Chris Hedges's Blog, page 319

House to Query 60 Trump Officials in Obstruction Probe

WASHINGTON—Declaring it’s “very clear” President Donald Trump obstructed justice, the chairman of the House committee in charge of impeachment says the panel is requesting documents Monday from more than 60 people from Trump’s administration, family and business as part of a rapidly expanding Russia investigation.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the House Judiciary Committee wants to review documents from the Justice Department, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. and Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg. Former White House chief of staff John Kelly and former White House counsel Don McGahn also are likely targets, he said.

“We are going to initiate investigations into abuses of power, into corruption and into obstruction of justice,” Nadler said. “We will do everything we can to get that evidence.”

Asked if he believed Trump obstructed justice, Nadler said, “Yes, I do.”

Nadler isn’t calling the inquiry an impeachment investigation but said House Democrats, now in the majority, are simply doing “our job to protect the rule of law” after Republicans during the first two years of Trump’s term were “shielding the president from any proper accountability.”

“We’re far from making decisions” about impeachment, he said.

In a tweet on Sunday, Trump blasted anew the Russia investigation, calling it a partisan probe unfairly aimed at discrediting his win in the 2016 presidential election. “I am an innocent man being persecuted by some very bad, conflicted & corrupt people in a Witch Hunt that is illegal & should never have been allowed to start – And only because I won the Election!” he wrote.

Nadler’s comments follow a bad political week for Trump. He emerged empty-handed from a high-profile summit with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un on denuclearization and Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, in three days of congressional testimony, publicly characterized the president as a “con man” and “cheat.”

Newly empowered House Democrats are flexing their strength with blossoming investigations. A half-dozen House committees are now probing alleged coordination between Trump associates and Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 election, Trump’s tax returns and possible conflicts of interest involving the Trump family business and policy-making. The House oversight committee, for instance, has set a Monday deadline for the White House to turn over documents related to security clearances after The New York Times reported that the president ordered officials to grant his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s clearance over the objections of national security officials.

Nadler’s added lines of inquiry also come as special counsel Robert Mueller is believed to be wrapping up his work into possible questions of Trump campaign collusion and obstruction in Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. In his testimony, Cohen acknowledged he did not witness or know directly of collusion between Trump aides and Russia but had his “suspicions.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on Sunday accused House Democrats of prejudging Trump as part of a query based purely on partisan politics.

“I think Congressman Nadler decided to impeach the president the day the president won the election,” McCarthy said. “Listen to exactly what he said. He talks about impeachment before he even became chairman and then he says, ‘you’ve got to persuade people to get there.’ There’s nothing that the president did wrong.”

“Show me where the president did anything to be impeached…Nadler is setting the framework now that the Democrats are not to believe the Mueller report,” he said.

Nadler said Sunday his committee will seek to review the Mueller report but stressed the investigation “goes far beyond collusion.”

He pointed to what he considered several instances of obstruction of justice by the president, including the “1,100 times he referred to the Mueller investigation as a ‘witch hunt'” as well Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI director James Comey in 2017. According to Comey, Trump had encouraged the then-FBI director to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Trump has denied he told Comey to end the Flynn probe.

“It’s very clear that the president obstructed justice,” Nadler said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has kept calls for impeachment at bay by insisting that Mueller first must be allowed to finish his work, and present his findings publicly — though it’s unclear whether the White House will allow its full release.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who chairs the House intelligence committee, on Sunday also stressed that it’s too early to make judgments about impeachment.

“That is something that we will have to await Bob Mueller’s report and the underlying evidence to determine. We will also have to look at the whole body of improper and criminal actions by the president including those campaign finance crimes to determine whether they rise to the level of removal from office,” Schiff said.

Nadler and McCarthy spoke on ABC’s “This Week,” and Schiff appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

___

Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

___

Follow all of AP’s Trump Investigations coverage at https://apnews.com/TrumpInvestigations

A Doctor Explains Why Medicare for All Is a No-Brainer (Video)

Amid mounting excitement over new Medicare for All legislation unveiled this week, Dr. Adam Gaffney took on a panel of skeptics at Fox Business Network on Friday, delivering a widely celebrated argument for why U.S. lawmakers need to heed the growing public demands to replace private for-profit health insurance with a national single-payer system.

“Guys, you MUST watch this,” tweeted Briahna Joy Gray of The Intercept. In the nine-minute segment, she said, Gaffney “makes one of the best cases for single payer I’ve ever seen.”

Guys, you MUST watch this. @awgaffney absolutely BODIES these Fox news pundits and makes one of the best cases for single payer I’ve ever seen.https://t.co/mPvZWxe85A

— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) March 2, 2019

Noting that every other highly developed nation has universal healthcare, Gaffney pointed out to the panel that “overall, the healthcare systems of these countries are quite high quality. Overall, they have higher life expectancies than we do; they have lower infant mortality… Overall, these nations achieve better results with less money.”

Asked why a free market system for healthcare can’t work “like it does with auto insurance,” he said:

A true free market in healthcare is something… no civilized nation would ever accept. You’d have people literally dying on the street because they couldn’t afford the care. You can’t have a free market in healthcare when you think something is a right… that people should have healthcare by virtue of being a human being, then you cannot leave it to the free market. That means that people who can afford it get it and everybody else suffers.

I work in an intensive care unit. I’ve seen people come in with life-threatening complications ’cause they couldn’t afford care… I don’t want to see that anymore, and we need, as a nation, to decide that that’s not going to be acceptable.

Gaffney is an instructor at Harvard Medical School, and a pulmonologist and critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance. He also serves as president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), which advocates for implementing a single-payer healthcare system in the United States.

The Fox Business Network segment aired just days after Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2019. The bill has been praised as precedent-setting in terms of guaranteeing healthcare as a human right and is endorsed by PNHP.

In statement supporting Jayapal’s legislation and denouncing what critics often call “Medicare for Some” proposals, Gaffney said, “Accept no substitutes—only single-payer, Medicare for All can fix the grave dysfunctions and injustices of the American healthcare system.”

“Congress shouldn’t be distracted with incremental plans like a Medicare buy-in or public option,” he added. “The only way to achieve universal and comprehensive coverage is to eliminate the profits and waste of the private insurance industry, which drains hundreds of billions of dollars from our healthcare system each year.”

The current profit-driven system in the United States “is failing both physicians and patients,” Gaffney concluded. “We can do better. In fact, we have to: The health and future of our nation hangs in the balance.”

SKorea, U.S. End Springtime Military Drills to Back Diplomacy

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea and the U.S. are eliminating their massive springtime military drills and replacing them with smaller exercises in what they call an effort to support diplomacy aimed at resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis.

The decision announced by both countries Sunday came after President Donald Trump complained about the cost of joint drills even as his high-stakes second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam collapsed last week.

The drills’ cancellation is an olive branch to North Korea, which has viewed them as an invasion rehearsal. But it will likely raise worries about how the allies will maintain their readiness in the event that military tensions erupt again in the wake of the failed nuclear summit.

The Pentagon said in a release the U.S. and South Korean defense chiefs decided to conclude the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle series of exercises. It said the allies agreed to maintain firm military readiness through newly designed command post exercises and revised field training programs.

Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan and South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo “made clear that the alliance decision to adapt our training program reflected our desire to reduce tension and support our diplomatic efforts to achieve complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a final, fully verified manner,” the statement said.

Seoul’s Defense Ministry released a similar statement.

Jeong expressed his regrets at the lack of agreement at the Trump-Kim summit but still hopes that Washington and Pyongyang would continue negotiations, the South Korean statement said.

The new training, dubbed “Dong Maeng,” which means “alliance” in English, starts Monday through March 12. It will focus on “strategic operational and tactical aspects of general military operations on the Korean Peninsula,” South Korea’s military and the U.S.-South Korean combined forces command said in a joint statement.

According to U.S. officials, the new training will be done in smaller drills, tabletop exercises and simulations, and it will involve smaller units, such as battalions and companies rather than massive formations involving thousands of troops, as they had in the past.

Officials said the Pentagon will focus on smaller exercises and mission essential tasks, which include the ability to integrate airstrikes and the use of other weapons systems, drones, surveillance assets, logistics and communications.

Last November, a month before he resigned as defense secretary, Jim Mattis disclosed that the U.S. and South Korea would scale back and tone down the spring exercises. He said the aim was to avoid setting back diplomacy over North Korea’s nuclear weapons. He described it as a reorganization of the exercises, not an end to maneuvers on the peninsula.

Trump has long complained about the cost of military drills with South Korea.

After his second summit with Kim ended without any agreement in Hanoi on Thursday, Trump spoke again about the cost of annual military drills. “It’s a very, very expensive thing and we do have to think about that, too,” Trump told reporters.

Following his first summit Kim in Singapore last June, Trump caught many in the U.S. and South Korea by surprise by suspending the allies’ summertime military drills. He called joint drills “very provocative” and “massively expensive.”

The U.S and South Korea also have since suspended a few other smaller joint drills.

Trump has also pushed South Korea to increase its financial contribution for the cost of the 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in the country as deterrence against North Korea. He previously threatened to withdraw troops from South Korea and Japan if they refused to pay more.

The end of the springtime war games will benefit North Korea, which has responded with its own costly military exercises and weapons tests, including firing a new intermediate-range missile over Japan in 2017.

North Korea’s state media on Sunday didn’t immediately comment on the drills’ cancellation.

After the Hanoi summit, the U.S. and North Korea blamed each other for the breakdown of the talks. But both sides stopped short of pulling out of negotiations.

The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

___

Baldor reported from Washington.

Netanyahu’s Political Career Is Probably Not Over

Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit has announced that he will indict Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu on bribery and fraud charges. ‘

I think it should be underlined that two of the charges have to do with tampering with press coverage of the prime minister, which is to say, tampering with the Fourth Estate, one of the key elements of democracy.

Israeli politics are not truly democratic, in part because of the occupation of 5 million stateless Palestinians whose fates are decided by the Israeli military and political elite, and in part because of severe censorship of the press. But Netanyahu’s thuggish threats and sweetheart deals to manipulate press coverage of himself are on top of all that.

Corrupt US casino mogul Sheldon Adelson also played a sinister role in destroying Israeli democracy by funding a free newspaper that did cheerleading for Netanyahu. Since it was free, it hurt the business of the other newspapers and Netanyahu could use it to blackmail them by threatening that Adelson might print up more free issues, or could bribe them by pledging to have fewer free newspapers in circulation.

I wrote last December:

“One of the charges concerns the giant media company, Bezeq and the favors and tax breaks thrown to it by Netanyahu, who kept the Communications portfolio in his cabinet for himself.”

According to BBC Monitoring:

“Between the years 2012 and 2017 the prime minister and his aides intervened blatantly and continuously, and sometimes even daily, in the content published by the Walla news website. The intervention of the prime minister and his aides in the content and appointments [of editors and reporters] at the Walla website was meant to advance his personal interests, through publication of flattering articles and photos, removal of content critical of the prime minister and his family members, and so on.”

Netanyahu was also “accused by the police of attempting to do a deal with the owner of Yediot Aharanot, a major mass circulation newspaper. Its sales were being hurt by a free newspaper started by Netanyahu supporter Sheldon Adelson, Yisrael Ha-yom (Israel Today). Netanyahu suggested that Adelson could reduce his print run to help out Yediot Aharanot if only the latter would run more positive stories about Netanyahu and his far right Likud Party.”

The third charge is that Netanyahu received what were essentially bribes for favors from Arnon Milchan, an Israeli Hollywood film producer, and James Packer.

Netanyahu disputes all three charges.

A final indictment awaits a set of hearings where Netanyahu’s attorneys will make one last attempt to avert the indictment. This process won’t begin until after the next election, and could drag on for many months.

Some Israel watchers are convinced that the indictment will make no difference. Netanyahu’s right wing coalition may well win the 61 seats in parliament needed for a majority, and his far right wing Likud Party will likely be the largest party in the coalition. Netanyahu may well be reelected prime minister despite the charges.

Chernobyl’s Legacy Still Threatens Hundreds Thousands of Lives

The risk of an accident with civil nuclear power may be small, but when an accident does happen the impact may be immense, as a new book on Chernobyl’s legacy makes clear.

The nuclear industry promotes its technology as a key way of battling climate change. A nuclear reactor can supply vast amounts of energy; compared with coal, oil or gas-fired power plants there are few or no emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases.

But nuclear energy does have considerable drawbacks. A nuclear power plant costs many billions of dollars to build – and is even more expensive to decommission at the end of its working life.

Nuclear power plants have been around for decades, yet the problem of how to deal with vast stockpiles of highly dangerous waste is still there – a poisonous legacy for future generations.

And then there is the safety factor.

At 1.23 on the morning of 26 April 1986, engineers at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in western Ukraine, close to the border with Belarus, were carrying out a routine turbine and reactor shut-down test.

“As far as the engineers were concerned, the reactor and its panoply of safety systems were idiot-proof. No textbook they had ever read suggested that reactors could explode”

There was a sudden roar. “That roar was a completely unfamiliar kind, very low in tone, like a human moan”, said one of those present in the plant’s central control room.

Then there was a loud blast. Nobody knew what had happened; some thought there’d been an earthquake.

In his recently published study of events at Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy– now a professor of history at Harvard, but in 1986 a Ukraine resident – says no-one believed a nuclear reactor had fractured. Chernobyl used the latest Soviet technology. A nuclear accident was inconceivable.

The nuclear industry today, whether in Russia, China or the West, is similarly confident of its safety. “As far as they (the engineers) were concerned, the reactor and its panoply of safety systems were idiot-proof. No textbook they had ever read suggested that reactors could explode.”

Yet explode it did. A build-up of steam destroyed the reactor’s casing; a concrete structure weighing 200 tonnes that mantled the reactor was blown through the roof.

Obsessed with secrecy

Vast clouds of radiation escaped into the atmosphere, blown by winds first northwest over Belarus and on over much of Scandinavia and to as far away as the hills of Wales. Later the winds changed and carried the radiation east, over Ukraine itself.

Plokhy’s book is not the first on Chernobyl, but it is billed as the most up-to-date and extensively researched.

He details how the nuclear industry, which grew out of and alongside nuclear arms programmes, has always been obsessed with secrecy – in what was the Soviet Union, and elsewhere.

In 1957 there’d been a serious nuclear accident at a Soviet nuclear plant at Ozersk in the Ural mountains. The American military learned of the incident but decided not to disclose it to the public in the West.

“Both sides had a stake in keeping it under wraps so as not to frighten their citizens and make them reject nuclear power as a source of cheap energy”, says Plokhy.

Reports suppressed

The Soviet authorities at first denied – both to the West and to their own citizens – the scale of the disaster at Chernobyl. The KGB – the Soviet intelligence service – cut phone lines so people could not communicate what had happened, and toned down or suppressed scientists’ reports.

Several KGB agents succumbed to radiation poisoning as they crawled in bushes round the Chernobyl plant, guarding visiting officials against assassination attempts.

While many top officials showed scant regard for their own citizens’ safety, there were also many acts of great bravery. Divers swam through radioactive waters at the plant in order to manipulate submerged valves, knowing they would die as a result.

Scientists, firemen and helicopter crews did their work despite absorbing often lethal levels of radiation. Young conscripts in the Soviet military – most unprotected and not knowing what danger they were in – did much of the clean-up work at the plant.

Engineers working at Chernobyl became scapegoats for the explosion. Some were imprisoned. Some committed suicide. Others died of radiation sickness.

Frightened into silence

Plokhy says a combination of factors was to blame There were short cuts in construction at the plant. There was pressure to increase energy quotas. Testing procedures had not been followed. There were serious design faults.

Scientists and engineers frightened of losing their jobs knew there were faults but were reluctant to contradict their superiors.

The Soviet Union crumbled. There was a rush in the West to fund safety measures at Soviet-era reactors.

“The directors of the nuclear power companies in the West were in panic: another accident in the East could damage the reputation of nuclear power in the West beyond repair and potentially put them out of business.”

While deaths as a direct result of the explosion at Chernobyl were few, hundreds of thousands of people in what was the old Soviet Union have developed or are in danger of developing cancers and other diseases as a result of the explosion. Many thousands of square kilometres of land have been contaminated.

Unsafe for 20,000 years

Chernobyl is shut down and a giant metal sarcophagus now covers the fractured reactor.

The land around the plant will not be safe for human habitation for at least another 20,000 years. The costs of the explosion run into hundreds of billions of dollars.

Plokhy says we’re still just as far from taming nuclear reactions as we were in 1986; he questions whether safety measures will be followed completely in countries like Egypt, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, at present involved in nuclear programmes.

“Are we sure that all these reactors are sound, that safety measures will be followed to the letter, and that the autocratic regimes running most of these countries will not sacrifice the safety of their people and the world as a whole to get extra energy and cash to build up their military, ensure rapid economic development, and try to head off public discontent?

“That is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union back in 1986.”

Facebook’s Conveniently Inconsistent Approach to Government-Funded News

The statement of ownership In the Now was forced to run to be allowed back on Facebook.

There’s a famous polling experiment that asked people in the Cold War-era US:

Do you think the United States should let Communist newspaper reporters from other countries come in here and send back to their papers the news as they see it?

When this question was posed on its own, only 36 percent of respondents said yes. But a separate sample was first asked:

Do you think a Communist country like Russia should let American newspaper reporters come in and send back to America the news as they see it?

When the questions were asked together—reminding people that restrictions on press freedom could be placed on their own country’s journalists, as well as on those of an official enemy—support for allowing access to Communist reporters doubled to 73 percent. (Ninety percent said that US reporters should be allowed to report freely from Russia—suggesting that only a relatively narrow slice of the population openly subscribed to the principle of free speech for me but not for thee.)

I thought of this experiment when Rania Khalek (who’s written for FAIR) told me that the viral video company she works for, “In the Now,: was taken off Facebook because of its indirect connection to the Russian government. (A majority stake in In the Now’s parent company, Maffick Media, is owned by a subsidiary of RT—a Moscow-based media group that, although organized as a private entity, is funded by the Russian government.)

CNN (2/28/19) reported on Maffick‘s Russian backing, noting “Maffick‘s videos are generally critical of US foreign policy and the mainstream American media.”

Facebook suspended the page of “In the Now,” along with three other pages run by Maffick—the current affairs channel Soapbox, the environment-oriented Waste-Ed and the history-focused BackThen—after the social media giant was asked about the RT-connected pages by CNN. CNN (2/18/19), in turn, reported it was tipped off to the “In the Now”/RT connection by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a group based at US government–funded German Marshall Fund.

“In the Now” is back on Facebook again—after a ten-day suspension—and returned with this rather user-unfriendly description:

“In the Now” is a brand of Maffick which is owned and operated by Anissa Naouai and Ruptly GmbH, a subsidiary of RT.

That’s not particularly helpful if you want to know what “In the Now” does, of course, but disclosure is good, right? For the goose but not the gander, apparently: Among the US-funded institutions with Facebook pages are, well, the German Marshall Fund. Its description just reads, “Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation.” Will that page be taken down until the Fund acknowledges where its money comes from?

How about the PBS NewsHour, also funded by the US government? No mention of that on Facebook: Just, “On air and online, the PBS NewsHour provides in-depth analysis of the issues that matter to you.”

NPR’s Facebook page seems to go out of its way to conceal the fact that it’s US government–supported, calling itself “a privately supported, not-for-profit membership organization.” Maybe the P stands for “Private”?

Full-fledged propaganda services are not required by Facebook to reveal their government connections–if it’s a Facebook-approved government.

Even straightforward propaganda outlets of the US government don’t have to identify themselves as such on Facebook. Take Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, set up at the height of the Cold War to broadcast the US government’s version of reality behind the Iron Curtain—and still going strong almost 70 years later. Its “About” on Facebook reads:

Uncensored news. Responsible and open debate. Specialized coverage of Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, Caucasus, Iran, Balkans, South Asia, Eastern Europe.

For those who go the extra mile and click on “See More” under “Who We Are,” you do get this misleading semi-acknowledgement:

RFE/RL is registered with the IRS as a private, nonprofit Sec. 501(c)3 corporation, and is funded by a grant from the US Congress through the United States Agency for Global Media(USAGM) as a private grantee. RFE/RL‘s editorial independence is protected by US law.

Yes, RFE/RL is organized as a private entity—just like RT is. But just as the head of RT is also the head of the Russian state international news agency, the head of RFE/RL is appointed by the head of the USAGM—a government official picked by the president. That’s a funny kind of “independence.”

The Facebook page of Voice of America, the US government’s main broadcast outlet, is even squirrelier. There doesn’t seem to be any acknowledgement at all that VoA is connected to the US government—just the slogan, “The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth”; the claim that it has “the world’s most interesting stories”; and information on how you can “have the best of VoA News delivered directly to your inbox each day.”

If you’re thinking that Facebook—90 percent of whose customers are not in the United States—should treat Russian-backed outlets differently than US-backed outlets because the US supports peace and democracy, or doesn’t use social media to try to manipulate other nations…. Well, this is why it’s important to get your information from a variety of sources.

But it’s not just US outlets that get to conceal their government funding on Facebook. The BBCdoesn’t mention that it’s controlled and funded by the British government—only that its “mission is to enrich your life. To inform, educate and entertain.”

At Al Jazeera English’s Facebook page, you learn, “We are the voice of the voiceless”—not that they are owned by the monarchy of Qatar.

Facebook needs to have one rule for whether government-funded outlets need to disclose their connections. And it needs to apply that rule consistently.

Foes ‘Trying to Take Me Out With Bullshit,’ Trump Tells CPAC Faithful

OXON HILL, Md.—In a slashing speech packed with braggadocio and grievance, President Donald Trump denounced Democrats as the party of “the socialist nightmare,” relitigated his crowd sizes back to the inauguration and took on “sick,” ”lunatic” and “dirty” foes at every turn, earning him the unvarnished adoration of cheering conservatives Saturday.

After a trying week of tumult and setbacks, Trump delivered a stemwinder that extended beyond two hours and hardly left him winded.

Trump let loose against House Democrats, who are broadening their investigations of him, predicted he would win re-election by a greater margin than his 2016 victory, taunted his potential White House challengers and sounded themes that are staples of his rallies. He complained often of getting “no credit” for his achievements as he proudly drifted “off script” at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

His remarks capped a week that saw his nuclear summit with North Korea’s leader collapse without an agreement, his former lawyer deliver damaging congressional testimony about his character and business practices and Congress take action to nullify his emergency declaration to secure money for the border wall that lawmakers have denied him.

On the stage, he was a prideful and at times profane figure as he complained that political foes are “trying to take me out with bullshit.” Trump reached back to old criticisms of his ex-attorney general, mocking Jeff Sessions’ southern accent. And he laced into the “New Green Deal or whatever the hell they call” the climate-change plan floated by some liberal Democrats that Trump showcased as creeping socialism.

It took him more than an hour to get to the message that Republicans and members of his administration have been spreading in recent weeks as they brand Democratic policy ideas as socialism.

“America will never be a socialist country,” he said. “Socialism is not about the environment, it’s not about justice, it’s not about virtue.” He said it’s about “power for the ruling class.”

For every prepared line like that, there were multiple improvisations from a president on policy and personality.

“That’s how I got elected — by being off script,” Trump said as the crowd roared its approval.

He took particular delight in going after the Democrats’ Green New Deal, brought forward by some liberal Democrats in Congress and backed to varying degrees by several of the party’s 2020 presidential candidates.

“I think the New Green Deal or whatever the hell they call it — the Green New Deal — I encourage it,” Trump said mockingly as he wound up for a round of exaggeration. “I think it’s really something that they should promote. They should work hard on it. … No planes, no energy. When the wind stops blowing that’s the end of your electric. Let’s hurry up. Darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.”

Trump continued to bask in his 2016 victory and the crowds that attend his events. He talked of how few gave him a chance to win.

“I think we’re going to do even better in 2020,” Trump said. “I think we’re going to see numbers we haven’t seen in a long time.”

When he made his prediction of a second term, the crowd responded with chants of “USA, USA, USA.”

He also took a lengthy detour back to his inauguration, claiming that an enormous if not unprecedented crowd showed up, contrary to the thorough video and photo coverage that showed otherwise.

Trump claimed that as president he was “reversing decades of blunders and betrayals” by those who preceded him in office.

“These are serious, serious betrayals to our nation and everything we stand for,” Trump said. “It’s been done by the failed ruling class that enriched foreign countries at our expense. It’s wasn’t America first. In many cases, it was America last.”

With special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation seemingly approaching its end, Trump spoke of the “collusion delusion” and lashed out at newly empowered House Democrats who are opening new inquires involving him.

“This phony thing,” Trump said of the Russia probe, “looks like it’s dying so they don’t have anything with Russia there, no collusion. So now they go in and morph into ‘Let’s inspect every deal he’s ever done. We’re going to go into his finances. We’re going to check his deals. We’re going to check’ — these people are sick.”

House Democrats are undertaking several broad new investigations that reach far beyond Mueller’s focus on Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign. So far, Mueller has not brought any public charges alleging a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia; the investigation continues.

Their efforts increased this past week after Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, appeared before two House committees and a Senate committee. In his public testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Cohen called the president a “con man” and a “cheat” and gave Democrats several new leads for inquiry.

Scientists Look to Young Forests to Absorb Carbon Emissions

LONDON—For forests, it really does help to be young. British scientists who have identified the vital factor that shows what makes a forest a good carbon sink say young forests use carbon best and absorb it most efficiently.

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences seems on the face of it to settle an old puzzle with an unsurprising answer. New and young forests make the most efficient and effective carbon sinks.

Humans burn fossil fuels and emit vast quantities of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The felling, burning and clearing of natural forest releases ever more carbon.

But green plants absorb CO2 to make tissue and turn the gas into root and branch, leaf and bark, trunk and fruit. So scientists, led by Tom Pugh of the University of Birmingham in England, addressed the question: what kind of forest is best as a carbon sink?

They gathered data about forest age, devised computer models and looked at the estimates of carbon intake between 2001 and 2010 in old, long-established areas of forest. Then they looked at the data from younger stands of timber that had colonised areas once logged, or damaged by forest fire, or farmed and then abandoned.

They identified an age effect in stands of timber less than 140 years old: big enough to account for 25% of forest carbon uptake from the atmosphere.

And although the great tropical rainforests are regarded as the “lungs” of the planet, and invaluable resources and homes for biodiversity, in fact the most efficient carbon dioxide consumers were forests in the middle and high latitudes: these included areas of land once farmed in the US eastern states, and then left to become part of the U.S. National Forest, and farmland abandoned during the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s.

The finding seems reasonable, if only because the carbon appetite that turns a sapling into a full-grown tree would seem to be more demanding than that of mature or very old trees. But nothing about the notorious “carbon budget problem” is simple.

Uncertain Response

It is an axiom of global response to climate change that forests should be protected and restored. But the nature and the mechanisms of forest carbon uptake can be difficult to establish.

In theory forests may absorb around a third of all carbon emissions, but the way trees could respond to the extra carbon dioxide available is still not certain.

As carbon dioxide ratios in the atmosphere increase, the planet warms and climates change: it could be possible for some forests, some of the time, to actually release more carbon than they absorb.

And while it might seem obvious that young trees would be greedier than old ones, precise measurement of the forest giants doesn’t necessarily tell the same story. Although the importance of forests is not in question, researchers keep making the point that forests are not enough.

Drastic Cuts Needed

Humans must still find ways to drastically cut fossil fuel use, and greenhouse gas emissions. But as of 2019, there is no sign that this is happening.

But the latest research confirms the value of some investments. It suggests that the vast reforestation programs launched in China, and the huge boreal forests of Canada, Russia and Europe, are playing an important role in climate management.

“It’s important to get a clear sense of where and why this carbon uptake is happening, because it helps us make targeted and informed decisions about forest management,” Dr Pugh said.

“The amount of CO2 that can be taken up by forests is a finite amount; ultimately reforestation programs will only be effective if we simultaneously work to reduce our emissions.”

Sacramento Cops Who Shot Stephon Clark Won’t Face Charges

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—The two Sacramento police officers whose fatal shooting of an unarmed black man last year prompted nationwide protests will not face criminal charges, prosecutors announced Saturday.

Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said Officers Terrance Mercadal and Jared Robinet used lethal force lawfully. The officers have said they thought Stephon Clark, a vandalism suspect, had a gun but investigators found only a cellphone.

“We must recognize that they are often forced to make split-second decisions and we must recognize that they are under tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving circumstances,” Schubert said.

The city has been bracing for protests ahead of the decision, with business owners warned by a business association and state government workers told by legislative officials in recent days to stay away from downtown at least through the weekend.

Schubert said the decision not to file charges against the officers “does not diminish in any way the tragedy, the anger and the frustration that we heard since the time of his death.”

She added: “We cannot ignore that there is rage within our community.”

Protests after the shooting were largely peaceful but disrupted downtown professional basketball games and freeway traffic.

Clark’s family, including his two sons, his parents and his grandparents, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in January seeking more than $20 million from the city, Mercadal and Robinet, alleging that the officers used excessive force and that he was a victim of racial profiling.

One of the officers who shot Clark is black and the other is white, police said.

Passions were more inflamed by conflicting autopsy results.

Police said Clark was facing officers when he was killed, moving forward with his arms extended and an object in his hands.

Police video of the shooting does not clearly capture all that happened after Clark ran into his grandmother’s backyard.

It shows him initially moving toward the officers, who are peeking out from behind a corner of the house, but it’s not clear whether he was facing them or that he knew the officers were there when they opened fire after shouting “gun, gun, gun.” The video shows Clark staggering sideways and falling on his stomach as the officers continue shooting.

Dr. Bennet Omalu, the pathologist whose study of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football players prompted the NFL to adopt new safety rules designed to prevent concussions, said the autopsy he conducted for the family showed police shot Clark seven times from behind.

The official autopsy made public later said Clark was most likely shot as he approached police, consistent with the officers’ story. The pathologist retained by the Sacramento County coroner said Omalu mistook an exit wound for an entry wound, leaving the impression that police first shot Clark from the back, though Omalu defended his conclusion.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is conducting his own investigation at the request of local officials.

Use-of-force experts have said there was little chance the officers would face criminal charges under court decisions that let officers use deadly force when they have a reasonable fear of being harmed. The standard makes it rare for officers to be charged after a shooting and rarer still for them to be convicted.

Clark’s shooting helped prompt pending state legislation that would allow police to use deadly force only if there is no reasonable alternative, including non-lethal force or efforts to calm the situation.

___

Associated Press writer Daisy Nguyen in San Francisco contributed to this report.

Bernie Sanders Launches 2020 Bid With Threats to Ruling Elite

Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders returned to Brooklyn, where he was born, to kick off his 2020 presidential campaign on Saturday. At Brooklyn College, where he spent his freshman year, Sanders emphasized progressive ideas of anti-bigotry, accountability for corporate greed and rights for the working class that have defined his political career and already pushed other Democratic hopefuls to the left.

“Thank you all for being part of a political revolution which is going to transform America,” he said. The crowd applauded and began chanting his name: “Bernie! Bernie!”

“No, no, no, it is not Bernie; it is us together,” Sanders responded.

A frontrunner in a crowded Democratic field, Sanders has succeeded in pushing health care reforms, particularly Medicare-for all, from a fringe issue to a major 2020 litmus test. His push for a $15 minimum wage and support for unions comes as a wave of teacher strikes shows burgeoning labor strength.

Often hesitant to discuss his own background, Sanders told the crowd that his upbringing as the son of a lower-middle class Jewish immigrant from Poland informed his politics.

“I know where I came from, and that is something I will never forget,” he said.

Sanders went on to juxtapose his upbringing to Donald Trump’s: “I did not have a father who gave me millions of dollars to build luxury skyscrapers and casinos and country clubs. … But I had something more valuable: I had the role model of a father who had unbelievable courage in journeying across an ocean, with no money in his pocket to start a new and better life.”

Sanders has already seen unprecedented levels of small donations from supporters, something that fits with his message of opposition to elite control. In the first 24 hours after he announced his campaign, Sanders raised $5.9 million from 223,000 donors from all 50 states. In the first week, he raised $10 million.

“Today I welcome you to a campaign which tells the powerful special interests who control so much of our economic and political life that we will no longer tolerate the greed of corporate America and the billionaire class,” Sanders said.

Truthdig correspondent Michael Nigro was live at the event. Below is his photo essay.

PHOTO ESSAY | 15 photosphoto essay

We're getting ready to kick off our campaign at Brooklyn College and begin the next phase of our political revolution. #BernieInBrooklynpic.twitter.com/jelKfganfD

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 2, 2019

Watch the full speech here: