Chris Hedges's Blog, page 382

Mick Mulvaney Says It’s ‘Very Possible’ Shutdown Will Stretch Into 2019

WASHINGTON — A top White House official warned Sunday that it’s “very possible” the partial government shutdown stretches into the new year and that how quickly numerous shuttered Cabinet departments and agencies resume doing the people’s business is up to Congress.

“The ball is in the Senate’s court,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said.

Senate Democrats, who oppose funding for President Donald Trump’s promised border wall, contend government could reopen immediately if Trump drops his demand to extend a physical barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.

A stalemate over the wall led parts of the government to shut down Saturday after funding for numerous departments and agencies expired.

Mulvaney, who is also director of the White House budget office, said he’s awaiting word from Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York after the administration on Saturday presented Schumer with a counteroffer in the long-running dispute over funding the wall.

Mulvaney withheld specifics but placed the offer between Trump’s $5.7 billion request and $1.3 billion offered by Democrats.

The shutdown was expected to last through Thursday after the House and Senate, which held rare weekend sessions, adjourned until later in the week. Monday and Tuesday, Christmas Eve and Christmas, respectively, are federal holidays, meaning much of the federal government would already be closed.

Wednesday is the first day taxpayers could begin to feel the effects of a shutdown, Mulvaney said. But he predicted it could last beyond Thursday, when Congress is next scheduled to come into session.

“It’s very possible that this shutdown will go beyond the 28th and into the new Congress,” he said.

Democrats held firm Sunday in opposition to paying for a border wall, which was a central promise of Trump’s campaign for president.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said the administration is sitting on most of the money Congress gave Trump last year for border security, excluding a wall.

“If you’re not going to spend nine out of 10 dollars on an issue, you obviously don’t care about it that much,” Merkley said. “This is politics, not policy.”

Mulvaney countered that “the president’s not going to not accept money for a border wall.”

On the second day of the federal closure, Trump tweeted Sunday that what the country needs is “a good old fashioned WALL that works,” as opposed to aerial drones and other measures that “are wonderful and lots of fun” but not the right answer to address “drugs, gangs, human trafficking, criminal elements and much else from coming into” the United States.

From coast to coast, the first day of the shutdown played out in uneven ways. The Statue of Liberty remained open for tours, thanks to money from New York state, and the U.S. Postal Service, an independent agency, was still delivering mail.

Yet the disruption has affected many government operations and the routines of 800,000 federal employees. Roughly 420,000 workers were deemed essential and were expected to work unpaid. An additional 380,000 were to be furloughed, meaning they will stay home without pay. The Senate had already passed legislation ensuring that workers will receive back pay, and the House was likely to follow suit.

Unlike past shutdowns, this one seemed to lack urgency, coming during the long holiday weekend after Trump had already declared Christmas Eve a federal holiday. Rather than work around the clock to try to end the shutdown, as they had done in the past, the leaders of the House and the Senate effectively closed up shop. But they didn’t rule out action if a deal were struck.

“Listen, anything can happen,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters after he closed the Senate’s rare Saturday session hours after it opened.

But after ushering Vice President Mike Pence through the Capitol for another round of negotiations, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said a quick end to the shutdown was “not probable.”

Trump had lunch at the White House on Saturday with conservative lawmakers. Absent were GOP leaders or Democrats who would be needed for a deal. The White House said Trump would spend Christmas in Washington because of the shutdown and that his wife, first lady Melania Trump, would fly back from their Florida estate to spend the holiday with him.

With Democrats set to take control of the House on Jan. 3, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., on his way out, the shutdown was providing a last gasp of the conservative majority before the new Congress.

Trump savored the prospect of a shutdown over the wall for months. This past week he said he would be “proud” to close down the government. He had campaigned on the promise of building the wall, and he also promised Mexico would pay for it. Mexico has refused.

In recent days, though, Trump tried to shift blame to Democrats for not acceding to his demand. He has given mixed messages on whether he would sign any bill into law.

Schumer and Pence met Saturday at the request of the White House, according to Schumer’s office. But the senator’s spokesman said they remained “very far apart” on a spending agreement.

Schumer said the “Trump shutdown” could end immediately if the president abandons the wall.

Democrats said they were open to proposals that didn’t include the wall, which Schumer said was too costly and ineffective. They have offered to keep spending at existing levels of $1.3 billion for border fencing and other security.

Senators approved a bipartisan deal earlier in the week to keep the government open into February and provide $1.3 billion for border security projects, but not the wall. But as Trump faced criticism from conservatives for “caving” on a campaign promise, he pushed the House to approve a package temporarily financing the government but also setting aside $5.7 billion for the border wall.

The impasse blocked money for nine of 15 Cabinet-level departments and dozens of agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Interior, Agriculture, State and Justice.

Those being furloughed included nearly everyone at NASA and 52,000 workers at the Internal Revenue Service. About 8 in 10 employees of the National Park Service were to stay home; many parks were expected to close.

Some agencies, including the Pentagon and the departments of Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services, were already funded and will operate as usual. Also still functioning were the FBI, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard. Transportation Security Administration officers continued to staff airport checkpoints and air traffic controllers were on the job.

Mulvaney appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and ABC’s “This Week.” Merkley also appeared on ABC.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Mary Clare Jalonick and Jill Colvin in Washington contributed to this report.

Add ‘Floating Guantanamos’ to the List of U.S. Crimes Abroad

I grew up in New London, Connecticut, watching many a military ship float by my window. New London was home to the Coast Guard Academy and sat across the river from a U.S. Navy submarine base. Uniformed guardsmen, sailors in training, and sub crews leaving port would regularly wave to my friends and me from the decks of their ships. It never occurred to me that, 50 years later, such ships would come to my attention again, this time because of the confusing messages they’re sending overseas, a reflection of the conflicting images embedded in Washington’s latest version of diplomacy and foreign policy.

We still want populations around the world to admire, appreciate, and respect this country as a democracy and a powerful protector. Some ships are used to make exactly that point. And yet, in the twenty-first-century version of war American-style, other ships have become the very image and essence of hardship and harm in ways that violate the most basic tenets of democracy and justice.

This mixed message is anything but new to American foreign policy. In 2003, seven months after the invasion of Iraq, Margaret Tutwiler, incoming undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, was assigned to deal with the sort of worries then being raised by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN). He chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and so oversaw Tutwiler’s confirmation hearing, describing himself as “deeply concerned” and “anxious” about the country’s deteriorating image abroad.

“Americans are troubled,” he explained, “by examples of virulent anti-American hatred in the Islamic world and are frustrated by public opinion in allied countries that seems increasingly ready to question American motives or blame American actions for a host of problems.” Tutwiler responded with intrepid optimism. She understood the uphill battle she faced, she assured him, one that required “maintaining and in some respects regaining respect and understanding” for the U.S. around the globe. And she promised to do what she could “to contribute to the overall effort of trying to prevent any further deterioration in our nation’s image.”

Five months later, Congressman José Serrano (D-NY), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, would suggest just how implausible was Tutwiler’s task of convincing allies and enemies alike of the good intentions of the United States, in Iraq in particular. Though respectful of the idea of public diplomacy, he expressed extreme doubt about the possibility of applying it successfully in that war-torn land then occupied by the U.S. military. As he put it, he was cognizant of just “how difficult it has become for us on the one hand to try to change the image of who we are; and, on the other hand, you know, invade and occupy an Arab country.” Then he added, in a bow of empathy for Tutwiler, “I just wonder how my job would be if I had to tell people that I am a good guy, while, on the other hand, I hit them over the head with a hammer.”

I was at that long-ago hearing and his words punctuated an otherwise boilerplate event, bringing the room to a stunned silence for a moment — even if, soon after, everything went right on as if Serrano had never said a word. Since then, those words of his have come back to haunt me often, as I’ve witnessed the policies and practices deeply embedded in America’s war on terror. In that moment, Serrano highlighted the deep contradiction between Washington’s desire to project a protective, constructive, compassionate image abroad, and the contrasting reality of injustice and aggression which has torn at our standards and tarnished that very image. Recently, as I began to delve into this story of U.S. ships deployed on the high seas, his words resonated one more time in an unexpected fashion.

Operation Hammer

For a century, the U.S. Navy has used hospital ships to bring medical aid to those in need around the globe. In recent years, there have been two such vessels: the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort. The last two are still in operation as floating hospitals, transporting medical aid to communities around the globe. They provided medical assistance to Indonesia in the wake of the tsunami and earthquake in 2004, help to Haiti in the aftermath of its devastating 2010 earthquake, and aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria ripped through the island in the fall of 2017.

As 2018 ends, the Comfort is completing a three-month medical assistance program designed to tend to the sick in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Honduras. Deployed as part of U.S. Southern Command’s Enduring Promise Initiative, that ship, according to the Navy, “reflects the United States’ enduring promise of friendship, partnership, and solidarity with the Americas.”

Several years ago, out of curiosity, I asked a Navy friend if I could see the Comfort at a time when it was docked in Baltimore. Granted it didn’t have patients then, but it proved to be a remarkable vessel. A full-scale hospital on the seas, it has 1,000 beds, several operating theaters, labs, radiology equipment, and dental equipment, while carrying a staff of 900. The Comfort is prepared to see up to 1,000 patients a day in distant lands. On December 1st, the head of U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Craig Faller, visited Colombia and met with local officials to underscore the “security partnership” between the two nations at the moment the ship was stationed there.

Unfortunately, this is not the only message that U.S. vessels are sending out these days. In the same hemisphere where the Comfort now sails, there are more than a dozen other ships on a shared mission of quite a different sort. These also fly the U.S. flag, although under the auspices of the Coast Guard, a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), rather than the Navy. Approximately 400-foot vessels, they are known as National Security Cutters and have been refashioned not as hospital ships but as prison ships. They, too, are patrolling the southern waters of the Americas. Their mission is the apprehension and detention of drug smugglers, part of a multinational effort to stem the narcotics trade. They detain prisoners of the “drug war” on board, theoretically as a prelude to their future charging and prosecution, usually in the United States.

During the first 20 years of this drug interdiction program, the U.S. detained around 200 individuals per year on board such ships. Then, in 2012, Washington escalated its efforts by launching a Coast Guard-led multinational campaign. It would soon be overseen by Marine General John Kelly, who became head of U.S. Southern Command as that year ended. A further and more pronounced expansion of the program came when he was appointed secretary of DHS, the Coast Guard’s mother agency. In 2017, as shipboard detentions soared, Kelly described the policy as an effort to stem the “existential” threat to the nation that drug traffickers posed.

As if to enshrine Congressman Serrano’s long-gone comments and offer a new lesson in American “public diplomacy,” this program of increasingly murky detentions at sea was dubbed Operation Martillo, or Operation Hammer. Under it, by the fall of 2017, the numbers of detainees had leapt more than 300% to 700 that year. Meanwhile, some of the detained, on release, have reported unjust, often brutal treatment, in both physical and legal terms. Physically, some were shackled for significant periods to the decks of Coast Guard ships, kept there in chains exposed to the wind, rain, and sun, while forced to defecate into buckets.

Legally, they suffered as well. As the New York Times reported, they were “not read Miranda rights, not appointed lawyers, not allowed to contact their consulate or their families.” Nor were they brought before a judge in the timely fashion that the law demands. In many of these cases, stateside judges have failed to apply a basic legal rule known as speedy presentment, designed to prevent the incommunicado warehousing of defendants for interrogation purposes and start the 70-day period that the government has to bring a case to trial.

Of course, this sort of militarized detention of prisoners offshore of American justice is nothing new in this century. No surprise, for instance, that these Coast Guard prison ships were referred to as “floating Guantánamos” by a former Coast Guard lawyer and “boat prisons” by another Coast Guard officer. For those of us who have been following the role of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the war on terror, the playbook has, in fact, been all too familiar. Claiming the need for intelligence about operational networks (in this case those of drug running outfits, not terror ones), the authorities claim the right to detain those apprehended in their busts for informational purposes before turning them over to the criminal justice system.

Increasingly, in the case of the Coast Guard (as at Guantánamo), there seems to be no time limit on such imprisonments and anything but a rush to charge the detainees in federal court.  Nor, it seems, is any special attention paid to the conditions of confinement, no matter how cruel. As at Guantánamo, being held at sea now increasingly means being kept away from both public scrutiny and the law as it is acknowledged and practiced on shore.

Remember, many of the individuals who arrived at Guantánamo had already been held for long periods of time away from lawyers or the legal system. Not surprisingly, the assumption of guilt rather than innocence was baked into such detentions, as it now is into the Coast Guard ones. As a former Coast Guard commandant claimed, when defending that service against the name “floating Guantánamos,” such detainees are “peddlers of poison who elected to engage in criminal activity.” In this, he was following to a T the Guantánamo playbook. There, in defense of the mistreatment of war on terror detainees, it was often said that they had engaged in anti-American activities — the assumption being that they were not worthy of the protections afforded others in U.S. custody.

In 2017, Seth Freed Wessler offered a vivid portrait of such attitudes and of the kind of imprisonment at sea that went with it. (“Most of the time, he couldn’t move more than an arm’s length in either direction without jostling the next shackled man. ‘The sea used to be freedom,’ he told me. But on the ship, ‘it was the opposite. Like a prison in the open ocean.’”) Wessler focused on two Ecuadorians detained in 2014 on a Coast Guard vessel for more than 70 days and spoke as well to many other prisoners held on such ships, often for long periods, prior to their prosecution in the U.S. In some instances, the Coast Guard detainees were even transferred from one ship to another, while authorities prodded them for information outside the court system.

According to Laura Pitter, U.S. deputy director at Human Rights Watch, there’s a direct relationship between lack of access to the courts and the abuse of prisoners in custody. As she noted in describing to me a forthcoming essay of hers, “National Security and Court Deference: Ramifications and Worrying Trends”:

“A pattern of abuse characterizes these ship detentions. It has been made possible by judges permitting the government longer and longer delays in getting defendants before them as promptly as required, and once they get there these defendants have no real ability to challenge the way they’ve been treated. There are safeguards in place to guard against abuse, but the prosecutors have been circumventing them and courts have been permitting it.”

Detention Missions

From the earliest days of the post-9/11 era, prisoners were put aboard ships for interrogation purposes. John Walker Lindh, a U.S. citizen and among the first American captives in the war on terror, was held for questioning aboard the USS Peleliu; others were held aboard the USS Bataan before being turned over to the criminal justice system. As recently as 2014, Abu Khattalah, convicted in 2017 in connection with a 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, was held aboard the USS New York and interrogated for 13 days without a lawyer being present.

Other terror suspects have spent long periods aboard such naval vessels,subjected to regular questioning, sometimes under harsh conditions, before being transferred to law enforcement custody. Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali national, for example, was apprehended in the Gulf of Aden in 2011 and held aboard a Navy ship for two months for questioning. He later pled guilty to providing material support to both the Somali terror group al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda.

Abu Anas al-Libi, a Libyan, was captured by Army Delta Force commandos and held on a Navy vessel for about a week prior to being read his Miranda rights. As the Atlantic magazine reported in 2014, in such terrorism cases, the Navy had “taken on the role of high-seas prison warden.” Like the prolonged detentions at Guantánamo, such detentions at sea under conditions that avoid the requirements of law give America another black eye abroad. (It was no happenstance, for instance, that ISIS mockingly adopted Guantánamo’s orange jumpsuits for its prisoners before openly treating them in a horrific fashion.)

As the shackling of men on the decks of ships reveals, the Coast Guard’s present war-on-drugs detention mission is not one it has exactly been prepared for. Early this year, then-Coast Guard Commandant Paul Zukunft told Military.com that the service was “exploring the possibility of leasing a dedicated commercial vessel that would do nothing but hold suspects until they can be transferred to the United States.” Consider that an indication both of Coast Guard discomfort with its present role and of the fact that drug detentions at sea are likely to be realities for the foreseeable future — though conceivably in privatized settings where whatever happens on board would be even further removed from public scrutiny.

The conflicting images the United States is projecting in the Southern Hemisphere are perfectly illustrated by its bizarrely bifurcated seaborne missions of hope and despair. On the one hand, the hospital ships, as their very names — Mercy and Comfort — suggest, are beacons of U.S. public diplomacy. On the other hand, those Coast Guard prison ships lower the “hammer” not just on drug dealers but on international legal codes, domestic law, and military law, while hammering this country’s reputation abroad as well. (It’s no irony but a reflection of twenty-first-century Washington reality that the prisoners shackled on those vessels are from some of the same countries, including Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, targeted this year by those hospital vessels.)

Even as unlawful detention on the high seas continues, other challenges to the image of the U.S. as a lawful nation capable of bringing aid and comfort elsewhere are multiplying. Consider it more than symbolic that the very position Margaret Tutwiler once held, undersecretary for public affairs and public diplomacy, remains unfilled in Donald Trump’s Washington. It’s just one more sign of the State Department’s evisceration by a willful refusal to fill empty posts, including ambassadorships to Bolivia, Honduras, and Panama, countries central to the war on drugs. Worse yet, there are plans to retire either the Mercy or the Comfort by the end of 2019, reducing by half the U.S. Navy’s ability to care for those in need around the world.

It’s clear enough these days where the image of America is headed.

Record Rainfall Won’t Save Us From Impending Water Shortages

Even in a world with more intense rain, communities could begin to run short of water. New research has confirmed that, in a warming world, extremes of drought have begun to diminish the world’s groundwater – and ever more intense rainstorms will do little to make up the loss in the global water supply.

And a second, separate study delivers support for this seeming paradox: worldwide, there is evidence that rainfall patterns are, increasingly, being disturbed. The number of record-dry months has increased overall. And so has the number of record-breaking rainy months.

Both studies match predictions in a world of climate change driven by ever-higher ratios of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, from ever-increasing combustion of fossil fuels. But, unlike many climate studies, neither of these is based on computer simulation of predicted change.

Each is instead based on the meticulous analysis of huge quantities of on-the-ground data. Together they provide substance to a 40-year-old prediction of climate change research: that in a warming world, those regions already wet will get ever more rain, while the drylands will tend to become increasingly more arid.

As global temperatures creep up – and they have already risen by 1°C in the past century, and could be set to reach 3°C by 2100 – so does the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb more moisture. It follows that more rain must fall. But at the same time more groundwater evaporates, and the risk of damaging drought increases.

“What we did not expect, despite all the extra rain everywhere in the world, is that the large rivers are drying out”

Australian scientists report in the journal Water Resources Research that they studied readings from 43,000 rainfall stations and 5,300 river monitoring sites in 160 countries. And they confirm that even in a world of more intense rain, drought could become the new normal in those regions already at risk.

“This is something that has been missed. We expected rainfall to increase, since warmer air stores more moisture – and that is what climate models predicted too,” said Ashish Sharma, an environmental engineer at the University of New South Wales.

“What we did not expect, despite all the extra rain everywhere in the world, is that the large rivers are drying out. We believe the cause is the drying of soils in our catchments. Where once these were moist before a storm event – allowing excess rainfall to run off into rivers – they are now drier and soak up more rain, so less water makes it as flow.”

The study matches predictions. Just in the last few months, climate scientists have warned that catastrophic climate change could be on the way, and that the double hazard of heat waves and sustained drought could devastate harvests in more than one climatic zone in the same season; and that those landlocked rainfall catchment areas that are already dry are becoming increasingly more parched.

But over the same few months, researchers have established repeatedly that tomorrow’s storms will be worse and that more devastating flash floods can be expected even in one of the world’s driest continents, Australia itself.

Less water available

Of all rainfall, only 36% gets into aquifers, streams and lakes. The remaining two thirds seeps into the soils, grasslands and woodlands. But more soil evaporation means less water is available from river supplies for cities and farms.

US researchers have already confirmed that if soils are moist before a storm, 62% of rainfall leads to floods that fill catchments. If soils are dry, only 13% of the rain leads to flooding.

“It’s a double whammy. Less water is ending up where we can’t store it for later use. At the same time, more rain is overwhelming drainage infrastructure in towns and cities, leading to more urban flooding,” said Professor Sharma.

“Small floods are very important for water supply, because they refill dams and form the basis of our water supply. But they’re happening less often, because the soils are sucking up extra rain. Even when a major storm dumps a lot of rain, the soils are so dry they absorb more water than before, and less reaches the rivers and reservoirs”, he said. “We need to adapt to this emerging reality.”

In the second close look at change so far, researchers based in Germany report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters  that they analysed data from 50,000 weather stations worldwide to measure rainfall on a monthly basis.

Climate drives aridity

The US has seen a more than 25% increase of record wet months in the eastern and central regions between 1980 and 2013. Argentina has seen a 32% increase. In central and northern Europe the increase is between 19% and 37%; in Asian Russia, it has been about 20%.

But in Africa south of the Sahara the incidence of very dry months has increased by 50%. “This implies that approximately one out of three record dry months in this region would not have occurred without long-term climate change,” said Dim Coumou, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

“Generally, land regions in the tropics and sub-tropics have seen more dry records, and the northern mid- to high-latitudes more wet records. This largely fits the patterns that scientists expect from human-caused climate change.”

His colleague and lead author Jascha Lehmann said: “Normally, record weather events occur by chance and we know how many would happen in a climate without warning. It’s like throwing a dice: on average one out of six times you get a six.

“But by injecting huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humankind has loaded the dice. In many regions, we throw sixes much more often, with severe impacts for society and the environment.

“It is worrying that we see significant increases of such extremes with just one degree of global warming.”

This Could Stop Congress From Forcing Shutdowns

US Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Saturday called for congressional salaries to be put on hold during the next government shutdown.

The US government went into a partial shutdown at midnight on Friday after President Trump refused to sign a spending bill that did not include $5 billion for his wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He had long claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall.

“It’s completely unacceptable that members of Congress can force a government shutdown on partisan lines & then have Congressional salaries exempt from that decision,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter.

“Have some integrity,” she added, calling for salaries to be furloughed for the next shutdown.

 

Next time we have a gov shutdown, Congressional salaries should be furloughed as well.

It’s completely unacceptable that members of Congress can force a government shutdown on partisan lines & then have Congressional salaries exempt from that decision.

Have some integrity. https://t.co/BgueNNjf0f

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 22, 2018

(Spoiler alert: most members of Congress are already wealthy!)

Speaking as a working class member-elect, I think it’s only fair.

It would also cause members who actually depend on their salary to think twice about leadership and take a shutdown vote more seriously. https://t.co/fSAcPAj0Xf

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 22, 2018

Members of the House and the Senate are paid $174,000 a year. According to Roll Call, 153 House members and 50 senators are millionaires.

More than 420,000 federal workers who are considered “essential” will continue working — but without pay, according to CBS News. Those employees may eventually receive back pay. However, an additional 380,000 workers will be furloughed and may miss a paycheck depending on how long the shutdown lasts.

Ocasio-Cortez, who will join Congress in early January  as the new representative for New York’s 14th District, has been a vocal critic of the demand for $5 billion for a border wall. When the House passed a short-term spending bill with $5.7 billion for border security, Ocasio-Cortez challenged the GOP trope that the federal government simply doesn’t have the money to implement bold progressive policies such as Medicare for All or a Green New Deal.

“And just like that, GOP discovers $5.7 billion for a wall,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “But notice how no one’s asking the GOP how they’re paying for it.”

For the wall’s $5.7 billion, every child in America could have access to Universal Pre-K.

Yet when we propose the SAME $, we’re told Universal Edu is a “fantasy”& asked “how are you going to pay for it”

Education is an investment in society that yields returns.

Walls are waste. https://t.co/fs0nvq6LJq

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 21, 2018

On Friday, she outlined another way the $5.7 billion could be spent instead of Trump’s proposed wall.  “For the wall’s $5.7 billion, every child in America could have access to Universal Pre-K. Yet when we propose the SAME $, we’re told Universal Edu is a ‘fantasy’ & asked ‘how are you going to pay for it.’ Education is an investment in society that yields returns,” she tweeted. “Walls are waste.”

Paul Ryan’s Entire Career Was a Cash Grab for Billionaires

Each New Year’s, my wife and I indulge one of our favorite traditions: the household purge. We scour our closets for stuff that’s just taking up space, quietly draining our home’s energy, and move it along. I can’t recommend it enough.

This year, America’s doing the same thing — and putting House Speaker Paul Ryan out on the curb.

For years, the ten-term Wisconsin Republican — who’s retiring as Democrats prepare to take over the House — enjoyed an improbable reputation as a “deficit hawk” and “deep thinker” about fiscal issues.

Year after year, as House budget chairman, Ryan would roll out his latest “blueprint.” He’d literally roll up his sleeves for the cameras and detail his latest plans to slash rich people’s taxes and scale back public services for everyone else.

For a while, mainstream liberals greeted Ryan as a serious interlocutor.

They treated his plans to privatize Medicare, eviscerate Social Security, and shred the safety net as valid viewpoints in the Adult Conversation they wanted politics to be. Even if you didn’t agree with him, they said, you had to admit Ryan “had a plan” to “deal with the debt.”

That scam propelled Ryan to the House speakership in 2015. Then the long con really took off.

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The Speaker Who Lost His Voice



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For five straight years before Ryan took over, deficits had declined. By the time he gave his self-satisfied farewell, they’d increased by $343 billion — a product of Ryan’s tax breaks for corporations and millionaires, which will cost $2 trillion over the next decade.

Thanks to the very deficit he created, Ryan then left office warning that Congress needed to cut — you guessed it — Medicare and Social Security. (No doubt he’s still stinging from his 2017 failure to throw 24 million Americans off their health care — a feat of pure sociopathy he actually said he’d been dreaming about since he “was drinking out of kegs.”)

Ryan was never a serious thinker and he didn’t care about debt. He was a frat bro from a wealthy family who read a lot of Ayn Rand, a writer who called it “a disease” to do anything good for “the primordial savages” who made up “the collective” —  i.e., the public.

A bad model for public servants, if you ask me.

True to his training, Ryan presided over a massive cash grab by America’s billionaires and left the rest of us “savages” to pick at the scraps. No wonder Ryan never mounted that “principled conservative” challenge to Donald Trump in 2016 — on this they agreed entirely.

Ryan’s crimes go beyond what fits in spreadsheets. After signing off on over $700 billion for the Pentagon — no austerity for that agency, which has never passed an audit — Ryan concluded his speakership with an act of pure villainy. He tucked a provision into this year’s Farm Bill that prevented even a debate on ending U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen.

The UN calls that war the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet. It’s caused over 85,000 children to starve to death. Almost miraculously, after years of inaction, the U.S. Senate just concluded a remarkable bipartisan vote to get the U.S. out of it.

In stymieing that effort with low procedural tricks, Ryan “used the Farm Bill to starve children,” as The American Conservative put it.

The silver lining is that Ryan’s villainy — like Trump’s — spurred the growth of powerful movements to expand health care, rebalance the economy, and get the U.S. out of immoral wars. Lawmakers from those movements — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and others — and a new House majority can now get to work burying Ryan’s legacy forever.

No one who isn’t a billionaire — or a bombmaker — will miss him.

At Least 20 Killed, 165 Injured After Tsunami Hits Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia—A tsunami apparently caused by undersea landslides from a volcanic island killed at least 20 people after the waves hit the coast around Indonesia’s Sunda Strait, the government reported.

Another 165 people were hurt and dozens of buildings damaged Saturday night, the National Disaster Management Agency said.

The Meteorology and Geophysics agency in a separate statement said it could have been caused by undersea landslides from Anak Krakatau, a volcanic island formed over years from the Krakatau volcano, which last erupted in October.

“I had to run, as the wave passed the beach and landed 15-20m (meters) inland,” Øystein Lund Andersen wrote on Facebook. He said he was taking pictures of the volcano when he suddenly saw a big wave come toward him.

“Next wave entered the hotel area where I was staying and downed cars on the road behind it. Managed to evacuate with my family to higher ground trough forest paths and villages, where we are taken care of (by) the locals. Were unharmed, thankfully.”

The Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra connects the Java Sea to the Indian Ocean.

Footage posted by the head of the disaster management agency showed the aftermath of flooded streets and an overturned car.

In September, at least 832 people were killed by a quake and tsunami that hit the city of Palu on the island of Sulawesi, which is just east of Borneo.

U.S. Envoy to Anti-IS Coalition Quits Over Trump’s Syria Move

WASHINGTON—Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the global coalition fighting the Islamic State group, has resigned in protest over President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, a U.S. official said, joining Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in an administration exodus of experienced national security figures.

Only 11 days ago, McGurk had said it would be “reckless” to consider IS defeated and therefore would be unwise to bring American forces home. McGurk decided to speed up his original plan to leave his post in mid-February.

Appointed to the post by President Barack Obama in 2015 and retained by Trump, McGurk said in his resignation letter that the militants were on the run, but not yet defeated, and that the premature pullout of American forces from Syria would create the conditions that gave rise to IS. He also cited gains in accelerating the campaign against IS, but that the work was not yet done.

His letter, submitted Friday to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was described to The Associated Press on Saturday by an official familiar with its contents. The official was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter before the letter was released and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In a tweet shortly after news of McGurk’s resignation broke, Trump again defended his decision to pull all of the roughly 2,000 U.S. forces from Syria in the coming weeks.

“We were originally going to be there for three months, and that was seven years ago – we never left,” Trump tweeted. “When I became President, ISIS was going wild. Now ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains. We’re coming home!”

Although the civil war in Syria has gone on since 2011, the U.S. did not begin launching airstrikes against IS until September 2014, and American troops did not go into Syria until 2015.

McGurk, whose resignation is effective Dec. 31, was planning to leave the job in mid-February after a U.S.-hosted meeting of foreign ministers from the coalition countries, but he felt he could continue no longer after Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria and Mattis’ resignation, according to the official.

Trump declaration of a victory over IS has been roundly contradicted by his own experts’ assessments, and his decision to pull troops out was widely denounced by members of Congress, who called his action rash and dangerous.

Mattis, perhaps the most respected foreign policy official in the administration, announced on Thursday that he will leave by the end of February. He told Trump in a letter that he was departing because “you have a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”

The withdrawal decision will fulfill Trump’s goal of bringing troops home from Syria, but military leaders have pushed back for months, arguing that the IS group remains a threat and could regroup in Syria’s long-running civil war. U.S. policy has been to keep troops in place until the extremists are eradicated.

Among officials’ key concerns is that a U.S. pullout will leave U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces vulnerable to attacks by Turkey, the Syrian government and remaining IS fighters. The SDF, a Kurdish-led force, is America’s only military partner in Syria.

A second official said McGurk on Friday was pushing for the U.S. to allow the SDF to reach out to troops allied with Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government for protection. McGurk argued that America had a moral obligation to help prevent the allied fighters from being slaughtered by Turkey, which considers the SDF an enemy.

McGurk said at a State Department briefing on Dec. 11 that “it would be reckless if we were just to say, ‘Well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now.’ I think anyone who’s looked at a conflict like this would agree with that.”

A week before that, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. had a long way to go in training local Syrian forces to prevent a resurgence of IS and stabilize Syria. He said it would take 35,000 to 40,000 local troops in northeastern Syria to maintain security over the long term, but only about 20 percent of that number had been trained.

McGurk, 45, previously served as a deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran, and during the negotiations for the landmark Iran nuclear deal by the Obama administration, led secret side talks with Tehran on the release of Americans imprisoned there.

McGurk, was briefly considered for the post of ambassador to Iraq after having served as a senior official covering Iraq and Afghanistan during President George W. Bush’s administration.

A former Supreme Court law clerk to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, McGurk worked as a lawyer for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and joined Bush’s National Security Council staff, where in 2007 and 2008, he was the lead U.S. negotiator on security agreements with Iraq.

Taking over for now for McGurk will be his deputy, retired Lt. Gen. Terry Wolff, who served three tours of active duty in Iraq.

Jim Jeffrey, a veteran diplomat who was appointed special representative for Syria engagement in August, is expected to stay in his position, officials said.

IS militants still hold a string of villages and towns along the Euphrates River in eastern Syria, where they have resisted weeks of attacks by the U.S.-supported Syrian Democratic Forces to drive them out. The pocket is home to about 15,000 people, among them 2,000 IS fighters, according to U.S. military estimates.

But that figure could be as high as 8,000 militants, if fighters hiding out in the deserts south of the Euphrates River are also counted, according to according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict through networks of local informants. Military officials have also made it clear that IS fighters fleeing Euphrates River region have found refuge in other areas of the country, fueling concerns that they could regroup and rise again.

The SDF said Thursday: “The war against Islamic State has not ended and the group has not been defeated.”

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Associated Press writer Susannah George contributed to this report.

Aid Ship With 311 Migrants Ignored by Italy, Heads to Spain

BARCELONA, Spain—Spain’s Foreign Ministry gave permission Saturday to an aid boat carrying 311 rescued migrants to set course for Spain after Italy and other Mediterranean countries did not answer its request to dock.

The boat belonging to the Spanish aid group Proactiva Open Arms saved 313 migrants Friday in waters near Libya. A baby and its mother were then evacuated from the boat.

Spain’s Foreign Ministry said Malta denied the aid boat permission to dock and the boat’s calls to Italy, France, Tunisia and Libya have gone unanswered.

The aid group said it now has permission to enter the Spanish port of Algeciras. On its Twitter account, Proactiva said “it will be many and difficult days sailing, but we have a safe port.”

In June, Italy and Malta denied entrance to another aid ship belonging to SOS Mediterranee Sea and Doctors Without Borders that was carrying over 600 rescued migrants. Spain granted it entry to end its weeklong saga at sea, as Spain’s new center-left government made the humane treatment of migrants one of its first policy decisions in contrast with the hard-line taken by Italy’s populist leaders.

According to the U.N. refugee agency, over 2,200 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea this year in unseaworthy smugglers’ boats and 117,540 migrants have reached Europe.

Connected Cars Accelerate Down Data-Collection Highway

SAN FRANCISCO—That holiday trip over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house could turn into a nice little gift for automakers as they increasingly collect oodles and oodles of data about the driver.

Automakers are collecting valuable pieces of information thanks to the internet connections, cameras and sensors built into most vehicles in recent years. The online access makes it possible for cars to be unlocked remotely if the keys are lost. It’s how safety features can be upgraded wirelessly and maintenance schedules adjusted based on performance.

But these digital peepholes are also offering a windshield-size view of people’s lives. That’s creating the potential for intrusive marketing pitches and government surveillance.

No serious incidents have occurred in the United States, Europe and Japan, but a red flag has already been raised in China, where automakers have been sharing location details of connected cars with the government.

“We are not that far away from when 100 percent of all new cars will come equipped with data modems,” Navigant Research analyst Sam Abuelsamid predicted. “Having the potential to collect more data about people in their cars means there is going to be potential for abuses, too.”

Here are some key questions about the auto industry’s acceleration down the data-collection highway:

Q: What kind of cars collect data?

A: In 2016, about one in every five cars sold globally could be plugged into the internet, according to BI Intelligence. By 2020, about three out of every four cars sold will be online.

So if you are driving a 2009 Toyota Corolla, you probably only have to worry about the tracking and data collection being done by the smartphone resting on the cup holder. But as those older models go to the scrapyard, it will become difficult to avoid a vehicle set up for gathering data that will be sent to automakers.

Q: Which automakers are leading the way in this trend?

A: General Motors accounted for 46 percent of connected-car shipments last year, according to the market research firm Counterpoint. They’re followed by BMW (20 percent), Audi (14 percent) and Mercedes Benz (13 percent). In addition, Tesla’s Model S sold since 2012 all come with connectivity. The firm said the biggest markets for connected car sales last year were China (32 percent), the United States (13 percent), Germany (11 percent) and the United Kingdom (9 percent).

Q: Do I own data that’s collected?

A: Under U.S. law, it’s unclear.

Drivers own the data stored in the “black boxes” that monitor vehicles in a crash. Police and insurers need a driver’s consent — or a court order — to get that data. But there are no laws addressing data collected by automakers through vehicle internet connections.

So far, few automakers will share their data in the United States without the owners’ consent, Abuelsamid said. Twenty companies — including GM, Toyota, Ford, Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz — signed a voluntary agreement in 2014 to get permission before sharing a driver’s location, health or behavior with third parties. The agreement doesn’t require approval from drivers for data to be shared with emergency workers or for internal research.

One of the most notable exceptions is electric car maker Tesla Motors, which has released data publicly to reveal — sometimes within hours of a crash — how fast a driver was traveling and whether the company’s semi-autonomous Autopilot system was engaged after a collision.

Q: In what ways are automakers passing along data when drivers allow it to be shared?

A: They’re giving the data to insurers to determine the premiums that should be charged, if a driver consents. This could be good if data indicates drivers are cautious, adhere to speed limits and seldom log lots of miles. But insurance premiums could jump for drivers who are prone to speeding or frequent hard braking — all of which could be interpreted as raising the risks for accidents. Insurers would also know whether your seat belt is fastened.

Q: Can I stop an automaker from collecting my data?

A: Most automakers let owners decline, or opt out of, data collection, but that’s usually buried in the fine print. Otherwise, permission is assumed. Also, unlike smartphones, some data collection may be required to ensure that cars operate safely and can receive essential software updates. That’s especially true as more vehicles come with features such as semi-autonomous driving. And it could be necessary in order to have self-driving vehicles.

Q: Should I be worried about automakers using my data in ways that are annoying or compromise my privacy?

A: Probably, if what has happened with smartphones is a reliable gauge.

As automakers collect more data about drivers, they’re more likely to look for ways to profit. The built-in display screens and mapping software would seem to be ideal spots for posting advertisements, similar to what Google, Facebook, Amazon and many other internet companies already do.

The business consultancy McKinsey has estimated automotive data could be worth $450 billion to $750 billion worldwide by 2030. Ford Motor CEO Jim Hackett may have foreshadowed what’s coming as he boasted in a recent interview about how much the automaker already knows about its customers who get their loans through its financial services division. All the lending information has allowed Ford to learn how much money people, where they live, where they live and whether they are married.

“We’ve never ever been challenged on how we use that,” Hackett told a Freakonomics podcast last month.

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AP Auto Writer Tom Krisher in Detroit contributed to this story.

 

Slate’s Readers May Be Liberal, But Its Ownership Isn’t

While successful unionization drives and contract settlements have been common in the digital media-sphere for the last several years, the sector just may see its first strike. Union members at Slate, represented by the Writers Guild of America East, voted 52 to 1 last week to authorize a strike (Bloomberg, 12/11/18), and the sticking point is an interesting one: The company refuses to back down from its demand that a contract make union fees optional, creating a so-called “right-to-work” environment that unions regard as union-busting.

It’s common for employers to press for things like management flexibility in directing employees, or limiting how much investment will have to made into salary increases or benefits, but Slate has made a peculiar demand that it govern how the union does its business—and, worse, it is insisting that the bargaining unit exist in a position of weakness and division.

Imposing “right-to-work,” or the option for workers in a unionized workplace to opt out of the union without paying union dues or agency shop fees, has long been a campaign of the US right. These “right-to-work” laws are on the books in more than half the states, and as of this summer, they apply to all public-sector unions, thanks to the Supreme Court decision Janus v. AFSCME, which overturned a four-decade old precedent.

In Washington, DC, where the Slate Group is based (it’s controlled by the Graham family, which used to own the Washington Post), there are no “right-to-work” laws for the private sector, but Slate is trying impose them through bargaining. That WGAE members are threatening a strike over this says how much of an affront to union power such a demand is.

“We just feel that it’s a total and absolute betrayal of Slate’s most fundamental values,” Slate writer and union activist Mark Joseph Stern told Bloomberg. Slate is hardly an anti-capitalist news website, but it’s noted by critics and supporters alike for its fairly nuanced takes on politics and the economy, generally seen as coming from the center-left. Pew Research Center (10/20/14) found that Slate’s audience, alongside that of the New Yorker, was more “consistently liberal” than consumers of other mainstream outlets, including NPR, the Daily Show, Huffington Post and MSNBC.

Even New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was elected on a platform explicitly antagonistic toward public sector unions, signed legislation in the wake of Janus easing the blow “right-to-work” would have on state unions. Slate’s bargaining position puts the company firmly on the anti-union right.

So what gives? Why would an institution with such a left-leaning audience take such a reactionary position against its union? Any labor organizer will tell you that liberal  non-profits and even unions themselves are not immune from hostility toward staff organizing, often because unionization can be wrongly read as a lack of dedication toward the outfit’s mission, and because most bosses, regardless of the sector, benefit from having the greatest flexibility in labor relations. The trend of unionization, usually with representation by the News Guild, in digital media—at places like Vice and The Onion—as well as in print/digital hybrids, is perceived as a threat to the labor flexibility that media bosses have long taken for granted.

Such a demand by management is a declaration to other media companies that they should not go quietly into this increasing unionization of the sector.

Regardless of whether there is a strike, or whether this language appears in the final collective bargaining agreement, the damage to Slate’s reputation goes beyond the bargaining table. How can readers take seriously critical commentary on Republican tax cuts, or the administration’s attack of the Affordable Care Act, when the company has allied its own economic outlook to that of the Koch brothers?

That’s a reputation that Slate’s writers themselves don’t deserve. Yet even after this ordeal is over, they will have to write and report under a cloud of distrust of management. From a labor perspective, that kind of tension can be good for building strength in a union, but it will be bad for a media outlet’s credibility.