Chris Hedges's Blog, page 384

The Pentagon Doesn’t Deserve the Media’s Sympathies

It is a sign of our times that our media attempt to decipher future government policy by analyzing the president’s tweets, like some bizarre game of telephone. Throughout November, there was speculation of a coming reduction in military spending, and when Donald Trump took to Twitter (12/3/18) to describe the $716 billion budget as “crazy,” media took this as confirmation.

The prospect of a cut to the military elicited a storm of condemnation across the media landscape. The National Review (11/17/18) wrote that “cutting the resources available to the Pentagon is a bad idea,” noting that, “for decades, America has short-changed defense” meaning “America’s ability to defend its allies, its partners, and its own vital interests is increasingly in doubt.” In an article headlined “Don’t Cut Military Spending Mr. President” (Wall Street Journal, 11/29/18),  Senate and House Armed Services committee chairs James Inhofe and Mac Thornberry claimed the military is in “crisis” after “inadequate budgets for nearly a decade,” and that “any cut in the Defense budget would be a senseless step backward.”

More centrist outlets concurred. Forbes Magazine (11/26/18) began its article with the words, “The security and well-being of the United States are at greater risk than at any time in decades,” recommending a “sensible and consistent increase” to the budget. Bloomberg (19/11/18) recommended a consistent increase in military spending of 3 percent above inflation for five to ten years, while Reuters (12/4/18) noted the increased “risk” of a lower military budget.

What exactly was this “risk” that media were so worried about? Max Boot, neo-con fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations—who apparently still supports the Iraq War and demanded ones in Syria and Libya, while arguing that America should become a world empire—articulated the risk in the Washington Post (12/12/18). Describing a reduction in military spending as “suicide,” and claiming the US is in a “full-blown national security crisis,” he cited the work of a blue-ribbon panel that called for continuous hikes in military spending:

“If the United States had to fight Russia in a Baltic contingency or China in a war over Taiwan, Americans could face a decisive military defeat,” the report warns. “These two nations possess precision-strike capabilities, integrated air defenses, cruise and ballistic missiles, advanced cyberwarfare and anti-satellite capabilities, significant air and naval forces, and nuclear weapons—a suite of advanced capabilities heretofore possessed only by the United States.”… So we’re in deep trouble. We are losing the military edge that has underpinned our security and prosperity since 1945.

Thus, the crisis is that the US could not be assured of destroying the Russian military in a Baltic war or the Chinese in the South China Sea. It is important to note that these necessary wars of defense would not be happening in Maine or California, but thousands of miles away, on the doorsteps of our geopolitical rivals. Boot presents these wars on the other side of the world as impossible to avoid—“if the US had to fight”—continuing a tradition of presenting the US as stumbling or being reluctantly dragged into wars against its will, that we at FAIR (6/22/17) have cataloged.

In reality, more than half of all US discretionary spending goes to the military, and its war-related spending is a much larger percentage of its budget than in comparable countries—3–5 times as much as Canada, Germany or Japan. In fact, the US spends almost as much on its military as all other countries in the world put together, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and has around 800 (official) foreign military bases, placed on every inhabited continent of the world.

Even these figures do not include military pensions and veterans’ healthcare, or nuclear weapons, and therefore the true total is possibly greater than all other countries combined. Military spending is approaching the highest in recorded history of any country, and the increase in military spending Trump approved last year alone would be enough to make public colleges and universities across the US free to all.

Considering the problems of unemployment, poverty, climate change and infrastructure in the US, perhaps tooling up for an intercontinental war against two nuclear-armed superpowers is not the most effective use of trillions of dollars. That reducing a $716 billion war budget can be presented as a threat to the nation, and that “defense” can refer to wars in Taiwan or the Baltic, illustrates the depth of the media’s imperial mindset, and goes to show President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the power of the military industrial complex went unheeded.

The media needn’t have worried, as the military industrial complex usually gets its way. President Trump, “with the help of Senator Inhofe and Chairman Thornberry,” according to the Defense Department (London Independent, 12/10/18), agreed to increase the military budget after all, to $750 billion. A lot of people are going to get rich—not least of all Senator Inhofe, who quietly purchased tens of thousands of dollars in Raytheon stock after he met with Trump (CNN, 12/13/18). Raytheon is the world’s largest producer of guided missiles, and is sure to reap a huge windfall from the spending boom.

This whole affair illustrates the important and worrying links between the media, “defense” contractors and politicians. But at least the terrible risk to the United States has been avoided. Those defenseless Air Force Generals and Defense contractors can finally sleep easy at night.

‘Cold War’ Way Sexier Than Actual Cold War

Filmmaker left Poland in the 1980s, settling in England where he plied his craft, eventually pairing up with English-born playwright . His first films were documentaries for British television, followed by unremarkable turns at feature filmmaking. “My Summer of Love,” with , came out in 2004, followed in 2011 by the French thriller, “The Woman in the Fifth,” with and and a striking Polish blond named .

In 2013, Pawlikowski returned to Poland and shot “Ida,” about a nun who travels to her hometown to uncover a family secret that speaks to the core of her identity–she is Jewish. Shot in sumptuous black and white using 4:3 (squarish) aspect ratio, “Ida” represented a stylistic break for the director, and it won him an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film.

In theaters Dec. 21, his new movie, “Cold War,” continues in the vein of “Ida,” as it too is in black and white with a 4:3 aspect ratio, and has been submitted by Poland for Oscar consideration. Inspired by Pawlikowski’s late parents, for whom the characters, Zula (Joanna Kulig) and Wiktor (), are named and to whom the film is dedicated, identity is at the core of this lugubrious love story.

It begins with people singing, a montage of faces caught mid-tune, each cut before any melodic momentum is achieved. If it feels like work, that’s because it is the work of Wiktor, a musician, and his partner, TV producer Irena (Agata Kulesza). They are putting together a folk troupe, based on the real-life Mazowsze group, still performing today since its beginnings in the wake of World War II.

Wiktor and Irena are auditioning country girls singing folk songs, but one look at Zula and Wiktor knows she isn’t from the country. And the fact that she served time for stabbing her overly attentive father only further intrigues him. She chooses to sing “Hearts,” a love song from a Russian movie. It’s hardly a folk song, but it hardly matters. She is cast and the troupe is a hit. Its jammed touring schedule is breathlessly captured in silvery black and white night shots and a string of performance snippets, almost as breathless as the flailing sex on the go between Wiktor and Zula.

Caught in a semi-public space with limited time and the feeling overtaking them, Zula tells him, “Let’s do it,” and Pawlikowski abruptly cuts to swishing skirts at the head of the following dance number. It’s edits like this and the natural marriage between bluesy jazz tunes like “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” and cinematographer ’s lustrous imagery that imbue Pawlikowski’s star-crossed lovers with the grit of tragedy beneath the gloss of a unified aesthetic.

In the years following the war, Communists took over the Polish government under the Red Army, the Soviet secret police and the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Polish resisters of Nazi rule were found guilty of dubious charges under the Soviets, and executed to spare the new occupiers a resurgent resistance.

In the film, Stalin’s shadow falls across the land and the troupe is requested to sing inspirational songs in praise of land reform and other agenda items, a suggestion their toady manager, (Borys Szyc), readily agrees to. And, if they know what’s good for them, so do Wiktor and Irena. The final nail comes as a banner portrait of the Russian leader is unfurled behind them accompanied by coerced and thunderous applause at the end of a performance.

But still the troupe’s popularity grows and soon they are touring to Eastern bloc cities like Berlin, where an opportunity to escape presents itself. One seizes it, the other doesn’t, but they soon meet up in Paris, united in a jazz band, Zula singing show-stopping torch songs while Wiktor and his band play behind her.

With new songs come new lyrics, care of Parisian poet and vixen to Wiktor, Juliette (Jeanne Balibar). Zula and Wiktor argue and soon it’s all over between them, only it isn’t, of course. As with Pawlikowski, whose sojourn in the West brought him a career and good fortune, all roads lead back to the Fatherland. In the end, Zula and Wiktor spend the rest of their lives together in a way that defies the happy ending implied.

The Poland that Pawlikowski Pleft in the 1980s, with the Solidarity movement in full swing and Soviet influence crumbling, must have been a place of optimism and hope in the frenetic demonstrations and vibrant chaos of positive change. The Poland he returned to, to make “Ida,” was a country that had adopted democracy and seemingly found it wanting as the openly authoritarian Law and Justice Party was in ascension, eventually taking over state broadcaster, Telewizja Polska, and packing the Polish Supreme Court.

It’s not difficult to find parallels between what Pawlikowski found in his home country and the identity crisis confronting Ida, the Jewish nun, or the existential funk of Zula and Wiktor, two expats clinging to their love because it’s all they have to cling to. There is passion in “Cold War,” not sensual but raw. Their joinings are like slacking thirsts, clamoring for what they can because a love that isn’t ill-fated is beyond their reach. Pawlikowski uses minimal camera movement, relying on jazz compositions and Zal’s off-balance framing to capture the fatalistic mood of the piece.

A subtly expressive actor, Kot internalizes Wiktor, his love and commitment to two things only: his music and Zula, personified in a brooding, cerebral portrayal. Kot moves through the movie like a condemned man, even when he crosses to the West. Happiness is nowhere to be found, not even with Zula, though his scenes with her tend to be the least joyless. Their love is more like a compulsion, a part of themselves they cannot let go. They hold and kiss each other ravenously, sharing everything but a smile.

While Wiktor smolders, Zula burns. It is precisely this fire that captivates him. Kulig dominates the movie with an irrepressible presence and a sultry power, a woman who is vulnerable, confident and, in the end, confounded by a relationship that has come to dominate her existence. She keeps coming back to him until she doesn’t, because while she would give her life for him, her dignity is too much to sacrifice.

By downplaying the romance and not accompanying each embrace with a swelling saxophone, Pawlikowski paradoxically makes “Cold War” even more romantic. The settings only emphasize the feelings of irretrievable loss, the disintegration of hope along with fortunes, friends, loved ones and feelings, and with them the blanching of self. While hardly a political film, “Cold War” exists firmly within the iron grasp of politics. Love in confinement is joyless, but even joyless love is better than none at all.

Mattis Leaving as Pentagon Chief After Clashes With Trump

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis abruptly said he was resigning Thursday, a day after President Donald Trump overruled his advice against pulling troops out of Syria and pressed forward on discussions to withdraw forces from Afghanistan.

Mattis, perhaps the most respected foreign policy official in Trump’s administration, will leave by the end of February after two tumultuous years struggling to soften and moderate the president’s hardline and sometimes sharply changing policies. He told Trump in a letter that he was leaving because “you have a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”

Trump said in a tweet that Mattis was retiring, but that’s not what Mattis said.

The announcement came a day after Trump surprised U.S. allies and members of Congress by announcing the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria, and as he continues to consider shrinking the American deployment in Afghanistan.

Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria has been sharply criticized for abandoning America’s Kurdish allies, who may well face a Turkish assault once U.S. troops leave, and had been staunchly opposed by the Pentagon.

Mattis, in his resignation letter, emphasized the importance of standing up for U.S. allies — an implicit criticism of the president’s decision on this issue and others.

“While the U.S. remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies,” Mattis wrote.

His departure was quickly lamented by foreign policy hands on both sides of the aisle, who viewed him as a sober voice of experience in the ear of a president who had never before held political office or served in the military.

Last year, Republican Sen. Bob Corker — a frequent Trump critic — said Mattis, along with White House chief of staff John Kelly and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were helping “separate our country from chaos.”

Tillerson was fired early this year. Kelly is to leave the White House in the coming days.

“This is scary,” reacted Senate Intelligence committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., on Twitter. “Secretary Mattis has been an island of stability amidst the chaos of the Trump administration.”

Mattis’ departure has long been rumored, but officials close to him have insisted that the battle-hardened retired Marine would hang on, determined to bring military calm and reason to the administration’s often chaotic national security decisions and soften some of Trump’s sharper tones with allies.

Opponents of Mattis, however, have seen him as an unwanted check on Trump.

A White House official said Mattis informed Trump of his decision to leave the administration Thursday afternoon. Trump said a replacement would be chosen soon.

At the start of the Trump administration, the president had gushed about his respect for Mattis, repeatedly calling him “Mad Dog,” despite Mattis’ own public insistence that the moniker was never his. Instead, his nickname for years was CHAOS, which stood for “Colonel Has An Outstanding Suggestion,” and reflected Mattis’ more cerebral nature.

The two quickly clashed on major policy decisions.

During his first conversations with Trump about the Pentagon job, Mattis made it clear that he disagreed with his new boss in two areas: He said torture doesn’t work, despite Trump’s assertion during the campaign that it did, and he voiced staunch support for traditional U.S. international alliances, including NATO, which Trump repeatedly criticized.

Mattis was credited by some in the administration for blocking an executive order that would have reopened CIA interrogation “black sites.” Trump has said the Pentagon chief convinced him it wasn’t necessary to bring back banned torture techniques like waterboarding.

En route to his first visit to Iraq as defense secretary, Mattis bluntly rebuffed Trump’s assertion that America might take Iraqi oil as compensation for U.S. efforts in the war-torn country.

The two also were initially divided on the future of the Afghanistan war, with Trump complaining about its cost and arguing for withdrawal. Mattis and others ultimately persuaded Trump to pour additional resources and troops into the conflict to press toward a resolution.

Trump also chafed at the Pentagon’s slow response to his order to ban transgender people from serving in the military. That effort has stalled due to multiple legal challenges.

The Pentagon has appeared to be caught off guard by a number of Trump policy declarations, often made through Twitter. Those include plans that ultimately fizzled to have a big military parade this month and the more recent decision to send thousands of active duty troops to the Southwest border.

Mattis has determinedly kept a low public profile, striving to stay out of the news and out of Trump’s line of fire.

Those close to him have repeatedly insisted that he would not quit, and would have to either be fired or die in the job. But others have noted that a two-year stint as defense chief is a normal and respectable length of service.

Born in Pullman, Washington, Mattis enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1969, later earning a history degree from Central Washington University. He was commissioned as an officer in 1972. As a lieutenant colonel, he led an assault battalion into Kuwait during the first U.S. war with Iraq in 1991.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mattis commanded the Marines who launched an early amphibious assault into Afghanistan and established a U.S. foothold in the Taliban heartland. As the first wave of Marines moved toward Kandahar, Mattis declared, “The Marines have landed, and now we own a piece of Afghanistan.”

Two years later, he helped lead the invasion into Iraq in 2003 as the two-star commander of the 1st Marine Division. As a four-star, he led Central Command from 2010 until his retirement in 2013.

The Trump Administration Wants to Make It Harder to Access Food Stamps

Although congressional Republicans failed to increase work requirements for recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) program (aka food stamps) in the 2018 Farm Bill, on Thursday, the United States Department of Agriculture did what Congress could not: It released a proposed regulatory rule that, if implemented, would, as The Washington Post reports, use the rulemaking powers granted to executive agencies to “force hundreds of thousands more Americans to hold jobs if they want to keep receiving food stamps.”

Over 42 million Americans rely on SNAP benefits to buy groceries to feed themselves and their families. Existing SNAP rules, Vox points out, already include work requirements for adult recipients who are able-bodied, have no dependents and use the program for more than three months in a three-year period. They must work at least 20 hours a week or be enrolled in a job training program.

The USDA, which oversees SNAP, currently allows states to waive those requirements in areas where the unemployment rate is at least 20 percent or greater than the national average of 3.7 percent. The new rules, as proposed by the USDA, would decrease that rate to 7 percent above the current average. They would also limit the use of waivers to a year, as well as limiting the ability to save waivers and use them in the future. The Post reports that “Approximately 2.8 million able-bodied recipients without children or an ailing person in their care were not working in 2016, according to the USDA’s latest numbers.”

Under the new proposal, the Post adds, “Roughly 755,000 [people] live in areas that stand to lose the waivers.”

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue touted the benefits of the rule on a press call, saying, as NPR reported, “These actions will save hard-working taxpayers $15 billion over 10 years.”

He also claimed that the new rules would restore “the dignity of work to a sizeable segment of our population,” and that the changes would make the Farm Bill in general more palatable to President Trump.

Congressional Democrats however, criticized the plan, and, as the Post writes, “questioned whether the administration had a legal basis to authorize it.”

Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich, the ranking member on the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, told the Post that “Congress writes laws, and the administration is required to write rules based on the law.” She added, “Administrative changes should not be driven by ideology. I do not support unilateral and unjustified changes that would take food away from families.”

Republicans have long argued that the approximately $70 billion SNAP program is too expensive, inefficient and discourages Americans from finding work.

Outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., proposed turning the flexible SNAP program into a block grant, with strict limits on funding for each state, and terms set by each state. Others have proposed drug testing recipients, and kicking them off the rolls should they fail. In a September 2015 Politico interview, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said business leaders complain of hiring shortages, telling him they have “a hard time finding people to do the work because they’re doing too good with food stamps, Social Security and all the rest.”

SNAP’s defenders counter that, as Vox has argued, “SNAP is a program ” A 2017 update to a 2013 USDA report said that “[the agency] has seen declines in the rate of trafficking from four percent down to about one percent of benefits over the last 15 years.”

James Ziliak, the director of University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research, told Vox that “The evidence shows that the program actually works. Not all programs work. But SNAP actually is one of those that does what it is supposed to be doing.”

The rule will be posted to the Federal Register, and the public will have 60 days to comment.

We’re Allowed to Celebrate Trump’s Withdrawal From Syria

This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.

“Impulsive, irresponsible, and dangerous.” Such was the way, just this morning on CNN, that Democratic Representative, and House Minority Whip, Steny Hoyer described President Trump’s recent announcement that he’s bringing home the 2,000 U.S. troops currently in Syria. Last night, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham – a true hawk’s hawk – declared on the Senate floor that Trump’s decision is a “disaster,” and a “stain on the honor of the United States.” Two points here, one minor, one major – let’s begin with a semantic quibble: when maintaining national “honor” becomes a last ditch argument for continuing indecisive, perpetual war, perhaps it really is time to leave. And, more importantly, there’s this: anytime that Steny Hoyer and Lindsay Graham are in agreement and share a disdain for a foreign policy decision – even a Trump decision – well, then, the president might just be on to something.

My point is this: the bipartisan interventionist/militarist consensus of centrist Dems and hawkish Republicans has brought only disaster, death, humanitarian crisis, exploding debt and endless war for nearly two decades. For ample evidence see Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, etc. So, why are we still listening to these folks? Well, partly because the United States is an increasingly militarized (ostensible) republic in which a world-leading domestic arms industry all but owns Congress and the corporate media. Then there’s the matter of Trump – a man that the bipartisan Washington establishment simply loathes. Indeed, The Donald can do no right as far as these folks are concerned. Now, few authors – especially serving on active-duty in the military – have been as (constructively) critical of this president as I have, but occasionally the man demonstrates good sense, especially in foreign affairs. Fairness demands that we recognize this, whatever we think of the president’s general personality.

Let us return, then, to Syria, and take Representative Hoyer’s assessment apart one piece at a time. In point of fact there was nothing particularly “impulsive” about President Trump’s announcement. More than six months ago, in May, he announced that the US military would be withdrawing from Syria “like, very soon.” In fact, arguably the only reason American troops have remained in the country as long as they have can be attributed to poor advice from the last “adult-in-the-room,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Candidate Trump ran on a largely anti-interventionist platform, and – during the Obama presidency – regularly tweeted that the US should “stay out” of Syria. So there’s nothing exceptionally impulsive or surprising about Trump’s latest decision on troop withdrawal.

Next, Hoyer called Trump’s decision “irresponsible.” But is it, really? One could, in fact, argue the exact opposite. Besides the originally stated mission to defeat ISIS’s physical caliphate – which has essentially been accomplished – ever more expansive, unachievable, and flimsy justifications for a perpetual US troop presence in Syria have begun to creep in. Trump’s own cabinet members, and the usual (perennially wrong) Beltway insiders have alternately argued that America must stay in Syria to check Russia, counter Iran, deter Turkey, protect the Kurds, and on and on. No one, not Trump nor his “grown-up” advisors, seemed capable of articulating a cogent, sustainable strategy or communicating an exit strategy. And military occupation of a sovereign country – sanctioned neither by the US Congress nor the United Nations – ought to be driven by more than policy inertia.

Only that’s become the norm in US Mideast policy. We stay because we don’t know what else to do – remaining not for positivist goals but out of fear of negativist what-ifs. When policy goals are muddled and end-states unclear, now that’s “irresponsible.” If Trump’s team can’t enunciate a vital national interest in maintaining a military intervention – which they’ve proven time and again that they can’t – then the president has a duty to pull the plug on the latest forever war.

Then there’s Hoyer’s claim – echoed by Senator Graham, every pundit on CNN and MSNBC, and just about every vacuous D.C. analyst – that pulling out of Syria is “dangerous.” It’s not, or, put another way, it’s at least less dangerous than staying. This author has argued for over a year that Syria is the next great Middle East trap, all risk and no reward for the United States. Let’s review just why this is. Here’s what the US stands to gain by staying put in Syria – a temporary denial of Assad and his allies’ forces entering the country’s far east, a limited zone of unsustainable Kurdish autonomy, and tough-guy bragging rights on the international scene.

Up against this are the truly “dangerous” – and arguably unacceptable – risks of perpetual military occupation. As if the latest (unnecessary) iteration of Cold War with Russia in Eastern Europe isn’t treacherous enough, in Syria today US troops (and allies) face-off with Russian troops (and their allies) on an unstable front along the Euphrates River. Despite some limited deconfliction measures in place, we now know that American and Russian soldiers have – according to the special US ambassador – exchanged gunfire “more than once” along this precarious boundary. In one particularly disturbing incident several months back, US airstrikes killed “dozens” of Russian mercenaries in a four-hour battle. Luckily Putin showed restraint after that exchange. Can we count on that in the future? Who knows. What’s certain is that Russia holds the stronger hand in Syria, has been invited there by Assad, and possesses thousands of nuclear weapons. De-escalation seems more than prudent given these undeniable truths.

Then there’s the minor matter of Turkey, a treaty ally with the second-largest army in NATO. President Erdogan has repeatedly threatened US troops, actually invaded Northern Syria, and refuses to recognize any sort of Kurdish autonomous entity (and he never will). All this bluster led the Pentagon, in November, to announce a new strategy of placing outposts along the Turkish border to deter Ankara. Tell me how this risky “strategy” contributes to the stated mission of US troops in Syria – the defeat of ISIS? It doesn’t. Again, plentiful risk, scant reward.

Finally, if 17+ years of indecisive war in the Greater Middle East should have taught Washington anything, it’d be this: prolonged ground-force occupation of sovereign Islamic states or regions is ultimately counterproductive. The longer the US stays in Syria – or anywhere for that matter – the greater the chance of an outbreak of armed insurgency. Turns out (gasp!) that folks don’t appreciate being occupied by a foreign superpower. Sure, the Kurds want our protection, but Eastern Syria is home to more than just a Kurdish minority. Indefinite US military presence could enflame Sunni tribal hostilities, reestablishing that perilous, if ubiquitous, alliance between nationalist Sunnis and Islamist jihadis – something we’ve seen percolate in both Afghanistan and Iraq. And just wait: should such an insurgency break out – and I predict it eventually would – well then the Pentagon and professional DC pundits would tell us we have to stay and sprinkle some magic counterinsurgency dust on that new enemy. It is thus that America’s post-9/11 wars have become self-sustaining quagmires.

US strategy, especially military strategy, should be undergirded by realism, policy sobriety, and facts. And here’s the most relevant, if inconvenient, fact: Bashar al-Assad’s regime – backed by Iran and Russia – has already won the civil war. Nothing the US has done, can do, or is willing to try, will change that salient truth. The endgame in Syria – just as in Afghanistan someday soon – will be messy, uncomfortable, and optically unsettling. Syria will remain what it’s been for half-a-century, a minor “adversary’s” ally stably situated in the Russian and, to a lesser extent, Iranian camp. So it has been and so it shall remain. Assad’s Syria is eminently containable – as is Iran, for that matter – and presents no existential threat or vital interest to U.S. security. Indeed, though Assad is undoubtedly a monster, his secular regime is actually morelikely to suppress transnational terror threats than a divided Syria at war with itself. Extremism feeds on instability and division – precisely what continued American military intervention would ensure.

It is long past time to leave behind childish things – excessive optimism, sentimentality (for the Kurds, for example), and the foolish fantasy of America’s special mission to transform the world – in the interest of sound strategy. Love Trump or hate him, his decision on Syria is neither “impulsive,” “irresponsible,” or unacceptably “dangerous.” The president is delivering on his – albeit muddled – campaign promise to eschew risky interventionism and put American interests first in foreign policy. Let us give credit where credit is due.

U.S. Says Asylum-Seeking Migrants Will Wait in Mexico

WASHINGTON — Immigrants seeking asylum along the southwest border will no longer be released into the U.S. while their cases play out, the Trump administration said on Thursday, forcing them instead to wait in Mexico in one of the most significant moves on immigration since the president took office.

“They will not be able to disappear into the United States,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen said on Thursday in remarks before the House Judiciary Committee. “They will have to wait for approval. If they are granted asylum by a U.S. judge, they will be welcomed into America. If they are not, they will be removed to their home countries.”

The new policy covers immigrants apprehended at border entry points, those who have been interviewed by U.S. immigration authorities and those who have received an immigration court date. It does not apply children traveling alone or to Mexican nationals making asylum claims.

Asylum seekers typically wait years on average before their cases are resolved, allowing them to put down roots in the U.S. while they wait. Many are fitted with electronic ankle monitors and are allowed to work while their cases progress.

Critics say the immigrants are gaming the system. Only about 9 percent of those who apply are actually granted asylum, and administration officials have long said too many migrants make false claims as a way to stay in the U.S.

Discussions between U.S. and Mexico to hammer out the arrangement began well before Mexico’s new president, Manuel Lopez Obrador, took office on Dec. 1. On Thursday, the Mexican foreign ministry said Mexico had agreed to the policy on a temporary basis for humanitarian reasons.

Many details have not been worked out or disclosed. U.S. officials said the changes will be rolled out gradually across the border. Mexican officials will allow the waiting migrants to work and travel.

Homeland Security officials said the Mexican government will allow asylum seekers access to U.S. immigration lawyers, but it was unclear where attorneys and their clients would meet.

Some parts of northern Mexico, particularly across the Rio Grande from Texas, are considered very dangerous due to violence and drug trafficking. The U.S. State Department has warned American citizens not to travel to the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which borders the Texas cities of McAllen and Brownsville.

Forcing thousands of asylum seekers to remain in Mexico possibly for years will put many of them in life-threatening danger, said Jennifer Harbury, a South Texas attorney and human rights advocate.

“Giving them food or work authorization does not protect them from the cartels or the war zone that they would be sent to,” she said. “If Mexico could protect them, they would be protecting their own citizens, and they can’t.”

Immigrant advocates decried the administration’s decision, saying keeping asylum seekers in Mexico while they seek safe haven in the United States is illegal.

“This deal is a stark violation of international law, flies in the face of US laws passed by Congress and is a callous response to the families and individuals running for their lives,” Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International, said in a statement.

American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt said the plan was illegal. “This plan cannot be done lawfully and will result in countless people in life-threatening situations.”

Advocates said Mexico is especially dangerous for LGBT immigrants, and traffickers and kidnappers threaten the well-being of women and children seeking protection in the United States.

More than 100,000 immigrants were caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in October and November. Nearly half of them were traveling in family groups that included children, according to statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

While the number of immigrants caught crossing the border illegally has fallen since the 1990s and early 2000s, U.S. authorities have been grappling in recent years with an increase in children traveling alone or with family.

It is not illegal to cross the border without a visa to apply for asylum. Immigrant advocates say violence in the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is driving people north, and many are coming to seek asylum. Nearly 100,000 immigrants requested initial asylum screenings during the fiscal year ending in September, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Trump administration officials say migrants are seeking asylum at the southern border because they can wait in the United States for months or even years as their cases are decided. They argue that many disappear into the U.S. and forcing them to wait in Mexico will cut down on what administration officials say are false asylum claims.

Thousands of migrants have come up from Central America in recent weeks as part of caravans. President Donald Trump used his national security powers to put in place regulations that denied asylum to anyone they say crossed the border illegally, but a judge has halted that change as a lawsuit progresses.

Nielsen said in a statement the policy would be done legally.

“This will also allow us to focus more attention on those who are actually fleeing persecution,” she said.

The agreement comes two days after the US pledged $10.6 billion for Central America and southern Mexico to promote development so that people did not have to leave their countries.

Experts in Mexico doubted whether Lopez Obrador would face any significant backlash against the decision, which they noted was announced when much of the country had its mind on Christmas shopping and holiday planning.

“These are not humiliating concessions, they’re quite reasonable,” said Federico Estevez, a political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. Lopez Obrador may absorb a cost, but it’s relatively small price to get your neck out of the noose on the immigration issue.”

Trump Is Pulling Out of Syria—Could Afghanistan Be Next?

WASHINGTON — Against the advice of many in his own administration, President Donald Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria. Could a withdrawal from Afghanistan be far behind?

Trump has said his instinct is to quit Afghanistan as a lost cause, but more recently he’s suggested a willingness to stay in search of peace with the Taliban. However, the abruptness with which he turned the page on Syria raises questions about whether combat partners like Iraq and Afghanistan should feel confident that he will not pull the plug on them, too.

“If he’s willing to walk away from Syria, I think we should be concerned about whether Afghanistan is next,” Jennifer Cafarella, the director of intelligence planning at the Institute for the Study of War, said in an interview Wednesday.

The U.S. has been at war in Afghanistan for 17 years and still has about 15,000 troops there helping government troops combat the Taliban. The approximately 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are training and advising Iraqi security forces as they continue to fight Islamic State militants, a battle the U.S. entered in 2014 after IS swept into Iraq from Syria.

Before other officials confirmed the withdrawal decision, Trump tweeted, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.” The aspect of this that he did not address is whether the extremists or others will fill the security vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal to regroup and pose a new threat.

The administration said it intends to continue combatting Islamic State extremists globally and could return to Syria if necessary. Still, critics launched a barrage of questions about the implications of Trump’s decision, including whether it opens the door for Turkish forces to attack the Syrian Kurds who had partnered with the U.S.

Kori Schake, deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote on the Atlantic.com website Wednesday that the Syria decision ought to unsettle every ally that relies on U.S. security assurances.

“The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan ought to be very, very worried,” she wrote. “For if Syria can be so lightly written off, the fight arbitrarily declared won, what is the argument for continuing to assist Iraq — where ISIS is even more defeated? And if Trump has so little interest in stabilizing security and assisting governance in Syria, how can Afghanistan have confidence that he won’t make the same decision about them, when the fight there is costlier and progress less evident?”

These and other questions about the Trump decision and its broader implications were on the minds of many in Congress. Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, denounced what he called a betrayal of the Syrian Kurds.

“Now the President seems content to forsake their trust and abandon them to a potentially bloody conflict with Turkey,” Reed said. “This decision also significantly increases the security risks to our key regional partners in Israel, Iraq and Jordan.”

Trump has argued for a Syria withdrawal since he was a presidential candidate in 2016, and he has repeated his view several times since taking office.

On Thursday, Trump defended his decision, saying on Twitter: “Getting out of Syria was no surprise. I’ve been campaigning on it for years, and six months ago, when I very publicly wanted to do it, I agreed to stay longer.”

He added: “Does the USA want to be the Policeman of the Middle East, getting NOTHING but spending precious lives and trillions of dollars protecting others who, in almost all cases, do not appreciate what we are doing? Do we want to be there forever?”

Still, the decision appeared to catch many in his administration by surprise; Pentagon officials offered no details on the timing or pace of the withdrawal, nor could they square it with numerous statements by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis about the importance of remaining in Syria to assure stability.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and typically a Trump supporter, said he was “blindsided” by the decision and called it “a disaster in the making.” He said, “The biggest winners in this are ISIS and Iran.”

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said the withdrawal would be a “grave error with broader implications” beyond the fight against IS. He called it “one more example of how the United States is not a reliable partner.”

Just last week, the U.S. special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk, said U.S. troops would remain in Syria even after the Islamic State militants were driven from their strongholds.

“I think it’s fair to say Americans will remain on the ground after the physical defeat of the caliphate, until we have the pieces in place to ensure that that defeat is enduring,” McGurk told reporters on Dec. 11. “Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished. Defeating a physical caliphate is one phase of a much longer-term campaign.”

And two weeks ago, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. still has a long way to go in training local Syrian forces to prevent a resurgence of IS and stabilize the country. He said it will take 35,000 to 40,000 local troops in northeastern Syria to maintain security over the long term, but only about 20 percent of them have been trained.

Putin Issues Chilling Warning on Rising Threat of Nuclear War

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a chilling warning Thursday about the rising threat of a nuclear war, saying “it could lead to the destruction of civilization as a whole and maybe even our planet” — and putting the blame squarely on the U.S.

Speaking at his annual news conference, Putin scoffed at Western claims he wants to dominate the world and said Western countries are antagonizing Russia for their own domestic reasons, and at their own peril. He dismissed claims of Russian interference abroad, from a nerve agent poisoning in Britain to an alleged effort to infiltrate the U.S. National Rifle Association.

Instead he sought to paint himself as the world’s protector. Pointing at the U.S. intention to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, Treaty, Putin warned that if the U.S. puts intermediate-range missiles in Europe, Russia will be forced to take countermeasures.

“We are witnessing the breakup of the arms control system,” Putin said, noting the U.S. plan to opt out of the INF Treaty and its reluctance to negotiate the extension of the New START agreement. U.S. officials say the withdrawal from the INF was prompted by Russian violations of the treaty.

Putin noted that Western analysts are talking about the possibility of using low-yield nuclear weapons.

“There is a trend of lowering the threshold” of using nuclear weapons, Putin said. “Lowering the threshold could lead to a global nuclear catastrophe.”

“We will have to ensure our security,” he said. “And they shouldn’t squeak later about us gaining unilateral advantages. We aren’t seeking advantages, we are trying to preserve the balance and ensure our security.”

Putin also emphasized that the U.S. is pondering the use of ballistic missiles with conventional warheads, saying that the launch of such a missile could be mistaken for the launch of a nuclear-tipped one and trigger a global catastrophe.

“If that happens, it could lead to the destruction of civilization as a whole and maybe even our planet,” he said.

Putin also noted that the U.S. appears to show little interest in extending the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, which expires in 2021.

“You aren’t interested, you don’t need it? OK, we know how to ensure our security,” he said.

Putin said it’s the U.S., not Russia, that’s aspiring to dominate the world. He pointed at U.S. annual defense spending exceeding $700 billion, comparing it with Russia’s military budget of $46 billion.

He had one nice thing to say about the United States, however: He welcomed President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. military from Syria.

The U.S. “has done the right thing,” Putin said, reaffirming the long-held Russian argument that the U.S. presence in Syria was illegitimate because it wasn’t vetted by the U.N. Security Council or approved by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government. The pullout is also likely to strengthen Russia’s role in Syria’s future.

Putin said accusations of Russian interference in the West were trumped-up.

He insisted that a Russian woman in U.S. custody has not carried out any mission for the Russian government, even though she has pleaded guilty to acting as a covert agent of the government. Putin claimed that Maria Butina — accused of trying to infiltrate the NRA and American conservative circles around the time of Trump’s election — made the guilty plea because of the threat of a long prison sentence in the case, which Putin described as fabricated.

He described British accusations of Russian involvement in the poisoning of a former spy in Salisbury as part of Western efforts to isolate and weaken Russia. However, he voiced readiness to normalize ties after the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March.

Putin showed no sign of backing down from Russia’s stance on Ukraine. He accused his Ukrainian counterpart of provoking a naval standoff with Russia to boost his electoral prospects. The Russian coast guard fired upon and seized three Ukrainian naval vessels and 24 seamen when they tried to sail from the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov in what U.S. and its NATO allies condemned as unjustified use of force by Russia.

On the economy, Putin hailed another year of Russian growth after a previous period of stagnation.

Russia’s gross domestic product is set to grow by 1.8 percent this year, while industrial output has grown faster at 3 percent, he said.

The Russian president noted that the nation’s hard currency reserves have increased from $432 billion at the start of the year to $464 billion now.

The positive statistics follow a difficult period in recent years when Russia’s economy has suffered a combined blow of low oil prices and Western sanctions.

Russia’s economy registered 1.5-percent growth last year following the two-year stagnation.

Putin pledged that the government will create incentives to speed up growth.

Steve Mnuchin Has a Gift for Ruining Americans’ Lives

The following is an adapted excerpt from the new book Fat Cat: The Steve Mnuchin Story by Rebecca Burns and David Dayen (Strong Arm Press, 2018), available for purchase from Amazon and IndieBound.

In February, two months after the Trump administration pulled off one of the biggest wealth transfers in U.S. history, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin gave a public lecture on economic policy at UCLA. To his apparent surprise, it did not go well.

Mnuchin was a key architect of the GOP’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts, passed last December, which over the next decade will funnel 83 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent of U.S. earners—including to himself. With a net worth of half a billion dollars, Mnuchin and his wife are in the top one-one hundredth of one percent.

Arriving on UCLA’s leafy campus, he was greeted by student protesters who had dressed as Marie Antoinette and were serving cake to passersby. It was a nice touch, but the dramatization was hardly necessary: Mnuchin’s own performance quickly betrayed him as a man as aggressively out of touch with his audience as an 18th-century monarch staring down starving peasants.

Introduced as a man who is “a financier in his DNA”—a reference to his Goldman Sachs pedigree—Mnuchin looked taken aback when his arrival on stage drew hisses from the audience. “This is a new experience for me,” he said petulantly. “I usually go speak to people who want to listen to me speak.”

Nonetheless, Mnuchin pressed on with his standard talking points about tax reform. After years of stagnant wages, he proclaimed, more than 4.5 million workers were finally getting a boost this year thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Not an actual raise, mind you, but the one-time bonuses that Republicans have been touting relentlessly since the bill’s passage. Never mind that the handful of $1,000 checks given out by large companies amount to a fraction of their tax cuts savings, or that most workers at the bottom of the bracket will pay more in taxes by 2027, regardless of whether they ever get a raise. Let them eat one-time bonuses.

The audience continued their subdued heckling and, after about five minutes, Mnuchin began to unravel. “Who hissed?” he snapped awkwardly.

“Can I at least get a hand on who hissed on that one?”

“If you were getting paychecks in February, when your withholdings went down, you wouldn’t be hissing.”

About seven minutes in, the peasants began revolting. One person screamed that the tax bill was “the politics of cruelty” and was carried out by security. Matters grew even worse when Mnuchin’s interlocutor for the conversation, Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal, took a shot at the aforementioned bonuses, asking, “What would you rather have? Would you rather have a one-time bonus or a consistent wage increase over the next couple of years?” Mnuchin accused the public radio host of bias. “For people who are getting these thousand-dollar bonuses, these are not crumbs,” the multi-millionaire protested.

All of this culminated in a comically preventable PR disaster for Mnuchin: he tried to block UCLA from releasing video of the event. Of course, this had the opposite effect of ensuring that the otherwise low-profile incident remained in the news cycle for weeks. After several news organizations filed public-records requests, the university posted the video nearly three weeks later, saying that it had received Mnuchin’s consent. The massive, unforced error seems to have been caused only by the treasury secretary’s vanity.

One might expect that a man who posed, smirking, with a sheet of newly minted $1 bills—and delighted at the inevitable comparison to a James Bond villain—might be more prepared to own his overwhelming unpopularity. But this isn’t the first time that Mnuchin has shrunk from the spotlight turned on him through his own imiserating policies.

As chairman of OneWest Bank, Mnuchin began having his address scrubbed from the internet after anti-foreclosure protesters marched on his 9-bedroom, 10-bathroom Bel-Air mansion in 2011.

“Without the … large LAPD presence on scene, I do not think the protest would have been as placid as it was,” Mnuchin pled in a 2014 divorce filing in which he asked the judge to keep his address private. “I can only imagine the psychological harm that would have come to our minor children if they were at the house to see over 100 people protesting at their home.”

Never mind that the victims of OneWest’s operation included seniors reportedly foreclosed on over $0.27, and a family with young twin sons evicted abruptly while still in the process of applying for a loan modification. Won’t someone please think of the children?

Stories like these earned Mnuchin, who ran OneWest from 2009 to 2015, the nickname “Foreclosure King.” This apparently wounded him: During his confirmation hearings, he complained to senators that he has “been maligned as taking advantage of others’ hardships in order to earn a buck. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

This kind of self-righteous indignation might be no more than a bit of political theater on the part of someone used to getting his hands dirty. But it’s equally possible that over the course of a preternaturally fortunate career, built through no discernible virtue of his own, Steven Terner Mnuchin has grown an extraordinarily thin skin.

Born into Wall Street royalty, Mnuchin ascended easily from a job in the mortgage department of Goldman Sachs into the brave new early-aughts world of hedge funds. There, he assembled a consortium of investors to buy a bank that was imploding (thanks to the type of financial products he peddled for years at Goldman) and proceeded to run that bank abominably for a few years before selling it to a bigger bank at enormous profit. A series of train wrecks, in other words, from which he has always managed to jump clear.

That trajectory inspired one of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s better quips. “Steve Mnuchin is the Forrest Gump of the financial crisis,” she said in a statement after his appointment was announced in November 2016.

Indeed, like the Best Picture-winning tale of Tom Hanks’ humble everyman, Mnuchin’s story has a compelling sense of continuity to it. The 1994 film starts and ends with the image of a white feather floating through the air; Mnuchin got his own, slightly less whimsical, recurrence when the same protesters who marched on his Bel-Air mansion in 2011 returned on a bleak January day in 2017, the day before his confirmation hearings, carrying signs that read “Stop Trump’s Foreclosure King.”

They were led by Rose Gudiel, a homecare worker who fought a years-long battle with OneWest to save the Los Angeles home where she lives with her parents, husband and young daughter. The trouble began in 2009, when the family missed a mortgage payment following the devastating murder of Gudiel’s brother. Two weeks later, the family got the money together and attempted to send in the payment, but OneWest refused to accept it and started the foreclosure process. The bank relented only after the 2011 protest at Mnuchin’s house.

“Mnuchin doesn’t care about ordinary people,” Gudiel told the rain-soaked crowd six years later.

What’s more, Mnuchin doesn’t appear to understand just how many ordinary people revile him and the ongoing economic ruin he represents in their lives. In comparison to some of the career white supremacists on the Trump team, the confirmation of “hedge fund guys” like Mnuchin was welcomed in some quarters as a moderating force: He’s been described in our papers of record as “pragmatic” and “non-ideological.” It’s possible, given the treasury secretary’s shock at his cold reception at UCLA, that even he believes himself to be a clear-eyed technocrat rather than a Wall Street ideologue.

But the intense condemnation from people like Gudiel, or Los Angeles county health worker Robert Strong, who left a bag of horse manure on the secretary’s doorstep on Christmas Eve with the note “We’re returning the ‘gift’ of the Christmas tax bill… Warmest wishes, The American people,” suggests that most of us understand exactly which side Mnuchin is on—even if he himself does not.

The King of Foreclosures

Mnuchin’s biggest coup, and the start of his reign as foreclosure king, came in 2009. In a generous deal with the FDIC, Mnuchin led an investment team that bought the predatory lender IndyMac, saddled with tens of thousands of failing mortgages, for $1.65 billion. The FDIC had a standard deal for buyers of crisis-era banks; they would cover all losses above the first 20 percent on loan defaults.

Mnuchin, who became CEO and later chairman, treated this as a money-printing machine: his bank, renamed OneWest, could foreclose on homeowners, harvest fees for appraisals and inspections and late payments, and get protected by a federal backstop.

The FDIC lost at least $13 billion on IndyMac; the bank made $3 billion in profits in the five years after it was purchased by Mnuchin and company, much of that coming directly from the FDIC in loss-sharing costs. In 2014, CIT Group announced an agreement to acquire OneWest Bank for $3.4 billion. For six years of ownership, Mnuchin’s personal payout was a reported $10.9 million.

According to a Wall Street Journal analysis, Mnuchin’s predatory lender OneWest Bank started foreclosure proceedings on some 137,000 homes nationwide between early 2009 and the middle of 2015.

Some of the worst foreclosure horror stories involve OneWest’s involvement with reverse mortgages, a product marketed to an especially vulnerable group—elderly individuals and couples on fixed incomes.

A 103-year-old, Myrtle Lewis, slipped into foreclosure after a one-month lapse in her homeowner’s insurance coverage. A 92-year-old widow from Florida was evicted by Financial Freedom, OneWest’s reverse mortgage arm, over a 27-cent underpayment.

Sandra Jolley, a whistleblower who eventually filed a complaint against Financial Freedom, first fought the company over a reverse mortgage sold to her parents in 2005.

At the time, Jolley’s father was dying from terminal cancer and heavily medicated for pain; her mother was in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease. A long-term care salesman “knew exactly what he was looking at,” according to Jolley, and pushed the couple into a reverse mortgage. She says it was “the last thing they needed.” Interest from an investment portfolio covered their bills, and their mortgage was almost paid off. In the meantime, the couple had built up more than $400,000 of equity in the house in Thousand Oaks, California, where they had lived for 35 years.

Through the 2005 reverse mortgage, Financial Freedom paid Jolley’s parents a lump sum of $80,000—a loan that came due, with fees and interest, when her father died later the same year. Jolley had moved back in with her parents as a caregiver, but did not learn of the loan until after her father’s death. That started a protracted legal battle to hang on to the house.

After connecting with other consumers, Jolley went on to document more than a dozen ways that Financial Freedom had allegedly violated federal and state regulations, including refusing to allow heirs to repay the loan balance, backdating documents, force placing insurance, and illegally accelerating foreclosure and auction following the death of a borrower.

Jolley says that Financial Freedom repeatedly dodged her attempts to communicate with them and repay the loan. Finally, she says the company sold the house at auction, giving her just two days’ notice. The buyer was Colony America—a single-family rental company owned by another member of Trump’s inner circle, Tom Barrack. After a year of paying rent on the house her parents used to own, Jolley decided to cut her losses and move away. Her mother died in 2011.

The reverse mortgage “completely destroyed our family,” says Jolley. “I didn’t have time to grieve my father for six years.” A years-long legal battle against Financial Freedom cost nearly $100,000, and “trapped my mother in a two-story house that was unsafe for her, with me as her full-time caregiver, because we couldn’t access the equity in our home.”

But through her ordeal, Jolley began documenting the depths of abuses in the reverse mortgage industry. She set up a website where reverse mortgage borrowers and their families could contact her and offered them free consultation, often helping others succeed where she had failed. Last year, Jolley launched her own organization, Consumer Advocates Against Reverse Mortgage Abuse, to advocate for improved regulations.

“I learned that Financial Freedom was the absolute worst lender and servicer,” says Jolley. “They would sell these things to anyone with a beating heart. And when Mnuchin took over, their aggression only got worse.”

In 2014, CIT Group announced an agreement to acquire OneWest Bank for $3.4 billion. For six years of ownership, Mnuchin’s personal payout was a reported $10.9 million.

The 2015 merger of OneWest with CIT, which Mnuchin helped engineer, put the combined institution over a key regulatory threshold of $50 billion in assets, requiring bank officials to clear the unusual hurdle of public hearings staged by the OCC.

Armed with data on OneWest’s foreclosure and banking practices, advocacy groups like the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC) turned a typically dry, procedural hearing into an indictment of the bank’s record. Sandra Jolley and other reverse mortgage victims were among those who testified against the merger, citing OneWest’s ownership of sleazy reverse mortgage company Financial Freedom.

“It was probably the largest protest of a bank merger in U.S. history,” says CRC’s deputy director, Kevin Stein.

Community groups also charged that the bank was failing in its obligations to communities of color—both by locating its branches overwhelmingly in white neighborhoods, and by putting forward a woefully inadequate plan to increase lending in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. One of the factors regulators must consider when banks merge is whether the institutions are meeting the requirements of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a federal law passed in 1977 in response to the history of redlining in black and Latino communities.

As part of its application, OneWest had outlined a plan for $5 billion of lending in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods over four years. CRC Executive Director Paulina Gonzalez charged during the hearings that the effect of the public subsidies the bank had received from the FDIC and TARP funds “dwarfs the measly CRA plan offered by the bank and dwarfs the public benefit of this merger.”

The merger went through regardless. In November 2016, CRC and Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California filed a fair housing complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, alleging that OneWest Bank had engaged in discriminatory lending. According to data submitted by OneWest to federal regulators, black and Latino borrowers were significantly underrepresented in the bank’s lending. In 2015, for example, just 8.4 percent of OneWest’s mortgage loans in Southern California went to Latino borrowers, even though they comprised 22.4 percent of borrowers across the industry and 43 percent of the area’s population.

While new loans were few and far between, the majority of OneWest’s foreclosures in Southern California took place in neighborhoods of color. “The foreclosure to loan ratio in these neighborhoods was 9:1,” notes Stein. The coalition’s redlining complaint is still pending with HUD.

Regulatory Meltdown

Mnuchin’s special blend of incompetence and ill intent leaves the field wide open for rampant Wall Street deregulation. In an April report, the agency boasted that it had already reduced its regulatory agenda by nearly 100 regulations. As with most reports that Mnuchin has had a hand in, the math here is a little unclear. But there are several areas where Treasury or related bodies have already pulled off some dramatic slash-and-burn.

Take the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a 10-member body created by Dodd-Frank to identify and constrain risk in the financial system. Although Treasury only has one vote, the secretary chairs FSOC and tends to have outsized sway. In that capacity, Treasury has pushed successfully to change the designation criteria for “systemically important financial institutions” that are subject to enhanced supervision. The process began with a vote to de-designate AIG, freeing the insurance giant from stricter prudential standards a decade after the Fed rescued it from bankruptcy.

“The original test for designation was, ‘if a bank got in trouble, would it create a threat to the financial system?’” says Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform. “They’ve changed that to, ‘do we think it is likely to get in trouble?’ even though the whole point was to regulate banks before they’re about to fail.”

The Community Reinvestment Act is also in the crosshairs of Mnuchin’s Treasury. After months of alluding to plans to “modernize” the CRA, in April Treasury released a report proposing sweeping changes to its implementation. Among other suggestions, Treasury wishes to expand the “universe of CRA-eligible activities” and increase the “clarity and flexibility” of CRA examinations, even though banks almost always receive passing grades from regulators as it is.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), an independent bureau within Treasury that charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks, is now taking the lead on rewriting CRA rules, based on Treasury’s guidance. Though Trump’s other banking regulators have blanched at undermining regulations to ensure low-income communities aren’t left behind by the financial system, the OCC under its new head Joseph Otting is thundering ahead on its own.

Who is Joseph Otting? His previous experience includes—wait for it—helming OneWest bank during its 2015 merger. This put both OneWest CEOs in its short history, prior to being swallowed up by CIT, in key regulatory positions in the government.

A career banker without an advanced degree or any previous government experience, Otting has made no bones about where his sympathies lie. “I like bankers,” was his opening line in an April speech before the Independent Community Bankers of America. In what’s now standard nomenclature for Trump regulators, Otting went on to describe banks as his “customers,” and his own job as improving “responsiveness” to them. That responsiveness was on full display when, in the wake of the Wells Fargo fake account scandal, Otting’s OCC investigated sales practices at major banks and found over 250 separate problems that needed fixing, including several banks opening accounts in their customers’ names without consent. But OCC refused to make these findings public, instead asking politely that the banks please refrain from lawbreaking if they can help it.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has broad leeway to make far-reaching deregulatory changes. In August 2017, the OCC announced that it was beginning the process of reforming the Volcker rule, another Dodd-Frank regulation that aims to prevent banks that accept taxpayer-insured deposits from making risky market bets. According to Reuters, the changes being considered include shifting the burden of proof for compliance to regulators and narrowing the definition of which funds are considered risky.

This year, the OCC has also proposed amendments to the rules governing banks’ leverage ratio, or how much debt they can assume relative to their capital. After lifting a longstanding prohibition on partnerships between national banks and payday lender ACE Cash Express, giving the chain a means to circumvent state-level interest rate caps, in May the OCC issued guidance essentially encouraging banks to start hawking their own payday loans. And in July, the OCC began accepting applications for so-called “fintech” firms—online lenders and other tech companies—to acquire national bank charters, which could immunize them from state consumer protection laws. The move came hours after Mnuchin’s Treasury Department released a report recommending the action.

“It’s my viewpoint that consumers should have more choices,” said Otting in a press briefing.

All this is shaping up to be Mnuchin’s next “Forrest Gump” moment. He and Otting are within arm’s reach of unraveling the post-2008 rules that hemmed them in, albeit insufficiently, as bankers. But the assault on key regulatory cornerstones like the Community Reinvestment Act signals that they’re preparing to go much further. All told, Mnuchin’s Treasury could easily roll back the clock on not just years, but decades, of reforms.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

That Time Democrats Secretly Used Russian Social Media Tactics

Remember those dubious Twitter and Facebook tactics the Russians reportedly employed to influence the United States’ 2016 election? You know, the ones that Democrats have been railing against for a couple of years. Turns out that the Democratic Party may be furious about their possible impact on American democracy, but isn’t above using them.

According to The New York Times, “a group of Democratic tech experts” mimicked Russia’s social media tactics in the infamous 2017 Alabama senate race between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones. Jones ultimately beat accused sex offender Moore by a narrow margin, earning Democrats another seat in the Senate.

Just a year after the Alabama special election, a secret project which, according to one of the participants, aimed at garnering a better understanding of Russian methods, has come to light. As reported by the Times:

An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”

The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says. …

The project had a budget of just $100,000, in a race that cost approximately $51 million, including the primaries, according to Federal Election Commission records. … Despite its small size, the Alabama project brought together some prominent names in the world of political technology. The funding came from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who has sought to help Democrats catch up with Republicans in their use of online technology.

The money passed through American Engagement Technologies, run by Mikey Dickerson, the founding director of the United States Digital Service, which was created during the Obama administration to try to upgrade the federal government’s use of technology. Sara K. Hudson, a former Justice Department fellow now with Investing in Us, a tech finance company partly funded by Mr. Hoffman, worked on the project, along with [Jonathon Morgan, the chief executive of the cyber security firm New Knowledge].

Due to the limited scope of the effort, it’s considered highly unlikely it had a significant impact on the 2017 election. However, as the Times’ piece points out, the cause for concern lies in whether future U.S. elections will be determined by questionable tactics such as these. The Alabama incident illustrates that it’s not just foreign entities that are invested in stacking the odds in favor of their interests. As Republican consultant Dan Bayens put it, “You’ve got Russia, which showed folks how to do it, you’ve got consultants willing to engage in this type of behavior and political leaders who apparently find it futile to stop it.”