Chris Hedges's Blog, page 399

Sheryl Sandberg Needs to Log Off

Last week, Laura Loomer, a minor right-wing internet celebrity, chained herself to the front door of Twitter’s Manhattan offices. But her handcuffs only attached to one of the double doors, allowing Twitter employees to simply pass through the other. They ducked past her with the look of embarrassed nausea that well-to-do urbanites reserve for the homeless and megaphone preachers of the gospel.

People began livestreaming. Loomer, who had just been banned from Twitter for some stupidly racist provocations (and, likely also, a history of promoting false-flag conspiracies about mass shootings, among other rhetorical offenses), did have a megaphone, as well as several foam-core posters of—what else—her own tweets, which she’d mounted in the transom window above the door. Some security or maintenance workers appeared with a ladder and took them down. “You banned my Twitter, and now you’re actually trying to steal my tweets in real life!” she called through the megaphone. A bemused worker seemed to consider it for a moment, then leaned the poster against the wall beside her and headed back inside.

Two hours later, the police freed her with a bolt cutter. She’d gotten cold, and she’d lost the key.

Most right-wingers are content to keep their activism largely online or within the studios of Fox News, where they can comfortably scam huge salaries by feeding pre-chewed conservative pabulum to their paranoid elders, but Loomer is committed to a more antic sort of graft. A bizarro Abbie Hoffman for our fascist time, she first came to my attention when she interrupted a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, objecting to its depiction of the eponymous dictator as a Trump-like figure.

It’s not entirely clear she makes any money from these performances. Loomer exists in the world, a real woman, flesh and blood. She gets her hair mussed. She gets angry. She hurts. Yet even in the Kaufmanesque synecdoche of her protest, she enacted the reality of our online lives: a tragically alone figure mewling furiously yet helplessly into a strangely cacophonous void.

This makes me think of Sheryl Sandberg, the second-in-command at Facebook, a once-sainted figure for the meritocratic class who has been buffeted by bad publicity and political scrutiny over the social media network’s role in disseminating political disinformation.

The internet, and social media in particular, has always been far kinder to reactionaries than their insistence they are hemmed in and harassed by omnipotent liberal censors would have you believe. While the Trumpist right has deep roots in the history of American conservativism, there’s no doubt the advent of online has been an enormous boon to the once-lunatic fringe. The sorts of ravings that used to be confined to bar-stool prophets—that terrorists disguised as Guatemalan fieldworkers are sneaking across the border; that mass shootings are false-flag pretexts for gun roundups—are now an indelible part of the mainstream discourse.

The people who run Facebook (and Twitter, for that matter) know their website is full of shit with wild conspiracy theories and scam health and nutrition products—it’s fake news, to coin a phrase. They also don’t care, as long as it drives engagement.

Even if its direct “influence-elections-through-posting” aspects are almost certainly overblown, Russiagate has drawn scrutiny to the sheer volume of total and utter crap on social media, to the ubiquitous presence of malicious actors and false advertising, and to a policy of deliberate passivity at the highest echelons of the major firms. Although they have made occasional, desultory efforts to clean up their information environments, the plain truth is that Twitter and Facebook don’t mind—and effectively encourage—the proliferation of the vilest political slanders and most despicable confidence schemes.

In the ensuing backlash, Facebook has pursued a scorched-earth campaign against its enemies, real and perceived. “Facebook,” The New York Times reported in November, “employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.” We have subsequently learned Sandberg herself ordered her own communications team to research Soros. Her website, of course, has been a primary vector for the anti-Semitic right-wing conspiracy that Soros is the Svengali of the international left, a figure straight out of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

We do not expect corporations to act morally; we barely expect them to act legally. But Facebook is a top-down organization with two of the most recognized—and in the case of Sandberg, lauded—executives in America. The fact that this crisis communications strategy bears her direct imprimatur is awfully damning. Mark Zuckerberg was raised Jewish, then called himself an atheist until it became a publicity liability, and now espouses a vague “belief in something is better than belief in nothing” by way of an aesthetic Buddhism that was, for many years, mostly associated with Hollywood celebrities.

Sandberg, on the other hand, has far more publicly embraced Judaism and a Jewish identity. After the sudden death of her husband in 2015, she observed not just shiva, the weeklong period of mourning common even among largely secular Jews, but also wrote of observing shloshim, the 30-day period of ritual bereavement followed by the more observant and pious. In 2017, after a round of executive orders from President Donald Trump strictly curtailing immigration and entry into the U.S., she wrote of her great-great-grandmother fleeing religious persecution in the Pale of Settlement, which she linked directly to the plight of contemporary immigrants.

She has, in other words, embraced a public Jewish identity, draped herself in our history of flight and cloaked herself in our traditions of grief, even as her platform has reintroduced some of the world’s oldest and most despicable calumnies to the public sphere. What’s worse: She was fully aware of their revitalized currency, and she used them to her advantage the moment it became convenient to do so.

Sandberg at first denied that Facebook had done any of this, and she denied knowing anything about Definers Public Affairs, the too-on-the-nose name of the Republican oppo firm her team had hired. Later, she softly walked this back, admitting that certain materials they’d gathered may have been presented to her. A subordinate—already on his way out—fell on his sword and took the blame.

Through this ongoing unraveling, Sandberg—or at least whoever writes her copy—has maintained an air of studied incredulity: that anyone could imagine she, or the company she runs, could ever do anything wrong. Perhaps, she suggests, they missed a few things here and there through inattention, but they mean well, and they care about the truth.

I think she is sincere in this, even as I firmly believe the people who run social media companies know and encourage this shit. Most people manage to function just fine with their minds stuffed from ear to sinus with a pool table of careening, unreconcilable notions. Some of them even run billion-dollar internet corporations, which could not begin to function if their users were not likewise hopelessly unable to sink and eliminate any of the clacking, scattering billiard balls of credulous beliefs. She is, to use another metaphor, and bearing in mind that social media is potentially addictive, the famous cautionary tale: the drug dealer who is high on her own supply.

I suspect it’s necessary for the success of the whole edifice, which would otherwise collapse beneath the weight of its own absurdity.

After Facebook’s head of security told the board of directors the company had failed to detect and deter foreign disinformation efforts and the board took Facebook to task, she reportedly screamed at him: “You threw us under the bus!”

It is the cry of a person who cannot be wrong, only wronged, chained to the door of the online machine that made her, calling into the gathering cold that its betrayal is ruining her life.

Robert Reich: Trump’s Economic Nationalism Is Crashing and Burning

Donald Trump’s “America first” economic nationalism is finally crashing into the reality of America’s shareholder-first global capitalism.

Last week, General Motors announced it would cut about 14,000 jobs, most of them in the politically vital swing states of Michigan and Ohio.

This doesn’t quite square with the giant $1.5 trillion tax cut Trump and the Republicans in Congress enacted last December, whose official rationale was to help big corporations make more investments in America and thereby create more jobs. Trump told Ohio residents “don’t sell your homes,” because lost automaking jobs “are all coming back.”

GM got a nice windfall from the tax cut. The company has already saved more than $150 million this year. But some of those Ohio residents probably should have sold their homes.

Trump is (or is trying to appear) furious, tweeting up a storm of threats against GM, including taking away its federal subsidies.

In reality, GM gets very few direct subsidies. Prior to the tax cut, the biggest gift GM got from the government was a bailout in 2009 of more than $50 billion.

But neither last year’s tax cut nor the 2009 bailout required GM to create or preserve jobs in America. Both government handouts simply assumed that, as former GM CEO Charles Erwin “Engine” Wilson put it when he was nominated as secretary of defense by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”

Yet much has changed since 1953. Then, GM was the largest employer in America and had only a few operations around the rest of the world. Now, GM is a global corporation that makes and sells just about everywhere.

Moreover, in the 1950s a third of America’s workforce was unionized, and GM was as accountable to the United Auto Workers as it was to GM’s shareholders. That’s why, in the 1950s, GM’s typical worker received $35 an hour (in today’s dollars).

Today, GM’s typical American worker earns a fraction of that. The bargaining clout of the United Auto Workers has been weakened not only by automation but also by the ease with which GM can get cheaper labor abroad.

In 2010, when GM emerged from the bailout and went public again, it even boasted to Wall Street that it was making 43 percent of its cars in places where labor cost less than $15 an hour, while in North America it could now pay “lower-tiered” wages and benefits for new employees.

So this year, when the costs of producing many of its cars in Ohio and Detroit got too high (due in part to Trump’s tariffs on foreign steel) GM simply decided to shift more production to Mexico in order to boost profits.

In light of GM’s decision, Trump is also demanding that GM close one of its plants in China.

But this raises a second reality of shareholder-first global capitalism that’s apparently been lost on Trump: GM doesn’t make many cars in China for export to the United States. Almost all of the cars it makes in China are for sale there.

In fact, GM is now making and selling more cars in China than it does in the United States. “China is playing a key role in the company’s strategy,” says GM CEO Mary Barra.

Even as Trump has escalated his trade war with China, GM has invested in state-of-the-art electrification, autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing technologies there.

Which brings us to a third fallacy behind Trump’s “America first” economic nationalism. Trump accuses China of stealing technology from American businesses. But big American corporations like GM are eager to invest in China regardless.

In shareholder-first global capitalism, technology doesn’t belong to any nation. It goes wherever the profits are.

“Making America great again” has nothing to do with making American corporations great again. Big American-based corporations are doing wonderfully well, as are their shareholders.

The real challenge is to make American workers great again. They don’t just need any job. They need good jobs, akin to those that GM’s unionized workers had a half-century ago. Most Americans haven’t had a raise in decades, considering inflation.

The difference between China and America is that big Chinese companies are either state-owned or dependent on capital from government-run financial institutions. This means they exist to advance China’s national interests, including more and better jobs for the Chinese people.

American corporations exist to advance the interests of their shareholders, who aren’t prepared to sacrifice profits for more and better jobs for Americans.

If Trump were serious about his aims, he’d try to reduce the chokehold of Wall Street investors on American corporations while strengthening the hand of American labor unions.

Don’t hold your breath.

Protests Engulf Wisconsin Capital Amid GOP Power Grab

As Wisconsin Republicans voted to plow ahead with a sweeping package of legislation that would allow outgoing Gov. Scott Walker to strip significant authority from Democratic governor-elect Tony Evers, outraged Wisconsinites flooded the state capitol Monday night to denounce the GOP’s brazen attempt to subvert the will of the voters and “undo democracy itself.”

“This isn’t a bill. This is a coup,” Randy Bryce—aka the “Iron Stache”—said before Wisconsin’s Joint Committee on Finance, which deliberated and ultimately voted along party lines to advance the Republican plan, which seeks to transfer many of Evers’ crucial executive powers to the GOP-dominated legislature. A final vote on the plan is expected as early as Tuesday.

Apparently lacking the courage to speak on behalf of their legislation—or fearing the immense grassroots backlash—the bill’s Republican sponsors didn’t bother to show up to the lame-duck hearing.

Unlike some of their representatives, thousands of Wisconsinites braved the freezing weather and turned out in force, crowding the inside of the capitol building with chants of “Respect our vote!” and rallying outside to denounce the Republicans’ last-ditch power grab.

“They are terrified that democracy is returning to Wisconsin,” The Nation‘s John Nichols, a Wisconsin native, declared in a speech from the steps of the capitol building. “They are terrified that 2018 is not the end of anything, but only the beginning.”

Watch a full video of the rally:

“The only way they can pull this off is if nobody finds out about it,” Ben Wikler, another Wisconsin native and MoveOn.org’s Washington director, said at Monday night’s demonstration. “I was texting right before the show with some national reporters. They can’t believe people are coming out in this weather once they hear how cold it is. We’re proving them wrong right now. This is what democracy looks like.”

I’d be tweeting more from this awesome rally if my thumb weren’t an icicle pic.twitter.com/ooJobQsnM9

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) December 4, 2018

Illuminators with a concise and on-point message tonight. pic.twitter.com/Q5SrLgKysO

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) December 4, 2018

Power to the people #WIpowergrab pic.twitter.com/UxrsE6J2O9

— Rep. Melissa Sargent (@RepSargent) December 4, 2018

If approved by the state legislature, the Republican plan would force Evers to implement Wisconsin’s Trump-approved Medicaid work requirements, stop him from banning guns in the state capitol, and restrict both his ability and that of newly-elected Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul to execute the state’s legal affairs.

The GOP’s sweeping legislative package would also severely restrict early voting, limiting it to as little as two weeks before an election.

Walker, who has just weeks left in office, told reporters on Monday that he would sign the legislative package if it reaches his desk.

With governor-elect Evers vowing to pursue legal action if the plan passes the legislature, Wisconsin Democrats continued to voice their outrage at the GOP’s patently anti-democratic plan, which mirrors ongoing efforts by Republicans in Michigan to effectively overturn November’s election results.

“You rig the system when you win and you rig the system when you lose,” Wisconsin Democratic state Rep. Chris Taylor said of the Republican legislation. “How is it that you have more power when you lose?”

‘The G-20 Is Death,’ and Other Lessons in Global Capitalism

You will hear a demonstration in Buenos Aires before you see it, its bass drum throbbing deep and regular like a heartbeat.

On Friday, while the world’s leaders gathered for the 13th annual G-20 summit at the nearby Centro Costa Salguero on the Río de la Plata, the echo reverberated several blocks. This was due not to the size of the crowd, which probably numbered in the low thousands, but the emptiness of the city in which it traveled. The subway system had been shut down for the day, entire blocks of the microcentro had been barricaded with reinforced steel and officers from the Argentine Federal Police sporting shotguns and bulletproof vests seemed to outnumber the pedestrians. Calle Florida, typically overflowing with shoppers, street artists and arbolitos offering to purchase dollars for pesos, had been all but abandoned.

Closer to Avenida 9 de Julio, a wide avenue that bifurcates the city and features its most recognizable monument, El Obelisco de Buenos Aires, members of the Prefectura Naval Argentina strapped on their gear and prepared their automatic weapons, while the occasional helicopter whirred overhead. In front of a human wall of riot police, an officer casually explained to a small coterie of photographers and foreign tourists where they could cross.

A steel barricade along Avenida 9 de Julio. Little traffic made it in and out of the city’s microcentro during the G-20 summit. (Jacob Sugarman / Truthdig)

At the intersection of avenidas Independencia and 9 de Julio, the protest was in full swing, a procession maybe half a mile long snaking toward the Palace of the Argentine National Congress. No sooner had I joined the march than a collection of demonstrators began singing, “Vamos a luchar por trabajo, vamos a luchar por salario” (“We’re going to fight for work, we’re going to fight for salary.”) Along one of the avenue’s dividers, another protester spray-painted what would later emerge as the march’s cri de coeur: “G20=MUERTE.”

Founded in 1999 and consisting of 19 nations plus the European Union, the Group of 20 has supplanted the G-8 as the world’s pre-eminent economic council, its ostensible aim to foster global financial stability. The organization’s members account for 85 percent of the world’s GDP along with two-thirds of its population. And while discussions tend to focus on trade deals and labor markets, heads of state and foreign ministers will raise any number of issues pressing to the international community. Topics of discussion this year included climate change, the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine in the Kerch Strait, to name but a few.

In the streets, the G-20 protests similarly contained multitudes. Two blocks’ worth of demonstrations produced placards decrying climate denialism, the Syrian civil war and virtually every member of the G-20. A single banner read “Fuera Trump-Abe-May-Macron-Merkel” (“Out with Trump-Abe-May-Macron-Merkel”); another simply “Fuera Putin, Sicario Del Imperialismo” (“Out with Putin, Assassin of Imperialism”). S., a woman in her mid-20s wearing rainbow-colored face paint and a matching flag draped across her shoulders, claimed that she was not protesting any single head of state but an entire politico-economic system. “Queremos otra cosa” (“We want something else”).

The G-20 march left a trail of graffiti in its wake. (Jacob Sugarman / Truthdig)

Argentines were not the only population that made their presence felt. Bearing red flags emblazoned with the portrait of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, a handful of Brazilians chanted “Lula Livre” (“Free Lula”)—a reference to the former president and popular Workers’ Party politician who has been incarcerated since his arrest in April of this year. Lula currently faces 12 years in prison on dubious money-laundering charges stemming from a larger corruption scandal known as “Operação Lava Jato“ (“Operation Car Wash”). More significantly, Brazil’s top electoral court barred him for running for president in the 2018 election, a decision that paved the way for the election of neofascist Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, in turn, has appointed the judge who imprisoned da Silva as Brazil’s new .

Far more ubiquitous than Lula’s visage was that of Santiago Maldonado, an Argentine activist who went missing last August in the Patagonian province of Chubut. In 2017, less than two years after the stunning victory of right-wing presidential candidate Mauricio Macri, “Donde Está Santiago Maldonado?” (“Where is Santiago Maldonado?”) became a rallying cry for an Argentine civil society still scarred by the 30,000 disappearances under El Proceso de Reorganizacion—a military junta aided and abetted by the United States as part of a larger campaign of state-sponsored terror across South America, later known as Operation Condor.

The body was discovered months later at the bottom of the Chubut River, with no apparent signs of foul play. Last week, a federal judge closed the case’s investigation, declaring that Maldonado had drowned on his own, “sin que nadie lo notara” (“without anybody noticing.”). The victim’s family claims the judge was pressured politically. In the Friday edition of Pagina 12, one of the country’s leading left-leaning newspapers, the front-page headline read “La Segunda Muerte de Santiago Maldonado” (“The Second Death of Santiago Maldonado”).

The news was not lost on the demonstrators, some of whom bore copied pictures of the 28-year-old native of Veinticinco de Mayo with the message “Fue el estado” (“It was the state.”) Across one of the steel barriers along Avenida de Mayo, behind which stood several rows of PNA officers with riot shields, someone had scrawled the words “Santiago Vive” (“Santiago Lives”) in bright purple letters.

Demonstrators wield a placard that reads in Spanish “The masters of hunger and war are not welcome.” (Jacob Sugarman / Truthdig)

Indeed, much of the protest’s ire was directed at the Macri administration and its neoliberal agenda. In September, Argentina secured a loan of $57 billion from the International Monetary Fund—the largest in the institution’s 74-year history and an infusion of capital the Cambiemos government hopes will offset a currency crisis and double-digit inflation. But as The Guardian reported in September, the loan comes with “stringent conditions” that include a commitment to zero deficit for 2019, the layoff of thousands of public servants and a freeze on national incomes through December of that year. “Estamos en crisis económica desde que subió esta administración” (“We’ve had an economic crisis since this administration took power”), observed M., a slender woman of 32 with a flannel shirt knotted around her waist. “Tenemos un gobierno para los ricos que excluye al pueblo por las fuerzas represivas” (“We have a government for the rich that excludes the people through repressive force.”)

Macri’s maneuverings have triggered fears of another great depression, the most recent of which (1998-2002) saw the economy shrink 28 percent, unemployment balloon and poverty explode. During that crisis, not only did the IMF refuse to accept a discount when Argentina defaulted on its debt, it actively enlisted private creditors, or vulture funds, who continue to prey on the country to this day. (Billionaire Paul Singer, one of the Republican Party’s most prominent donors, stands to earn an estimated 370 percent on his investment.)

“Estamos aca por los chicos” (“We’re here for the children”), offered W. behind a salt-and-pepper beard and a pair of sunglasses. W. was previously employed at Hospital Italiano before a round of layoffs left him unemployed shortly after Macri took office. Nodding in the direction of the PNA, he added: “Es una guerra esto” (“This is a war.”)

If it is, then one side is winning. Despite their disparate targets, Friday’s protests shared the same root cause: a global capitalist system that has not only run roughshod over the region through its brutal austerity measures and attendant authoritarianism, but now threatens human life on earth. And to their credit, the demonstrators understood this implicitly, even as they articulated their individual reasons for marching.

Officers from the Prefectura Naval Argentina line up along Avenida de Mayo. (Jacob Sugarman / Truthdig)

 

“Estamos protestando en contra a todos que representan al imperialismo” (“We’re protesting all of those who represent imperialism”), observed L., a man of 36 sporting a T-shirt with a portrait of Friedrich Engels and the words “socialism or barbarism” emblazoned across its chest. “También en contra de un modelo ultra neoliberal que produce condiciones que son cada vez peores” (“Also against an ultra-neoliberal model that produces conditions that are getting worse.”)

In front of the Congreso Nacional, the demonstration began to fracture as protesters collected in a nearby park while others marched on along Calle Solís. The sun was setting, and between blasts of a bullhorn you could hear the steady squawk of the cotorras diving across the plaza. A small crowd had swelled on Avenida Entre Rios. At its center stood a fragile woman no more than 5 feet tall, her gray hair held in place by a white silk scarf. Around her neck, she wore a laminated photograph featuring a young man in a bright green shirt, a name and date written above it: “Carlos Gustavo Cortiñas, 25 De Abril De 1977.”

That year, Nora Morales de Cortiñas co-founded Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organization that became a worldwide phenomenon after drawing attention to the abuses of the Argentine dictatorship. Her son Carlos had disappeared while working at INDEC (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos). Cortiñas, now 88, barely spoke above a whisper, and she required as many as three people to help keep her upright.  Her words were indecipherable over the din of the crowd, but I learned she had separately told Radionauta the following: “En el G-20, se cocina el saqueo de nuestros pueblos” (“In the G-20, they are preparing the looting of our people.”)

After a few minutes, she straightened her back and ambled forward, the masses parting as she passed.

Nora Morales de Cortiñas, co-founder of Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, wends her way down Avenida Entre Rios. (Jacob Sugarman / Truthdig)

 

So Close, but So Far From the Land of the Free

I was in Tijuana on a Sunday in late November, moving west on the road underneath Puente El Chaparral—the bridge that crosses the Mexican side of the Tijuana River—when a group of a hundred or so Central American migrants made a run for the U.S. port of entry. The group of mostly men, who had broken away from a larger protest, charged toward me and a group of Mexican police officers, weaving around us to avoid collision. This charge was their last Hail Mary attempt to make it to the United States after uprooting their lives and making the 2,000-mile journey from Central America.

PHOTO ESSAY | 14 photosPhoto Essay: Scenes From the Border

But the breakaway protesters appeared to not know where they were going. They ran past the road that leads to the United States, into a dead end on Calle José María Larroque, a street just a block away from the border wall. There, a group of Mexican police officers cornered them. For a moment, I found myself in the middle of a standoff between a group desperate to make it to the land of the free, and police dressed in full riot gear, determined to stand in their way. I thought the police were going to arrest the men, but they were vastly outnumbered and the men escaped by running down an alley that led back to the main road.

To block their way, the police rolled in a 15-foot-high rusted door and formed a blockade in the middle of the street, sealing the road from the United States into Mexico. The migrants ran back to the canal adjacent to the border fence, rejoining the protesters they had broken away from. One of the protesters yelled, “Estan haciendo el trabajo de Trump! Odia a los Mexicanos también!”—“You’re doing Trump’s work! He hates Mexicans, too!”

The protesters started a scattered march along the outer edges of the canal, some waving Honduran flags, some American. One woman had a sign that said, “El respeto a los derechos ajenos es la paz”—“The rights of foreigners means peace.”

Despite their anger, despite their frustrations, I never once saw anyone being violent or destructive, or behaving as people did in the video the Trump administration shared during the midterm elections campaign. I felt completely safe.

Out of nowhere, tear gas started wafting into Tijuana. My eyes began to water, and an uncontrollable cough racked me. As soon as the gas came, I heard someone yell, “No tiren piedras!”—“Don’t throw any rocks.” I never saw anyone throwing rocks, but I figured that someone at some point must have provoked the Border Patrol. If it happened, it definitely wasn’t something more than a few people were doing. Who knows what their motivation was?

I only caught a small whiff of tear gas. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for the men, women and children who were swallowed by the monstrous clouds down in the canal as they ran as fast as they could.

As this was happening, I heard someone say in Spanish that the Border Patrol agents were pointing their guns at us. I panicked. All I could think of was President Trump saying he considered a rock to be a rifle. I started to move quickly away from the fence, before I heard someone say that the weapons pointed at us were nonlethal.

As the gas dispersed, so did the crowds. I saw a mother giving water to her two small children, and I wondered why anyone would bring their children to a protest. It dawned on me that after traveling all that way and being blocked from the U.S. port of entry by Mexican police, the only option left was to keep protesting. Maybe their voices would be heard. Maybe not. But the reality is that the woman would probably go back to the tent city at Benito Juarez stadium, where a few days later a rainstorm would flood the encampment and cover their temporary homes with mud.

I got in my car, and as I waited almost five hours in line to cross the border back into San Diego I couldn’t stop thinking about the people I saw that day. What does it take for people to uproot their lives and try to move to a country that doesn’t want them? We can argue about policy and asylum laws in the United States. We can argue whether the Border Patrol was right or wrong to gas the men, women and children who were protesting for their rights. What I think can’t be argued is that these people are not a violent mob of criminals trying to destroy America. These people are strong and resilient in their quest for a better life, and they are currently facing horrendous living conditions that deserve human empathy, regardless of where you stand.

For Middle- and Working-Class Americans, Running for Congress is Nearly Unaffordable

The candidate pool in the 2018 midterm elections was more diverse, female and full of first-time candidates than ever. Democrats nominated 180 women, 60 more than the previous record of 120, according to data from Rutgers University Center for American Women in Politics, Politico reports. They also nominated 133 people of color and 158 first-time candidates. But while Congress may look a little more like America in January, amid the celebrations of all these firsts is a harsher truth: Many of the midterm candidates, whether they won or lost, could barely afford to run.

The odds are stacked against less wealthy candidates before they decide to run. As Amanda Terkel explains in HuffPost, “Many of the lawmakers walking the gilded halls of Congress are, financially, far better off than the constituents they represent. Millionaires comprise nearly 40 percent of Congress, compared to being just 4 percent of the U.S. population.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representative-elect from New York’s 14th District, has been the subject of constant media attention. She was a bartender before running and has $7,000 in her bank account, and some conservative writers accuse her of dressing too well, considering how little money she claims to have.

“In other words,” Terkel says, “if you look nice, you could look too nice. But if you don’t look nice, you might not look professional enough to seem like you should be elected.”

Ocasio-Cortez is one of the lucky contenders. She had money saved, and she won her race.

Before Shawna Roberts decided to run for Congress in Ohio’s 6th District, she was working part-time at McDonald’s. Like many Americans, she became politically active following the 2016 election, joining a local chapter of Indivisible, a progressive advocacy group. No one was challenging the incumbent Republican, Bill Johnson, so despite the district skewing heavily Republican, Roberts decided to run, just so he’d have a challenger.

“You have to say to yourself, ‘Can I afford to not have cash coming in?’ ” she told HuffPost. She and her husband had money saved up, which helped a little, but she still wasn’t raising enough campaign money to take a salary to cover the cost of living for her family, which includes five children.

“The notion of being able to just write a check for that much to help pay for ads and such—that would be completely out of my abilities,” she said.

Roberts, now back working at McDonald’s after losing the race, told HuffPost that she is “sick and tired of hearing about politicians who talk about how they were raised poor—when they’re now millionaires. Government needs to have more people from lower-income levels.”

Federal campaign laws allow candidates to give themselves a salary from both public financing and any private fundraising, equivalent to what they would be paid if they won, or to what they made in the previous year—whichever is lowest. But many first-time candidates who could be taking a salary from campaign funds don’t because they fear political repercussions. Meanwhile, independently wealthy candidates who can afford to not take a salary make a show out of not doing so in an effort to make themselves more relatable.

Kerri Harris, who tried to unseat fellow Democrat Tom Carper of Delaware, had five paid staffers, but felt she couldn’t pay herself. “By summer I was losing about $1,600 a month, which was very painful,” she said. “I don’t make a lot of money as it is. … It was an added stress on top of the stress of campaigning.”

The small, day-to-day expenses of running a campaign added up. While the media scrutinized Ocasio-Cortez’s outfits, Harris was trying to both canvass and make dressier public appearances while wearing the same pair of shoes. She had to scrimp, she explained, “because while appearance is important, I have kids to take care of. I was losing money every month.”

Deirdre DeJear, who lost her race for secretary of state in Iowa, told Terkel, “There’s this whole underlying power structure that exists around a candidacy that I didn’t know about — the people who you’ve got to talk to, to let them know you’re running, so they can help you cast a wider net. I needed help navigating that stratosphere.” DeJear feared her lack of connections alienated potential donors, skewing their perceptions of her chances. “It was a challenge to get funders in the mindset of contributing to a woman who had no polling, no resources, who had never run before,” she said.

Read the full article here.

U.N. Chief Issues Dramatic Climate Appeal to World Leaders

KATOWICE, Poland — U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres opened the climate summit in Poland by issuing a dramatic appeal to world leaders Monday to take seriously the threat of global warming and act boldly to avert a catastrophic rise in temperatures before the end of the century.

Guterres named climate change as “the most important issue we face.”

“Even as we witness devastating climate impacts causing havoc across the world, we are still not doing enough, nor moving fast enough, to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption,” Guterres told representatives from almost 200 countries gathered in Katowice, Poland.

The U.N. chief chided countries, particularly those most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, for failing to do enough to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord. The 2015 agreement set a goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), ideally 1.5 C (2.7 F) by the end of the century.

Citing a recent scientific report on the dire consequences of letting average global temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees, Guterres urged countries to cut their emissions by 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030 and aim for net zero emissions by 2050.

Such a move, which experts say is the only way to achieve the 1.5-degree goal, would require a radical overhaul of the global economy.

“In short, we need a complete transformation of our global energy economy, as well as how we manage land and forest resources,” Guterres said.

He said governments should embrace the opportunities rather than cling to fossil fuels such as coal, which are blamed for a significant share of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

In order to steer businesses and consumers away from heavily polluting forms of energy, he urged countries to embrace carbon pricing, something few countries have yet to do.

Guterres also called on negotiators not to lose sight of the fact that the challenges they face pale in comparison to the difficulties already caused by climate change to millions of people around the world seeing their livelihoods at risk from rising sea levels, drought and more powerful storms.

The two-week conference, in Poland’s southern coal mining region of Silesia, is expected to work out how governments can report on their efforts to reduce green gas emission and keep global warming within the Paris accord limit.

“This is the challenge on which this generation’s leaders will be judged,” Guterres said.

Host Poland proposed a declaration for a “just transition” away from coal mining, the supplier of its main source of energy, which calls for winning social acceptance for the necessary changes.

Fiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, who presided over last year’s summit, said the “just transition” proposal shouldn’t just consider the fate of workers in the fossil fuel industries, but all people around the world whose lives are affected by climate change.

French Prime Minister Holds Talks After Violent Protests in Paris

PARIS — French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe met with political rivals Monday in a bid to ease protesters’ anger after facing widespread criticism following violent anti-government protests that rocked Paris.

More than 130 people were injured and 412 arrested Saturday in the French capital amid the nation’s worst riot in a generation. Police responded with tear gas and water cannons, closing down dozens of streets and subway stations to contain the riot.

By Sunday, some of the most popular tourist streets in Paris were littered with torched cars and broken glass from looted shops and the Arc de Triomphe monument was tagged with graffiti.

French President Emmanuel Macron, just back from the Group of 20 summit in Argentina, held an emergency meeting Sunday on security and the government hasn’t ruled out the possibility of imposing a state of emergency.

It was the third straight weekend of clashes in Paris led by protesters wearing distinctive yellow traffic vests. The protests began last month with motorists upset over a fuel tax hike and have grown to encompass a range of complaints that Macron’s government doesn’t care about the problems of ordinary people. Yet other protests in France on the same topic Saturday remained peaceful.

Philippe and Macron have been lambasted for their handling of the crisis. After meeting with the prime minister, Socialist leader Olivier Faure urged Philippe to drop the tax hikes and to restore a wealth tax that was slashed by the centrist government.

“We want a change in the method. One needs to come down from Mount Olympus,” Faure said, referring to Macron’s Greek god nickname of Jupiter.

Laurent Wauquiez, head of center-right Les Republicains party, urged Macron to hold a referendum to end the crisis but did not say what its topic should be.

“French people need to be heard again, and for that we must organize a referendum to decide these issues. Only these measures will restore calm,” Wauquiez said.

More anti-government protests took place Monday as ambulance workers took to the streets near the National Assembly in Paris to complain about changes to working conditions. Protesters set tires on fire and blocked traffic. One activist held up a sign reading “The State killed me” and others chanted “Macron resign!”

The yellow vest movement is bringing together people from across the political spectrum complaining about France’s economic inequalities and waning spending power.

Since the movement kicked off on Nov. 17, three people have been killed and hundreds injured in clashes or accidents stemming from the protests. Over the past three weeks, protesters have been setting up road blockades across the country and their movement has garnered wide public support.

Philippe will try to defuse tensions this week before more possible protests this weekend, speaking with yellow vest representatives on Tuesday. Members of the National Assembly will also hold talks on France’s social crisis later this week.

___

Michel Euler contributed to this report.

The Academics Who Unleashed the Demon of Geopolitical Power

As Washington’s leadership fades more quickly than anyone could have imagined and a new global order struggles to take shape, a generation of leaders has crowded onto the world stage with their own bold geopolitical visions for winning international influence. Xi Xinping has launched his trillion-dollar “Belt and Road Initiative” to dominate Eurasia and thereby the world beyond. To recover the Soviet Union’s lost influence, Vladimir Putin seeks to shatter the Western alliance with cyberwar, while threatening to dominate a nationalizing, fragmenting Eastern Europe through raw military power. The Trump White House, in turn, is wielding tariffs as weapons to try to beat recalcitrant allies back into line and cripple the planet’s rising power, China. However bizarrely different these approaches may seem, they all share one strikingly similar feature: a reliance on the concept of “geopolitics” to guide their bids for global power.

Over the past century, countless scholars, columnists, and commentators have employed the term “geopolitics” (or the study of global control) to lend gravitas to their arguments. Few, though, have grasped the true significance of this elusive concept. However else the term might be used, geopolitics is essentially a methodology for the management (or mismanagement) of empire. Unlike conventional nations whose peoples are, in normal times, readily and efficiently mobilized for self-defense, empires, thanks to their global reach, are a surprisingly fragile form of government. They seem to yearn for strategic visionaries who can merge land, peoples, and resources into a sustainable global system.

The practice of geopolitics, even if once conducted from horseback, is as old as empire itself, dating back some 4,000 years. Until the dawn of the twentieth century, it was the conquerors themselves — from Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte — whose geopolitical visions guided the relentless expansion of their imperial domains. The ancient Greek historian Plutarch tried to capture (or perhaps exaggerate) the enormity of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul — a territory that comprises all of modern France and Belgium — by enumerating the nine years of war that “took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred tribes, and fought pitched battles… with three million men, of whom he slew one million… and took as many more prisoners.”

In his own account, however, Caesar reduced all of this to its geopolitical essentials. “All Gaul is divided into three parts,” he wrote in that famous first sentence of his Gallic Wars. “Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest, because… they are the nearest to the Germans, who dwell beyond the Rhine, with whom they are continually waging war; for which reason the Helvetii also surpass the rest of the Gauls in valor, as they contend with the Germans in almost daily battles.” When those formidable Helvetii marched out of their Alpine cantons to occupy Gallic lowlands in 58 BC, Caesar deployed geopolitics to defeat them — seizing strategic terrain, controlling their grain supplies, and manipulating rival tribes. Instead of enslaving the vanquished Helvetii as other Roman generals might have, Caesar, mindful of the empire’s geopolitical balance, returned them to their homelands with generous provisions, lest the German “barbarians” cross the Rhine and destabilize Gaul’s natural frontier.

In more modern times, imperial expansion has been guided by professional scholars who have made the formal study of geopolitics a hybrid field of some significance. Its intellectual lineage is actually remarkably straightforward. At the end of the nineteenth century, an American naval historian argued that seapower was the key to national security and international influence. A decade later, a British geographer observed that railroads had shifted the locus of global power landward into the interior of the vast Eurasian continent. In the succeeding century, a succession of scholars would draw on these two basic ideas to inspire bold geopolitical gambits by Nazi Germany, Cold War Washington, post-Soviet Russia, and even Donald Trump’s White House.

There is, in fact, a common thread in those disparate scholarly lives: in each case, the study of geopolitics seemed to change the trajectory of their careers, lifting them from the margins of society to the right hand of power. There, at moments when the empire they lived in was experiencing a crisis, their unconventional, even eccentric, ideas won influence — often in what would prove in the long term a nightmarish fashion.

Over the last century or so, while the actual application of such thinking regularly proved problematic at best and genuinely horrific at worst, geopolitics would remain a seductive concept with a persistent power to entice would-be practitioners. It would also prove an enormously elusive style of thinking, making it difficult to distinguish between the banal and the brilliant, between the imperially helpful and the imperially devastating.

Charting the interplay of land, people, and resources inside any empire, much less in a clash between such behemoths, is impossibly difficult. Admittedly, geopolitics in the hands of a grandmaster has, in the past, led to the crushing of armies and the conquest of continents. But seemingly similar strategies have also produced searing defeat and disaster. Caesar’s deft geopolitical balancing of Gaul and Germany on the fulcrum of the Rhine survived for some four centuries; Napoleon’s similar attempt lasted all of seven years.

Telling the difference, in the historical moment, is a daunting task and one that hasn’t turned out well in the last century. With that in mind, let’s now approach the careers of five modern “grandmasters” of geopolitics with an appropriate skepticism.

America’s Strategic Visionary

In 1890, as the industrial boom of the Gilded Age prepared the nation for a debut on the world stage, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, arguably America’s only original strategic thinker, published his famed Influence of Seapower Upon History. In it, he argued that naval power was the determining factor in the fate of nations. Born at West Point, where his father taught military tactics to Army cadets, Mahan came to the study of strategy almost by birthright. After graduating from the Naval Academy and having an indifferent career at sea, he became the head of the Naval War College in 1886. There, he developed novel geopolitical ideas that would revive a stalled career.

By analyzing sea power through a wide range of factors, including the defensibility of ports, national technological prowess, and the nature of good government, Mahan would produce the first serious study of geopolitics in the guise of a guide to naval strategy. In the process, he became an international celebrity, influencing admirals from London to Tokyo and inspiring leaders worldwide to join a naval arms race that would drain their treasuries to build costly battleships. The admiral who headed Germany’s navy, for instance, distributed 8,000 copies of Mahan’s history in translation and in the process won passage of the country’s first naval bill in 1898, funding his fateful challenge to British sea power.

As Europe’s empires continued to spread globally in the 1890s, Mahan’s prolific prose persuaded Washington that national defense required the creation of a genuine blue-water navy and bases in both the Caribbean and the Pacific. So important were such bases for the nation’s defense that, as Mahan gravely concluded, “No European state should henceforth acquire a coaling position within three thousand miles of San Francisco” — a distance that encompassed the Hawaiian Islands, soon to become U.S. possessions.

Like many advocates of geopolitics to come, Mahan would use seemingly precise strategic concepts to project his country’s current position into a murky future. As his geopolitical principles took physical form after 1898, they would produce an indefensible string of bases stretching across the Pacific from Panama to the Philippines.

Following his doctrine, the Navy ordered Admiral George Dewey’s squadron to seize Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War of 1898, which he did by sinking the Spanish fleet. Within five years, however, Japan’s stunning victory over the Russian fleet in the Sea of Japan forced Washington to withdraw much of its navy from the Western Pacific. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt began building a new Pacific bastion at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, not in Manila Bay, saying that the Philippines, by then an American colony, is “our heel of Achilles.” Making matters worse, the Versailles peace settlement at the end of World War I conceded the Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific to Japan, allowing its navy to block the sea-lanes from Pearl Harbor to Manila Bay — a geopolitical reality that would doom General Douglas MacArthur’s Philippine command to a searing defeat at the start of World War II.

At that war’s end, however, Washington finally resolved this geopolitical conundrum by conquering Japan and building a chain of more than 100 bases from that country to the Philippines, making the Pacific littoral the strategic fulcrum for the defense of one continent (North America) and dominion over another (Eurasia).

Sir Halford Propagates Geopolitics

Little more than a decade after Mahan wrote his influential studies of seapower, Sir Halford Mackinder, head of the London School of Economics (LSE), published a seminal article that shifted the focus of geopolitics from sea to land. Writing in 1904, as the 5,700 miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway was still being built from Moscow to Vladivostok, Mackinder argued that future rail lines would knit Eurasia into a unitary landmass that he dubbed “the world island.” When that day came, Russia, perhaps in alliance with another land power like Germany, could control Eurasia’s sprawling “heartland,” allowing “the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would be in sight.”

This path-breaking analysis came at a fortuitous time in Mackinder’s academic career. After teaching geography at Oxford for 10 years, he had failed to win a professorship and his marriage collapsed. At this low ebb in his life, he tried to establish himself as an exploratory geographer by making the first recorded ascent of Mount Kenya. Using the “moral suasion of my Mauser” rifle to force his 170 African bearers to “obey like the faithful dogs they are,” Mackinder moved through the famine-stricken foothills leading to that mountain by extracting food from hungry villages at gunpoint. Then, in September 1899, at the cost of 10 porters shot and many more whipped for “malingering,” he traversed glaciers to reach the summit at 17,000 feet. His triumph before a cheering crowd at the Royal Geographical Society in London was, however, marred not by his treatment of those bearers but by his failure to bring back significant findings or scientific specimens.

So, in yet another career change, Mackinder joined the LSE where he produced that influential article on geopolitics. At the end of World War I, he turned it into a book that contained his most memorable maxim: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”

Mackinder’s expertise in imperial geopolitics helped launch his political career, including gaining him a seat in Parliament. In 1919, amid the turmoil of the Russian revolution, Britain was shipping arms to anti-Bolshevik forces there under General Anton Denikin. At Winston Churchill’s behest, the cabinet then appointed Mackinder as a special high commissioner for southern Russia. In a unique test of his “heartland” theory, Mackinder made an abortive attempt to rally the Czarist forces by meeting General Denikin inside his railcar in the Caucasus to propose an alliance with Poland and promise a mass evacuation in the event of defeat. Upon return to London, ignoring the general’s role in slaughtering some 100,000 Jews, Mackinder recommended recognizing his government and providing aid — advice the cabinet quickly dismissed.

From that brief moment at the apex of power, Mackinder soon fell into obscurity — losing his seat in Parliament, retiring from the LSE, and settling into a sinecure as chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee. Were it not for the surprising later appeal of his ideas in Nazi Germany and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, his name would have been largely forgotten.

The Sorcerer’s Nazi Apprentice

As the Versailles peace conference of 1919 stripped Germany of its colonial empire and placed its Rhineland frontier under foreign occupation, Karl Haushofer exchanged his general’s baton for a geography professorship at Munich University. There, he would apply Mackinder’s concepts in an attempt to assure that his fatherland would never again engage in the sort of strategic blunders that, in World War I, had led to such a humiliating defeat.

While Mackinder himself was courting the powerful in postwar London, Haushofer was teaching geopolitics to future top Nazis in Munich — first to his graduate assistant Rudolf Hess (later to become the deputy Führer), and then to Adolf Hitler himself while he was writing Mein Kampf during his incarceration at Munich’s Landsberg Prison in 1924. Both Haushofer and his son Albrecht, who would train Nazi diplomats in the geopolitics of European conquest, were later rewarded with influential positions in the Third Reich. By dressing the British don’s idea of the Eurasian heartland as the pivot of world power in the local garb of Lebensraum (or “the Greater German Reich’s dazzling ascent by war… for extension of its living space”), Haushofer helped propagate an enticing logic of expansion that would send Hitler’s army on the road to defeat.

In 1942, Hitler dispatched a million men, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 500 tanks to breach the Volga River at Stalingrad and capture Russia’s heartland for lebensraum. In the end, the Reich’s forces would suffer 850,000 casualties — killed, wounded, and captured — in a vain attempt to break through the East European rimland into the world island’s heartland.

Appalled by the attack on Russia, Haushofer’s son joined the underground’s attempt to assassinate Hitler and was imprisoned. Before he was finally shot by the SS (on the day the Allies captured Berlin), he would compose mournful sonnets about geopolitical power, which he saw metaphorically as buried deep under the sea until “my father broke the seal” and “set the demon free to roam throughout the world.” A few months later, Karl Haushofer and his Jewish wife committed suicide together when confronted with the possibility that the victorious allies might prosecute him as a senior Nazi war criminal.

The Liberator of Eastern Europe

As the United States recoiled from its searing defeat in Vietnam, Zbigniew Brzezinski, an émigré Polish aristocrat and autodidact when it came to geopolitics, went from teaching international relations in New York to being President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor in Washington. There, his risky geopolitical gambits gained an attentive audience after the SovietRed Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

As an intellectual acolyte of Mackinder, Brzezinski embraced his concept of the Eurasian heartland as the “pivot” of global power. But in marked contrast to Mackinder’s failure in southern Russia in 1920, Brzezinski would prove adept at applying that geopolitician’s famous dictum on the dynamic that tied Eastern Europe to Eurasia’s heartland. (In the end, however, his Afghan moves would help give rise to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, and the never-ending war on terror of this century.)

Wielding a multi-billion-dollar CIA covert operation in Afghanistan like a sharpened wedge, Brzezinski drove radical Islam deep into the heart of Soviet Central Asia. In the process, he drew Moscow into a debilitating decade-long Afghan war, so weakening it that Eastern Europe would finally break free from the Soviet empire in 1989. Asked about the enormous human suffering his strategy inflicted on Afghanistan and his role in creating a militant Islam hostile to the United States, he would remain coolly unapologetic. “What is most important to the history of the world?” he responded in 1998. “The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

In retirement, Brzezinski resumed his study of Mackinder’s theory, doing a better job as an armchair analyst than he had as a presidential adviser. In a 1998 book, he warned that dominance over Eurasia remained “the central basis for global primacy.” To control that vast region, Washington, he insisted, would have to preserve its “perch on the Western periphery” of Europe and hold its string of “offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral. Should these conditions change, he predicted with some prescience, “a potential rival to America might at some point arise.”

Putin’s Geopolitical Visionary

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a Russian rightist ideologue, Alexander Dugin, would revive Mackinder’s ideas yet again to promote expansion into Eurasia. In the process, he would become “a major influence” on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel, Dugin was still moving in Moscow’s bohemian circles as a dabbler in the occult and a fringe member of the “ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic organization Pamiat.” After the Soviet collapse, he became chief ideologue for an eclectic alliance of patriotic and punk-rock groups called the New Bolshevik Party, serving as its candidate for a seat in the 1995 Duma legislative elections and winning just 1% of the vote.

At this political nadir for both him and his country, Dugin recycled Mackinder’s long-forgotten writings in a 1997 bestseller, The Foundation of Geopolitics: Russia’s Geopolitical Future. As his book moved into its fourth printing and he “became a pole star for a broad section of Russian hardliners,” he began teaching geopolitics to military officers at the General Staff Academy, later lecturing on it to elite students at Moscow State University, and anchoring Landmarks, a weekly television show on the subject. In those years, Moscow bookstores even opened special sections for geopolitics, the legislature formed a geopolitics committee, and the Russian leadership began to embrace Dugin’s vision of expansionist nationalism.

Drawing on Haushofer’s German writings, he argued that Russia should become a Eurasian bastion against “the conspiracy of ‘Atlanticism’ led by the United States and NATO… aimed at containing Russia within successive geographic rings” of the former Soviet republics. To achieve the destiny envisioned by Mackinder, Russia needed, in Dugin’s view, to dominate Eurasia — annexing Ukraine, conquering Georgia, incorporating Finland, and bringing the Balkan states (Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria) under its rule as an Orthodox “Third Rome.” To advance such ideas, Dugin founded the Eurasia Youth Union of Russia in 2005, first to serve as “human shields” to fight against the Orange revolution in Ukraine and later to counter the “degeneration” caused by American cultural influence.

For the past decade, he has been a forceful advocate for Russian expansionism. During that country’s war with Georgia in 2008, he was photographed with a rocket launcher in South Ossetia and quoted in the national press calling for its annexation. After serving as “the brains behind Vladimir Putin’s wildly popular annexation of Crimea” in March 2014, Dugin embraced the Russian minority in eastern Ukraine, prodding the Russian president to openly support their separatist militia.

While advocacy of aggressive geopolitics has given Dugin significant political influence and Putin unprecedented popularity in Russia, it is still unclear whether in the long run such expansionism, in defiance of international norms, will prove a geopolitical masterstroke or a diplomatic debacle.

The Geopolitics of Trump’s Trade War

Most recently, a dissident economist and failed California politician named Peter Navarro has parlayed his hostility toward China into the role of key architect of Donald Trump’s “trade war” against Beijing. Like his Russian counterpart Alexander Dugin, Navarro is another in a long line of intellectuals whose embrace of geopolitics changed the trajectory of his career.

Raised by a single mom who worked secretarial jobs to rent one-bedroomapartments where he slept on the couch, Navarro went to college at Tufts on a scholarship and earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Despite that Ivy League degree, he remained an angry outsider, denouncing the special interests “stealing America” in his first book and later, as a business professor at the University of California-Irvine, branding San Diego developers “punks in pinstripes.” A passionate environmentalist, in 1992 Navarro plunged into politics as a Democratic candidate for the mayor of San Diego, denouncing his opponent’s husband as a convicted drug-money launderer and losing when he smirked as she wept during their televised debate.

For the next 10 years, Navarro fought losing campaigns for everything from city council to Congress. He detailed his crushing defeat for a seat in the House of Representatives in a tell-all book, San Diego Confidential, that dished out disdain for that duplicitous “sell out” Bill Clinton, dumb “blue-collar detritus” voters, and just about everybody else as well.

Following his last losing campaign for city council, Navarro spent a decade churning out books attacking a new enemy: China. His first “shock and awe” jeremiad in 2006 told horror stories about that country’s foreign trade; five years later, Death By China was filled with torrid tales of “bone-crushing, cancer-causing, flammable, poisonous, and otherwise lethal products” from that land. In 2015, a third book turned to geopolitics, complete with carefully drawn maps and respectful references to Captain Mahan, to offer an analysis of how China’s military was pursuing a relentless strategy of “anti-access, area denial” to challenge the U.S. Navy’s control over the Western Pacific.

To check China, the Pentagon then had two competing strategies — “Air-Sea Battle,” in which China’s satellites were to be blinded, knocking out its missiles, and “Offshore Control,” in which China’s entire coastline was to be blockaded by mining six maritime choke points from Japan to Singapore. Both, Navarro claimed, were fatally flawed. Given that, Navarro’s third book and a companion film (endorsed by one Donald Trump) asked: What should the United States do to check Beijing’s aggression and its rise as a global power? Since all U.S. imports from China, Navarro suggested, were “helping to finance a Chinese military buildup,” the only realistic solution was “the imposition of countervailing tariffs to offset China’s unfair trade practices.”

Just a year after reaching that controversial conclusion, Navarro joined the Trump election campaign as a policy adviser and then, after the November victory, became a junior member of the White House economic team. As a protectionist in an administration initially dominated by globalists, he would be excluded from high-level meetings and, according to Time Magazine, “required to copy chief economic adviser Gary Cohn on all his emails.” By February 2018, however, Cohn was on his way out and Navarro had become assistant to the president, with his new trade office now the co-equal of the National Economic Council.

As the chief defender of Trump’s belief that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” Navarro has finally realized his own geopolitical dream of attempting to check China with tariffs. In March, the president slapped heavy ones on Chinese steel imports and, just a few weeks later, promised to impose more of them on $50 billion of imports. When those started in July, China’s leaders retaliated against what they called “typical trade bullying,” imposing similar duties on American goods. Despite a warning from the Federal Reserve chairman that “trade tensions… could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global economy,” with Navarro at his elbow, Trump escalated in September, adding tariffs on an additional $200 billion in Chinese goods and threatening another $267 billion worth if China dared retaliate. Nonetheless, Beijing hit back, this time on just $60 billion in goods since 95% of all U.S. imports had already been covered.

Then something truly surprising happened. In September, the U.S. trade deficit with China ballooned to $305 billion for the year, driven by an 8% surge in Chinese imports — a clear sign that Navarro’s bold geopolitical vision of beating Beijing into submission with tariffs had collided big time with the complexities of world trade. Whether this tariff dispute will fizzle out inconsequentially or escalate into a full-blown trade war, wreaking havoc on global supply chains and the world economy, none of us can yet know, particularly that would-be geopolitical grandmaster Peter Navarro.

The Desire to be Grandmaster of the Universe

Though such experts usually dazzle the public and the powerful alike with erudition and boldness of vision, their geopolitical moves often have troubling long-term consequences. Mahan’s plans for Pacific dominion through offshore bases created a strategic conundrum that plagued American defense policy for a half-century. Brzezinski’s geopolitical lunge at the Soviet Union’s soft Central Asian underbelly helped unleash radical Islam. Today, Alexander Dugin’s use of geopolitics to revive Russia’s dominion over Eurasia has placed Moscow on a volatile collision course with Europe and the United States. Simultaneously, Peter Navarro’s bold gambit to contain China’s military and economic push into the Pacific with a trade war could, if it persists, produce untold complications for our globalized economy.

No matter how deeply flawed such geopolitical visions may ultimately prove to be, their brief moments as official policy have regularly shaped the destiny of nations and of empires in unpredictable, unplanned, and often dangerous ways. And no matter how this current round of geopolitical gambits plays out, we can be reasonably certain that, in the not-too-distant future, another would-be grandmaster will embrace this seductive concept to guide his bold bid for global power.

An Indictment of Netanyahu Would Further Endanger Palestinians

Israeli police over the weekend urged that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sarah, be indicted for corruption. The decision lies with Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit.

The Israeli police and justice system have shown a willingness to punish corruption in high places. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to 27 months in 2014, but was released early.

According to BBC Monitoring, the police issued a statement saying, “Between the years 2012 and 2017 the prime minister and his aides intervened blatantly and continuously, and sometimes even daily, in the content published by the Walla news website. The intervention of the prime minister and his aides in the content and appointments [of editors and reporters] at the Walla website was meant to advance his personal interests, through publication of flattering articles and photos, removal of content critical of the prime minister and his family members, and so on.”

The case concerns the giant media company Bezeq and the favors and tax breaks thrown to it by Netanyahu, who kept the communications portfolio in his Cabinet for himself.

Netanyahu had earlier been accused by the police of attempting to do a deal with the owner of Yediot Aharanot, a major mass-circulation newspaper. Its sales were being hurt by a free newspaper started by Netanyahu supporter Sheldon Adelson [called] Yisrael Ha-yom (Israel Today). Netanyahu suggested that Adelson could reduce his print run to help out Yediot Aharanot if only the latter would run more positive stories about Netanyahu and his far right Likud Party.

In the terms of contemporary Israeli politics, Netanyahu, despite being a far-right politician, is to the left of many persons on the Cabinet. If he is indicted, there will likely be new elections, and extremist parties could come to power.

Avigdor Lieberman of the (mostly Russian) “Israeli is our Home” party, recently resigned from the cabinet over Netanyahu’s unwillingness to go to war immediately against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Hence, a change in government could accelerate the Israeli dispossession of the Palestinians and result in further warfare and bloodshed.