Chris Hedges's Blog, page 537

Bye, Scott. Is Donald Next?

In December 2016, just a month after winning the presidency, Donald Trump appointed former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA is arguably the most important federal government agency, setting standards for public safety for air and water pollution, climate change and more. So the decision to have Pruitt lead the EPA was an offense to the agency’s mandate, since he had led a crusade against the EPA, particularly its climate agenda, during the Barack Obama years.

As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt had filed a whopping 14 lawsuits over regulatory safeguards put in place by the agency he would later be tasked to lead. Ken Cook, a spokesperson for the Environmental Working Group, told The New York Times, “It’s a safe assumption that Pruitt could be the most hostile EPA administrator toward clean air and safe drinking water in history.” In retrospect, Cook was spot on. While the EPA released a sanitized list of Pruitt’s accomplishments a year into his tenure, environmental groups and journalists offered a more honest assessment. Mother Jones compiled a terrifying list of the damage Pruitt did to protections of Americans from toxic pollutants and more.

Just as a minority of frustrated and/or ill-informed Americans gave Trump permission to run roughshod over the Constitution and government as a whole, Trump’s appointment of Pruitt to the EPA was likewise aimed at destroying the institution from within. And Pruitt got devastatingly far.

Once lodged at the EPA, Pruitt also proceeded to turn the agency into a cash cow for himself and his family. Remember the infamous $43,000 private phone booth in his office, the fishy, cheap condo rental from a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., the hefty pay raises for aides about which he lied, the abuse of his position to try to get his wife a high-paying job, and the tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars he spent flying first class. Journalists have said they’ve “lost count” of the scandals.

This past May, the Sierra Club obtained tens of thousands of internal documents through the Freedom of Information Act showing so much rampant corruption at the EPA under Pruitt that the organization’s executive director, Michael Brune, concluded, “Scott Pruitt doesn’t live in the swamp—he is the swamp—and he should resign, or be fired immediately.” The ethics violations were so blatant and numerous that no agency head, whether a climate denialist like Pruitt or a strict proponent of environmental standards, should have been able to get away with them. Perhaps it was the mother who recently confronted Pruitt at a restaurant that provided the straw that broke the camel’s back, shaming the EPA head into heeding her advice and resigning.

In the end, it wasn’t Pruitt’s actual EPA-related actions that ruined him, but the fact that he let corruption and scandal loom large in the public imagination and made Republicans look bad. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, released a statement saying, “It has become increasingly challenging for the EPA to carry out its mission with the administrator under investigation.”

If the appearance of scandal is what impeded Pruitt’s work in the eyes of Republicans, then it is only natural to extend that standard to the president, who has been mired in one questionable situation after another from the moment he began his campaign. “The controversies surrounding the former administrator of @EPA had become a major impediment & necessitated a leadership change,” tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. Reread that same sentence with Trump in mind, and it should be clear why the end of Pruitt’s political career should mark the beginning of the end of Trump’s tenure.

Not only is the president under a major investigation himself, he remains mired in corruption and repeated questions about the use of his office for personal gain. On the website corporatepresidency.org, the group Public Citizen details the endless scandals surrounding Trump and details how he and his family have enriched themselves with clients currying favor by patronizing his businesses, his rewarding of donors and business partners, and deregulations that benefit Trump’s corporate friends and his own businesses. Trump’s list of wrongdoings, like those of Pruitt, is exhausting and endless.

Just as Pruitt’s position on the climate and regulations were the more compelling reasons for his stepping down, Trump’s deep disdain for the Constitution and his deliberate lack of understanding of the president’s powers ought to be the basis for his resignation or impeachment. But if it takes shining a light on ethics violations to achieve the same end, so be it.

Or perhaps the ethics violations by Pruitt and Trump and the deliberate destruction of the institutions they are meant to lead are two sides of the same coin. The hubris with which Pruitt approached his responsibilities at the EPA is linked to his abuse of power. The same is true for Trump, who walked into the presidency assuming he could run it as he has run his businesses—with false bravado, a blowing up of expectations and norms, taking wild risks and, most importantly, acting in his own personal interest.

The appointment of Pruitt to lead the EPA should be added to the list of Trump’s misdeeds. Many of us remember watching with horror the parade of one ill-equipped, inexperienced and inappropriate Cabinet members after another in the last two years that predictably threw various government institutions into disarray. The responsibility for hiring figures that have left in disgrace, including Steve Bannon, Gary Cohn, Anthony Scaramucci and Rex Tillerson, and those who remain today, such as Stephen Miller and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, lies with Trump. If Pruitt and the rest were unsuitable for government, it is because Trump himself is the worst possible person for his job.

Republicans and Democrats seem to be in agreement about Pruitt’s resignation being good for the country. If so, surely they can agree on the resignation of the position that has far greater impact on us, namely the presidency. Pruitt’s downfall ought to be the most compelling case study for Trump’s own political end.

Trump’s Immigration Policies Can’t Make America White Again

Racism is a feature of the Trump administration, not a bug. Like demagogues before him, President Trump and his aides consistently single out one group for scapegoating and persecution: non-white Hispanic immigrants.

Trump doesn’t much seem to like non-white newcomers from anywhere, in truth—remember how he once expressed a fond wish for more immigrants from Norway?—but he displays an especially vicious antipathy toward men, women and even children from Latin America. We have not seen such overt racism from a president since Woodrow Wilson imposed Jim Crow segregation in Washington and approvingly showed “The Birth of a Nation,” director D.W. Griffith’s epic celebration of the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House.

Trump encourages supporters to see the nation as beset by high levels of violent crime—and to blame the “animals” of the street gang MS-13. He is lying; crime rates nationwide are far lower than two or three decades ago, and some big cities are safer than they have been in a half-century. But Trump has to paint a dystopian panorama in order to justify the need to Make America Great Again.

MS-13 is, indeed, unspeakably violent. But it is small; law enforcement officials estimate the gang’s total U.S. membership at roughly 10,000, concentrated in a few metropolitan areas that have large populations of Central American immigrants—Los Angeles, New York and Washington. Trump never acknowledges that the gang was founded in the United States by immigrants from El Salvador and exported to Central America, where it took hold. He also neglects to mention that its members here, mostly teenagers, generally direct their violence at one another, not at outsiders.

Trump deliberately exaggerates the threat from MS-13 in order to justify his brutality toward Central American asylum-seekers at the border. People should never be treated that way, but “animals” are a different story.

It is unbelievable that the U.S. government would separate more than 2,300 children from their parents for no good reason other than to demonstrate cruelty. It is shocking that our government would expect toddlers and infants to represent themselves at formal immigration hearings. It is incredible that our government, forced to grudgingly end the policy, would charge desperate parents hundreds or thousands of dollars to be reunited with their children. It is appalling that our government would refuse even to give a full and updated accounting of how many children still have not been returned. Yet all of this has been done—in our name.

Trump uses words such as “invading” and “infest” and “breeding” to describe Central American migrants who arrive at the border lawfully seeking asylum. I’ll believe this is neutral immigration policy when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents begin hunting down and locking up Norwegians who have overstayed their visas.

Said Norwegians, if anyone bothered to look for them, might well be taking jobs away from American workers or taking advantage of social-welfare programs or boosting crime rates. There is no evidence that asylum-seekers are doing any of these things.

Trump’s policies flow from a worldview that he has never tried to hide. To describe Trump and aides such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and adviser Stephen Miller as “anti-immigration” tells only part of the story. They adopt the stance of racial and cultural warriors, “defending” the United States against brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking hordes “invading” from the south.

Trump has proposed not just building a wall along the border with Mexico to halt the flow of undocumented migrants, but also changing the system of legal immigration so that it no longer promotes family unification. He calls his aim a “merit-based” system, but Miller has specified that the administration wants to produce “more assimilation.”

Yet there is no evidence that immigrants from Latin America fail to assimilate in any way except one: They do not come to look like Trump’s mental image of “American,” which is basically the same as his mental image of “Norwegian.”

This is a story as old as the nation. German, Irish, Polish, Italian and other immigrant groups were once seen as irredeemably foreign and incapable of assimilating. The ethnic and racial mix of the country has changed before and is changing now.

Hispanics are by far the biggest minority group in the country, making up nearly 18 percent of the population; by 2060, the Census Bureau estimates, that share will rise to nearly 29 percent. Trump is punishing Central American mothers and babies because, try as he might, he can’t Make America White Again.

After Marathon Meeting, U.K. Leaders Endorse Brexit Trade Plan

LONDON — British Prime Minister Theresa May corralled her Cabinet inside an English country house for a long, hot day Friday, and announced that the divided government had finally agreed on a plan for a future free-trade deal with the European Union.

The proposal aims to keep the U.K. and the bloc in a free-trade zone for goods, but not for services, which make up the bulk of the British economy.

After almost 12 hours of talks at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat, May said that “the Cabinet has agreed our collective position for the future of our negotiations with the EU” — a pronouncement akin to the British government equivalent of white smoke from the Vatican announcing the election of a new pope.

But getting the Conservative government to agree with itself may be the easy part. As ministers met behind closed doors — and without their phones, to prevent snooping and leaks — the EU’s chief negotiator warned the bloc would not accept anything that treated the union’s single market, which allows the free flow of goods and services, as a “big supermarket.”

At first glance the British proposals sit uneasily with repeated EU warnings that it cannot “cherry pick” the benefits of EU membership, such as access to the tariff-free customs union and single market, without accepting the responsibilities, which include allowing the free movement of EU citizens to the U.K.

The U.K. is firm that it will end free movement, as well as the jurisdiction of the EU’s top court in British affairs.

Friday’s meeting at the 16th-century manor house 40 miles (65 kilometers) northwest of London came with just nine months to go until the U.K. leaves the bloc, and with the EU warning that time is running out to seal a divorce deal.

Currently Britain is part of the EU’s single market — which allows for the frictionless flow of goods and services among the 28 member states — and its tariff-free customs union for goods. That will end after Brexit, but what will replace it remains unclear.

Ever since Britain voted to leave the EU two years ago, its government has been divided between Brexit-backing ministers who want a sharp break from the EU so the U.K. can strike new trade deals around the world, and a more pro-EU group that wants to avoid tariffs and other friction between the U.K. and its biggest trading partner.

That view has been echoed by big manufacturers, including Airbus and Jaguar Land Rover, who warn they could abandon Britain if the EU and the U.K. cannot strike a strong free trade deal. Airbus alone employs some 14,000 workers in Britain.

Airbus chief executive Tom Enders slammed Britain’s divided government early Friday, saying “Her Majesty’s government still has no clue, or at least no consensus, on how to execute Brexit without severe harm.”

Leading pro-Brexit Cabinet ministers, including Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Brexit Secretary David Davis, met in private on the eve of Friday’s meeting, sparking rumors some could quit rather than agree to May’s proposal.

For now, though, May appears to have united the pro-Brexit and pro-EU wings of her government behind a compromise. Under the proposals — which will be published in detail next week — Britain would agree to maintain the same rules as the bloc for trade in goods and agricultural products.

The U.K. will also promise to keep “high regulatory standards” for areas including the environment and employment law, which could ease fears among unions and others that the government plans to slash standards to secure new trade deals.

Under the plan, however, Britain will not seek to stay in the single market for services. The government said it recognized that meant the U.K. and the EU would have less access to each other’s markets than they do now.

On customs, the plan calls for the U.K. to use technology at the border to determine whether goods are bound for Britain or the EU, and to charge the appropriate tariffs.

May said the plan would “avoid friction in terms of trade, which protects jobs and livelihoods” — a key concern of ministers who want a “soft” Brexit. She said it would also leave Britain free to strike new trade deals around the world, a major preoccupation of government Brexiteers.

Britain said the proposal would also solve the problem of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which will be the U.K.’s only land frontier with an EU member after Brexit. Britain has promised to maintain an invisible border, free of customs posts and other infrastructure, but until now has not said how it plans to achieve that.

In a tacit acknowledgement that Brussels may not like the proposals, the British government said it would step up preparations for a “no deal” Brexit — though it said it strongly favored an agreement.

Speaking in Brussels before the proposals were released, EU negotiator Michel Barnier appealed for compromise. He said the EU was willing to adapt its offer if Britain moved the “red lines” that rule out customs union or single market membership.

“Time is short. We need to quickly have realistic and workable solutions,” Barnier added.

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Associated Press writers Danica Kirka in London and Raf Casert in Brussels contributed to this report.

U.N. Reports ‘Exceptional’ Death Rates in Sea Off Libya

ROME—Roughly one of every six migrants who set out in traffickers’ unseaworthy boats from Libya perished at sea last month, U.N. refugee agency officials said on Friday. The period corresponds to crackdowns launched by Italy and Malta against private rescue boats operating in the area.

Even taking into account that traffickers often send out more boats in the summer to take advantage of warmer weather, that mortality rate was “dramatic and exceptional,” said Carlotta Sami, a Rome-based spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Last month, 629 died while 3,136 were rescued at sea, according to UNHCR data. In comparison, in June 2017, 418 died while 23,524 were rescued.

Private aid boats carried out some 40 percent of the rescue operations in January-April 2018 for migrants disembarked in Italian ports, including those first rescued by military and merchant vessels and later transferred to the aid groups’ ships.

But in recent weeks, the private boats’ ability to operate has been sharply curtailed by anti-migrant politics.

Italy’s new right-wing interior minister, Matteo Salvini, is denying the aid boats docking permission at Italian ports, while Malta is investigating whether the vessels follow international maritime rules, so they are no longer stopping in Maltese harbors for fresh supplies and refueling.

UN refugee agency officials noted that in the first six months of 2018, one of every 19 migrants setting out at sea from Libya died, compared to one of every 38 in 2017.

The officials cited the effects of Malta’s and Italy’s crackdowns combined with the poorly-equipped Libyan coast guard’s struggles to conduct successful rescues as factors in making the crossings more perilous than before.

“In the current situation, the search-and-rescue ability has been clearly and severely reduced,” Sami said. “This is having an immediate impact” on survival, Sami said, adding that the private rescue ships should be allowed to operate.

While the voyages are deadlier, the number of migrants taking them is sharply down this year.

In the first half of this year, 45,700 asylum-seekers and migrants reached European shores after rescue, five times lower than the same period two years earlier, the UNHCR said.

The U.N. refugee agency also said more efforts are needed to get migrants identified as being eligible for asylum or some other protection out of Libya, so they won’t put themselves at the mercy of smugglers’ boats.

Some 500 such people have been identified in the few official Libyan detention centers where U.N. personnel have access and are awaiting offers from European or other nations to take them aboard humanitarian flights directly from Libya, said Roberto Mignone, the UNHCR’s representative in Libya.

Other refugees have been already taken to a transit center in Niger, where they await countries to make good on relocations offers for 4,000 of them, Mignone said.

“But so far only 200 have been taken” since December, he noted. The Niger facility has capacity for 1,500 people, but only 200 places are now available, meaning “one more plane full” of transfers from Libya will maximize capacity there, leaving thousands of others stuck in Libya, Mignone said.

Complaining that in Italy, some 40 percent of all asylum-seekers have been granted some sort of protection, if not outright asylum, Salvini announced this week he has instructed his ministry’s asylum commissions to be more rigorous in deciding who deserves to stay in the country, where several hundred thousand migrants have arrived after sea rescues.

Many of the migrants are Africans fleeing poverty, not war or persecution. But Mignone said migrants who were trafficked, shouldn’t be repatriated to their homelands since “the persecutors are the traffickers.”

Syrian Forces Raise Flag at Jordan Border Crossing

BEIRUT—Syrian government forces on Friday reached a vital border crossing with Jordan and raised the national flag for the first time in years, state media reported, reinstating sovereignty over a key region that potentially reopens the way for Syrian exports to Arab countries.

State news agency SANA said the capture of the Naseeb border crossing happened Friday afternoon after a deal was reached between rebels and Russian mediators to end the violence in southern Syria.

The capture of the Naseeb border crossing is another victory for President Bashar Assad’s forces, who have regained control of most of the country’s key cities from insurgents in recent years with the help of powerful allies Russia and Iran. It came after a crushing government offensive that began June 19 to retake southern Daraa province and the nearby Quneitra region that borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The assault has forced more than 330,000 residents to flee toward the sealed Jordanian border and the frontier with Israel in one of the largest displacements in the seven-year Syrian conflict. Dozens have been killed.

Rebels seized control of the crossing in 2015, cutting a major lifeline for Syrian exports and disrupting a major trade route between Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and oil-rich gulf countries.

There was no immediate comment from Jordan on the Syrian forces’ recapture of Naseeb crossing. On Twitter, Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said Amman was holding talks with all parties to the Syrian crisis focused on ensuring the return of the displaced.

“The solution is political and the protection of civilians, preventing their displacement and saving the (Syrian) brothers more suffering is everyone’s responsibility,” he wrote.

Earlier on Friday, rebels said they reached an agreement with Russian mediators to end the violence in Daraa and surrender the Naseeb crossing point.

Ibrahim Jabawi, spokesman for the rebels’ joint operations room, said under the agreement, insurgents will begin to hand over some of their heavy weapons in return for a government pullout from several villages.

Jabawi added that Russian military police would deploy along the border with Jordan, including the Naseeb crossing, and that rebels opposed to the deal will be evacuated to rebel-held regions in northern Syria.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 159 civilians have been killed since the offensive began two weeks ago, including 33 children.

Friday’s agreement came after the bombardment of rebel-held areas intensified earlier this week after rebels rejected a deal with the Russians. The crushing new wave of attacks appears to have compelled the rebels to accept the deal.

A Syrian man on the Syrian side of the border said he and his family have been camped out near the Jordanian border for 10 days after fleeing the bombardment and airstrikes. The 70-year-old, identifying himself only as Abu Mohammed, said Syrian troops were now heading for the border.

“We are stuck here and God only knows what the regime will be doing now,” he said over the phone, with sounds of children around him.

He said he was angry at Jordan for keeping its border closed “and watching us dying.” Bitterly, he added the Syrian army will now take over the crossing points with Jordan “so your (Jordan’s) economic interest will resume at our expense.”

An Associated Press journalist on the Jordanian side of the border could see the Syrian side of the crossing known as Jaber, along with the former free zone, and some blue tents housing displaced people.

Nabaa Media, an opposition activist collective, said the latest government assault on the area killed several people in the past 24 hours including a woman and her four children in a rebel-held village in Daraa. The agency posted a video showing what it said were the women and her children lying dead in a pickup truck.

The U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, said in a statement Friday it received “horrific reports” of an entire family including four children being killed. It said the latest deaths bring to 65 the number of children reported killed in less than three weeks in southern Syria alone.

“In the largest wave of displacement to hit southern Syria since the start of the seven-year-long war, an estimated 180,000 children have been forced to flee their homes with little resource for protection, shelter or assistance,” UNICEF said.

Earlier on Friday, the government-controlled Central Military Media said government forces now control most of the towns and villages on the eastern side of southern Daraa province.

___

Associated Press writers Omar Akour in Jaber, Jordan and Fares Akram in Amman, Jordan contributed reporting.

The Californian Ideology Personified

“Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times”
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“Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times”

A book by John Perry Barlow with Robert Greenfield

John Perry Barlow, who died this year at age 70, led an extraordinary life. The son of a Wyoming rancher and politician, Barlow befriended a young Bob Weir at a Colorado boarding school and met Timothy Leary while studying in Connecticut. Soon after the Grateful Dead became popular, Barlow reconnected with Weir and wrote several songs with him. He took over the family ranch, married and fathered three daughters. He was also active in Wyoming politics; in the late 1970s, he coordinated Dick Cheney’s congressional campaign in Sublette County.  

Eventually Barlow contributed to dozens of Grateful Dead songs. Only lyricist Robert Hunter, who entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the band, outproduced him. The Dead’s reputation, especially in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, opened other doors for Barlow. Through the Dead, for example, he developed an interest in Apple computers and eventually came to know Steve Jobs. An early internet enthusiast, he also wrote for Wired magazine, which was described at the time as “the Rolling Stone of technology.”

In 1990, Barlow cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which defends civil liberties in the digital world. He also popularized the term cyberspace, which he lifted from “Neuromancer,” the 1984 science fiction novel. In 1996, the year after the Grateful Dead dissolved, he wrote “The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” a libertarian manifesto that reached a broad online audience. For these and other efforts, fellow EFF co-founder Mitch Kapor dubbed Barlow “the uncrowned poet laureate of cyberspace.”

Barlow’s memoir, “Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times,” guides readers through his various worlds. Author Robert Greenfield—whose previous works include biographies of Leary, Jerry Garcia, and Owsley Stanley—also receives a writing credit. Greenfield’s assistance was almost certainly indispensable. As the memoir notes, Barlow failed to deliver on two early book contracts and was in poor health for the last several years of his life.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Mother American Night” at Google Books.

Barlow’s cast of characters is broad and diverse, and the tone is conversational, even homespun, despite his increasingly cosmopolitan life. As in many real conversations, little effort is made to smooth out inconsistencies or explore paradoxes. On one page, Barlow prides himself on not judging people; on the next, he says the best way to judge people is by their children. He describes Leary as the least spiritual person he knew, then suggests that no one since Jesus Christ introduced more people to the spiritual dimension. Rather than probe or reconcile these claims, Barlow turns to the next topic.

Occasionally he slows down to showcase a romance or friendship. As expected, he features Weir, Leary, Jobs and Grateful Dead guitarist Garcia. He also showcases his relationship with John F. Kennedy Jr., who spent a summer on Barlow’s ranch as a teenager. Barlow says he taught Kennedy how to fly and later maintained a “psychoactive” friendship with him. Along the way, we hear about Cheney, Alan Simpson, Owsley Stanley, Andy Warhol, Daryl Hannah and a host of other notables in entertainment, politics and technology.  

For Barlow, these relationships are badges of honor, even when his anecdotes don’t show him to advantage. The passages about Garcia, for example, suggest not only a prickly relationship, but also that Garcia had his number. Barlow says that Hannah, who was Kennedy’s girlfriend at the time, didn’t trust him. “I am not an untrustworthy person at all,” Barlow says, “but for some reason people often feel that I might be, especially if they are not terribly sophisticated.”

Barlow didn’t seem to fit a type, but he exemplifies what two British sociologists call the Californian Ideology, a term they coined in the mid-1990s to describe the Silicon Valley mashup of countercultural, libertarian and neoliberal values. That blend is on full display in the memoir. Barlow’s Grateful Dead connection and long-standing interest in psychedelics established his standing among hippies. He was also active in the Stewart Brand strain of the Bay Area counterculture, which produced the Whole Earth Catalog, Wired, and the WELL, an early virtual community co-founded by Brand in 1985.

Barlow’s politics emerge most clearly in his discussion of Simpson, a family friend and former senator from Wyoming. “For many years, I described myself as an Al Simpson Republican,” he writes. “He was a conservationist, a fiscal conservative, and a social liberal.” Barlow regrets Simpson’s role in the GOP effort to destroy Anita Hill’s reputation during the Clarence Thomas hearings. Simpson, he says, “just got caught up in the mob, as one sometimes can.” Simpson’s key contribution to American public life may have been his co-chairmanship of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, whose primary goal was federal debt reduction. For his part, Simpson never tired of warning Americans that popular social insurance programs would burden future generations.

After his 18-year Senate stint, Simpson taught at Harvard, where he directed the Institute of Politics. “I’d actually had something to do with helping him get the appointment,” Barlow writes, “and the two of us had a fine time there.” It was during this period, he says, that he had three dates with Anita Hill. He was also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, which was founded in 1998. That affiliation burnished Barlow’s credentials as an expert on digital culture.

If Barlow’s politics grew out of his Wyoming experience, he also mapped his libertarian views onto the emergent cyberculture. It’s no accident that the word “frontier” figures in the name of the organization he co-founded. In his memoir and elsewhere, Barlow compares the internet to the American West of the 19th century. In particular, the internet was “vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous … and up for grabs.” It was also, he claims, “a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty.” It’s a rich simile, but not only for the reasons Barlow cites. In the 19th century, massive government investments fueled westward expansion. Once settled, the American West was quickly dominated by corporate monopolies, especially the railroads. Likewise, cyberspace flowed not from private-sector visionaries but from federally funded research that quickly spawned today’s monopolies, most notably Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.

The EFF, which Barlow calls “one of the major achievements of my life,” has reflected his libertarianism since its inception. It is quick to join legal fights over government surveillance and crackdowns on free expression. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, both of whom appear in the memoir, received EFF support. The watchdogs are more docile, however, when Silicon Valley corporations routinely breach user privacy for profit. April Glaser, a former EFF employee, has wondered why the digital crusaders were keen to challenge the surveillance state but less concerned about reining in Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica affair. Yet that posture is consistent with the Californian Ideology that Barlow personifies.

Both in the memoir and elsewhere, Barlow is given to sweeping pronouncements rather than policy specifics. Kapor once noted his colleague’s need for the occasional “hyberbolectomy.” The memoir, too, is dotted with stretchers. Barlow claims that samurai founded a Japanese firm that acquired (and then shut down) a biotech company he backed. My online check showed that the firm was founded toward the end of the samurai period, but I saw no mention of samurai. Yet Barlow barrels on, describing the firm’s corporate culture today in samurai terms.

Barlow also claims that Garcia “always had overwhelming personal charisma. Saint Thomas Aquinas and the original Scholastics defined charisma as unwarranted grace. Unearned, undeserved, completely gratuitous grace. So that was yet another burden he had to carry with him, both onstage and off.” It is unclear from this passage how Garcia’s charisma was a burden, or what the theological reference adds to an otherwise routine observation. (Charisms were thought to be gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as piety, not connected to divine grace as such or personal charisma in the modern sense.) As with the samurai, perhaps, Barlow thought it sounded cooler to name-check Aquinas.

The memoir frequently lapses into cliche. Simpson, we learn, would have won re-election to the Senate unless found in bed with a live man or a dead woman. For Jobs, “design was something that went all the way to the core, and he knew there weren’t many people who understood that. It’s hard to say where that came from, but what I do know for certain is that we will never see his like again.”

Although Barlow is forthcoming about his love life, he is relatively tight-lipped about his marriage to Elaine Parker Barlow. “Even though I was not completely faithful to Elaine during this period,” he says, “it was always my strong intention to stay married to her. So I made sure that whatever I did was a one-night stand that would not come back to affect our marriage.” They divorced in 1995. Recounting his time with Leary and his wife Barbara, Barlow says, “Tim basically gave me permission to be her lover.” Basically? We also learn that Barlow and Grateful Dead manager Jon McIntire tried to have sex; that effort failed somehow, and they resumed their friendship. Barlow’s most serious romance was with a married woman—he was also married at the time—but she died unexpectedly. Readers may wonder why the memoir includes the text of his eulogy or the fact that it went viral.

There is something deeply American about Barlow. Leary introduced him as the most American person he knew. “It was intended to be both a compliment and an insult,” Barlow recalls. “Here’s Barlow. He’s an American.” The book’s cover photograph plays to that image. We see him in high cowboy drag, literally wrapped in an American flag, with a laptop tucked under his arm. Barlow’s unremitting self-invention, thinly masked by his studied nonchalance, is nothing if not American. He concludes his memoir by reassuring readers of its unprecedented veracity. “To the best of my knowledge,” he writes, “a completely true work of nonfiction has never been written before. But now at long last it finally has.”

He was an American, all right—perhaps more Buffalo Bill Cody than Mark Twain.

 

Pompeo in North Korea to Nail Down Details of Agreement

PYONGYANG, North Korea — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began his first trip to Pyongyang since President Donald Trump’s summit with leader Kim Jong Un last month with a vow to nail down the specifics of the commitments Kim made on denuclearization.

Pompeo has the crucial task of dispelling growing skepticism over how seriously Kim is about giving up his nuclear arsenal and translate the upbeat rhetoric following the first meeting between leaders of the U.S. and North Korea into concrete action.

He was met at the Pyongyang airport by Kim Yong Chol, a senior ruling party official and former intelligence chief, and Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to begin his third visit since April and first since the June 12 summit.

“Our leaders made commitments at the Singapore summit on the complete denuclearization of North Korea and outlined what a transformed US-DPRK relationship could look like,” he said while still en route, according to comments relayed to reporters on his plane by spokeswoman Heather Nauert.

DPRK is the abbreviation of the authoritarian nation’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“On this trip I’m seeking to fill in some details on these commitments and continue the momentum towards implementation of what the two leaders promised each other and the world. I expect that the DPRK is ready to do the same,” Pompeo said.

One hoped-for breakthrough during his visit would be the return of the remains of U.S. GIs killed during the 1950-53 Korean War. Both sides have suggested Pyongyang is willing to turn over dozens if not hundreds of sets of remains.

But just before Pompeo’s arrival, the North’s state-run media lobbed a warning shot at Washington over its criticism of the North’s human rights record.

The criticism, published on North Korea’s government-run Uriminzokkiri website, said Washington should stop provoking the North with an “anachronistic human rights racket” at a time of diplomatic attempts to improve ties.

What position it will take on the nuclear issue appears to be anything but a done deal.

Over the past quarter-century, North Korea has frustrated or outfoxed U.S. administrations that have attempted to stop and reverse its weapons development through diplomacy and sanctions. Since the summit, doubts over the North’s intentions have grown again, amid reports that it is continuing to expand facilities related to its nuclear and missile programs and that U.S. intelligence is skeptical about its intentions to give up its weapons.

Asked Thursday if North Korea was hiding nuclear facilities the president said: “We’ll see. All I can tell you is this. You haven’t had one missile launch and you haven’t had one rocket launch or you haven’t had any nuclear tests.”

Speaking aboard Air Force One on a trip to Montana, Trump said he believed he forged a personal connection with the young autocrat he once pilloried as “Little Rocket Man.”

“I had a very good feeling about him. … I shook his hand, I felt we got along very well,” Trump told reporters. “I think we understand each other. I really believe that he sees a different future for North Korea. … I hope that’s true. If it’s not true, then we go back to the other way, but I don’t think that’s going to be necessary.”

Pompeo will put that proposition to the test and help lay to rest doubts over whether the president, who has already ordered a suspension of large-scale U.S. military drills with South Korea, is overeager to claim a success.

National security adviser John Bolton, who has expressed hardline views on North Korea, said Sunday that Pompeo will present Pyongyang with a plan to complete the dismantling of the North’s nuclear and missile programs in one year. On Tuesday, Nauert walked that back, declining to give a timeline.

This will be Pompeo’s third trip to North Korea in three months. He last visited in May ahead of the Trump-Kim summit and traveled there secretly in early April while he was director of the CIA.

Pyongyang is the first stop on his first around-the-world trip as America’s top diplomat. He will then travel to Japan, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates before heading to Belgium, where he will accompany Trump at the NATO summit in Brussels.

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AP Pyongyang bureau chief Eric Talmadge, in Tokyo, and writer Kim Tong-Hyung in Seoul, South Korea contributed to this report.

Diver Dies in Operation to Rescue Boys Trapped in Cave

MAE SAI, Thailand — A Thai navy diver working as part of the effort to rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped in a flooded cave died Friday from lack of oxygen, underscoring risks of extracting the team.

The rescuer, a former Thai SEAL, was working in a volunteer capacity and died during an overnight mission in which he was placing oxygen canisters, Thai SEAL commander Arpakorn Yookongkaew told a news conference.

He said while underwater, the rescuer passed out and efforts to resuscitate him failed.

“Despite this, we will continue until we accomplish our mission,” Arpakorn said.

Thai authorities are racing to pump out water from a flooded cave where 12 boys and their soccer coach have been trapped since June 23, before more rains are forecast to hit the northern region.

On Thursday, Chiang Rai provincial Gov. Narongsak Osatanakorn said he asked the SEALs in charge of extraction plans to estimate what sort of a risk would be involved to bring out the boys and their coach even though they weren’t 100 percent ready for a risky hourslong dive.

Officials prefer to get the boys out as soon as possible because heavy rain expected by Saturday almost surely will raise water levels again in the cave, making passage in some areas even more difficult, if not impossible. They are hoping that an upgraded draining effort can lower the water in an area where it is still at or near the ceiling. The idea is to get some headroom so the boys would not be reliant on scuba apparatus for a long stretch and could keep their heads above water.

“We can no longer wait for all conditions (to be ready) because the circumstance is pressuring us,” Arpakorn said. “We originally thought the boys can stay safe inside the cave for quite some time but circumstances have changed. We have limited amount of time.”

The governor has said the 13 may not be extracted at the same time, depending on their condition. They’ve practiced wearing diving masks and breathing, in preparation for the diving possibility.

The boys, aged 11-16, and their 25-year-old coach went exploring in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in the northern province after a soccer game June 23. Monsoon flooding cut off their escape and prevented rescuers from finding them for nine days. The boys, although skinny, have been described as in good health. Authorities have said the soccer players are being looked after by Thai navy SEALs, including medics, staying with them inside the cave.

Cave rescue experts have said it could be safest to simply supply the boys where they are, and wait for the flooding to subside. That could take months, however, given that Thailand’s rainy season typically lasts through October.

Experienced divers are wary of taking out the boys through the dark and dangerous waters still in the cave, especially since they are untrained.

U.S. Army Quietly Discharging Immigrant Recruits

SAN ANTONIO — Some immigrant U.S. Army reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship are being abruptly discharged, the Associated Press has learned.

The AP was unable to quantify how many men and women who enlisted through the special recruitment program have been booted from the Army, but immigration attorneys say they know of more than 40 who have been discharged or whose status has become questionable, jeopardizing their futures.

“It was my dream to serve in the military,” said reservist Lucas Calixto, a Brazilian immigrant who filed a lawsuit against the Army last week. “Since this country has been so good to me, I thought it was the least I could do to give back to my adopted country and serve in the United States military.”

Some of the service members say they were not told why they were being discharged. Others who pressed for answers said the Army informed them they’d been labeled as security risks because they have relatives abroad or because the Defense Department had not completed background checks on them.

Spokespeople for the Pentagon and the Army said that, due to the pending litigation, they were unable to explain the discharges or respond to questions about whether there have been policy changes in any of the military branches.

Eligible recruits are required to have legal status in the U.S., such as a student visa, before enlisting. More than 5,000 immigrants were recruited into the program in 2016, and an estimated 10,000 are currently serving. Most go the Army, but some also go to the other military branches.

To become citizens, the service members need an honorable service designation, which can come after even just a few days at boot camp. But the recently discharged service members have had their basic training delayed, so they can’t be naturalized.

Margaret Stock, an Alaska-based immigration attorney and a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who helped create the immigrant recruitment program, said she’s been inundated over the past several days by recruits who have been abruptly discharged.

All had signed enlistment contracts and taken an Army oath, Stock said. Many were reservists who had been attending unit drills, receiving pay and undergoing training, while others had been in a “delayed entry” program, she said.

“Immigrants have been serving in the Army since 1775,” Stock said. “We wouldn’t have won the revolution without immigrants. And we’re not going to win the global war on terrorism today without immigrants.”

Stock said the service members she’s heard from had been told the Defense Department had not managed to put them through extensive background checks, which include CIA, FBI and National Intelligence Agency screenings and counterintelligence interviews. Therefore, by default, they do not meet the background check requirement.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” she said.

The AP interviewed Calixto and recruits from Pakistan and Iran, all of whom said they were devastated by their unexpected discharges.

“Now the great feeling I had when I enlisted is going down the drain,” said Calixto, 28. “I don’t understand why this is happening.”

In hopes of undoing the discharge, he filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., last week alleging the Defense Department hadn’t given him a chance to defend himself or appeal. He said he was given no specific grounds other than “personnel security.”

Calixto, who lives in Massachusetts and came to the U.S. when he was 12, said in an email interview arranged through his attorney that he joined the Army out of patriotism.

In the suit, Calixto said he learned he was being kicked out soon after he was promoted to private second class.

The Pakistani service member who spoke to the AP said he learned in a phone call a few weeks ago that his military career was over.

“There were so many tears in my eyes that my hands couldn’t move fast enough to wipe them away,” he said. “I was devastated, because I love the U.S. and was so honored to be able to serve this great country.”

He asked that his name be withheld because he fears he might be forced to return to Pakistan, where he could face danger as a former U.S. Army enlistee.

Portions of the 22-year-old’s military file reviewed by the AP said he was so deeply loyal to the U.S. that his relationships with his family and fiancee in Pakistan would not make him a security threat. Nonetheless, the documents show the Army cited those foreign ties as a concern.

The man had enlisted in April 2016 anticipating he’d be a citizen within months, but faced a series of delays. He had been slated to ship out to basic training in January 2017, but that also was delayed.

An Iranian citizen who came to the U.S. for a graduate degree in engineering told the AP that he enlisted in the program hoping to gain medical training. He said he had felt proud that he was “pursuing everything legally and living an honorable life.”

In recent weeks, he said, he learned that he’d been discharged.

“It’s terrible because I put my life in the line for this country, but I feel like I’m being treated like trash,” he said. “If I am not eligible to become a U.S. citizen, I am really scared to return to my country.”

He spoke on condition of anonymity because of those fears.

It’s unclear how the service members’ discharges could affect their status as legal immigrants.

In a statement, the Defense Department said: “All service members (i.e. contracted recruits, active duty, Guard and Reserve) and those with an honorable discharge are protected from deportation.”

However, immigration attorneys told the AP that many immigrants let go in recent weeks were an “uncharacterized discharge,” neither dishonorable nor honorable.

The service members affected by the recent discharges all enlisted in recent years under a special program aimed at bringing medical specialists and fluent speakers of 44 sought-after languages into the military. The idea, according to the Defense Department, was to “recognize their contribution and sacrifice.”

President George W. Bush ordered “expedited naturalization” for immigrant soldiers in 2002 in an effort to swell military ranks. Seven years later the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest program, known as MAVNI, became an official recruiting program.

It came under fire from conservatives when President Barack Obama added DACA recipients — young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally — to the list of eligible enlistees. In response, the military layered on additional security clearances for recruits to pass before heading to boot camp.

The Trump Administration added even more hurdles, creating a backlog within the Defense Department. Last fall, hundreds of recruits still in the enlistment process had their contracts canceled. A few months later, the military suspended MAVNI.

Republican Congressman Andy Harris of Maryland, who has supported legislation to limit the program, told the AP that MAVNI was established by executive order and never properly authorized by Congress.

“Our military must prioritize enlisting American citizens, and restore the MAVNI program to its specialized, limited scope,” he said.

Non-U.S. citizens have served in the military since the Revolutionary War, when Continental soldiers included Irish, French and Germans. The U.S. recruited Filipino nationals to serve in the Navy in the 1940s, and worked to enlist Eastern Europeans in the military over the next decade, according to the Defense Department.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly 110,000 members of the Armed Forces have gained citizenship by serving in the U.S. military, according to the Defense Department.

Many service members recruited through the program have proven to be exemplary. In 2012, then-Sgt. Saral K. Shrestha, originally from Nepal, was named U.S. Army Soldier of the Year.

In general, the immigrant recruits have been more cost-effective, outperforming their fellow soldiers in the areas of attrition, performance, education and promotions, according to a recently released review by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institution.

The AP spoke with a 26-year-old woman from Dominica who said she proudly enlisted in the immigrant recruitment program in 2016 while earning her nursing degree. She said she drilled each month with her reserve unit, which gave her an award, and had been awaiting a date to start basic training.

But in March, she said she looked up her profile on an Army portal and saw that the section about her security eligibility was marked “loss of jurisdiction,” with no further explanation. The next month, her attorney said she found the reservist’s name listed as “unsuitable” on a spreadsheet created by the Defense Department.

The reservist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns about her legal standing, said she received additional paperwork last month that indicated her case is awaiting a final decision.

“I have always been a good soldier and have always done what they ask me to do,” she said. “I got into debt when I joined the Army because I can’t work legally but, financially, I can’t survive anymore. I don’t want to give up because I genuinely like being in the Army. But I don’t know who to turn to.”

In recent years, a group of attorneys have been fighting to keep their recruited immigrant clients eligible for naturalization as delays have mounted. Some have been successful, including nearly 50 recruits who were granted a type of temporary status while their background investigations are being completed.

“Some of our clients have finally emerged through the system and at least are doing basic training,” said Donald Friedman, a Washington attorney with Perkins Coie.

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Burke reported from San Francisco.

The Unpleasant, Undeniable Political Realities of Our Moment

We human beings cling to dogmas long after they’re disproven. We tend to believe things that make us feel better or remind of us of a past that we miss. This is certainly true of our assumptions about electoral politics.

Among the myths that can steer us off course in the Trump era, three are particularly popular.

First, that political polarization is primarily a product of how elites behave and not the result of real divisions in our country.

Second, that a vast group of party-loathing independents can be mobilized by anti-partisan messages.

Third, that Republicans and Democrats are becoming increasingly and equally extreme, so they should be scolded equally.

All these pious wishes are false, as Alan Abramowitz’s latest book, “The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump,” makes clear. He provides a wealth of data in a compact package.

A political scientist at Emory University, Abramowitz is perhaps best known for the idea of “negative partisanship.” It explains a great deal about the fractious nature of our public sphere.

“Over the past two decades,” he writes, “the proportion of party supporters … who have strongly negative feelings toward the opposing party has risen sharply. A growing number of Americans have been voting against the opposing party rather than for their own.”

People rate their own side about the same as they used to. On a 100-degree “feeling thermometer,” Americans gave their own party a moderately warm 71 degrees in 1978, and 70 degrees in 2012.

But over the same years, their sentiments toward the opposing party turned ice cold, plummeting from 47 degrees to 30 degrees. When politicians are nasty to the other side, they are mirroring the attitudes of their supporters. Polarization, in other words, is not just an elite thing. It reflects deeply held opinions among voters themselves.

Democrats draw “their strongest support from groups with the most positive views of recent social and cultural changes.” Conversely, the GOP is strongest with groups having “the most negative views” of those changes.

In another important new book, “Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable,” the veteran political analyst Bill Schneider notes that while polarization did not begin with President Trump (it “has been going on for at least 50 years”), Trump “uses every issue, every policy, every tweet to set one group of Americans against another.” Divisions around issues related to immigration, race and culture serve the president’s interests.

Ah, but since increasing numbers of Americans identify as independents, isn’t there an eager nonpartisan middle waiting to rescue us from all this?

Sorry, but no. As Abramowitz shows, most people who identify as independents lean toward one party or the other. When it comes to casting ballots, “leaning independents as well as strong and weak party identifiers are voting more along party lines than at any time in the past half century.”

Factoring out independents who tilt toward a party, “only about 12 percent of Americans have fallen into the ‘pure independent’ category, and these people are much less interested in politics and much less likely to vote than independent leaners.” Independents are plainly not some magical force that will call into being that centrist third party that looms so large in the imaginations of many pundits and fundraisers.

And the centrist heavenly chorus is off-key in another respect: While it sings mournful songs about the major parties becoming “extreme,” Abramowitz’s data makes clear that the two sides are not equivalent. Republicans have moved significantly further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left.

Between 1972 and 2012, he notes, the proportion of Democrats who put themselves at the center of the ideological spectrum (or were unable to place themselves) fell from 52 percent to 41 percent, an 11-point drop. In the same period, the comparable figures for Republicans were 44 percent and 22 percent, double the Democratic swing.

The upshot: The share of Democrats in the ideological middle is nearly twice that of Republicans.

Abramowitz doesn’t polemicize; he simply lays out the facts. But the story he tells suggests the essential first step to getting past extremism and polarization is the defeat of today’s intemperate brand of Republicanism, embodied by the most intemperate president in our history.

Those who long for moderate and harmonious politics find it both comforting and convenient to cling to myths that allow them to keep their distance from charges of grubby “partisanship.” They’re likelier to get what they want by accepting the unpleasant but also undeniable realities of our moment.