Chris Hedges's Blog, page 46

‘NewsHour’ Host and Debate Moderator Jim Lehrer Dies at 85

NEW YORK — Jim Lehrer, longtime host of the nightly PBS “NewsHour” whose serious, sober demeanor made him the choice to moderate 11 presidential debates between 1988 and 2012, has died, PBS said Thursday. He was 85.

Lehrer died “peacefully in his sleep,” according to PBS. He had suffered a heart attack in 1983 and more recently, had undergone heart valve surgery in April 2008.

For Lehrer, and for his friend and longtime partner Robert MacNeil, broadcast journalism was a service, with public understanding of events and issues its primary goal.

“We both believed the American people were not as stupid as some of the folks publishing and programming for them believed,” Lehrer wrote in his 1992 memoir, “A Bus of My Own.”

“We were convinced they cared about the significant matters of human events. … And we were certain they could and would hang in there more than 35 seconds for information about those subjects if given a chance.”

Tributes poured in from colleagues and watchers alike, including from Fox News’ Bret Baier, who called Lehrer “an inspiration to a whole generation of political journalists— including this one.” Dan Rather said “few approached their work with more equanimity and integrity than Jim Lehrer.” And Jake Tapper of CNN called Lehrer “a wonderful man and a superb journalist.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called him a “champion for truth and transparency.”

Many Americans knew him best for his role as debate moderator. For seven straight presidential elections, he was the sole journalist sitting across from the candidates for the first debate of the general election campaign. In 1996 and 2000, he moderated all of the debates — five of them — and a vice presidential contest to boot.

He told The Associated Press in 2011 that his goal was to probe the candidates’ thinking and avoid “gotcha” questions. He felt his best debate performance was in 2004, with George W. Bush and John Kerry, not because of anything he did, but because the candidates were able to state their positions clearly.

“I didn’t get in the way,” said Lehrer, whose book “Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates” told stories of his experiences. “Nobody was talking about what I did as a moderator. I didn’t become part of the story.”

He was lured out of retirement for his last debate in 2012 and it may have been a mistake; he received criticism that year for having too light a touch on the proceedings.

The half-hour “Robert MacNeil Report” began on PBS in 1975 with Lehrer as Washington correspondent. The two had already made names for themselves at the then-fledgling network through their work with the National Public Affairs Center for Television and its coverage of the Watergate hearings in 1973.

The nightly news broadcast, later retitled the “MacNeil-Lehrer Report,” became the nation’s first one-hour TV news broadcast in 1983 and was then known as the “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.” After MacNeil bowed out in 1995, it became “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”

“I’m heartbroken at the loss of someone who was central to my professional life, a mentor to me and someone whose friendship I’ve cherished for decades,” said Judy Woodruff, anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour, in a statement.

Politics, international relations, economics, science, even developments in the arts were all given lengthy, detailed coverage in their show.

“When we expanded to the hour, it changed from being a supplement to an alternative,” Lehrer said in 1990. “Now we take the position that if you’re looking for a place to go every 24 hours and find out what’s happened and get some in-depth treatment, we’re the place.”

Lehrer moderated his first presidential debate in 1988 and was a frequent consensus choice for the task in subsequent presidential contests. He likened the job to “walking down the blade of a knife.”

“Anybody who would say it’s just another TV show is a liar or a fool,” he once said. “I know how important it is, but it’s not about me. It’s what the candidates say that matters.”

He also anchored PBS coverage of inaugurations and conventions, dismissing criticism from other TV news organizations that the latter had become too scripted to yield much in the way of real news.

“I think when the major political parties of this country gather together their people and resources in one place to nominate their candidates, that’s important,” he told The Associated Press in 2000. “To me, it’s a non-argument. I don’t see why someone would argue that it wasn’t important.”

Naturally, Lehrer came in for some knocks for being so low-key in the big televised events. After a matchup between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, David Letterman cracked, “Last night was probably the first and only that time Jim Lehrer (was) the most exciting person in the room.”

But the real-life Lehrer — who had a tradition of buying a new tie for good luck before each debate — was more colorful than he might have seemed on PBS.

On the side, he was also a novelist and sometime playwright. His debut novel “Viva Max!” was made into a movie starring Peter Ustinov. He did a whole series of novels about the adventures of an Oklahoma politician known as The One-Eyed Mack.

“Hemingway said this, too: If you paid attention as a reporter, then when the time came to write fiction you’d have something to write about,” Lehrer told The Associated Press in 1991.

“And it turned out I did. And I’ve got all these stories stored up after 30 years in the news business. And they’re just flowing out of me.”

As Lehrer turned 75 in spring 2009, PBS announced that the show would be retitled as “PBS NewsHour” later in the year, with Lehrer pairing up on anchor duties with other show regulars.

He said he approved of the changes, telling The New York Times that having a pair of anchors would “shake things up a bit,” even as all sectors of the news business struggled to meet changing reader and viewer demands.

Lehrer was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1934, the son of parents who ran a bus line. In addition to titling his memoir “A Bus of My Own,” he collected bus memorabilia — from station signs to a real 1946 Flxible Clipper bus.

After graduation from college in 1956, he served three years in the Marines, later calling the experience so valuable that he thought all young people should take part in national service.

“I had no close calls, no rendezvous with danger, no skirted destinies with death,” he wrote. “What I had was a chance to discover and test myself, physically and emotionally and spiritually, in important, lasting ways.”

He went to work from 1959 to 1970 at The Dallas Morning News and the now-defunct Dallas Times-Herald. Lehrer jumped to television for a Dallas nightly newscast.

Lehrer wrote that it was ironic that the Watergate hearings helped establish the importance of public TV, since President Richard Nixon hated public broadcasting. He also recalled that the lengthy hearings gave him the chance to practice his new craft, and MacNeil, already a veteran, gave him valuable pointers on how to speak on camera clearly and conversationally.

He is survived by his wife, Kate; three daughters: Jamie, Lucy, and Amanda; and six grandchildren.

___

Former Associated Press writer Polly Anderson contributed to this report.

U.S. General Says Troop Surge in Middle East May Not End Soon

ABOARD THE USS BATAAN — Over the past eight months, the United States has poured more than 20,000 additional troops into the Middle East to counter the escalating threat from Iran that peaked with the recent missile attack on American forces in Iraq.

Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to bring troops home, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East on Thursday said the most recent forces to enter the region could be there for “quite a while.”

“You’re here because I requested that you come,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie told sailors and Marines aboard the USS Bataan amphibious assault ship, his voice booming over the ship’s loudspeaker. “I’m not sure how long you’re going to stay in the theater. We’ll work that out as we go ahead. Could be quite a while, could be less than that, just don’t know right now.”

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The Bataan and two other U.S. warships moved into the Middle East on Jan. 11. By Thursday, they were in the north Red Sea, roughly 50 miles south of the Sinai Peninsula. They are the latest additions to America’s troop presence in the region. Since May, their numbers have grown from about 60,000 to more than 80,000.

Those increased deployments came despite two significant hurdles: Trump’s persistent pledge to end the wars and bring troops home, and U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s insistence that U.S. forces be shifted to the Asia-Pacific as a bulwark against threats from China.

In making its case for troops in the Middle East, the U.S. military points to Iran’s Jan. 8 launch of as many as two dozen ballistic missiles at two Iraqi bases where U.S. troops were stationed. The attack was in retaliation for a U.S. drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top general.

“Iran continues to pose a very real threat,” McKenzie told reporters traveling with him to the Bataan. “I do believe that they are deterred right now, at least from state-on-state actions by our response. And so I think that while that threat remains, I think we’re in a period where they’re certainly not seeking to escalate anything.”

He added, however, that Iranian proxy forces, who may strike with or without direction from Iranian leaders, still present a threat. He noted that Iranian attacks against Saudi Arabia last fall came as a surprise.

“Iran is very hard to read,” McKenzie said. “So I would say the fact that things are quiet for a while does not mean that necessarily things are getting better.”

To help deter additional Iranian attacks, McKenzie asked to have the USS Bataan Amphibious Ready Group, which includes two other ships and a Marine Expeditionary Unit, divert from their original mission in Europe and go through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea. There are about 2,500 Marines and 1,500 sailors on the three ships.

That decision is the latest move since May to bolster the American presence in the region, including the deployment of the 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne division, to Kuwait and Iraq after the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was attacked. The U.S. also moved an aircraft carrier into the region last year. It has left and was replaced the USS Harry S. Truman. The Pentagon has sent additional fighter jets, bomber aircraft, and Patriot missile batteries to Middle East to provide additional security for U.S. troops and allies and as a show of force to deter attacks by Iran.

Those moves have increased the U.S. troop strength in the region to more than 83,000, based on numbers from several U.S. officials and other government agencies that track military movements.

Asked about the increase, McKenzie said he understands the demand for troops in other parts of the world, and he has had discussions with Esper about the level of risk in the Middle East.

Esper, who has approved the moves, is looking closely at worldwide deployments in a broader effort to meet the needs of the national defense strategy that identified China and Russia as the key future threats. Even as McKenzie was traveling to the Bataan, Esper was in Florida telling reporters that Russia and China are “mission number one.”

“There’s only a finite number of dollars, a finite number of troops, so I’ve got to figure out, where is the best place to put them? I’ve articulated in the past that I want to either return forces to the States to improve their readiness, or redeploy others” to the IndoPacific, Esper said.

Trump has argued that the U.S. must get out of the “endless wars” in the Middle East. But he has also singled out Iran as a malign influence in the region, and after the Iranian missile strikes, was quick to threaten revenge.

After hundreds of Iranian-supported militiamen breached the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in early January, Trump tweeted, “They will pay a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning, it is a Threat. Happy New Year!” Trump also approved the airstrike on Soleimani, which triggered the Iranian reprisal. Some U.S. troops were flown out of Iraq for evaluation of concussion-like symptom after the missile strikes.

Senior U.S. officials have noted the relative calm after the Iranian strikes, saying both the U.S. and Iran want to deescalate tensions.

But McKenzie said that while the U.S. wants to be “coolheaded,” he worries that cooler heads may not prevail in Iran.

So when he went to the microphone on the Bataan, where Marine Harrier jets intermittently roared down the ship’s deck into the air, he issued a warning.

“You need to be ready because I may need to employ you on very short notice and on some very difficult missions,” he said.

Democrats Focus Day 2 of Trial on Trump’s ‘Dangerous’ Abuse

WASHINGTON — Pressing through a second day of impeachment arguments, House Democrats scoffed at President Donald Trump’s claims that he had good reasons for pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political foes.

It was Trump who engaged in a shocking abuse of power, not former Vice President Joe Biden or other Trump foes, said Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas. There is “no evidence, nothing, nada”‘ to suggest that Biden did anything improper in dealings with Ukraine, said the former judge.

The Democratic prosecutors argued in the impeachment trial before skeptical Republican senators and a watchful American public that Trump sought a political investigation of Biden from Ukraine for his own gain to sway the 2020 election in his favor.

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“There was no basis for the investigation the president was pursuing and pushing. None. He was doing it only for his own political benefit,” Garcia declared.

Trump is facing trial in the Senate after the House impeached him last month, arguing he abused his office by asking Ukraine to investigate political rival Biden while withholding crucial military aid. They also charged him with obstructing Congress by refusing to turn over documents or allow officials to testify in the House probe.

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has pursued investigations of Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on a Ukrainian gas company’s board, and also of debunked theories of what nation was guilty of interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Republicans, growing tired of the long hours of proceedings, have defended Trump’s actions as appropriate and cast the process as a politically motivated effort to weaken the president in the midst of his reelection campaign.

The Democrats’ challenge is clear as they try to convince not just fidgety senators but an American public divided over the Republican president in an election year.

Democrats opened the day arguing that “no president” has ever abused power the way Trump did as they focused on the first article of impeachment, abuse of power, arguing Trump’s motives were clear.

“No president has ever used his office to compel a foreign nation to help him cheat in our elections,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told the senators. He said the nation’s founders would be shocked. “The president’s conduct is wrong. It is illegal. It is dangerous,”

Republican senators, who hold a majority in the chamber and will vote on Trump’s conviction or acquittal, exhibited no shock.

Ahead of the day’s proceedings, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri said the Democrats were putting forward “admirable presentations.” But he said, “They’ve basically got about one hour of presentation, and they gave it six times on Tuesday and eight times yesterday. There’s just not much new here.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, stood before restless senators forced to sit silently for another long day there would be “some repetition of information” from the overview heard on day one.

But he promised a stitching together of the facts to an inevitable conclusion.

“You’ve now heard hundreds of hours of depositions and live testimony from the House,” Schiff said. ’We will now show these facts and many others and how they are interwoven … to a finding of guilt and conviction.”

The top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer, acknowledged Thursday that many senators “really don’t want to be here.”

But Schumer said Schiff has been outlining a compelling case about Trump’s pressure on Ukraine and the scheme to cover up the charges and many Republicans are hearing it for only the first time. He contended they can’t help but be “glued” to his testimony.

Once reluctant to take on impeachment during an election year, Democrats are now marching toward a decision by the Senate that the American public also will judge. They are one-third of the way through 24 hours of opening arguments.

Trump blasted the proceedings in a Thursday morning tweet, declaring them the “Most unfair & corrupt hearing in Congressional history!”

Campaigning in Iowa, Biden said, “People ask the question, ‘Isn’t the president going to be stronger and harder to beat if he survives this?’ Yes, probably. But Congress has no choice,” He said senators must cast their votes and “live with that in history.”

Each side has up to three days to present its case. After the House prosecutors finish, likely Friday, the president’s lawyers will have as much as 24 hours. It’s unclear how much time they will actually take, but Trump’s team promises not only to defend the president but to take apart the Democrats’ case. The Senate is expected to take only Sunday off and push into next week.

“There’s a lot of things I’d like to rebut,” said Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow at the Capitol, “and we will rebut.”

After that senators will face the question of whether they do, or do not, want to call witnesses to testify.

On the first day of opening arguments, Schiff appealed to senators not to be “cynical” about politics, but to draw on the intent of the nation’s Founding Fathers in providing the remedy of impeachment and removal. He spoke directly to Republicans to join in voting to oust Trump from office to “protect our democracy.”

Holding the room proved difficult. Most senators sat at their desks throughout, as the rules stipulate, though some stretched their legs, standing behind the desks or against the back wall of the chamber. Sometimes they yawned. Republicans sometimes quietly smirked at the presentation from Schiff and the lesser-known House Democrats prosecuting the case.

Nearing nine long hours of arguments, the empty seats became glaringly apparent. Some lawmakers dashed down the hall to appear on television. Visitors thinned from the galleries, one briefly interrupting in protest and being removed by Capitol police.

The impeachment trial is set against the backdrop of the 2020 election. All four senators who are Democratic presidential candidates are off the campaign trail, seated as jurors.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed the public slightly more likely to say the Senate should convict and remove Trump from office than to say it should not, 45% to 40%. But a sizable percentage, 14%, said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion.

One issue with wide agreement: Trump should allow top aides to appear as witnesses at the trial. About 7 in 10 said so, including majorities of Republicans and Democrats, according to the poll.

The strategy of more witnesses, though, seemed all but settled. Republicans rejected Democratic efforts to get Trump aides including former national security adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, to testify in back-to-back votes earlier this week.

Senators were likely to repeat that rejection next week, shutting out any chance of new testimony.

Republicans remained eager for a swift trial. Yet Trump’s legal team passed on an opportunity to file a motion to dismiss the case on Wednesday, an acknowledgment that there were not enough Republican votes to support it.

The White House legal team, in its court filings and presentations, has not disputed Trump’s actions. But the lawyers insist the president did nothing wrong.

___

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Laurie Kellman, Matthew Daly and Padmananda Rama in Washington and Bill Barrow in Osage, Iowa, contributed to this report.

Trump’s Rosy Economic Outlook Is a Big Lie

President Donald Trump this week addressed the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, exaggerating the successes of the U.S. economy to such a great extent that it was as though he hoped to match reality to his fantastical claims by sheer force of will. The WEF — a yearly meeting that he chose to skip last year — is a gathering of global elites that this year convened at the same time his Senate impeachment trial began in earnest. Trump’s attendance was perhaps a deliberate attempt to distract from the proceedings that could lay bare his corrupt dealings. He seemed to be saying, “Ignore the scheming corruption I was engaged in, and look at the riches I have brought Americans.”

Indeed, Trump’s version of the U.S. economy is so outlandish that it would be laughable were he not president of the United States. “The United States is in the midst of an economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen before,” he said triumphantly Tuesday at Davos. Throwing out as many buzzwords as he could gather together in one speech, Trump proclaimed, at the risk of sounding repetitive, “America is thriving, America is flourishing, and yes, America is winning again like never before.” And, he claimed, “America’s newfound prosperity is undeniable, unprecedented and unmatched anywhere in the world.” Giving few specifics beyond the standard talking points scripted by his economic advisers, Trump resorted to his usual superlatives, saying, “America’s economic turnaround has been nothing short of spectacular,” and proclaiming, “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”

But when asked about the economy, Americans take a different view from their president. A recent Pew research poll found that “[s]even-in-10 U.S. adults say the economic system in their country unfairly favors powerful interests, compared with less than a third who say the system is generally fair to most Americans.” Large majorities in all income groups from rich to poor are convinced the current system benefits powerful interests such as corporations and wealthy individuals.

To coincide with the WEF, two major reports underscored this dismal view of the economy on a global level. The International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency, found that global unemployment is projected to rise over the next two years and that about half a billion people worldwide simply cannot find adequate work to support themselves. The non-governmental organization Oxfam released its yearly report on global inequality and concluded there are currently 2,153 people worldwide who are considered billionaires and that together they own more wealth than 4.6 billion people combined. Both reports highlighted the ongoing gender gap in income and wealth.

In his WEF speech this week, Trump had some advice for the global economy, offering his version of the U.S. as an example for the world: “[W]e are building an economy that works for everyone, restoring the bonds of love and loyalty that unite citizens and power nations.” He added, “I hold up the American model as an example to the world of a working system of free enterprise that will produce the most benefits for the most people in the 21st century and beyond.”

But a survey by Gallup last April concluded that Americans are among the most stressed people in the world. Stress levels in the U.S. went up in 2018 — on Trump’s watch — and reached levels higher than most places globally. About 55% of Americans said they were stressed out compared to the international average of 35%. Another new study examining minimum wage increases and correlations with suicide rates concluded that even a small increase in the federal minimum wage could result in lower suicide rates nationwide, suggesting Americans who kill themselves are often economically stressed. So much for “restoring the bonds of love and loyalty” in the U.S.

When compared to actual facts, Trump’s rhetoric on the American economy exists in the realm of fantasy. The official unemployment rate in the U.S. is indeed at a record low of 3.5%, according to the latest jobs report. That number suggests that only 3.5% of all Americans capable of working are currently unemployed and that more than 96% have jobs. But digging into the numbers offers a much different picture. As per an analysis by FiveThirtyEight.com, the 3.5% unemployment figure is misleading; only about half of all employable Americans are working full time, 10% are working part time, 2.1% are actively seeking work but are unemployed, and 1.8% are not seeking work but want a job. A whopping 35% are out of the job market and not actively seeking work.

The situation is worse for people of color, whom Trump likes to claim have benefited greatly under his presidency. Black Americans are far more likely than whites to be “underemployed” — a term for those who work part-time but are seeking full-time jobs. Additionally, the racial wealth gap in the U.S. remains strikingly high. According to a recent study, “The median black household holds just 10% of the wealth of median white household, and while blacks constitute 13% of America’s population, they hold less than 3% of its wealth.”

Yet in Trump’s version of the economy, he is “creating the most inclusive economy ever to exist,” and “lifting up Americans of every race, color, religion and creed.” On Monday, to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Trump shamelessly boasted on Twitter that it was the third anniversary of his inauguration as president and that it is, “So appropriate that today is also MLK jr DAY,” because “African-American Unemployment is the LOWEST in the history of our Country, by far. Also, best Poverty, Youth, and Employment numbers, ever.”

Trump offered several explanations for his rosy (but false) picture of a booming American economy, saying, “I knew that … if we cut taxes, slashed regulations … fixed broken trade deals and fully tapped American energy, that prosperity would come thundering back at a record speed.” But on taxes and regulations especially, Trump’s promises have fallen flat. Business Insider concluded last December that the highly touted Republican-backed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 “achieved none of the ambitious goals Republicans put forward, and there are few signs they ever will.” The Washington Post questioned Trump’s wild assertion that his deregulatory agenda was translating into a savings of $3,000 a year per household and awarded his claim “three Pinocchios.” The trade war with China that Trump dragged the country into to win a trade deal arguably cost the U.S.  economy more than the proposed benefits. In a single tweet, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich demolished Trump’s triumphant celebration of his newly signed deal with China, calculating a net loss of $39 billion to the U.S. economy.

It should not surprise us in the least that the most dishonest president in U.S. history would spin a fantastical vision of the economy that appears to exist only in his imagination. After all, fact checkers at The Washington Post found that Trump made “16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years” in office. The reporters pithily observed, “The president apparently believes he can weather an impeachment trial through sheer repetition of easily disproved falsehoods.” Given that Trump expects that economic prosperity is his strongest path to reelection, it is no surprise that it is one of the topics he lies about the most.

China Locks Down 3 Cities With 18 Million to Stop Virus

BEIJING — Chinese authorities Thursday moved to lock down three cities with a combined population of more than 18 million in an unprecedented effort to contain the deadly new virus that has sickened hundreds of people and spread to other parts of the world during the busy Lunar New Year travel period.

The open-ended lockdowns are unmatched in size, embracing more people than New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago put together.

The train station and airport in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, were shut down, and ferry, subway and bus service was halted. Normally bustling streets, shopping malls, restaurants and other public spaces in the city of 11 million were eerily quiet. Police checked all incoming vehicles but did not close off the roads.

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Authorities announced similar measures would take effect Friday in the nearby cities of Huanggang and Ezhou. In Huanggang, theaters, internet cafes and other entertainment centers were also ordered closed.

In the capital, Beijing, officials canceled “major events” indefinitely, including traditional temple fairs that are a staple of holiday celebrations, in order to “execute epidemic prevention and control.” The Forbidden City, the palace complex in Beijing that is now a museum, announced it will close indefinitely on Saturday.

Seventeen people have died in the outbreak, all of them in and around Wuhan. Close to 600 have been infected, the vast majority of them in Wuhan, and many countries have begun screening travelers from China for symptoms of the virus, which can cause fever, coughing, trouble breathing and pneumonia.

Chinese officials have not said how long the shutdowns will last. While sweeping measures are typical of China’s communist government, large-scale quarantines are rare around the world, even in deadly epidemics, because of concerns about infringing on people’s liberties. And the effectiveness of such measures is unclear.

“To my knowledge, trying to contain a city of 11 million people is new to science,” Gauden Galea, the World Health Organization’s representative in China, said in an interview. “It has not been tried before as a public health measure. We cannot at this stage say it will or it will not work.”

Jonathan Ball, a professor of virology at molecular virology at the University of Nottingham in Britain, said the lockdowns appear to be justified scientifically.

“Until there’s a better understanding of what the situation is, I think it’s not an unreasonable thing to do,” he said. “Anything that limits people’s travels during an outbreak would obviously work.”

But Ball cautioned that any such quarantine should be strictly time-limited. He added: “You have to make sure you communicate effectively about why this is being done. Otherwise you will lose the goodwill of the people.”

During the devastating West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014, Sierra Leone imposed a national three-day quarantine as health teams went door-to-door searching for hidden cases. Frustrated residents complained of food shortages amid deserted streets. Burial teams collecting Ebola corpses and people transporting the sick to Ebola centers were the only ones allowed to move freely.

In China, the illnesses from the newly identified coronavirus first appeared last month in Wuhan, an industrial and transportation hub in central China’s Hubei province. Other cases have been reported in the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Thailand. Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong reported their first cases Thursday.

Most of the illnesses outside China involve people who were from Wuhan or had recently traveled there.

Images from Wuhan showed long lines and empty shelves at supermarkets, as residents stocked up for what could be weeks of isolation. That appeared to be an over-reaction, since no restrictions were placed on trucks carrying supplies into the city, although many Chinese have strong memories of shortages in the years before the country’s recent economic boom.

Local authorities in Wuhan demanded all residents wear masks in public places. Police, SWAT teams and paramilitary troops guarded Wuhan’s train station.

Liu Haihan left Wuhan last Friday after visiting her boyfriend there. She said everything was normal then, before human-to-human transmission of the virus was confirmed. But things had changed rapidly.

Her boyfriend “didn’t sleep much yesterday. He disinfected his house and stocked up on instant noodles,” Liu said. “He’s not really going out. If he does, he wears a mask.”

The sharp rise in illnesses comes as millions of Chinese travel for the Lunar New Year, one of the world’s largest annual migrations of people. Chinese are expected to take an estimated 3 billion trips during the 40-day spike in travel.

Analysts predicted cases will continue to multiply, although the jump in numbers is also attributable in part to increased monitoring.

“Even if (cases) are in the thousands, this would not surprise us,” the WHO’s Galea said, adding, however, that the number of those infected is not an indicator of the outbreak’s severity, so long as the mortality rate remains low.

The coronavirus family includes the common cold as well as viruses that cause more serious illnesses, such as the SARS outbreak that spread from China to more than a dozen countries in 2002-03 and killed about 800 people, and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, or MERS, which is thought to have originated from camels.

China is keen to avoid repeating mistakes with its handling of SARS. For months, even after the illness had spread around the world, China parked patients in hotels and drove them around in ambulances to conceal the true number of cases and avoid WHO experts.

In the current outbreak, China has been credited with sharing information rapidly, and President Xi Jinping has emphasized that as a priority.

“Party committees, governments and relevant departments at all levels must put people’s lives and health first,” Xi said Monday. “It is necessary to release epidemic information in a timely manner and deepen international cooperation.”

Health authorities were taking extraordinary measures to prevent additional person-to-person transmissions, placing those believed infected in plastic tubes and wheeled boxes, with air passed through filters.

The first cases in the Wuhan outbreak were connected to people who worked at or visited a seafood market, which has since been closed for an investigation. Experts suspect that the virus was first transmitted from wild animals but that it may also be mutating. Mutations can make it deadlier or more contagious.

WHO convened its emergency committee of independent experts on Thursday to consider whether the outbreak should be declared a global health emergency, after the group failed to come to a consensus on Wednesday.

The U.N. health agency defines a global emergency as an “extraordinary event” that constitutes a risk to other countries and requires a coordinated international response.

A declaration of a global emergency typically brings greater money and resources, but may also prompt nervous governments to restrict travel to and trade with affected countries. The announcement also imposes more disease-reporting requirements on countries.

Declaring an international emergency can also be politically fraught. Countries typically resist the notion that they have a crisis within their borders and may argue strenuously for other control measures.

___

Associated Press journalists Shanshan Wang in Shanghai, Maria Cheng in London and Krista Larson in Dakar contributed to this report.

Violent Chaos Is Practically American Foreign Policy

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be redesigned “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”

I got to thinking about that recently, five years after I became an antiwar dissenter (while still a major in the U.S. Army), and in the wake of another near-war, this time with Iran. I was struck yet again by the way every single U.S. military intervention in the Greater Middle East since 9/11 has backfired in wildly counterproductive ways, destabilizing a vast expanse of the planet stretching from West Africa to South Asia.

Chaos, it seems, is now Washington’s stock-in-trade. Perhaps, then, it’s time to resurrect Twain’s comment — only today maybe those stars on our flag should be replaced with the universal symbol for chaos.

After all, our present administration, however unhinged, hardly launched this madness. President Trump’s rash, risky, and repugnant decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani on the sovereign soil of Iraq was only the latest version of what has proven to be a pervasive state of affairs. Still, that and Trump’s other recent escalations in the region do illustrate an American chaos machine that’s gone off the rails. And the very manner — I’m loathe to call it a “process” — by which it’s happened just demonstrates the way this president has taken American chaos to its dark but logical conclusion.

The Goldilocks Method

Any military officer worth his salt knows full well the importance of understanding the basic psychology of your commander. President George W. Bush liked to call himself “the decider,” an apt term for any commander. Senior leaders don’t, as a rule, actually do that much work in the traditional sense. Rather, they hobnob with superiors, buck up unit morale, evaluate and mentor subordinates, and above all make key decisions. It’s the operations staff officers who analyze problems, present options, and do the detailed planning once the boss blesses or signs off on a particular course of action.

Though they may toil thanklessly in the shadows, however, those staffers possess immense power to potentially circumscribe the range of available options and so influence the future mission. In other words, to be a deft operations officer, you need to know your commander’s mind, be able translate his sparse guidance, and frame his eventual choice in such a manner that the boss leaves a “decision briefing” convinced the plan was his own. Believe me, this is the actual language military lifers use to describe the tortured process of decision-making.

In 2009, as a young captain, fresh out of Baghdad, Iraq, I spent two unfulfilling, if instructive, years enmeshed in exactly this sort of planning system. As a battalion-level planner, then assistant, and finally a primary operations officer, I observed this cycle countless times. So allow me to take you “under the hood” for some inside baseball. I — and just about every new staff officer — was taught to always provide the boss with three plans, but to suss out ahead of time which one he’d choose (and, above all, which one you wanted him to choose).

Confident in your ability to frame his choices persuasively, you’d often even direct your staffers to begin writing up the full operations order before the boss’s briefing took place. The key to success was what some labeled the Goldilocks method. You’d always present your commander with a too-cautious option, a too-risky option, and a “just-right” course of action. It nearly always worked.

I did this under the command of two very different lieutenant colonels. The first was rational, ethical, empathetic, and tactically competent. He made mission planning easy on his staff. He knew the game as well as we did and only pretended to be fooled. He built relationships with his senior operations officers over the course of months, thereby revealing his preferred methods, tactical predilections, and even personal learning style. Then he’d give just enough initial guidance — far more than most commanders — to set his staff going in a reasonably focused fashion.

Unfortunately, that consummate professional moved on to bigger things and his replacement was a sociopath who gave vague, often conflicting guidance, oozed insecurity in briefings, and had a disturbing penchant for choosing the most radical (read: foolhardy) option around. Sound familiar? It should!

Still, military professionals are coached to adapt and improvise and so we did. As a staff we worked to limit his range of options by reverse–ordering the choices we presented him or even lying about nonexistent logistical limitations to stop him from doing the truly horrific.

And as recent events remind us, such exercises play out remarkably similarly, no matter whether you’re dealing at a battalion level (perhaps 400 to 700 troops) or that of this country’s commander-in-chief (more than two million uniformed service personnel). The behind-the-scenes war-gaming of the boss, the entire calculus, remains the same, whether the options are ultimately presented by a captain (me, then) or — as in the recent decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Suleimani — Mark Milley, the four-star general at the helm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Soon after President Trump’s egregious, a-strategic, dubiously legal, unilateral execution of a uniformed leader of a sovereign country, reports surfaced describing his convoluted decision-making process. Perhaps predictably, it appears that The Donald took his military staff by surprise and chose the most extreme measure they presented him with — assassinating a foreign military figure. Honestly, that this president did so should have surprised no one. That, according to a report in the New York Times, his generals were indeed surprised strikes me as basic dereliction of duty (especially given that, seven months earlier, Trump had essentially given the green light to such a future assassination — the deepest desire, by the way, of both his secretary of state and his then-national security advisor, John Bolton).

At this point in their careers, having played out such processes at every possible level for at least 30 years, his generals ought to have known their boss better, toiled valiantly to temper his worst instincts, assumed he might choose the most extreme measure offered and, when he did so, publicly resigned before potentially relegating their soldiers to a hopeless new conflict. That they didn’t, particularly that the lead briefer Milley didn’t, is just further proof that, 18-plus years after our latest round of wars began, such senior leaders lack both competence and integrity.

Bush, Obama, and the Chaos Machine’s Tragic Foundations

The current commander-in-chief could never have expanded America’s wars in the Greater Middle East (contra his campaign promises) or unilaterally drone-assassinated a foreign leader, without the militaristic foundations laid down for him by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. So it’s vital to review, however briefly, the chaotic precedents to the rule of Donald Trump.

Guided by a coterie of neoconservative zealots, Bush the Younger committed the nation to the “original sin” of expansive, largely unsanctioned wars as his chosen response to the 9/11 attacks. It was his team that would write the playbook on selling an ill-advised, illegal invasion of Iraq based on bad intelligence and false pretenses. He also escalated tensions with Iran to the brink of war by including the Islamic Republic in an imaginary “axis of evil” (with Iraq and North Korea) after invading first one of its neighbors, Afghanistan, and then the other, Iraq, while imposing sanctions, which froze the assets of Iranians allegedly connected to that country’s nuclear program. He ushered in the use of torture, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, illegal domestic mass surveillance, and drone attacks over the sovereign airspace of other countries — then lied about it all. That neither Congress, nor the courts, nor his successor held him (or anyone else) accountable for such decisions set a dangerous new standard for foreign policy.

Barack Obama promised “hope and change,” a refreshing (if vague) alternative to the sins of the Bush years. The very abstraction of that slogan, however, allowed his supporters to project their own wants, needs, and preferred policies onto the future Obama experiment. So perhaps none of us ought to have been as surprised as many of us were when, despite slowly pulling troops out of Iraq, he only escalated the Afghan War, continued the forever wars in general (even returning to Iraq in 2014), and set his own perilous precedents along the way.

It was, after all, Obama who, as an alternative to large-scale military occupations, took Bush’s drone program and ran with it. He would be the first president to truly earn the sobriquet “assassin-in-chief.” He made selecting individuals for assassination in “Terror Tuesday” meetings at the White House banal and put his stamp of approval on the drone campaigns across significant parts of the planet that followed — even killing American citizens without due process. Encouraged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he also launched a new regime-change war in Libya, turning that land into a failed state filled with terror groups, a decision which, he later admitted, added up to a “shit show.” After vacillating for a couple years, he also mired the U.S., however indirectly, in the Syrian civil war, empowering Islamist factions there and worsening that already staggering humanitarian catastrophe.

In response to the sudden explosion of the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda offshoot first catalyzed by the Bush invasion of Iraq and actually formed in an American prison in that country — its taking of key Iraqi cities and smashing of the American-trained Iraqi army, Obama loosed U.S. air power on them and sent American troops back into that country. He also greatly expanded his predecessor’s nascent military interventions across the African continent. There, too, the results were largely tragic and counterproductive as ethnic militias and Islamic terror groups have spread widely and civil warfare has exploded.

Finally, it was Obama who first sanctioned, supported, and enabled the Saudi terror bombing of Yemen, which, even now, remains perhaps the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. So it is that, from Mali to Libya, Syria to Afghanistan, every one of Bush’s and Obama’s military forays has sowed further chaos, startling body counts, and increased rates of terrorism. It’s those policies, those results, and the military toolbox that went with them that Donald J. Trump inherited in January 2017.

The Trumpian Perfect Storm

During the climax to the American phase of a 30-year war in Vietnam, newly elected President Richard Nixon, a well-established Republican cold warrior, developed what he dubbed the “madman theory” for bringing the intractable U.S. intervention there to a face-saving conclusion. The president’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, recalled Nixon telling him:

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ and [North Vietnamese leader] Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

It didn’t work, of course. Nixon escalated and expanded the war. He briefly invaded neighboring Cambodia and Laos, secretly (and illegally) bombed both countries, and ramped up air strikes on North Vietnam. Apart from slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents, however, none of this had a notable effect on the ultimate outcome. The North Vietnamese called his bluff, extending the war long enough to force an outright American withdrawal less than four years later. Washington lost in Southeast Asia, just as today it’s losing in the Greater Middle East.

So it was, with the necessary foundations of militarism and hyper-interventionism in place, that Donald Trump entered the White House, at times seemingly intent on testing out his own personal “fire and fury” version of the madman theory. Indeed, his more irrational and provocative foreign policy incitements, including pulling out of the Paris climate accords, spiking a working nuclear deal with Iran, existentially threatening North Korea, seizing Syrian oil fields, sending yet more military personnel into the Persian Gulf region, and most recently assassinating a foreign leader seem right out of some madman instruction manual. And just like Nixon’s stillborn escalations, Trump’s most absurd moves also seem bound to fail.

Take the Suleimani execution as a case in point. An outright regional war has (so far) been avoided, thanks not to the “deal-making” skills of that self-styled “stable genius” in the White House but to Iran’s long history of restraint. As retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently put it: “The leadership in Tehran is far more rational than the leadership in Washington.”

In fact, Trump’s unprecedented assassination order backfired at every level. He even managed briefly to unite a divided Iranian nation, caused the Iraqi government to demand a full U.S. troop withdrawal from that country, convinced Iran to end its commitment to restrain its enrichment of uranium, and undoubtedly incentivized both Tehran and Pyongyang not to commit to, or abide by, any future nuclear deals with Washington.

If George W. Bush and Barack Obama sowed the seeds of the American chaos machine, Donald Trump represents the first true madman at the wheel of state, thanks to his volatile temperament, profound ignorance, and crippling insecurity.

The Rapture as Foreign Policy

All of which raises another disturbing question: What if this administration’s chaos-sowing proves an end in itself, one that coheres with the millenarian fantasies of sections of the Republican Christian Right? After all, several key figures on the Trump team — notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence — explicitly view the Middle East as evangelical Christians. Like a disturbing 73% of evangelicals (or 20% of the U.S. population), Pompeo and Pence believe that the Rapture (that is, the prophesied Christian end of the world) is likely to unfold in this generation and that a contemporary conflict in Israel and an impending war with Iran might actually be trigger events ushering in just such an apocalypse.  

Donald Trump is, by all indications, far too self-serving, self-absorbed, and cynical to adhere to the eschatological blind-faith of the two Mikes. He clearly believes only in Donald Trump. And yet what a terrible irony it would be if, due to his perfect-storm disposition, he unwittingly ends up playing the role of the very Antichrist those evangelicals believe necessary to usher in end-times.

Given the foundations set in place for Trump by George W. Bush and Barack Obama and his capacity to throw caution to the wind, it’s hard to imagine a better candidate to play that role.

Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vets Chris Henriksen and Keegan Ryan Miller. 

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2020 Danny Sjursen

U.S. Imposes Visa Rules for Pregnant Women on ‘Birth Tourism’

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday published new visa rules aimed at restricting “birth tourism,” in which women travel to the United States to give birth so their children can have U.S. citizenship.

Applicants will be denied tourist visas if they are determined by consular officers to be coming to the U.S. primarily to give birth, according to the rules in the Federal Register. It is a bigger hurdle to overcome, proving they are traveling to the U.S. because they have a medical need and not just because they want to give birth here. Those with medical needs will be treated like other foreigners coming to the U.S. for medical treatment and must prove they have the money to pay for it — including transportation and living expenses.

“Closing this glaring immigration loophole will combat these endemic abuses and ultimately protect the United States from the national security risks created by this practice,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement. “It will also defend American taxpayers from having their hard-earned dollars siphoned away to finance the direct and downstream costs associated with birth tourism. The integrity of American citizenship must be protected.”

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The practice of traveling to the U.S. to give birth is fundamentally legal, although there are scattered cases of authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies for visa fraud or tax evasion. And women are often honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even show signed contracts with doctors and hospitals.

The State Department “does not believe that visiting the United States for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child, by giving birth in the United States — an activity commonly referred to as ‘birth tourism’ — is a legitimate activity for pleasure or of a recreational nature,” according to the new rules, which take effect Friday.

While the new rules deal specifically with birth tourism, the Trump administration also has turned away pregnant women coming over the U.S.-Mexico border as part of a broader immigration crackdown. Those women were initially part of a “vulnerable” group that included others like small children who were allowed in, while tens of thousands of other asylum seekers have been returned to Mexico to wait out their cases.

President Donald Trump’s administration has been restricting all forms of immigration, but Trump has been particularly plagued by the issue of birthright citizenship — anyone born in the U.S. is considered a citizen, under the Constitution. The Republican president has railed against the practice and threatened to end it, but scholars and members of his administration have said it’s not so easy to do.

Regulating tourist visas for pregnant women is one way to get at the issue, but it raises questions about how officers would determine whether a woman is pregnant to begin with and whether a woman could get turned away by border officers who suspect she may be just by looking at her.

And critics of the new policy say it could put pregnant women at risk.

Consular officers don’t have the right to ask during visa interviews whether a woman is pregnant or intends to become so. But they would still have to determine whether a visa applicant would be coming to the U.S. primarily to give birth.

Birth tourism is a lucrative business in both the U.S. and abroad. Companies take out advertisements and charge up to $80,000 to facilitate the practice, offering hotel rooms and medical care. Many of the women travel from Russia and China to give birth in the U.S.

The U.S. has been cracking down on the practice since before Trump took office.

“An entire ‘birth tourism’ industry has evolved to assist pregnant women from other countries to come to the United States to obtain U.S. citizenship for their children by giving birth in the United States, and thereby entitle their children to the benefits of U.S. citizenship,” according to the State Department rules.

There are no figures on how many foreign women travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter immigration laws, estimated that in 2012 about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the U.S. and then left the country.

“This rule will help eliminate the criminal activity associated with the birth tourism industry,” according to the rules. “The recent federal indictments describe birth tourism schemes in which foreign nationals applied for visitor visas to come to the United States and lied to consular officers about the duration of their trips, where they would stay, and their purpose of travel.”

___

Associated Press Writer Ellen Knickmeyer contributed to this report.

World Leaders Meet in Jerusalem to Denounce Anti-Semitism

JERUSALEM — Dozens of world leaders gathered Thursday in Jerusalem for the largest-ever gathering focused on commemorating the Holocaust and combating rising modern-day anti-Semitism — a politically charged event that has been clouded by rival national interpretations of the genocide.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Prince Charles, Vice President Mike Pence and the presidents of Germany, Italy and Austria were among the more than 40 dignitaries attending the World Holocaust Forum, which coincides with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

The three-hour-long ceremony at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial — called “Remembering the Holocaust: Fighting Antisemitism” — looks to project a united front in commemorating the genocide of European Jewry amid a global spike in anti-Jewish violence.

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But the unresolved remnants of World War II’s politics have permeated the solemn assembly over the differing historical narratives of various players. Poland’s president, who’s been criticized for his own wartime revisionism, has boycotted the gathering since he wasn’t invited to speak. Putin was granted a central role even as he leads a campaign to play down the Soviet Union’s pre-war pact with the Nazis and shift responsibility for the war’s outbreak on Poland, which was invaded in 1939 to start the fighting.

On the eve of the gathering, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin implored visiting dignitaries to “leave history for the historians.”

“The role of political leaders, of all of us, is to shape the future,” he said.

But Putin quickly ventured into the sensitive terrain shortly after his arrival Thursday, claiming that 40% of Jewish Holocaust victims were Soviet.

Of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis, historians say about 1 million were Soviet. Putin’s controversial figure appears to include an additional 1.5 million Jewish victims from eastern European areas occupied by the Soviets under their pact with the Nazis.

“When it comes to the tragedy of the Holocaust, 40% of tortured and killed Jews were Soviet Union Jews. So this is our common tragedy in the fullest sense of the word,” he said during a meeting with Rivlin.

Arkadi Zeltser, a Yad Vashem historian, said the accuracy of the statement depended on rival “definitions” of when the war began. Yad Vashem, along with all other reputable institutions, considers the war to have been sparked on Sept. 1, 1939 with the invasion of Poland. The Soviets generally consider their “Great Patriotic War” to have started two years later, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

It was the latest chapter in a bitter dispute over Soviet actions in World War II. Putin has been leading a campaign to downplay the Soviet Union’s pre-war pact with the Nazis and focus instead on its role in defeating them.

Israel has appeared eager to oblige, giving Putin a fawning welcome and hosting him for the dedication of an imposing monument honoring the nearly 900-day Nazi siege of Leningrad. The city, now known as St. Petersburg, is Putin’s hometown.

“We mustn’t for even one second blur the sacrifice and the contribution of the former Soviet Union” in defeating “the Nazi monster,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the ceremony.

The forum at Yad Vashem marks one of the largest political gatherings in Israeli history, as a cascade of delegations including European presidents, prime ministers and royals, as well as American, Canadian and Australian representatives, arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport. More than 10,000 police officers were deployed in Jerusalem and major highways leading to it. Large parts of the city were shut down ahead of the event.

For Netanyahu it offered another opportunity to solidify Israel’s diplomatic standing and boost his profile as he seeks re-election on March 2. He was hoping to use his meetings with world leaders to bolster his tough line toward Iran and rally opposition to a looming war crimes case against Israel in the International Criminal Court.

“I am concerned that we have yet to see a unified and resolute stance against the most anti-Semitic regime on the planet, a regime that openly seeks to develop nuclear weapons and annihilate the one and only Jewish state,” he said of Iran. “For the Jewish people, Auschwitz is more than the ultimate symbol of evil. It is also the ultimate symbol of Jewish powerlessness. … Today we have a voice, we have a land, and we have a shield.”

For historians, though, the main message is one of education amid growing signs of ignorance and indifference to the Holocaust. A comprehensive survey released this week by the Claims Conference, a Jewish organization responsible for negotiating compensation for victims of Nazi persecution, found that most people in France did not know that 6 million Jews were killed during World War II. Among millennials, 45% said they were unaware of French collaboration with the Nazi regime and 25% said they weren’t even sure they had heard of the Holocaust.

The World Holocaust Forum is the brainchild of Moshe Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress, an umbrella group representing Jewish communities across Europe. The group recently reported that 80% of European Jews feel unsafe in the continent.

Kantor established the World Holocaust Forum Foundation in 2005 and it has held forums before in Auschwitz, the killing fields of Babi Yar in Ukraine and at the former concentration camp Terezin. Thursday’s event is the first time it is convening in Israel. The official commemoration marking the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation will be held next week at the site itself in southern Poland.

Organizers of the Jerusalem event have come under criticism for not including enough Holocaust survivors and instead focusing on the panoply of visiting dignitaries and the festival-like atmosphere surrounding it. In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy tweeted on Thursday that his delegation was giving up its seats to allow more survivors to attend.

Yad Vashem called the decision “odd” since about 100 survivors were expected to be among the 780 attendees and it was too late to make any adjustments in any case.

“It’s a shame he took such a step,” the memorial said in a statement.

The gathering comes amid an uptick in anti-Semitic violence. Tel Aviv University researchers reported last year that violent attacks against Jews grew significantly in 2018, with the largest reported number of Jews killed in anti-Semitic acts in decades. They recorded 400 cases, with the spike most dramatic in western Europe. In Germany, for instance, there was a 70% increase in anti-Semitic violence. In addition to the shooting attacks, assaults and vandalism, the research also noted increased anti-Semitic vitriol online and in newspapers, as extremist political parties grew in power in several countries, raising shock and concern among aging survivors.

“Anti-Semitism does not stop with the Jews,” Rivlin said in the opening speech. “Anti-Semitism and racism are a malignant disease that destroyed and takes apart societies from within and no democracy is immune.”

Democratic Party Loyalty Has Always Been a Scam

During a recent conversation with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) did not mince words about the state of the Democratic Party. “We don’t have a left party in the United States,” she said. “The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center, or center-conservative, party.” The congresswoman later added that while there are “left members inside the Democratic Party that are working to try to make that shift happen,” there are still many true believers in the status quo. If anything, she reasoned, they’re “probably the majority.”

The 2016 primaries marked the beginning of a major struggle between party loyalists and progressive reformers. While the former championed Hillary Clinton and took umbrage that anybody might challenge her path to the nomination, the latter backed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the hope of transforming the Democratic Party into a truly progressive institution. In the years since, they’ve made serious strides toward achieving their goal, with Reps. Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., gaining national recognition and pushing the conversation to the left. But as Clinton’s latest attacks on Sanders make clear, the Democratic establishment is loyal first and foremost to itself.

Among the party’s reformers, Ocasio-Cortez has been perhaps the most outspoken and unapologetic since her election in 2018, and her recent run-in with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) indicates she has no plans of backing down. Responding to contentions that she had withheld her “dues,” Ocasio-Cortez criticized the DCCC for blacklisting progressive candidates and supporting centrists in competitive primaries while pledging to give directly to candidates who share her values. “I can choose not to fund that kind of exclusion,” she said after raising more money than any other House Democrat in the third quarter of 2019.

Considering some of the candidates the party machine has backed in recent years, who can blame her? In 2018, for example, the DCCC helped New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew fight off a primary challenge from his left. A year later, he announced that he would be switching parties, pledging his “undying support” to President Donald Trump.

Not long after the DCCC complained about unpaid dues, Ocasio-Cortez announced her decision to launch a new political action committee — the Courage to Change PAC — to help progressive newcomers run for office. “We are pushing the envelope in D.C. by rewarding those who reject lobbyist money, fight for working families and welcome newcomers,” the congresswoman tweeted.

This bold effort to boost progressives has predictably put Democrats on the defensive. Establishment figures have pushed back against what they perceive as a hostile takeover, portraying leftists as outsiders who want to undermine the party and tarnish its legacy (along with those of Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton). Not surprisingly, the 2020 Democratic primary race has become the most visible arena for this struggle, with reformers like Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal endorsing Sanders. Centrists who want to preserve the status quo, meanwhile, have mostly lined up behind Joe Biden.

Interestingly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., seems to have attracted both loyalists and reformers to her campaign over the past year, and for a while it looked as if she could be a compromise candidate between the two factions. In recent months, however, the party loyalists seem to have gained the upper hand within the campaign, and it now looks doubtful whether Warren could become the “unity” candidate after her unfortunate and bizarre spat with Sanders over a private conversation they had a year ago.

Partisans who preach party loyalty over ideological consistency now seem to be flocking to the Warren campaign, and as Sanders has climbed in the polls, they have been eager to portray him as a fake Democrat who wants to destroy the party. “The idea Sanders was ever an ally of *any* Democrat was always pure fantasy,” declared the prominent 2016 Clinton surrogate and current Warren supporter Tom Watson. In her 2017 memoir, Clinton herself wrote that: “He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party. … I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.”

That Sanders attended almost four times as many rallies as she did for Obama in 2008 make her latest remarks all the more grotesque. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the former Democratic candidate refused to say she would endorse the Vermont senator if he secured the party’s nomination and claimed that “nobody likes him”—ironic coming from someone who has a lower favorability rating than Trump. As if determined to “disrupt the Democratic Party,” Clinton went on to rehash a discredited “Bernie Bro” narrative from 2016, revealing more about herself than Sanders and his movement.

Increasingly, it appears that Clinton and her ilk are only loyal to the Democratic Party when they control its levers of powers. In other words, they are loyal to the same status quo that most American voters are now revolting against. The fact that Sanders has been a registered Independent throughout most of his career is often touted by partisan critics as evidence of his disloyalty or bad intentions. But among a broader electorate that includes many Democrats, it’s one of his primary appeals.

According to Gallup, a plurality of voters identify as independent, while less than a third identify as a Democrat or Republican. What’s more, most voters don’t feel a strong sense of party loyalty, and consider the two-party system to be bad for the country. Nearly six in 10 Americans want an alternative to our political duopoly, including 54% of self-identified Democrats and 72% of independents. (Republicans seem to have the most party loyalty, with only 38% saying a third party is needed).

All of this should make recent polling from Morning Consult, which has Sanders nine points ahead of Trump with independent voters, unsurprising. (By comparison, Biden is ahead four points, and Warren is tied with the president, unsurprisingly.) Trump won these voters by four points, so it’s very possible they could be the deciding factor this November.

After the Democratic Party suffered its historic collapse in 2016, losing not only the presidency but also state legislatures and governorships across the country, many Democrats did some soul-searching and concluded that the party needed to change. Unfortunately, this period of self-examination didn’t last long for some. In the coming months, Democratic voters will have to decide what kind of party they want to be going forward; one can only hope that the lessons of 2016 haven’t been completely forgotten.

Britain’s Brexit Bill Passes Final Hurdle in Parliament

LONDON — Britain’s Brexit bill passed its final hurdle in Parliament on Wednesday after the House of Lords abandoned attempts to amend it, leaving the U.K. on course to leave the European Union next week.

The bill was approved by Parliament’s upper chamber after the House of Commons overturned changes to the government’s flagship Brexit bill made a day earlier by the unelected House of Lords.

The bill will become law when it receives royal assent from Queen Elizabeth II, a formality that could come as soon as Thursday.

Britain is scheduled to leave the European Union on Jan. 31, more than three and a half years after voters opted for Brexit in a June 2016 referendum, and after many rounds of political wrangling.

“Ät times it felt like we would never cross the Brexit finish line, but we’ve done it,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.

The Lords voted Tuesday to demand that post-Brexit Britain continues to let unaccompanied migrant children in EU countries join relatives living in the U.K. The promise was made in 2018 by former British Prime Minister Theresa May, but it was removed from the Brexit legislation after Johnson’s Conservatives won a big parliamentary majority in an election last month.

Johnson’s government says it intends to continue resettling child migrants in Britain after the country leaves the EU but argues that the issue does not belong in the EU withdrawal bill, which sets out the terms of Britain’s departure from the 28-nation bloc.

Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said an agreement on taking in the children “is ultimately a matter which must be negotiated with the EU, and the government is committed to seeking the best possible outcome in those negotiations.”

But Labour lawmaker Yvette Cooper accused Johnson’s Conservative government of planning to “betray the commitments that have been made to the most vulnerable children of all.”

The House of Commons also stripped out changes made by the Lords to bolster the rights of EU citizens in Britain, protect the powers of U.K. courts and ensure a say for Scotland and Wales in post-Brexit legal changes.

The wrangling didn’t stop the Brexit bill from becoming law, because the House of Commons can override the unelected Lords.

Members of the Lords acknowledged Wednesday that they would have to give way.

“We are at the end of a very long road,” said Martin Callanan, a Conservative Brexit minister in the Lords.

The EU parliament also must approve the Brexit divorce deal before Jan. 31. A vote by the European Parliament is expected next week.

Despite Johnson’s repeated promise to “get Brexit done” on Jan. 31, the departure will only mark the start of the first stage of the country’s EU exit. Britain and the EU will then launch into negotiations on their future ties, racing to strike new relationships for trade, security and a host of other areas by the end of 2020.

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