for Israeli actions that break international law. And she’s spoken out against the role money in politics plays in shoring up that support.

Neither is anti-semitic.

What is anti-semitic is the cacophony of mainstream media and politicians saying that criticizing U.S. policy toward the state of Israel is the same as attacking Jewish people.

Like most American Jewish youth, I grew up knowing Israel. During holidays, I sang prayers about Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. In Hebrew school, I learned about the country’s culture, its cities, its past prime ministers. At my Jewish summer camp, we started every day with the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah.

My image of Israel was a rosy one. When I finally visited it in college, I was spellbound by the lush landscapes and sparkling cities, certain I would one day move to this golden ancestral home myself.

All this emotional buildup made it all the more sickening when, in the years that followed, I learned the realities of the Israeli occupation.

The modern state of Israel was established by Zionists — a nationalist movement started by European Jews with the aim of creating a “Jewish state” as a refuge for persecuted Jews.

It’s true that Jews have faced centuries of brutal persecution in Europe. But the Zionists’ project shared unmistakably European colonialist roots.

In 1948, Israel’s war of independence led to the Nakba, an invasion driving 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. These Palestinians were never allowed to return, creating a massive refugee population that today numbers over 7 million.

While I was able to travel freely up and down Israel, the Palestinians who once lived there are legally barred from returning. While I wandered the marketplaces trying stews and shawarmas, Palestinians in Gaza can’t afford even the gas to cook their food because of the Israeli blockade.

Zionism didn’t create an inclusive Jewish refuge either. In fact, the diverse Mizrahi — or Arab — Jewish population that was already thriving in Palestine was pushed out of Israeli society as Ashkenazi — or European — Jews became the elite class.

What it did create is an imperialist stronghold that continues to break international law by building settlements deeper and deeper into Palestinian territory, giving Jewish Israelis superior legal status to Arab Israelis and Palestinians, and attacking all who protest.

Since Israel’s origin, the U.S. has supplied tens of billions of dollars of military aid and ardent political support. Congress consistently ignores dozens of UN resolutions condemning Israeli abuses, and year after year gives it more resources to violently oppress impoverished Palestinians.

Pro-Israel lobbying groups’ considerable political influence has even pushed Congress to consider bills punishing Americans who support Palestinian rights. (Around half of all states already have such laws.)

More broadly, they rely on villainizing critics with false claims of antisemitism — especially when the criticism comes from a person of color, as we’ve seen with Angela Davis, Marc Lamont Hill, and Michelle Alexanderbefore Rep. Omar.

I, along with an increasing number of young American Jews, want to discuss U.S. support of Israel. Talking foreign policy is not anti-semitism.

What is anti-semitic — always — is saying that all Jews support violence and imperialism.

Solving the Border and China Problems in One Swell Foop

Call me crazy, if you want, but I think I see how to do it!

We have two intractable issues, one intractable president, and an intractable world, but what if it weren’t so? What if those two intractable problems could be swept off the table by a single gesture from that same intractable man?

As a start, consider the problem of President Trump’s embattled “great, great wall,” the one to be built across 1,000 (or is it 2,000?) miles of our southern border, the one that so obsesses him, filling every other hour of his tweet-storming day, the one that a recalcitrant Mexican government refused to pay for, that Congress wouldn’t pony up the money for, and that striking percentages of Americans don’t want to fund either. As for turning it into a national emergency, that’s only going to line the pockets of law firms, not build the “big, fat, beautiful wall” of his dreams. But what if there were a simple solution, an easy-to-make deal that could solve his wall problem, while wiping the other intractable problem that goes by the name of China off the map of American troubles?

Wouldn’t that be a geopolitical magic trick of the first order, the art of the deal on a previously unimaginable scale? If your answer is yes, as it would almost have to be, then here’s the amazing thing: just a little fresh thinking in Donald Trump’s Washington could make it so.

Great, Great Walls in History

With that in mind, let me begin with China and show you just how it could be done. First, a simple question: Historically speaking, what country has had the greatest success building great, great walls? It’s a no-brainer, right?

I mean, how long is China’s famed Great Wall? Not a mere couple of thousand miles, but more like 13,000 of them (as Donald Trump himself has, in the past, pointed out). Admittedly, the idea of that wall — if not the actual set of walls built at different moments in history — was initially conceived of in 220 BC by Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China. And here’s the remarkable thing: the construction of various versions of his wall continued, on and off, for almost 2,000 years, into the mid-seventeenth century. Urban legends aside, China’s Great Wall is not visible to the naked eye from space, but it’s no less impressive for that. It was meant to keep out the nomadic peoples of the Asian steppes and other “barbarians” who might threaten the empire. Admittedly, as will undoubtedly be true of Trump’s future great wall (if it’s ever built), China’s version kept out far less than was advertised. Otherwise, there would never have been either a Mongol or a Manchu dynasty, both founded by invading groups from outside the wall.

Still, that country’s Great Wall is a monument to the building and engineering skills of a remarkable imperial power and, even in the twenty-first century, remains a tourist magnet. (More than 10 million people visit it annually.) That, in turn, should appeal to the Donald Trump we all now know so well, the man who clearly would, in the fashion of the Qin emperor, like his name to be highlighted in the history books a couple of thousand years from now. You know, the guy who is eternally eager to give the thumb (“You’re fired!”) to anyone not willing to make it so (which, of course, means just about everyone).

At the moment, he and his men are deep in a fierce trade war, escalating tariff battles, high-pressure negotiations, and various kinds of semi-militarized struggles with China, a country that, alone on the planet, has a special relationship to great walls. Now, do me a favor: keep all of that in the back of your mind for a moment, while I move on to some history that’s a little closer to home.

When it comes to the building of monumental infrastructure of the most tangible sort (rather than that of the virtual world), what country on this planet would you normally look to? In the 1950s or 1960s, it would, of course, have been the United States. In those decades, from superhighways to airports, this country was the planet’s infrastructure-building powerhouse.

Almost half a century later, though, it’s quite another story. In 2017, for instance, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a D+ on a “report card” it issued. From dams to roads, levees to drinking-water systems, airports to public transit, the situation could hardly have been more dismal. Imagine this: the highest grade, a “B,” went to “rail” in a country that has yet to build a single high-speed mile of it (and whose only significant high-speed line in the late planning stages, the one that was to run between San Francisco and Los Angeles, now seems to be going down). China, on the other hand, already has 15,500 miles of high-speed rail and far more planned for the future.

In reality, Americans simply don’t invest in infrastructure any more. Our airports generally have a third-world feel to them, our rail lines are sagging, public transportation is generally a joke, highways potholed, and few in Washington seem to give a damn. As of 2019, despite moments of Trumpian braggadocio about a supposed $1.5 trillion infrastructure investment plan — largely a scam that has yet to arrive in Congress — the only kind of infrastructure still getting attention is, of course, the president’s great wall to nowhere. And if it ever does get started, you might think twice about letting American companies loose on it, given their lack of recent experience with infrastructure construction. All of which leads me back to China.

The Belt, Road, and Wall Initiative?

The president is now knee deep in a trade war with China that couldn’t be more threatening. His tariffs (and the tariffs that country slapped on American goods in return) have already hitthe Chinese economy in ways that could, in the long run, destabilize it. If so, in what’s still a distinctly global economy, the U.S. would undoubtedly be clobbered, too.

Now, add in just one more thing: unlike the United States, twenty-first-century China has launched what could prove to be the greatest global infrastructure project of all time. I’m thinking of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a projected series of pipelines, rail lines, highways, ports, and the like that Beijing is intent on helping finance and construct across much of Eurasia and Africa at an initial cost of more than $1 trillion and, in the future, up to $8 trillion. It’s a plan meant to span 64 countries, potentially linking significant parts of the global economy directly to Beijing for decades to come.

Given all of the above, here’s my suggestion to you, Mr. President: make this country the first in the Americas to join that project. In the process, you would, of course, insist on relabeling it the Belt, Road, and Wall Initiative, or even the Donald J. Trump Belt, Road, and Wall Initiative. You would then simply take those punitive tariffs and that trade war of yours off the table in return for one simple thing: the twenty-first century’s empire of infrastructure, that land of Great Walls, would have to take full responsibility, at a cost of between $25 billion and $70 billion, for fulfilling your promise to your base and building that long-ballyhooed great wall of yours along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Admittedly, you continue to claim that your wall is already being built, but of course it isn’t. Not a mile of it. And given the morass of court cases and other roadblocks likely to follow your recent national emergency declaration, that could be the situation for the rest of your term, during which you, your family, and the wall could all find yourselves locked in a myriad of court struggles. And yet, with a single decision you could instantly create a planet on which the two largest economies were no longer at war and a truly great, great wall, one to boggle even your imagination, might indeed be built, its parapets emblazoned with your name in giant gold letters. That future Chinese wall in North America, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, might even be the first wall on the planet truly visible to the naked eye from space.

Imagine for a moment if, in election campaign 2016, you hadn’t so vociferously and repeatedly assured that base of yours that the Mexicans would pay for your wall. After all, had you known your history a little better, you would have realized that Mexico lost most of its wall-building moxie in its post-Aztec incarnation. But what if, from the very beginning, you had called upon China to pay for and construct the wall instead? Had you done so, much that has been tense and threatening to the global economy (not to speak of the possibility of a future World War III) might have been avoided. Still, even on this increasingly absurd planet of ours, it’s not too late for you to decisively move in another direction.

Were you to do so, it would instantly be the deal of at least the century and you would be the dealer of perhaps any century. Of course, it goes without saying that, given the historical record, you would have to grant the Chinese another 2,000 years to complete the greatest wall of all.

Lawsuit: Trump Family-Planning Rule ‘Politicizes’ Medicine

A new Trump administration rule for family-planning grants could trigger a national public health crisis, the American Medical Association and Planned Parenthood said in a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the rule.

The new rule, announced last week by the Department of Health and Human Services, would prohibit family planning clinics funded by the federal Title X program from making abortion referrals — a provision that critics denounce as a “gag rule.”

Clinics that receive Title X grants also would be barred from sharing office space with abortion providers — a requirement that would in many cases boost costs for providers like Planned Parenthood that offer abortions and other services, including family planning.

The result of the rule, if implemented, “will be a national public health crisis in short order,” the lawsuit said.

“Pregnancies that are unintended, and thus riskier, will increase. The number of abortions will also increase. And there will be fewer tests for sexually transmitted infections and cancer screens — putting patients and their partners at great health risk,” the lawsuit said.

Planned Parenthood, which operates a nationwide network of health centers, says it will leave the Title X program if the rule is implemented, forgoing an estimated $60 million in annual funding rather than abide by the new restrictions.

Such an exit could have enormous impact: Planned Parenthood serves 1.6 million of the 4 million women who get care through Title X. The program, enacted in 1970, makes family-planning services available to low-income individuals for free or at low cost.

In the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene, Oregon, the AMA and Planned Parenthood contended that the new rule violates a congressional mandate that patients receiving information about their pregnancies through Title X must receive complete, unbiased information about their options. They argued that the ban on abortion referrals violates this mandate and unconstitutionally infringes on health care providers’ responsibilities to their patients.

“Because of the administration’s overreach and interference … physicians will be prohibited from having open, frank conversations with their patients about all their health care options,” said the AMA’s president, Dr. Barbara McAneny. “This blatant violation of patients’ rights under the Code of Medical Ethics is untenable.”

Leana Wen, a physician who is Planned Parenthood’s president, said a majority of the Title X patients served by her organization are low-income black and Hispanic women.

“Families that are struggling to make ends meet and people who live in rural areas must have the same access to full, unbiased information from their doctor as everyone else,” said Wen.

Wen stressed that Planned Parenthood, even if it left Title X, would continue to offer its full array of services, including birth control and screenings for sexually transmitted diseases and cancer. But it would not be able to maintain the level of free or low-cost contraception that was available via Title X.

The new Trump administration rule is scheduled to take effect in 60 days, but implementation is likely to be delayed by litigation. In addition to the AMA/Planned Parenthood lawsuit, the rule is being challenged in a lawsuit filed Monday by California officials and another filed Tuesday by officials in 20 other mostly Democratic controlled states. A lawsuit also is planned by the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents publicly funded family planning providers.

The Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services have declined comment on the lawsuits. HHS contends that the new rule “makes notable improvements designed to increase the number of patients served and improve the quality of their care.”

The AMA cited two primary motives for challenging the rule: to prevent infringement on the physician/patient relationship and to protect the integrity of Title X, which the AMA considers one of the most cost-effective federal health programs. Its grants totaled $286 million in the 2017 fiscal year.

The AMA has engaged previously in cases involving physician/patient communications. For example, it joined other medical organizations in successfully opposing a Florida law that barred doctors from discussing firearm risks and safety with their patients.

One of the concerns of the AMA and Planned Parenthood is that the new Title X rule may result in a shift of some money to ideologically conservative entities which favor abstinence education and natural family planning and which would be unwilling or unable to provide women with the most effective forms of contraception.

The new rule “blesses biased and incomplete pregnancy counseling where the interests of the patient are no longer paramount,” the lawsuit said. The rule “will politicize the practice of medicine and the delivery of health care.”

Abortion is a legal medical procedure, but federal laws prohibit the use of taxpayer funds to pay for the procedure except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the woman.

Religious conservatives and abortion opponents contend that Title X has been used to indirectly subsidize Planned Parenthood — the leading abortion provider in the U.S.

Groups such as the National Right to Life Committee have hailed the new rule, saying it does not cut funding, but “merely ensures that health facilities receiving Title X funds do not perform or promote abortion as a method of family planning.”

The Slandering of Ilhan Omar

Even though there is an actual member of Congress who has called himself “David Duke without the baggage” and the president peddles racist bigotry of all stripes, The Washington Post somehow found it journalistically appropriate on Monday to compare Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, to Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar. Omar, a Democrat who has criticized the relationship between Israel and the United States, spoke out recently about “ending oppression, or the freeing of every human life and wanting dignity” in light of Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians.

The piece was written by Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the far-right, Koch-funded Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank once led by Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s Venezuela envoy. Omar questioned Abrams last month over his role in human rights abuses and his conviction for lying to Congress. As House Democrats prepare to take floor action Wednesday, supposedly to condemn anti-Semitism, it seems worth revisiting the details of the statement in question.

The guy who wrote this, Henry Olsen, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy, whose former president is Elliott Abrams. Can't make this shit up https://t.co/HUKVZBQ0bW

— Naomi LaChance (@lachancenaomi) March 4, 2019

Last week, in a talk at a Washington, D.C., bookstore, Omar discussed her concern about Palestinians’ human rights as well as the close U.S.-Israel relationship:

“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country. I want to ask why is it OK for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, of the fossil fuel industries, of big pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobbying group that is influencing policy?”

Her statement was condemned by many to her right. Nathan Goldman wrote at The Baffler that “The claim that the statement was anti-Semitic rests upon the word ‘allegiance,’ which pundits have spent the past week torturing with dim-witted hermeneutics.”

The other key word in Omar’s phrase is “people.” Those who are outraged seem confident that Omar was discussing Jews. Given the second sentence, though, it seems likely that she was discussing pro-Israel lobbyists and politicians, who often are not Jewish: none of the top five recipients of pro-Israel money during the 2018 election cycle are. New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez is Catholic; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is a Baptist; Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown is Lutheran; South Dakota Sen. Tammy Baldwin does not have a religious affiliation and Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke is Catholic. Juan Vargas, a Democratic congressman from California who tweeted that “questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable,” is Catholic. There is a strong faction of evangelical Christians who believe that they, not Jews, hold claim to Jerusalem because of a religious prophecy about the apocalypse.

At the bookstore, Omar also discussed her experience as one of the first two Muslim members of Congress, along with Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib. “We get to be called names and we get to be labeled as hateful? No, we know what hate looks like. We experience it every single day.”

No one can deny that Omar has endured a great deal of hateful Islamophobia. The FBI is investigating an event where someone wrote “Assassinate Ilhan Omar” in a gas station bathroom in Minnesota. A poster at the State Capitol in West Virginia falsely associated Omar with the 9/11 attacks.

At the same time, no one should deny the very palpable anti-Semitism that exists in the U.S. As Mehdi Hassan points out at The Intercept, Trump and members of the Republican Party have pushed conspiracy theories that Jews are power hungry and money obsessed. One man who bought into Trump’s “globalist” hoax shot and killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and other House Democrats’ resolution condemning anti-Semitism—offered in response to Omar’s comments—mentions the massacre, which begs a question of intention that Goldman articulates at The Baffler:

After all, if concern with rising anti-Semitism was the true impetus for this House resolution, why wasn’t it introduced much earlier? The resolution’s brief history of American anti-Semitism culminates with the October 2018 attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue that left eleven Jews dead by the hand of a white supremacist. But why was the moment of this tragedy, which the text admits was “the deadliest attack on Jewish people in the United States,” not the time to unite against anti-Semitism? It’s particularly craven to allow this incident to sit side-by-side with an analysis of the dual loyalty canard in a condemnation of Omar, as if her words have anything to do with the rising white supremacy that actually endangers Jews.

Former NYC Mayor Bloomberg Won’t Run for President in 2020

WASHINGTON — Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor, announced Tuesday that he will not join the crowded field of Democrats running for president in 2020.

Instead, Bloomberg said he planned to focus his energy and considerable resources on outside efforts aimed at defeating President Donald Trump, as well as on combating climate change and addressing gun violence.

Bloomberg spent months weighing a White House run, traveling to early voting states and building a team of experienced political advisers. But aides said internal polling suggested Bloomberg’s path to the Democratic nomination was narrow, particularly if Vice President Joe Biden — who shares some of Bloomberg’s moderate positions — decides to run.

In an editorial for Bloomberg News — the media company Bloomberg owns — he said he was “clear-eyed about the difficulty of winning the Democratic nomination in such a crowded field.”

Bloomberg has flirted with a presidential run before, but as an independent. He registered as a Democrat last fall and began pitching himself to primary voters as a political centrist. But as an older white man with strong ties to Wall Street, he may have struggled to win over the Democratic Party’s energized liberal base that’s increasingly embracing diversity.

He encouraged Democrats on Tuesday to unify behind a nominee who could beat Trump, a not-so-subtle dig against candidates pushing the party to embrace liberal priorities such as “Medicare-for-all.”

“It’s essential that we nominate a Democrat who will be in the strongest position to defeat Donald Trump and bring our country back together,” he wrote. “We cannot allow the primary process to drag the party to an extreme that would diminish our chances in the general election and translate into ‘Four More Years.'”

Bloomberg aides said Biden’s likely White House run was a factor in the mayor’s decision. The team’s internal polling showed that there is an opportunity for a moderate, like Bloomberg or Biden, to win the Democratic primary, but there wasn’t room for both.

Biden may not announce his final decision until April. But Bloomberg concluded that was too long to wait to make his own decision, and he informed advisers on Monday that he would not be running for the White House.

Bloomberg does plan to keep his political network together as he considers how to play a role in the 2020 election from the outside. He’s working with several top advisers to former President Barack Obama, including David Plouffe, the architect of Obama’s 2008 campaign, data guru Dan Wagner and Mitch Stewart, Obama’s battlefield-states director.

Aides said Bloomberg believes Trump’s fundraising prowess is underestimated and the eventual Democratic nominee will need significant support from outside forces, particularly if the primary contest drags well into 2020.

Bloomberg invested more than $100 million to help Democrats in the 2018 midterm election; his team has quietly been preparing a data-driven effort to go much further in 2020. While the effort would have supported Bloomberg’s presidential bid had he ran, it will now be used to help Democrats defeat Trump.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is now the only candidate in the 2020 race putting climate change front and center in his campaign, but he declined to speculate Tuesday at a campaign stop in Iowa on whether Bloomberg’s departure from the field would boost his bid.

“Whether we were in the same race or he is doing work as a private citizen, I know we will be allied in some sense eventually, one way or another, because he has just been so visionary on this for such a long period of time,” Inslee said. “So I look forward to working with him one way or another.”

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Associated Press writer Alexandra Jaffe in Ames, Iowa, contributed to this report.