Chris Hedges's Blog, page 349

GOP Leaders Signal No Taste for Renewing Shutdown Over Wall

WASHINGTON — Wary of reigniting a clash that proved damaging to Republicans, congressional GOP leaders signaled Tuesday that they want to de-escalate the battle over President Donald Trump’s border wall and suggested they could be flexible as bargainers seek a bipartisan agreement.

In what seemed a message aimed at the White House, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized the two confrontational tactics that Trump has threatened to employ if negotiators can’t craft a border security accord to his liking. The president has said he’d trigger a fresh shutdown or declare a national emergency on the Southwest boundary, a disputed move that could let him redirect budget funds to building segments of the wall.

The remarks by McConnell, R-Ky., were noteworthy because the guarded lawmaker seldom volunteers his opinions and reporters had not specifically asked him about a shutdown or a possible emergency declaration. The comments underscored his party’s eagerness to put the 35-day partial federal shutdown behind them and avoid additional jarring clashes, and suggested possible divisions between GOP lawmakers and the White House.

“I’m for whatever works that would prevent the level of dysfunction we’ve seen on full display here the last month and also doesn’t bring about a view on the president’s part that he needs to declare a national emergency,” McConnell said when asked to describe a border security agreement he’d support.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said he would not insist that any deal include the word “wall.” The comment signaled the GOP’s latest rhetorical retreat from a battle cry — “Build the wall!” — that Trump made a keystone of his presidential campaign.

The longest shutdown ever was initiated by Trump after Democrats refused his demand for $5.7 billion to build segments of his long-sought border wall. Polls show people chiefly blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown and widely dislike the wall.

The president surrendered last Friday and agreed to reopen government for three weeks so negotiators can seek a border security deal, but with no commitments for wall funds.

House-Senate bargainers plan their first negotiating session Wednesday.

Some lawmakers have suggested broadening whatever package emerges, perhaps adding protections from deportation for young “Dreamer” immigrants in the U.S. illegally or making it harder for future shutdowns to occur. Disagreements over those issues make their inclusion unlikely, most lawmakers say.

McCarthy told reporters Tuesday that the wording of an agreement “could be barrier. It doesn’t have to be a wall.”

Trump has retreated increasingly from “wall” as it became apparent that he lacked the votes in Congress to win taxpayer financing for the project, which he initially said would be financed by Mexico.

“They can name it ‘Peaches,'” Trump said earlier this month. “I don’t care what they name it. But we need money for that barrier.” He’s also recently tweeted a new mantra, “BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL!”

McCarthy said wall and barrier mean the same thing to him and Trump.

“Inside the meetings we’ve had, he’s said it could be a barrier, it could be a wall,” said McCarthy. “Because what a barrier does, it’s still the same thing. It’s the 30-foot steel slat, that’s a barrier.”

White House spokeswoman Mercedes Schlapp said, “The president has perfectly set this table for the negotiations with Congress. He wants to give Congress one more chance.”

Democrats have repeatedly said they wouldn’t finance the wall, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has called “immoral.” In recent weeks, they’ve expressed support for fencing or physical barriers but have left ambiguous exactly what they would back. They’ve said they want to spend money on more border patrol agents and technology like scanning devices and drones.

“There are many kinds of walls, and so I think that we’re going to try to find common ground,” said No. 3 House Democratic leader James Clyburn of South Carolina.

McConnell and many GOP lawmakers have long sought to avoid government shutdowns, aware of the tactic’s long and consistent history of backfiring badly on whoever sparks one. In the one that just ended, 800,000 federal workers went unpaid for five weeks, countless Americans were denied federal services and mushrooming problems included slowed air travel and delayed IRS refunds.

“There certainly would be no education in the third kick of a mule,” said McConnell, adding an additional kick to the homily he frequently cites about how shutdowns don’t work.

Members of both parties have opposed Trump declaring an emergency on the Mexican border. They say it would set a dangerous precedent for future presidents who might use the strategy to push their own agendas that stall in Congress. If he issued the declaration, it would trigger near-immediate lawsuits that might block the money anyway.

“There’s no appetite for government shutdowns and there’s not much appetite for an emergency declaration. For a lot of reasons, our members are very wary of that,” said No. 2 Senate GOP leader John Thune of South Dakota.

Interviews with numerous Republican lawmakers showed little taste for a new shutdown.

“Most members, whatever faction in the Republican caucus, would be opposed to a shutdown and would do everything they can to work some kind of deal,” said Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina, a member of House GOP leadership.

___

AP congressional correspondent Lisa Mascaro and reporters Matthew Daly and Jill Colvin contributed.

Illegal Abortions Exact a High Toll Among African Women

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere.

Nomathemba Njuza will never forget the traumatic loss she suffered on Aug. 23 last year. Two young women showed up at her family home in rural Lesotho with their schoolmate, Njuza’s 21-year-old daughter Nontsikelo, who was in severe pain. Nontsikelo’s friends said their teacher had asked them to bring her back from school.

PHOTO ESSAY | 5 photosClick here to see photos of Nontsikelo Njuza, her mother and fellow villagers.

Njuza called neighbors for help because Nontsikelo was suffering from piercing cramps and heavy bleeding. “I hired a van to take her to a clinic, and by the time we arrived, she was lying in a pool of blood,” Njuza says. Nontsikelo’s condition was so severe she had to be transferred to a hospital 30 miles away. She died during the trip there.

Njuza knows exactly what killed her daughter. On the way to the clinic, Nontsikelo said she had taken an abortion pill from a man she found on Facebook.

Nontsikelo was the victim of an unsafe abortion—one performed by an unskilled practitioner or in a substandard medical environment. Her story is a common one in Africa, where more than 4 million unsafe abortions are performed each year. One out of every 150 African women who have an unsafe abortion dies from complications, and countless others come away scarred physically or emotionally.

As in many other southern African countries, abortion is illegal in Lesotho unless the woman’s health is in danger or the pregnancy is the result of rape. If a woman gets pregnant but can’t care for a child psychologically or financially, she has very little option but to undergo a clandestine abortion that might be life-threatening.

Changing the law is essential but isn’t a cure-all, as the experience in South Africa shows. In that country (which encircles Lesotho), abortion is allowed by law, but many women can’t access a legal procedure. Several factors stand in the way, including cultural or religious beliefs as well as interference from halfway around the globe. A United States government policy reinstated by President Trump blocks federal funding worldwide to nongovernmental organizations that provide any kind of abortion service including advocacy, referral and counseling.

Finding Abortions on Facebook

In Lesotho, a predominantly Catholic country, women who get abortions face social ostracism as well as arrest. Leaving Lesotho to have the procedure isn’t an option for most women. In interviews with this reporter, several women have said they know that safe, legal abortion is available in South Africa, but they can’t afford the private doctors’ fees in that country.

The social, legal and financial barriers lead many women to Facebook, the dominant social media website in Lesotho, where they make contact with unskilled clinicians. Such practitioners are easily accessible and charge more affordable rates to perform abortions.

Various methods are used in these unsafe procedures, with one of the most common involving “abortion pills” that induce labor. These pills, used “off label,” can cause incomplete abortion, which often leads to dangerous bleeding. Other illegal termination methods include ingesting dangerous substances such as brake fluid or bleach.

Complications from unsafe abortions cause a shocking number of deaths among women in Africa compared with other parts of the world. The World Health Organization reports that “in developed regions, it is estimated that 30 women die for every 100,000 unsafe abortions. That number rises to 220 deaths per 100,000 unsafe abortions in developing regions and 520 deaths per 100,000 unsafe abortions in sub-Saharan Africa.”

In Lesotho, it is difficult to pinpoint the number of deaths from unsafe abortion because women who enter hospitals with complications often don’t admit they have had the procedure.

Recently, Lesotho’s Minister of Health, Nkaku Kabi, announced that Queen Mamohato Memorial Hospital, the country’s only referral hospital, is filled to capacity with women suffering from the effects of unsafe abortions. (Other hospitals or clinics that lack proper resources refer patients to this hospital.)

Illegal abortions can result in a range of life-threatening complications, according to Matsebo Mpeta, a nurse-clinician at the referral hospital. Some women develop sepsis, a dangerous response to an infection often caused by the material used in the procedure or by an unclean clinical environment. Other women die from infection itself, loss of blood or harm to the organs or genital tract.

Those who survive unsafe abortions often face serious and lasting health consequences. Women can become infertile if the uterus is damaged—or has to be removed—due to chemicals or instruments used to terminate the pregnancy. Urine or stool incontinence caused by injury to organs is another common lifelong consequence.

Damage to Mental Health

Mpeta also reports mental health issues associated with unsafe abortion, including depression, anxiety attacks and suicidal tendencies. She has seen women and girls become severely traumatized, and she describes some as “mentally challenged” after their experiences.

Puseletso Lekhafola (a pseudonym) had an illegal abortion in Lesotho five years ago, and she is still in anguish. She says she hasn’t been able to grieve—or even process her experience—because she does not feel safe in confiding in anyone.

“It makes you the mother of the dead child, and I have always considered myself a murderer,” Lekhafola says. “Constant questions coming to my mind (are) ‘Will I be able to conceive again?’ and ‘What if God will punish me by not (letting me have) kids again?’ ” Because of the stigma associated with abortion, she has not gone to a counselor for help and has not asked a health professional whether she is able to have children.

In several cases, pregnant women have been too frightened to get illegal abortions so they have had their babies and then committed another crime of despair called concealment. The Lesotho Penal Code states: “A person who disposes of the dead body of a new-born child with intent to conceal the fact of its birth, whether the child died before, during, or after birth commits an offence.”

Magistrate Mapitso Leseeo has handled several cases involving charges of concealment. She tells of one young woman driven to desperation by economic problems and social pressure. “[She] was in her early 30s and was in tears when she described … why she committed the crime,” Leseeo says. “She could not provide for the child, and the father of the child was nowhere to be found.”

South Africa

Although abortion has been legalized in neighboring South Africa, of the estimated 260,000 abortions performed there each year about half are illegal.

On paper, the country has taken an important step toward respecting the rights of women, but observers say the reality is a different story. Many qualified South African health care professionals refuse to perform abortions because it violates their cultural or religious beliefs. These practitioners can refuse to perform the procedure if they conscientiously object to it, but they are legally bound to refer patients to safe abortion providers. According to Amnesty International, this guideline isn’t well regulated and the result is lack of access to safe procedures.

Economic and geographic factors also make it difficult for women to access safe abortions. Most South African health care professionals work in the private sector, leaving a dearth of available doctors in public health centers, which are the only affordable option for much of the population. Compounding the problem, women in rural areas have little access to safe terminations because they lack transportation to appropriate facilities.

Global Gag Rule

A United States policy makes it even harder to find safe abortions in southern Africa. Known as the “Global Gag Rule,” this policy blocks U.S. aid to nongovernmental agencies that offer any services related to abortion.

The policy, first implemented by President Reagan in 1984, has been rescinded by Democratic administrations and reinstated by Republican ones. President Obama revoked it, and in 2017 President Trump revived and expanded it. In the past, the policy only applied to U.S. family planning and affected about $575 million in funding, according to Human Rights Watch. Under the Trump administration, the policy now affects about $8.8 billion in global spending. Among other consequences, women in developing countries such as South Africa face less access to information, contraception and legal abortion.

The gag rule also has affected services in countries where abortion is illegal. Health practitioners in Lesotho who used to offer free contraceptives, family planning advice and abortion counseling no longer have the funding to continue. Since Trump’s expansion of the U.S. policy, family planning groups have had to radically downsize outreach efforts as well as services within their facilities.

A Mother’s Scar

Nomathemba Njuza’s daughter Nontsikelelo died two months before taking a final examination that would have determined her educational and career possibilities. Instead of having hopes for a child with a bright future, Njuza says she’s left only with a scar in her heart.

Before Nontsikelelo’s death, Njuza was among those who opposed abortion on moral grounds. She had heard of other young women in the area who had illegally terminated pregnancies, but she hadn’t known any who had died. Nontsikelelo’s death radically changed her attitude.

“Women and girls are in need of safe abortion to save their lives,” Njuza says. “I have come to understand abortion as a medical necessity because it … has a very real impact on people’s lives. I have witnessed that.”

There Are Only Two Democratic Hopefuls Wall Street Fears

What do Democratic officials as diverse as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Joe Biden have in common? Each has signaled a desire to run for president in 2020, if not formally announced a decision to do so. And less than two years from their party’s primary, none appear to pose any kind of meaningful threat to Wall Street, even as its wealth and influence have grown in the protracted aftermath of the Great Recession.

According to new report from Politico, there are only two prospective candidates that the nation’s bankers genuinely fear. “It can’t be Warren, and it can’t be Sanders,” claims one anonymous CEO of a major bank. “It has to be someone centrist and someone who can win.”

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the report reveals, Wall Street’s ideal candidate is Mike Bloomberg—a former Republican with deep ties to the financial sector and no discernible base. (According to the most recent Morning Consult/Politico data, he’s currently polling at 2 percent among Democratic voters.)

The industry would also likely be amenable to somebody like former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who made headlines this week when he called Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed tax on the ultra-rich “ridiculous.” Schultz’s ongoing flirtation with a third-party bid has already ignited calls for a Starbucks boycott, and he recently found himself brutally heckled during a promotional event at a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan. (Editor’s note: Schultz has postponed any announcement until at least the summer, and claims he will “only run if he sees a viable path” to victory.)

“On Wall Street, executives love Trump’s tax cuts and soft-touch regulatory posture,” writes Politico’s Ben White. “But as the nation comes off the longest shutdown in American history amid warnings of an impending economic slowdown, there is also a clear preference for a change to more predictable leadership.”

While finance has its concerns about each Democratic hopeful, it’s already assembling its favorites within the party. That list includes the aforementioned Harris, Booker and Biden, along with long shots like former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, although White acknowledges that “few actually know his [O’Rourke’s] positions.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has engendered more mixed feelings. Despite her calling for a financial transactions tax and the reinstatement of legislation that creates a wall between retail and investment banking, at least one Wall Street alumnus views her as a “pragmatist, not an ideologue.” (In recent weeks, the New York senator has also put out feelers to executives to gauge their interest in backing her presidential run.)

“Among the most hardcore Democrats on Wall Street, the strong desire is to find a candidate — any candidate — who can beat Trump,” White continues, “even if that means getting behind someone like Warren who supports policies that bankers hate.”

Implicit in the report is the assumption among its interview subjects that the only nominee guaranteed to lose against Donald Trump is a certain independent senator from Vermont. As one senior banking executive concludes, “Everyone in the top tier not named Bernie Sanders could probably win.”

Whether that belief is genuine or a bit of self-protective posturing is anyone’s guess. But if Sanders ultimately elects to run, the bumper sticker practically writes itself.

Read more at Politico.

After the Shutdown, the Lowest Paid Workers Still Won’t Get Back Pay

President Trump and Congress reached a deal to open the government until Feb. 15 and to give 800,000 federal workers 35 days of missed wages. Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that while payroll won’t happen all at once, “We hope that by the end of this week, all of the back pay will be made up and, of course, the next payroll will go out on time.”

Over half a million federal contractors however—those whose employers have contracts with the federal government but are not directly employed by it—have no such relief.

As Danielle Paquette reports in The Washington Post, “Unlike the 800,000 career public servants who are slated to receive full back pay over the next week or so, the contractors who clean, guard, cook and shoulder other jobs at federal workplaces aren’t legally guaranteed a single penny.”

These workers, Paquette writes, tend to be “the lowest paid in the government economy, generally earning between $450 and $650 weekly, union leaders say.”

Audrey Murray-Wright, a cleaning supervisor for the National Portrait Gallery, said money became so tight, between gas bills, mortgage payments, and electricity, that she stopped taking her blood pressure medication and started rationing groceries. “I never, ever want to tell my son, ‘Don’t drink all that milk so you can save your brother some,’ ” she told Paquette.

While workers like Carl Houtman, a chemical engineer for the Forest Service in Madison, Wis., told USA Today that he cried “Alleluia!” when he heard that the government reopened, and added, “It’s great for everybody,” returning to work offers little hope for contractors like Murray-Wright. Héctor Figueroa, president of 32BJ SEIU, a union that represents 170,000 service workers on the East Coast, explained in an email to the Post that “Contracted workers are still in limbo,” saying:

The men and women who clean and secure federal buildings have been living on the edge of disaster for five weeks. Many of these workers are facing eviction, power shut-offs, hunger and even going without lifesaving medications. And unlike direct federal employees, they may never be made whole.

To prevent a repeat of this situation, two bills have been introduced in Congress, one from Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., and another from Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., that seek to remedy the problem. Twenty Democratic senators have signed on to Smith’s bill so far, but as Vox reported Tuesday, no Republicans have joined them.

One of Smith’s co-sponsors, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told Vox, “I don’t know of any Republican opposition to this,” and is still hoping that back pay for contractors could be added to the next bill that funds the government.

Meanwhile, contractors like Murray-Williams and Loniece Hamilton, a guard at the Smithsonian who told the Post that she had to drain $1,000 from her bank account during the shutdown, are struggling to figure out how they’ll make up for their lost paychecks, with Feb. 15, when the latest funding bill expires, looming.

Your Complete Guide to the N.Y. Times’ Support of U.S.-Backed Coups in Latin America

On Friday, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.

A survey of The New York Times archives shows the Times editorial board has supported 10 out of 12 American-backed coups in Latin America, with two editorials—those involving the 1983 Grenada invasion and the 2009 Honduras coup—ranging from ambiguous to reluctant opposition. The survey can be viewed here.

Covert involvement of the United States, by the CIA or other intelligence services, isn’t mentioned in any of the Times’ editorials on any of the coups. Absent an open, undeniable U.S. military invasion (as in the Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada), things seem to happen in Latin American countries entirely on their own, with outside forces rarely, if ever, mentioned in the Times. Obviously, there are limits to what is “provable” in the immediate aftermath of such events (covert intervention is, by definition, covert), but the idea that the U.S. or other imperial actors could have stirred the pot, funded a junta or run weapons in any of the conflicts under the table is never entertained.

More often than not, what one is left with, reading Times editorials on these coups, are racist, paternalistic “cycle of violence” cliches. Sigh, it’s just the way of things Over There. When reading these quotes, keep in mind the CIA supplied and funded the groups that ultimately killed these leaders:

Brazil 1964: “They have, throughout their history, suffered from a lack of first class rulers.”
Chile 1973: “No Chilean party or faction can escape some responsibility for the disaster, but a heavy share must be assigned to the unfortunate Dr. Allende himself.”
Argentina 1976: “It was typical of the cynicism with which many Argentines view their country’s politics that most people in Buenos Aires seemed more interested in a soccer telecast Tuesday night than in the ouster of President Isabel Martinez de Perlin by the armed forces. The script was familiar for this long‐anticipated coup.”

See, it didn’t matter! It’s worth pointing out the military junta put in power by the CIA-contrived coup killed 10,000 to 30,000 Argentines from 1976 to 1983.

There’s a familiar script: The CIA and its U.S. corporate partners come in, wage economic warfare, fund and arm the opposition, then the target of this operation is blamed. This, of course, isn’t to say there isn’t merit to some of the objections being raised by The New York Times—whether it be Chile in 1973 or Venezuela in 2019. But that’s not really the point. The reason the CIA and U.S. military and its corporate partisans historically target governments in Latin America is because those governments are hostile to U.S. capital and strategic interests, not because they are undemocratic. So while the points the Times makes about illiberalism may sometimes be true, they’re mostly a non sequitur when analyzing the reality of what’s unfolding.

Did Allende, as the Times alleged in 1973 when backing his violent overthrow, “persist in pushing a program of pervasive socialism” without a “popular mandate”? Did, as the Times alleged, Allende “pursue this goal by dubious means, including attempts to bypass both Congress and the courts”? Possibly. But Allende’s supposed authoritarianism isn’t why the CIA sought his ouster. It wasn’t his means of pursuing redistributive policies that offended the CIA and U.S. corporate partners; it was the redistributive policies themselves.

Hand-wringing over the anti-democratic nature of how Allende carried out his agenda without noting that it was the agenda itself—not the means by which it was carried out—that animated his opponents is butting into a conversation no one in power is really having. Why, historically, has The New York Times taken for granted the liberal pretexts for U.S. involvement, rather than analyzing whether there were possibly other, more cynical forces at work?

The answer is that rank ideology is baked into the premise. The idea that the U.S. is motivated by human rights and democracy is taken for granted by The New York Times editorial board and has been since its inception. This does all the heavy lifting without most people—even liberals vaguely skeptical of American motives in Latin America—noticing that a sleight of hand has taken place. “In recent decades,” a 2017 Times editorial scolding Russia asserted, “American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with extraordinary results.” Oh, well, good then.

What should be a conversation about American military and its covert apparatus unduly meddling in other countries quickly becomes a referendum on the moral properties of those countries. Theoretically a good conversation to have (and one certainly ongoing among people and institutions in these countries), but absent a discussion of the merits of the initial axiom—that U.S. talking heads and the Washington national security apparatus have a birthright to determine which regimes are good and bad—it serves little practical purpose stateside beyond posturing. And often, as a practical matter, it works to cement the broader narrative justifying the meddling itself.

Do the U.S. and its allies have a moral or ethical right to determine the political future of Venezuela? This question is breezed past, and we move on to the question of how this self-evident authority is best exercised. This is the scope of debate in The New York Times—and among virtually all U.S. media outlets. To ante up in the poker game of Serious People Discussing Foreign Policy Seriously, one is obligated to register an Official Condemnation of the Official Bad Regime. This is so everyone knows you accept the core premises of U.S. regime change but oppose it on pragmatic or legalistic grounds. It’s a tedious, extortive exercise designed to shift the conversation away from the United States’ history of arbitrary and violent overthrows and into an exchange about how best to oppose the Official Bad Regime in question. U.S. liberals are to keep a real-time report card on these Official Bad Regimes, and if these regimes—due to an ill-defined rubric of un-democraticness and human rights—fall below a score of say, “60,” they become illegitimate and unworthy of defense as such.

While obviously not in Latin America, it’s also worth noting that the Times cheerled the CIA-sponsored coup against Iran’s President, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. Its editorial, written two days after his ouster, engaged in the Times’ patented combination of victim-blaming and “oh dear” bloviating:

“The now-deposed Premier Mossadegh was flirting with Russia. He had won his phony plebiscite to dissolve the Majlis, or lower House of Parliament, with the aid of the Tudeh Communists.”
“Mossadegh is out, a prisoner awaiting trial. It is a credit to the Shah, to whom he was so disloyal, and to Premier Zahedi, that this rabid, self-seeking nationalist would have been protected at a time when his life would not have been worth the wager of a plugged nickel.”
“The Shah … deserves praise in this crisis. … He was always true to the parliamentary institutions of his country, he was a moderating influence in the wild fanaticism exhibited by the nationalists under Mossadegh, and he was socially progressive.”

Again, no mention of CIA involvement (which the agency now openly acknowledges), which the Times wouldn’t necessarily have had any way of knowing at the time. (This is part of the point of covert operations.) Mossadegh is summarily demonized, and it’s not until decades later the public learns of the extent of U.S. involvement. The Times even gets in an orientalist description of Iranians, implying why a strong Shah is necessary:

[The average Iranian] has nothing to lose. He is a man of infinite patience, of great charm and gentleness, but he is also—as we have been seeing—a volatile character, highly emotional, and violent when sufficiently aroused.

Needless to say, there are major difference between these cases: Mossadegh, Allende, Chavez and Maduro all lived in radically different times and championed different policies, with varying degrees of liberalism and corruption. But the one thing they all had in common is that the U.S. government, and a compliant U.S. media, decided they “needed to go” and did everything to achieve this end. The fundamental arrogance of this assumption, one would think, is what ought to be discussed in the U.S. media—as typified by the Times’ editorial board—but time and again, this assumption is either taken for granted or hand-waved away, and we all move on to how and when we can best overthrow the Bad Regime.

For those earnestly concerned about Maduro’s efforts to undermine the democratic institutions of Venezuela (he’s been accused of jailing opponents, stacking the courts and holding Potemkin elections), it’s worth pointing out that even when the liberal democratic properties of Venezuela were at their height in 2002 (they were internationally sanctioned and overseen by the Carter Center for years, and no serious observer considers Hugo Chavez’s rule illegitimate), the CIA still greenlit a military coup against Chavez, and the New York Times still profusely praised the act. As it wrote at the time:

With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.

Chavez would soon be restored to power after millions took to the streets to protest his removal from office, but the question remains: If The New York Times was willing to ignore the undisputed will of the Venezuelan people in 2002, what makes anyone think the newspaper is earnestly concerned about it in 2019? Again, the thing that’s being objected to by the White House, the State Department and their U.S. imperial apparatchiks is the redistributive policies and opposition to the United States’ will, not the means by which they do so. Perhaps the Times and other U.S. media—living in the heart of, and presumably having influence over, this empire—could try centering this reality rather than, for the millionth time, adjudicating the moral properties of the countries subject to its violent, illegitimate whims.

British Jews Apply for German Nationality as Brexit Looms

BERLIN — Simon Wallfisch grew up in London as the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor, who had sworn to never return to the country that murdered her parents and 6 million other Jews.

But more than 70 years after the Holocaust, Brexit has prompted Wallfisch and thousands of other Jews in Britain to apply for German citizenship, which was stripped from their ancestors by the Nazis during the Third Reich.

“This disaster that we call Brexit has led to me just finding a way to secure my future and my children’s future,” said Wallfisch, 36, a well-known classical singer and cellist who received his German passport in October. “In order to remain European I’ve taken the European citizenship.”

Britons holding dual citizenship from an EU country like Germany will retain the privilege of free movement and work across the soon-to-be 27-nation bloc.

Many Britons whose ancestors came from other parts of Europe have been claiming citizenship in other EU member states so they can keep ties to the continent. But for Jews whose families fled Germany to escape the Nazis, the decision has meant re-examining long-held beliefs about the country.

The German Embassy in London says it has received more than 3,380 citizenship applications since the Brexit referendum in June 2016 under article 116 of the German Constitution, which allows the descendants of people persecuted by the Nazis to regain the citizenship that was removed between 1933 and 1945.

In comparison, only around 20 such requests were made annually in the years before Brexit.

Wallfisch’s grandmother, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, was 18 in December 1943 when she was deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland where more than 1 million Jews were murdered.

She survived because she was a member of the camp’s girls’ orchestra. As a cellist, she had to play classical music while other Jews were taken to the gas chambers.

In November 1944, she was taken to Bergen-Belsen — the concentration camp where diarist Anne Frank died after also being transferred from Auschwitz at about the same time — where she was eventually liberated by the British army in April 1945.

Lasker-Wallfisch immigrated to Britain in 1946, got married and had two children. Her career as a famous cello player took her around the world, but it took decades until she overcame her hatred enough to set foot on German soil again in the 1990s.

In recent years, Lasker-Wallfisch, 93, has become a regular visitor, educating children in Germany about the Holocaust and speaking last year during the German parliament’s annual Holocaust memorial event.

On Sunday’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Lasker-Wallfisch, her grandson Simon and her daughter Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch performed for the first time together on stage at the Jewish Museum Berlin in commemoration of their family. They played music with other members of their extended family and read letters from the past as a tribute to those who survived and those who perished in the Shoah.

Before the show, the three generations sat together on the red couch in the museum’s dressing room and told The Associated Press about the emotional thoughts that went into the younger two’s decision to take German citizenship.

“We cannot be victims of our past. We have to have some hope for change,” said Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch, a 60-year-old London psychotherapist who is Simon’s aunt and is still waiting on her German citizenship to be approved. “I feel somehow in a strange way triumphant. Something is coming full circle.”

More than just retaining the ability to travel easily from country to country or maintain business ties, Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch said there are other, more emotional reasons to acquiring German citizenship, with Britain due to leave the European Union on March 29.

“I feel an aliveness here (in Berlin) that I have not experienced before, but it totally makes sense because after all I am German,” Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch said. She added that if the country behind the Holocaust is now one that welcomes the descendants of the victims, “that’s a good thing.”

But Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust, remained skeptical and pessimistic.

“Jewish people never feel secure,” she said to her daughter and grandson, reminding them of her own past. “I had German nationality — it did not buy me security.”

Trump Administration Ramps Up Interference in Venezuela

The Trump administration intensified its interference in politically-fractured Venezuela on Monday by announcing the seizure of billions of dollars in assets connected to the nation’s state-owned oil company, a move critics decried as part of a “dangerous” U.S. policy to help opposition forces overthrow elected president Nicolás Maduro.

National Security Adviser John Bolton and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced the sanctions imposed via executive order against Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA)—a primary source of income and foreign currency for the country—at a White House press briefing on Monday afternoon. They were joined by Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council.

.@AmbJohnBolton on sanctions against PDVSA, #Venezuela state-owned oil monopoly: “Today’s measure total’s $7 billion in assets blocked today. Plus, over $11 billion in lost export proceeds over the next year.” pic.twitter.com/EqNC5mg9wl

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 28, 2019

Mnuchin vowed the United States “will continue to use all of our diplomatic and economic tools” to back Juan Guaidó, who has declared himself Venezuela’s “interim president.” The secretary made clear that “the path to sanctions relief for PdVSA is through the expeditious transfer of control to the interim president or a subsequent, democratically-elected government.”

As CNBC reported:

Mnuchin said PDVSA has long been a vehicle for embezzlement and corruption by officials and businessmen. The sanctions will prevent the nation’s oil wealth from being diverted to Maduro and will only be lifted when his regime hands control of PDVSA to a successor government, he added.

[…]

Under the sanctions, U.S. companies can continue to purchase Venezuelan oil, but the payments must be held in an account that cannot be accessed by the Maduro regime.

“If the people in Venezuela want to continue to sell us oil, as long as that money goes into blocked accounts, we’ll continue to take it,” Mnuchin said. “Otherwise we will not be buying it.”

In addition to tightening economic restrictions on the Maduro government as a way to bolster the position of Guaidó, Bolton also issued a fresh threat of military action by telling reporters in the White House briefing room that Trump “has made it clear that all options are on the table” when it comes to next possible steps.

“This is very dangerous,” world-renowned economics professor and senior U.N. advisor Jeffrey D. Sachs warned on CNN Monday afternoon. He expressed concern that the administration’s actions could cause immense suffering among the Venezuelan people, similar to the consequences endured by citizens of other countries subjected to U.S. interventions.

“The problem here is that these efforts by the United States to change other countries’ governments often lead to catastrophe,” Sachs noted, “as has happened all through the Middle East in recent years.”

“Very often Washington says, ‘Somebody must go,'” he continued. “And this is how our foreign policy often works—it’s very arrogant [to say] who should rule in another country. By the way, Maduro is not a decent, pleasant man—but on the other hand, for Washington to just announce that a self-declared politician is the president, is kind of an American regime change tradition.”

Keeping with that tradition, a Wall Street Journal report published last week revealedthat Guaidó’s coup attempt has been highly coordinated with Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers. A handful of other nations including Israel and Brazil are also backing Guaidó, and in a speech before the U.N. Security Council on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged others to follow suit.

Experts and a few progressive members of Congress, meanwhile, have acknowledged the economic and political crises in Venezuela but also demanded that the Trump administration refrain from intervening through military action or sanctions.

“Instead of a U.S.-led regime change, the two sides need to share power temporarily, until new elections, perhaps in 2021. It seems inconceivable, yet history shows this can be done,” Sachs charged in a column for CNN on Sunday, citing Poland’s transition to democracy in 1989 as an example. As he outlined:

Such a compromise would have Maduro remain as president, the military in effect hold the Ministries of Defense and Interior, and the opposition forces take over the civilian ministries, and the Central Bank of Venezuela. Guaidó, or some other leader in the opposition camp, would serve in effect as a prime minister, leading the civilian cabinet, and guiding Venezuela’s economic policies. Elections would be agreed upon for 2021 or 2022, perhaps under a semi-parliamentary system by that time.

“The U.S. instead appears to be aiming for regime change and tightening sanctions to bring Maduro to his knees,” Sachs concluded. “Such an outcome is perhaps feasible, though it would leave a very bitter legacy. More likely, though, it would occasion further violence and an escalation of the economic crisis, possibly leading to war.”

Officials Urge Vaccinations Amid Northwest Measles Outbreak

VANCOUVER, Wash.—Public health officials scrambling to contain a measles outbreak in the U.S. Northwest warned people to vaccinate their children Monday and worried that it could take months to contain the highly contagious viral illness due to a lower-than-normal vaccination rate at the epicenter of the crisis.

The outbreak near Portland has sickened 35 people in Oregon and Washington since Jan. 1, with 11 more cases suspected. Most of the patients are children under 10, and one child has been hospitalized.

Health officials say the outbreak is a textbook example of why it’s critical to vaccinate against measles, which was eradicated in the U.S. after the vaccine was introduced in 1963. In recent years, however, the viral illness has popped up again from New York to California and sickened hundreds.

Clark County, Washington, has a vaccination rate of 78 percent, well below the level necessary to protect those with compromised immune systems or who can’t get vaccinated because of medical issues or because they are too young.

Misinformation is circulating on social media, said Dr. Alan Melnick, Clark County public health director.

“What keeps me up at night is eventually having a child die from this completely preventable situation,” he said. “It’s still out there, even though it’s been debunked, that the measles vaccine results in autism. That’s nonsense.”

Before mass vaccination, 400 to 500 people in the United States died of the measles every year, 50,000 people were hospitalized and 4,000 people developed brain swelling that can cause deafness, Melnick said. One to three cases out of every 1,000 are fatal, he said.

People may have been exposed to the disease at about four dozen locations, including Portland International Airport and a Portland Trail Blazers game, officials said.

They announced Monday that others could have been infected at the popular Oregon Museum of Science & Industry in Portland and a Wal-Mart Supercenter in the bedroom community of Vancouver, Washington.

Thirty-one of the confirmed patients had not been vaccinated against measles. The vaccination status of four others who were infected is unknown.

The vaccine has been part of routine childhood shots for decades, and measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000. But measles is still a big problem in other parts of the world, and travelers infected abroad can bring the virus back and spread it, causing periodic outbreaks.

Last year, there were 17 outbreaks and about 350 cases of measles in the U.S.

Officials still are not sure where the Northwest outbreak began. The first known patient sought medical care on Dec. 31, but it isn’t known if other people may have gotten sick before that and did not seek treatment.

Children receive the first vaccine between 12 and 15 months old and the second vaccine between ages 4 and 6. One vaccine provides 93 percent immunity from measles, and two shots provide 97 percent protection.

But the vaccine is less effective in those under a year old and is generally not given to infants.

Jocelyn Smith is terrified her youngest son, who is 11 months, will get measles. They live in Camas, Washington, where at least one infected person spent time while contagious.

Smith has an appointment to get her son vaccinated as soon as he’s eligible — the day after he turns 1.

“I haven’t taken the baby in public for 10 days. I’m just so scared,” she said. “Everybody’s staying inside.”

The virus, spread by coughing or sneezing, can remain in the air for up to two hours in an isolated space. Ninety percent of people exposed to measles who have not been vaccinated will get it, health officials said.

Those who may have been exposed should watch for early symptoms of high fever, malaise and red eyes, followed by a rash that starts on the head and moves down the body.

Strongest Tornado in 8 Decades Hits Cuba; 3 Dead, 172 Hurt

HAVANA—Neighborhood brigades and teams of government workers hacked at fallen trees and hauled chunks of concrete out of collapsed homes Monday as the Cuban capital attempted to recover from what officials called the strongest tornado to hit Cuba in nearly 80 years.

Three people were dead and hundreds injured, at least 12 in critical condition, after the tornado touched down with estimated winds of 200 mph (320 kph) in three neighborhoods across eastern Havana.

Members of the Provincial Defense Council of Havana said 90 homes collapsed completely and 30 suffered partial collapse.

A quarter of the city’s roughly 2 million people were without power Monday afternoon and more than 200,000 people had lost water service because of a broken main and power cuts that left pumps out of service. Some 100 underground cisterns close to the coastal section of Havana were contaminated by seawater.

Three electric substations were knocked out by the tornado, the strongest to hit Cuba since Dec. 26, 1940, when a Category F4 tornado hit the town of Bejucal, in what is now Mayabeque province, officials said. It also appeared to be the first tornado to hit the capital in at least as many years.

Residents of the three relatively poor boroughs hit by the tornado were bracing for further calamity once the tropical sun started to dry sodden buildings, which can often lead to structures shifting and collapsing.

Julio Menendez, a 33-year-old restaurant worker, said his neighborhood in Havana’s 10 de Octubre district looked “like a horror movie.”

“From one moment to the next, we heard a noise like an airplane falling out of the sky. The first thing I did was go hug my daughters,” who are 9 and 12, he told The Associated Press.

Driver Oster Rodriguez said that amid a fierce storm, what looked like a thick, swirling cloud touched down in the central plaza of the Reparto Modelo neighborhood “like a fireball.” He saw a bus blown over, though he said the driver escaped unharmed.

Miguel Angel Hernandez of the Cuban Center for Meteorology said the tornado was a Category F3, with winds between 155 and 199 miles per hour, produced when a cold front hit Cuba’s northern coast. Other meteorologist told state media that the tornado may have been even stronger.

Some of the heaviest damage from Sunday night’s rare tornado was in the eastern borough of Guanabacoa, where the twister tore the roof off a shelter for dozens of homeless families.

Cubans enduring long waits for government housing often live in such multifamily shelters for years.

Dianabys Bueno, 31, was living in the shelter with her husband and son after they were forced to relocate by the collapse of their home in Central Havana. Much of the housing in Havana is in dire condition due to years without maintenance, and building collapses are routine even in ordinary storms.

“This has already happened to us once,” Bueno said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Around Havana, cars were crushed by fallen light posts and vehicles were trapped in floodwaters.

Leanys Calvo, a restaurant cook in the 10th de Octubre borough, said she was working Sunday night despite heavy rain and wind when she heard a rumbling noise outside and looked out to see what appeared to be a tornado touching down.

“It was something that touched down, and then took off again. It was like a tower,” she said, describing it as displaying colors of red and green. “It was here for two-three seconds, nothing more. They were the most frightening seconds of my life.”

The tornado tore the concrete roof off an apartment building in the Regla section of Havana and dumped it into an alleyway, briefly trapping residents in their homes.

Marlene Marrero Garcia, 77, said she was in her ground-floor apartment with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren Sunday night when she heard electrical transformers begin to explode. Then the tornado passed.

“It looked like fire, everything was red, then everything began to fall,” she said.

Marrero said she and her family were trapped by debris for about half an hour before firefighters arrived.

Executives at Davos Are Eager for Automation

Donald Trump has often mentioned bringing back manufacturing jobs, 5.5 million of which were lost in the U.S. from 2000 to 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But while the president blames trade deals for the job losses, economic experts and officials, including from the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, see another culprit: the rise in automation, with machines taking over positions that had been only performed by humans.

While 72 percent of Americans are very or somewhat worried about the prospect of automation, as the Pew Charitable Trust found in 2017, one group that remains unfazed, perhaps even enthusiastic about the prospect of a robot-worker future, are the wealthy attendees of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, according to a Davos dispatch from Kevin Roose in The New York Times. “They’ll never admit it in public,” Roose writes, “but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.”

Publicly, Roose continued, attendees “wring their hands” over most lost jobs, but in private, “they are racing to automate their own workforces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.”

Mohit Joshi, president of Infosys, a firm that helps other companies automate their operations, told Roose that more companies are coming to Infosys with ever-increasing goals for achieving more profits with fewer workers; “Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their workforce, Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”

Executives at Davos, Roose reported, claim they have no choice but to automate. He quotes Katy George, a senior partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, who told him, “They will be disrupted if they don’t,” and their competitors will get there first.

The impacts of automation “will vary, especially across occupations, places and demographic groups,” a January report on automation and artificial intelligence from the Brookings Institution explained. The report also cautions the effects of automation “will be neither apocalypse nor utopia, but instead both benefits and stresses alike.”

What might be the positive aspects of automation and artificial intelligence? One is that even if some jobs are eliminated, others will be created. Also, as Roose noted, “some automation helps workers by improving productivity and freeing them to focus on creative tasks over routine ones.”

The Brookings Institution report said that people whose work focuses on “‘routine,’ predictable physical and cognitive tasks will be the most vulnerable to automation in the coming years.” This includes “office administration, production, transportation and food preparation.”

Executives, according to Roose, would not specify how much money they were saving with automation, though his reporting suggests the practice is beneficial to at least a few companies’ bottom lines. For example:

IBM’s ‘cognitive solutions’ unit, which uses AI to help businesses increase efficiency, has become the company’s second-largest division, posting $5.5 billion in revenue last quarter. The investment bank UBS projects that the artificial intelligence industry could be worth as much as $180 billion by next year.

Ben Pring, the director of the Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant, a technology services firm, explained to Roose that companies are facing a conflict between their desire for profits and the increasing public distrust of automation as people fear losing their livelihoods. “On one hand,” Pring said, executives “absolutely want to automate as much as they can. On the other hand … they’re facing a backlash in civic society.”

Even if automation is inevitable, according to Roose, the job loss doesn’t have to be catastrophic. These wealthy executives are at a turning point, Roose writes, in which they must “choose how the gains from automation and AI are distributed, and whether to give the excess profits they reap as a result to workers or hoard it for themselves and their shareholders.”