Chris Hedges's Blog, page 462

Parents Face Tougher Rules to Get Immigrant Children Back

MIAMI — Armando Tabora desperately wants to get his teenage daughter out of the government detention facility where she has been for more than three months. He has been stymied at every turn.

The Florida landscaping worker took the bold step of going to a government office to submit fingerprints and other documents required for immigrants to get their children out of government custody — and now that information is being shared with deportation agents. He was then told that the woman he rents a room from would also need to submit fingerprints, something she refused to do. He then sought out friends who are here legally to help him out, to no avail.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Tabora, an immigrant from Honduras who has lived more than a decade in the shadows without being detected. “My daughter is desperate, crying. She wants to get out of there.”

The drama of parents being separated from their children at the border dominated the headlines this year, but thousands of immigrant families are experiencing a similar frustration: the increasing hurdles they must surmount to take custody of sons, daughters and relatives who crossed the border on their own.

The Trump administration has imposed more stringent rules and vetting for family members to get these children back as part of an across-the-board hardening of immigration policy.

As a result, family members are struggling to comply with the new requirement, keeping children in detention longer and helping the number of migrant kids in government custody soar to the highest levels ever. Federal officials insist the policies are about ensuring the safety of children.

More than 12,000 children are now in government shelters, compared with 2,400 in May 2017. The average length that children spend in detention has increased from 40 days in fiscal year 2016 to 59 in fiscal year 2018, according to federal data.

The requirements include the submission of fingerprints by all adults in the household where a migrant child will live. These sponsors — the term the U.S. uses for adults who take custody of immigrant children — are also subject to more background checks, proofs of income and home visits, lawyers say.

And this information will now be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — something that did not occur in the past. ICE said this week that the agency has arrested 41 sponsors since the agencies started sharing information in June.

Lawyers and advocates say that change has had a chilling effect because many family members live in the country illegally and have been deterred from claiming relatives for fear they will be deported.

“They are saying: ‘We are going after the people trying to take care of them (children),'” said Jen Podkul, director of policy at Kids in Need of Defense.

The government has long required families to go through some vetting to serve as sponsors. The issue has become more prevalent in the last five years when tens of thousands of unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras started coming across the border.

Since October 2014, the federal government has placed more than 150,000 unaccompanied minors with parents or other adult sponsors who are expected to care for the children and help them attend school while they seek legal status in immigration court.

Under Trump, the rules have been toughened in what the administration says are necessary steps to keep children from ending up in the homes of people with criminal records and other issues that could endanger kids.

“If somebody is unwilling to claim their child from custody because they’re concerned about their own immigration status, I think that de facto calls into question whether they’re an adequate sponsor and whether we should be releasing the child to that person,” Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, said when the policy was announced in May.

The issue of sharing information with ICE arises because children and adult immigrants are handled by separate federal government agencies. Children are in the custody of the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, while adults are handled by ICE.

Until the new fingerprinting policy took effect, the government rarely shared such information with immigration officials unless a fingerprint match showed that a potential sponsor had a particularly alarming record, said Holly Cooper, co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of California, Davis.

The tougher rules have put many immigrants in the position of doing something that once seemed unthinkable: turning over their fingerprints and other information knowing that it’ll be shared with ICE.

Marvin Puerto did just that to get custody of his 9-year-old son, Nahun. Puerto crossed the border in 2014 and has been trying to live in Missouri in the shadows since then. He and his wife, Eilyn Carbajal, waited two months to get custody of the boy.

“I did not want to do the fingerprints, but I had no choice”, said the 29-year-old construction worker. “Now they have all my information. I feel they are going to accuse me of smuggling family members.”

Workers at The Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama say that after the Office of Refugee Resettlement started sharing information with ICE in June, two to four sponsors a week did not show up for appointments and a few who did visit refused to get fingerprinted.

After the New York Civil Liberties Union sued in February on behalf of a detained Salvadoran teen and his mother, the government was required to release case files on 45 children held under similar circumstances. In about half a dozen of those cases, reluctance to provide fingerprints was a factor in holding up children’s release, forcing some sponsors to scramble for another place to live and others to drop out of the application process, the NYCLU said.

If unaccompanied minors are not placed with sponsors they can end up in a federal foster care program. Some could be deported to the same dangers from which they fled.

Many of the parents and other relatives trying to secure their children’s release are poor and, to cover expenses, often share homes with others who are unrelated or in the country illegally. Many of those roommates have been reluctant to submit their fingerprints.

For Adan, a 27-year-old Guatemalan living in south Florida, leaving his 17-year-old sister in detention was out of the question. He followed the process and was given custody of her. Now, he wants to leave his apartment.

“I feel I need to move to have a sense of security”, said the landscaper about ICE knowing where he lives. He did not provide a last name because of his immigration status.

___

Associated Press Writer Adam Geller contributed to this report from New York.

EU, Iran Set Financial Vehicle to Ease Trade

UNITED NATIONS — Five world powers and Iran agreed late Monday to establish a financial facility in the European Union to facilitate payments for Iranian imports and exports including oil, a key move sought by Tehran following the U.S. pullout from the 2015 nuclear deal and its re-imposition of sanctions.

Foreign ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and Iran said in a joint statement that the so-called “Special Purpose Vehicle” will “assist and reassure economic operators pursuing legitimate business with Iran.”

The nuclear agreement is meant to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, but U.S. President Donald Trump announced in May he was unilaterally pulling out because he felt it wasn’t strong enough and didn’t cover other issues of concern to the U.S. and its allies, such as Iran’s military influence in the Middle East and ballistic missile program. The U.S. has also accused Iran of promoting international terrorism, which Tehran vehemently denies.

Iran’s economy is already suffering from the sanctions that Washington re-imposed after walking away from the nuclear agreement, and the U.S. has threatened to punish companies from other nations that continue doing business with Iran.

In sharp contrast, the five other world powers who signed the nuclear deal remain strongly committed to it, and the new financial facility is almost certain to anger the Trump administration.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters after the closed-door ministerial meeting that the financial facility is also aimed at preserving the nuclear agreement. The EU and Iran say the deal is working, and the joint statement notes that the International Atomic Energy Agency has now certified 12 times that Iran is in compliance with its obligations.

“In practical terms,” Mogherini said, “this will mean that EU member states will set up a legal entity to facilitate legitimate financial transactions with Iran and this will allow European companies to continue to trade with Iran in accordance with European Union law and could be open to other partners in the world. ”

She said the agreement follows extensive exchanges and announced that a meeting of technical experts will be held to “operationalize” the new financial facility.

The joint statement said the six countries that signed the 2015 nuclear agreement “reconfirmed their commitment to its full and effective implementation in good faith and in a constructive atmosphere.” They called the agreement “a key element of the global non-proliferation architecture and a significant achievement of multilateral diplomacy.”

The participants reaffirmed their joint statement on July 6, “in particular to pursue concrete and effective measures to secure payment channels with Iran.”

The Sexual Predators With Links to Kavanaugh’s Nomination

I would argue that it is no accident that yet another accusation of sexual harassment against Brett Kavanaugh has surfaced, by his Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez. Persons who do these things do them for reasons of power, not sex, and they typically don’t just do them once. Kavanaugh is denying this allegation as he did the first one, by Christine Blasey Ford. If they accusations are true, one thing Kavanaugh’s behavior did was drive more than one woman into the field of psychology so that she could help victims of sexual abuse.

I cannot know the truth of the matter with absolute certainty, though I’m inclined to believe the two women–all the more so because there are now two. I think it is worth pointing out that the entire process whereby Trump became a celebrity, was elected president, and put Kavaugh forward was itself deeply entangled with practices of sexual predation toward women. I love and respect reporters, and have been one, so I understand the pressure of the deadline and the focus on the last five minutes. But I haven’t seen anyone lay out the historical concatenation of sexual abuse that brought us to this dark moment.

It is amazing to me the way some reporters write about Donald Trump’s smearing of Christine Blasey Ford, in which he said on Twitter Friday that surely she reported the attempted rape to the police. I have not seen one piece of written or television journalism that points out that Trump is himself a serial sexual predator who has openly admitted to groping strange women, under the impression that “they let you get away with it.” Except that some don’t and then you have to pay them to be quiet. Those who do, don’t want the damage to their reputations, or to relive trauma or to risk a billionaire suing them for libel, with a battery of highly paid shysters.

Trump has no credibility to intervene in this matter. Yet just because the Electoral College anointed him despite the popular vote, he is accorded the respect of being taken seriously.

Indeed, what is remarkable about the ugly battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is how involved sexual predators have been in it.

1. There is Trump himself, who according to the testimony of his victims would try to put his hand up the skirt of random strangers, “touching” their “vagina.”

Another victim, Jessica Leeds, was sitting next to him on an airplanes, and admitted she was kind of interested in being spontaneously kissed by the wealthy and good-looking Trump, but his hand up the skirt made her change her airplane seat. In other instances he just locked lips with women in the street, who did not welcome it. Trump has a fair number of accusers, who have been silenced either through threats or pay-offs. And the powerful, intrepid US press lets him get away with attacking Dr. Ford why?

Trump, moreover, nominated Kavanaugh precisely in order to reestablish men’s control over women’s bodies through the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Trump told Chris Matthews– and no one brings this up– that “there has to be punishment” for women who have abortions. Arranging for criminalizing a woman’s choice and setting women up for jail terms is exactly what the Kavanaugh nomination was about. Not because Trump cares, but because he wants to please his base so as to get a second term, or, perhaps, a dictatorship for life.

2. Mark Burnett, executive producer of The Apprentice at NBC kept renewing Trump’s contract, which was in some years very highly rated, even though he must have witnessed Trump’s use of sexual innuendo, inappropriate comments, and racial slurs over several years. He created Trump as a national celebrity for his corporation’s bottom line despite what was almost certainly intimate knowledge of women being mistreated.

Variety reported in May, “A former contestant on Donald Trump’s reality competition “The Apprentice” has subpoenaed footage from the show, according to a report. Summer Zervos, who has accused Trump of unwanted groping and kissing, is seeking any footage from the show . . .”

Rumors are rife on social media that Ronan Farrow has some Apprentice outtakes of Trump that are damning.

Burnett may be a perfect gentleman in his personal life, and may not have choked Tom Arnold at the Emmys, but you can’t wallow with Trump for years on end without coming up smelling like a swine.

3. Trump was given to us in some large part by NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox and the other giant media conglomerates. In Michael Moore’s excellent new documentary, “Fahrenheit 11/9,” he shows Les Moonves, the head of CBS, glowing about how good the Trump presidential bid and presidency has been for media corporations like his. He admits it might not be good for the country, but is clearly delighted at the impact on the bottom line. CNN and MSNBC and Fox routinely turned their airwaves over to Trump at 7:30 pm every night in the summer and fall of 2016, something they did not do for Hillary Clinton or indeed for anyone in history.

Les Moonves in particular was probably not bothered by Trump’s history of sexual predation, since he had one of his own, exposed by Ronen Farrow and brave women who came forward. So a sexual predator helped give us a sexual predator.

4. Vladimir Putin admitted at Helsinki that he backed Trump, and the St. Petersburg troll farms were ordered by Putin to try to put Trump in by suppressing the Democratic vote (hence the Facebook ad attacks on Hillary Clinton as being responsible for the incarceration of a million African-Americans, being a Muslim Brotherhood asset, etc.)

Putin isn’t exactly a feminist, and would not have scrupled to back Trump just because he is a serial sexual predator. When Moshe Katsav, president of Israel 2000-2007, was accused of being a serial rapist (for which he later went to jail), Putin joked about it. Kommersant reported that when Putin met Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in the wake of the scandal, Putin had been unimpressed by Katsav until then. Putin exclaimed, “He turns out to be a really powerful guy! He raped 10 women!” He is said to have added, “We all envy him.”

Media Fails to Tell Climate Story Behind Hurricane Florence

The Miami Herald never mentioned global warming in 21 stories on Hurricane Florence, Public Citizen found–despite being based in one of the US cities most vulnerable to climate change.

That Hurricane Florence broke rainfall records for tropical storms in both North and South Carolina shouldn’t be surprising, as global climate change has increased extreme precipitation in all areas of the continental United States. One analysis released before the massive storm hit, by researchers at Stony Brook, Berkeley National Lab and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, projected that warming would cause Florence to bring twice as much rain compared to a similar storm with normal temperatures. But news audiences were rarely informed about the contribution of human-caused climate disruption to the devastating storm, according to a study of hurricane coverage by Public Citizen. Less than 8 percent of Florence stories in the 50 top-circulation US newspapers  (9/9–16/18) mentioned climate change—and only 4 percent of segments on major TV outlets.

The New York Times had the most Florence-related stories that made reference to climate change: 15 out of 75 stories, or 20 percent. By contrast, 19 of the top 50 papers had no stories on the hurricane that mentioned climate change, including the Chicago Tribune (out of 34 stories), Atlanta Journal-Constitution (28 stories), Orlando Sentinel (37 stories) and Miami Herald (21 stories). (Three papers—the East Bay Times, San Jose Mercury News and Orange County Register—ran no stories on Florence.) Aside from the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer (6 out of 32 stories) and Washington Post (4 out of 49) were the only other papers to reference climate change in Florence stories more than three times.

ABC never referred to climate change in its coverage of Florence, Public Citizen found; its over-the-air colleagues did little better, with CBS and NBC airing one segment apiece that mentioned Florence and climate change together (out of 63 and 73 hurricane segments, respectively). MSNBC brought up climate in 13 percent of its Florence reports, considerably ahead of CNN’s 4 percent;

Fox News only brought up climate change with regard to Hurricane Florence in order to dispute the connection.

Fox discussed climate in 10 percent of 51 segments on Florence, but, the study noted,  “All five of Fox News Network’s mentions of climate change were segments denying the relationship between the storm and climate change.”

“When outlets fail to connect these events to global warming, audiences are left uninformed about some of the most critical decisions we face,” David Arkush, who directs Public Citizen’s climate program, said in a statement. “We need a serious national discussion about the urgent, existential threat from climate change and how we are going to fix it—and it’s very difficult to have that conversation when media won’t talk about the topic.”

Trump’s Babysitters Are as Scary as He Is

During a lifetime of make-believe, Donald Trump has never pretended to be a conventional politician. When he finally decided to make a serious bid for office, he built his presidential aspirations on the flimsiest of foundations: a wild conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birthplace. His leadership bona fides were equally laughable, having presided over bankrupt casinos and failed real-estate projects, fabricated the persona of a lady-killer, and created a reality TV show about a tin-pot entrepreneur.

It wasn’t difficult to predict how all this would end up politically. Plenty of oddballs had run for president, from Jello Biafra to Roseanne Barr, and gotten nowhere. The guardrails of American democracy were set up to prevent just such outsiders from making it anywhere near the Oval Office. Donald Trump’s three presidential qualifications — money, name recognition, and unbounded arrogance — were obviously not enough to overcome his lack of sway with party bosses. Seasoned politicians and backroom operators, the putative “adults in the room,” had spent years ridiculing the blowhard with the bad hair banging on the door and demanding red-carpet treatment.

And then, of course, he won. In the 2016 presidential election, the guardrails of democracy collapsed. The Electoral College, designed to weed out all those with what Alexander Hamilton had once called “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity,” delivered a victory to a candidate who had talents for little else. As Jeff Greenfield wrote at Politico immediately after the elections,

“The blunt fact is that many of the guardrails that were supposed to protect the world’s oldest functioning democracy have been shown to be perilously weak, as vulnerable to assault as the Maginot Line was in the face of the German army some 75 years ago.”

In the wake of The Donald’s upset victory, journalists and pundits hastened to recommend a slate of advisers who could inject some gravitas into the new administration and restore an approximation of that Maginot Line. Under counsel from such grey eminences as former national security advisors Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, the new president brought a bevy of such “adults” into his administration, including ExxonMobil oil executive Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and active duty Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as national security advisor. Two “adults,” Republican Party grandee Reince Priebus and retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, have similarly tried, as White House chiefs of staff, to manage Trump. Recently, a New York Times op-ed written by an anonymous “senior administration official” suggested that a “steady state” of “adults in the room” has been covertly ensuring that President Trump doesn’t blow up the country or the world.

In response, President Trump has done his best to fire or at least ignore all such adult supervisors. After the departures of Tillerson, McMaster, and economic adviser Gary Cohn, the New Republic lamented that Trump was “systematically removing the guardrails in his cabinet” (which proved no more effective than the electoral ones). In fact, after the latest “crazytown” revelations in the bestselling new book by veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, perhaps it’s time to retire those creaky metaphors of American politics. No more “guardrails,” no more “adults.” They represent thinking that has proven woefully inadequate for understanding Donald Trump’s rise to power or the America of this moment.

Forget Donald Trump for a second and just think to yourself: Who’s responsible for the last 17 years of never-ending American wars that have convulsed the planet? Babies? Teenagers? Grown men acting like babies? Let’s face it: perfectly sober adults, including the man who left ExxonMobil to become secretary of state, have long seemed intent on ensuring the flooding, burning, and general destruction of this planet. And don’t forget that the adults in the Republican Party, backed by their deep-pocket funders, were responsible for getting Donald Trump over the hump and into the Oval Office. Ultimately they, and not the policy-ignorant president, are to blame for the devastation that followed.

As for those guardrails, they represent, at best, the most imperfect of metaphors. Despite all the actual guardrails on American highways, traffic fatalities have risen to more than 40,000 a year and cars are now the top killers of Americans between the ages of 15 and 24. Guardrails may prevent the occasional drunk from driving into a ravine, but they obviously don’t stop a significant portion of the population from committing autocide.

The truth is: those guardrails of democracy were faulty long before Trump came along and some of the adults in the room are scarier than the squalling infant. Such metaphors, in fact, make it increasingly difficult to see what Trump and his babysitters are really doing: not just destroying a culture of civility or undoing the accomplishments of the Obama administration but attacking the very pillars of democracy.

Moving the Guardrails

Donald Trump, The Washington Post concluded a year after his election, had broken through “the guardrails of presidential behavior.”

Given the sheer number of lies he’s spewed in his tenure in office — more than eight mistruths a day and rising — the Post’s conclusion seems incontrovertible. However, when it comes to wrongdoing, Trump has plenty of presidential precedents, from the high crimes and misdemeanors of Richard Nixon to the torture policies of George W. Bush. Trump is as crude as Lyndon Baines Johnson, as ill prepared as Ronald Reagan, as sexually predatory as Bill Clinton. All of these presidents prepared the American public for a leader who, like some super villain in a comic strip, would combine the worst qualities of his predecessors in one explosive package.

Trump broke through no guardrails (a feature of highway safety that he once disparaged in a Wall Street Journal interview as the “worst crap”). Rather, generations of politicians and operatives incrementally moved them to such a degree that his behavior became acceptable to enough Americans to elect him.

Admittedly, his actions are now breaking new ground. He’s elevated family members — daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner — to senior policy positions, while ensuring that his business empire profits from his presidency in unprecedented ways. Still, to understand the more lasting impact of the Trump administration requires a look at how his crew is transforming the underlying structures of American democracy, whether it’s the influence of money on politics, the hijacking of the judiciary, or the undermining of media watchdogs.

Trump grabs the daily headlines with his loose tweets and outrageous acts. The savvy operators and implementers lurking in his shadow use the cover of scandal to move those guardrails in a big league fashion. The defenders of today’s Maginot Line will wake up some morning to discover that the enemy never had to storm the battlements. They just uprooted the fortifications and shoved them out of the way.

Boosting the Rich

Many democratic countries wouldn’t tolerate the way the rich and corporations call the shots in American elections. To win a House seat, for example, now costs, on average, $1.5 million; a Senate seat, nearly $20 million. By contrast, in Canada, where neither corporations nor unions can make campaign contributions and individuals are restricted to a very modest $1,500 cap on party donations, a typical campaign for parliament costs in the tens of thousands of dollars and nearly half of the biggest spenders lose.

In 2010, the situation in the United States became incomparably worse when the Supreme Court decided, in the Citizens United case, that campaign contributions are constitutionally protected free speech. Super PACs can now spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, giving rich individuals unparalleled impact and a way to cover their tracks through “dark money” contributions. Former president Jimmy Carter has accurately labeled that decision “legalized bribery.”

Meanwhile, money has come to play a remarkable role in policymaking, too. Where other countries struggle to expunge bribery and corruption from their political systems, the United States has simply institutionalized it under the rubric of lobbying. As Michael Maiello wrote in Forbes back in 2009:

“[I]n an open society like the U.S., our brightest minds are unable to draw meaningful distinctions between handing someone an envelope full of cash and flooding a senator’s campaign war chest, except to point out that lobbying is far more effective. A briber wants to circumvent the law. A lobbyist wants to change it.”

Trump famously declared his independence from donors and lobbyists. He told the Koch brothers, for instance, that he didn’t “need their money or bad ideas.” In the end, however, he would prove just as beholden to big donors as any conventional politician. He rode to power with the backing of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder Linda McMahon, hedge fund operator Robert Mercer, and philanthropist Betsy DeVos. After the election, he immediately rewarded McMahon and DeVos with administration positions, then pushed through a tax reform bill that was a bonanza for his billionaire buddies and transformed Middle East policy to reflect the demands of Adelson, Marcus, and Mercer. And though he promised to clean out the Washington swamp, his appointees have been embroiled in one scandal after another.

The Trump team is also making structural changes to restrict the ways that ordinary citizens can, in the future, challenge such a plutocratic form of government. Building on successful Republican Party efforts in, for instance, Florida leading up to the 2000 presidential election, the Trump administration is going all out to suppress the electoral participation of minorities and the poor. New voter ID laws helped him win key states like Wisconsin, so no surprise that he wants to make such a voter ID system a nationwide one.

Leading up to the midterms, the Republican Party has also been rushing to purge voter rolls and put in place racial gerrymandering, even using the Americans with Disabilities Act as an excuse to close polling places in rural Georgia to tamp down the African-American vote. In a team effort by the Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the president has also directed federal agencies to gather voting records in areas of North Carolina with large Latino populations in order to keep likely Democratic Party voters away from the polls.

In this way, Trump is working to return America to its glory days — when only well-off white men had the right to vote.

Tilting the Courts

Trump controls (if that’s the term for it) the White House; the Republicans, in part through voter suppression and gerrymandering, control Congress. But pollsters predict that the Democrats are likely to win back at least the House in the coming midterm elections and the 2020 presidential election is clearly still up for grabs. So, in its quest to move the political guardrails more permanently, the Trump administration has focused on the third branch of government: the courts. There, it can not only neuter one of the most powerful checks on Trump’s 1% agenda, but have an impact that will last for decades.

With the Supreme Court, the Republicans in Congress proved both lucky and strategic. President Trump was immediately able to fill a vacancy, thanks to the Republican Party’s successful Hail Mary decision to block Merrick Garland’s nomination in the waning months of the Obama administration. Then, by nominating Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy created by Antonin Scalia’s death, the Trump team began to make a play for the retirement of swing-voting justice Anthony Kennedy. Gorsuch had clerked for Kennedy and so had the two key candidates (Brett Kavanaugh and Raymond Kethledge) that Trump fingered for his seat, should it become vacant. The president then played up his business relationship with Kennedy’s banker son, while Ivanka worked her charms on the judge over lunch. Administration officials swore that they would honor Kennedy’s legacy, as long as he resigned quickly enough to squeeze in another confirmation before those midterms threatened Republican majorities in Congress.

Meanwhile, the Trump team barreled along making judicial appointments to the lower courts at a time when it could barely be bothered to fill key positions in the State Department. The new president came into office with 105 unfilled judicial vacancies, a legacy of Republican congressional foot-dragging during the Obama years. While conservative allies supplied himwith a wish list of judicial ideologues, Trump acted with all deliberate haste by appointing 22 appeals court judges and 20 district judges (all lifetime positions). These new judges — in the 12 federal judicial circuits with regional jurisdiction — have already made their mark in cases involving campaign finance, presidential authority, and abortion, among other issues. “After just 18 months, Trump has ‘flipped’ two circuits — the Sixth and Seventh — from what Trump’s supporters in the conservative legal movement consider ‘liberal’ to more properly conservative,” writes Jason Zengerle in the New York Times Magazine, pointing out that other circuits are also now nearing the tipping point.

This judicial transformation extends to federal agencies. Administrative law judges are basically civil servants who handle a varied caseload from Social Security benefit claims to regulatory enforcement. After making a broad interpretation of a recent Supreme Court decision, the Trump administration is now transforming these 1,900 judges into the equivalent of political appointees. It also argues that it can fire judges and hire new ones to packsuch administrative courts, which will then help push a Republican anti-regulatory revolution from within.

At one point, Donald Trump casually remarked that he thought the United States should try out the Chinese system of “president for life.” While that’s not likely to happen any time soon, with his judges for life, the president is institutionalizing the 1% ideology of the adults in that room of his before the voters can kick him out of office.

Sidestepping the Watchdogs

After a lifetime using the media to build his brand, Donald Trump is now systematically trying to blow up one of the cornerstones of American democracy. He has called the press the “enemy of the American people,” repeatedly labeled reputable media outlets as “fake news,” and legitimized far-right sources by parroting their claims.

Trump didn’t create such a climate. The rise of Fox News, the spread of websites like Infowars, and the persistent popularity of right-wing radio shock jocks have all contributed to the demonization of the “liberal” media. As a result, for a significant number of Americans, trying to gather facts — as opposed to expressing opinions at top volume — has become a suspect occupation. According to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, when it comes to the general population, trust in the media has dropped five points since 2017 and an astounding 22 points for the “informed public” (defined as college-educated and in the top 25% of household income).

The mainstream media have long aspired to serve a watchdog role. Reporters are supposed to fact-check the powerful, sniff out corruption, and peel away government propaganda to expose the hidden histories behind it. Granted, journalists have blind spots and the economically powerful often don’t receive the sort of scrutiny that the politically powerful do, but media operations with budgets for investigative journalists and fact-checkers are an integral part of any democratic society.

Donald Trump hasn’t just disparaged the mainstream media, he’s done an end run around it. He feels little need to hold press conferences — only one in his first year of office (compared to Obama’s 11) — because he communicates with the America he wants to reach directly through his Twitter account. The news media then have to play catch-up reporting on his tweets.

In doing so, he creates the appearance of candor, since he speaks his mind without PR specialists getting in the way — but not to the entire American population. Typically, he avoids making speeches in blue states (places that his administration’s policies are deliberately crafted to harm). His strategy is to preach to the choir 24/7 in a communications universe free of the mainstream media. When it comes to reporters, the president’s supporters follow his lead and pay them little attention. Indeed, 72% of Republicans trust Trump over the media and nearly half believe that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” His attackson the media, deliberately designed to distract attention from his various scandals, are undermining the entire institution.

In effect, Trump has cultivated a constituency that lies outside the democratic conversation, building on the 22% of Americans who believe autocracy to be superior to democracy and the slightly larger percentage who would support a military coup to combat crime or corruption. Independent media wouldn’t last long in either scenario.

The New Normal

The most dangerous part of Trump’s onslaught on democracy is the cynicism it’s likely to generate, which will only reinforce the goals of the Trumpistas if a significant chunk of the 99% decide that voting isn’t worth it, politics is a game best avoided, and Twitter is superior to a newspaper. Democracy doesn’t just die in darkness. It can die of indifference — not with a bang or a whimper, that is, but with a yawn.

Of course, there’s nothing like a famously corrupt politician to reinvigorate civic action. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandals, a new wave of reformers won places in Congress, immediately launching investigations into covert operations, establishing new rules for campaign finance, and attempting to rein in the power of the presidency through measures like the War Powers Act. In other words, after the scandals of the early 1970s, reformers surveyed the wreckage of the political landscape and attempted to repair the infrastructure of American democracy. At best, they offered quick fixes, while during the Reagan years that followed, the putative adults in the room returned to their favorite activity: moving the guardrails to favor the wealthy and the powerful.

After the midterms in November, new voices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib will be in Congress and there will undoubtedly be renewed energy to stop, if not roll back, Trumpism. All those whom the president has insulted — and it’s an ever-lengthening list — may join hands in an effort to break the vicious circle of ignorance, apathy, and anger Trump has encouraged. This will be no easy task. But it would be poetic justice if what’s left of the mechanisms of democracy — voting, the courts, and the press — can still be used to defeat a potential autocrat, his family, and all the putative adults he’s brought into the room to implement his profoundly anti-democratic program. The question is: Will it already be too late?

Amazon Is Getting Cities and States to Rob Their Own Citizens

How much are you paying Amazon?

I don’t mean how much you’re shelling out for stuff you bought. I mean much you and your neighbors are simply giving to this huge and uber-rich on-line retailer.

If you live in Indianapolis, Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, or 16 other lucky cities, congratulations! You’re a finalist in the “Throw-Your-Money-At-Amazon” Sweepstakes!

It’s like Bonnie and Clyde, but instead of robbing banks, Amazon has enticed city and state officials to rob their own citizens — then hand over the loot in the form of tax breaks, land, and other bribes to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. The locality that offers the most booty “wins” the grand prize of having this thieving corporate behemoth become its new neighbor.

At least until Bezos gets a better offer.

So, again I ask: How much are your officials offering?

Shhhh, that’s a secret. Nearly all of the 20 contestant cities won’t tell city council members (much less taxpayers) how many billions they’re throwing at Bezos. Many cities even turned their negotiations over to business groups like the Chamber of Commerce, letting this handful of unelected, self-interested, private elites secretly make binding promises that would affect all residents without consulting them.

In the few places that did release information, it’s amounted to an unfunny joke. Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, made public a 10-page document listing “incentives” it was offering, but every word on every page was blacked out!

This whole flim-flam is abominable and ought to be criminal. Amazon will rake in a quarter-trillion dollars in sales this year, and Bezos is sitting on $166 billion in personal wealth. Shame on him for demanding public handouts, and shame on local officials for robbing the public till to further bloat his ego and fortune.

Renewables Could Green the Sahara Desert

Wind and solar energy could deliver more than just renewable, low-carbon electricity: they could green the desert, increasing the Sahara’s rainfall and helping it to bloom.

A sufficiently large network of wind turbines and solar panels arrayed across the dusty wastes of North Africa could change the local climate in ways that could double rainfall, stimulate vegetation growth and set up a feedback loop that could go on increasing moisture in the world’s greatest desert region.

The array of wind turbines and solar panels so far remains hypothetical: to green the Sahara even a little, it would have to extend over 9 million square kilometres – an area bigger than Brazil.

The combined power output from this entirely imaginary infrastructure however would be enormous, at more than 80 terawatts of electrical power. Global consumption in 2017 was only 18 terawatts.

“Large-scale wind and solar farms can produce significant climate change on continental scales”

The study is an exercise in climate modelling: were investors to exploit the Sahara desert and the Sahel, what would all that hardware do to the land on which it stood?

Researchers have already established that wind turbines actually do change the prevailing winds: they convert high winds to a mix of electrical energy and lower wind speeds.

Similarly, light-absorbing photovoltaic cells on the ground would change the reflectivity of the surface on which they stood, and there is a demonstrable link between what climate scientists call albedo, and local climate.

Researchers chose to model the impact of renewable energy infrastructure on the Sahara because it is relatively empty, sunlit and windy. They matched the results with experiment.

Benefits for Sahel

They report in the journal Science that they found that wind farms mix warmer air from above, to raise minimum temperatures and create a feedback loop that drives greater evaporation, precipitation and plant growth.

Over the Sahara proper, rainfall increased by 150%, but since the desert is very dry the increase is relatively small. In the Sahel region to the south, a dry landscape of scrub, savannah and woodland, stretching from the Atlantic to the Nile, the simulated wind farms stepped up rainfall by 1.12 millimetres a day.

This is more than double the average observed in a control experiment, and what could amount to an extra 500mm a year could have “major ecological, environmental and societal impacts,” the scientists say.

“Previous modelling studies have shown that large-scale wind and solar farms can produce significant climate change on continental scales,” said Yan Li, an environmental scientist at the University of Illinois, one of the chief authors.

Big rain boost

Solar arrays had very little effect on wind speed, but these too triggered a change in local conditions. The solar panels – and the wind turbines – together created a darker, more broken surface, a change that once again favoured around 50% more rainfall, and more vegetation growth, which in turn could promote even more rain.

Two centuries of exploitation of fossil fuels has driven economic growth everywhere, but at a cost in ever greater ratios of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The planet is warming, and increasing extremes of heat, drought and storm threaten to change climates with catastrophic consequences, drying up water supplies, advancing the desert regions and creating millions of climate refugees.

So the case for renewable energy is easily made, and five years ago researchers began looking to the North African countries as potential providers of renewable power. And the latest study makes the point that such investment could actually be beneficial in unexpected ways.

“The increase in rainfall and vegetation, combined with clean electricity as a result of solar and wind energy, could help agriculture, economic development and social well-being in the Sahara, Sahel, Middle East and other nearby regions,” said Safa Mottesharrei of the University of Maryland, another of the authors.

The Establishment’s ‘Fear’ Is Different From Yours

The instantly famous Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed (ATOE), published Sept. 5, in which a senior Trump administration official complained about the brutish awfulness and incompetence of Donald Trump and claimed to be working with other White House officials to check Trump’s worst impulses, has evoked a range of responses on so-called social media.

“The author is Mike Pence,” a first correspondent wrote to me, because the editorial’s anonymous author (hereafter “AA”) used the word “lodestar,” an unusual word that Pence has used many times in the past.

No—too easy. The word choice seems calculated to throw people off. Pence, Trump’s presidential heir apparent in the case of constitutional removal, is like the first suspect in every murder mystery. He’s the person who initially seems to make sense as the culprit and then fades as the investigation gets more serious.

As William Saletan showed on Slate, moreover, there’s a strong linguistic, ideological and broadly political case for the AOTE’s real author being Jon Huntsman, Trump’s ambassador to Russia.

The ATOE was “treason,” a second correspondent—an online Trumpenleftist—wrote me. Wrong. The ATOE wasn’t treasonous unless we idiotically conclude that the president (a global real estate mogul) and the U.S. nation-state are one and the same, as in “L’Etat, C’est Trump.”

“It’s an imperialist coup,” another “left” Trump apologist (such preposterous “red-brown” people are surprisingly common online) told me. That was amusing. It conjured images of Trump—himself a foiled (so far) billionaire advocate of a U.S.-sponsored coup to overthrow the democratically elected Maduro government in Venezuela—as Mohammad Mosaddegh, Jacobo Arbenz, Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende or Manuel Zelaya.

It is not a “coup” or “treason” if top staffers in an administration turn against the president of the United States (POTUS). It’s an egregious failure of that POTUS to achieve loyalty and consensus across the executive branch. Trump is not owed such loyalty and consensus simply because of his title. POTUS is not a king.

(You’ve got to hand it to the Trumpenleft: They say they want a revolution and then they raise alarms about “the plot against the president,” who happens to be a creeping fascist and arch-plutocrat with openly totalitarian instincts and behaviors.)

“The op-ed only makes things worse,” a fourth correspondent wrote me, “by feeding the orange beast’s conspiratorial ‘deep state’ paranoia and that of his white-nationalist base.” (I had the same thought at first. If the ATOE had self-described lefties writing me feverishly about “treason” and an attempted “deep state coup” against poor Donald Trump, imagine how it’s been playing out in the minds of the president and his more fully right-wing and armed white-Amerikaner backers!)

“This,” a fifth correspondent wrote me, “looks like the biggest example in history of ‘cover your ass.’ ” In this correspondent’s view, the AA and his allies are aware that veterans of the current Insane Clown White House are falling short of usual post-West Wing salary and career expectations when they leave. The AA and his circle in the administration want be able to tell prospective future employers and/or voters and campaign funders that “we tried our best to check the wacky tyrant. We were doing our duty to the nation and the world by staying in the administration.”

That is a workable hypothesis, one which makes a lot of sense to me. I would add here that the AA and his Times editors may be trying to cover not only their own asses but those of the whole Trump-sullied U.S.-American establishment, the Republican Party and the American Empire as well.

Whoever he may be (my money is on Huntsman), the AA is clearly no friend of the left. He says this explicitly: “Ours is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left.” (Of course, his notion of “the left” he’s not part of absurdly includes the corporate-neoliberal Democrats.)

The ATOE reflects a standard neoliberal, establishment Republican perspective, one that seeks to align itself with traditionally Republican victories attained under Trump while distancing itself from the malevolent stink of associating with him.

The AA writes that “[w]e want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.” He praises Trump’s presidency for “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”

Consistent with the Republican Party establishment’s long and noxious embrace of racist-nativist dog-whistling and climate denial, the ATOE says nothing about the Trump administration’s two most egregious sins beyond its shocking and relentless hyper-Orwellian practice of the “permanent lie” (the constant and maddening distortion of facts and truth): (1) its racist and even creeping fascist rhetoric and actions regarding immigrants and people of color and others, and (2) its zealous carbon-capitalist acceleration of the Greenhouse Gassing-to-Death of Life on Earth, a crime that promises to make even the Nazis look like small-time criminals.

The second problem—state-capitalist ecocide—is being advanced with noteworthy efficiency by the Trump administration. “While the Trump administration swirls around in a vortex of Tweets, lies and Russiagate,” Joshua Frank noted on Counterpunch last weekend, “one thing is for certain, while we are all distracted and perplexed by the daily mayhem, Trump and his fossil fuel buddies are getting away with environmental plunder.” The administration’s infamous incompetence and dysfunctionality (much bemoaned by the AA) does not extend to the ecocide project, curiously enough—a topic that fails to receive significant media attention despite its status as the biggest issue of our or any time.



The AA fears and loathes Trump for ruling-class and imperialist reasons, not for ones that ought to most concern people who care about democracy, social justice and prospects for a decent future.

He is typical among establishment political actors from both major capitalist and imperialist U.S. parties in that regard. As I’ve been writing and saying from before the Trump presidency, the establishment—from people like Huntsman, George Will, the late John McCain, Dick Cheney and Jeff Flake on the right to folks like Rachel Maddow, Bob Woodward, the Clintons, Barack Obama, Tim Kaine, John Kerry and Anderson Cooper on the so-called left—hates Trump for reasons different from those that ought to most concern we the people.

What are the mainstream ruling class’ problems with Trump? The main wealth and power elite policy complaints are that the “populist,” “isolationist” and “protectionist” president is woefully ignorant about, and even strangely opposed to, the standard institutional structures of U.S. empire and of U.S.-dominated global trade and investment.

Then there’s the explicitness of Trump’s racial bigotry and sexism; the openness of Trump’s authoritarianism and totalitarianism; and the transparent “beyond the pale” malignancy and childishness of his Twitter-addicted narcissism (so extreme that he feels compelled to deny the number of Puerto Ricans who died in the wake of Hurricane Maria last year). There’s also the remarkable extent of Trump’s stubborn idiocy, deepened by his ridiculous (if textbook narcissist) faith in his own superiority; and troubling connections between “the House of Trump,” Russian state-connected oligarchs and “the House of Putin” going back many years.

Properly restrained divide-and-rule racism has long been OK for the ruling class, but Trump is far too seriously invested in toxic racial bigotry for an American elite that has learned to cloak persistent white supremacism in the flags of diversity and tolerance.

Standard “imperial presidency” authoritarianism has always been fine with the establishment, but Trump takes it to preposterous levels by transparently attacking the rule of law and the independence of the corporate media.

The U.S. establishment has long tolerated and even cultivated fascism in Third World client states but not in the “homeland” itself, the supposed exceptional headquarters and beacon of so-called capitalist democracy and liberty.

Presidential lying has long been tolerated and even applauded in the national media-political culture, but Trump goes far beyond acceptable elite norms with his wild and shameless advance of untruth. He averaged 16 false and misleading statements per day in June and July of this year. His astonishing record of grotesque, self-serving falsehood (e.g., the ridiculous charge that he was denied a popular vote victory by illegal immigrant ballots and the sickening claim that the Puerto Rican death toll from Hurricane Maria was tiny) includes numerous “permanent lie” fabrications that he repeats again and again—long after they’ve been exposed as fictions.

The U.S. remains a patriarchal and sexist nation, but the beauty pageant pussy-grabber-in-chief is a disturbing embarrassment.

Standard presidential narcissism (i.e., Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) is fine, but Trump’s constant Twitter-weaponized shame-fest and his endless reality-television drama are just too nationally humiliating. He’s been turning the executive branch of the world’s most powerful state into something on par with “The Apprentice,” if not “The Maury Povich Show.”

It’s OK for the president to be stupid as far as the ruling class is concerned. Look at George W. Bush. He was an abject dolt who thought God had told him to invade Iraq. But “Du[m]bya” had the decency to know that he was a figurehead for purportedly smarter establishment actors and let himself be managed by ruling class “adults” like Cheney and Robert Gates.

Corruption and captivity to wealthy elites from the U.S. and some other rich, U.S.-allied nations is one thing. Potential captivity to a “hostile power” (as Russia is officially designated by the U.S. foreign policy establishment and media) is another.

Above all, perhaps, Trump is just too unpredictable and impulsive for the ruling class. It’s hard to make decent investment decisions when the White House is a fickle and capricious horror show that might (for example) impose (or roll back) a whole new set of tariffs or insult a “valued trading and investment partner” on a foolish tyrant’s bizarre whim from one day to the next.

There are limits to just how malevolent a U.S. president can be before he turns into an imperial public relations liability.

I caught Bob Woodward’s appearance on Rachel Maddow’s widely viewed MSNBC talk show last week. The remarkably dull and uninspiring Woodward was there to pitch his recently released instant bestseller “Fear: Trump in the White House.”

Neither Maddow nor Woodward said anything about Trump’s racism-fascism or about Trump’s acceleration of ecocide (though Maddow preceded her Woodward interview by helping break the news that the Trump administration had diverted $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay for building racist immigrant detention centers—no small story as Hurricane Florence bore down on the Carolinas).

The basic theme of the segment was that Trump is bad at U.S. “global leadership” (also known as U.S. imperialism), as well as at what Woodward and Maddow risibly called “avoiding World War III,” and at ensuring U.S. domination of global trade. Maybe they should have complained that Trump’s anti-immigrant stance was helping shrink the reserve army of easily exploitable cheap labor.

Trump is a dangerous monster who needs to be removed from the White House and the nation’s political life. On that all decent people can agree. But we can’t stop there. The Fake Resistance and Inauthentic Opposition Party (the Democrats and some traditional Republicans) seek the removal of Trump, to be sold as a great victory for popular democracy while preserving the reign of the nation’s unelected and interrelated juntas of capital, empire, race and militarized police-state repression.

And that’s not good enough, not with the species teetering on the edge of full environmental catastrophe under the soulless command of the profits system. We need a rebellion, indeed a revolution (and not just a political one) that goes much deeper than merely the amputation of the malignant symptom of Amerikan cruelty, plutocracy, sexism, racism and stupidity that is Trump.

We need to undertake a giant popular uprising that targets the whole U.S. state-capitalist societal order and its vast imperial and repressive edifice at home and abroad—the broad institutional and cultural structures of oppression (including the Democratic Party) that made something as noxious as a Donald Trump presidency possible in the first place. Chris Hedges noted on Truthdig last May:

The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience.… If we do not stand up, we will enter a new dark age.

The “real issue to be faced,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his final essay, “is the radical reconstruction of society itself.”

That’s the last thing you’ll hear from establishment elites. They have a simple fake-fix: Vote for Democrats in the midterms. “The best way to protest,” the deeply conservative former president Barack Obama told University of Illinois students three days after the ATOE, “is to vote. … When you vote, you’ve got the power. …”

Really? We get to vote, yes, but mammon reigns nonetheless in the United States, where, as the mainstream political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens note in their important book “Democracy in America?,” “government policy … reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office”—candidates like Obama, who blew up the public presidential campaign finance system with record-setting contributions from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup in 2008.

Am I saying you shouldn’t vote for Democrats in the midterms? No, I’m not. It’s important to try to oust the openly ecocidal and creeping fascist Republican Party from its control of the U.S. Congress and the state governments. Trust me, fellow workers and citizens, you do not want to live under Trump if the GOP keeps both the House and the Senate. So suck it up and vote if you live in a contested district. But do so without any faith in the notion that voting under the oligarchic U.S. electoral and party system is anything close to the real and democratic politics that matter most or anything like what Obama called in Illinois “everybody doing their part” for “this whole project of self-government.” Our greatest intellectual, Noam Chomsky, put it very well on the eve of the 2004 elections:

Americans may be encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. … A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’ But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics. … The urgency is for popular progressive groups to grow and become strong … by steady, dedicated work at all levels, every day, not just once every four years. … You can’t ignore the elections. You should recognize that one of the two groups now contending for power happens to be extremist and dangerous and has already caused plenty of trouble and could cause plenty more. … So in the election, sensible choices have to be made. But they are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome.

Chomsky’s good friend Howard Zinn said it even better nearly four years later, as the Obama phenomenon had engulfed the entire society, including “the left,” in the nation’s quadrennial “Election Madness”:

I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth. … But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice. … Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore. … Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

There has long been a self-destructive and frankly pathetic degree of intra-leftist bloodletting on how portsiders can best respond to the absurdly narrow range of choices on offer in the U.S. party and elections system. This venom among progressives and radicals is badly misplaced. It must stop. The real and serious political action is about what we do before and after, not during elections.

Glenn Greenwald Makes the Case for Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 11/9’

In July of 2016, with Hillary Clinton narrowly leading in the polls, documentarian Michael Moore issued a dire prophecy. “I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president,” he wrote on his website. “And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November.”

For that reason alone, his newest film, exploring an American democracy on the brink, likely demands a wide viewership. But as Glenn Greenwald argues in The Intercept, “Fahrenheit 11/9″—whose title is a play on Moore’s Bush-focused “Fahrenheit 9/11” and a reference to the date when Trump’s election victory was confirmed—offers much more than a facile #Resistance polemic. Instead, he writes, it pinpoints the social and political pathologies that have enabled a real-estate-mogul-cum-reality-show-host’s rise to power, even if the documentary’s director occasionally succumbs to gimmickry and lurid speculation. And while the administration bears the brunt of Moore’s invective, no institution or party goes unscathed. From Greenwald:

Grifters exploit fears of Trump to build massive social media followings that are easily converted into profit from well-meaning, manipulated dupes. One rickety, unhinged, rant-filled, speculation-driven Trump book after the next dominates the best-seller lists, enriching charlatans and publishing companies alike: the more conspiratorial, the better. Anti-Trump mania is big business, and – as the record-shattering first-week sales of Bob Woodward’s new Trump book demonstrates – there is no end in sight to this profiteering.

All of this is historical revisionism in its crudest and most malevolent form. It’s intended to heap most if not all blame for systemic, enduring, entrenched suffering across the country onto a single personality who wielded no political power until 18 months ago. In doing so, it averts everyone’s eyes away from the real culprits: the governors, both titled and untitled, of the establishment ruling class, who for decades have exercised largely unchecked power – immune even from election outcomes – and, in many senses, still do.

The message is as clear as the beneficial outcomes: Just look only at Trump. Keep your eyes fixated on him. Direct all your suffering, deprivations, fears, resentments, anger and energy to him and him alone. By doing so, you’ll forget about us – except that we’ll join you in your Trump-centered crusade, even lead you in it, and you will learn again to love us: the real authors of your misery. …

The overriding value of “Fahrenheit 9/11” is that it avoids – in fact, aggressively rejects – this ahistorical manipulation. Moore dutifully devotes a few minutes at the start of his film to Trump’s rise, and then asks the question that dominates the rest of it, the one the political and media establishment has steadfastly avoided examining except in the most superficial and self-protective ways: “how the fuck did this happen”?

Read the review in its entirety at The Intercept.

From ‘Rocket Man’ to ‘Terrific’: Trump Lauds Kim in U.N. Return

UNITED NATIONS—President Trump raised hopes at the United Nations on Monday that a second meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un could occur “quite soon,” striking a conciliatory tone one year after he used his debut at the U.N. to deride the autocrat as “Little Rocket Man” and threaten to “totally destroy North Korea.”

Trump praised Kim as “very open” and “terrific,” despite the glacial pace of progress toward denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.

U.S. officials defended Trump’s strategy of engagement with the erstwhile pariah state as the president embarked on a week of meetings with world leaders. The softer tone toward North Korea — once threatened with “fire and fury” — has been replaced by rosy optimism, with Trump reserving tough rhetoric for another potential nuclear aspirant and strategic foe: Iran.

“It was a different world,” Trump said Monday of his one-time moniker for the North Korean leader. “That was a dangerous time. This is one year later, a much different time.”

Trump began his second visit to the U.N. with a brief meeting on the global drug trade before sitting down with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who delivered a personal message to Trump from Kim after their inter-Korean talks last week in Pyongyang.

“You are the only person who can solve this problem,” Moon said to Trump, relaying Kim’s words.

Trump, for his part, said: “We are in no rush. We are in no hurry” to bring about a nuclear agreement. U.S. officials are insisting that economic sanctions remain in place against the North until it eliminates its nuclear program.

Trump said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been tasked with bringing about the second summit, despite an assessment by U.S. officials that the North has not followed through on its commitments to take steps toward denuclearization. Pompeo defended Trump’s decision to seek another meeting despite the slow progress.

“We’ve been at this the other way an awfully long time and failed,” he said, adding: “We tried to do details. We tried to do step for step. We tried to do trade for trade. Each of those failed.”

“We’re bringing the two senior leaders, the individuals who can actually make the decisions that will move this process forward,” in hopes they can make a breakthrough, he said.

Trump said the location for the second summit is still to be determined, but officials have said the U.S. leader is holding out hope it could take place on American soil. Such a move would itself present a complex political and logistical challenge for the North Korean leader. His trip to Singapore in June for the inaugural summit was anything but trivial.

Trump has often fondly invoked the Singapore summit, a made-for-TV event that attracted the world’s media attention and largely received positive marks from cable pundits — reviews that were not repeated for his summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki the following month.

Trump and Moon on Monday signed a new version of the U.S.-South Korean trade agreement, marking one of Trump’s first successes in his effort to renegotiate economic deals on more favorable terms for the U.S. Trump labeled it a “very big deal” and says the new agreement makes significant improvements to reduce the trade deficit between the countries and create new opportunities to export American products to South Korea. He says U.S. automobiles, pharmaceuticals and agricultural products will gain better access to Korean markets.

Even so, some U.S. officials worry that South Korea’s eagerness to restore relations with the North — known as its “sunshine policy” — could reduce sanctions pressure on Kim’s government, hampering efforts to negotiate a nuclear accord.

The nuclear threat also was on the agenda at Trump’s first meeting in New York, a dinner with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday night. Abe stands first among world leaders in cultivating a close relationship with the president through displays of flattery that he has used to advance his efforts to influence the unpredictable American leader.

Trump is set to address the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday morning and will chair a meeting of the Security Council Wednesday on counter-proliferation. In both venues, U.S. officials say, he is expected to offer a contrast between the path of negotiation chosen by North Korea and that of Iran.

Trump earlier this year bucked allies and removed the U.S. from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, citing Iran’s malign influence in the region and support for terrorist groups like Hezbollah. The next round of tough sanctions on Iran is set to go into effect in November.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is in New York to attend U.N. meetings. U.S. officials said Trump is not seeking a meeting with the Iranian leader, but is not opposed to talking if Iran requests a session.

Rouhani, appearing on NBC on Monday, cited the threat of more U.S. sanctions in stating, “There is no such program for a meeting.”

In keeping with his “America First” pronouncements, Trump’s return tour to the annual diplomatic summit was eclipsed before it began by domestic political crises. The fate of Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee was cast into doubt over the weekend amid new allegations of sexual misconduct. Drama also swirled Monday around the status of his deputy attorney general.

Rod Rosenstein was revealed last week to have floated the idea of secretly recording Trump last year and to have raised the idea of using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Rosenstein has denied the reports. Trump said he will meet with Rosenstein on Thursday upon his return to Washington.