Chris Hedges's Blog, page 348

A Brief History of Our Longest, Most Futile War

Anyone who closely followed the U.S. war in Afghanistan since Oct. 7, 2001, knew it would end badly. The news that the U.S. has reached an agreement with the Taliban for a peace framework is indeed a positive development, but it masks the fact that the war has largely been futile and destructive—and that the Taliban is the likely victor.

Over the past 18 years, the U.S. went from considering the Taliban an inconsequential enemy that would be easily defeated to negotiating with the dictatorial regime to now seemingly capitulating to its demands. This disastrous trajectory of events is well worth examining as the history of the United States’ longest war is written.

In the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush flatly refused the Taliban’s offer to try Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Instead, he launched a war on what was one of the poorest nations in the world, already devastated by decades of violence by U.S.-backed and -armed fundamentalist groups. In what might be viewed as “famous last words,” the Bush White House warned the Taliban, “We will defeat you.” Bush’s stated objectives in Afghanistan (aside from buying time to build a case for the more desired war in Iraq) included “to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” Bush flip-flopped on his pledge to never engage in “nation-building” and adopted the lofty goal of rebuilding Afghanistan’s government. Writing about it in his memoir, he said, “Afghanistan was the ultimate nation building mission. We had liberated the country from a primitive dictatorship, and we had a moral obligation to leave behind something better. We also had a strategic interest in helping the Afghan people build a free society,” because “a democratic Afghanistan would be a hopeful alternative to the vision of the extremists.”

Perhaps it is fitting that the man now in charge of negotiating with the Taliban in President Donald Trump’s administration is Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad’s claim to fame was his Bush-era role as special envoy for Afghanistan from 2001 to 2002, when he oversaw the crafting of a transitional government that had the outward hallmarks of democracy but was designed to fit U.S. interests and appease fundamentalist and Taliban-like warlords, and had little bearing on the aspirations of ordinary Afghans. After helping to craft the new Afghan constitution, Khalilzad said, “We are witness to a major milestone in putting behind the era of the rule of the gun in Afghanistan.” At the same time, he was cementing the power of armed groups with a history of violent oppression. His words were just as futile and disingenuous as Bush’s claim of certain victory over the Taliban. The Bush plan to build a stable Afghan government as a bulwark against the Taliban and al-Qaida failed for reasons that had as much to do with imperial hubris as it did with the practical shortcuts taken by an outsider to patch together a precarious government—as if that were a sufficient substitute for real democracy.

Cut to a few years later, when the Bush presidency ended and a naive Barack Obama was enthusiastic about negotiating with “moderate” elements of the Taliban. The next eight years were an embarrassing parade of failed talks between the U.S. and the Taliban, as well as between the U.S.-backed Afghan government and the Taliban—failures that made headlines in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2016. Obama’s strategy included a temporary increase in troops, as if throwing more American soldiers at the problem would help any one of his goals stick. He also adopted a set of vague objectives similar to those of his predecessor but with the end goal of strengthening the weak and corrupt Afghan government so that it could deal with the Taliban on its own. In the end, Obama broke his promise to end the war in Afghanistan. Seven years ago, Khalilzad explained in an interview that the U.S. remained in Afghanistan because “[t]here’s a reputational dimension of it that after investing so much, America’s prestige is involved.” And so, perhaps, we remained because it was too embarrassing to leave at that time.

The Taliban appears to have had a “wait it out” strategy with respect to Americans, stringing along the U.S. and the Afghan government over several years of talks until it had the upper hand to return to power. Cut to today, and that long game seems to have paid off, with Trump itching to withdraw. In an interview with The New York Times on Monday, Khalilzad announced a tentative framework for a peace agreement, saying, “The Taliban have committed, to our satisfaction, to do what is necessary that would prevent Afghanistan from ever becoming a platform for international terrorist groups or individuals.” On its face, this is either supremely naive or a purposeful ignoring of the fact that Islamic State has already gained a strong foothold in Afghanistan and that neither the Taliban nor the Afghan government have been unable to fight it off.

Meanwhile, the Taliban itself has been continuing to behave like a terrorist group (as it always has done), repeatedly perpetrating deadly attacks, such as one that took place a mere two days before Khalilzad’s announced framework for a peace agreement, which killed 95 people in Kabul. Days earlier, the Taliban claimed responsibility for an attack that killed four and wounded 100 in Kabul. The attacks are ongoing and relentless. The United States’ continued negotiations with the very group launching violent attacks in the Afghanistan’s capital suggests that Trump’s approach is to throw our own flawed creation (the Afghan central government) under the bus in order to appease the original enemy it pledged to destroy. And Khalilzad’s role as American representative has bookended both bloody ends of a long, needless war.

A journalist with the Afghan media outlet Tolo News recently questioned Khalilzad about the United States’ motives, asking, “Why do the Taliban negotiate with you, the U.S., but do not negotiate with the Afghan government and Afghan people?” To that, Khalilzad had no good answer.

Had the U.S. envoy been honest, he would have explained that the grand plan to transform Afghanistan into a democracy by force was an imperial fantasy whose time has come to an end, and that the U.S. is simply going to cut its losses and hand the country back to the very enemy it claimed to have been fighting for more than 18 years. Had he been honest, he might have admitted that not only is it well past time for the United States’ longest official war to end, it should have never been launched in the first place.

Benjamin Netanyahu Blasted for Wooing Holocaust-Distorting Allies

JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warm welcome to Lithuania’s prime minister marks his latest embrace of an eastern European leader who has offered strong political support while promoting a distorted image of the Holocaust.

Lithuania is among a slew of former communist nations swept up in a wave of World War II-era revisionism that seeks to diminish their culpability in the Holocaust while making heroes out of anti-Soviet nationalists involved in the mass killing of Jews. In Israel, established in the wake of the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews, many say Netanyahu is cynically betraying the victims’ memory.

Lithuania, for instance, has been a leading force behind creating a joint memorial day for all victims of totalitarianism, blurring the distinction between the crimes of the Nazis and the communists who fought them.

It also has pushed for legislation to prohibit the sale of books that “distort Lithuanian history” by citing the rampant, documented collaboration of the local population with Nazis. Most recently it has resisted calls to remove the various plaques commemorating anti-Soviet fighter Jonas Noreika, despite recent revelations by his own granddaughter, Silvia Foti, that he was a fierce anti-Semite who had a role in the murder of thousands of Jews.

Nearly all of Lithuania’s 200,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

When Netanyahu, who has Lithuanian roots, visited Vilnius last year, he praised Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis for taking “great steps to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust” and for fighting modern-day anti-Semitism.

“It’s unforgivable. Netanyahu is giving them a green light,” said Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “It’s like praising the Ku Klux Klan for improving racial relations in the South.”

“We have to say the truth. We owe it to the victims,” he added.

In a meeting with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin on Tuesday, Skvernelis said “Lithuania has been learning the lessons of the past” and was “improving the life of the Jewish community and restoring historical sites.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, Netanyahu treaded cautiously. He referred to the “tragedies of the past” but steered clear of any criticism of modern Lithuania, praising the “spirit of friendship” and “a bridge from the past to a future.”

Skvernelis’ visit comes a week after Netanyahu similarly rolled out the red carpet for President Petro Porochenko of Ukraine, whose parliament just designated the birthday of Ukrainian wartime collaborator Stepan Bandera a national holiday. A regional legislature declared 2019 “the year of Stepan Bandera.”

Bandera’s forces fought alongside the Nazis and were implicated in the murder of thousands of Jews. As Porochenko was visiting Israel, another memorial was being erected in Kiev for Symon Petliura, whose troops are linked to pogroms that killed as many as 50,000 Jews after World War I.

Netanyahu’s outreach in eastern Europe is part of his larger strategy of forging alliances to counter the criticism Israel faces in the United Nations and other international forums over its treatment of the Palestinians.

Critics consider it a deal with the devil. They say Netanyahu — who often invokes the Holocaust when inveighing against archrival Iran — turns a blind eye when it comes to like-minded allies.

“It’s a specific maneuver that legitimizes anti-Semitism and borders on Holocaust denial,” said Tamar Zandberg, leader of the dovish Meretz party.

The prime minister’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Under communist rule, the Holocaust was not seriously dealt with and, upon independence, the newfound eastern and central European nations sought to canonize nationalist icons who resisted the Soviets, while largely ignoring their crimes alongside the Nazis. Domestic academics who have challenged the false narrative have been shamed, and external criticism has often been met with new anti-Semitic outbursts.

For countries like Lithuania and Ukraine, the warm embrace of the Israeli leader provides a strong defense against accusation of anti-Semitism while also strengthening ties with a close U.S. ally.

Netanyahu has also formed a close alliance with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has lavished praise on Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s World War II-era ruler, who introduced anti-Semitic laws and collaborated with the Nazis. Orban has also employed anti-Semitic tropes against the Jewish Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist George Soros and backed a state-funded museum that experts say plays down the role of Hungarian collaborators.

Netanyahu also struck a deal with Polish leaders over their country’s controversial Holocaust speech law, which would have criminalized blaming the Polish nation for crimes committed against Jews during World War II.

Israeli Holocaust historians slammed the agreement, which seemed to accept a Polish narrative that they were only victims of the Nazis. Scholars say anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in pre-war Poland and Poles might have either killed or helped Germans kill up to 200,000 Jews.

Still, Netanyahu has invited Orban and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki — who last year equated Polish perpetrators in the Holocaust to supposed “Jewish perpetrators” — to Israel in February for a summit with the leaders of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party and the son of a Holocaust survivor, called on Netanyahu to cancel the meeting, saying one prime minister has “published anti-Semitic content” and another “passed a law desecrating the memory of Holocaust victims.”

In an annual report Sunday, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs said 2018 saw a record number of worldwide anti-Semitic attacks, with most carried out by neo-Nazis in Europe and white supremacists.

But at his Cabinet meeting later in the day, Netanyahu singled out “Islamic anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitism of the extreme left, which includes anti-Zionism.”

Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, which hosts all visiting foreign dignitaries, has been thrust into the controversy.

While it says it will never disqualify anyone wishing to visit, Yad Vashem insists it will “forcefully” address any denial or distortion. Yad Vashem said the Lithuanian leader received a comprehensive explanation of the Holocaust, including details about “the murder of Jews of Lithuania by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.”

Foxconn Wisconsin Exposed for the Scam It’s Been From the Start

President Donald Trump, Wisconsin’s former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, and former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) spent a lot of time at press events and photo-ops last year touting the 13,000 manufacturing jobs Foxconn was supposedly going to create in the U.S., but—as with many of his job claims—the president’s soaring promises are looking increasingly hollow.

As Reuters reported on Wednesday, the Taiwanese tech firm—which Walker lured to Wisconsin with over $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies—is now saying “it intends to hire mostly engineers and researchers rather than the manufacturing workforce the project originally promised.”

In an exclusive interview with Reuters, Louis Woo, a special assistant to Foxconn chairman Terry Gou, said the company is completely walking back its plan to build $10 billion factory in Wisconsin.

“In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory. You can’t use a factory to view our Wisconsin investment,” Woo said.

SHOCKER—Foxconn was a MAJOR CON by Trump & Scott Walker. I’d like to hear a presidential candidate start pushing jail time for corporate welfare thievery https://t.co/eHYuqC1vbe

— Jordan (@JordanChariton) January 30, 2019

As Reuters notes, FoxConn “initially said it expected to employ about 5,200 people by the end of 2020; a company source said that figure now looks likely to be closer to 1,000 workers. It is unclear when the full 13,000 workers will be hired. But Woo, in the interview, said about three-quarters of Foxconn’s eventual jobs will be in R&D and design—what he described as ‘knowledge’ positions—rather than blue-collar manufacturing jobs.”

Trump bragged about his deal with Foxconn to bring jobs to Wisconsin. So far 178 people were hired—but the company is on track to score over $4 billion in incentives.

That’s $22M per job. #WhatADeal https://t.co/FGfZ9L3IHD

— Swing Left (@swingleft) January 30, 2019

foxconn was supposed to employ 5,200 ppl by end of 2020; now looking closer to 1,000. “In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory. You can’t use a factory to view our Wisconsin investment,” said CEO’s asst.

….yes wisconsin paid $4 BILLION for thishttps://t.co/79WwUUZCab

— Sarah Holder (@ptsarahdactyl) January 30, 2019

“Foxconn took Wisconsin for a ride. Other states, beware the allure of the mega deal,” wrote Reid Wilson, reporter for The Hill.

News that FoxConn is slowly reversing its promises of manufacturing investment and job-creation will come as no surprise to progressive analysts and corporate welfare critics, who have argued all along that the sweetheart deal Walker and Wisconsin Republicans cut with FoxConn in 2017 was an “absolute fraud.”

“I remain skeptical that the Foxconn project will ever play out as advertised,” Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, told Bloomberg last week.

Following Reuters‘ report on Foxconn’s moves to renege on its previous job pledges, critics pointed to footage of Trump participating in a “groundbreaking” ceremony with Walker, Ryan, and Foxconn’s chairman at the site of the company’s planned facility last June, where he touted the 13,000 manufacturing positions the tech firm vowed to create.

“I’m thrilled to be here in the Badger State with the hardworking men and women of Foxconn working with you,” Trump declared during the event. “Moments ago, we broke ground on a plant that will provide jobs for much more than 13,000 Wisconsin workers. Really something. Really something.”

Why Is Justin Trudeau Backing Trump’s Coup in Venezuela?

What follows is a conversation between Yves Engler and The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

SHARMINI PERIES: It’s The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore.

The Lima group will meet in Canada on February 4 to address the Venezuela crisis. For those of you who doesn’t even know who the Lima Group is, don’t worry; neither did we, many of us who are in the business of following this stuff. It is a multilateral body formed by Canada of Latin American countries that includes Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Guyana, and St. Lucia. The last two countries just joined.

The group was established in August of 2017 as an opposition to the OAS because they couldn’t get the decisions that they wanted to get out of the Organization of American States. So they formed a organization to address the Venezuela crisis. And in its mandate it states that it is established to bring about a peaceful resolution to the Venezuela crisis.

Joining me now to discuss Canada’s role in the Venezuela crisis today is Yves Engler and Paul Jay. Yves is a Canadian commentator and author of several books, and the most recent one is Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada. And Paul Jay is the Senior Editor-In-Chief here at The Real News Network. And he was also the former executive producer of Counterspin, a current affairs debate show that took place in Canada on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for nearly ten years. Thanks for joining us, Paul.

PAUL JAY: Thank you.

SHARMINI PERIES: So, Yves, let me go to you first. First of all, tell us about who or what this Lima Group is, why it was formed. And then, of course, why is Canada leading the charge here, along with the United States, in the Venezuela crisis?

YVES ENGLER: Yes. The Lima Group was formed because the governments that were critical of the Maduro government in Venezuela, because they couldn’t get resolutions through the Organization of American States. They didn’t have the majority of votes to pass resolutions at the OAS. So they basically set up another forum to bring together governments, mostly right-wing governments, in Latin America that were critical of the Maduro government. And Canada has played–was right there at the founding. Canada hosted the third meeting of the Lima Group, and now is hosting a second meeting; I think the first country to host two different meetings of the Lima Group. And this is just part, one part, of a multifaceted Canadian campaign to undermine the Maduro government in Venezuela.

That campaign includes all kinds of critical comments against the Venezuelan government; includes back in September bringing the Venezuelan government–first time ever that a member state has brought another member state to the International Criminal Court. Canada and a couple of other governments brought Venezuela to the International Criminal Court. Canada has brought in three rounds of sanctions against Venezuela. Canada has been funding opposition groups in Venezuela. Canada has been pressuring Caribbean countries to join the Lima Group, to join the critical statements of the Maduro government. And so–and then in recent–last few weeks, last couple of months, Canada has been right at the forefront in this campaign to recognize the head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido, as the interim president, as the president of Venezuela, and completely reject the legitimacy of the Maduro government.

So the Liberal government in Canada is viewed by many as a sort of a progressive government. But the Trudeau government in Canada has been right at the forefront of this campaign to try to undermine the Maduro government. And you know, this is certainly what they’re looking for. My estimation is their preference would be a military coup. But there is some indication that Canada even would be fine with a foreign invasion. In fact, when the head of the Organization of American States a few months ago sort of mused about a possible foreign invasion, the Lima Group, or 11 of the 14 members of the Lima group, criticized the head of the Organization of American States for talking about a foreign invasion. Canada, Colombia, and Guyana were the three countries that refused to to condemn any talk of a foreign invasion. So possibly even Canada is prepared to accept some form of military type intervention as part of this effort to get rid of the Maduro government.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right. Paul, for many of us who feel warm and cozy about Canada being a peace loving nation that goes around the world with peacekeeping forces and not military forces–of course, that is a mythology. Give us a sense of the history of Canada’s role in these kinds of situations.

PAUL JAY: Well, let me talk specifically about Venezuela. Just a little note, first of all. Mexico was part of the Lima Group, but now with the new leadership, with AMLO now taking office in Mexico, Mexico is not going along with this plan to recognize Juan Guaido. Guaido or Guido? I keep mixing it up.

SHARMINI PERIES: Guaido.

PAUL JAY: Guaido. Thank you. Is not going along with this, and has called for–that it is a domestic affair, and that there should be negotiations. And Mexico is not the only country of the region. Many, many countries of CARICOM have come forward and have said they do not support this plan. So the corporate media is trying to make this sound like the whole region’s on board with this scheme.

Canada’s argument here, and it came out in the Canadian press recently, that the formation of the Lima group in 2017–and for months Canada has been playing a leading role in preparing for, according to the Canadian newspapers, for exactly what happened, the recognition of Juan Guaido. I keep screwing up his name, I’m sorry. Guaido? Am I saying it right? Juan Guaido. And that this has been a scheme for months. And Canada has been into this scheme for months. And the rationale is supposedly that the election of 2017 was not a legitimate election because there was the, people were supposedly kept out. The press is not telling people that there was a big boycott from the opposition that didn’t want to run. But because of–there are supposed to have been various infractions in the 2017 elections that reelected Maduro. This is the rationale for why Canada gets so involved.

Well, it’s a total crock. And the reason it’s a crock is I know from personal experience that Canada has been trying to destabilize and nurture and promote the opposition in Venezuela at least from 2004. When Chavez was still in power, Chavez had been elected over and over again with internationally observed elections. Everyone said the elections were clean during the Chavez period. Many people that tried to throw the elections into disrepute were invalidated. The Carter Center legitimatized them. I actually personally was on an election observer mission to go to polling stations in 2004, 2005, one of the elections leading up to the referendum on Chavez’s presidency. And I went to 40 polling stations, and I interviewed opposition people in all 40 polling stations in Caracas. And I asked, have you seen any infractions? And if there were any infractions were they dealt with properly. And I took video, and I recorded it all, and there wasn’t a single complaint from an opposition observer that there had been anything done incorrectly with those elections. And in fact, this vote was called the report. So it’s a complicated thing, but it led to a referendum on Chavez’s presidency. And in fact, the opposition won that vote.

Now, right around that time, when they were clean elections, and Chavez was getting elected over and over again, my first trip to Venezuela in 2004, I was producing the big debate show on Canadian TV called Counterspin on CBC Newsworld. I was a well-known documentary filmmaker. I had founded the Big Hot Docs! Documentary Film Festival. So I was a known quantity in Canada. And so when I was in Venezuela I said for the heck of it I’ll go say hello to the Canadian Embassy, and take their temperature. And you know, I was trying to figure out what was going on in Venezuela. And so I went, I went to the embassy. I made an appointment and I went to go see–I figured I’d see some counselor of some kind who would, you know, pat me on the head and say welcome to Venezuela. No, I get, like, the number two charge d’affaires greets me and brings me into a meeting room with seven members of the opposition who then for–it must have been two hours–beat me over the head with how corrupt the regime was, how awful it was, and so on.

I’m not going to comment on what was right or wrong with what the opposition people said. I have perhaps that sort of experience. I don’t know. What I do know is what business does the Canadian Embassy have bring in a Canadian journalist into a room with opposition people, doing–essentially trying to involve me in a conspiracy against the Venezuelan government.

So this Canadian role in Venezuela, it’s been going on for a long time, and been very, very active in trying to destabilize the situation, promote and nurture the opposition. And clearly for two reasons. Number one, Canada is one of the biggest mining nations in the world, and Venezuela has tremendous untapped natural resources, particularly gold. And Canada has a very strong gold mining sector. And the gold was not–Canada wasn’t, Canadian companies weren’t easily getting at that gold. There was one company called Crystallex that actually had a concession and then lost it. So the ability to nurture an opposition and get an in with an opposition that might come to power, and then favour Canadian mining companies, I think that’s one motivation.

And another motivation, I think, has to do with Canada’s role historically; how it plays with the United States and helps the U.S. and its foreign policy. And I once interviewed a Canadian general in 2004, Lewis MacKenzie. And I asked him, why is Canada so into this Afghan war? You know, this Afghan, post-9/11. It could have been dealt with as a police-type operation, in terms of going after al Qaeda. But a full-fledged invasion, full-fledged regime change. Why is Canada in this, and in it for the long haul? Because it’s 2004, after the invasion of Iraq. And his answer was, I think, very instructive. He said, well, we didn’t go to Iraq. So to keep our ability to selling goods into the United States, we needed to pay with some blood. We needed to send troops to Afghanistan and have some Canadian soldiers killed to show we’re willing to share the burden. He didn’t use the word empire, but that’s essentially what he was saying.

So the role of Canada assisting in very nefarious American policy, and giving it this Canadian, oh, we’re for the UN, we’re humanitarians, giving it that veneer, it’s an important role that Canada plays. But it’s, I think, now the recognition of Guaido so exposes Canada because it’s such a clear violation of the UN Charter of non-interference in internal affairs.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right. Now, the Canadian media wasn’t really covering this issue very much till recently. And I saw Thomas Walkom in the Toronto Star do a very good article that reinforces what Paul just said about Canada’s role, and the interest of trade, and of course the interests of Canadian corporations getting played out through its foreign policy. And then there was a blast of news in the Globe and Mail today about the Lima Group, and so forth. Tell us how the Canadian media is covering this issue, and are they seeing through the farce here about keeping peace in Venezuela?

YVES ENGLER: No. I mean, the Canadian media is sort of on two hands. On one hand they are just following the sort of Washington-Ottawa propaganda about how, you know, Maduro’s a total dictator that needs to be overthrown. On one hand they’re doing that, and that’s the sort of bulk of the discussion. But simultaneously they have, as Paul pointed out, the Globe and Mail and the Canadian press both run incredibly–what should be viewed as incredibly damning stories about Canada’s role in building opposition support for Guaido. They talk about how Canada’s facilitating meetings within Venezuela, facilitating meetings internationally to try to solidify support for this recognition of the head of the National Assembly.

But the thrust of the stories are that, you know, to just present this as a positive affair that Canada is pursuing, to the point where a few of the NDP, the social democratic party, MPs, or people in that party, a couple of them have expressed criticism of Canada’s policy on Twitter, and the media has sort of pushed back against the NDP’s, in my opinion, quite mild criticism of Canadian policy.

But I do want to echo, for sure, what Paul is saying. There’s a quote in terms of Canada’s role historically in terms of serving empire, and the fact that sometimes it’s better to have a sort of Canadian face on an intervention than a more sort of, more easily demonized U.S. face. In his biography, Jacques Chretien, a former prime minister, says quite explicitly that he told Bill Clinton that if we just go along with you in everything, we’re just going to be perceived as a 51st state. But if we, if it looks like we have a little bit of independence, we can do more for you than the CIA can do. And it was almost like–that’s a paraphrase, almost word for word. So there’s just this historic kind of putting a bit of a Canada, a positive Canada cover on policies that the U.S. is pursuing around the world.

And there’s a long history of that in the hemisphere beyond the example that Paul gave with regards to Afghanistan. In Haiti in 2004 Canada played a very important role in the overthrow of the elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide. And again, there was Bill Graham, the former defense minister, said in a book about about the war in Afghanistan, he said that because Canada officially joined the coalition of the willing that invaded Iraq in 2003, they felt like they needed to not only go heavily into Afghanistan, but also participate significantly in the coup in Haiti.

So part of this Canadian policy in Venezuela today is about Canada’s close ties to the U.S. empire. And Canada, in my opinion, has been quite a beneficiary. The Canadian corporate class have been very much beneficiaries of U.S. empire for half a century. And the mining sector in Latin America is a big force, banking sector is a big force that partly explains Canadian policy there today.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right. Paul, do you have anything more to add before we sign off here?

PAUL JAY: Well, just a, just a quick note that Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, it was his father that played exactly this role in Vietnam. There was something called the International Control Commission, the ICC, that was, I believe, under the auspices of the UN, supposed to monitor treaties and such and during the Vietnam War. And they would go to Hanoi and interview people in the North, and they would observe, and then they would come back. And it turned out that the Canadian delegation, completely contrary to international law and the norms of such a commission, was going back and reporting to the CIA on what was going on in North Vietnam, and straightforwardly spying. So it seems to be a family business in the Trudeau family to play this kind of a role.

SHARMINI PERIES: And yet at the same time Pierre Trudeau established a different kind of approach when there was sanctions and the blockade against Cuba, where it was beneficial for Canada to have direct relations different from that of the U.S. in Cuba, where the Canadian companies actually benefited from that, as well.

PAUL JAY: Well, it’s true. But let’s add to that it was Diefenbaker, the conservative, that established that policy, and refused to join the embargo and sanctions that the Americans tried to get Diefenbaker to impose on Cuba. So while it’s true Pierre Trudeau did that, he was carrying on the policy of Diefenbaker.

SHARMINI PERIES: And then subsequent governments actually upheld those, you know, open trade relations and bypassed American blockades against Cuba. So there is precedent set that Canada could follow.

So, stay tuned. These conversations will continue here The Real News Network. Thanks for joining us, Yves Engler, in Toronto, yes?

YVES ENGLER: Montreal.

SHARMINI PERIES: In Montreal. Yves Engler in Montreal, and Paul Jay right here at The Real News Studio. Thanks for joining us.

Did Jerry Brown Let an Innocent Man Languish on Death Row?

This piece originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. 

On Christmas Eve, shortly before the end of his final term as California’s governor, Jerry Brown ordered new DNA testing in a case that has been cited repeatedly as a possible miscarriage of justice.

But Brown inexplicably stopped short of ordering all the testing needed to finally settle whether Kevin Cooper was wrongly convicted for the savage 1983 murders of a Chino Hills family and a child staying at their house.

Cooper, a convicted burglar who had escaped from a nearby prison two days before the murders, was soon arrested, although the one family member who survived the attack, Joshua Ryen, 8, indicated immediately after being rushed to the hospital that there were three attackers and they were white. Cooper is African American.

Over the decades Cooper has fought to prove his innocence, DNA technology has become so precise that testing of key evidence could finally determine whether or not he is guilty. It might even point to one or more others involved in the killing of Chino Hills chiropractors and Arabian horse breeders Peggy and Doug Ryen, both 41; their daughter Jessica, 10; and neighbor Christopher Hughes, 11.

That’s why Brown’s action is so puzzling.

Brown took an important step in allowing additional analysis and appointing a special master to oversee the testing. But he authorized DNA tests on only four of nine critically important items on an evidence list Cooper’s attorneys provided. They are a tan T-shirt believed worn by the killer; a never-tested bloody towel taken from the Ryen home; a hatchet believed to have been used in the murders; and ahatchet sheath that looks newer, found in the home where Cooper hid for two days after his escape.

Most puzzling of the items Brown did not authorize for testing is a clump of long light-brown hairs found clutched in the hand of Jessica, quite possibly yanked from the head of her killer and clearly not Cooper’s hair.

Josh Ryen, now in his 40s, pleaded for further investigation in a 2004 television interview on “48 Hours”: “The hair needs to be tested,” he said. “Her hand is clenched fighting for her life with hair in it. So, I want to know. I need to know.” Brown’s order won’t help.

Brown also did not authorize DNA testing of the victims’ fingernail scrapings, or items that could prove Cooper was framed, including a vial of Cooper’s blood drawn when he was arrested. It contains the blood preservative EDTA, as expected, but also the blood of at least one unknown person.

It was blood from this vial that Cooper’s attorneys believe was planted on the medium-size tan T-shirt that Cooper (who wears a size large) demanded in 2002 to be tested. When it revealed his blood, he and his attorneys were shocked, and in 2004 they got a retest. This time, EDTA was found in the blood spot, which Cooper’s attorneys said was proof that investigators took preserved blood from the vial taken when he was arrested and planted it on the shirt. The lab analyst later rescinded his EDTA finding, saying it was a result of contamination in his lab.

Brown’s order also excluded testing for EDTA of a tiny spot of blood determined to be Cooper’s that was found on a wall in the Ryen home. Someone else’s DNA was also found in the spot. This test is important because it was the lone bit of evidence putting Cooper at the crime scene; his attorneys believe it was planted.

The testing Brown authorized does include important items. Advanced DNA testing technology today might be able to identify the killer who wore the T-shirt 35 years ago by testing the inside collar and armpit material. It might pinpoint the user of the hatchet wielded in the attack. The orange towel should reveal the DNA of anyone who touched it. The hatchet was found near the T-shirt on the side of a road near the Ryen residence.

The San Bernardino County coroner initially said the victims were slain by three or four killers wielding a hatchet, knives and an ice pick, inflicting 144 wounds within four minutes. Several witnesses reported seeing three people in the Ryens’ stolen car shortly after the killings, and when the car was found by police a few days later, it had blood on three seats.

Five days after the slayings, a woman told a deputy she suspected her convicted-murderer boyfriend of being involved and gave the deputy bloody coveralls the boyfriend left at their house the night of the murders. She also identified the bloody tan T-shirt as one she bought, and said her boyfriend was wearing it the day of the killings; and she reported that his missing hatchet resembled the one identified as the murder weapon.

Sheriff Floyd Tidwell seemingly had a solid lead.

But when he learned that Cooper had escaped from a nearby minimum-security prison and hid out near the Ryens, he declared Cooper the lone suspect.

It’s jarring, of course, to think that investigators would have ignored evidence that didn’t fit their theory. But in a minority opinion about the case, U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William C. Fletcher wrote: “In the course of their investigation, they discounted, disregarded, and discarded evidence pointing to other killers.” Fletcher has since said he believes the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed Cooper.

The coveralls were discarded without being tested, and the woman who gave them to police was never called as a witness. The ex-boyfriend has consistently denied his involvement. Cooper’s attorneys have his DNA and will turn it over the state in the testing process.

As for Cooper, in a recent interview from a cramped visiting cell on death row, he talked about justice and the need for further tests: “People who want me executed say the families need closure. But closure is not justice. Truth is justice.”

Howard Schultz Is a Presidential Candidate Only Late Capitalism Could Produce

I was born in 1981, and some of my earliest political memories are of the 1992 presidential campaign—in particular of the diminutive, eccentric rich man with the goofy drawl who stood on the debate stage between a clipped, patrician incumbent and an upstart governor with a more opportunistic drawl, lamenting the evils of international labor cost arbitrage. At the time, I did not know what labor arbitrage was, but I did get the gist of the “giant sucking sound” coming out of Mexico. The basic social and economic principles underlying this candidacy were easy enough for even a 10-year-old to understand.

Ross Perot’s quixotic campaign was the ne plus ultra of independent and third-party presidential campaigns. Others had tried, and a couple had even won a few Electoral College votes, but none, before or since, has ever approached his nearly 20 percent of the popular vote—a number that might have been even higher had his campaign not suffered from the inevitable difficulties of working for a billionaire madman who demanded loyalty oaths (sound familiar?) and refused to listen to the advice of his counselors.

Part of Perot’s success was good luck and timing. It was the first post-Cold War presidential race; the U.S. was in the middle of a severe recession; the incumbent was uniquely weak; and the Clinton campaign was dogged by moral scandal.

But in retrospect, we can’t deny the animating force of Perot’s obsessive focus on trade and de-industrialization. From the vantage point of the Donald Trump era, we can see how these ideas, when combined with the timeless allure of nativism and xenophobia, can win. Perot often appeared monomaniacal, but there was no doubt that he ran for a reason.

Since then, we have seen a steady trickle of stupidly wealthy businessmen drifting into electoral politics—not merely as financial backers of parties and candidates, as was their traditional role, but as candidates themselves. They have, in a few cases, become governors, and Michael Bloomberg famously served three terms as mayor of New York City. Bloomberg has flirted with his own independent run for president but concluded that he could not possibly win. The electoral math is against him, and, while he will probably not admit it out loud, he seems self-aware enough to recognize the more fundamental issue: There is no natural constituency for a technocratic centrism that at its most daring can only ape tired corporate communications rhetoric about opportunity, innovation and access.

Yet onto this rickety dais tiptoes one of Seattle’s greatest gifts to the monied class: Howard Schultz, erstwhile chairman and CEO of Starbucks. Schultz has not precisely announced his candidacy. Instead, he has announced his intention to consider possibly running for president, after much thought and prayer and many “family meetings.”

Schultz’s pseudo-announcement, timed with the release of his pseudo-campaign book, “From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America,” has so far been met with howls of outrage and derision from Democratic partisans and leftist activists who view him as a potential spoiler, siphoning enough professional-class and suburban votes in the 2020 contest to re-elect Trump. The national media love a billionaire, and Schultz can afford good publicists, so he was quickly booked for interviews and op-eds, in which he mostly evinced the self-satisfaction and complete lack of content or specifics that a corporate leader can get away with at a board meeting everyone has been paid to attend. As he recently told CNBC, “I don’t want to talk in the hypothetical about what I would do if I was president.”

Since then, he’s managed—possibly accidentally—to put a slightly finer point on his run. He’s mad that newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others have floated the idea of a 70 percent top marginal tax rate on income over $10 million per year, and he (or his adviser, McCain-Palin veteran Steve Schmidt) views his potential run as a backstop to any Democratic nomination of a left-leaning candidate.

As has been suggested, this is a sort of blackmail: Nominate a “moderate,” or I’ll jump in and spoil the race. Why, after all, should he care if Trump wins another term? Trump has been a boon for the Howard Schultzes of the world.

I suspect this shakedown theory gives him too much credit for cunning, just as it gives Schmidt too little credit for recognizing an easy mark and a huge paycheck for very little actual work. The imperturbable confidence of a man with so much money is a force of nature: entirely dumb, but not to be diverted. You’ve gotta ride it out.

And we can already see the sky lightening over the ocean as Hurricane Howard lashes the shore. Bill Burton, “a former aide to President Barack Obama who recently joined Schultz’s political team,” is already giving interviews in which he teases a months-long will-he-or-won’t-he, with Schultz planning to “travel the country and pitch himself as a moderate alternative to two extremes.”

He will, in other words, dissipate his energy doing a series of increasingly sparse media appearances and getting ratioed on Twitter. Then he will decide, for the good of his family, the country, his God, and the judgment of history that now—whenever now is—is not the time. (Schultz has already postponed any final decision until at least the summer.) He will probably go on to try to establish some kind of movement or institute that has a word like “solution” or “together” or “reimagine” in the title, and, buoyed by his millions, it will putter along at the margins, producing two USA Today op-eds and a CNN panelist every year until the rising seas swallow us all.

In the meantime, if the Democrats are smart, they will recognize in Schultz a potent and useful foil for their economic message, more so than the bewildered, dissipated Trump. Yes, there are members of the professional and small-business class who see Schultz as an aspirational figure. Imagining that you will become a billionaire mogul is, after all, the “winning the lottery” of the upper-middle class; buying Schultz’s book on Amazon is the gated-community version of spending a dollar a day on the scratch-off.

But for most people—not just the working class, but plenty of folks in the professional class as well—Schultz is a figure far closer to home: the clueless, insipid, absolutely self-absorbed boss who wanders through workaday life trailing idiotic assignments, do-nothing initiatives and go-get-’em exhortations in his stupid wake. He is that perfect product of our economic age: the manager as a psychopathic guidance counselor. If the Democrats are smart, they’ll bring him up every chance they get.

Robert Reich: Public Workers Will Be Our Salvation

Air traffic controllers hold the trump card (pardon the expression) in upcoming negotiations between Donald Trump and congressional Democrats over border security.

That’s because the president and the Republicans know that another shutdown would likely cause a repeat of what happened last Friday, when so many of the nation’s air traffic controllers called in sick that America’s air traffic came to a near standstill. Hours later, Trump agreed to reopen the government without funding for his wall.

Never underestimate the power of airport delays to arouse the nation. Nancy Pelosi deserves credit for sticking to her guns, but the controllers brought the country to its knees.

Trump is threatening another shutdown if he doesn’t get his way by 15 February, when government funding will run out again. “Does anybody really think I won’t build the WALL?” he tweeted Sunday, after his acting chief of staff said that he was prepared to shutter the government for a second time.

But his threat is for the cameras. If there’s no agreement this time around, the controllers won’t work another 35 days without pay. Now that they understand their power, they will shut down the shutdown right away. Trump knows this.

Ironically, it was Ronald Reagan’s audacious decision in 1981 to fire and replace more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who were then striking illegally that legitimized decades of union busting. It signaled to employers around the country that unions – both public and private-sector – were fair game.

It also unleashed political forces against unions, culminating last year with the supreme court’s 5-4 decision in Janus v AFSCME, holding that government workers can’t be forced to contribute to labor unions that represent them in collective bargaining.

But the decision last week by thousands of controllers not to come to work wasn’t a strike, and it wasn’t initiated by a union. Beforehand, Paul Rinaldi, the president of the controller’s union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, even went so far as to announce that the union did not “condone or endorse any federal employees participating in or endorsing a coordinated activity that negatively effects the capacity of the National Airspace System”.

Controllers simply stayed home. No federal law prohibits federal employees from getting sick or calling in sick. And who’s to say it was coordinated? Today, the internet can spread information about a voluntary walkout as quickly and efficiently as any centralized coordinator.

The larger story is that public workers who lack any formal power to strike – but have the informal power not to work – are becoming a new force in American politics and labor relations.

Look what teachers accomplished last year by walking out of their classrooms in the unlikeliest of places – West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Colorado and North Carolina. Most of these are Republican “right-to-work” states that bar strikes by public employees. In recent years, all have slashed school funding and eroded teacher pay and benefits.

Like the air traffic controllers, the teachers chose not to work rather than give in to what they considered intolerable conditions. These unauthorized “wildcat” strikes won gains in teachers’ salaries and funding for schools. (Not incidentally, they also galvanized thousands of teachers to run for office in the 2018 midterm elections.)

They were especially powerful because they offered elected officials no union leader or chief organizer with whom to negotiate a deal, who would then sell it to rank-and-file workers. As with the air traffic controllers last week, officials had to back down because the people they were dealing with were all rank-and-file, and public pressure was mounting rapidly.

Not all public workers can expect similar results by walking off their jobs. The walkout has to cause a major and visible disruption. (A work stoppage by FDA inspectors would hardly be noticed, at least until the public begins to worry about toxic drugs and tainted meat.)

And the public has to be supportive. By the fifth week of Trump’s shutdown, polls showed the public highly sympathetic to federal workers who hadn’t been paid. Likewise, most Americans have been on the side of teachers. National polls have shown the public largely in favor of higher teacher pay and supportive of teachers’ right to strike.

Finally, it’s not a weapon that can be used often because it relies for its potency on public frustration and inconvenience. If walkouts by public employees in France and other nations are any guide, public patience eventually wears thin.

But when elected officials in the United States abuse their power or take actions that unnecessarily harm the public, walkouts by public workers can function as an important constraint.

In the age of Trump, we need all the constraints we can get.

Incompetence Plus Malice Add Up to Trump’s Losing Formula on Immigration

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the immigration issue has defined his political profile. More than anything else, it has opened a window on his authoritarian mind, his disdain for the truth and for democratic institutions. Such contempt has revealed the dangers of Trumpism to much of a nation governed, often imperfectly, by the law. The way immigrants are locked up in detention centers without trial warns us of the possibility of a police state.

Last week, the president’s braggadocio crumbled in the face of facts and the strategic opposition of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She clearly saw beyond the façade as she took the measure of her opponent.

Trump’s signature combination of untruthfulness, ignorance and arrogance became evident to the country on Friday when maps appeared on cable television showing planes stacking up at airports, sending passengers into a state of exasperation that transcends partisan politics. Those deficiencies were further exposed when he, while putting an end to the protracted government shutdown, used his concession speech in the White House Rose Garden on Friday to rehash his lying attacks on immigrants.

Trump repeated his call for a wall, arguing that only a wall would stop the drug dealers and other criminals from coming across the southern border. But he pulled back from the “Build the Wall” promises that stirred nationalistic crowds at his rallies. “We do not need 2,000 miles of concrete wall from sea to shiny [sic] sea—we never did,” he said, insisting that he had never proposed one.

On the contrary, as Linda Qiu and Michael Tackett wrote in The New York Times:

Dozens of times during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump promised to build a wall along the southwestern border, usually saying it would be 1,000 miles at varying heights and costs. At times the building materials changed. He mentioned concrete, steel and, at one point, even a wall that would have solar panels. But a wall and the unsupported pledge that Mexico would pay for it were foundational elements of his campaign, and Mr. Trump has continued to make similar assertions throughout his presidency.

Except on Friday. Qiu and Tackett also picked up that detail:  “ … notable was something Mr. Trump did not say, namely that Mexico would pay for the wall. …”

As he had from the beginning of his presidential campaign, Trump trafficked in falsehoods Friday in the Rose Garden when he described the immigrants trying to cross the border into the United States as dangerous criminals.

Figures from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Clearinghouse (TRAC), a respected compiler of immigration statistics, refute his claim.

As of June 30, 2018, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had 44,435 immigrants in custody. Of these, four out of five had no criminal record or had committed only a minor offense, such as a traffic violation. Of the remainder, only 16 percent had committed crimes considered serious, which includes selling marijuana, now legal in many states. Of those eventually convicted of a crime, most were for illegal entry into the United States, a misdemeanor.

Another factor to consider is the incompetence of the way Trump administers his anti-immigrant policy. His former Attorney General Jeff Sessions drastically reduced the grounds for immigrants seeking asylum in the United States. Under his plan, dangers posed to immigrants by criminal gangs or domestic violence were no longer accepted as reasons for granting asylum—a devastating legislative blow to those fleeing gang-ridden Central American countries.

Other restrictions on asylum were also imposed. When immigrants present themselves to border officers and ask for sanctuary, they are arrested for illegal entry. They are then placed in detention, awaiting a hearing in immigration court, or are deported, although courts have ordered some released.

Sessions also ordered judges in immigration courts to speed up their hearings and decision-making protocols. He claimed this directive was aimed at reducing the backlog of cases awaiting hearing in immigration court that involve immigrants either in detention or freed through the legal intervention of immigrant advocates.

The backlog, TRAC said, totals 1,098,468—more than double the waiting list in January 2017 when Trump took office. It would take immigration courts more than five years to work their way through the backlog. This explains why so many immigrants are held in detention for years without a trial in onerous conditions, and why those freed from detention are in legal limbo, subject to being stopped, questioned and improperly arrested.

When Trump shut down the government, most immigration hearings were cancelled. That gave the president a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Rather than carry out his intent—hustling the immigrants out of the country—he has done the opposite and has increased the logjam.

In short, incompetence plus evil intentions have brought the country to this point.

Trump has been able to paper over his incompetence with bluster. The mass media has served as an accomplice. Too many stories focus on his performance. Sometimes, even his critics offer grudging admiration.

The shutdown ripped away the mask. Immigration was the central issue behind Trump’s closure of the federal government. His lies about immigration were exposed, as was his bungling execution of a cruel policy.

The United States Is the Most Corrupt Country in the World

The United States fell six places to a ranking of only 22 in Transparency International’s list of countries by corruption. Under Donald Trump, America is not in the top 20 for fair dealing.

But as I have argued before, the United States is the most corrupt country in the world and should be ranked 194, not 22. What follows is a much-revised version of my popular list.

Transparency International

 

Obviously, the U.S. Departments of Justice and the Treasury would not give corporations impunity for obtaining contracts by bribery, and it is this sort of scrupulousness that the Transparency International list is rewarding. And Americans don’t have to bribe government officials, as is true in many countries (though, to be fair to the government officials, they typically demand bribes because their governments don’t pay them a living wage).

But in all sorts of ways, U.S. corruption is off the charts, and because the U.S. is still the No. 1 economy in the world by nominal gross domestic product, massive corruption here has a global impact.

Here are the top signs that the U.S. is the most corrupt country in the world:

1. The U.S. is so corrupt that our ruling Republican Party would even deny human-made climate change and adopt pro-carbon policies inexorably destined to wreck the planet earth, all to ensure a few extra years of profits for dirty coal companies and oil giants like ExxonMobil.

Americans are now finally waking up from the 30 years of mesmerized unreality into which Big Carbon and its willing henchmen in the U.S. government had cast them. But nothing of any significance is being done by the federal government on the climate emergency, and the real leaders are states like California. Americans do not realize how peculiar their climate dementia is. No government in Europe openly denies human-made climate change through the burning of fossil fuels and the lodging of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, however lackadaisical some of them are about addressing the problem.

The Chinese Communist Party is more realistic than the U.S. government, and is making a full-court press to move to green energy. Germany, the fourth-largest economy, has announced the end of coal. Britain gets a third of its electricity from wind, and coal provides only 2 percent of British electricity—an achievement of less than a decade.

Only the dodo birds of the sneakily misnamed Australian Liberal Party are still vehemently pro-coal and shrilly denying the plain science of greenhouse gases.

2. Our government is so corrupt that the Environmental Protection Agency has not only ceased protecting the environment, it has become a cheerleader for polluting industries, gutting any regulation that might stand in the way of making a little extra money at the expense of, like, killing people. Its current head is a former coal industry lobbyist! The EPA has decided to back coal plants and to remove the annoyance of government regulations interfering with their spewing mercury into the air. Mercury is a nerve poison, and it concentrates at the top of the food chain (i.e., in us). The Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland” was driven crazy by using his hands to put mercury on the brim of felt hats so as to straighten them. Continual exposure to mercury damages your neural system.

3. The U.S. government is so corrupt that it is winking at the murder by Saudi authorities of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, almost certainly at the order of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And the grounds which the president of the United States gave for his insouciance at the deployment of a bone saw on the hapless scribbler were that he did not want to endanger Saudi arms purchases from and investments in the United States. This response is the very definition of corruption. Saudi Arabia is bribing the U.S. government to ignore a vicious murder of a high-profile journalist whose children are American citizens and who wrote for the Washington paper of record. You can tell all this is corrupt by just imagining what the response would be in Washington if Iran were discovered carving up a dissident in a consulate with a bone saw.

4. The U.S. is so corrupt (audience: “How corrupt is it?”) that the Senate has allowed a bill to come to the floor, introduced by Marco “Benedict Arnold” Rubio, that approves of individual states excluding vendors and contractors who boycott Israel. Although Rubio, Gary Peters, Ron Wyden and other backers of the bill maintain that it does not affect freedom of speech, it actually guts freedom of speech. We university lecturers who speak on other campuses are considered contractors, and people will be prevented from giving talks at the University of Texas, for example, by such laws. The law is unconstitutional and will be struck down if the U.S. judiciary still has a modicum of integrity. But the law was passed in order to uphold the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank and the sentencing of Palestinians to being stateless and helpless and without rights. And it was worked up in the shadows in coordination with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs (i.e., of propaganda), with the backing of pro-squatter fanatics such as sleazy casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has been accused of making his pile, in part, by bribing members of the Chinese Communist Party to let him open a lucrative casino in Macau. The senators have brought this bill to the floor, despite its being a poison pill for the U.S. Constitution, because they are in the back pocket of the Israel lobbies, which help fund their political campaigns. (I hasten to add that most American Jews do not approve of these shenanigans.)

In other words, the senators are acting this way because they are being bribed by a sliver of corrupt American businesspeople, who in turn are virulent partisans of a foreign state, or by U.S. evangelicals, who have an irrational hope that the final solution of the Palestinian problem will provoke the return of Christ. The important thing is that U.S. electoral politics is an elaborate system of bribery, for which even the Constitution itself is not sacrosanct.

5. A sure sign of corruption is an electoral outcome like that of 2016. An addled nonentity like Donald Trump got filthy rich via tax loopholes and predatory behavior in his casinos and other businesses, and then was permitted to buy the presidency with his own money. He was given billions of dollars in free campaign time every evening on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other channels that should have been more even-handed, because they were in search of advertising dollars and Trump was a good draw. Then, too, the way the Supreme Court got rid of campaign finance reform and allowed open, unlimited secret buying of elections is the height of corruption. The permitting of massive black money in our elections was taken advantage of by the Russian Federation, which, having hopelessly corrupted its own presidential elections, managed to further corrupt the American ones as well. Once ensconced in power, Trump Inc. has taken advantage of the power of White House to engage in a wide range of corrupt practices, including an attempt to sell visas to wealthy Chinese and the promotion of the Trump brand as part of diplomacy.

6. The rich are well-placed to bribe our politicians to reduce taxes on the rich. The Koch brothers and other megarich troglodytes explicitly told Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in 2017 that if the Republican Party, controlling all three branches of government, could not lower taxes on its main sponsors, there would be no billionaire backing of the party in the 2018 midterms. This threat of an electoral firing squad made the hundreds of bribe-takers in Congress sit up and take notice, and they duly gave away to the billionaire class $1.5 trillion in government services (that’s what federal taxes are, folks—services, such as roads, schools, health inspections, implementation of anti-pollution laws), things that everyone benefits from and that won’t be there any more. To the extent that the government will try to continue to provide those slashed services despite assessing no taxes on the people with the money to pay for them, it will run up an enormous budget deficit and weaken the dollar, which is a form of inflation in the imported-goods sector. Inflation hits the poor the worst. As it stands, 3 American billionaires are worth as much as the poorest 150 million Americans. That kind of wealth inequality hasn’t been seen in the U.S. since the age of the robber barons in the 19th century. Both eras are marked by extreme corruption.

7. One sign of American corruption is the rapidity with which American society has become more unequal since the 1980s Reagan destruction of the progressive income tax. The wealthier the top 1 percent is, the more politicians it can buy to gather up even more of the country’s wealth. In my lifetime, the top 1 percent has gone from holding 25 percent of the privately held wealth under President Eisenhower to over 38 percent today. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right that we need to much increase the top marginal tax rate, and we need to tax unearned income as well.

8. The U.S. military budget is bloated and enormous, bigger than the military budgets of the next 12 major states. What isn’t usually realized is that perhaps half of it is spent on outsourced services, not on the military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic scale. I’ve seen with my own eyes how officers in the military get out and then form companies to sell things to their former colleagues still on the inside. Precisely because it is a cesspool of large-scale corruption, Trump’s budget will throw over $100 billion extra taxpayer dollars at it.

9. The U.S. has a vast gulag of 2.2 million prisoners in jails and penitentiaries. There is an increasing tendency for prisons to be privatized, and this tendency is corrupting the system.  It is wrong for people to profit from putting and keeping human beings behind bars. This troubling trend is made all the more troubling by the move to give extra-long sentences for minor crimes, to deny parole and to imprison people for life for, for example, three small thefts.

10. Asset forfeiture in the “drug war” is corrupting police departments and the judiciary. Although some state legislatures are dialing this corrupt practice back, it is widespread and a danger to the Constitution.

So don’t tell the Global South how corrupt it is for taking a few petty bribes. Americans are not seen as corrupt because we only deal in the big denominations. Steal $2 trillion and you aren’t corrupt, you’re respectable.

U.S. Launches Plan for Asylum Seekers to Wait in Mexico

SAN DIEGO — The Trump administration on Tuesday quietly launched an effort to make asylum seekers wait in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts, despite clear reservations and conflicting messages from the Mexican government.

The U.S. returned one asylum seeker to Mexico — a 55-year-old Honduran man — on the first day of what would be one of the most dramatic changes to the U.S. immigration system in Donald Trump’s presidency, if the policy survives an anticipated legal challenge. Rodulfo Figueroa, head of Mexico’s immigration agency in Baja California state, said the man requested a ride to a migrant shelter in Tijuana.

Mexican officials sent mixed signals on the crucial point of whether Mexico would impose limits on accepting families. Tonatiuh Guillen, commissioner of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, said Mexico would only accept people 18 to 60 years old, which rules out families with young children.

Roberto Velasco, spokesman for Mexico’s Foreign Relations Secretary, said Friday that families would be considered case by case. And a Mexican official with direct knowledge of the process said Mexico requested that families be excluded from the policy but that the U.S. declined to make any commitment, conceding only to start with single adults. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the deliberations were not public.

The launch is limited to San Diego’s San Ysidro border crossing, the nation’s busiest, though Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan wrote in a memo released Tuesday that it is expected to expand to other crossings “in the near future.” Adding to a sense of confusion, Guillen said Mexico will only allow it at the one crossing that connects San Diego and Tijuana.

Katie Waldman, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, disputed Guillen’s description, calling it “false.” A sharp increase in Central American families seeking asylum in the U.S. led to the Trump administration’s dramatic move, and limiting families would blunt or diminish the impact.

“It will be expanded across the entire Southwest border, and it will apply to family groups,” Waldman said.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was in San Diego on Tuesday to observe the launch but had no public appearances. The U.S. Embassy in Mexico said in a news release that the program began Tuesday.

Mexico’s foreign relations secretary said Friday that the U.S. would start with 20 people a day. Two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deliberations were not public said shortly before the launch that the policy would start with about 100 people a week in a trial period of up to 90 days in San Diego.

The launch followed months of delicate talks between the U.S. and Mexico and marked a change to the U.S. asylum system that both the administration and asylum experts said was unprecedented.

Velasco, writing Monday in an opinion article in The Washington Post, outlined Mexico’s doubts and said there “are several technical-level questions … that our two governments need to address to guarantee an adequate implementation of this unilateral policy.” Mexico has repeatedly said the U.S. is acting alone, but it has pledged to issue temporary visas to the asylum seekers in the U.S., with permission to seek work authorization.

“The operational complexity of receiving asylum seekers from the United States opens the door to new potential drawbacks,” Velasco wrote. “Mexico will keep raising these concerns to the United States, to adequately manage the situation while guaranteeing the orderly functioning of our border.

On Monday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a memo to employees that asylum officers would interview migrants to determine if they are “more likely than not” to be persecuted or tortured in Mexico while waiting for hearings in the U.S. If they are not, they will be returned to Mexico.

Asylum seekers will not be allowed to have attorneys at that initial screening held at border crossings “given the limited capacity and resources,” drawing swift criticism from immigration attorneys.

“With this policy, the Trump administration is purposefully keeping Central Americans in unsafe conditions without access to counsel and evidence in an effort to send them straight back to the hands of their persecutors,” Dree Collopy, an immigration lawyer and asylum expert in Washington, wrote in an email. She regards the practice as illegal and contrary to U.S. obligations under domestic and international law.

Due largely to a court-imposed 20-day limit on detaining children, families are typically released in the U.S. with a notice to appear in immigration court. With a backlog of more than 800,000 cases, it can take years to settle cases, giving rise to what the administration calls “catch and release.”

Nielsen said last week that the “migrant protection protocols” being introduced in San Diego are a “methodical commonsense” approach to what she calls a humanitarian and security crisis on the Mexican border.

“For far too long, our immigration system has been exploited by smugglers, traffickers and those who have no legal right to remain in the United States,” she said.

Children traveling alone and Mexican asylum seekers will be exempt from the program, as will “criminals,” people with a “history of violence” and those with physical or mental health issues, according to guidelines issued Tuesday by Customs and Border Protection.

U.S. authorities will transport asylum seekers to and from the border to attend hearings in San Diego. Guillen said Mexico’s temporary visas would last for a maximum of 120 days. The Mexican official said U.S. asylum judges are expected to render final decisions within 90 days.

___

Associated Press writer Maria Verza in Mexico City and AP photographer Gregory Bull in Tijuana, Mexico, contributed to this report.