Chris Hedges's Blog, page 354

Robert Reich: The Real Source of Authoritarianism Can Be Found at Davos

This article first appeared on RobertReich.Org.

The annual confab of the captains of global industry, finance, and wealth is underway in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum.

Meanwhile, Oxfam reports the wealth of the 2,200 billionaires across the globe increased by $900 billion last year–or $2.5 billion a day. Their 12 percent increase in wealth contrasts with a drop of 11 percent in the wealth of the bottom half of the people of the world. In fact, the world’s 26 richest billionaires now own as much as the 3.8 billion who comprise the bottom half of the planet’s population.

If Davos’ attendees ignore all this, and blame the rise of right-wing populism around the globe on racism fueled by immigrants from the Middle East and from Central America, they’re deluding themselves.

The real source of the rise of repressive authoritarianism, nativism and xenophobia in the United States as well as Italy, Spain, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Bulgaria, Greece, France and Britain is a pervasive sense that elites are rigging the world economy for themselves. And, guess what? They are.

Message to Davos Man (and Woman): Either commit to pushing for broader prosperity and democracy, or watch as trade wars, capital controls and isolationism erode global prosperity (including yours) and global peace.

Betsy DeVos and the Privatizers She Backs Have Met Their Match

It took a week, but the public school teachers of Los Angeles won. Over 30,000 teachers and school staff, members of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union, went on strike for the first time in 30 years, demanding more resources for their classrooms, nurses and librarians in every school, smaller class sizes and higher wages. In rain and shine, they were joined on their picket lines by students, parents and other allies. On Tuesday, LAUSD, the Los Angeles Unified School District — the nation’s second-largest school system, with about three-quarters of its students Latino — agreed to meet the strikers’ demands. Classes resumed Wednesday. This major strike also joins a wave of similar labor actions around the country confronting the attempt by corporate interests to privatize public education.

“We went on strike, in one of the largest strikes that the United States has seen in decades,” UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said Tuesday night, after a supermajority of union members ratified the agreement. “The creativity and innovation and passion and love and emotion of our members was out on the street, in the communities, in the parks, for everyone to see.”

Arlene Inouye, a speech and language specialist with 18 years’ experience in the LAUSD, chaired the UTLA’s bargaining committee. “This was a historic agreement and gave us more than we expected,” Inouye said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. All of their principal demands, including a cap on charter schools to reverse the trend toward privatization, were met. Additionally, Inouye explained, “we were also able to bring in some non-mandatory subjects of bargaining into our schools … like green space on campus, stopping the criminalization of youth. We were able to bring in an immigrant defense fund. We’re making a statement of our values.”

Also speaking on “Democracy Now!,” investigative journalist Sarah Jaffe, author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt,” said: “There have been reform currents within the UTLA for at least a decade … going back to the 2008 financial crisis, recession, the layoffs of a lot of teachers. In 2014, the Union Power caucus took charge … teachers like Arlene, with Alex Caputo-Pearl, brought in an organizing department, a research department, a political department, that the union didn’t have before. [They] actually voted to raise their own dues in order to … invest in really becoming a fighting, organizing union.”

On the picket lines, teachers repeatedly brought up privatization. “Ultimately, this fight is about the privatization of schools,” teacher Marianne O’Brien told us. “Superintendent Austin Beutner is pushing to privatize schools. … Our students would be disproportionately hurt by that and not have access to a quality education, if all the funding for public school is pulled into charter schools.”

Beutner, a wealthy investment banker, has no background in education. The 2018 LAUSD school board election, Jaffe explained, “had $14.7 million in outside funding spent on it by charter school advocates, big-dollar hedge funds … they got a majority of pro-charter school candidates on there. They put Beutner in.” One of Beutner’s plans is to break up the LA Unified School District into 32 “portfolio” districts, copying efforts in cities like Detroit and Newark the UTLA says “are riddled with a patchwork of privatization schemes that do not improve student outcomes.”

Charter schools can not only fire teachers more easily than public schools can—they can fire students as well. By choosing high-performing students and rejecting those who have special needs or score poorly on standardized tests, charter schools drain resources from schools in poorer neighborhoods. Another teacher on the picket line, Lilit Azarian, told us, “This is about fighting for communities of color, because those are the communities that are affected by this privatization.”

A special election in March to fill a seat on the LAUSD school board, vacated when a member pleaded guilty to felony campaign finance violations, is being hotly contested between charter school advocates and the UTLA and other allies of traditional public schools. “If the teachers want Beutner gone, that’s going to be the way to do it,” Jaffe said.

A wave of teacher strikes swept the nation last year, but in largely Republican-controlled red states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona. Teachers and staff went on strike and achieved remarkable improvements, not only in pay and benefits but by directing more resources to schools and classrooms. Now the teachers are rising up in Democratic strongholds like Los Angeles. On Tuesday, as the UTLA declared victory, ending the strike, the teachers union in Denver, voted overwhelmingly to strike. Unionized teachers in Oakland, California, also are expected to strike, as are teachers in Chicago’s community colleges.

If the Los Angeles teachers are any indication of what’s to come, the privatizers and their champion in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump’s billionaire Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, may have met their match.

Davos Attendees Must Accept That They Have Too Much Money

A global gathering of world elites is taking place in Davos, Switzerland, this week, claiming—as it does every year—to “define priorities and shape global, industry and regional agendas.” The World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting, held in the rarified elite space of the snow-capped Swiss Alps, consists, in its own words, of “leaders of global society.” In reality, it represents no formal body. There is no public mandate, no accountability for crafting goals or achieving them. It is a private, invitation-only gathering bringing together corporate elites and liberal technocrats, along with elected representatives and nonprofit leaders, for discussions about how to solve the world’s problems—on their terms.

The WEF’s attendees are so cut off from the rest of society that of the 3,000 attendees, about 1,500 flew into Davos in their own private jets. Most are men, and a majority are either North American or European. The WEF does not like to focus on how wealthy private interests dominate the forum, boasting instead of the myriad high-profile political officials and human rights leaders who have been invited. They will tout speeches by Jane Goodall and David Attenborough—but not by the CEOs of GE or ExxonMobil. Indeed, more than half the attendees are from the business sector—a fact that is revealed on the WEF’s website in only a fragment of a sentence: “… the private sector will be represented by more than 1,700 leaders.” The influence of these representatives on the WEF, and by extension, on government policies, is as invisible as their identities.

Among the human rights leaders invited to Davos is Oxfam International’s Executive Director, Winnie Byanyima, a woman who pulls no punches in the presence of global elites. She wrote ahead of the forum, “Every January I get a glimpse into a different world. A world of billionaires, of business and political elites.” Byanyima explained, “For Oxfam, Davos is an opportunity to take stock of the crisis of extreme inequality.” In fact, each year Oxfam releases its report on global inequality to coincide with the start of the WEF, and this year’s report clearly blames global inequality on the continuously lowered tax rates of the wealthy.

In “Public Good or Private Wealth,” Oxfam asserts that “While governments are under-taxing the wealthy and big corporations, public services are suffering from chronic underfunding or being outsourced to private companies that exclude the poorest people.” Oxfam America’s Vice President for Policy and Advocacy, Paul O’Brien, explained to me in an interview that “If you want to address poverty in this economy, you’re going to have to deal with global tax rates and structural inequality.”

The entire gamut of public services that ordinary people the world over are entitled to—free of charge—are going unfunded or underfunded thanks in large part to the insatiable greed of the fabulously wealthy. Access to services like education and health care, and the stockpiling of cash by billionaires, are two sides of the same coin. One stark example of the impact of dwindling government revenues is that “262 million kids are not going to be able to go to school somewhere in the world because their public institutions don’t have the funding to put them into school,” O’Brien said.

The example of underfunded education drives home the fact that inequality is not just the scourge of so-called Third World nations, but affects the world’s wealthiest nation as well. Think about the wave of teacher-led revolts across the U.S., such as the Los Angeles public teachers strike about which I wrote last week. Wealthy elites like school superintendent Austin Beutner and several of the Los Angeles Unified School District board members have been reluctant to fully fund the school system, leading to poor-quality education. This, in turn, has forced teachers to take a stand, lose pay and risk their livelihoods in a fight for the basic rights of the kids they teach.

There is plenty of money in the U.S. to fully fund schools across the nation so that all kids can have a well-rounded, quality education and all teachers can be generously compensated. But much of that money is either funding the military or being siphoned away from the Treasury through tax cuts.

Meanwhile, Americans who consider themselves to be firmly in the middle-class are often one or two paychecks away from a financial crisis. The ongoing government shutdown illustrates this, as about the 800,000 federal employees are going unpaid. The solution to these myriad problems is to simply, in O’Brien’s words, “Go where the real money is—which is sitting mostly idly in the pockets of the extreme wealthy and corporations.” That money is essentially not being taxed or being undertaxed—a goal that Davos’ attendees have successfully pursued for decades.

Oxfam’s report wisely focuses on women’s wellbeing as a measure of social health. “Investments in public services, particularly health care, education, and social protection, have a disproportionate impact for women and girls,” O’Brien said. For example, educating a young girl “Has this three-generational effect where communities benefit directly and indirectly.” In other words, when girls and women are educated, they are more likely to encourage education in the rest of the family.

Private interests of the sort gathered in Davos show plenty of concern for education, health care and other social services. Philanthropic efforts across the world are filling in gaps created by a lack of government-funded programs and offering great public relations opportunities for billionaires. But those efforts are piecemeal and controlled by the whims of the wealthy. They are often skewed toward feel-good technological innovations and a measurable return on investment rather than long-term outcomes and social good for its own sake. Privately funded charities are no substitute for squeezing much-needed revenues from the tightly closed fists of the wealthy and having those revenues be spent by elected representatives rather than unelected, unaccountable, nameless aristocrats.

Here in the U.S., there is majority public support for raising taxes on the nation’s wealthy—and why wouldn’t there be? The Republican Party’s signature tax reform law passed in December 2017 did exactly what Oxfam’s report warns against—it reduced taxes on the already-rich. A new poll by Business Insider has found that more Americans favor Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan to tax the rich at the rate of 70 percent than those who back the 2017 tax reform law. Davos attendees have good reason to be worried that the world’s inhabitants are onto the con game that the wealthy capitalist class has played on us.

Ultimately, if the many are to have more, the wealthy must make do with less. A lot less. Rhetorically addressing the WEF attendees, O’Brien said, “If we are going to have a world in which wealth and power are more equally distributed, you must do your part, [which means] having less wealth and less power to determine the well-being of so many others.”

Oxfam Report Finds Billionaires Thriving At Our Expense from Rising Up With Sonali on Vimeo:

 

We’ve Reached Peak Political Absurdity

American telescreens broadcast an endless theater of the politically absurd. Take, for example, the ongoing saga over the government shutdown and President Donald Trump’s border wall that has been playing out on screens across the nation for weeks.

Recently, news channels showed Trump telling reporters he can empathize with 800,000 federal workers struggling to pay their bills thanks to the government shutdown he ordered on the pretext of a “national security” crisis on the United States’ southern border.

“I can relate,” Trump said. “And I’m sure that the people that are toward the receiving end will make adjustments. They always do. … People understand exactly what’s going on.”

According to CNN, the government even gave unpaid workers sample letters “explaining the situation” to creditors.

The closure could go on “for years,” claimed the president, adding that given federal government workers support the move, it was better to call his payment stoppage a “strike.”

The telescreens showed Trump threatening to declare a “national emergency” over a “national crisis” of “illegal crossings” at the U.S.-Mexican boundary. We saw Trump and his press secretary claim that U.S. authorities had recently interdicted many “terrorists” (including “Islamic” ones) from crossing the border.

We learned that the president threatened via tweet to end “birthright citizenship”—the national citizenship granted to all persons born in the U.S. under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment—through an executive order.

When the corporate media granted Trump prime telescreen time to promote his wall, he dedicated much of his talk to grisly stories about Latino immigrants who raped and murdered U.S. citizens.

The following weekend, Trump made another appearance to offer Democrats a “deal” he claimed would end the shutdown and “the humanitarian crisis at the border.” His “proposal” (a non-starter before it aired) combined billions for the border wall with some short-term and partial protections for the “Dreamers” (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival [DACA] recipients who were born to parents without legal status). Calling opponents of his wall “open-border extremists” who would render the country defenseless in the face of a criminal invasion of drugs, gangs and violence, he also attributed the nation’s widespread drug crisis to our “open border policy.”

“The radical Left,” Trump bizarrely intoned during his speech, “can never control our borders. I will never let it happen. Walls are not immoral. In fact, they are the opposite of immoral.”

His entire proposal was absurdity in its purest form for a number of reasons. To begin with, contrary to what the president would have Americans believe, border crossings have been dropping for years and are now at historic lows. There is also no evidence of anything remotely akin to a terrorist (“Islamic” or otherwise) influx at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s actually Trump’s draconian policies, replete with the vicious mass-internment of asylum-seeking families and children from Central America, which are the main causes of humanitarian horror unfolding at the border.

Moreover, drugs enter the U.S. primarily via air, water and legal points of entry. They will not be stopped by physical boundaries along the southern U.S. border.

When it comes to “illegal immigrants,” most of the people labeled as such are those who overstayed their visas, not people who crossed the southern border. Mexican and Central American immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are also less, not more, prone than naturalized U.S. citizens to commit violent crimes in the U.S. The young people known as Dreamers do not need or want another maddening deferral of the resolution of their situation.

And as far as revoking birthright citizenship goes, a president cannot undo a Constitutional amendment with an executive order (or a tweet).

There is naturally no evidence of significant federal worker support for the president’s preposterous decision that they should go without paychecks. It’s worth remembering that a strike occurs when workers collectively withhold their labor to try to compel their employer to make changes in pay and/or working conditions. To describe federal workers’ involuntary loss of payment at the command of their boss as a “strike” is ludicrous to a degree that would make George Orwell blush.

While he’s at it, Trump might as well send out a tweet claiming to resolve the problem of “essential” federal workers’ unpaid status with an executive order abolishing the 13th Amendment and designating them as slaves.

The president’s claim that “the radical left” is a threat to “control our borders” is just as bizarre, not to mention a prime example of red-baiting

Equally ridiculous is any assumption that federal workers can forego pay for an extended period. Like their working- and middle-class counterparts around the nation, many government employees live from paycheck to paycheck with slight savings. You can’t buy gas or groceries with a letter from your dysfunctional employer, even if he is the president of the United States. And profit-hungry financial institutions aren’t going to tolerate long-term non-payment because people have a deadbeat boss.

Can Trump “relate” to the workers whose paychecks and benefits he’s suspended, as he claims? The president’s net worth is $3.1 billion. Though he continually claims he didn’t inherit his wealth, a detailed New York Times investigation last fall showed that he got his start and otherwise benefited significantly from his father’s real estate fortune. “By age 3,” the Times reported, Trump “was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire. He was a millionaire by age 8. In his 40s and 50s, he was receiving more than $5 million a year.”

The millionaire’s ability to “relate” is evidently so strong that he couldn’t say anything about the plight of 800,000 unpaid federal workers during his speech to the nation last Saturday afternoon—not one word.

A president of the United States proudly proclaiming his readiness to cripple essential national services like air-traffic control, coastal protection, food safety inspectors and much more is nearly as outrageous as the U.S. Coast Guard telling its workers to take dog-walking and babysitting jobs and have garage sales to pay their bills. Or expecting air-traffic controllers to focus properly on their stressful and momentous duties while worrying about making their next rent or mortgage payment.

But Trump and his party do not have a monopoly on the political absurdity that stalks the cable news.

Top Democrats’ claim to find Trump’s wall “immoral” is a case in point. Their party’s leaders have long championed expensive and draconian “border security” measures, including fencing. Wall-building at the border increased dramatically under Bill Clinton, who feared an influx of Mexican farmers displaced by his arch-neoliberal North American Free Trade Agreement. Fence construction also continued under the record-setting “deporter-in-chief” Barack Obama.

One recent morning, I tuned into “liberal” MSNBC, the cable news headquarters of “progressive neoliberalism,” that curious mixture of corporate-financial allegiance and metropolitan identity politics that holds sway atop the Democratic Party. There I beheld morning MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle speak passionately against the human costs of Trump’s “ridiculous” shutdown. Ruhle mocked the president’s pretense of empathy with unpaid federal workers. Then, right before a swath of drug commercials, she said that her next segment would turn to “Wall Street, my favorite place.”

That’s right, the same Wall Street that has been screwing over working-class people of all kinds (federal workers included) in service to the nation’s unelected dictatorship of capital for as long as it has existed.

MSNBC talking heads can cry all they want about the plight of working people and the poor. Their network, most of its hosts and the top Democrats they support are every bit as allegiant (if not more so) to that dictatorship as Fox News and the Republicans.

Ruhle wasn’t kidding about the world’s leading financial district being her happy place. Before entering the corporate media universe via Bloomberg Television, the MSNBC host spent six years in global hedge fund sales. Ruhle was vice president of Credit Suisse First Boston, where she “became the highest producing credit derivatives salesperson in the United States.”

“In 2003,” her Wikipedia page boasts, “Ruhle joined Deutsche Bank as a credit salesperson covering hedge funds. She ended her eight-year career there as a managing director in Global Markets Senior Relationship Management.”

With a fortune built on financial weapons of mass destruction that helped ruin working-class lives, Stephanie Ruhle enjoys a net worth of $5 million and receives $1 million a year from MSNBC. Evidently she feels for working people while inhabiting a lavish $7.5 million townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Now that she’s lost her Senate seat, the right-wing corporate Democrat Claire McCaskill should fit into her new position as a regular commentator at MSNBC, where neoliberal centrism privileges the servicing of corporate sponsors over social justice and even over the winning of elections by Democrats.

Along the way, “MSDNC” talking heads join not-so-progressive neoliberal brethren at CNN (where liberal hosts regularly invite and applaud anti-Trump commentary from former top national spymasters and generals) in doing their best to manufacture consent to the American Empire. As Glenn Greenwald notes, MSNBC has become “reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping President Donald Trump, and [is] now the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine’s promotion of militarism and imperialism.” Thanks to what Greenwald calls “NBC/MSNBC’s all-consuming militarism”:

An entire generation of Democrats paying attention to politics for the first time is being instilled with formerly right-wing Cold Warrior values of jingoism, über-patriotism, reverence for security state agencies and prosecutors, a reckless use of the ‘traitor’ accusation to smear one’s enemies, and a belief that neoconservatives embody moral rectitude and foreign policy expertise has long been obvious and deeply disturbing. These toxins will endure far beyond Trump, particularly given the now full-scale unity between the Democratic establishment and neocons.

How ridiculous: A cable news network commonly said and thought to represent the positions of “the Left” functions as perhaps the leading propaganda organ of the War Party, opposing Trump on the grounds that’s he’s bad for the supposedly noble U.S. global empire.

Sadly, as Greenwald observes, Democrats are now more globally interventionist and imperial than Republicans. MSNBC and CNN’s relentless promotion of the national security state and the military-industrial-complex in the name of #Resistance played no small part in the party’s transformation.

An MSNBC roundtable last Sunday morning ended with a “Democratic strategist” offering curious commentary on what’s happened to the right- and nationalist-leaning U.S. and Europe over the last two years. Things were going great, the strategist said, under the leadership of Barack Obama, who embodied the best of enlightened Western civilization. Then Vladimir Putin came along and single-handedly ruined it all by passing Brexit, electing Donald Trump and fueling “populism” across Europe.

The suggestion begs a darkly interesting question regarding the nation’s reigning “corporate-managed democracy,” as Alex Carey calls it. Who’s more absurd: those who blame corporate-ruled America’s continuing systemic decline on a mythical invasion of Mexican and Central American rapists or those who point the finger at the supposedly all-powerful president of Russia?

It’s Off: Pelosi Says No State of the Union During Shutdown

WASHINGTON — In a high-stakes case of dare and double-dare, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi served notice Wednesday that President Donald Trump won’t be allowed to deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress next week. She took the step after Trump said he planned to show up in spite of Democratic objections to the speech taking place when big swaths of the government are shut down.

Denied that grand venue, Trump promised to come up with some sort of alternative event. But the White House was scrambling to find something matching the gravitas of the traditional address from the dais of the House to lawmakers from both parties, Supreme Court justices, invited guests and a television audience of millions.

“I think that’s a great blotch on the incredible country that we all love,” Trump said. “It’s a great, great horrible mark.”

Fireworks over the speech shot back and forth between the Capitol and the White House as the month-long partial government shutdown showed no signs of ending and with about 800,000 federal workers facing the prospect of going without their second paycheck in a row come Friday.

Pelosi told Trump the House won’t approve a resolution allowing him to address Congress until the shutdown ends. Trump shot back that Pelosi was afraid of hearing the truth.

The drama surrounding the State of the Union address began last week when Pelosi asked Trump to make other plans but stopped short of denying him the chamber for his address. Trump called her bluff Wednesday in a letter, saying he intended to come anyway.

“It would be so very sad for our Country if the State of the Union were not delivered on time, on schedule, and very importantly, on location,” he wrote.

Pelosi quickly squelched the speech, writing back that the House “will not consider a concurrent resolution authorizing the President’s State of the Union address in the House Chamber until government has opened.”

The president cannot speak in front of a joint session of Congress without both chambers’ explicit permission. A resolution needs to be approved by both chambers specifying the date and time for receiving an address from the president.

The Constitution states only that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union,” meaning the president can speak anywhere he chooses or give his update in writing. The address has been delayed before.

Ronald Reagan’s 1986 State of the Union address was postponed after the Challenger space shuttle exploded in flight on Jan. 28 of that year.

Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter issued their final messages in print. As Eisenhower recovered from a heart attack in 1956, he prepared a seven-minute, filmed summary of the message from his retreat in Key West, Florida, that was broadcast nationwide. Richard Nixon sent a printed message in 1973; his staff said an oral message would have come too soon after his second inaugural address.

White House officials have been working on a backup plan to have Trump give the speech somewhere else if Democrats blocked access to the House chamber. Nevertheless, they were rattled by Pelosi’s move Wednesday and expressed concern it would further sour shutdown negotiations.

Pelosi said that when she extended her Jan. 3 invitation to Trump to deliver the State of the Union address on Jan. 29, there was no thought that the government would still be shut down.

She wrote Thursday: “I look forward to welcoming you to the House on a mutually agreeable date for this address when government has been opened.”

Moments after her letter became public, Trump told reporters he wasn’t surprised by Pelosi’s action. Democrats have become “radicalized,” he claimed. He expanded on those sentiments during a subsequent event at the White House, calling the cancellation a “disgrace” and asserting that Pelosi didn’t want to hear the truth about the need for better border security.

The White House and Democratic lawmakers have been accusing one another of pettiness since Pelosi raised doubts about the speech. Trump followed up by revoking her use of a military plane for a congressional delegation visit to Afghanistan.

Officials have been considering alternative venues for the speech, including a rally-style event, an Oval Office address, a speech in the Senate chamber, and even a visit to the Mexican border. Multiple versions of the speech were being drafted to suit the final venue.

North Carolina’s House speaker, Tim Moore, invited Trump to deliver the speech in the North Carolina House chamber. Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield has offered his state capitol. Trump spoke with both of them this week, according to Moore’s office and a tweet from Chatfield.

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Associated Press writers Darlene Superville, Andrew Taylor and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

Colombia’s President Urges Maduro of Venezuela to Step Aside

CARACAS, Venezuela — The latest on nationwide protests in Venezuela (all times local):

7:05 p.m.

Colombia’s president is urging Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to give up his post.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Colombian leader Ivan Duque said Wednesday that Maduro should “step aside and let the Venezuelan people be free.”

Duque spoke after a tumultuous day that saw Juan Guaido, the head of Venezuela’s opposition-controlled congress, declare himself interim president and call elections.

Colombia joined several other Latin American governments as well as the United States and Canada in quickly recognizing Guaido as Venezuela’s leader.

Duque was asked if military intervention in Venezuela was a possibility. He responded: “We’re not talking about military intervention. We’re talking about a diplomatic consensus and also the support of the Venezuelan people.”

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5:10 p.m.

Lawmakers in Russia, which has close relations with Venezuela, are sharply critical of U.S. President Donald Trump’s recognition of an opposition politician who has declared himself the country’s legitimate interim president.

“I think that in this developing situation the United States is trying to carry out an operation to organize the next color revolution in Venezuela,” the deputy chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the upper house of parliament, Andrei Klimov, told state news agency RIA-Novosti. “Color revolution” is a Russian term for the popular uprisings that unseated leaders in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

“I do not think that we can recognize this — it is, in essence, a coup,” another committee member, Vladimir Dzhabrailov, was quoted as saying by the Interfax agency.

Russia is a major political ally of Venezuela, and Russia’s largest oil company, Rosneft, is heavily invested in the South American nation’s oil fields, which produce less crude each month.

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5:05 p.m.

Authorities say two protesters are dead and five others injured in anti-government demonstrations in the Venezuelan city of San Cristobal.

A spokeswoman for the state of Tachira’s health agency said the two demonstrators were shot to death but provided no further details.

At least one other person has been killed in this week’s unrest.

Meanwhile demonstrators in Caracas are facing off against security forces firing rubber bullets and tear gas as they march through the capital.

Thousands of President Nicolas Maduro’s followers are heading toward the presidential palace, heeding socialist leader Diosdado Cabello’s call to protect the embattled leader.

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5 p.m.

The opposition leader who has declared himself Venezuela’s interim president is looking to undermine President Nicolas Maduro’s orders for American diplomats to abandon the country within 72 hours.

In a statement, Juan Guaido urged all foreign embassies in the country to disobey Maduro’s orders and not remove their diplomats.

Although the message didn’t name the U.S., it seemed to be issued in response to Maduro’s announcement that he was severing relations with the United States.

The 35-year-old opposition leader says it is his right under Venezuela’s constitution to take over the presidency until new elections can be called.

He and his supporters accuse Maduro of usurping power after being sworn into a contested new term.

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4:50 p.m.

At least two Latin American governments are standing behind Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Bolivian President Evo Morales has expressed his “solidarity” with the Venezuelan people and condemned what he called an “imperialist attack.”

On Twitter he said: “Our solidarity with the Venezuelan people and @Nicolas Maduro, in these decisive hours when the claws of imperialism are once again trying to deal a death blow on democracy and self-determination on the peoples of South America. We will not be the backyard of the U.S. again.”

A spokesman for Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also said that Mexico would continue recognizing Maduro as Venezuela’s president.

Jesus Ramirez Cuevas told Milenio television Wednesday: “We maintain our position of neutrality in the Venezuelan conflict.”

He also said: “The Mexican government is analyzing the situation in Venezuela. Until now, there is no change in its diplomatic relations with that country nor with its government.”

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4:35 p.m.

A U.S. senator from Florida is calling for designating Venezuela a “terrorist state” and imposing additional sanctions in order to pressure President Nicolas Maduro to resign.

Sen. Rick Scott, the junior senator from Florida, told reporters in Washington on Wednesday that Maduro “is clearly a terrorist.”

Scott added: “The way Maduro has treated his citizens is disgusting.”

Scott also urged U.S. President Donald Trump to “look at every sanction he can have” and impose penalties on anybody doing business with or supporting Maduro.

Scott said he expects that opposition leader Juan Guiado, who has declared himself interim president, will call elections “as quickly as possible.”

Florida is home to tens of thousands of Venezuelans who have fled the chaos in their country in recent years.

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4:30 p.m.

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro is giving American diplomats 72 hours to abandon the country after breaking diplomatic relations with the U.S. over its decision to recognize an opposition leader as interim president.

“Before the people and nations of the world, and as constitutional president…..I’ve decided to break diplomatic and political relations with the imperialist U.S. government,” Maduro told a crowd of red-shirted supporters gathered at the presidential palace.

He made the announcement following a tumultuous day that saw Juan Guaido, the head of the opposition-controlled congress, declare himself interim president and call elections.

The move was immediately backed by the Trump administration, which said it was willing to use all its economic and diplomatic power to restore Venezuela’s democracy.

Maduro said in his speech the U.S. was making a “grave mistake” by trying to impose a president on Venezuela and rattled off a long list of countries — Guatemala, Brazil, Chile and Argentina — that saw leftist governments toppled or come under military rule during the Cold War with U.S. support.

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4:15 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been asked whether the U.S. would use military action in Venezuela to support the ouster of President Nicolas Maduro and his response was ambiguous.

“We are not considering anything, but all options are on the table,” Trump told reporters following a roundtable discussion at the White House on medical costs.

The comment came after his administration announced it would recognize opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president over Maduro.

Trump did not clarify what he meant by “all options.”

His administration has imposed several rounds of sanctions aimed at pressuring the government of the South American country.

___

4:05 p.m.

The head of the Organization of American States says that the two-year process initiated by Venezuela to leave the organization was interrupted after opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself president of the South American nation.

Luis Almagro said Wednesday: “Obviously the clock is stopped from today.”

Guaido presides over the opposition controlled National Assembly, which adopted a document Tuesday expressing its intention to remain in the OAS and appoint ex-legislator Gustavo Tarre Briceno as special representative.

Guaido declared himself interim president on Wednesday before thousands of demonstrators cheering in support.

The government of President Nicolas Maduro began the process to leave the entity in April 2017, alleging that Almagro exceeded his duties by criticizing a member state.

The Supreme Court in Venezuela has declared documents issued by the National Assembly null and void.

The Venezuelan mission to the OAS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

___

3:50 p.m.

Venezuelans are holding rallies across Spain against the government of Nicolas Maduro and in support of an opposition leader who has declared himself interim president of the country.

The rallies were staged in many provincial capitals, with major protests in Tenerife, Barcelona and Madrid. They were timed to coincide with marches in the streets of Venezuela.

Organizers said that around 7,000 protesters gathered in a central square of the Spanish capital, where there is a large Venezuelan community.

The protesters cheered when exiled members of the Venezuelan opposition announced that the U.S. government had recognized the interim leadership of Juan Guaido.

They called on Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to follow the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump in endorsing Guaido.

___

3:35 p.m.

Socialist party boss Diosdado Cabello is calling on government supporters to mobilize in front of Venezuela’s presidential palace to protect Nicolas Maduro from what he is calling a U.S.-led conspiracy to remove him from power.

“The Bolivarian revolution doesn’t have an expiration date,” he told a crowd of red-shirted supporters at a rally in downtown Caracas.

“We are going to stay in the streets, and stay in battle, for now and forever,” Cabello said, marking the government’s first reaction to opposition leader Juan Guaido’s decision to declare himself interim president.

Supporters responded with shouts of “They Will Not Return!,” a popular refrain used by the government to denounce the elite politicians who governed Venezuela before Hugo Chavez’s revolution in 1999.

The pro-government march attracted thousands but was far smaller than the cross-town opposition march where Guaido said he would temporarily take over as president and call elections.

The Trump administration immediately backed Guaido’s declaration.

___

3:30 p.m.

Three South American nations are recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president.

The leaders of Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay all quickly expressed their support after Guaido took a symbolic oath before thousands of supporters.

Colombia President Ivan Duque said his nation would accompany Guaido “in this process of transition toward democracy.”

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro also said that he would support the 35-year-old lawmaker “so that peace and democracy return to Venezuela.”

Paraguayan President Mario Abdo Benitez said on Twitter that his country supported Venezuela’s interim President Juan Guaido. “Count on us to embrace freedom and democracy again,” Abdo Benitez said.

Guaido says it is his right under Venezuela’s constitution to take over the presidency until new elections can be called.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was sworn into a contested second term two weeks ago in a move condemned by dozens of nations.

___

3:20 p.m.

Canada says it is recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaido as the interim president of Venezuela.

Two officials familiar with the matter confirmed the Canadian position, but spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The move comes shortly after the U.S. also issued recognition of Guaido as president and called for President Nicolas Maduro to step down.

Guaido declared himself interim president on Wednesday.

Recognition of the opposition leader by the U.S. and Canada increases international pressure on Maduro and could result in severe economic consequences for his government.

-By Associated Press writer Rob Gillies

___

3 p.m.

The Trump administration is calling for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to step down after recognizing the chief of the country’s opposition-led National Assembly as its interim leader.

President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo all issued statements proclaiming U.S. recognition of Juan Guaido. Each of them said the U.S. would take all diplomatic and economic measures necessary to support a transition to a new government.

In his statement, Pompeo said Maduro should “step aside in favor of a legitimate leader reflecting the will of the Venezuelan people.”

Guaido declared himself interim president on Wednesday amid widespread street protests against Maduro.

At a pro-government rally, powerful socialist party leader Diosdado Cabello said right-wing forces do not represent the majority.

___

2:20 p.m.

President Donald Trump says the U.S. is recognizing the president of Venezuela’s opposition-led National Assembly as the country’s interim president.

The Trump administration has been moving toward such a declaration of support for Juan Guaido ever since Nicolas Maduro was sworn in for a contested second term two weeks ago. Guaido declared himself the interim president before thousands of cheering supporters Wednesday.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence this week said Maduro is a dictator who did not win the presidency in free and fair elections.

Trump said in Wednesday’s statement that Venezuelans have “courageously spoken” against Maduro and for freedom and the rule of law.

Venezuelans are marching in the streets to demand that Maduro step down, citing spiraling inflation, a shortage of basic goods and a migration crisis that is dividing families.

___

2 p.m.

A civil society group says it has detected major internet disruptions in Venezuela affecting YouTube, Google, Android mobile platforms, and other services.

The NetBlocks observatory said on its website Wednesday: “Social media services are notably disrupted, with Facebook, Instagram intermittently cut off and the disruptions have increasingly affected other services.”

Tens of thousands of people are marching in the South American country demanding that socialist leader Nicolas Maduro step down from power.

___

1:55 p.m.

A Trump administration official and a U.S. congressional aide say U.S. President Donald Trump plans to recognize the president of Venezuela’s opposition-led National Assembly as the interim president of the crisis-mired South American country.

The official and aide said on condition of anonymity that Trump is expected to issue a statement recognizing Juan Guaido (GWA-ee-DOH) as the interim president after the Venezuelan parliament votes to appoint him to the post.

The parliament is not expected to convene until Thursday at the earliest. Guaido declared himself interim president on Wednesday.

The official and aide spoke on condition of anonymity because the statement has not been released and the White House had no comment.

The Trump administration has been inching toward such a declaration ever since Nicolas Maduro was inaugurated earlier this month. Maduro was re-elected last year but the opposition in the country says the election was fraudulent and does not recognize him.

Recognition of Guaido by the U.S. would increase international pressure on Maduro to step down and could result in severe economic consequences for his government amid an already painful economic crisis in the once-prosperous oil-producing nation.

-By Associated Press writer Matthew Lee

___

1:50 p.m.

Venezuela opposition leader Juan Guaido has declared himself the nation’s interim president before thousands of demonstrators cheering in support.

The 35-year-old lawmaker raised his right hand and said he was “formally assuming the responsibility of the national executive.”

The move comes as tens of thousands march around Venezuelan demanding that the socialist leader Nicolas Maduro steps down from power.

Maduro was sworn in for a contested second term two weeks ago but has been met by international condemnation.

___

1:30 p.m.

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, says it is hypocritical for the U.S. government to impose sanctions on Venezuela, but not Saudi Arabia.

“The US is sanctioning Venezuela for their lack of democracy but not Saudi Arabia? Such hypocrisy. Maduro’s policies are bad and not helping his people, but crippling sanctions or pushing for regime change will only make the situation worse,” Khanna wrote on Twitter.

Legislators from both parties have previously criticized the U.S. response to the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul last year.

Khanna posted his message while Venezuelans marched Wednesday in the streets demanding that President Nicolas Maduro step down from power.

___

1 p.m.

Powerful socialist party leader Diosdado Cabello is accusing Venezuela’s opposition of being on a mission to “threaten and cause terror.”

At a pro-government rally Wednesday, the head of the all-powerful constitutional assembly said right-wing forces do not represent the majority.

He added that anyone who acts out of line at Wednesday’s protest will be met with justice.

Venezuela’s government routinely accuses the opposition of inciting violence. Rights groups say the government itself regularly violates citizen rights.

Opposition and pro-government marches are taking place concurrently Wednesday, about two weeks after Nicolas Maduro was sworn into a contested second term.

The marches have at times briefly crossed paths, with government supporters crying out words like “Traitor!” to opposition demonstrators.

___

12:30 p.m.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio says that Venezuelan authorities may use “agitators” to employ violence so they can later accuse opposition leaders of terrorism.

The Florida senator wrote on Twitter: “The regime’s response is being directed by #Cuba’s intelligence agency. Expect them to undertake a massive disinformation effort, cut off internet, use agitators to provoke violence & ultimately accuse members of National Assembly of treason & terrorism.”

Rubio posted several messages Wednesday morning in both English and Spanish while Venezuelans marched in the streets demanding that President Nicolas Maduro step down from power.

___

11:35 a.m.

Venezuelans are marching in the streets and waving their nation’s flag as they demand that President Nicolas Maduro step down from power.

Members of the National Guard launched tear gas at protesters in the middle-class neighborhood of El Paraiso on Wednesday.

Protests in other parts of the city were taking place without any confrontation.

Venezuelans attending the anti-government protest say they are fed up with spiraling inflation, a shortage of basic goods and a migration crisis dividing families.

Demonstrators are shouting phrases like “Get out Maduro!” as they heed the opposition’s call to gather.

Pro-Maduro Venezuelans are also beginning to converge in concentration points for counter-protests organized by the government.

The government has accused the opposition of trying to provoke bloodshed.

___

11:15 a.m.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is telling the administration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro that social protest and freedom of expression are “fundamental values” in any democratic society.

The human rights body of the Organization of American States says repression of demonstrations through excessive use of force may be a grave violation to fundamental rights.

The commission said in a press release that the Venezuelan crisis has deteriorated since Maduro took office on Jan. 10 for a second six year-term.

The Venezuelan opposition is holding street demonstrations Wednesday in multiple cities throughout the country.

___

11:05 a.m.

A statue of former socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been burnt to a crisp amid a wave of anti-government unrest.

Videos shared on social media late Tuesday show the statue in the city of San Felix in flames as residents bang pots and pans.

Chavez installed the nation’s socialist system two decades ago and designated current President Nicolas Maduro as his successor.

While many in Venezuela still hold Chavez in high esteem, statues of his image have been targeted in various protests over the years to show discontent.

Venezuelans are angry over soaring hyperinflation and food and medical shortages, and have taken to the streets this week. They accuse Maduro of usurping power and demand he step down.

___

11 a.m.

At least one person has been killed in a looting incident in southern Venezuela coinciding with bouts of anti-government unrest.

A police report said that a 30-year-old worker named Carlos Olivares was killed Tuesday night in Ciudad Bolivar by four unidentified people who descended from a beige Jeep and fired upon a crowd that had raided a store.

The report was based on an interview with the victim’s sister-in-law.

___

10:40 a.m.

Ivanka Trump is reiterating the U.S. government’s support for Venezuelans ahead of a forthcoming anti-government demonstration seeking to oust President Nicolas Maduro.

“@Potus, @VP and the whole Administration stand with the people of Venezuela as they seek freedom from the oppression of dictator Maduro,” Ivanka Trump posted on Twitter on Wednesday, in reply to an earlier post by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.

The message from the White House senior adviser and daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump echoed a similar sentiment from U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.

Pence said Tuesday that Venezuelans have the “unwavering support” of the United States in their effort to restore democracy to their country.

___

9:52 a.m.

There was an eerie calm on the streets of Caracas early Wednesday ahead of a planned anti-government demonstration seeking to oust President Nicolas Maduro.

Many shops were closed while riot police flanked by water tanks and lightly armored vehicles guarded the emblematic Plaza Venezuela that leads to downtown.

Juan Guaido, the newly-installed leader of congress who called Wednesday’s march, urged security forces to stand alongside peaceful protesters.

“The world’s eyes are on our homeland today,” he said in an early-morning tweet.

Overnight there were reports of unrest in several working-class neighborhoods of Caracas as residents took to the streets to set fire to barricades demanding Maduro’s resignation.

___

9 a.m.

Venezuela’s re-invigorated opposition faces a crucial test Wednesday as it seeks to fill streets nationwide with protesters in an appeal to the military and the poor to shift loyalties that until recently looked solidly behind President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government.

The protests have been called to coincide with a historic date for Venezuelans — the anniversary of the 1958 coup that overthrew military dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez. Government supporters are also expected to march in downtown Caracas in a rival show of strength.

The competing demonstrations will come after a whirlwind week that saw an uprising by a tiny military unit, fires set during protests in poor neighborhoods and the brief detention by security forces of the newly installed head of the opposition-controlled congress.

The Global Crisis of Childhood Is Coming Home to Roost

Halfway through 2018, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski hurled a mother-to-mother dagger at Ivanka Trump. How, during the very weeks when the headlines were filled with grim news of child separations and suffering at the U.S.-Mexico border, she asked, could the first daughter and presidential adviser be so tone-deaf as to show herself hugging her two-year-old son? Similarly, six months earlier, she had been photographed posing with her six-year-old daughter in the glossiest of photos. America had, in other words, found its very own Marie Antoinette, gloating while others suffered. “I wish,” Brzezinski tweeted at Ivanka, “you would speak for all mothers and take a stand for all mothers and children.”

The problem, however, wasn’t just the heartlessness and insensitivity of the first daughter, nor was it simply the grotesque disparity between those mothers on the border and her. The problem was that the sensibility displayed in those photos — that implicit we-are-not-them exceptionalism — was in no way restricted to Ivanka Trump. A subtle but pervasive sense that this country and its children can remain separated from, and immune to, the problems currently being visited upon children around the world is, in fact, widespread.

If you need proof, just watch a night of television and catch the plentiful ads extolling the bouncy exuberance of our children — seat-belted into SUV’s, waving pennants at sports events, or basking in their parents’ praise for doing homework. If you think about it, you’ll soon grasp the deep disparity between the image of children and childhood in the United States and what’s happening to kids in so many other places on Earth. The well-ingrained sense of exceptionalism that goes with such imagery attests to a wider illusion: that the United States can continue to stand apart from the ills plaguing so much of the world.

In truth, the global reality of children in crisis may be the most pressing issue we as a nation need to confront if we are ever to understand that global ills can’t be kept eternally outside our borders, not with first-daughter hugs, not with a self-centered version of tunnel vision, not even with a “great, great wall.”

From north to south, east to west, children around the world are suffering, increasingly unsafe, and preyed upon in ever larger numbers. For years now, their deaths from disease, deprivation, starvation, and conflicts of every sort have been on the rise. They are increasingly fodder for weapons of war. This is the case, disturbingly, for countries in which the United States has been deeply involved in its post-9/11 global war on terror, which over the last 17 years has unsettled a significant part of the planet and badly affected children in particular.

In the first three-quarters of 2018, for instance, 5,000 children were reportedly killed or maimed in war-torn Afghanistan where the U.S. still has 14,000 troops and countless private contractors. Save the Children estimates that up to 85,000 children under the age of five may have died of starvation in a Yemen being torn apart by civil war and, according to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, at least 1,248 children have been killed and as many wounded in U.S.-backed Saudi air strikes there since 2015.

By the end of 2017, at least 14,000 children had been reported killed in the war in Syria, “by snipers, machine guns, missiles, grenades, roadside bombs and aerial bombs.” In addition, as journalist Marcia Biggs showed in an award-winning PBS NewsHour special, vast numbers of children have been maimed and, having lost limbs, struggle to live with (or without) prosthetics, while their schools have been reduced to rubble.

Nor is such devastation limited to the Middle East. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die daily worldwide due to starvation. In Africa, violence and hunger threaten children in increasing numbers. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, millions of children are reportedly “at risk of severe acute malnutrition.”

The Making of a Lost Generation

When it comes to children, those who survive the rigors of our present world often find themselves homeless, stateless, and parentless. The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, reports that the number of displaced people, both those who have fled across national boundaries as refugees and those still in their own countries, reached a staggering 68.5 million by the end of 2017. According to UNICEF, nearly half of that displaced population are children, an estimated 30 million of them. Many of those children are starving, without access to medical care or basic human needs like toilets and clean water, not to speak of schools or a future. Surprising numbers of them, as in Iraq, are in refugee or internal displacement camps. As Ben Taub points out, reporting for the New Yorker on post-ISIS Iraq, many such children have “been abandoned or orphaned by the war.”

In addition, living in areas torn by violence and warfare, those children have often witnessed atrocities on a mass scale. Inside and outside the camps where so many of them are now living, youngsters are subject to rape, violence, and abuse. In Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among other places, such children have sometimes had siblings and parents killed right before their eyes. According to Taub, those in Iraq who are suspected of having relatives in ISIS, or an affiliation with ISIS, are often brutally punished or even executed. Human Rights Watch reports that the security services in Iraqi Kurdistan are using “beatings, stress positions, and electric shock on boys in their custody” between the ages of 14 and 17 in order to elicit confessions about ties to ISIS.

In a brilliant and searing new documentary, ISIS, Tomorrow: The Lost Souls of Mosul, filmmakers Francesca Mannocchi and Alessio Romenzi report on children who survived three years of Islamic State rule in that Iraqi city, significant parts of which now lie in ruins. Many of them are presently held in camps that are, in Taub’s term, “de facto prisons,” along with other alleged family members of ISIS fighters. The filmmakers document the psychological scars of being held in such places, as well as of having been subjected to the indoctrination and training offered by ISIS. Having been brutalized, they are full of anger and the desire for revenge. As one young man in the film declares, “May God do the same to them as they did to us.”

In other words, in Iraq and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, new generations of terror and suffering are already in the offing as the terrorized children of the present nightmares grow up.

Mia Bloom, co-author of the forthcoming book Small Arms: Children and Terrorism, suggests that the authorities in such lands should focus on creating “a multi-pronged approach that addresses the psychological trauma suffered by the children from watching executions, in addition to the effects of having participated in acts of violence.” Many in the human rights community agree with her. In the harsh conditions of those countries, wracked by conflict and collapse, however, theirs is but a dream.

In reality, such children are regularly ostracized as permanent enemies of the state. They are, as Taub, Mannocchi, and Romenzi show, a lost generation in the most literal sense of the term and that loss will, in the end, affect us all.

And no end is in sight when it comes to the damaging, and then further use, of those damaged young people. Quite the opposite, the cycle of violence is only being strengthened, thanks to an uptick in the recruitment of children for warfare. In Yemen, Sudan, and Libya, for example, the recruitment of child fighters has been on the rise for several years. Meanwhile, to carry on their war in Yemen, the Saudis have also been recruiting — quite literally, buying, in fact — soldiers from the Sudan, “desperate survivors of the conflict in Darfur.” Many of them are, reportedly, teenagers as young as 14.

And such recruitment is in no way confined to the Greater Middle East. In Somalia and Ukraine, for example, alarming reports of child recruits have recently come to light. In Ukraine, children as young as eight years old are being trained to shoot to kill and desensitized to the act. CBS News recently quoted one of their adult trainers this way: “We never aim guns at people. But we don’t count separatists, little green men, occupiers from Moscow, as people. So we can and should aim at them.”

Such attempts to prey upon adrift, often hungry, and desperate young people in an effort to have yet more arms at the ready is a prescription for long-term global violence. And terror groups don’t hesitate to use the young either. In her work on children recruited into such wars, for instance, Bloom notes that the Nigerian terror group Boko Haram is notorious for using young girls on suicide missions, while, in the wake of its rise in 2014, ISIS recruited “hundreds, if not thousands, of children for military engagement.” So, in fact, has the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Childhood, a Wasting Asset

Make no mistake: in the long run, the United States will not remain untouched by such violence. Unfortunately, in this century American officials and policymakers have remained convinced that the only way this country can be protected against the turmoil and chaos engulfing the larger world is via a military-first foreign policy. As Senator Lindsey Graham recently put it, in the wake of President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, “I want to fight the war in the enemy’s backyard, not ours. That’s why we need a forward-deployed force in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan for a while to come.” In this, he caught the spirit of an approach embraced by so many in the Bush and Obama administrations, even as American forces continued to unsettle those other “backyards” in significant ways.

As the first 18 years of this century have shown, reality defies this false sense of security, which contends that it is possible to keep the problems of our world at arm’s length. As the 9/11 attacks should have shown us, in a global age of communications, travel, trade, and the delivery of the weapons of war, the spawning of a homeless, stateless, angry generation is guaranteed to create unbearable future problems, even here in the United States. The only way to limit such future damage isn’t the walling off of America, but some kind of compassionate attention to those young people now.

When it comes to creating bitter futures, the Trump administration’s treatment of children at the border is of a piece with the larger global attack on them. While on a smaller scale than in the Greater Middle East and beyond, acts against the young at our southern border certainly should evoke their counterparts elsewhere. In December and January, for example, the first deaths of children were recorded at American border detention centers.

In addition, widespread neglect and obvious acts of cruelty continue to define those centers. Tots are left in soiled diapers and otherwise unsanitary conditions, while children of all ages are often separated from their mothers and fathers, initially housed in bitterly cold jail-like conditions, and terrified about what might lie in store for them and their parents. Recently, a video of workers slapping, pushing, and dragging around young immigrants at a detention center run by Southwest Key Programs in Arizona was made public. Similarly, a jury found guilty the first of two Southwest Key employees charged with sexually abusing children (at two of that company’s centers) last September.

And the mistreatment of immigrant children on the border is just a sign of the times. Among U.S. citizens, there is trouble as well. In an ever more unequal society, 21% of children in this country now live below the official poverty line, a rate that is the highest among the world’s richest countries. In 2009, a Department of Justice report found that more than 60% of American children witnessed or were the targets of violence “directly or indirectly.” Won’t such abuse lead to a version of the resentment, anger, and damage that the rest of the world is struggling to contain? In the words of the Department of Justice, “Children’s exposure to violence… is often associated with long-term physical, psychological, and emotional harm” and can lead to a “cycle of violence.”

Giving up on those children and turning a blind eye to the harm being visited on them is a formula for disaster not just in the world but at home as well. In fact, such children should become a far more important American priority than so many of the other national security expenditures we now regularly fund without a second thought. Isn’t it time for the United States to set some other kind of example for the rest of the world than those terrible detention centers in our southern borderlands? Shouldn’t Washington make the rescue of children a global priority and pioneer new ways to help them regain viable lives? (A first step in that direction might be to create an ambassadorship for the world’s children as a way to attest to an American refusal to give up on childhood in this or any other generation.)

For her part, Ivanka Trump could start posing with refugee children, ones seeking asylum, or even American children suffering from poverty, neglect, and violence and so send quite a different Instagram message to the world — namely, that childhood is precious and needs to be protected everywhere.

Admittedly, in the Trump years, this will remain a fantasy of the first order. But keep in mind that to ignore the global crisis of childhood will someday bring it home to roost here, too. We-are-not-them exceptionalism will, in the end, prove just another kind of fantasy. In the meantime, as legal expert Jason Pobjoy notes in his book The Child in International Refugee Law, “Childhood is a wasting asset — there are no second chances.”

Supreme Court Returns to Gun Rights for First Time in 9 Years

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Tuesday it will take up its first gun rights case in nine years, a challenge to New York City’s prohibition on carrying a licensed, locked and unloaded handgun outside the city limits.

The court’s decision to hear the appeal filed by three New York residents and New York’s National Rifle Association affiliate could signal a revived interest in gun rights by a more conservative court. The case won’t be argued until October.

The challengers are represented by prominent lawyer Paul Clement, who has been urging the justices to elaborate on the extent of constitutional gun rights the Supreme Court declared in decisions in 2008 and 2010. The court had previously rejected several appeals.

The court may be more willing to take on a gun rights case now that Justice Anthony Kennedy has retired and been replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was President Donald Trump’s second high-court nominee to be confirmed.

Clement says the case “is a perfect vehicle to reaffirm that those decisions and the constitutional text have consequences.”

Joining in support of gun rights, 17 states said the court should break its years-long silence and use the case to define the scope of gun rights under the Constitution and the level of scrutiny, or skepticism, judges should apply to gun laws.

New York’s ordinance allows people licensed to have handguns to carry them outside the home to gun ranges in the city. The guns must be locked and unloaded.

The city residents who filed suit want to practice shooting at target ranges outside the city or take their guns to second homes elsewhere in New York state.

Lower courts had rejected the challenge.

The city’s top lawyer, Zachary Carter, urged the court to reject the case, arguing that the restrictions allowed New York police to reduce the number of guns carried in public.

There are seven shooting ranges in the city and at least one in each of the city’s five boroughs, Carter said.

A N.Y. Times Story Just Accidentally Shredded the Russiagate Hysteria

Every once in a while, one of those stories comes along that makes the mainstream corporate media look like a bunch of middle-school kids filming their “news show” on an iPhone with their neck ties crooked. Recently, one of those stories splashed down into the middle of our cultural zeitgeist like a small meteor landing in the middle of an elite dinner party.

It made our mass media pundits look like hardened fools. But they have kept spouting their nonsense anyway, hoping no one notices the soup dripping down their faces.

But to talk about that, I have to talk about this: Last month we finally got to see the Senate report spelling out the Russian meddling in our last election. And it was a bombshell. It rocked the heart of our country. It shredded the inflamed core of our palpitating democracy.

As Dan Cohen reported for the Grayzone Project, the report said that “…everything from the Green Party’s Jill Stein to Instagram to Pokemon Go to the African American population had been used and confused by the deceptive Facebook pages of a private Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency.”

That’s right. Russia even used Pokémon Go to pulverize the previously pristine 2016 election. That’s ever so frightening, since Pokémon Go is CIA-backed. (I guess it’s high time we just accept that the CIA has been taken over by those ruthless vodka drinkers.)

Back to the point—we learned from the report last month that the Russian Internet Research Agency manipulated every one of us with Facebook ads. If you don’t mind though, the Senate and the corporate media (and anybody else who knows the secret oligarchy handshake) would really prefer you just ignore the fact that Facebook clearly stated “…56% [of the Russian ads] were after the election” and “…roughly 25% of the ads were never shown to anyone.”

But like an overweight man dressed like Wolverine at a Comic-Con, our brave congressmen and -women are not about to be dissuaded by reality. After the reports came out, Sen. Mark Warner tweeted, “Incredible. These bombshell reports demonstrate just how far Russia went to exploit the fault lines of our society and divide Americans, in an attempt to undermine and manipulate our democracy.”

Just after posting that, Warner patriotically pissed his red, white and blue Underoos.

So who are these amazing nonpartisan unbiased sleuths who put together this legitimate and nonpartisan unbiased Senate report? The New York Times found out they are a group called New Knowledge (which sounds like a terrible boy band). New Knowledge was founded by two veterans of the Obama administration, Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox. …So, I guess we’re, um, doing away with the “nonpartisan unbiased” thing.

Well, in that case—I say go hard or go home. I want MORE bias!

The Grayzone Project pointed out that besides working for Obama and the State Department, “… Morgan also developed technology for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the arm of the Department of Defense created for basic, applied technological research, and futuristic war toys.”

All right, all right, not bad. But I know what you’re thinking. “Lee, that might be a great bias appetizer, but we want the full bias entree!”

Okay, how about this?

Ryan Fox is a 15-year veteran of the NSA and was a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) military unit. JSOC is notorious for its spree of atrocities across the Middle East. …

Hell yeah! You can feel that bias in my toes, can’t ya? But, the truth is, we’re still only at a 45 percent bias rating. I say we get it up to at least 65 percent. Back to Dan Cohen:

The report … was overseen by Renee DiResta, a former Wall Street trader and tech specialist who was recruited by Obama’s State Department to devise strategies for combating online ISIS propaganda.

So now we’ve got former Wall Street, former State Department, former Obama White House, former NSA, former DARPA, and former JSOC writing this completely legitimate completely factual report for the Senate about the powerful Russian impact of Facebook ads that no one ever saw.

I love it. This is like a report written by a hungry virus telling you not to wash your hands.

But hold on, it’s not only this Senate report that showed nefarious Russian meddling. It’s also all of those evil Russian bots. How do we know there are evil Russian bots? Well, most outlets quote Hamilton 68, which tracked Russian influence operations on Twitter.

Outlets like MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Mother Jones and Tiger Beat. They’re all quoting Hamilton 68 or people who are referencing work done by Hamilton 68. Well, who the hell made Hamilton 68, and why does it sound like a ’90s alt-rock band that opened for Blink 182?

Oh, what do you know! Our old friend “[Jonathon] Morgan is also one the developers of Hamilton 68. … Funded by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy—which is itself backed by NATO and USAID.”

Well okay, that sounds pretty serious. Clearly these people have found a special device that locates Russian bots on the interwebs, and it most likely resembles the thing Egon used in the “Ghostbusters” movies. So, shouldn’t we just congratulate Morgan on helping to develop the holy grail for spotting Russian bots and then call it a day? Well, there’s one itsy bitsy problem:

 … one of Hamilton 68’s founders, Clint Watts, admitted that the Twitter accounts it follows may actually be real people who are not Russian at all.

Real people? Who aren’t Russian? Call me crazy, but what I personally look for in a Russian bot is something that is at least Russian. And if not that, then a bot. And if neither, then you don’t have much of a goddamn Russian bot, do ya? Claiming these are Russian bots is like saying, “I just met the Queen of England, except she may have been a small Icelandic goat.”

Then, a few weeks ago The New York Times revealed that New Knowledge carried out an elaborate false flag operation to hurt the election chances of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama. You might recall that Roy Moore is an accused pedophile and a proven dipshit. And I don’t believe he should be elected to pick the bedbugs out of Rush Limbaugh’s armpits. But that doesn’t mean I think these New Knowledge charlatans shouldn’t be revealed for what they are.

So here’s how New Knowledge’s game worked, according to the Times. New Knowledge created a fake Facebook page in order to get conservatives in Alabama to support patio supply salesman Mac Watson instead of Roy Moore.

New Knowledge then tried to make everyone think that Moore’s campaign was working with the Kremlin by showing that he had thousands of Russian bots following his Twitter account. Many in the mainstream media ran with this outlandish idea. Mother Jones’s well-researched (sarcasm) article on the topic was entitled “Russian Propagandists Are Pushing for Roy Moore to Win!” In the article they sourced (Can you guess?) Hamilton 68.

So to rehash: Hamilton 68, using their “Ghostbusters” device (patent pending), found that Russian bots (which may not be Russian and may not be bots and may not be Russian bots) were simply in love with alleged pedophiliac Alabama judges. So much so, that a majority of their tweets (meaning at least 51 percent) were in support of Roy Moore.

But as The New York Times has revealed, New Knowledge’s own internal report said, “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”

After these revelations came out a few weeks ago, Facebook suspended some of the accounts. So now The New York Times found itself in a quandary. They must have been thinking, “We need to report on this huge development in which the core authors of the Senate report on Russian meddling and the co-founder of Hamilton 68 were involved in lying, bullshitting, and false-flagging in order to help the Democratic party. But that completely undermines the Russiagate hysteria we have anchored our ship to. What do we do?”

Well, kids, take notes. This is how you do it. This is how you have your yellowcake uranium story and eat it too.

The New York Times headline was “Facebook Closes 5 Accounts Tied to Russia-Like Tactics in Alabama Senate Race”

Russia-like tactics?! This is literally an article about how Russia was NOT involved in the Alabama senate race false flag. In fact, it’s an article on how the guy who helped write the Senate report on the so-called Russian tactics is also one of the top people at New Knowledge, which either created or pushed pretend Russian bots to support Roy Moore so that they could leak to the press, “Russian bots are supporting Roy Moore!”

Sometimes the ability of the legacy media to believe (or at least regurgitate) their own bullshit is truly breathtaking.

To sum up this fuck de cluster:

1) The Senate report is laughable.

2) Any journalist who quotes Hamilton 68 should have their face sewn to the carpet.

3) If you want ridiculous pathetic reporting on nonsense that seduces us all to the edge of nuclear annihilation, turn to your mainstream corporate media.

4) If you want someone to actually put together the truth about these issues, you’ll have to turn to alternative outlets like Truthdig or the Grayzone Project.

5) Bill Murray and the Ghostbusters were ahead of their time.

If you think this column is important, please share it. To find out about all of Lee Camp’s columns, subscribe to his free newsletter here. 

  This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “Redacted Tonight.”

Tentative Deal Reached to End L.A. Teachers Strike

LOS ANGELES — A crowd of teachers roared its approval after a tentative deal was announced Tuesday between Los Angeles school officials and the union that will allow educators to return to classrooms after a six-day strike in the nation’s second-largest district.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, accompanied by leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District, announced the agreement at City Hall a few hours after a 21-hour bargaining session ended before dawn.

“I’m proud to announce that, pending approval by the teachers represented by UTLA and educational professionals and this Board of Education, we have an agreement that will allow our teachers to go back to work on their campuses tomorrow,” Garcetti said.

Union President Alex Caputo-Pearl said teachers would vote Tuesday, and he expected approval. Teachers planned to meet with union representatives to familiarize themselves with the agreement before casting ballots later in the day.

It wasn’t clear when the vote results would be known, but teachers are expected to be back at work on Wednesday.

The deal was broadly described by officials at the news conference as including a 6 percent pay hike and a commitment to reduce class sizes over four years.

Specifics provided later by the district included the addition of more than 600 nursing positions over the next three school years. Additional counselors and librarians were also part of the increase in support staff.

Marianne O’Brien said the need for additional support staff was one of the main reasons she walked picket lines. “This is not just for teachers. It’s also for counselors, nurses, psychologists and social workers,” said O’Brien, who teaches 10th grade English.

The new contract also eliminates a longstanding clause that gave the district authority over class sizes, the district said. Grades 4 through 12 would be reduced by one student during each of the next two school years and two pupils in 2021-2022.

District Superintendent Austin Beutner said he was delighted the deal was reached. But he hinted that financial challenges remained.

“The issue has always been how do we pay for it?” Beutner said. “That issue does not go away now that we have a contract. We can’t solve 40 years of underinvestment in public education in just one week or just one contract.”

The Board of Education met in closed session on Tuesday and was expected to move quickly to ratify the deal, which would expire at the end of June 2020.

The deal came as teachers in Denver were finishing up a vote on whether to go on strike as soon as next Monday. The main sticking point is increasing base pay and lessening teachers’ reliance on one-time bonuses for having students with high test scores or working in a high-poverty school.

In Oakland, California, some teachers called in sick last week as part of an unofficial rally over their contract negotiations, which also hinge partly on a demand for smaller class sizes.

Thousands of boisterous educators, many wearing red, and their supporters gathered on the steps outside City Hall.

The crowd began cheering, blowing horns and chanting the initials of Caputo-Pearl as the smiling union leader emerged from the building and walked through the throng.

Joaquin Flores, a special education teacher, said he believed he would support the deal unless it weakened health care or didn’t go far enough to reduce class size.

“It’s almost like metaphoric,” Flores said. “The sun’s out. When we started, it was all rainy and cold. I feel like it’s a new day.”

Teacher Sharon Maloney said she was reluctant to support the deal without seeing the details. She was skeptical that the district had made enough concessions on class size, health care benefits for new teachers or that the superintendent would spend enough of about $2 billion in reserves.

“I suspect the motives of Beutner,” Maloney said. “If he doesn’t release some of that $2 billion and there’s no understanding for moving forward how he’s going to cut out this crap that we’re running at a deficit and yet our reserves are going up every year.”

Talks resumed Thursday at Garcetti’s urging. The mayor does not have authority over LAUSD, but he sought to help both sides reach an agreement after nearly two years of fruitless talks.

Clashes over pay, class sizes and support-staff levels in the district with 640,000 students led to its first strike in 30 years and prompted the staffing of classrooms with substitute teachers and administrators.

The district maintained that the union’s demands could bankrupt the school system, which is projecting a half-billion-dollar deficit this budget year and has billions obligated for pension payments and health coverage for retired teachers.

Teachers hoped to build on the “Red4Ed” movement that began last year in West Virginia and moved to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and Washington state. It spread from conservative states with “right to work” laws that limit the ability to strike to the more liberal West Coast with strong unions.

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Associated Press writers John Antczak and John Rogers contributed to this report.