Chris Hedges's Blog, page 532

FBI Agent: My Work Has Never Been Tainted by Political Bias

WASHINGTON—An FBI agent whose anti-Trump text messages fueled suspicions of partisan bias told lawmakers Thursday that his work has never been tainted by politics and that the intense scrutiny he is facing represents “just another victory notch in Putin’s belt.”

Peter Strzok, who helped lead FBI investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email use and potential coordination between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign, was testifying publicly for the first time since being removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team following the discovery of the derogatory text messages last year.

In his opening statement, Strzok said he has never allowed personal opinions to infect his work, that he knew information during the campaign that had the potential to damage Trump but never contemplated leaking it and that the focus on him by Congress is misguided and plays into “our enemies’ campaign to tear America apart.”

Republican members of the House judiciary and oversight committees were expected to grill Strzok for hours as they argue that the text messages with FBI lawyer Lisa Page color the outcome of the Clinton email investigation and undercut the FBI’s ongoing investigation into Russian election interference.

Trump himself has launched personal attacks against the two FBI officials, including a Wednesday evening tweet that asked “how can the Rigged Witch Hunt proceed when it was started, influenced and worked on, for an extended period of time” by Strzok. He described the texts as “hate filled and biased.”

Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., asked the audience to imagine being investigated by someone who “hated” you and “made crucial investigative decisions on how your case should be treated and eventually adjudicated.”

“Would anyone sitting here today believe that this was an acceptable state of affairs, particularly at an agency whose motto is “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity?” Goodlatte asked.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, the Oversight Committee chair, added, “Agent Strzok had Hillary Clinton winning the White House before he finished investigating her. Agent Strzok had Donald Trump impeached before he even started investigating him. That is bias. Agent Strzok may not see it but the rest of the country does, and it is not what we want, expect or deserve from any law enforcement officer much less the FBI.

Strzok acknowledged that while his text message criticism was “blunt,” it was not directed at one person or political party and included jabs not only at Trump but also at Clinton as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders. He said there was “simply no evidence of bias in my professional actions.”

“Let me be clear, unequivocally and under oath: not once in my 26 years of defending my nation did my personal opinions impact any official action I took,” he will say.

He says that he was one of the few people during the 2016 election who knew the details of Russian election interference and its possible connections with people in the Trump orbit, and that that information could have derailed Trump’s election chances. “But,” he said, “the thought of exposing that information never crossed my mind.”

Although Strzok has said through his lawyer that he was eager to tell his side of the story, he makes clear his exasperation at being the focal point of a congressional hearing at a time when Russian election interference has been successfully “sowing discord in our nation and shaking faith in our institutions.”

“I have the utmost respect for Congress’s oversight role, but I truly believe that today’s hearing is just another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear America apart,” Strzok will say, according to the remarks. “As someone who loves this country and cherishes its ideals, it is profoundly painful to watch and even worse to play a part in.”

He also flatly rejected the president’s characterizations of Mueller’s work and the threat of Russian election interference, saying, “This investigation is not politically motivated, it is not a witch hunt, it is not a hoax.”

The sharp tone of Strzok’s statement sets the stage for a contentious hearing following hours of closed-door questioning last week. It also reflected an effort to shift attention away from the content of Strzok’s texts and onto what he says is the more pressing issue: the Russians’ “grave attack” on American democracy and continuing efforts to divide the country.

But that’s unlikely to be the focus of Thursday’s hearing. Republicans eager for ways to discredit Mueller’s investigation have for months held up the texts from Strzok and Page to support allegations of anti-Trump bias within federal law enforcement.

One message that has received particular attention, and is likely to be discussed at the hearing, is an Aug. 8, 2016 text in which Strzok, discussing with Page the prospect of a Trump win, says, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general has criticized Strzok and Page for creating the appearance of impropriety through the texts. But the report said it found no evidence of political bias in the FBI’s decision to not pursue criminal charges against Clinton. And many Democrats say actions taken by law enforcement during the campaign season — including announcing a reopening of the investigation into Clinton just days before the election — actually wound up harming the Democratic candidate and aiding the Republican candidate, Trump.

FBI Director Chris Wray says the FBI has referred to internal disciplinary officials employees who were singled out for criticism in the inspector general’s report. Strzok’s lawyer has said he was escorted from the FBI building last month as the disciplinary process winds its way through the system.

Page left the bureau in May. House lawmakers subpoenaed her to appear for a private interview and warned her that they would begin the process of holding her in contempt if she does not show this week. Goodlatte told CNN that Page had agreed to appear Friday.

U.S. Reopens Probe Into 1955 Slaying of Emmett Till

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—The federal government has reopened its investigation into the slaying of Emmett Till, the black teenager whose brutal killing in Mississippi shocked the world and helped inspire the civil rights movement more than 60 years ago.

The Justice Department told Congress in a report in March it is reinvestigating Till’s slaying in Money, Miss., in 1955 after receiving “new information.” The case was closed in 2007 with authorities saying the suspects were dead; a state grand jury didn’t file any new charges.

Deborah Watts, a cousin of Till, said she was unaware the case had been reopened until contacted by The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The federal report, sent annually to lawmakers under a law that bears Till’s name, does not indicate what the new information might be.

But it was issued in late March following the publication last year of “The Blood of Emmett Till,” a book that says a key figure in the case acknowledged lying about events preceding the slaying of the 14-year-old youth from Chicago.

The book, by Timothy B. Tyson, quotes a white woman, Carolyn Donham, as acknowledging during a 2008 interview that she wasn’t truthful when she testified that Till grabbed her, whistled and made sexual advances at a store in 1955.

Two white men — Donham’s then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam — were charged with murder but acquitted in the slaying of Till, who had been staying with relatives in northern Mississippi at the time. The men later confessed to the crime in a magazine interview, but weren’t retried. Both are now dead.

Donham, who turns 84 this month, lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. A man who came to the door at her residence declined to comment about the FBI reopening the investigation.

“We don’t want to talk to you,” the man said before going back inside.

Paula Johnson, co-director of an academic group that reviews unsolved civil rights slayings, said she can’t think of anything other than Tyson’s book that could have prompted the Justice Department to reopen the Till investigation.

“We’re happy to have that be the case so that ultimately or finally someone can be held responsible for his murder,” said Johnson, who leads the Cold Case Justice Initiative at Syracuse University.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the status of the probe.

The government has investigated 115 cases involving 128 victims under the “cold case” law named for Till, the report said. Only one resulted in in a federal conviction since the act became law, that of Ku Klux Klansman James Ford Seale for kidnapping two black teenagers, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, who were killed in Mississippi in 1964. At least 109 of the investigations have been closed, the report said.

State prosecutions assisted by federal authorities have resulted in additional convictions, most recently when a one-time Alabama state trooper was convicted of shooting a black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, during a protest in 1965. Jackson’s slaying was an impetus for the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march later that year.

Watts, co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, said it’s “wonderful” her cousin’s killing is getting another look, but she didn’t want to discuss details.

“None of us wants to do anything that jeopardizes any investigation or impedes, but we are also very interested in justice being done,” she said.

Abducted from the home where he was staying, Till was beaten and shot, and his body was found weighted down with a cotton gin fan in the Tallahatchie River. His mother, Mamie Till, had his casket left open. Images of his mutilated body gave witness to the depth of racial hatred in the Deep South and helped build momentum for subsequent civil rights campaigns.

Relatives of Till pushed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reopen the case last year following publication of the book.

Donham, then known as Carolyn Bryant and 21 years old at the time, testified in 1955 as a prospective defense witness in the trial of Bryant and Milam. With jurors out of the courtroom, she said a “nigger man” she didn’t know took her by the arm.

“Just what did he say when he grabbed your hand?” defense attorney Sidney Carlton asked, according to a trial transcript released by the FBI a decade ago.

“He said, ‘How about a date, baby?'” she testified. Bryant said she pulled away, and moments later the young man “caught me at the cash register,” grasping her around the waist with both hands and pulling her toward him.

“He said, ‘What’s the matter baby, can’t you take it?'” she testified. Bryant also said he told her “you don’t need to be afraid of me,” claiming that he used an obscenity and mentioned something he had done “with white women before.”

A judge ruled the testimony inadmissible. An all-white jury freed her husband and the other man even without it. Testimony indicated a woman might have been in a car with Bryant and Milam when they abducted Till, but no one else was ever charged.

In the book, author Tyson wrote that Donham told him her testimony about Till accosting her wasn’t true.

“Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” the book quotes her as saying.

Sen. Doug Jones, D-Alabama, introduced legislation this week that would make the government release information about unsolved civil rights killings. In an interview, Jones said the Till killing or any other case likely wouldn’t be covered by this legislation if authorities were actively investigating.

“You’d have to leave it to the judgment of some of the law enforcement agencies that are involved or the commission that would be created” to consider materials for release, Jones said.

___

Associated Press writer Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

Trump Lands in Britain for His First Official Visit There

BRUSSELS — The Latest on President Donald Trump’s trip to Europe (all times local):

9:15 p.m.

President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, are being greeted with pomp and circumstance, along with protesters, as he arrives at spectacular Blenheim Palace for a gala dinner.

Anti-Trump protesters with critical signs are lining the roadway leading to the palace near Oxford.

But it’s unlikely the Trumps even saw them.

Instead, the couple arrived via helicopter and was driven by presidential limousine onto the property, where they were welcomed by British Prime Minister Theresa May and her husband Philip.

The couples then enjoyed a performance by a large British military marching band wearing traditional bearskin hats.

The performance included a bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace.”

___

9:10 p.m.

First lady Melania Trump is wearing a yellow silk pleated chiffon dress by New York-based J. Mendel to a gala at Blenheim Palace.

She paired the off-the-shoulder gown with floor-length pleated sleeves with matching silk pumps by Manolo Blahnik.

President and Mrs. Trump are having dinner at the palace with British Prime Minister Theresa May and her husband Philip. Blenheim Palace is Winston Churchill’s birthplace.

A similar dress in emerald, originally priced at $6,990, can be found online for $4,194.

J. Mendel’s website says the design house is a fifth-generation French atelier now based in New York.

___

8: 15 p.m.

President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, are on their way to a black-tie gala at Blenheim Palace near Oxford, England where they’ll be joined by British Prime Minister Theresa May.

The dinner is Trumps’ official welcome to the U.K. during their first visit since Trump’s election. The president wore a tuxedo and Mrs. Trump wore a pale yellow gown as they boarded a helicopter to the gala.

Audible jeers could be heard from protesters as Marine One lifted off from London.

Blenheim Palace is the birthplace of Winston Churchill, for whom Trump has expressed admiration.

He reinstalled a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office shortly after his inauguration and screened the 2017 film “Darkest Hour” at the White House last winter in a sign of his affinity for the British leader.

___

6:15 p.m.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg says that despite President Donald Trump’s fire-and-brimstone approach to this week’s summit, the U.S. president has had an impact on the commitment by alliance members to boost their individual military spending.

Stoltenberg says Thursday that “the clear message from President Trump is having an impact.”

Since taking office, Trump has been criticizing most alliance members for not spending more on their militaries and pressing them to do more.

Stoltenberg says Trump’s approach is paying off. The NATO secretary-general says allies have added $41 billion extra for defense spending — a figure he cited on Wednesday.

___

2:50 p.m.

President Donald Trump has arrived in Great Britain for his first visit as president amid NATO tensions, protests and Brexit turmoil.

Air Force One has landed at London Stansted Airport, where Trump is beginning a four-day visit to the country.

Trump will attend a gala dinner Thursday with British and American officials at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

On Friday, Trump will meet with Prime Minister Theresa May and Queen Elizabeth II and then spend the weekend at one of his private golf courses in Scotland.

Widespread protests of Trump are expected during his visit to the U.K., which comes during a tumultuous week for May’s government as it seeks to navigate the Brexit process. Trump is arriving following a chaotic NATO summit.

1:20 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump is forecasting an unspecified “escalation” between the U.S. and Iran.

Trump also says Iran is treating the U.S. with more respect, though there is no evidence to support Trump’s claim.

Trump withdrew the U.S from the Iran nuclear deal earlier this year, reinstating economic sanctions that had been lifted under a deal among Iran, the U.S. and other world powers in exchange for curbs on Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump was asked about Iran at a news conference in Brussels, where he wrapped up his participation in a NATO summit.

He says Iran is feeling a lot of pain as a result and that at some point Iran will “call me and they’re going to say let’s make a deal, and we’ll make a deal.”

___

1:20 p.m.

French President Emmanuel Macron has rejected President Donald Trump’s claim that NATO allies have agreed to boost defense spending beyond 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product.

Macron said: There is a communique that was published yesterday. It’s very detailed.”

He added: “It confirms the goal of 2 percent by 2024. That’s all.”

The summit statement affirms a commitment made in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea that NATO allies would halt defense spending cuts and start spending more as their economies grow, with the aim of moving toward 2 percent of GDP within a decade.

___

1:15 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump is offering assurances that the United States will “ultimately” work out a “pretty nasty trade battle” with China.

Trump says along the sidelines of the NATO summit that the U.S. will “negotiate a fair deal, if that’s possible” with China. He’s predicting in a news conference that the U.S. will “end up doing something very good with China.”

The Trump administration has threatened to impose 10 percent tariffs on another $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, and Beijing has vowed to retaliate.

It follows the U.S. imposing 25 percent duties on $34 billion of Chinese goods, which China responded to by increasing its own taxes on the same amount of American imports.

___

1:10 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump says Russian President Vladimir Putin is neither friend nor foe. Instead, the U.S. leader calls Putin a “competitor” and says he is representing the best interests of the Russian people as he represents those of Americans.

Speaking during an unscheduled press conference at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump says his sit-down with Putin will be “just a loose meeting,” but said significant progress could be made in the relationship. The U.S. and Russia leaders are to meet Monday in Helsinki.

Trump’s meeting with Putin has been met by skepticism from NATO allies concerned that he will not be sufficiently tough with the leader. Trump says he will raise Russian election meddling in Western elections with Putin.

__

1 p.m.

Thousands are gearing up in London to protest U.S. President Donald Trump’s first official visit to the U.K. because of anger over his policies on issues ranging from immigration and race relations to Russia and the Middle East.

Demonstrations are planned Thursday outside the U.S. ambassador’s residence in London, where Trump will stay, and Winston Churchill’s birthplace at Blenheim Palace, where he’ll attend a black-tie dinner.

The biggest protests are set for Friday, when demonstrators plan to march through central London and float a huge balloon depicting Trump as a baby in diapers over the Houses of Parliament.

The National Police Chiefs Council says rest days for officers have been cancelled and many will be working 12-hour shifts during Trump’s visit.

___

1 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump says he’ll raise election meddling and arms control when he and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet next week.

Trump also says he is “not happy about Crimea.” Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. Trump continues to blame his predecessor, President Barack Obama, for allowing that to happen.

Speaking at a news conference during a NATO summit in Brussels, Trump says Thursday that alliance members “actually thanked me” for meeting with Putin.

Trump has been criticized for seeking the one-on-one meeting with Putin, scheduled for Monday in Helsinki, in part because of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump describes it as a “loose meeting” and says “we’ll see where it leads.”

Says Trump: “I think meeting with people is great.”

___

12:55 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump says after an emergency session of NATO members, the military alliance is “very unified, very strong, no problem.”

The president is speaking at a news conference in Brussels along the sidelines of the annual NATO summit. He says he successfully pushed for NATO members to spend more of their budgets on defense and at a faster pace than previously expected.

Trump says NATO is “more coordinated” and there’s a “better spirit for NATO” even amid reports that he threated to pull the United States out of the alliance in a dispute over defense spending.

___

12:45 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump says he probably can withdraw the U.S. from NATO but that such a step is “unnecessary.”

Published reports Thursday said Trump had threatened during the NATO summit in Brussels to pull the U.S. out of the military alliance in a dispute over defense spending.

Trump says at a news conference that he was “extremely unhappy” with the situation, but that alliance members have upped their commitment in response to his complaints.

Asked whether he’s still threatening to pull out of NATO and whether he can do so without buy-in from Congress, Trump said: “I think I probably can but that’s unnecessary.”

___

12:30 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump says he told NATO allies that he was “extremely unhappy” with the level of defense spending but received a commitment from the member nations for them to spend more.

Trump says during a news conference in Brussels that NATO members have agreed to pursue defense spending of at least 2 percent of their GDP at a faster rate than the current 2024 timeline.

___

12:30 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump says the U.S. commitment to NATO “remains very strong” despite reports that he threated to pull out in a dispute over defense spending.

Trump says at a news conference Thursday in Brussels that he told “people” that he would be “very unhappy” if they didn’t increase their commitments.

Trump says the U.S. has been paying “probably 90 percent of the costs of NATO.”

Trump adds that he was “extremely unhappy with what was happening and they have substantially upped their commitment.”

NATO had no immediate comment.

Trump once declared NATO “obsolete.” He says Thursday: “I believe in NATO.”

___

12:05 p.m.

President Donald Trump plans to make a statement at the NATO summit in Brussels.

The White House says the president will address reporters before he departs for the United Kingdom, the next stop on his weeklong visit to Europe.

The statement follows tense discussions at the summit over Trump’s criticism of most NATO allies for not spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense as well as his demand that they immediately double such spending. Trump also criticized Germany over a natural gas pipeline deal with Russia.

Two officials at the summit say the alliance is currently meeting in an emergency session amid Trump’s demands.

__

9:30 a.m.

President Donald Trump has arrived at NATO headquarters, where he’s attending a second day of meetings with leaders of the military alliance.

Trump was running behind schedule Thursday morning and arrived at the Brussels site a good half an hour later than expected.

A meeting of the North Atlantic Council with Georgia and Ukraine that Trump was scheduled to attend was called into order around 8:50 a.m. Trump arrived around 9:15 a.m.

Other leaders have also been trickling in, and continue to arrive after Trump.

The president is expected to meet with the leaders of Azerbaijan, Romania, Ukraine and Georgia before he travels to London Thursday.

__

8:50 a.m.

President Donald Trump is continuing to hammer NATO nations over their defense spending as he prepares for a second day of meetings in Brussels.

Trump says presidents have been trying to get “Germany and other rich NATO Nations” to pay toward protection from Russia.

He says the U.S. “pays tens of Billions of Dollars too much to subsidize Europe” and is demanding members meet their pledge to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense. He says it “must ultimately” go to 4 percent.

Trump’s railing against a German pipeline deal with Russia, saying it’s “Not acceptable!”

He’s also weighing in on news from the Russia investigation that former FBI lawyer Lisa Page is resisting a subpoena.

Trump alleges, “So much corruption on the other side. Where is the Attorney General?”

__

8:25 a.m.

President Donald Trump will be meeting with the leaders of Azerbaijan, Romania, Ukraine and Georgia as he kicks off his second day at the NATO summit in Brussels.

The president will also be attending a pair of meetings of the North Atlantic Council before he departs for the United Kingdom.

Trump’s first day of meetings with leaders of the military alliance was contentious, with Trump demanding nations spend far more on defense and accusing Germany of being “totally controlled” by Russia because of a pipeline project.

Trump’s next stop will be London, where he’ll be meeting with Queen Elizabeth II and British Prime Minister Theresa May.

May’s government is in turmoil over how to exit the European Union following the Brexit vote.

__

6:30 a.m.

President Donald Trump is tearing into this week’s NATO summit. He’s questioning the value of a military alliance that has defined decades of American foreign policy, torching an ally and proposing a massive increase in European defense spending.

Trump on Wednesday turned a harsh spotlight on Germany’s own ties to Russia. He declared that a natural gas pipeline venture with Moscow has left Angela Merkel’s government “totally controlled” and “captive” to Russia.

The attack against a core ally comes days before Trump is set to meet one-on-one with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Trump questioned the necessity of the alliance that formed a bulwark against Soviet aggression.

He tweeted after a day of contentious meetings: “What good is NATO if Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars for gas and energy?”

In Thailand, the Kids Are All Right. Elsewhere, Not So Much.

In Thailand, the saga of 12 young soccer players and their coach trapped deep inside the inundated Tham Luang cave complex gripped the world; their successful rescue was a cause for global celebration. Juxtapose this outpouring of compassion and solidarity with the catastrophe facing millions of children in Yemen, and the ongoing debacle created here in the United States by President Donald Trump with the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. These comparisons do not make America look great.

Since 2015, Yemen has been subjected to unrelenting airstrikes by Saudi Arabia, with critical support and arms from the United States, slaughtering the civilian population. The recent siege of the port city of Hodeida has forced at least 121,000 civilians to flee. Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Yemeni scholar and activist based in the U.S., told the “Democracy Now!” news hour: “Any kind of disruption to the aid that’s coming in through the port of Hodeidah means the starvation of millions of Yemenis. More than 8 million are on the verge of starvation, and another 22 million people, 80 percent of the population, are relying on humanitarian aid that is coming in through this port.”

Since the war in Yemen began, according to UNICEF, more than half of the country’s health facilities have closed or been destroyed; 1,500 schools have been damaged by airstrikes and shelling; and at least 2,200 children have been killed, and 3,400 injured. “These are only numbers we have been able to verify. The actual figures could be even higher,” UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said last week in Geneva after returning from a trip to Yemen. “There is no justification for this carnage.”

At least 1 million children are suffering from severe malnutrition in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, heightening susceptibility to the world’s largest cholera epidemic that has swept the nation, infecting over 1 million Yemenis. Images of these skeletal children, in some cases just hours before death, are devastating.

Meanwhile, in the United States, over 3,000 children remain separated from their parents in the wake of Trump’s disastrous “zero tolerance” policy. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunite these children with their parents or other family members. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, who earlier claimed under congressional grilling that he could locate the children and their parents with mere “keystrokes,” missed the first deadline (July 10) to reunite all 102 children under the age of 5 with their parents, which doesn’t bode well for releasing all 3,000 children by the judge’s deadline of July 26.

As that first deadline loomed, Secretary Azar attempted to describe their failure to reunite the children as a success, telling CNN, “It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids who are smuggled into our country or come across illegally.” Parroting his boss Donald Trump’s infamous 2015 campaign launch speech, in which he denigrated Mexicans as rapists and murderers, Azar told CNN that some of the parents of these separated children were “murderers, kidnappers, rapists.” In fact, many of these people fled to the United States from Central America to avoid just such violence. The self-proclaimed “law and order” president violates the law, which guarantees a hearing to those seeking asylum.

On Monday, the U.N. Security Council met to debate a resolution on children and armed conflict. It passed unanimously. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nimrata “Nikki” Haley (nee Randhawa), the daughter of immigrants, said: “The Security Council must hold governments accountable for how they treat children both during and after active conflicts. They cannot neglect the unseen damage done to children’s hearts and minds.”

If Haley and the Trump administration care about children’s “hearts and minds,” they could show it by immediately reuniting the thousands of children they have taken from their parents, and ensure those families receive due process. They also should stop backing the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen, which is killing thousands of children.

The New York Times reports several of the young soccer players and their coach rescued in Thailand are stateless refugees, having fled violence and persecution in neighboring Burma. Let the migrant children locked up by President Trump here in the United States and the children of Yemen feel a similar outpouring of kindness, an equal, global effort to deliver them to safety.

Obama Officials Are Living Large in Trump’s America

Since departing the White House in January 2017, Barack Obama has kept a conspicuously low profile, surfacing briefly to condemn the Trump administration’s violation of the Iran nuclear deal and offer a few, inadequate words about its child separation policy. During that time, he has grown fabulously wealthy, inking a $65 million book contract and a Netflix television deal and delivering speeches to Wall Street firms for several hundred thousand dollars a pop.

But the former president is hardly the only member of his administration to cash in on his time in office. As HuffPost’s Zach Carter and Paul Blumenthal report, numerous Obama officials are “riding out” President Trump’s term by enriching themselves through consulting and lobbying deals, many at “scandal-fraught” organizations.

One such official is former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. When he’s not denouncing child detention camps as “immoral and un-American” while simultaneously dismissing calls to abolish ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) as “about as serious as the claim that Mexico is ‘gonna pay for the wall,’ ” Johnson serves on the board of directors at Lockheed Martin—the country’s biggest weapons manufacturer and a corporation that has incurred $767 million in fines for assorted misconduct since its formation in 1995. While Johnson’s precise level of involvement at the defense contractor is uncertain, HuffPost reveals that as a Lockheed Martin director he earned as much as $290,000 last year.

Melody Barnes, previously Obama’s Domestic Policy Council director, has proscribed the Trump administration for showing “virtually no respect for constitutional principles, or often, basic human decency.” But she too works for a defense contractor, Booz Hamilton, investigated for criminal wrongdoing, in this case by the Department of Justice for alleged accounting irregularities. HuffPost reports that the company has received as much as $63 million in contracts from ICE, the government agency that has made headlines for allegedly denying essential care to pregnant women in its custody and for employing agents who have told asylum seekers, “Don’t you know that we hate you people?,” among countless other offenses.

Then there’s Timothy Geithner, Obama’s treasury secretary and current president of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus. That firm is the owner of a money lender called Mariner Finance, which according to a damning new Washington Post report preys on the country’s most vulnerable. As one former branch manager put it, “it’s basically a way of monetizing poor people.”

Geithner, who has blamed predatory lenders for their role in the 2008 financial crisis, declined to comment on the article, but Mariner Finance LLC documents indicate the company has $561 million in total assets.

There are many more examples: Former Attorney General Eric Holder, former Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, former White House press secretary Jay Carney, and Obama’s original Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Mary Schapiro, have all found lucrative second lives in the private sector.

“Elite Washington is comfortable with what it calls ‘the revolving door’―the movement of government officials into lobbying, contracting or consulting jobs where they can exploit government connections for profit,” conclude HuffPost’s Carter and Blumenthal. “But much of what passes for normal in Washington is considered grotesque in the rest of the country. If the Trump administration weren’t bumbling between different crimes against humanity, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting nostalgic for the era when these folks ran the free world.”

When Doing Good Becomes Doing Bad

Oxfam wasn’t the only nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Haiti where the so-called protectors turned into predators. After the 2010 earthquake, thousands of foreign aid workers arrived in the country. In Port-au-Prince, women on the streets reported that foreigners would give them more than five times the price a local would pay for sex.

Recent revelations of sexual abuse implicating specific NGOs and other agencies that provide relief to some of the world’s most vulnerable people are more widespread than initially reported. The most-publicized depredation involves the former Oxfam country director in Haiti, Belgian Roland van Hauwermeiren, who acknowledged paying for sexual encounters with Haitian earthquake survivors in a villa at odds with a disaster-ridden landscape.

Taina Bien-Aimé, director of the international Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and a first-generation Haitian-American and colleague, told me, “To understand the scandal of sexual abuse in Haiti is to understand the country’s history of debilitating colonialism. The history of Haiti for the majority of Haitian women and girls is also an historical arc of sexual violence and harassment at the hands of foreign military men, NGO workers, U.N. personnel and others.”

Haiti has been ravaged by rapacious nations, initially enslaved under French domination combined with a concomitant U.S. economic blockade. Later, in 1915, the U.S. Marines invaded the country and, many say, have never left.

In more recent times, the sexual exploitation of women in Haiti has been carried out by countless waves of U.N. peacekeepers entrusted with helping the country withstand internal conflicts and natural disasters. From 1990 to the present, at least nine United Nations aid operations were assembled to support the people of Haiti. The acronyms multiply: ONUVEH, MICIVIH, MINUHA, MANUH, MITNUH, MIPONUH, MICAH, MINUSTAH, and finally MINUJUSTH. All variously spell out missions intended to assist, stabilize, verify elections, aid in transition, establish a civilian police and build a justice system in the country.

A 2017 U.N. report found that sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti was pervasive over a period of seven years. The record of sexual exploitation during the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is the longest—a decade of rape, sexual assault and prostituting that left a legacy of what are called MINUSTAH babies in a country where 59 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and almost 25 percent exist in abject poverty.

Haiti, the first country in the Western Hemisphere and the first black nation to abolish slavery, has found itself at the epicenter of a tsunami of sexual slavery that struck Haitian women and has continued for years. Slavery is a fortissimo word for this large-scale sexual exploitation of women and children, what some would prefer to mute as “survival sex.” But if you are desperate for money or medicine, or you need to feed hungry children by providing sex in exchange for bread, milk or food coupons, your survival is your servitude.

In addition to Oxfam, recent revelations of NGO sexual exploitation have involved the larger corporate-style organizations, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). These organizations are flush with funds and led by high-salaried directors.

Some NGOs have enacted policies on prostitution that provide an enabling environment for the sexual exploitation that takes place both within their organizations and on country missions. Amnesty International’s prostitution policy  transforms prostitution into “sex work” by arguing that decriminalization of not only prostituted women but also of pimps and buyers is the best way of protecting women. Ken Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, cheered on Amnesty’s proposal as a praiseworthy poverty program for underprivileged women when he tweeted, “Why deny poor women the option of voluntary sex work?”—a question reminiscent of the chorus of johns who justify their sexual exploitation by transforming it into a welfare system for the women they abuse.

I contacted Oxfam to inquire whether the organization has a policy prohibiting staff from buying “sexual services.” Media have reported that organizational guidance issued in 2006 stated that Oxfam “did not ban the use of prostitutes, but we strongly discourage it. We don’t ban it because we cannot infringe on people’s liberties.” When I asked Tricia O’Rourke, head of news at Oxfam Great Britain, about Oxfam’s 2017 policy, she responded, “Our code of conduct now states that staff cannot ‘exchange money, offers of employment, employment, goods or services for sex or sexual favors.’ The previous code prohibited sex with people in direct receipt of aid—we admit it was wrong not to explicitly prohibit staff from engaging in any kind of transactional sexual behavior and deeply regret this.”

In February, Oxfam’s chief executive, Mark Goldring, was called to account for why Oxfam’s sexual abuse of Haitian women was not disclosed to the U.K. government, its primary funder. The Daily Telegraph reported that Goldring was “expected to claim that Oxfam had not informed ministers of the allegations in 2011 because it believed that staff accused of paying prostitutes were not guilty of exchanging ‘sex for aid.’ ” It appears that the Oxfam executive made a distinction between using women in prostitution (OK) and trading “sex for aid” (not OK), and in doing so, at that point in time, was ignorant of the organization’s 2017 revised code of conduct.

After the Oxfam scandal, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announced it had “dealt with” 24 cases of sexual harassment and abuse in 2017, all involving field staff and almost all in mission countries. Nineteen people were dismissed from the organization. When I inquired about its current policy on sexual harassment and abuse, MSF responded that it has a no-tolerance policy that applies to minors and adults. Seeming to contradict the policy, MSF also added, “there is no one global code of conduct for all MSF offices and missions,” although each of its 21 different sections shares the same “binding commitment and vision.”

When asked whether it prohibits its personnel from purchasing “sexual services,” MSF told me, “There is current discussion within MSF to reinforce our policy on sexual exploitation, by explicitly addressing the specific issue of buying services from sex workers, in guidance to all staff.” Yet when asked whether it takes any position on Amnesty International’s policy of full decriminalization of the sex industry, MSF pointed me to its teams in South Africa that, in a response to the South African Law Reform Commission’s report on prostitution, condemned the report for not supporting decriminalization of the sex industry. Instead, MSF South Africa “supports the decriminalization of sex work” and stands “in solidarity” with pro-sex trade groups such as SWEAT and the Sisonke Sex Worker Movement. The organization makes no mention of groups that oppose decriminalization of the sex industry in South Africa, such as Masimanyane or Dignity, both representing survivors of prostitution.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is also on the roster of big corporate NGO abusers. ICRC director Yves Daccord has acknowledged that 21 staffers violated the organization’s policy by paying for “sexual services.” No details of where the sexual exploitation took place were released.

To its credit, the ICRC has long included in its code of conduct an explicit proscription against staffers purchasing “sexual services.” Daccord affirmed that “the ban applies worldwide and at all times, including in locations where prostitution is legal, as the ICRC believes that staff paying for sex is incompatible with the values and mission of the organization.” The ICRC’s policy is contractually binding. Daccord has contacted other NGOs with the goal of preventing offenders from being shifted from one agency to another, a common NGO practice.

And then there was the annual men-only charity benefit in Britain sponsored by the corporate businessmen of the Presidents Club, who for years allowed powerful titans of business, politics, finance, media, entertainment and government to prey on young women at the event. In January, the club hired 130 “hostesses”—who were ordered to wear skimpy, body-clinging, black outfits with matching underwear and high heels—to provide “services” to the male guests. Procured from the Artista agency, the women were told to make men happy. During the event, Artista also showed videos of women dancing in their underwear.

Paraded in at the start of the evening, hostesses were made to smile and strut across the stage for men’s gaze before walking to their assigned tables as the men whistled, cheered and clapped. According to one hostess, certain women wore soaring red heels or red belts so they could be identified as available for “extra duties,” i.e., for sex. As the event went on, alcohol and drugs flowed freely, and the sexual demands became more forceful. One shocked businessman said, “It’s a cesspit … it’s just an upper-class whorehouse.”

At the event and especially at the after-party, where the hostesses were required to stay until 2 a.m., they were groped and propositioned. The harassment included being fondled repeatedly, pulled onto men’s laps, asked to remove their underwear, and invited to men’s rooms in the hotel. Men exposed themselves and asked women if they were “prostitutes.” Caroline Dandridge, the founder of Artista, told the women to just tell the men, “You’re a naughty boy.” The benefit auctioned off nights at a strip club and a course of plastic surgery that invited men to “add spice to your wife.”

The benefit was not merely an event that got out of hand, with a few rogue men behaving badly. It was deliberately designed to prey on young women and allow the male attendees sex on demand. Apparently, the club was able to mask its misdeeds for 33 years because it raised millions of pounds to aid those in need. The women were made to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Is it surprising that NGO executives and staffers are acting like the corporate businessmen at a Presidents Club benefit? Some, like Goldring at Oxfam, explain their organization’s sexual abuse based on a distinction between “sex for aid” and prostitution. Commentators such as Suzanne Moore, writing in The Guardian, appear to make this same distinction. She claims that Oxfam’s abuse of vulnerable women, while it is “vile exploitation,” is not prostitution because “prostitution implies choice and consent. However, it is not clear how any choice was made, in the devastating aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.”

Minus an earthquake, what does it take to understand that it is not clear how any choice is made for the majority of women in prostitution?

The privileged male abusers of Haitian women are not much different from the privileged male abusers who prowl the streets of major cities in the United States looking “to score,” or who gratify themselves in the legal brothels of Germany, the Netherlands or Nevada. The women they exploit are mostly women whose alleged choice and consent is driven by family breakdown, past and present sexual abuse, poverty, substance abuse and/or a predatory recruiter or pimp who smooths the way–no choice at all, really.

Policies legalizing or decriminalizing the sex industry seem based on a sliding scale that makes distinctions between “especially vulnerable women” and “not-so-vulnerable women.” Should we distinguish between “especially vulnerable women” on the streets of Haiti who swap sex for necessities and those who allegedly are “not so vulnerable” because they provide sex for money in Haiti’s sex clubs and bars? Or is the sliding scale more accurate if we acknowledge that all women who resort to prostitution in Haiti are “especially vulnerable” but not women in European or U.S. sex venues because the latter have more “choice”?

Amnesty International’s prostitution policy has further confused general NGO policy on prostitution by giving prostitution users permission to abuse women, rationalizing that decriminalization of the sex industry benefits women and allegedly preserves their right to prostitute. But whose rights are really being protected here? Amnesty’s policy provides validation for men who would abuse vulnerable women and—like other NGO perpetrators and the corporate abusers of the Presidents Club—call it charity, protection or economic welfare.

There have been many protests in the wake of these NGO scandals. On International Women’s Day, women aid workers published an open letter to senior managers, CEOs and board members of humanitarian and development organizations, demanding reform of the corporate NGO culture that permits sexual harassment and exploitation. The #MeToo movement has also removed impunity from many high-flying and wealthy sexual abusers prominent in Hollywood, the media and women’s sports.

Much has been said about the need to change the culture of organizational sexual abuse—a culture that in large measure is built on the culture of prostitution. Prostitution has been much in the background of the #MeToo movement but much in the foreground of many men’s lives. We need to acknowledge how prostitution and the sex industry are major propellants of the sexual abuse endured by women in everyday life.

Prostitution is the arena in which sexual harassment and abuse are normalized and repeated in nearly every sexual encounter—where sexual abuse is justified because she allegedly consents to it, and he pays for it. Prostituted women experience daily the sexual sadism aimed at women in the entertainment media and the violent acts depicted in gonzo porn—the most debasing genre of pornography that dominates the pornography market. Media sexual sadism and pornography have also been instrumental in desensitizing men to the “regular” sexual abuse they inflict on many women outside of prostitution, abuse for which the #MeToo movement has made men accountable.

Pimp culture has invaded our language, making it hip to use the word. Billboards advertising “pimp smooth” beer, marketers who “pimp” their products and a TV show called “pimp my ride” all pass, especially in youth circles, for something cool. One need not understand the multiple meanings this word conveys in different contexts to know that using that term ignores the actual consequences that pimping inflicts on prostituted women and girls.

I asked prostitution survivor Autumn Burris, director of Survivors for Solutions, about the connections between the sexual exploitation reported by women in the #MeToo movement and the sexual abuse of prostitution. In what has now become a legendary tweet, she responded that prostitution is “#MeToo on steroids.” When asked about her tweet, Burris explained that prostituted women are subjected “to hourly sexual harassment, rape, unwanted advances/penetration and aggressive and violent behavior by white, privileged men sexually commodifying our bodies.”

How can we change the NGO culture of sexual abuse and assault when certain human rights organizations have institutionalized pimping and buying a woman’s body for sex as basic freedoms to protect? How can we change the general culture of sexual abuse and assault if those whose very mission is to do good are doing bad?

Scott Pruitt Got Off Easy: Ecocide Is No Small Matter

Scott Pruitt, the now-former, scandal-plagued Environmental Protection Agency chief in the Trump administration, got off easy.

The spoliation of the commons by those who pursue private profit and what Western economists call “development” is no small matter.

Consider the case of the white “settler” William  Davis in northern Illinois in the spring of 1832. Two years earlier, Davis, a blacksmith from West Virginia, had moved his wife and six children to Big Indian Creek, 20 miles north of the town of Ottawa. Davis built a house, a blacksmith shop and sawmill six miles downstream from a large village of Potawatomi Indians.

The white newcomers considered the Potawatomi peaceful. Their chief, Shaubena, traveled by horse to warn the white “settlers” about potential attacks from the Sauks, who had been sparked by the old warrior Black Hawk to resist the white invasion of northern Illinois. This included the occupation of Sauk villages and otherwise proved most unsettling to the indigenous people who called the region home.

But Davis spoiled his relations with the local Potawatomi by building a dam to power his sawmill. The dam, it turned out, hampered the upstream migration of fish, on which the native population depended for food and fertilizer.

When the Potawatomi asked him to stop blocking their fish supply, Davis brusquely refused and turned them away. Then, in April 1832, Davis came upon a Potawatomi villager named Keewassee trying to destroy the much-reviled dam. “Davis caught him in the act,” writes historian Kelly Trask, “and gave him a severe thrashing with a hickory rod. Keewassee went away bruised and angry, but he was far from finished with Davis.”

On the unusually hot afternoon of May 21, 1832, more than 60 Potawatomis and three Sauks attacked the Davis homestead, where the Davis family was gathered with two other “settler” clans. The Indians killed 15 whites. “All were scalped. The men and women were chopped to pieces,” Trask notes, “After that, the war party burned down the house and all the outbuildings and wantonly slaughtered the livestock.”

Sparked by a white invader’s arrogant response to indigenous people asking him to cease and desist from spoiling the commons on which they relied for sustenance, the Indian Creek Massacre quickly became part of a white-nationalist narrative justifying the launching of the U.S. Black Hawk War. This one-sided slaughter by the U.S. military resulted in the white ethnic cleansing of northern Illinois and the rapid destruction of Illinois prairie.

Davis (who personally survived the massacre) was just one of many tens of thousands of white un-settlers who “contributed,” in the words of Harry Podschwit in the College of DuPage’s Essai, “to the destruction of the tallgrass grass prairies and other ecological features of Northern Illinois”—including remarkable biodiversity—well before the turn of the 20th century. As Podschwit observes:

Much of the damage to the Northern Illinois ecology was sustained during the period early settlement [the 1830s-1850s], as the rapid spread of urban centers and agriculture dominated the tallgrass prairie and also decimated the remaining woodlands of the region. Thus, to the dismay of many modern naturalists, much of the ecology of the Northern Illinois was disturbed before its nuances could be fully understood. … By 1900 the landscape of Northern Illinois had been abused and defeated, lamenting its fantastic, yet brief reign in North America.

Nearly two centuries after the Indian removal, much, if not most, of the region’s once-luxuriant prairie farmland is ruled by toxic corporate mega-farmers. They apply poisonous chemical fertilizers fence post to fence post to grow giant corn and soybean crops destined for the digestive tracts of industrially penned and slaughtered cows and pigs. The once richly fertile and black earth of the Illinois plains feeds a giant, methane-spewing animal agriculture industry that contributes massively to the destructive overheating of the planet.

Still, William Davis should have listened to the Potawatomis, who at first politely beseeched him to stop endangering their food supply through his selfish distortion of the commons.

White “settler” descendant Scott Pruitt’s crimes against the commons far surpass anything Davis ever did.

Pruitt is a fundamentalist Southern Baptist who thinks that evolution and global warming are scientific hoaxes and that “God” wants human beings to use natural gas and oil, not leave it in the ground. He first made a name for himself as a state attorney general bankrolled by big oil and gas who battled the EPA during the Obama years.

An enemy of environmental regulation from the oil and gas state of Oklahoma, Pruitt was backed for his job as EPA chief by leading right-wing petro-plutocrats, including the billionaire petro-oligarchs David and Charles Koch. Other top Pruitt boosters and allies included the oil and fracking tycoon Harold Hamm (the world’s 90th richest person) and billionaire coal executive Joseph W. Craft III.

In exchange for such deep-pocketed, big-carbon support, Pruitt worked to systematically dismantle federal regulatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions. He led the effort to pull the United States out of the Paris agreement, making the U.S. the only country out of 193 nations to declare its intention to withdraw from a modest global effort to curb the ever-growing world climate crisis.

Pruitt might as well have renamed the EPA the “Environmental Destruction Agency.” His career has been dedicated to two things: filling his own family bank account and bending energy policy toward the extraction and burning of every last hydrocarbon on earth.

That is no small criminal record. The collapse of livable ecology planetwide by anthropogenic (really capitalogenic) climate change in the name of development and “jobs” is a transgression unparalleled in history. All bets are off on prospects for a decent future unless Homo sapiens wake up and act quickly to move off fossil fuels and on to renewable energy—a technically viable project. Curiously enough, the world’s leading intellectual, Noam Chomsky, has noted that “those [most urgently] trying to mitigate and overcome” [the climate crisis]” are the least developed societies, the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them; tribal societies; and first nations in Canada.”

To be sure, the environmental crisis is nothing new. Earth scientists have been warning us for many years about the imminent risk of environmental downfall, identifying the reckless extraction and burning of fossil fuels as the leading driver behind the approaching calamity. Under the commons-plundering command of capital, we are careening to the fatal mark of 500 carbon parts per million by 2067, if not sooner. That’s goodbye Greenland ice sheet and so long Antarctica (which recently lost an ice chunk so large that National Geographic had to reconfigure its world atlas), both critical life support systems.

The World Bank warns that millions of Latin Americans are endangered by the loss of their continent’s giant natural water towers for irrigation, drinking and hydropower as the Andean glaciers disappear. Among the most ominous recent developments, environmental writer Robert Hunzinker explains that:

Permafrost thrives on global warming, like bees to honey, as it releases massive quantities of methane. The Siberian region may be on the verge of collapse, which will heat up the planet by several degrees; agriculture couldn’t possibly survive. Russian scientists have identified 7,000 ‘pingos’—mounds of earth pushed upwards by melting permafrost and erupting methane gas, often imploding into huge craters (there may be as many as 100,000 pingos). … Alaskan permafrost is mimicking Siberia as global warming strikes hard, and a tipping point is being triggered. A two-year scientific expedition registered 220 million tons of carbon emissions spewing out of Alaska’s permafrost, equivalent to all U.S. commercial emissions per year.

Billionaire climate-denying and planet-cooking savages like Donald Trump, the Kochs and Harold Hamm and their servants like Scott Pruitt hardly invented our “ecological rift,” which is rooted in what John Bellamy Foster rightly calls “capitalism’s [longstanding] war on Earth.” With the U.S. in the oil-coal-and-gas-addicted, commons-plundering and poisoning lead, humanity has been steering madly toward the cliff of environmental self-extermination for decades. But with his determination to “deregulate energy”—to go full bore with the greenhouse gassing to death of life on earth (a crime destined to the make the Nazis look like small-time criminals)—Trump represents what Chomsky has called “almost a death knell for the species.” The Trump presidency’s extreme commitment to fossil fuels is no small part of why the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock ahead by 30 seconds to two minutes to midnight.

A young mother with her baby in her arms confronted Pruitt at a Washington restaurant just days before his resignation. “Hi” she said, “I just wanted to urge you to resign because of what you’re doing to the environment and our country. This is my son. He loves animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing strong fuel standards for cars and trucks, for the benefit of big corporations.”

Pruitt took his two bodyguards and left in shame before the mother and her child could return to their seats.

He got off easy. The loss of a government job and public humiliation is a small price to pay for playing a leading role in the eco-exterminist destruction of livable ecology.

People like Pruitt should feel lucky to be able to walk freely and breathe fresh air, or what’s left of it on a planet he’s been trying to destroy.

Four terrible things are darkly noteworthy about Pruitt’s forced resignation last week. First, it was absurdly belated. The fact that he lasted as long as he did atop the EPA makes one wonder just how far one of Trump’s favorite petro-plutocratic swamp creatures has to sink before he can lose his job in Washington. Pruitt’s departure came after months of seemingly endless controversy surrounding his personal corruption. The Pruitt scandal timeline includes the following:

● April 12, 2017: The Washington Post revealed Pruitt requested and received an around-the-clock security detail at huge cost to taxpayers (nearly $3.5 million during his first year in office).

● Sept. 26, 2017: The Post reported the EPA illegally built Pruitt a $25,000 (later revised to $43,000) soundproof phone booth.

● March 21, 2018: Politico reported Pruitt spent $105,000 on first-class flights.

● March 29, 2018: ABC News reported Pruitt had rented a Capitol Hill condo co-owned by the wife of an influential energy lobbyist during his first year in office. Bloomberg News later reported Pruitt paid just $50 for each night he stayed there.

● April 3, 2018: The Atlantic reported Pruitt gave large pay raises to two close aides after the White House rejected requests for the increases.

● May 1, 2018: The Post reported an influential energy industry lobbyist helped plan a trip to Morocco for Pruitt. It was later reported that a Washington energy industry consultant sought to plan a Pruitt jaunt to Australia.

● June 4, 2018: Democratic congresspeople revealed a close Pruitt aide told House Oversight Committee staffers that Pruitt enlisted her help in personal tasks, including a search for housing, shopping for skin moisturizer, picking up dry cleaning and trying “to secure a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel in Washington.”

● June 5, 2018: The Post reported Pruitt used his position to seek a Chick-fil-A franchise for his wife.

● June 24, 2018: Politico reported the U.S. Office of Special Counsel was examining charges Pruitt retaliated against EPA staffers who had questioned his management and spending decisions. Six staffers were either fired or reassigned within the agency.

● July 2, 2018: The New York Times reported a former senior aide at the EPA told lawmakers Pruitt had asked her to help his wife obtain a job as a fundraiser for the Republican Attorneys General Association. When the aide warned Pruitt he would have to report his wife’s income on financial disclosures, he told her he would establish a limited liability corporation to hide the “earnings.”

Throughout all this and almost to the very end, Trump defended his “great EPA chief” against criticism from the “Fake News” media. Trump praised Pruitt as a champion of working people who was helping “create jobs” by slashing supposedly dysfunctional and anti-growth environmental regulations. Never mind that (as environmentalists rightly point out) “there’s no jobs on a dead planet” and that (as the economist Robert Pollin has shown) alternative energy investments create more and better jobs than those ones connected to the extraction of fossil fuels.

Second, Pruitt has been forced out with remarkably little pressure from the Republican-led Congress. The hard-right, white-nationalist and eco-exterminist GOP is ready to tolerate almost any level of petroleum-drenched corruption in the Trump White House. This does not bode well for the future if, as seems distinctly possible (thanks in no small measure to the openly reactionary and authoritarian atrocity that is congressional gerrymandering), the Democrats are unable to regain control of the House and Senate during the upcoming midterm elections.

A third disturbing thing to reflect upon about Pruitt’s demise is that it was driven almost completely by his personal corruption, not the vastly more significant crime of ecocide—the ruination of livable ecology.

One of the most alarming things about the Trump presidency so far is the chilling fact that the single most grave threat it poses, the acceleration of the climate crisis, has been a shockingly invisible non-story in the dominant Trump-obsessed U.S. news media. That media has been even more fixated than usual on the misbehavior of the current U.S. president, but it has refused to focus seriously on the most important danger Trump presents: the escalation of the march to environmental calamity.

As Chomsky told political scientist C.J. Polychroniou last April: “It is hard to find words to describe the fact that the most powerful country in world history is not only withdrawing from global efforts to address a truly existential threat but is also dedicating itself to accelerating the race to disaster, all to put more dollars in overstuffed pockets. No less astounding is the limited attention paid to the phenomenon.”

Global warming, the left philosopher John Sanbonmatsu once wrote me, is “the biggest issue of our or any time.” You wouldn’t know it from U.S. news reporting and commentary, even with the ascendancy of a president dedicated to increasing the dire peril.

Fourth, Pruitt’s replacement as EPA chief for at least the next few months is Scott Wheeler, a veteran coal lobbyist who is no less committed to climate denial and “energy deregulation” than Pruitt, Trump and the Koch brothers. Wheeler is likely to be a slicker and more effective agent of big carbon than his predecessor. As the New York Times reported:

Andrew Wheeler [is] a former coal lobbyist who shares Mr. Pruitt’s zeal to undo environmental regulations. … But unlike Mr. Pruitt—-who had come to Washington as an outsider and aspiring politician, only to get caught up in a swirl of controversy over his costly first-class travel and security spending—Mr. Wheeler is viewed as a consummate Washington insider who avoids the limelight and has spent years effectively navigating the rules. …. For that reason, Mr. Wheeler’s friends and critics alike say, he could ultimately prove to be more adept than his controversial former boss in the job.

… Mr. Wheeler[’s] … career was built around quietly and incrementally advancing the interests of the fossil-fuel industry, chiefly by weakening or delaying federal regulations. … Mr. Wheeler has worked in Washington for more than 20 years. He is a former chief of staff to Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, the conservative Republican who has become known as Washington’s most prominent denialist of the established science of human-caused climate change. … Mr. Wheeler also worked at the E.P.A. during the administration of the first President George Bush. More recently, he lobbied for the coal company Murray Energy, whose chief executive, Robert E. Murray, has been a supporter and adviser of Mr. Trump’s.

The exchange of Wheeler’s “steady hand” for Pruitt’s messy, moisturized ones is probably “trading up” as far as the chieftains of big oil, gas and coal are concerned. Wheeler will be a more valuable vehicle of environmental catastrophe. As journalist and historian Terry Thomas told me, “Pruitt was an egomaniacal criminal who couldn’t help flouting his power. The next guy will do his business of destroying the planet in a very matter-of-fact way. The planet will be that much more destroyed but with no distracting sideshow.”

This is yet another of many reminders that we need revolutions of policy and (more deeply) power structure, not merely changes of personnel (new faces in high places), if we are going to have any chance of sustaining prospects for a decent future.

For his part, Pruitt should thank his lucky stars. He still has his scalp, his family and no doubt a sizable bank account, though nothing remotely on the wealth scale of the billionaire gas, oil and coal oligarchs he’s been serving all these years.

U.S. Soon to Leapfrog Saudis, Russia as Top Oil Producer

The U.S. is on pace to leapfrog both Saudi Arabia and Russia and reclaim the title of the world’s biggest oil producer for the first time since the 1970s.

The latest forecast from the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that U.S. output will grow next year to 11.8 million barrels a day.

“If the forecast holds, that would make the U.S. the world’s leading producer of crude,” says Linda Capuano, who heads the agency, a part of the Energy Department.

Saudi Arabia and Russia could upend that forecast by boosting their own production. In the face of rising global oil prices, members of the OPEC cartel and a few non-members including Russia agreed last month to ease production caps that had contributed to the run-up in prices.

President Donald Trump has urged the Saudis to pump more oil to contain rising prices. He tweeted on June 30 that King Salman agreed to boost production “maybe up to 2,000,000 barrels.” The White House later clarified that the king said his country has a reserve of 2 million barrels a day that could be tapped “if and when necessary.”

The idea that the U.S. could ever again become the world’s top oil producer once seemed preposterous.

“A decade ago the only question was how fast would U.S. production go down,” said Daniel Yergin, author of several books about the oil industry including a history, “The Prize.” The rebound of U.S. output “has made a huge difference. If this had not happened, we would have had a severe shortage of world oil,” he said.

The United States led the world in oil production for much of the 20th century, but the Soviet Union surpassed America in 1974, and Saudi Arabia did the same in 1976, according to Energy Department figures.

By the end of the 1970s the USSR was producing one-third more oil than the U.S.; by the end of the 1980s, Soviet output was nearly double that of the U.S.

The last decade or so has seen a revolution in American energy production, however, led by techniques including hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and horizontal drilling.

Those innovations — and the breakup of the Soviet Union — helped the U.S. narrow the gap. Last year, Russia produced more than 10.3 million barrels a day, Saudi Arabia pumped just under 10 million, and the U.S. came in under 9.4 million barrels a day, according to U.S. government figures.

The U.S. has been pumping more than 10 million barrels a day on average since February, and probably pumped about 10.9 million barrels a day in June, up from 10.8 million in May, the energy agency said Tuesday in its latest short-term outlook.

Capuano’s agency forecast that U.S. crude output will average 10.8 million barrels a day for all of 2018 and 11.8 million barrels a day in 2019. The current U.S. record for a full year is 9.6 million barrels a day in 1970.

The trend of rising U.S. output prompted Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, to predict this spring that the U.S. would leapfrog Russia and become the world’s largest producer by next year — if not sooner.

One potential obstacle for U.S. drillers is a bottleneck of pipeline capacity to ship oil from the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico to ports and refineries.

“They are growing the production but they can’t get it out of the area fast enough because of pipeline constraints,” said Jim Rittersbusch, a consultant to oil traders.

Some analysts believe that Permian production could decline, or at least grow more slowly, in 2019 or 2020 as energy companies move from their best acreage to more marginal areas.

When Resistance Becomes Capitulation: A Response to an Open Letter in The Nation

Editor’s note: The Nation contributor Norman Solomon, who has written for Truthdig, drew our attention to the magazine’s publication Wednesday of an open letter signed by multiple scholars, diplomats, politicians, writers and activists calling for “secure elections and true national security.” Here is Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer’s response to the letter, followed by its full text.

While The Nation deserves credit for this important effort, and I am a huge fan of the magazine’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, I find this statement to be an inadequate response to the jingoistic blather of the Democratic Party, and of course the GOP leadership.

What the statement’s opening paragraph woefully ignores is the harsh reality that the U.S. political system is far less vulnerable to hacking attacks from any foreign source than the rest of the world’s nations are from such attacks by the United States—including surveillance of world leaders, such as the Obama administration’s tapping of Angela Merkel’s personal cellphone. The NSA probably gets an alert every time Putin snores.

You can go back to the post-World War II elections in Italy and France in the 1940s for the start of our modern era of imperial meddling in free elections. There was the toppling of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the prevention of agreed-upon elections to unify Vietnam in 1956, the overthrowing of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973—the list goes on and on.

When it comes to meddling in other nations’ histories, we wrote the book. Surely, the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee know that. Ask some of the experts who signed this letter about the U.S. attempts to undermine Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform efforts that led to the coming to power of the ever-drunk Boris Yeltsin, who in desperation later picked Vladimir Putin to be his vice president and then to succeed him.

Yes, Putin—who had the startling virtue of being a teetotaler in a nation drowning in vodka even more than in crony socialism—was back then the preferred alternative frontman for the army of liberal American advisers preaching the virtues of a crony capitalism that savaged what remained of the Russian economy.

The rape of Russian resources by a new class of billionaires was an American export conflating virulent capitalism with freedom, and it proved once again to be the devil’s bargain. Most ordinary Russians seem to think that Putin has played that bad hand as well as could be expected.

Not so the ever-self-righteous leaders of the Democratic Party, who offer Putin-bashing as an alternative to coming to grips with their own failure to provide sound leadership to our country.

Instead of acknowledging their own responsibility for the angst in America, the Democrats have countered the demagogue in chief’s long list of scapegoats to blame for our problems, beginning with immigrants, with an even more absurd and much shorter “list” of their own: Putin did it!

Thus was born the red-baiting revival of the Cold War—but without a Red to attack, desperately offering up Putin, a born-again Russian Orthodox and Peter the Great clone, to explain away the Democratic leadership’s own well-deserved repudiation in the last election. Trump ruthlessly exploited the pain in America; the Clintonistas blindly ignored it. End of story.

Except it isn’t. The Democrats are now the party of warmongers, and no clearer evidence is needed than the tweet from their Senate leader, Charles Schumer, issued as Donald Trump was en route for his eventual meeting with Putin, saying Trump “is more loyal to President Putin than to our NATO allies … his duty is to protect the American people from foreign threats, not to sell out our democracy to Putin.” This is bizarre behavior on the part of the top Democrat in the Senate and reason enough never to trust the Democrats to be a “lesser evil” restraining force. Not back when Truman dropped those bombs, or when Johnson killed millions in Vietnam, or when both senators from New York endorsed George Bush’s regime change orgy. The same two senators—Schumer and Hillary Clinton—confused Wall Street with Main Street, ending the progressive tradition of their party and leaving aspiring neofascist Trump to harvest the populist discontent that resulted.

Yes, it is a wickedly dangerous development when these enablers of the unleashing of Wall Street greed and the wild neocon and neoliberal schemes for worldwide regime change now blame Putin for our nation’s political instability. But how can the signers of The Nation statement in good conscience issue a warning about this turn of events that omits any reference to the overwhelming intrusive power of the greatest empire the world has ever experienced—our own—or pathetically plead for the old guard politicians of both parties to come to their senses? Predictably, the GOP is proving that it can always be better at playing the red-baiting card than the Democrats, as Trump just demonstrated by declaring that Germany is “captive to Russia” because of their natural gas pipeline deal. Once again, Democratic Party “resistance” will prove to be abject capitulation.

Editor’s note: The full letter from The Nation is reprinted below. 

Common Ground: For Secure Elections and True National Security

An open letter by Gloria Steinem, Noam Chomsky, John Dean, Governor Bill Richardson, Walter Mosley, Valerie Plame, and others.

Many Americans remain deeply concerned about reports of Russian interference with the 2016 election. Meanwhile, relations between the United States and Russia are at their lowest and most dangerous point in several decades. For the sake of democracy at home and true national security, we must reach common ground to safeguard common interests—taking steps to protect the nation’s elections and to prevent war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

Whatever the truth of varied charges that Russia interfered with the election, there should be no doubt that America’s digital-age infrastructure for the electoral process is in urgent need of protection. The overarching fact remains that the system is vulnerable to would-be hackers based anywhere. Solutions will require a much higher level of security for everything from voter-registration records to tabulation of ballots with verifiable paper trails. As a nation, we must fortify our election system against unlawful intrusions as well as official policies of voter suppression.

At the same time, the U.S. and Russian governments show numerous signs of being on a collision course. Diplomacy has given way to hostility and reciprocal consular expulsions, along with dozens of near-miss military encounters in Syria and in skies above Europe. Both sides are plunging ahead with major new weapons development programs. In contrast to prior eras, there is now an alarming lack of standard procedures to keep the armed forces of both countries in sufficient communication to prevent an escalation that could lead to conventional or even nuclear attack. These tensions are festering between two nations with large quantities of nuclear weapons on virtual hair-trigger alert; yet the current partisan fixations in Washington are ignoring the dangers to global stability and, ultimately, human survival.

The United States should implement a pronounced shift in approach toward Russia. No political advantage, real or imagined, could possibly compensate for the consequences if even a fraction of U.S. and Russian arsenals were to be utilized in a thermonuclear exchange. The tacit pretense that the worsening of U.S.-Russian relations does not worsen the odds of survival for the next generations is profoundly false. Concrete steps can and must be taken to ease tensions between the nuclear superpowers.

Andrew Bacevich, Professor Emeritus, Boston University

Phyllis Bennis, Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies

Noam Chomsky, Professor, Author, and Activist

Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics, NYU and Princeton University, and Board Member, American Committee for East-West Accord

John Dean, Former Nixon White House Counsel

Phil Donahue, Journalist and Talk-Show Pioneer

Thomas Drake, Former NSA Senior Executive and Whistle-blower

Daniel Ellsberg, Activist, “Pentagon Papers” Whistle-blower, and Author of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

Jack Matlock, Former US Ambassador to the USSR and Board Member, American Committee for East-West Accord

Walter Mosley, Writer and Screenwriter

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–Winning Novelist

Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, CUNY Graduate School

Valerie Plame, Former Covert CIA Operations Officer and Author

Adolph Reed Jr., Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Bill Richardson, Former Governor of New Mexico

Patricia Schroeder, Former Congresswoman

Norman Solomon, National Coordinator, RootsAction.org

Gloria Steinem, Writer and Feminist Organizer

Adlai Stevenson III, Former US Senator and Chairman, Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy

Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher, The Nation

Alice Walker, Writer, Poet, and Activist

Jody Williams, Professor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

James Zogby, President, Arab American Institute

Signers have endorsed this Open Letter as individuals and not on behalf of any organization.

 

Grandmother—63 and Sick—Is a Target of Denaturalization Task Force

In June, the Trump administration announced it would launch a denaturalization task force, targeting naturalized citizens accused of cheating on their applications, or convicted of crimes, however minor, before they were granted citizenship. In the past, denaturalization was a rare move, usually reserved for war criminals, child-sex offenders or terrorists and their funders. Now, as the Miami Herald reports, the task force is targeting a 63-year-old secretary from Peru who fits into none of those categories.

Norma Borgono, as the Miami Herald reports, “immigrated from Peru in 1989, volunteers weekly at church, raised two children on a $500-a-week salary and suffers from a rare kidney disorder.” Just after the birth of her granddaughter, Borgano received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice saying it is suing to denaturalize her.

It is targeting Borgano for her minor role in a $24 million fraud scheme orchestrated by her former employer. As the Herald explains, “As the secretary of an export company called Texon Inc., she prepared paperwork for her boss, who pocketed money from doctored loan applications filed with the U.S. Export-Import Bank.”

When the government uncovered the crime, Borgono cooperated. Not only did she not make money from the crime, she helped the FBI with a case that put her former boss in prison for four years. For her part in the process, Borgono paid $5,000 in restitution and was sentenced to one year of house arrest and four years of probation. She worked two jobs to pay the restitution and was granted early release.

Two years later, she received the letter. “The stated reason,” the Herald reports, “was that Borgono became a U.S. citizen after the fraud scheme started. Although she had not yet been charged when she applied for citizenship, the Department of Justice is now arguing that she lied by not divulging her criminal activity on her application.”

Her daughter, Urpi Ríos, was shocked and heartbroken by the letter. “I don’t know what’s going to happen if she goes to Peru,” she said. “We have nothing there.”

During the case, there was no question of whether her sentence would impact Borgono’s citizenship. As Masha Gessen explains in a New Yorker essay on Trump’s new commission, this was to be expected:

Denaturalization has been an exceedingly rare occurrence, for good reason: by the time a person is naturalized, she has lived in this country for a number of years and has passed the hurdles of obtaining entry, legal permanent residency, and, finally, citizenship. The conceit of naturalization is that it makes an immigrant not only equal to natural-born citizens but indistinguishable from them.

The new task force, however, builds on Donald Trump’s idea that, as Gessen explains, “America is under attack by malevolent immigrants who cause dangerous harm by finding ways to live here.”

Immigration lawyers are concerned that his new task force will lead to a deluge of deportations. “I’m worried that people who have been citizens for a long time will now be targeted for denaturalization, and that the effort to defend against a federal denaturalization claim is so expensive that people will just give up,” Matthew Hoppock, a Kansas City immigration attorney who has been tracking the changes in denaturalization policy, told the Herald.

Borgono assumed she had passed the test and paid her debt to society. Based on the actions of former administrations, it was an understandable assumption, an innocent mistake. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staff, the task force is going after only those who knowingly lie on their applications, and not those who make an innocent mistake.

That distinction, Gessen argues, is fuzzier than many Trump administration officials would like to admit. She knows this from personal experience. When Gessen applied for citizenship in 1989 (she came to the U.S. in 1981 at age 14), the application barred “aliens afflicted with sexual deviation.” She knew at the time that she was gay, added a note saying so, and was granted citizenship anyway.

Later, after Gessen was naturalized, there was a question added to “green card” applications about whether applicants had ever committed a crime, although not specifying whether the crime was committed in the U.S. or elsewhere. Gessen writes:

In the Soviet Union of my youth, it was illegal to possess foreign currency or to spend the night anywhere you were not registered to live. In more than seventy countries, same-sex sexual activity is still illegal. On closer inspection, just about every naturalized citizen might look like an outlaw, or a liar.

Meanwhile, Borgono, who, the Herald reports, is just a year away from retirement and planning to spend more time with her family, especially her new granddaughter, is gearing up for a fight with the Department of Justice.

As Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer with the nonpartisan think tank Migration Policy Institute, told the Herald, “The finality that came with citizenship in the past is now gone.”