Chris Hedges's Blog, page 381

President Assails Fed as the ‘Only Problem Our Economy Has’

President Donald Trump lashed out at the Federal Reserve on Monday after administration officials spent the weekend trying to assure the public and financial markets that Jerome Powell’s job as Fed chairman was safe.

“The only problem our economy has is the Fed,” the president tweeted Monday. “They don’t have a feel for the Market, they don’t understand necessary Trade Wars or Strong Dollars or even Democrat Shutdowns over Borders. The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch — he can’t putt!”

On Wall Street, stocks had already been down but intensified their fall after Trump’s tweet. Markets are facing their worst month in a decade over fears about a U.S. trade war with China, a slowing global economy and chaos in the Trump White House. By the close of a holiday-shortened trading session Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had sunk 653 points for the day — 2.9 percent.

Trump’s latest tweet attacking the Fed was met with concern that any effort to diminish Powell or remove him as chairman could destabilize the economy.

“He is seeking open warfare on Christmas Eve,” said Peter Conti-Brown, a financial historian at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “We’ve never seen anything like this full-blown and full-frontal assault. This is a disaster for the Fed, a disaster for the president and a disaster for the economy.”

The president has expressed frustration over the Fed’s decision to raise its key short-term rate four times this year. Those moves are intended to prevent the economy from overheating at a time of brisk growth and an unemployment rate near a half-century low.

At a news conference last week, Powell explained that the rate hikes were evidence of the economy’s strength. But Trump sees the increases — which lead to higher borrowing costs for consumers and businesses — as an economic and political threat.

The president’s attacks are widely seen as an intrusion on the political independence of the Fed, which exists to determine the flow of money based off economic data on employment and inflation.

Fed independence has long been among the bedrocks of the U.S. financial markets. It ensures that central bankers can make politically unpopular decisions, such as fighting high inflation in the 1980s or rescuing banks after the 2008 financial crisis.

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, a senior Republican on the Banking Committee, has cautioned against removing Powell.

“I’d be very careful doing that,” Shelby told reporters Saturday at the Capitol. “The Federal Reserve is set up to be independent.”

Stocks did decline after Powell announced this year’s fourth rate hike on Wednesday. But the sell-off appeared to reflect concerns that the Fed might be moving too fast in its plans to raise rates and to shrink its vast portfolio of bonds given an economic slowdown that is expected in 2019.

Fed officials voted unanimously to increase rates last week. Among those voting with Powell were three other board members who were chosen by Trump: Richard Clarida, Randal Quarles and Michelle Bowman.

The president expressed his displeasure Monday with the Fed after Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had tweeted on Saturday that Powell’s job was safe. Mnuchin also tweeted on Sunday that he had checked with the heads of the six largest U.S. banks to ensure that they had enough liquidity to operate in a stock market that has tumbled sharply since October.

“My sense is the Mnuchin tweets don’t tell us much about the economy, but they provide unusual insight into the chaos inside the White House,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at the consultancy RSM. “Rather than instilling confidence, it created confusion and raised more questions than it answered. Foremost among those is, how safe is the job of Jay Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve?”

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AP chief congressional correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

Notorious RBG Gets Glitzified in ‘On the Basis of Sex’

On the 25th anniversary of her swearing in as a Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is being feted in not one, but two movies. The first, “RBG,” by Julie Cohen and Betsy West for CNN, is a rare documentary box office hit, earning $14.3 million and winning National Board of Review honors. And opening in theaters Dec. 25 is “On the Basis of Sex,” a conventional and often melodramatic hagiography beginning with the early Harvard Law School years of Ruth and Marty Ginsburg (miscast and ), leading to her landmark case, Charles E. Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, in 1972.

When a young Ginsburg matriculates in 1956, the halls of Harvard Law School are indeed hallowed, if composer  French horns and conventional scoring are to be trusted. Dean Griswold (), a nemesis who will return in act three, invites incoming students to dinner, including, for the first time, nine women. When each is asked why they deem themselves fit to take the seat of a man at the school, Ginsburg judiciously responds that the law is her husband’s endeavor, and by studying it, she hopes to become a more supportive wife.

The moment provides a glimpse of her jujitsu intellect, just part of what has made her so formidable, and much of what is missing in the film. Such authentic moments seem to be the work of a nimbler creative team, clashing with the prosaic dialogue of first-time screenwriter (Ginsburg’s nephew), and uninspired direction.

While Marty is ill with testicular cancer, Ginsburg works tirelessly and cheerfully, covering his classes and her own while also caring for a newborn. And if you’re not sure how you feel about testicular cancer, Danna’s mordant piano chords on the soundtrack will cue you, just as the rest of his music hints at every emotional beat in the story.

Marty overcomes cancer, and Ginsburg graduates with top honors, but is rejected from every major New York City firm, enduring sexism but also anti-Semitism. By the mid-1960s only six of the top 20 New York law firms were Jewish-run. As it is, anti-Semitism is a point “On the Basis of Sex” brushes up against but never explores, a missed opportunity since Ginsburg later premises many of her arguments on the 14th Amendment, which directly addresses racism by granting citizenship to slaves in the wake of the Civil War.

Judging by past projects and roots in Israel, it’s easy to assume that , who was originally cast, may have taken a different approach to Ginsburg. Her director on the project, before it fell apart, was the red-hot , whose critically acclaimed “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is currently in theaters while she directs Tom Hanks in a new Fred Rogers movie coming in 2019.

Miscast as Jones is, she soundly anchors “On the Basis of Sex,” balancing patience with determination. But the result is a movie version of Ginsburg, one that only occasionally channels a Brooklyn accent and is married to a tall, handsome, blue-eyed rendition of Marty. Together, they look nothing like the real-life Brooklynites they portray, and more like their WASP counterparts from Connecticut.

Ginsburg studied law to practice law, and so she chafes as a professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark, N.J. Marty consoles her with a tax case that might be of interest—Charles E. Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, a dispute involving a tax deduction for in-home care for an ailing mother, which Moritz was denied.

Ginsburg takes the case, arguing that the tax code discriminates on the basis of sex, allowing only men who are widowers, or whose wives have been incapacitated or institutionalized, to claim the deduction. To its credit, Stiepleman’s screenplay lays out the legal complexity of the case in clear, easy-to-follow fashion, but the price is paid in expositional scenes that may resonate like arias in the halls of Harvard Law, but not so much in the multiplex.

Defenders of the status quo, including Dean Griswold, base their argument on precedent. To make their point, they add to their brief “Exhibit E,” a list of dozens of laws based on gender. It becomes a roadmap for the ACLU Women’s Rights Project which, in the wake of the decision, earned five victories in six Supreme Court appeals basing arguments on the 14th Amendment.

The three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit begin by challenging Ginsburg’s logic, only to become bewitched as Leder’s camera lingers on them, capturing inadvertently ludicrous portrait shots of what appear to be troglodytes in black dresses, the obvious link between gender and race-based discrimination dawning on them like an epiphany. The moment is played with the same leaden subtlety of the movie’s themes about the courts reflecting their times.

After working in T.V. in the 1990s, producer/director Leder became one of Hollywood’s rarest creatures, a female director of studio blockbusters. Although “Deep Impact,” an Earth-asteroid collision movie, stood in the box office shadow of “Armageddon’s” bigger blast, it outpaced its predecessor, Leder’s “Peacemaker,” an action thriller starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. In the twenty years since, Leder has produced and directed for T.V., notably HBO’s “The Leftovers.”

Working with cinematographer , her camera in “On the Basis of Sex” covers the action instead of telling the story, almost never moving past the superficial expressions on the faces of her actors. It’s not that Felicity Jones (“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”), can’t act. She received an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Jane Hawking, wife of Stephen Hawking, in 2014’s “The Theory of Everything.” But casting a green-eyed gamine with cover girl looks partially flies in the face of the type of discrimination Ginsburg herself was fighting in an era when most women were valued mainly for their sex appeal.

Many remember Hammer for his breakthrough, two-handed performance in “The Social Network,” playing opposite himself as the Winklevoss twins, Zuckerberg nemeses and originators of a Facebook prototype. More recently, Hammer appeared in last year’s awards favorite, “Call Me by Your Name,” for which he received a Golden Globe nomination for his charismatic portrayal of an American graduate student in Italy who begins an affair with a teenage boy.

The fact that he’s an accomplished actor with matinee-idol looks might be enough to justify Hammer’s large presence in the movie, when portraits of male icons seldom feature their wives. Most of his time is spent being handsome and supportive, cooking and minding the kids, in addition to his work as a tax lawyer. He is avuncular and kind, intelligent yet humble and well meaning; the perfect match for Jones’ determined, indefatigable and wickedly smart Ginsburg. Such pure motives and scuff-proof souls result in dramatic conflict propelled not by inner struggles, but outer forces only, putting the characters at grave risk of mortal blandness.

Surrounding Jones and Hammer is a strong supporting cast, including Leder’s “The Leftovers” collaborator , who gives a spirited theatrical performance as Mel Wulf, Ginsburg’s associate at the ACLU. Waterston is sufficiently cocksure as the entitled and shortsighted Dean Griswold, a one-dimensional nemesis. And has a few memorable scenes as legendary lawyer-activist Dorothy Kenyon, surly and frustrated over the slow progress of social justice at the end of her career. Young delivers a lively and purposeful turn as Ginsburg’s teen daughter, Jane, a budding feminist who cues her mother into the modern movement’s bold, no-nonsense approach.

In the movie’s final frames, Ginsburg herself appears, mounting the top steps outside the Supreme Court. It’s a moment that jogs the audience back to her prodigious real-life achievements, beginning as an activist, an underdog winning case after case in the cause of social justice, and earning a place on the D.C. Court of Appeals in 1980. After transitioning to the Supreme Court in 1993, she continued to chip away at the status quo with cases like the United States v. Virginia, which struck down Virginia Military Institute’s traditional male-only admissions policy in 1996. Today, she’s a pop icon, the most famous Justice since Thurgood Marshall. It’s an epic legal life.

Someone should make a movie. Someone else.

Jesus Christ Would Be Appalled by America’s Immigration Policy

Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king,

Do you know what I know

In your palace warm, mighty king,

Do you know what I know

A child, a child shivers in the cold

Let us bring him silver and gold….

—Lyrics to the famous Christmas song, “Do You Hear What I Hear,” written by Gloria Shayne Baker & Noel Regney during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Whether or not you believe Jesus was the literal Son of God—I have doubts myself—two truths remain salient at this time of year: America is, by and large, the most religious (Christian) wealthy country on the planet; and the founder of that religion was, according to its holy book, a refugee. Depending on the gospel you favor, Christ was born on the run from wicked King Herod, spending the first years of his life not in his reputed birthplace, Bethlehem, but in Egypt and/or the small village of Nazareth in the Galilee.

Ironic then, isn’t it, that so many Americans lack empathy for a new generation of refugees— many of them victims of U.S. foreign policy generally and its militarism specifically. This has been especially true for people of color, which constitute the vast majority of migrants seeking refuge and repatriation today. As 2018 turns to 2019, the largest migration of people since the end of World War II has become a global crisis. And U.S. military policy is at least partly—if not mostly—responsible for some of the worst humanitarian disasters the world over.

The most shocking indictment of U.S. government action comes in Yemen, already the Arab world’s poorest country before the terror bombing and starvation blockade began. Here, the American military is deeply complicit in a Saudi-led, Washington-supported war on the Yemeni people. Without U.S. intelligence, munitions, in-flight refueling and international cover, Saudi Arabia’s villainous regime could never have starved or bombed people, mostly civilians, with such effectiveness.

The results have been nothing less than horrifying: tens of thousands of civilians killed in air strikes, 85,000 children already starved to death, the world’s worst cholera epidemic spreading, and, yes, the creation of more than 3 million refugees. Imagine the popular outcry if those starving faces and bodies were white and Christian. (Side note: our beloved Jesus was himself rather brown, despite the best efforts of the institutional church to literally whitewash that inconvenient fact). To their credit, the U.S. Senate has voted, however belatedly, to end U.S. support for that war. Still, don’t expect a change in Washington’s criminal policies any time soon: the president has announced his intention to veto the resolution, and the Senate thus far lacks the votes to override him.

In the Gaza Strip, the most densely populated sliver of the planet earth, Israel has forged the largest, all but permanent refugee camp in the world—this with the unconditional backing of the U.S. Now in its 11th year, the inhuman blockade of Gaza has reduced Palestinians trapped in the Strip to a state of complete dependency on humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations. And when the Gazans have the gall to protest their deplorable (and preventable) conditions, they are indiscriminately mowed down by Israeli Defense Forces. None of this would be possible, again, without the support of Washington’s $3 billion in annual military aid and the reflexive cover of America’s most powerful institutions.

Forgetting, conveniently, that Jesus Christ was himself a brown Palestinian (Jew), the U.S. has relegated the Gazans to second-class citizenship, subjugating them to an increasingly unhinged, far-right Israeli government. For good measure, and as a final slap in the face to Palestinian sovereignty, President Donald Trump has also unilaterally moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Despite it being home to three world religions, the region is now for Jews only,  Washington has apparently decided. Paradoxically, and ever so cynically, American evangelicals have thrown their full support behind the decision. A staggering 30 percent of Americans believe that end times are near and that backing of the Israeli government will help usher in Jesus’ return. Of course, according to the evangelical view, when the messiah does materialize, all those Jews will promptly go to hell unless they except Christianity, but that’s a risk Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his reactionary government is willing to take. The $3 billion in arms support goes a long way, I suppose.

Then there’s the migrant crisis on America’s own southern border. The president, naturally, wants a “tremendous” wall to keep the stream of asylum-seeking men, women and children out of the country. He’s even proved willing to shut down the government until he receives funding for his “artistically designed steel slats.” This Christmas, in fact, American soldiers will spend the holiday season stationed on the border to halt an “invasion” that isn’t an invasion at all but a collection of impoverished refugees seeking a better way of life. While celebrating the virgin birth of their refugee savior, away from their families, these troops will continue sealing off the border with what the president has called “beautiful” barbed wire, empathy be damned. So much for Lady Liberty’s call to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. …”

To return to Americans’ favored theology, let us admit the baby Jesus was born a refugee, and the grown Jesus essentially died one. Beginning his preaching mission, Christ had “nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8.20; Luke 9.58), and he and his followers counted on the hospitality of ordinary villagers to survive (Mark 6.8–11; Matthew 10.9–11; Luke 9.3). Reflect for just a moment this Christmas on the starving Yemeni children, perennially blockaded Gazans and the migrants tear-gassed on America’s southern border or separated from their parents. Think then, as the song says, of the children “shivering in the cold.”

When you do, ask what role America, our government, has played in creating and perpetuating the latest refugee crises. Is the United States living up to the ostensible ethics of its zealously proclaimed Christianity? The oldest gospel speaks of Jesus telling his transient apostles this: “And if any place will not receive you and refuse to hear you, shake off the dust on your feet when you leave, for a testimony to them” (Mark 6.11).

This author, at least, reads that passage with much discomfort. Our country, which today does most of its teaching with bombs, is complicit in some of the worst humanitarian and refugee crises in the world. And, by and large, it will not receive its victims, refuses to hear them and bars entry to most. That this is so, is, I fear, an unforgivable testimony to us all.

Merry Christmas, America.

Major Danny Sjursen, a Truthdig regular, is a U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kansas.  Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his new podcast “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henrikson.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Copyright 2018 Danny Sjursen

The IMF Is Dismantling Argentina All Over Again

In September, Argentine president Mauricio Macri accepted the 2018 Atlantic Council’s Global Citizen Award. In attendance were many of world’s neoliberal power players and policy makers, among them International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde.

Facing the crowd, Macri gleefully admitted that “with Christine, I have to confess we started a great relationship some months ago,” referring to a series of loan agreements with the IMF amounting to $57.1 billion dollars. “I expect that this is going to work very well, and we will end up with the whole country crushing on Christine,” he continued. This dynamic of chasing an improved image with the world’s big banks and the dominant economies in the West is emblematic of Macri’s priority to secure a relationship with the IMF and improve the country’s image with global financial institutions. But it comes at a devastating cost for the majority of the population who will suffer from neoliberal policy prescriptions of structural adjustment and slashed social spending, as well as the resulting growing unemployment and poverty.

Meanwhile, Argentina’s debt to the IMF continues to climb. In June, Macri and the IMF agreed on a $50 billion loan. In September, the amount increased to an unprecedented $57.1 billion over three years. During an announcement from the presidential office in August regarding recent agreements with the IMF, Macri told the people of Argentina that this “decision will put an end to any uncertainty that has come about regarding our image on an international level.” In other words, seeking the approval of the world’s international banks and global power players (the U.S. included) is worth the conditions of austerity, the havoc wreaked on the lives of Argentina’s poor, working and middle classes, and the limitations that it will put on future generations of Argentina’s leadership (a limitation that we have seen most recently in Mexico as President López Obrador pushes back against decades of neoliberal policies and conditions agreed to by his predecessors).

In order to afford the repayment plan, the 2019 budget eviscerates social spending, slashing it by 35 percent while increasing debt payments by 50 percent. Christine Lagarde recently defended the evisceration of social welfare, citing a current program in its place that allocates $6 per person among the 13 million poor in Argentina for the last six months of 2018. This is hardly enough for the country’s 3,965,840 unemployed (8.9 percent of the population) and 12,167,610 residents living below the poverty line (27.3 percent of the population), based on numbers that have steadily increased since 2016 according to the IMF’s own measure and the National Institute of Statistics of the Republic of Argentina’s latest report.

Argentina’s Long Relationship With the IMF, From 1976 to Today

The IMF has a long history of strong-arming the direction of Argentina’s policies and economy, beginning with the military junta in 1976 that tortured, killed, and disappeared 30,000 people in the span of six years. The junta largely targeted the left and the country’s poor and working class as they implemented a series of neoliberal policies, a tactic that journalist Naomi Klein discusses in depth in her book, The Shock Doctrine. Despite the human toll of Argentina’s genocide, the IMF was willing to look the other way as long as the junta followed their policy prescriptions. As Paul Cooney explained:

“just one week after the military coup of March 1976, and without having to negotiate or send a delegation, the Argentinian junta was able to obtain over US $100 million from the IMF. In addition to this show of support for a government willing to implement and impose neoliberal policies with an iron hand, the IMF came through with the largest loan ever to a Latin American country (US $260 million), just five months later.”

Meanwhile, Isabel Perón, the country’s president from 1974 to 1976 until she was ousted by the military coup, was unable to secure funds from the IMF. Her agenda, it would seem, was not to their liking. This is what Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Director Vijay Prashad calls an investment strike; the idea that credit is only available to countries who follow neoliberal policies. Governments that stray—or are perceived to stray—from this agenda are deprived from access to credit by the world’s financial institutions. In other words, the banks and credit lenders go on a strike of sorts, withholding funds and access to credit until their neoliberal policy prescriptions are met. But, unlike labor strikes—where the demands are centered around conditions to improve the lives of the majority—investors, through their strikes, “insist on cuts to national budgets paid for by taxes on workers and peasants and lower living standards for workers and peasants.” They use their leverage— capital—to increase their own wealth at the expense of the people who produce it—the majority of the world’s population.

When countries faithfully go along with these conditions and implement neoliberal policies, debt is allowed to disappear from the records, and credit is extended (such as when US $10 billion disappeared from the records out of a total of US $40 billion during negotiations between the IMF and military junta, or when the IMF loans to Argentina were extended from $50 billion to $57.1 billion in September 2018 under Macri). Should the policy direction change to show any inclination of a people-driven agenda, however, access to credit quickly disappears and a variety of tactics are used to destabilize “uncooperative” administrations—whether through the “unconventional wars” that we have seen recently in Venezuela and Brazil, or in Salvador Allende’s Chile, or through military intervention.

The IMF continued to ‘guide’ the country’s policies after the dictatorship under Carlos Menem (1989-1999). It was Menem’s neoliberal policies that led the country into the straits of the Great Depression of 1998 to 2002 when the country set a record for the largest debt default in history up to that point. In 2001, unemployment neared 20 percent and, by 2002, 53 percent of the country was living below the poverty line. It wasn’t until the Kirchner administrations from 2003 to 2015 that Argentina began to pull back from the grip of the IMF (Nestor Kirchner, 2003-2007, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, 2007-2015). In these 13 years, as Mark Weisbrot of CEPR explained in a recent interview, the poverty rate was reduced by 70 percent, extreme poverty by 80 percent, and unemployment fell from 17 percent to 6.5 percent. In contrast, in the three years since the beginning of Macri’s term, unemployment has increased to 8.5 percent. In Weisbrot’s view, the Kirchners “did very well after the terrible experience with the IMF, which was one of their worst depressions from 1998 to the beginning of 2002. That’s why they were popular, and that’s why Cristina was re-elected. If she could have run again, she would still be there.” The sharp turn of Macri’s administration is all the more painful with the recent memory of the country’s struggles with the IMF and a glimmer of what life could be like if the country were to free itself of the shackles of neoliberalism.

De- Linking From the IMF Agenda

It is possible, however, to imagine an alternative to the dismal reality created by neoliberal policies and the noose created by the investment strikes of the world’s banking institutions. The late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin provided us with a framework for building an international agenda that prioritizes the needs of the world’s poor and dispossessed, an alternative to today’s globalization that is dictated by the interests of global capital. In his interview with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Amin reflects on the era of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and multi-polar globalization. This era, Amin said, was “a time when imperialism was compelled to make concessions and to accept the national-popular programmes of India and other African and Asian countries. Instead of the countries of the south adjusting to the needs and demands of globalisation, it was the imperialist countries which were compelled to adjust to our demands.”

By 2030, Amin continues, 85 percent of the population will be living in the Global South. The interests of the majority of this group are neglected by neoliberal policies that slash social spending and place social wealth in private hands. This 85 percent, Amin said, “can successfully de-link to various degrees in accordance not only with our size but also in accordance with our alternative political block, which would replace the core imperialist blocks which are controlling our countries today.” The result of building such an alternative could indicate the ability of the world’s poor to “compel imperialism to accept [their] conditions or part of those conditions,” or to de-link.

Argentina’s poor and dispossessed are already challenging Macri’s agenda and pushing back against the constraints of global capital, having organized four general strikes since his term began in 2015. The country has been mired in protests similar to the cacerolazos that halted the streets of Buenos Aires during the 1998-2002 depression. As Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s recent dossier points out, groups such as the Federation of Workers of the Popular Economy (CTEP) are creating cooperatives among the country’s growing sector of informal workers, providing “an illustration of how the working class has been fragmented and reorganised by neo-liberal policies.”

These efforts are not limited to Argentina. In the Indian state of Kerala, the Left Democratic Front government led one of the most successful rescue and reconstruction efforts in the country’s history after the most devastating floods seen in 94 years, despite an attempt from the country’s right-wing to not only neglect but actively stifle aid to the communist-led state. In South Africa, shack dwellers of the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement are occupying lands and building homes, refusing to leave their dignity up to the whims of the State and the country’s elite. Across the world, people, and people’s movements, are fighting back and creating alternatives to neoliberal policies. As long as this happens, global capital will use any means that it has—whether through economic policy and coercion or through military force—to protect its interests. But, as Amin suggests, if the 85 percent of the world’s poor, from Argentina’s informal workers to South Africa’s shack dwellers, de-link from a neoliberal agenda and link with each other, they may very well be able to compel the current world order to accept their conditions and begin to create a future free from the shackles of global capital.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Robert Reich’s 10 Steps to Save American Democracy

President Donald Trump isn’t the only problem. As Big Money floods our political system, and some in power are intent on making it harder for certain people to vote, we need a movement to save our democracy.

Here are 10 steps:

1. Make voter registration automatic for all eligible voters, using the information they’ve already provided the Department of Motor Vehicles or another government agency. This has already been implemented in several states, including Oregon, and it works.  In 2014, over 1 in 5 Americans were eligible to vote but did not register. Automatic registration would automatically change this.

2. Pass a new Voting Rights Act, setting uniform national voting standards and preventing states from engaging in any form of voter suppression, such as voter ID laws, the purging of voter rolls and inaccessible and inadequate polling places.

3. Implement public financing of elections, in which public funds match small donations–thereby eliminating the advantage of big money.

4. Require public disclosure of the sources of all political donations. Much of that is now secret, so no one is held accountable.

5. End the revolving door between serving in government and lobbying. Too often, members of Congress, their staffs, cabinet members and top White House personnel take lucrative lobbying jobs after leaving government. In turn, lobbyists take important positions in government. This revolving door must stop. It creates conflicts between the public interest and private greed.

6. Ban members of Congress from owning specific shares of stock while they’re in office. Require that they hold their investments in index funds, so they won’t favor particular companies while carrying out their public duties.

7. Require that all candidates running for Congress and the presidency release their tax returns so the American people know of any potential financial conflicts of interests before they’re elected.

8. Eliminate gerrymandered districts by creating independent redistricting commissions. Some states–Arizona, California, Michigan, and Colorado, for example–have established nonpartisan commissions to ensure that congressional maps are drawn fairly, without racial or partisan bias. Other states should follow their lead.

9. Make the Electoral College irrelevant. The presidency should be awarded to the candidate who receives the most votes. Period. States should agree to award all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote by joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

10 and finally: Fight for a Supreme Court that will reverse its Citizens United decision, which interpreted the First Amendment to prevent Congress or state governments from limiting political spending.

Follow these 10 steps and begin to make our democracy work again.

Banishing Truth

The investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, in his memoir “Reporter,” describes a moment when as a young reporter he overheard a Chicago cop admit to murdering an African-American man. The murdered man had been falsely described by police as a robbery suspect who had been shot while trying to avoid arrest. Hersh frantically called his editor to ask what to do.

“The editor urged me to do nothing,” he writes. “It would be my word versus that of all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message was clear: I did not have a story. But of course I did.” He describes himself as “full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship.”

Hersh, the greatest investigative reporter of his generation, uncovered the U.S. military’s chemical weapons program, which used thousands of soldiers and volunteers, including pacifists from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, as unwitting human guinea pigs to measure the impact of biological agents including tularemia, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever and the plague. He broke the story of the My Lai massacre. He exposed Henry Kissinger’s wiretapping of his closest aides at the National Security Council (NSC) and journalists, the CIA’s funding of violent extremist groups to overthrow the Chilean President Salvador Allende, the CIA’s spying on domestic dissidents within the United States, the sadistic torture practices at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by American soldiers and contractors and the lies told by the Obama administration about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet he begins his memoir by the candid admission, familiar to any reporter, that there are crimes and events committed by the powerful you never write about, at least if you want to keep your job. One of his laments in the book is his decision not to follow up on a report he received that disgraced President Richard Nixon had hit his wife, Pat, and she had ended up in an emergency room in California.

Reporters embedded with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan routinely witness atrocities and often war crimes committed by the U.S. military, yet they know that access is dependent on keeping quiet. This collusion between the press and the powerful is a fundamental feature of journalism, one that even someone as courageous as Hersh, at least a few times, was forced to accept. And yet, there comes a time when reporters, at least the good ones, decide to sacrifice their careers to tell the truth. Hersh, relentlessly chronicling the crimes of the late empire, including the widespread use of torture, indiscriminate military strikes on civilian targets and targeted assassinations, has for this reason been virtually blacklisted in the American media. And the loss of his voice—he used to work for The New York Times and later The New Yorker—is evidence that the press, always flawed, has now been neutered by corporate power. Hersh’s memoir is as much about his remarkable career as it is about the death of investigative journalism and the transformation of news into a national reality television show that subsists on gossip, invective, officially approved narratives and leaks and entertainment.

Investigative journalism depends not only on reporters such as Hersh, but as importantly on men and women inside the systems of power who have the moral courage to expose lies and make public crimes. Writing off any institution, no matter how nefarious the activity, as filled with the irredeemable is a mistake. “There are many officers, including generals and admirals, who understood that the oath of office they took was a commitment to uphold and defend the Constitution and not the President, or an immediate superior,” he writes. “They deserve my respect and got it. Want to be a good military reporter? Find those officers.” One of the heroes in Hersh’s book is Ron Ridenhour, who served in a combat unit in Vietnam and who initiated the army’s investigation into the My Lai massacre and generously helped Hersh track down eyewitnesses and participants.

The government’s wholesale surveillance, however, has crippled the ability of those with a conscience, such as Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, to expose the crimes of state and remain undetected. The Obama administration charged eight people under the Espionage Act of leaking to the media—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden—effectively ending the vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the government.

This government persecution has, by default, left the exposure of government lies, fraud and crimes to hackers. And this is the reason hackers, and those who publish their material such as Julian Assange at WikiLeaks, are relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate state is to hermetically seal their activities, especially those that violate the law, from outside oversight or observation. And this goal is very far advanced.

Hersh notes throughout his memoir that, like all good reporters, he constantly battled his editors and fellow reporters as much as he did the government or corporations. There is a species of reporter you can see on most cable news programs and on the floor of the newsrooms at papers such as The New York Times who make their living as courtiers to the powerful. They will, at times, critique the excesses of power but never the virtues of the systems of power, including corporate capitalism or the motivations of the ruling elites. They detest reporters, like Hersh, whose reporting exposes their collusion.

The Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal was held in 1967 in Europe during the Vietnam War. It included the testimony of three American soldiers who spoke of watching soldiers and Marines routinely pump indiscriminate rounds of ammunition into villages with no regard for civilian casualties. Most of the American press dismissed the findings of the tribunal.  The Times foreign affairs columnist, C.L. Sulzberger, launched a venomous attack against the Noble Prize-winning philosopher and mathematician, who was then 94 years old. Sulzberger, a member of the family that owned the paper, wrote that Russell had “outlived his own conscious idea and become clay in unscrupulous hands.” The tribunal, Sulzberger went on, “cannot fairly be laid at the door of the wasted peer whose bodily endurance outpaced his brain.”

Hersh, however, tipped off by the testimony at the tribunal, eventually uncovered the My Lai massacre. But no publication would touch it. Magazines such as Life and Look turned down the story. “I was devastated, and frightened by the extent of self-censorship I was encountering in my profession,” Hersh writes. He finally published the story with the obscure, anti-war Dispatch News Service. Major publications, including The New York Times, along with Newsweek and Time, ignored the report. Hersh kept digging. More lurid facts about the massacre came to light.  It became too big to dismiss, as hard as the mainstream media initially tried, and Hersh was awarded the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The only officer convicted of the war crime, which left 106 men, women and children dead, was Lt. William Calley, who spent three months and 13 days in prison.

Papers like the New York Times pride themselves on their special access to the powerful, even if that access turns them into a public relations arm of the elites. This desire for access—which news organizations feel gives them prestige and an inside seat, although the information they are fed is usually lies or half-truths—pits conscientious reporters like Hersh against most editors and reporters in the newsroom. Hersh, who at the time was working for the Times, describes sitting across from another reporter, Bernard Gwertzman, who was covering Henry Kissinger and the NSC.

“There was a near-daily ritual involving Bernie that stunned me,” Hersh writes. “On far too many afternoons around 5:00, Max Frankel’s secretary would approach Bernie and tell him that Max [the Times’ bureau chief in Washington] was at that moment on the phone with ‘Henry’ and the call would soon he switched to him. Sure enough, in a few moments Bernie would avidly begin scratching notes as he listened to Kissinger—he listened far more than he talked—and the result was a foreign policy story that invariably led the paper the next morning, with quotes from an unnamed senior government official. After a week or two of observing the process, I asked the always affable and straightforward Bernie if he ever checked what Henry was telling him with Bill Rogers, the secretary of state, or Mel Laird at the Pentagon. “Oh no,’ he said. ‘If I did that, Henry wouldn’t speak to us.’”

The Washington Post broke the Watergate story, in which operatives for the Nixon White House in June 1972 broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington while Hersh was at the Times. Kissinger’s assurances—Hersh writes that Kissinger “lied the way most people breathed”—that it was not an event of consequence saw the top editors at The New York Times initially ignore it. The paper, however, finally embarrassed by the revelations in The Washington Post, threw Hersh onto the story, although the paper’s executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, called Hersh with a mixture of affection and wariness “my little commie.”

Hersh left the paper after a massive expose he and Jeff Gerth wrote about the corporation Gulf and Western, which carried out fraud, abuse, tax avoidance and had connections with the mob, was rewritten by cautious and timid editors. Charles Bluhdorn, the CEO of Gulf and Western, socialized with the publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger. Bluhdorn used his connections at the paper to discredit Hersh and Gerth, as well as bombard the paper with accusatory letters and menacing phone calls. When Hersh filed his 15,000-word expose, the business editor, John Lee, and “his ass-kissing coterie of moronic editors,” perhaps fearful of being sued, neutered it. It was one thing, Hersh found, to go up against a public institution. It was something else to take on a private institution. He would never again work regularly for a newspaper.

“The experience was frustrating and enervating,” he writes. “Writing about corporate America had sapped my energy, disappointed the editors, and unnerved me. There would be no check on corporate America, I feared: Greed had won out. The ugly fight with Gulf and Western had rattled the publisher and the editors to the point that the editors who ran the business pages had been allowed to vitiate and undercut the good work Jeff and I had done. … The courage the Times had shown in confronting the wrath of a president and an attorney general in the crisis over the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was nowhere to be seen when confronted by a gaggle of corporate con men. …”

His reporting, however, continued to relentlessly expose the falsifications in official narratives. The Navy intelligence official, Jonathan Pollard, for example, had been caught spying for Israel in 1985 and given a life sentence. Hersh found that Pollard primarily stole documents on how the United States spied on the Soviet Union. The Israeli government, Hersh suspected, “was trading Pollard’s information to Moscow in exchange for the emigration of Soviet Jews with skills and expertise needed by Israel.” Pollard was released, after heavy Israeli pressure, in 2015 and now lives in Israel.

The later part of Hersh’s career is the most distressing. He was writing for The New Yorker when Barack Obama was elected president. David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, socialized with Obama and was apparently wary of offending the president. When Hersh exposed the fictitious narrative spun out by the Obama administration about the killing of Bin Laden, the magazine killed the story, running instead a report about the raid, provided by the administration, from the point of view of one of the SEALs who was on the mission. Hersh resigned. He published the account of the raid in the London Review of Books, the beginning of his current exile to foreign publications. When we most urgently need Hersh and good investigative reporters like him, they have largely disappeared. A democracy, at best, tolerates them. A failed democracy, like ours, banishes them, and when it does, it kills its press.

Democrats Khanna and Lieu Support Syria Withdrawal—With Caveats

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., voiced his support Saturday for President Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria. While hawkish lawmakers criticized the announced withdrawal, Rep. Ro Khanna, another progressive California Democrat, has also voiced support.

“We should applaud the president’s desire to put an end to these interventions, but should challenge him to assemble a team that does so with better planning and diplomacy,” Khanna wrote in The Washington Post. Khanna said that although Trump’s policy is not perfect, he is right to withdraw troops, and should provide assistance to refugees.

He wrote:

There is no doubt Trump should have articulated a more prudent withdrawal strategy. He could have consulted beforehand with our allies and regional partners. One alternative to an immediate withdrawal in Syria is announcing a full withdrawal over the next few months. That would give us time to prepare local forces and to deploy intelligence platforms and networks that address potential terrorist threats.

We also cannot just leave without some consideration of our moral obligations to the Syrians that come from having engaged in war. We need to provide humanitarian assistance to civilians and accept our fair share of refugees. Trump should have used his leverage with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to ensure a cease-fire and guarantee protection for the Kurds. We should not sell Turkey Patriot missiles until we get that commitment.

Lieu told NPR’s Michel Martin on Saturday that Trump is fulfilling a campaign promise by withdrawing troops from Syria. “I do believe that withdrawing troops from Syria is the right thing to do,” he said. “There was never congressional authorization for much of the troop deployment. There was no strategy.”

Lieu also pointed out that the war did not begin with Trump. “While going after terrorists is authorized, both the Obama and Trump administrations went far beyond the congressionally authorized use of force against terrorists,” Lieu said in a statement. “Neither administration could articulate why American troops were fighting in Syria, what the desired end state should be, nor how we would achieve it.”

The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill stressed that Trump’s foreign policy as a whole should not be applauded.

1. I support withdrawing US troops from all these wars, overt and covert.
2. Trump is an unstable authoritarian who cannot be trusted.
3. “Mattis was an adult” is bullshit. He’s a hawkish war criminal.
4. It’s very telling that the war party in DC is furious.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) December 21, 2018

10. For those who somehow think this is Trump opposing the war machine, I point you to his massive escalation of drone strikes, his easing of rules for killing civilians, his use of ground troops in Yemen and Somalia and his use of criminal weaponry like the MOAB in Afghanistan.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) December 21, 2018

The crisis in Syria—and the Middle East—is far from over. Popular Resistance’s Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers stressed the need for people to continue protesting U.S. wars. “The people were right, and the military was wrong. The war on Syria never should have happened and now must end,” they wrote.

How to End the U.S. War on Syria

The US war against Syria was one that people almost stopped. President Obama was unable to get Congress to authorize the war in 2013, but the Pentagon and foreign policy establishment, who have long wanted to control Syria, pushed forward with war anyway.

It has been a disaster. The war has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries as well six million people displaced within the country and five million people who have fled the country.

The people were right, and the military was wrong. The war on Syria never should have happened and now must end.

President Trump announced withdrawal from Syria this week. This creates an opportunity to end the war on Syria. We have work to do to make peace a reality.

The People Almost Prevented the US  War in Syria

In 2013, amidst highly-doubted, unproven allegations of a chemical attack by Syrian President Assad (debunked a year later), the threat of war escalated, and so did opposition to the war. Protests against an attack on Syria took place around the world. In the the US, people were in the streets, and speaking out at town halls. Obama was forced to bring the issue to Congress for authorization.

Congress was barraged with a Peace Insurrection encamped outside its doors, sit-ins in Congressional offices, and a massive number of phone calls with 499 to 1 opposing the war. Obama could not get the votes to support the war. Harry Reid surrendered to the public by never holding a vote.

The other superpower, the people, had stopped a war. Obama became the first president to announce a bombing campaign who was forced to back down by the people. But the victory would be temporary, neocons and militarists continued to push for war. Based on new fake terror fears, and false chemical attack allegations, the ‘humanitarian’ destruction of Syria proceeded.

WSWS described how the war escalated under Obama, writing, “The illegal US occupation of Syria, begun under the Obama administration in October 2015 without authorization from either the United Nations or the Syrian government.” There was a shift from CIA support for Al Qaeda-linked militias to war to bring down the Assad government. US troops coordinated a campaign of airstrikes that reduced the city of Raqqa and other Syrian communities to rubble. Amnesty International, after conducting field investigations, reported the US has committed war crimes in Syria. Vijay Prashad described the US creating “hell on Earth” in Syria.

Despite this, the US was losing the war in Syria. With Russia coming to the aid of its ally, Assad was not going to be removed.

Trump escalated and drove the US deeper into the Middle East quagmire betraying the non-interventionist base who elected him. The corporate media praised Trump was as ‘becoming president’ for bombing Syria based on another unproven chemical attack. Later, even General Mattis admitted there was no evidence tying Assad to chemical attacks.

Early this year, the Trump administration was talking about having a permanent presence in one-third of Syria with 30,000 Syrian Kurds as the ground forces, US air support and eight new US bases. Protests continued against the bombing of Syria throughout the spring in the US and around the world.

Now, as Andre Vltchek describes, the Syrian people have prevailed and most of the country is liberated. People are returning and rebuilding.

Trump Announces Withdrawal

President Trump’s announcement that he is withdrawing from Syria over the next 60 to 100 days has been met with a firestorm of opposition. Trump tweeted on Wednesday, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”

Russia is drawing down its military activities with Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu reporting Russia was carrying out 100 to 110 flights per day at its peak and now they do no more than two to four flights per week, chiefly for reconnaissance purposes. Putin agreed that ISIS had been defeated and supported Trump’s decision but cast doubt on Washington’s plans, saying, “We don’t see any signs of withdrawing US troops yet, but I concede that it is possible.”

There has been very little support for withdrawal from elected officials. Many Republicans and the corporate media are criticizing Trump. The first two Democrats to step forward to support the removal of troops were Rep. Ted Lieu, a frequent Trump critic who applauded the action, and Rep. Ro Khanna. But, the bi-partisan war Congress opposes Trump.

Secretary of Defense Mattis resigned after Trump’s announcement. In his resignation, he expressed disagreements with Trump over foreign policy. The media is mourning the exit of Mattis, neglecting his history as a likely war criminal who targeted civilians. Ray McGovern reminds us Mattis was famous for quipping, “It’s fun to shoot some people.”

Mattis is the fourth of “My Generals,” as Trump called them, to leave the administration, e.g. Director of Homeland Security and then Chief of Staff, John Kelly, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. This leaves neocon extremist John Bolton and pro-militarist Mike Pompeo as the biggest influences on Trump’s foreign policy.

Popular Resistance supports the withdrawal of troops from Syria.

We are not alone in supporting Trump’s withdrawal announcement. Medea Benjamin of CODE PINK described the withdrawal as “a positive contribution to the peace process,” urging “all foreign powers that have been involved in Syria’s destruction, including the United States, take responsibility for rebuilding this nation and providing assistance to the Syrian people, including the refugees, who have suffered so tragically for over seven years.”

Veterans for Peace supports the withdrawal saying the US has “no legal right to be [there] in the first place” and describing the brutal destruction caused by US bombs.

Black Alliance for Peace supports the withdrawal writing  the war”should have never been allowed in the first place.” They denounce the corporate press and members of the political duopoly for opposing the withdrawal. BAP also recognizes that the foreign policy establishment will fight this withdrawal and promises to work to end all US involvement in Syria and other nations.

Will the Long History Of US Regime Change In Syria End?

Trump is being fought because the US has a long history of trying to control Syria dating back to the 1940s.  CIA documents from 1986 describe how the US could remove the Assad family.

While the bulk of destruction of Syria occurred during the Obama administration, plans for the current war and overthrowing Assad date back to the George W. Bush administration. A State Department cable, “Influencing the SARG In The End Of 2006”, examines strategies to bring about regime change in Syria.

This is not the first time President Trump said the war on Syria would be ending. He did so in March, but in April, Mattis announced expanding the US military in Syria. As Patrick Lawrence writes in Don’t Hold Your Breath on US Troop Withdrawal from Syria, “By September the Pentagon was saying. . .U.S. forces had to stay until Damascus and its political opponents achieved a full settlement.“

In response to Trump’s newest announcement, the Pentagon announced it will continue the air war in Syria. They would do so at least for as long as troops were on the ground, adding “As for anything post-US troops on the ground, we will not speculate on future operations.” The Pentagon has not given any details on a withdrawal timeline, citing “force protection and operational security reasons.”

Trump’s removal of US troops from Syria challenges the foreign policy establishment, which seemed to be planning a long-term presence in Syria.

The People Must Ensure the End of the War on Syria

The peace movement should do all it can to support Trump’ call for withdrawal because he needs allies. Patrick Lawrence describes the experience thus far during the Trump administration:

As Trump finishes his second year in office, the pattern is plain: This president can have all the foreign policy ideas he wants, but the Pentagon, State, the intelligence apparatus, and the rest of what some call ‘the deep state’ will either reverse, delay, or never implement any policy not to its liking.

We saw this scenario play out earlier this month when Trump complained about the Pentagon’s out-of-control budget and pledged to cut it. As Lawrence points out, just days later the president met with Mattis and the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee and announced that the three had agreed on a 2020 defense budget of $750 billion, a 5 percent increase.

Trump has made no progress on North Korea since their first meeting and has been prevented from making progress on positive relations with Russia. The foreign policy establishment of the Pentagon, State Department, Intelligence Agencies, Weapons Makers and Congressional hawks are in control. Trump will need all the help he can get to overcome them and withdraw from Syria.

We should urge Trump to be clear that ALL troops are leaving Syria. This should include not only the troops on the ground but the air force as well as private contractors. The CIA should also stop its secret war on Syria. And the US should leave the military bases it has built in Syria. Similarly, the movement should support Trump’s calls to withdraw from Afghanistan.

The US has done incredible damage to Syria and owes restitution, which is needed to help bring Syria back to normalcy.

Syria and Afghanistan join the list of failed and counterproductive US wars. These are more signs of a failing empire. The people of the United States must rise up to finish the job we started in 2013 — stop the war on Syria, a war that never should have occurred.

Trump: Mattis Out as of Jan. 1; Deputy Will Be Acting Chief

WASHINGTON — President Trump announced on Sunday that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis will now leave his post on Jan. 1, tweeting that deputy Pentagon chief Patrick Shanahan will take over as acting secretary to cover the accelerated departure.

The move comes just three days after Mattis resigned in protest over Trump’s decision to pull all U.S. troops out of Syria, and delivered a blistering letter to the president that roiled Washington and reportedly angered the White House.

Mattis originally said he would stay through February to ensure an orderly transition. But U.S. officials said that the fallout of his decision to leave — including the shock and dismay expressed on Capitol Hill — annoyed Trump and likely led to Mattis leaving earlier than planned.

Lt. Col. Joseph Buccino, a spokesman for Shanahan, said the former Boeing executive will accept the appointment as acting secretary.

“Deputy Secretary will continue to serve as directed by the president, and the Department of Defense will remain focused on the defense of the nation,” Buccino said on Sunday.

While Mattis’ resignation followed Trump’s announcement that he would soon pull all of the approximately 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria, officials said that the resignation was the result of an accumulation of disagreements.

In a stunning resignation letter, Mattis made clear he did not see eye to eye with a president who has expressed disdain for NATO and doubts about keeping troops in Asia.

Earlier Sunday, Trump’s acting chief of staff said that Trump had known for “quite some time now” that he and Mattis “did not share some of the same philosophies … have the same world view.”

Mick Mulvaney told ABC’s “This Week” that the president and his defense chief “just could never get on the same page” on Syria, adding that Trump had said since his presidential campaign that “he wanted to get out of Syria.” Mulvaney said the president “is entitled to have a secretary of defense who is committed to that same end.”

Asked whether Trump wanted a Pentagon leader willing to challenge him or someone in lock step with his views, Mulvaney said “a little bit of both.”

“I’ve encouraged him to find people who have some overlap with him but don’t see the world in lockstep with him,” Mulvaney said.

The Pentagon on Sunday would only say that Mattis serves at the pleasure of the president.

Other officials said it wasn’t clear whether Mattis had spoken directly to Trump about the accelerated departure. Mattis had been at work on Friday, and defense officials had insisted he was planning to stay through February, when he would attend a NATO defense ministers meeting.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., joined leading Republicans on foreign affairs in urging Trump to reconsider his decision to withdraw American forces from Syria.

“We believe that such action at this time is a premature and costly mistakes that not only threatens the safety and security of the United States but also emboldens” the Islamic State group, President Bashar Assad’s government, Iran and Russia, according to the letter, organized by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

They asked Trump to “not make any final decision for 90 days to allow time to adequately study the impacts of this decision on our partners, our allies and the re-emergence of ISIS and other terror groups, to ensure our nation’s strategic interests are secured.”

But Mulvaney, asked on ABC whether there was any chance the president might change his mind on Syria decision, said: “No. I think the president has told people from the very beginning that he doesn’t want us to stay in Syria forever. You’re seeing the end result now of two years’ worth of work. But keep in mind it’s not unusual for a president to lose members of the Cabinet over these types of disagreements.”

Just after tweeting the announcement about Shanahan, Trump said he had had “a long and productive call” with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump said they discussed IS, “our mutual involvement in Syria, & the slow & highly coordinated pullout of U.S. troops from the area. After many years they are coming home.”

Shanahan, a longtime Boeing Co. executive, was nominated for the deputy job in early 2017.

He moved up through the management ranks at Boeing over a career that began in 1986. The Puget Sound Business Journal called him a Boeing “fix-it” man in a March 2016 report. He oversaw the company’s global supply chain strategies and use of advanced manufacturing technologies. Shanahan was central to getting the 787 Dreamliner on track after production problems in the program’s early years, the report said.

___

AP National Security Writer Robert Burns contributed to this report.

Trump’s Reluctant Backers Sour on His Leadership, Policies

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Jill Mott doesn’t like the tweets. The hard line on the border is too hard. And when asked whether she will vote for President Donald Trump a second time, she lets out a long, deep sigh.

“That is the question,” said Mott, a Republican from suburban Detroit.

In her moment of hesitancy, Mott is the portrait of a small, but significant slice of voters poised to wield considerable influence in the 2020 presidential campaign. They are the 18 percent of voters who described themselves as only “somewhat” approving of the president.

It’s a group whose backing for Trump is most tenuous and whose reservations about his personality and his policies reveal warning signs for Republicans, perhaps even more so as he dug in on his demand for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, leading to a budget impasse with Congress that has shut down the government around Christmas.

An analysis of VoteCast, a nationwide poll of more than 115,000 midterm voters conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago, highlights the fractures.

Compared with the 27 percent of voters who describe themselves as strong Trump supporters, the “somewhat” Trump voters are much more likely to disapprove of Trump on key issues such as immigration and health care, and to express divergent opinions on a need for a border wall, gun control and climate change. They are much more likely to question his trustworthiness and temperament.

They are less likely to call themselves conservative, less likely to be evangelical Christians and more likely to have voted for Democrats in 2018. They are more educated, somewhat more likely to be women, and more likely to live in suburbs.

“How he presents himself is the biggest issue,” said Mott, a 52-year-old occupational therapist, who addressed her concerns this past week during a break from Christmas shopping outside the Gucci store at the Somerset Collection luxury mall. She also worries about the president’s fiery approach to immigration.

“I understand what he’s going for — trying to keep out criminal activity,” Mott said, pointing to Trump’s rhetoric about a caravan of Latin American migrants seeking asylum at the U.S. border. “However, I think he could do much better in showing concern for these people, offering short-term help.”

As Trump barrels into his third year in office, and tightens his focus on his own re-election, he has paid scant attention to shoring up support from voters such as Mott.

Still, Trump’s political future may depend on whether he can retain their support, particularly among the more educated and affluent suburban women who set aside their concerns about Trump two years ago and will be asked to do so again in 2020. Their backing helped Trump carve a path to the presidency through the industrial Midwest, but with little margin for error. The president won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by fewer than 80,000 votes combined.

VoteCast found that 16 percent of those who “somewhat” supported Trump’s job performance decided to vote for Democratic House candidates in the November midterms. That’s compared with 6 percent of those who self-identified as Trump’s “strong” supporters.

That difference helped Democrats capture the House majority, picking up 21 of their 40 new seats in districts Trump carried only two years earlier. The flipped Trump districts include Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, a swath of suburban middle-class America set between Detroit and Lansing.

Dozens of recent interviews across the area show that most reluctant Trump supporters aren’t ready to turn their backs on him or his party.

Michael Bernstein voted for Trump in 2016 and said he is likely would do so again in 2020. Bernstein, 52, points to the economy and to Trump’s success in getting justices approved to the U.S. Supreme Court as evidence that he chose the right candidate, but the freelance auto writer from suburban Detroit could do without some of what Trump brings.

“He’s supposed to represent the country and the people who don’t like him,” Bernstein added. “He doesn’t. He prefers to play in the dirt.”

Still, November’s elections bear out signs of erosion. In Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, two-term Republican Mike Bishop was ousted by Democratic newcomer Elissa Slotkin, who attributes her victory in part to skeptical Trump supporters.

“That’s part of the reason we won — those voters who kept an open mind, who never really liked the tweeting and the chaos and the vitriol who maybe thought the president would become more presidential,” Slotkin said in an interview.

“We had lots of voters who said I was the first Democrat they ever voted for,” she said. “They’re not necessarily becoming Democrats. They just voted for the candidate who most represents their values.”

The VoteCast analysis suggests that a significant share of these wary Trump supporters have some views in common with Democrats in the Trump era.

About half of Trump’s “somewhat” supporters said Trump has the right temperament to serve effectively as president or considered him honest and trustworthy.

On health care, reluctant supporters are more likely to think government should be responsible for making sure all Americans have coverage and they’re far less likely to think President Barack Obama’s health care law should be repealed entirely.

Trump’s reluctant supporters also are far more concerned about climate change than are other Trump backers and more likely to call for tighter gun laws.

Immigration exposed another clear rift in the Trump coalition.

Most Trump supporters favor building the border wall, but just 32 percent of his somewhat supporters are strongly in favor, compared with 80 percent of his strong approvers.

While 60 percent of strong Trump backers said immigrants living in the United States illegally should be deported, about 6 in 10 reluctant supporters said those immigrants should be offered a chance to apply for legal status.

Still, it’s not safe to assume that reluctant Trump supporters will abandon the president in his 2020 re-election, said Republican pollster Frank Luntz, also a Trump skeptic.

“They have rejected the Democrats. But they don’t fully embrace Trump. So, the question is whether they stay with Trump or whether they stay home,” Luntz said.

Republican leaders are aware of the divisions within Trump’s base of support, yet few expect Trump to moderate his tone or policies to appeal to wavering supporters. Some hope he’ll learn to focus his message on the economy.

About 90 percent of Trump’s somewhat supporters are still supporting of his handling of the economy, and 8 in 10 said he is a strong leader, he is bringing needed change to the government and he stands up for what he believes.

“Of course there are frustrations at times, however I know I have more money in my paycheck, more people working in our community, home values are up,” said Theresa Mungioli, the GOP chairwoman of Oakland County, Michigan, where Republicans lost two congressional seats this fall.

She acknowledged that some midterm voters, particularly women, may have soured on Trump’s leadership, especially as it pertains to security issues.

“Maybe in part because the president can be — likes to bluff in his negotiations, which makes it look like we’re on the brink of war,” Mungioli said. “That kind of instability was something that voters expressed.”

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Fingerhut reported from Washington.