Chris Hedges's Blog, page 358

The Washington Post Lets Scott Walker’s Misleading Tax Tweet Slide

The Washington Post (1/16/19) had an article about how Republicans and right-wingers have become obsessed with trying to attack Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the newly elected representative from New York. At one point, it refers to former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s attack on Ocasio-Cortez’s position advocating a high marginal tax rate on high-income individuals:

Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican who was defeated in November, on Tuesday mocked Ocasio-Cortez for her tax proposal and suggested it was an elementary-school understanding of the issue. “Even fifth graders get it,” he tweeted.

While the piece noted part of Ocasio-Cortez’s response, that rich people are the ones with the money, it left out the more important part: Walker misled the fifth graders he refers to in his tweet. In his tweet, Walker confuses a marginal tax rate with an average tax rate:

Explaining tax rates before Reagan to fifth graders: “Imagine if you did chores for your grandma and she gave you $10. When you got home, your parents took $7 from you.” The students said: “That’s not fair!” Even fifth graders get it.

Ocasio-Cortez correctly pointed out in her reply that the $10 the students earned for doing chores for their grandma would not be taxed, because the 70 percent tax rate she proposes would only apply to incomes above $10 million:

Explaining marginal taxes to a far-right former Governor:

Imagine if you did chores for abuela & she gave you $10. When you got home, you got to keep it, because it’s only $10.

Then we taxed the billionaire in town because he’s making tons of money underpaying the townspeople.

Ocasio-Cortez is right on this point and Walker is wrong. He either does not understand how our income tax system works, or is deliberately lying to advance his agenda. Either way, the Post should have pointed out that Walker was wrong.

Many people are confused about the concept of a marginal tax rate. (The higher tax rate only applies to the income above a cutoff.) Opponents of high marginal taxes on the rich try to take advantage of this confusion in the way Scott Walker did with his class of fifth graders. It is the media’s responsibility to try to inform people about how the tax system works and to expose politicians who misrepresent the issue.

What Trump’s Syrian Withdrawal Really Reveals

President Trump was wrong in asserting that the United States destroyed the Islamic State’s territorial statehood in a large part of Syria—Russia and its allies accomplished that—but he is right in proposing to withdraw some 2,000 American forces from that tragically war-ravaged country. The small American contingent serves no positive combat or strategic purpose unless it is to thwart the Russian-led peace negotiations now underway or to serve as a beachhead for a US war against Iran. Still worse, its presence represents a constant risk that American military personnel could be killed by Russian forces also operating in that relatively small area, thereby turning the new Cold War into a very hot conflict, even if inadvertently. Whether or not Trump understood this danger, his decision, if actually implemented—it is being fiercely resisted in Washington—will make US-Russian relations, and thus the world, somewhat safer.

Nonetheless, Trump’s decision on Syria, coupled with his order to reduce US forces in Afghanistan by half, has been “condemned,” as The New York Times approvingly reported, “across the ideological spectrum,” by “the left and right.” Analyzing these condemnations, particularly in the opinion-shaping New York Times and Washington Post and on interminable (and substantially uninformed) MSNBC and CNN segments, again reveals the alarming thinking that is deeply embedded in the US bipartisan policy-media establishment.

First, no foreign-policy initiative undertaken by President Trump, however wise it may be in regard to US national interests, will be accepted by that establishment. Any prominent political figure who does so will promptly and falsely be branded, in the malign spirit of Russiagate, as “pro-Putin,” or, as was Senator Rand Paul, arguably the only foreign-policy statesman in the senate today, “an isolationist.” This is unprecedented in modern American history. Not even Richard Nixon was subject to such establishment constraints on his ability to conduct national-security policy during the Watergate scandals.

Second, not surprisingly, the condemnations of Trump’s decision are infused with escalating, but still unproven, Russiagate allegations of the president’s “collusion” with the Kremlin. Thus, equally predictably, the Times finds a Moscow source to say, of the withdrawals, “Trump is God’s gift that keeps on giving” to Putin. (In fact, it is not clear that the Kremlin is eager to see the United States withdraw from either Syria or Afghanistan, as this would leave Russia alone with what it regards as common terrorist enemies.) Closer to home, there is the newly re-elected Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who, when asked about Trump’s policies and Russian President Putin, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid: “I think that the president’s relationship with thugs all over the world is appalling. Vladimir Putin, really? Really? I think it’s dangerous.” By this “leadership” reasoning, Trump should be the first US president since FDR to have no “relationship” whatsoever with a Kremlin leader. And to the extent that Pelosi speaks for the Democratic Party, it can no longer be considered a party of American national security.

But, third, something larger than even anti-Trumpism plays a major role in condemnations of the president’s withdrawal decisions: imperial thinking about America’s rightful role in the world. Euphemisms abound, but, if not an entreaty to American empire, what else could the New York Times’ David Sanger mean when he writes of a “world order that the United States has led for the 79 years since World War II,” and complains that Trump is reducing “the global footprint needed to keep that order together”? Or when President Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice bemoans Trump’s failures in “preserving American global leadership,” which a Times lead editorial insists is an “imperative”? Or when General James Mattis in his letter of resignation echoes President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state Madeline Albright—and Obama himself—in asserting that “the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world”? We cannot be surprised. Such “global” imperial thinking has informed US foreign-policy decision-making for decades—it’s taught in our schools of international relations—and particularly the many disastrous, anti-“order” wars it has produced.

Fourth, and characteristic of empires and imperial thinking, there is the valorization of generals. Perhaps the most widespread and revealing criticism of Trump’s withdrawal decisions is that he did not heed the advice of his generals, the undistinguished, uninspired Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis in particular. The pseudo-martyrdom and heroizing of Mattis, especially by the Democratic Party and its media, remind us that the party had earlier, in its Russiagate allegations, valorized US intelligence agencies, and, having taken control of the House, evidently intends to continue to do so. Anti-Trumpism is creating political cults of US intelligence and military institutions. What does this tell us about today’s Democratic Party? More profoundly, what does this tell us about an American Republic purportedly based on civilian rule?

Finally, and potentially tragically, Trump’s announcement of the Syrian withdrawal was the moment for a discussion of the long imperative US alliance with Russia against international terrorism, a Russia whose intelligence capabilities are unmatched in this regard. (Recall, for example, Moscow’s disregarded warnings about one of the brothers who set off bombs during the Boston Marathon.) Such an alliance has been on offer by Putin since 9/11. President George W. Bush completely disregarded it. Obama flirted with the offer but backed (or was pushed) away. Trump opened the door for such a discussion, as indeed he has since his presidential candidacy, but now again, at this most opportune moment, there has not been a hint of it in our political-media establishment. Instead, a national security imperative has been treated as “treacherous.”

In this context, there is Trump’s remarkable, but little-noted or forgotten, tweet of December 3 calling on the presidents of Russia and China to join him in “talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race.” If Trump acts on this essential overture, as we must hope he will, will it too be traduced as “treacherous”—also for the first time in American history? If so, it will again confirm my often-expressed thesis that powerful forces in America would prefer trying to impeach the president to avoiding a military catastrophe. And that those forces, not President Trump or Putin, are now the gravest threat to American national security.

Reprinted with permission from The Nation.

Tales of the New Cold War: 1 of 2: Condemning Trump for Putin's Syria. Stephen F. Cohen, @NYYU @Princeton EastestAccord.comTales of the New Cold War: 2 of 2: Condemning Trump for Putin's Syria. Stephen F. Cohen, @NYYU @Princeton EastestAccord.com

Feds Confirm Jailed Iranian TV Anchor Not Charged With Crime

WASHINGTON—Federal officials confirmed Friday that a prominent American-born anchorwoman on Iranian state television was jailed in the U.S. as a material witness and has not been charged with any crime, according to court papers.

Marzieh Hashemi has appeared twice before a U.S. district judge in Washington and has been appointed an attorney. U.S. government officials expect her to be released immediately after her testimony before a grand jury.

The order to unseal some parts of her case came days after she was first detained. It did not include details on the criminal case in which she was named a witness. Her son Hossein Hashemi did not comment on details of the case outside court on Friday.

It was not clear how long her testimony would take.

“We’re hoping that it would be complete and she would be out this week. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen,” he said. “So we’re just waiting to hear more.”

Federal law allows judges to order witnesses to be detained if the government can prove that their testimony has extraordinary value for a criminal case and that they would be a flight risk and unlikely to respond to a subpoena. The statute generally requires those witnesses to be promptly released once they are deposed.

Marzieh Hashemi, who works for the Press TV network’s English-language service, was detained by federal agents on Sunday in St. Louis, where she had filmed a Black Lives Matter documentary after visiting relatives in the New Orleans area, her son said. She was then transported to Washington and has remained behind bars since then.

Hashemi, 59, is a U.S. citizen and was born Melanie Franklin. She lives in Tehran and comes back to the United States about once a year to see her family, usually scheduling documentary work in the U.S., her son said.

Hossein Hashemi said he, his brother and his sister also have been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury. Asked whether his mother had been involved in any criminal activity or knew anyone who might be implicated in a crime, Hashemi said, “We don’t have any information along those lines.”

Marzieh Hashemi’s detention comes amid heightened tensions between Iran and the U.S. after President Donald Trump withdrew America from a nuclear deal. Iran also faces increasing criticism of its own arrests of dual citizens and other people with Western ties.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement early Friday expressing concern over Marzieh Hashemi’s case and asked the Justice Department to disclose the reason for her arrest. The group’s statement noted that “Iran routinely jails journalists.”

___

Balsamo reported from New York. Associated Press Writers Maria Danilova and Colleen Long contributed to this report.

Colombia Blames ELN for Bomb, Presses Cuba to Arrest Leaders

BOGOTA, Colombia—Colombia called on Cuba to arrest 10 National Liberation Army commanders currently in Havana for stalled peace talks after a car bombing blamed on the leftist rebels killed 21 people and injured dozens at a police academy in Bogota.

President Ivan Duque said late Friday that he had revoked a decree suspending arrest orders against leaders of Colombia’s last remaining rebel group, known as the ELN for its Spanish initials, who have been living on the communist-run island.

“It’s clear to all of Colombia that the ELN has no true desire for peace,” Duque said in a televised address, citing a long list of 400 terrorist attacks attributed to the guerrillas since peace talks began in 2017.

“We would like to thank the Cuban government for the solidarity it expressed yesterday and today, and we ask that it capture the terrorists who are inside its territory and hand them over to Colombian police,” he said, adding that no ideology could justify the cruelty of Thursday’s attack.

Duque’s comments came after authorities claimed that a one-armed ELN explosives expert was the person who carried out the attack, the deadliest in the South American nation in 15 years.

Even though Jose Aldemar Rojas had no criminal record, authorities said that the 56-year-old man is the same individual who shows up in intelligence reports as alias Mocho Kiko. He is believed to have lost part of his right arm manipulating explosives during a long clandestine career with an ELN cell near the border with Venezuela. He died in Thursday’s attack.

The shock bombing recalled some of the bloodiest chapters of Colombia’s recent past and has raised tough questions about lingering security threats in the wake of a 2016 peace deal with the larger and far more lethal Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

It would also appear to mark Duque’s return to the law and order platform on which he was elected last year but then somewhat moderated once he took office.

While Duque stopped short of shutting the door entirely to a negotiated end to decades of fighting with the ELN, he repeated his demands that the groups immediately cease all attacks and release 16 people it is believed to be holding captive as a condition for restarting stalled talks.

He also vowed to condemn any government that provides safe haven to the group — an indirect shot at Venezuela, considered by some a valuable rearguard for the clandestine cell that Rojas is accused of belonging to.

“Systematic deception and irrational violence have been the constant in three decades of failed talks with the ELN,” said Duque, who earlier in the day fielded phone calls of support from several foreign leaders as well as U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Cuba, which had been sponsoring peace talks and helped broker the historic 2016 deal with the FARC, offered its condolences to Colombia.

Cuba’s foreign ministry “will act with strict respect for the Protocols of Dialogue and Peace signed by the Government and the ELN, including the Protocol in Case of a Rupture in Negotiations,” wrote foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez.

The death toll of 21 made it the worst tragedy since a 2003 car bombing carried out by FARC rebels against an elite Bogota social club that killed 36. It proved especially unsettling because the target, the General Santander police academy, is one of the city’s most protected installations.

With the help of security cameras and fingerprints on his one-remaining hand, investigators were able to quickly identify Rojas and determine that he was the owner and driver of a 1993 Nissan-pick up that was loaded with 80 kilograms (175 pounds) of pentolite carried out the attack.

Defense Minister Guillermo Botero said Rojas entered the heavily guarded facility via a side entrance used for deliveries, driving fast through a gate opened to allow the exit of a few motorcycles. He then maneuvered into the heart of the leafy campus where the vehicle exploded in front of a red tile-roofed barrack used by female cadets just after an honor ceremony had ended.

Less than 10 minutes before the blast an unidentified man descended from the vehicle at a nearby bus stop — an indication the bomb may have been activated remotely and not an unprecedented suicide bombing as some had initially speculated.

Investigators are now trying to determine whether that man is Ricardo Carvajal, who acknowledged taking part in the attack in phone calls intercepted by police. Carvajal was arrested in a pre-dawn raid in Bogota on Friday in which authorities also seized a rebel combatant manual.

“This was an operation being planned for more than 10 months,” Botero said.

Only a small number of the 20 deceased cadets have been fully identified because the bodies of the young victims were badly mutilated.

Little is known about Rojas.

Records show he bought the car 10 months ago from Mauricio Mosquera, who authorities said was charged in the past for terrorism and rebellion. The car was last inspected six months ago in the eastern city of Arauca, near the border with Venezuela.

The same border region is a stronghold of the ELN, which has been stepping up its attacks on police targets and oil infrastructure in the volatile area. Authorities said Rojas traveled on several occasions to Venezuela to train rebels in the use of explosives.

In the past two decades the Cuban revolution-inspired group, which is believed to have around 1,500 fighters, has never been capable or shown much interest in carrying out high-profile act of violence.

But they’ve gained strength since the 2016 peace accord with the FARC led to the demobilization of some 7,000 guerrillas.

___

AP writers Christine Armario and Cesar Garcia contributed to this report.

Mueller Disputes Report That Trump Directed Lawyer to Lie

WASHINGTON — Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office on Friday issued a rare public statement disputing the accuracy of BuzzFeed News’ report that said President Donald Trump’s attorney told Mueller that the president directed him to lie to Congress.

BuzzFeed, citing two unidentified law enforcement officials, reported that Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate project and that Cohen told Mueller that Trump personally instructed him to lie about the timing of the project. The report said Mueller’s investigators learned about Trump’s directive “through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.

The report said Cohen then acknowledged Trump’s instructions when he was interviewed by the Mueller team.

The statement by Mueller’s office on Friday night doesn’t cite any specific errors, but the special counsel’s spokesman, Peter Carr, said, “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”

Immediately after the statement was issued, Trump retweeted a post that said: “Sadly so many will never get the memo that it was fake!”

Buzzfeed spokesman Matt Mittenthal said: “We stand by our reporting, and we are working to determine what exactly the Special Counsel is disputing. Stay tuned.”

Democrats had earlier vowed to investigate whether the report was true, calling that possibility a “concern of the greatest magnitude.” House intelligence committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., both said they would investigate the matter.

Any evidence that Trump directed a witness to lie to investigators would place him in the greatest political and legal jeopardy yet and confront him with allegations of the sort that led to the departure of one president and the impeachment of another.

The Associated Press had not independently confirmed the report.

Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said in a statement Friday that “any suggestion — from any source — that the President counseled Michael Cohen to lie is categorically false.” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the allegation “absolutely ridiculous.”

On Twitter Friday morning, Trump charged that Cohen was “Lying to reduce his jail time!”

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress to cover up that he was negotiating the Trump Tower project on Trump’s behalf during the heat of his presidential campaign. The charge was brought by Mueller and was the result of Cohen’s cooperation with that probe.

He admitted that he lied when he told lawmakers he had never agreed to travel to Russia in connection with the Moscow project and when he said that he’d decided by the end of January 2016 that the “proposal was not feasible for a variety of business reasons and should not be pursued further.”

He was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes that included arranging the payment of hush money to conceal his boss’ alleged sexual affairs, telling a judge that he agreed time and again to cover up Trump’s “dirty deeds” out of “blind loyalty.”

Giuliani noted that Cohen had pleaded guilty to lying and quoted federal prosecutors in New York who chastised him for a “pattern of lies and dishonesty over an extended period of time.” Mueller’s team, however, has called him a credible witness.

“Today’s claims are just more made-up lies born of Michael Cohen’s malice and desperation,” Giuliani said.

Lanny Davis, a Cohen adviser, declined to comment.

Cohen is scheduled to testify publicly before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Feb. 7. The top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, said Friday that he expects Cohen to talk to that panel in February.

Though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has discouraged any talk of impeachment in the early days of her new majority, some senior Democrats said that if the BuzzFeed report is confirmed, Trump’s actions could rise to that level.

“If the @BuzzFeed story is true, President Trump must resign or be impeached,” tweeted Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, a member of the House intelligence panel.

Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, also a Judiciary committee member, tweeted that if Trump directed Cohen to lie, “that is obstruction of justice. Period. Full stop.”

A Senate Democrat, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, tweeted that “we need to know this ASAP” if Mueller does have multiple sources confirming that Trump directed Cohen to lie.

“Mueller shouldn’t end his inquiry, but it’s about time for him to show Congress his cards before it’s too late for us to act,” Murphy tweeted.

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Zeke Miller in Washington and Jonathan Lemire and Jim Mustian in New York contributed to this report.

Born Disposable: Trump’s War on Youth

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Truthout. 

We live in an age in which the welfare of children is no longer a measure of the degree to which a society lives up to its democratic ideals. In an age of growing fascism, those in power no longer view children as the promise of a future but as a threat to the present.

In particular, poor Black and Brown children are being treated as what Teju Cole calls “unmournable bodies.” Rather than being educated, many are being imprisoned; rather than living in communities that are safe and clean, many are relegated to cities where the water is poisoned and the police function as an occupying army.

In the age of Trump, children of undocumented workers are stripped of their humanity, caged in internment camps, sometimes sexually abused and subjected to the unethical grammars of state violence. Sometimes they lose their lives, as did two children from Guatemala who died while in custody of Customs and Border Protection: seven-year old Jakelin Caal and eight-year-old Felipe Gómez. In this way the dual logic of disposability and pollution becomes the driving force of a machinery of social death.

Related Articles









Neoliberal Fascism and the Echoes of History



by Henry Giroux

Removed from the sphere of justice and human rights, undocumented children occupy a ruthless space of social and political abandonment beyond the reach of human rights. This is a zone in which moral numbness becomes a central feature of politics, power and governance. How else to explain Republican Congressman Peter King responding to the deaths of these two children by praising ICE’s “excellent record,” stating that since there are “only two children that have died,” the death count is a testament to how competent organizations like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actually are. This is a fascist discourse marked by the rhetorical tropes of hate, demonization and violence.

As this incident shows, in the era of Trump, people are now turned into objects not only to others but also to themselves. This suggests a crisis not only of politics and representation, but also one of individual and collective identity. As a form of domestic terrorism, the state produces and legitimates forms of material and symbolic violence in which people are rendered less than human, treated as excess, and subjected to zones of social abandonment and terminal exclusion. It does so both in its policies and its alignment with corporate-controlled media. Such terrorism is at the heart of the Trump administration and is evident in its anti-immigration policies, its militarization of the southern border, its expansion of the surveillance state, and its war on Muslims. It is also evident in mounting police violence against Black youth, the revocation of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the state’s attack on workers’ rights and safety protections, its creation of internment camps near the US-Mexico border, its scorn for reproductive rights, and its elevation of the police state as a central force for organizing society, to name only a few examples.

The Politics of Disposability

Disposable populations now labor under what sociologist Richard Sennett has called the “spectre of uselessness” and are catapulted out of the moral universe central to any notion of humanity. Such populations have their children forcibly taken away from them by immigration officials, are chased out of their homes, forced into exile, pushed into homelessness and poverty, excluded from the rights that grant them full-fledged citizenship. Too many of the poor and other vulnerable populations are frequently left to fend for themselves in the face of often devastating political and social costs caused by the financial elite and exploitative corporations such as the pharmaceutical companies partly responsible for the opioid crisis in the United States. These vulnerable populations are also removed from their material goods, denied crucial social provisions, and lack control over their bodies. Under the reign of neoliberalism, such populations are viewed with scorn and disdain. At best they experience the burden of a social death, and at worse they fall prey to the looming danger of real death.

Disposability, pollution and dispossession have another destructive register in that they attempt through a range of cultural, social and pedagogical apparatuses to make people unknown to themselves as potentially critical and engaged citizens. As public spheres increasingly become sites where politics thrive on the energies of a racially coded fascist politics, critical modes of subjectivity and identification are under siege. That is, new powerful cultural pathways work to choke democratic values, modes of agency, values and social relations normally rooted in the virtues of social and economic justice, compassion for others, and also the public goods and institutions that make such values and relationships possible. In the age of a culture of immediacy and hypersensationalism, critical thinking, civic courage and collective resistance are diverted into the private orbit of therapy, the isolated space of emotional management, the atomizing logic of wilful self-change, and a landscape of fractured identities.

This assault on democratic modes of agency and values is particularly aggressive and widespread under a political formation that merges neoliberal ideology and the structures of white supremacy. The public sphere now becomes a phantom empty space, a barren presence next to neoliberalism’s celebrated ethos of unbridled individualism. Neoliberal fascist politics is strengthened through the domestic machineries of inscription that extend from schools and the social media to the world of celebrity culture and corporate-controlled sports events. The corporate-dominated circuits of culture depoliticize people by defining them as both consumers and as isolated individuals for whom all the problems they face are both self-induced and only subject to change through the register of individual responsibility. This narrative of individual freedom and responsibility is constructed through the false notion of unlimited choices detached from any realistic material constraints. As such, this fictional idea of individual freedom is both overburdening and politically debilitating given its refusal to provide a language for individuals to be able to translate private problems into broader social and systemic considerations.

It is in the midst of a culture steeped in a growing plague of social atomization, loneliness and a race-based right-wing populist nationalism that the false dreamscape of a fascist politics gains ascendency. This bogus dreamscape provides individuals with a misleading sense of community and simple answers to complex problems, mobilizing anger against the neoliberal global economy into totalitarian impulses. In this instance, agency becomes unmoored from democratic communal relations and disconnected from a legitimate critique of existing power relations. Immiseration on both the material and psychic levels along with a state-sanctioned culture of fear mongering and bigotry is producing political and pedagogical landscapes that mobilize the highly charged emotive appeals of a fascist politics. This is a politics, as the writer Ian Hughes points out, that is embraced by tyrants who function as entrepreneurs of hate. He writes:

For each of these tyrants, their first goal was to exacerbate the feelings of separateness and otherness felt towards their chosen target out-group, whether they were Jews, kulaks, ‘capitalist railroaders’ or other ‘enemies of the people.’ Their second goal was to inflame feelings of anger and fear towards that out-group. And their third goal was to spread stories that explained, in false and simple terms, why that outgroup was a deserving target of people’s hate. These stories varied widely but they had certain elements in common: ‘the enemy is repulsive in looks and habits;’ ‘the enemy is contaminated and is spreading disease;’ ‘the enemy is part of a conspiracy seeking to control us;’ ‘the enemy is a criminal;’ ‘the enemy is a seducer and a rapist;’ ‘the enemy is an animal, an insect or a germ;’ ‘the enemy is the enemy of God;’ ‘the enemy is a murderer who delights in killing;’ ‘the enemy is standing in the way of our making our country great again.’

This tale of turning a “fabricated enemy” into an object has a long heritage in both the horrors of genocide against Native Americans, the reign of terror and disposability during the period of American slavery, and the apartheid system of incarceration that repudiates the claim that the reign of white supremacy and fascist politics is safely interred in the past.

It is also monumentally evident in Trump’s call for funding a border wall and his use of a partial shutdown of the US government as a bargaining chip to have Congress meet his racist-inspired demands. Trump has attempted to justify the wall by demonizing undocumented immigrants while criminalizing an entire culture of women, men and children, most of whom are seeking asylum in the United States. Moreover, Trump’s self-serving fictional political crisis has created a major crisis at home for thousands of children whose families are being held hostage to the partial government shutdown. While the press often cites that 800,000 people will not be paid as a result of the shutdown, the reality is that many of these workers also have dependents who will now face a severe financial crisis and have to endure a great deal of misery and suffering. This is an attack first and foremost on human rights, justice and democracy, and it is part of a larger war on people of color, children and others who are deemed by those in power to be throwaways, disposable and excess. The border wall began as a crowd pleaser for Trump, and it has now revealed itself as a symbol for the discourse of disposability, pollution and exclusion that is at the core of a neoliberal fascist politics.

This discourse is designed to segregate and exclude, and it has also been used to create a culture divided between winners and losers, friends and enemies. In doing so, it has produced a social order in which all that is left is fear for the people who are actually the real victims of state terrorism, plus the self-serving notion of anxiety and hatred on the part of those whites who falsely imagine themselves as victims threatened by the increasing presence of those whom they falsely deem threatening, contaminating and disposable. The language of objectifying people operates in the service of a toxic politics that, as Hannah Arendt puts it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “guide[s] the behavior of its subjects [as] a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim.”

Repeated endlessly by the Trump administration and the political parties of the post-1980s era, the logic of objectifying the precariat by means of notions such as that of disposability became a tool of violence used against alleged marginalized others and a rhetorical weapon used by those whose racial, class and gender privilege were viewed as at risk of losing power. Disposability as weapon of objectification and social exclusion has not only been used to undermine the bodies, capacities, and modes of identification crucial to creating engaged, informed, critical citizens, it has also become normalized as a story of victimhood. As the false promises of neoliberal capitalism become clear failures, the fear of powerlessness fuels a sense of victimization among many poor and middle-class whites who feel displaced in a demographically changing world. Written out of the discourse of social and economic mobility and security, the vulnerable accept the dominant culture’s seductive and venomous affirmation of hatred, white supremacy and white nationalism.

In this instance, the rhetoric of objectification by way of pollution and disposability has a doubling function in that it both creates real victims while reinforcing the false assumption on the part of right-wing populists that those considered other “pollute” the United States and pose a threat to white Americans. In this instance, the rhetoric of pollution both names those considered a threat to an alleged white public sphere, and feeds the fantasies of an apocalyptic nationalism. If Trump has proven adept at one thing, it is stoking the fears of those white Americans who comfortably inhabit mythic tales of race-based conspiracy theories of victimhood. The relentlessly asinine Fox News host Tucker Carlson echoed these sentiments when he claimed that immigration makes the US “poorer and dirtier.” Many liberal commentators were quick to condemn Carlson’s racist rhetoric, but what they did not do was acknowledge it as a tactic to further legitimate the fear and anger that often erupts in violence against those considered disposable.

Fascist Neoliberalism Thrives on Depoliticization

The footprints of a fascist politics are now found not only in the registers of racial purity, the chants of blood and soil, and a culture of cruelty, but also in the neoliberal stress on unchecked individualism, the collapse of social obligations, the uprooting of civic culture, and the effects of social atomization, all of which work to both depoliticize and render agency susceptible to modes of identification that embrace shared fears and hatreds rather than shared values and social obligations. Exclusion is no longer simply an economic issue that reinforces class divisions between workers and capitalists. On the contrary, it is more capacious under neoliberal fascism and is about not allowing more and more people the right to both enter the United States and participate in public life. The latter issue is most evident in Trump’s stated intention to end birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants in the US. Trump’s disregard for the constitutionality of birthright citizenship says as much about his racism as it does for his repeated disregard for the law.

In the current historical moment, agency is being emptied of its democratic possibilities in a neoliberal order in which identities and desires are defined through a market logic that enshrines consumerism, unending competition, unbridled individualism, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, and the celebration of unbridled self-interest. All of these forces are a breeding ground for unleashing a hatred for the common good, the social contract, and democracy itself. Within this new social and political formation, the people-objectifying discourses of disposability and pollution are aligned with the resonant discourse of bigotry, nativism and misogyny and configured as part of a condition for the production of accommodating and unquestioning modes of identification and selfhood. In this instance, isolation, as Hannah Arendt once argued, becomes crucial to the production of tyranny and is grounded in perpetuating the conditions for powerlessness and the inability of individuals to act as critical and informed participants in shaping the forces that bear down on their lives.

Neoliberal ideology becomes a justification for lawlessness when responsibility is shifted to the most vulnerable individuals, with women being disproportionately burdened as they are marginalized by class and race. Even though the problems faced by the dispossessed are not of their own making, the poisoned discourse of neoliberalism insists that their fate is a product of personal issues ranging from weak character, bad choices, or simply a moral deficiency. Isolation breeds political inaction, fear and intimidation, which work to instill toxic convictions. In this discourse, everyone is defined as an island and all connective forms of economic and social justice vanish from the public imagination.

As misfortune is emptied of any broader political, economic and social content, it is indeed depoliticized and viewed as a weakness, hence making it all the easier for the punishing state to criminalize social problems. As the late Frankfurt School theorist Leo Löwenthal once noted in his essay on the “Atomization of Man,” terror functions as a form of dehumanization and “fate itself becomes so enigmatic as to lose all meaning…. The creative faculties of fantasy, imaginations, memory become meaningless and tend to atrophy where they can no longer bring about any desired change in the individual’s fate.”

One consequence is that those individuals who are relatively powerless to address broader social issues are forced to partake in a system that encourages them to embrace their own oppression as though it were a normal part of their everyday existence.

Operating under the false assumption that there are only individual solutions to socially produced problems, the atomization of the individual thus becomes normalized rendering human beings numb and fearful, immune to the demands of economic and social justice increasingly divorced from matters of politics, ethics and social responsibility. This amounts to a form of domestic terrorism evident as individuals descend into a moral stupor, susceptible to political shocks, and seduced by the pleasure of the manufactured spectacle. In this instance not only does the political become relentlessly personal, it also reinforces the ongoing process of depoliticization. In this case, agency is reduced to a dystopian narrative limited to how to survive, and reduces the notion of autonomy to acts of consumption, allowing any aspirations that regain some sense of sovereignty to be hijacked by right-wing parties and populist movements.

Against the erosion of democratic ideals of equality and popular sovereignty, right-wing populists produce narratives in which democracy is removed from the discourse of equality and is wedded “to nationalistic authoritarian forms of neolib­eralism that, in the name of recovering democracy, in fact drastically restrict it,” in the words of Chantal Mouffe from For a Left Populism. Underlying this regressive notion of populism are pedagogical practices in which the desire on the part of people to gain control over their lives has, in Mouffe’s words, “been captured by right-wing populist parties that have managed to construct the people through a xenophobic discourse that excludes immigrants, considered as a threat to national prosperity.”

Within this new fascist neoliberal populist political formation, language functions to repress any sense of moral decency and connection to others, and as a result, personal communication rooted in democratic values loses all meaning. Individuals are pressured increasingly to act exclusively in their own self-interest, and in doing so are reduced to what Löwenthal describes as “ruthless seekers after their own survival, psychological pawns and puppets of a system that knows no other purpose than to keep itself in power.” All vestiges of critical agency now dissolve into a form of political regression and infantilism — not unlike what we see in many of the individuals and groups who give Trump undying and unquestioned loyalty.

This is a politics in which the ongoing process of depoliticization makes it easier for the financial elite and other right-wing extremists to argue that the objectifying logic of disposability and the curse of pollution mutually reinforce each other, making it easier to believe that those who suffer deserve to suffer.

As the connections are loosened between language and the common good, education and democracy, politics and civic responsibility, and truth and fiction, fascist terror reasserts itself as part of the largely unquestioned neoliberal diktat that there is no alternative to the current state of affairs. This speaks to a crisis of agency, representation, education and politics itself.

The President Plans Big Announcement on Saturday on Shutdown, Border

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump says he’ll make a “major announcement” on the government shutdown and the southern border on Saturday afternoon as the standstill over his border wall continues.

The White House did not immediately provide details on Friday about what the president would be announcing, but a person familiar with the planning said Trump planned to outline a new deal with specific proposals that the administration believes could potentially pave the way to the shutdown’s end. The person was not authorized to discuss the announcement and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The move — on Day 28 of a shutdown that has left hundreds of thousands of federal workers without paychecks — represents the first major overture by the president since Jan. 8, when he delivered an Oval Office address making the public case for his border wall. The president and his aides have said he will not budge on his demand for $5.7 billion for his border wall. Democrats have panned the offer and said they will not negotiate until the government reopens.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to discuss what Trump might propose but said he was “going to continue looking for the solution” to end what the administration had repeatedly referred to as a “humanitarian and national security crisis at the border.” While few would argue that a humanitarian crisis is unfolding as the demand for entry by migrants and the Trump administration’s hardline response overwhelm border resources, critics say Trump has badly exaggerated the security risks.

The Friday evening announcement came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday canceled her plans to travel by commercial plane to visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying Trump had caused a security risk by talking about the trip. The White House said there was no such leak.

But it was the latest turn — and potentially the most dangerous — in the high-stakes brinkmanship between Trump and Pelosi, playing out against the stalled negotiations over how to end the partial government shutdown.

And it showed once again the willingness of the former hard-charging businessman to hit hard when challenged, as he was earlier this week when Pelosi suggested postponing his State of the Union address during the shutdown.

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said it “gives new meaning” to tensions between the executive and legislative branches.

“There are public back and forths,” he said, citing relations between past presidents and House speakers. “But this kind of tensions, preventing the speaker from visiting the troops and the speaker suggesting the White House leaked information about a crucial flight, this is one more example of where Trumpism brings us into new territory.”

The political stakes are high as the shutdown moves into a fifth week, with hundreds of thousands of federal workers going without pay and no outward signs of resolution.

Sanders on Friday stressed the importance of a looming Tuesday deadline to process paychecks, when the government will need to decide if workers get another round of zeros on Friday’s payday.

“One of the key reasons that the president did not want Speaker Pelosi to leave the country is because, if she did, it would all but guarantee the fact that the negotiations couldn’t take place over the weekend,” Sanders told reporters.

It was an unusually combative week between the executive and legislative branches.

Tensions flared when Pelosi suggested Trump postpone the annual State of the Union address, a grand Washington tradition — and a platform for his border wall fight with Democrats — that was tentatively scheduled for Jan. 29.

Trump never responded directly. Instead, he abruptly canceled Pelosi’s military flight on Thursday, hours before she and a congressional delegation were to depart for Afghanistan on the previously undisclosed visit to U.S. troops.

Trump belittled the trip as a “public relations event” — even though he had just made a similar stop in a conflict zone during the shutdown — and said it would be best if Pelosi remained in Washington to negotiate to reopen the government.

“Obviously, if you would like to make your journey by flying commercial, that would certainly be your prerogative,” wrote Trump.

Pelosi, undeterred, quietly began making her own preparations for the overseas trip.

But on Friday, Pelosi said her plan to travel by commercial plane had been “leaked” by the White House.

“The administration leaked that we were traveling commercially,” Pelosi told reporters at the Capitol. She said it was “very irresponsible on the part of the president.”

She said the State Department told her “the president outing” the original trip made the scene on the ground in Afghanistan “more dangerous because it’s a signal to the bad actors that we’re coming.”

The White House said it had leaked nothing that would cause a security risk.

Denying military aircraft to a senior lawmaker — let alone the speaker, who is second in line to the presidency after the vice president, traveling to a combat region — is very rare.

Trump’s trip to Iraq after Christmas was not disclosed in advance for security reasons.

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California slammed Trump for revealing the closely held travel plans.

“I think the president’s decision to disclose a trip the speaker’s making to a war zone was completely and utterly irresponsible in every way,” Schiff said.

Some Republicans expressed frustration. Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted, “One sophomoric response does not deserve another.” He called Pelosi’s State of the Union move “very irresponsible and blatantly political” but said Trump’s reaction was “also inappropriate.”

The White House also canceled plans for a presidential delegation to travel to an economic forum in Switzerland next week, citing the shutdown. And it said future congressional trips would be postponed until the shutdown is resolved, though it was not immediately clear if any such travel — which often is not disclosed in advance — was coming up.

The new White House travel ban does not extend to the first family.

Next week, House Democrats will pass bills to try to fund the government, including one adding $1 billion to border security — to hire 75 immigration judges and improve infrastructure. The Senate, controlled by Republicans, has declined to consider any bills unless Trump is prepared to sign them into law.

___

Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann, Kevin Freking, Jon Lemire, Matthew Daly, Andy Taylor, Mary Clare Jalonick, Matt Lee and Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

Indigenous Peoples Show Solidarity at D.C. March

Activists from around the world gathered for the first-ever Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, D.C., on Friday. Issues including voter suppression, environmental protections and violence toward women and girls were at the forefront of the event.

“Our people are under constant threat, from pipelines, from police, from a system that wants to forget the valuable perspectives we bring to the table. But those challenges make us stronger,” said Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney at the Lakota People’s Law Project and member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

The indigenous people’s march pic.twitter.com/wnhZKP1AR4

— Naomi LaChance (@lachancenaomi) January 18, 2019

Iron Eyes, who was a leader in the movement against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017, said he supports the “Green New Deal”—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to address climate change through an economic stimulus program.

In the U.S., indigenous Americans are subject to disproportionate levels of police brutality, another focus of the march. “We must remind the world, again, that indigenous people matter. We are all made better when we respect one another and lift each other up,” Iron Eyes said.

This month, Canadian police arrested 14 people at a checkpoint where members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation were trying to block construction of TransCanada’s Coastal GasLink pipeline. In Minnesota, indigenous people are fighting the construction of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline.

“We don’t want these tar sands going through our waters,” said Tara Houska, National Campaigns Director of the group Honor the Earth and adviser to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.

More from the march this morning pic.twitter.com/K5SVjEoBQo

— Naomi LaChance (@lachancenaomi) January 18, 2019

New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland spoke at the rally.

“We need to build a future we can be proud of.” – Deb Haaland speaking at the Indigenous Peoples March in DC. #befierce #ipmdc19 pic.twitter.com/3HgJv9EhWa

— A.A.I.A. (@IndianAffairs) January 18, 2019

“As one of the first Native American women in Congress, I see it as my responsibility to educate my colleagues about the federal government’s trust responsibility and provide a voice to advocate for those who have historically not had a seat at the table to make a long-awaited change,” she said in a statement before the rally.

Another key focus of the event was violence against women. More than 5,000 native women are estimated to be missing in the U.S. More than half of indigenous women in the U.S. have experienced sexual violence; the attacker is almost always a non-tribal member.

A prayer for missing and murdered indigenous women pic.twitter.com/wa0mYy68En

— Naomi LaChance (@lachancenaomi) January 18, 2019

“I’m just this old Ojibwe woman from the north… I come as an elder, I come as a people, I come to you.” #IPMDC19 pic.twitter.com/UJFMHorPam

— Jourdan Bennett-Begaye (@jourdanbb) January 18, 2019

“Without the unity of the indigenous people we have no future for indigenous people,” said artist and activist Queen Melé Le’iato Tuiasosopo Muhammad Ali.

Carey McWilliams: The Most Important American Author Many Don’t Know

“American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

Truthdig contributor Peter Richardson is the author of “American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams,” now out in paperback from the University of California Press with a foreword by Mike Davis. We asked him about Carey McWilliams and his achievements.

Truthdig: Your book traces the extraordinary career of Carey McWilliams, from his Los Angeles legal activism to his radical journalism and finally to his two-decade editorial stint at The Nation. You argue that he was one of the most versatile and productive public intellectuals of the 20th century. Why don’t more Americans know about him?

Peter Richardson: Yeah, it’s funny. Despite the accolades, he’s probably the most important American author that most people have never heard of. He has his fans, of course. Kevin Starr was one. He called McWilliams “the single finest nonfiction writer on California—ever” and “the state’s most astute political observer.” Mike Davis is another. “City of Quartz” is a kind of love letter to McWilliams. Over the years, McWilliams also won over the city room at the Los Angeles Times. When journalists need a quote about the city, they often turn to McWilliams or Joan Didion.

There are a few reasons McWilliams isn’t better known. First, he was a radical. He had powerful enemies, including J. Edgar Hoover, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Farmers, which objected to his history of California farm labor in “Factories in the Field” (1939). When Earl Warren first ran for governor in 1942, he promised growers that his first act would be to fire McWilliams from his position in state government. The California Un-American Activities committee smeared him mercilessly. So even though he was accomplishing a great deal, he didn’t endear himself to those in power.

McCarthyism was a factor. By the 1950s, McWilliams was back in New York City, shepherding The Nation magazine through a difficult decade. Many of his friends were victims of the Communist witch hunt—in fact, McWilliams wrote a book on that topic in 1950, well before most people understood the dangers to our democracy. But that was typical of McWilliams. He was always a kind of early-warning system. In 1950, he called Richard Nixon “a dapper little man with an astonishing capacity of petty malice.” It took the rest of the country two more decades to figure that one out.

Finally, his style didn’t call a lot of attention to itself. His arguments were clear, fact-based, and hard-hitting. A 1944 Supreme Court opinion cited him four times on the Japanese internment. Other writers admire the clarity and power of his prose. He made it look easy, and professional writers know that it’s anything but that. He never went in for fireworks, but that’s probably one of the reasons that his work holds up so well now.

TD: You mentioned the Japanese internment during the Second World War. Did McWilliams write about other forms of racial and ethnic discrimination?

PR: Very much so. In fact, that’s one of the reasons he was always in trouble. He wrote a book in 1943 called “Brothers Under the Skin” that documented the histories of America’s minority populations. After it came out, reactionaries in the state legislature grilled him on the subject of interracial marriage, which was still illegal. He hadn’t written about that issue, but when he said he opposed those laws, they reported that his answer was consistent with the Communist Party line.

Click here to read long excerpts from “American Prophet” at Google Books.

He also wrote “A Mask for Privilege,” a book about anti-Semitism, and “North From Mexico,” which was a very important book on Latinos in the Southwest. At that time, there were very few works on that topic. Throughout the 1940s, he wrote almost one first-rate book per year.

He was also active in the community. He organized the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee after a group of Latino youths were railroaded for murder. That decision was overturned, and it’s still regarded as the Latino community’s first political victory in Los Angeles. He also helped calm the city during the Zoot Suit Riots, which was really a military riot that escalated after a scuffle between sailors and Latino youths in downtown Los Angeles. All of that material went into “North From Mexico,” but it also inspired “Zoot Suit,” the play and film written by Luis Valdez.

TD: You write that McWilliams wrote a Supreme Court brief for the Hollywood 10, the screenwriters and producers who were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and convicted for contempt of Congress.

PR: Right, but that case never got to the Supreme Court. McWilliams knew most of those guys from his political activism in and around Los Angeles. He was also close with Robert Kenny, one of their lawyers, who ran for governor in 1946. McWilliams dedicated one of his most important books, “Southern California Country,” to Kenny that year.

McWilliams’ amicus brief was part of his larger effort to defend Americans who held perfectly legal but unpopular political views. Ironically, one of McWilliams’ editors—Angus Cameron at Little, Brown—was caught up in that. He was forced to resign as editor in chief for publishing left-wing authors like McWilliams. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Harvard historian, led the charge against him and McWilliams, who never forgave Schlesinger. Cameron didn’t land another editorial job until the 1960s, when Random House hired him.

TD: Wasn’t Angus Cameron also Hunter S. Thompson’s editor?

PR: Almost. Cameron offered Thompson a contract for “Hell’s Angels,” but Thompson ended up signing with Ballantine, which published the paperback edition. Then Random House published the cloth edition, but Thompson worked with Jim Silberman. In the meantime, Cameron and Thompson exchanged some really interesting letters about the nature of Thompson’s work.

McWilliams played a big role in all of this. In fact, he gave Thompson the story idea in the first place. Thompson was living in San Francisco and desperate for freelance assignments. McWilliams asked him to cover the Hells Angels and then ran his story in The Nation. Almost instantly, Thompson began receiving offers for a book-length treatment. “Hell’s Angels” became his first best-seller, and he acknowledged McWilliams on the dedication page.

After that, Thompson kept in close touch with McWilliams, probably hoping he would supply another great story idea. Douglas Brinkley, who edited two volumes of Thompson’s correspondence, said that McWilliams was the only editor whom Thompson really admired.

TD: How would you describe McWilliams’ editorial work at The Nation generally?

PR: He had a reputation for being right on the big issues, especially civil rights and Vietnam, and he was very clear about Nixon’s shortcomings. He also kept an eye on Ronald Reagan while he was running for governor. Even then, McWilliams was talking about dog-whistle politics, especially on the issue of discriminatory housing.

Probably the most important thing McWilliams did at The Nation was convert it into an outlet for investigative reporting. It’s much easier for magazines to run opinion and analysis, but McWilliams gave several writers the space to pursue bigger stories. By the late 1960s, muckraking was back in style, but McWilliams kept it going when most outlets were content to publish the government’s lies about Vietnam, for example.

TD: You point out that McWilliams really had two constituencies—those who read his books, and those who knew his work at The Nation. 

PR: Right, and those two audiences didn’t usually intersect. When he went east to edit The Nation, he stopped writing books, so his California audience thought of him as an author in exile. Most of his readers (and colleagues) at The Nation weren’t familiar with his books. They saw him as the steward of a venerable magazine.

I think McWilliams modeled his career after H.L. Mencken, his boyhood idol, so it made sense for him to dedicate his energies to editing a magazine. But the 1950s was a terrible time to manage a left-wing magazine, and the 1960s ushered in a new kind of politics that didn’t play to his advantages. I love what he did at the magazine, but in some ways, The Nation’s gain was the country’s loss.

TD: Last question. What was the coolest thing you learned about McWilliams while researching his life?

PR: I suppose it was finding a letter in McWilliams’ archive from Robert Towne, who wrote the original screenplay for “Chinatown.” In the letter, Towne explained that a single chapter from one of McWilliams’ books—“Southern California Country,” published in 1946—inspired Towne’s effort, which won an Oscar in 1975. The chapter was about the region’s water politics. In addition to exposing the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, McWilliams was way ahead of his time in terms of environmental awareness. Anyway, Towne took that history and turned it into a Southern California epic. One of the fascinating things about McWilliams—who took a lot of criticism for what I regard as his decency and sanity—is how he inspired so many others to do their best work.

Trump, North Korean Leader to Hold Second Summit

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will hold a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to try to broker a deal to coax the North to give up its nuclear weapons, the White House announced Friday.

News of a second meeting with the reclusive North Korean leader came after Trump’s 90-minute meeting in the Oval Office with a North Korean envoy, Kim Yong Chol, who traveled to Washington to discuss denuclearization talks. Trump and Kim Jong Un are to meet near the end of February at a place to be announced later, said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

“The United States is going to continue to keep pressure and sanctions on North Korea until we see fully and verified denuclearization,” Sanders said “We’ve had very good steps and good faith from the North Koreans in releasing the hostages and other moves. And so we’re going to continue those conversations and the president looks forward to the next meeting.”

In May, North Korea released three American detainees and sent them home with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after his 90-minute meeting with the North Korean leader in Pyongyang.

The second summit signals stepped-up efforts by both countries to continue talks. Trump has exchanged multiple letters with the North Korean leader amid little tangible progress on the vague denuclearization agreement reached at their first meeting last June in Singapore.

On Friday, Pompeo met with the North Korean envoy at a Washington hotel before the White House meeting and the two had lunch together afterward.

Trump has spoken several times of having a second summit early this year. Vietnam has been considered as a possible summit venue, along with Thailand, Hawaii and Singapore.

Since their Singapore sit-down in June, several private analysts have published reports detailing continuing North Korean development of nuclear and missile technology. A planned meeting between Pompeo and the envoy, who is North Korea’s former spy chief, in New York last November was abruptly canceled. U.S. officials said at the time that North Korea had called off the session.

The talks have stalled over North Korea’s refusal to provide a detailed accounting of its nuclear and missile facilities that would be used by inspectors to verify any deal to dismantle them. The North also has demanded that the U.S. end harsh economic penalties and provide security guarantees before it takes any steps beyond its initial suspension of nuclear and missile tests.

Harry Kazianis, a North Korea expert at the Center for National Interest, said any talks between the two nations are a positive development, but the hard work of negotiating an agreement has only begun.

“Both nations must now show at least some tangible benefits from their diplomatic efforts during a second summit, or risk their efforts being panned as nothing more than reality TV,” Kazianis said.

As a possible first step, Kazianis said, North Korea could agree to close its nuclear centrifuge facility at Yongbyon in exchange for some relief from U.S. sanctions or a peace declaration ending the Korean War. The three-year war between North and South Korea ended in 1953 with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

“Such a deal allows both sides to come away with a much-needed win that can breathe new life into negotiations,” he said.

Kim expressed frustration in an annual New Year’s address over the lack of progress in negotiations. But on a visit to Beijing last week, he said North Korea would pursue a second summit “to achieve results that will be welcomed by the international community,” according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency.

Kim’s latest trip to China, his fourth since last year, came as the North’s strongest ally has encouraged negotiations with the U.S. while at the same time arguing in favor of an immediate easing of sanctions.

The U.S. and North Korea seemed close to war at points during 2017. The North staged a series of weapons tests that brought it closer to its nuclear goal of one day being able to target anywhere on the U.S. mainland. The two sides then turned to insulting each other: Trump called Kim “Little Rocket Man” and North Korea said Trump was a “dotard.”

Kim abruptly turned to diplomacy with Seoul and Washington last year, possibly fearing economic harm from the penalties imposed over the weapons tests.

Still, even after the Singapore summit, the first between U.S. and North Korean leaders, there has been little real progress in nuclear disarmament.

Independent analysts are highly skeptical that North Korea will easily abandon a nuclear arsenal constructed in the face of deep poverty and probably seen by Kim as his only guarantee of his government’s survival.