Chris Hedges's Blog, page 542

Mexico Elections Center on Disgust With Corruption, Violence

MEXICO CITY — Mexicans were voting Sunday in a potentially transformative election that could put in power a firebrand vowing to end politics and business as usual in a country weary of spiraling violence and scandal-plagued politicians.

Front-running candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was one of the first lined up to vote at his polling place in Mexico City, and some of his supporters turned out early.

“There is a lot of inequality, a lot of violence in this country,” said Lopez Obrador voter Hugo Carlos, 73. “This situation has to be changed.”

While Lopez Obrador held a commanding lead in polls, he worried many.

“I am concerned that some candidates are making proposals that are impossible, because they’re very expensive to carry out,” said Juan Carlos Limas, 26, who lined up at another Mexico City precinct to vote for Ricardo Anaya, who is running second in polls for a right-left coalition.

Lopez Obrador has promised a “transformation” of Mexico and pledged to give scholarships or paid apprenticeships to youth, and increase support payments for the elderly.

But rivals warn that a Lopez Obrador could set the country back decades with an interventionist economic policy.

All the candidates are lambasting President Donald Trump’s policies against migrants and Mexico, but voters were wondering who could best deal with Trump.

Sunday’s elections for posts at every level of government are Mexico’s largest ever and have become a referendum on corruption, graft and other tricks used to divert taxpayer money to officials’ pockets and empty those of the country’s poor.

This is Lopez Obrador’s third bid for the presidency and some see it as his best shot after 12 years of near-permanent campaigning. His railing against the “mafia of power” that has long ruled Mexico and in favor of the poor appears to be falling on receptive ears.

“The corrupt regime is coming to its end,” Lopez Obrador, a 64-year-old commonly known as AMLO, said at his final campaign event Wednesday. “We represent modernity forged from below.”

Much of the popular ire has been aimed at unpopular President Enrique Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose market-oriented economic reforms have yet to benefit many Mexicans.

Its candidate, Jose Antonio Meade, has experience in several areas of government — including the treasury and foreign relations departments — and that convinced some voters like Roman Acosta, a doctor from the western city of Morelia.

“Meade is the best person to continue what has worked, and get rid of what hasn’t,” said Acosta.

Anaya has tried to harness the youth vote with an emphasis on technology and new ideas, but he divided his own conservative party to take its candidacy and it’s unclear if his new allies in the leftist Democratic Revolution Party will actually turn out for someone from the other end of the ideological spectrum.

Sunday is the first time that an independent candidate appears on the ballot.

Jaime “El Bronco” Rodriguez fought for attention with a horse-mounted “everyman” campaign and by tossing out policy bombs like his proposal to cut off the hands of public officials caught stealing. Without the big party machinery it was an uphill battle.

It is also the first time Mexicans living abroad can vote for down ballot races like senators. More than 181,000 received ballots and the 97,000 that the National Electoral Institute had gotten back by Friday morning were already double what they got in 2012.

Hovering over the election is the specter of vote fraud, though electoral officials deny it is a possibility with the modern balloting technology and institutions now in place.

In both of Lopez Obrador’s previous two presidential losses he alleged fraud. In his first loss — by a mere 0.56 percent to conservative Felipe Calderon in 2006 — his supporters held months-long protests in Mexico City and he referred to himself as “the legitimate president.”

His allies are warning even before Sunday’s presidential vote that there better not be any funny business.

“They shouldn’t dare commit a fraud, because if they do they will meet the devil,” said Yeidckol Polevnsky, president of Lopez Obrador’s Morena party. “We will not accept it.”

Still, the voting Sunday was by and large peaceful, apart from the usual complaints about some volunteer-staffed polling places opening late.

In Michoacan state, polling places in a few villages were cancelled after some inhabitants said they didn’t want elections involving political parties, which they mistrust. Some ballots were stolen and burned in the town of Nahuatzen to prevent voting.

Nomi Prins on the Banks That Run the World (Audio and Transcript)

In this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer talks with Nomi Prins about her latest and, in Scheer’s words, “most ambitious” book, “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World.”

The two discuss the 2008 financial crisis and the disconnect between governments and the governed, as well as Prins’ unique perspective on the financial world thanks to her time as a banker. Scheer and Prins come to the conclusion that the world’s biggest banks “rigged the world,” as the author’s title suggests, and, what is perhaps more alarming, that the Federal Reserve has allowed financial institutions to continue growing and “screwing over the consumers.” 

“I think there’s an element of what’s happened in this past decade since the financial crisis,” says Prins, “where yes, the Federal Reserve sort of led the way for the major central banks in the world … to manufacture money in order to save the global financial system, basically global banks.”

Listen to the interview in the player above and read the transcript below. Find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

Full transcript:

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. Sometimes I say hopefully; today there’s no question. We are fortunate in having Nomi Prins in the studio here at KCRW. And I must say, I’ve written a bit about the financial collapse and economics; I was in graduate school in economics and so forth. But I finished Nomi’s–I know all of her other books, she’s been a guest in my class at USC, I assign parts of her books about the banking meltdown and how basically the banks were bailed out, but Main Street was screwed, and the whole thing. But this book is her most ambitious. It’s called Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World. And just by way of preface, you know, there’s a whole sort of conspiracy theory industry about the Federal Reserve and so forth, and then the sophisticated response is supposed to be, oh, yes, but all they’re doing is regulating interest rates, and keeping inflation down, so there’s no there there. And I must say [Laughs], I went along with that, you know, and I’ve covered the Federal Reserve, and as I say, studied it in graduate school. But reading your book, reading Collusion–no, you’re right. They’ve rigged the world. And the point that you make, particularly about the U.S. Federal Reserve, you deal with all the central banks–which, by the way, is not only not described in the Constitution, it’s something that only came about quite late in American history, 1913, I believe–is it was always described as having a very specific, modest function; as I say, controlling, you know, the rate of inflation. But what you point out in your book is because of the banking crisis–first of all, our Federal Reserve enabled the banking crisis; and secondly, instead of learning the lesson that they can do damage, they responded to the banking crisis by making it much worse, by allowing the banks to get even bigger and screwing over the consumers. Is that not the thesis of the book?

Nomi Prins: That’s the thesis–that’s just America. [Laughs] That’s the thesis of what the Fed has done, first of all, yes. Forgetting to watch their banks, which they are supposed to regulate, going into the financial crisis. In fact, seeing problems emerging and literally publicly deflecting, for example, that mortgage problems were going to become a bigger issue in the public eye and in the press. To, going on after the financial crisis, to subsidizing these banks; they have unleashed, the Federal Reserve, with no limitation, with no regulation, with no legislation, with no accountability, the largest bank subsidy program in the history of the world. And I say this because they’ve brought in–and this is where the term collusion comes into play–a number of other G7 central banks to expand that subsidy for banks in the financial system throughout the world.

RS: Yeah. I mean, this is what is so exciting about this book. And I must say, to use the word exciting in a discussion of banking is often a stretch. But you actually pull it off. And I, just to give something about your background, Nomi Prins comes from the enemy camp. She was one of these wonks, these experts on the mathematics of the economy, the econometrics and so forth, that gave rise to a lot of these bad packages. Your graduate work was done in this field. And you were working at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, both of which went belly-up; you were working at Goldman Sachs as a manager; you’ve worked at Chase and other places. And you bring an insider’s expertise. And in this book, you point out that in fact, there are some real contradictions. Because of the crisis of the housing meltdown, the greatest crisis we’ve had since the Great Depression, this spooked the banks all over the world and the economies all over the world. And the irony in this is that the resistance from other banks was met by our Federal Reserve in saying no, our way or the highway. And let me just make clear the critical point here: do these banks serve the people in their own country, or do they serve the bankers or the superrich? That is really the issue. And when the other bankers have tried to push back and say, you know, whether it was in France or elsewhere in Italy–no, we have to be concerned about how this plays out for our economy and ordinary people and wages and unemployment and so forth–it was the U.S. Federal Reserve that snapped the whip and said, no, we are saving the big banks here.

NP: That’s right, and the deceit in this–the sort of, you know, why I call it collusion–you know, it’s a group of people and it’s performing a deception, ultimately, against the whole world, against the people of the world–is that the Fed positioned itself, with the treasury department and with Congress, actually, in the very beginning, of saying you know, we need to formulate some form of emergency strategy in order to save the banks. And because of that, if we save the banks, it will help people; banks will then be free to lend again, we will keep them from having a greater catastrophe, we will keep a Great Depression from happening. And that was sort of the initial deceit that happened in the fall of 2008, in the beginning of the financial crisis. But that became a much bigger deceit, which is that the Federal Reserve—though its day job is supposed to be to regulate these institutions that have failed to regulate; to be a lender of last resort, that was how the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 set up the Fed; to regulate the balance between full employment and inflation—did something dramatically different from that. And that is that they conjured electronically $4.5 trillion worth of money out of nowhere in return for purchasing—that’s where that term quantitative easing comes, and none of those two words actually say “purchasing” or “buying” [Laughs] assets that don’t have the value that the Fed is paying for them—

RS: Well, it sounds like a back massage or something. Quantitative easing. And let me just explain what Nomi Prins has just—this is not another person sounding off about the economy. She in this book went to Mexico; you know, went to China, went to France and Italy and so forth. Went all over the world to the kind of scene of the crime that happened, and the impact on people, and the resistance. And you describe the central banks in each of these countries, and they actually at times, they seem to have accepted you as an insider; you were invited to speak at the Federal Reserve in New York, I believe—

NP: In Washington, mm-hmm.

RS: You hobnobbed with these very powerful people running the world economy and so forth. You were, in a sense, taken by them to be one of their own, that you speak their language. Well, you’re treated by these people as someone who does know what they’re talking about. And what’s great about this book is you not only provide the context and the history, but you actually analyze the struggle in a place like Brazil, where you’re trying to take care of ordinary people, they not lose everything they’ve worked for, and yet they’re under pressure to heed what Washington wants, what the Federal Reserve wants. So why don’t you, sort of in a sense of a novel—which the book has an aspect of it—describe how you see this great dilemma. Is it what Naomi Klein has talked about in her description of the world economy, or I mean, how would you put it?

NP: I think there’s an element of what’s happened in this past decade since the financial crisis, where yes, the Federal Reserve sort of led the way for the major central banks in the world, mostly, like the G7 type of central banks in the world, to manufacture money in order to save the global financial system, basically global banks.

RS: Let me just stop you there, by the way, because the book is all about manufacturing money. I don’t think people quite understand that. This is not, you know, you don’t sort of get this out of a bank and move it over here or something. When they bought the—basically what they did is they bailed out the banks, and Obama did it right along with George W. Bush; he did the same program. And what they did is they said, look, you guys have all these terrible collateralized debt obligations, and you know, credit default swaps, all these terrible packages of junk; we’re going to buy it from you, OK. But they didn’t tax Americans; they didn’t tax anyone; they didn’t have money, they didn’t actually write a check. They invent money electronically, use that to buy this stuff, right, and then stash it off the books of the banks with the Fed. Isn’t that the basic scam here?

NP: Yeah, that’s the basic scam, and this happened throughout the world. So for example, you know, when I say “conjure electronically,” create, you know, as you’re talking about, it would be literally like if you were a regular person, you go to your ATM, and your bank says you know what, I know you only have $1,000 in your account; we’re just going to add a zero. Yeah, we’re not even taking it from anyone else and giving it to you; we’re literally creating a zero. That’s what we’re doing, we are creating a zero. That’s basically what the Federal Reserve did. It created some zeros in its book, and it used that manufactured money, those zeros, to buy assets. For example, bad mortgage assets, toxic mortgage assets, at the beginning, at the early part of the last decade of this quantitative easing process. Today for example, though, they still have $1.75 trillion worth of mortgage assets that they created money to use to give to the banks to take from the banks so the banks wouldn’t have it on their balance sheet. That did a lot of things from the standpoint of what I call rigging the world, and the world financial system, and by extension the world economy. What that did was it gave the banks money to play with; it gave the banks extra space on their balance sheet to do more risky activity with; they were not slapped with real restrictions on the money they received from the Fed—as to, it has to go into the real economy, it has to go to small businesses, it has to go to help student debt—it did, none of those requirements were offered along with the money by the Fed to these banks. As a result, the banks just did what they wanted to do with this money, and they got rid of the assets they didn’t want to do. Now, $1.75 trillion in mortgage assets, that’s 26 percent of the mortgage market. It’s a big chunk of the mortgage market; it lets banks do other things. But that’s just a tiny piece of the global quantitative easing, which is about $21 trillion across the major central banks of the world, which is the size of the GDP of the United States. So they manufactured the size of the GDP of the United States out of nowhere, just the biggest banks; they used that to buy, in some countries for example throughout the European Union, corporate bonds; throughout Japan, stocks; throughout the U.S., government bonds and mortgage bonds; and so forth, all through the banking system, all through the major corporations of those countries. That destabilized the world around this decade, and for many years to come, because people didn’t get that money. These institutions, their leaders, their associates, they got that money. They used that money into the financial markets, but not into the real economy.

RS: Right, so just so we should explain, there had been in response to the housing meltdown—which was a creation of these banks, and deregulation, the end of Glass-Steagall and other measures, to let them be loose, and they know what they’re doing, Lawrence Summers’ famous word. So when the thing goes kaput, you know, explodes, one possibility would have been something like foreclosure relief. OK? You say to these homeowners, we’re going to invent money [Laughs] if you want, and we’ll buy your mortgages, because they were wrong to give you these mortgages; you were conned into it, they were liar loans, you were encouraged to do it, they didn’t do due diligence. So these banks committed basically a crime, we’re going to send some of them to jail for doing this, but you shouldn’t have to lose your home. And so when people said, well, they had no alternative—they did! They could have done the same adding the zeroes, and given the benefit directly to homeowners who had been sold these lousy mortgages, right? Or at least worked out payment plans that they could live with and let them stay in their house, right? Not disrupt their whole lives and everything else. But instead, they added those zeroes and said to the banks, we’ll take your lousy loans that you created, and we’re going to take them—and the result, and this is something I saw in your book so clearly stated, I haven’t seen it anywhere else—the whole irony is, this banking meltdown happened because these banks were allowed to become too big to fail. That was the whole significance of Glass-Steagall from the Great Depression: don’t ever let them be too big, don’t ever let them commingle investment banking with the federally secured deposit of ordinary people; that wall, OK, they get rid of the wall, they become too big to fail, and then we have to bail them out. But your book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, by Nomi Prins—your book points out they’ve grown twice as large as a result of this. They’re bigger than they were in terms of this indebtedness and what have you.

NP: Well, that’s right. So the largest six banks, just in the United States, have grown almost double; 84 percent bigger in terms of the assets that they have, about 42 percent bigger in terms of people’s deposits that they have. So in multiple ways, they are just simply bigger. But they’ve also received something else, and that is this cheap money, that’s these conjured zeroes, to reduce their load of bad debt, of bad assets that they created, that they had nowhere else to sell at the time, which allowed them to then overvalue assets they had left, make themselves look healthier than they were. And then ultimately what they’ve done recently is use this cheap money and the Fed’s permission—’cause they have to ask the Fed for permission to do this—to buy their own stock. So for example, last year, 99 percent—that would be almost all of the profits of the largest banks in the country who were subsidized by this $4.3, $4.5 trillion worth of conjured money to buy assets from them by the Federal Reserve—used 99 percent of their profits to buy their own stock. And that came out of a report that was discussed in front of Congress by the vice chair of the FDIC at the time, Thomas Hoenig, who has all of that data available to him, and said look, basically this is where the money is going. It’s not going to restructure, forget mortgages 10 years ago, it’s not going to help anyone right now; that is profits that could be used to help customers, that could be used to work with the government, even, to develop infrastructure, research development projects, whatever—it’s not. That money is going into their stock, and their shareholders, and their senior managers. And so this whole shift you talk about, in terms of the wealth effect, there are so many multiple levels by which the Fed has increased that shift of money from the sort of lower and middle classes of society, of American society, up to the elite. And again, this is not just a U.S. phenomenon; this is something the Fed pushed across the world with no accountability for the results of providing money into financial institutions and financial assets, and not into the real economy. And that’s what we’re dealing with right now. That’s shifted a lot of how economies, the relationship between governments and people, have interacted over these 10 years. Because people notice that there’s a problem. The leaders don’t want to admit there’s a problem. And that’s where the disconnect lies, and that’s where people get angry, that’s where they vote for, you know, people like President Trump, anyone that’s different from whoever was in office at the time. You know, vote for things like Brexit, shift to the right in Italy, shift to the left in Spain; it’s not even a question of whether you’re going to the left or the right, it’s a question of finding a source, an outlet, and to match them up between their personal problems financially that have been exacerbated by Fed policy and the collusion with other central banks, and the lack of accountability of not just the central banks but the governments with whom they interact.

RS: Well, that is the great disconnect, and we’re going to take a break for a second. I’m talking to Nomi Prins, who wrote a really powerful book called Collusion. [omission for station break] So I want to make this a little more personal. You started out as a banker. And now you’ve written a book, and it’s clear you’ve traveled all over the world talking to bankers; they accept you as a knowledgeable person; the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen actually had you speak to a high-level meeting of the Federal Reserve. You know the lingo, you know the math, and so forth. And is there a kind of a secret handshake or a nod, do they tell you you don’t know what you’re talking about, or do they tell you, yes, you’re absolutely right and I’m going to get mine while I can—I mean, what is the lingo? How does it work?

NP: It’s interesting, because when I talked at the Fed—and yes, I was invited to talk in the spring of 2015, and that actually predicated, that was kind of the catalyst for writing this particular book, because I was asked to talk about why Wall Street isn’t helping Main Street by the Fed. And when they asked me to talk about that, I thought they’d made a mistake in choosing me, because I’ve been very critical of the Fed and very clear about why Wall Street isn’t helping Main Street, which is that the Fed never made Wall Street help Main Street with the money it was giving Wall Street. So what would you expect? Which is exactly what I told them. I was not invited back to talk to the Fed after that particular address, but what I did get from that meeting, from the few days that I was there—because they also sort of went on, it was a joint Fed, IMF and World Bank meeting, three days, and every day they went to a different location—was that people who worked at the Fed—

RS: You’re being a little too modest. You were in there, you were invited—

NP: I was there, I was at the, yes—

RS: You were invited there at the highest level to actually give a talk—

NP: Yes.

RS: —right, where they all listened attentively—

NP: Yes.

RS: —did they at the end say, you’re on to something? Or we’re so happy to have you? Or you’re full of it? Or what?

NP: Well, again, this is what I’m getting at. So Janet Yellen actually was not in the physical room when I spoke; a lot of other central bankers—she had spoken right before me, and then sort of left to do whatever she was doing. And left all of these other central bankers who had come from around the world, at the very room, actually, at the Fed, the FOMC committee meets to set rates. So I mean, it was a very historical room. I got the impression in the follow-up dialogue from the group within the Fed, which was the regulatory body of the Fed, the people that actually ran the numbers on the banks, some of whom had been there for decades, who were very happy that I had articulated what their concerns were. Their concerns were that banks had gotten a whole pile of money, and they weren’t doing the right things with it, and like, what do we do now? And if we continue down this path, it could create real problems going forward. They were concerned about that. In fact, there were people who used to work at private banks in that division, who were like yeah, this is exactly what we’ve been talking about. However, what happens is that there is a disconnect even within those institutions, right? From where people who sort of are doing the day jobs, like looking at the numbers, and going up to their bosses like Janet Yellen and saying, look, you know what, this bank is kind of growing a lot, it’s taking on a lot of risk, you know, it’s had a bunch of help from us, maybe we should kind of be concerned. To someone like Janet Yellen at the top, saying-0-which is what she did that morning-0-that the banking system was fine; that we missed a bullet, that things are on the straight and narrow, that everything is fine. And subsequently in many speeches publicly she had said that we will not have a too-big-to-fail situation come back, you know, to haunt us. So she’s basically there taking credit for this sort of washing the financial system with all this conjured money from the Fed and other central banks. Central banks who are smaller in the room, you know, like Lebanon, like Thailand, like Malaysia, who basically can’t do that, can’t create all this money out of nowhere, so are stuck actually working on their rates and their cost of money relative to real inflation and the real price of things like food in their own countries. So can’t really participate in this “we create money and it goes into our banks” thing—so again, that creates inequality—are also nodding their heads and saying yeah, this makes a lot of sense, now we understand why this has happened. And they were very, you know, collaborative with me since then. And even at the time, even in those days. But when you get up to a Janet Yellen level, she, Ben Bernanke, Jay Powell now, you know, Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank and so forth—they travel in a circle sort of well above that, above me, above the people who actually do the numbers at their institutions. And in their circle they cannot admit any wrong. So in their circle—and this happened when Janet Yellen left the Fed, you know, where’s the first place she spoke, she spoke in a loft in Tribeca to a bunch of billionaires and basically told them, it’s OK, the Fed’s going to continue to do whatever it needs to do to help you guys—that’s what they do. Because they have ego involved, they have status involved, it’s a very select group of people. They sort of mix amongst each other, they go back out to think tanks, or they go back out onto the speaking circuit; they write books, they do all these things, and they always maintain–except if you’re Alan Greenspan and it’s decades later and it’s kind of off the cuff—that what they did was necessary, that what they did was the right thing to do, that somehow creating multi trillions of dollars throughout the world, that went into banks, that bought assets, somehow magically was going to transform real economies. And they can’t say anything different. They can’t say I’m right; none of these people will say that. Even if they are concerned about it. Because they are the ones with the faucets that they can turn on to create this money and sort of flood the system with it.

RS: Why are we betrayed by so many smart people? That’s—and you’re a smart person; you really know this stuff. But instead of lying about all this and going and constructing all these phony packages and selling people junk and everything, you have decided in your life—and now I’ve read, I don’t know, five of your books, or so forth—you decided to be a truth-teller; you decided to blow the whistle, basically. And you do it in a very skillful, you modulate your tone, you’re reasonable—no, I mean really, the detail in this book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, Nomi Prins, get it—the detail is wonderful. And you actually explain how it works. You know, how it works in different countries, and what the consequences are. But then I actually have a different image in my mind. I want to know how people can, with a straight face and smile, get away with it. I think of Lawrence Summers, actually probably the most devilish person in the whole banking meltdown. It wasn’t really as much Robert Rubin as Summers who took over. And it was Summers who tried, no, succeeded in destroying a woman named Brooksley Born. And Brooksley Born was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and I was covering this stuff back then; earlier, when Glass-Steagall was reversed, I was working at the LA Times and so forth. And you look at the history, Brooksley Born, who knew Hillary Clinton, actually Hillary Clinton had recommended her for a job, she was even somebody who was going to be, you know, Attorney General and so forth, she was a brilliant lawyer dealing with banks, dealing with finances, and she wrote a concept release when she was working–and she said, this is all going to hell in a handbasket, this is terrible, and you guys don’t know what you’re doing. And Lawrence Summers gets up before the House, before the Senate, and says Brooksley Born doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He’s backed by Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin. And they say, she’s very dangerous for the markets, she’s going to spook the markets, and these bankers know exactly what they’re doing; they’re experts, there’s no risk here. That was Lawrence Summers. He’s rewarded by being made head of Harvard. [Laughter] And then he’s brought back by Obama, right, as the big advisor. Timothy Geithner, very critical to your book, principal person in the New York Fed, is rewarded by Barack Obama being Secretary of the Treasury. So in your book you describe going to all these meetings and interviewing–do you ever have the sense of, ooh, deep corruption? These are people who have actually raped the economy, they’ve destroyed homeowners, they’ve destroyed parents trying to raise children and force them to move, lose whatever value they had in life, you know, keep them up at night, maybe commit suicide, because they can’t take care of their family? Do they ever have any of that sense of what the harm, the consequence, of this game plan?

NP: Literally, there’s no indication. I mean, you see it publicly, and privately it’s not that different, because privately they’re basically trying to sort of outplay each other at the same time as being on the same team. And so it goes back to this confluence of just egos, of the philosophy that they hold dear, which is that if you help banks, everything else will work out. And therefore, they don’t have to worry about the person who loses their home, or the kid who can’t go to school, or the mother who has to choose between healthcare and her next child. Like, they don’t have to worry about things like that, because it just doesn’t come into their purview, because their world view—and it’s very, very similar throughout these people. The people that stay in these careers for decades—you know, Janet Yellen worked, you know, with Larry Summers back in the Clinton administration. I mean, these people that stay in these careers and sort of intertwine for decades have to support each other, because otherwise they’re not in that club anymore. That’s what happens. That’s what happened with Brooksley Born. She could have chosen—like I could have chosen; we could have chosen different paths. I could have stayed at Goldman; you know, I could have sort of worked to help the bankers deal with Washington, because I could run the numbers and I could probably have had that argument as well. But I didn’t, because what was happening was very, very wrong and very, very unfair and very, very corrupt. That’s what Brooksley Born decided. That’s what some people decided, it’s a path. As a result of that path, you’re not going to get invited to become the treasury secretary; you’re not going to get invited to become the head of the Fed; you choose to understand that ramifications of those policies and talk to the world about them. I mean, I follow, for example, Brooksley Born on her Twitter feed; almost everything she says connotes that disconnect between the central bank policies, deregulation and so forth, with people. You know, how they’re diametrically opposed to helping people. But that’s a choice. The people that stay in the community, the sort of elite community of central banks, the ministries of finance, the treasury secretaries of presidents, and so forth, they support each other. And when they don’t, they get excommunicated from that community. That’s their choice.

RS: It would be nice to think that people who present as evil, or are crude or are boorish or are demagogues—so, Donald Trump—it would be nice to think that in any situation you could say, oh, there’s a bad guy. There’s a bad guy, and he’s going to hurt people. And the conceit that we have is that people who are well mannered, and don’t seem crude, and can talk a good game about the well-being of ordinary people, that they will somehow be restrained in their greed, they will somehow be accountable. And as David Halberstam pointed out in his, the title of his book The Best and the Brightest, about the making of the Vietnam War—no, it was the best and the brightest. And when you look at this banking world, they are not the Donald Trumps, they are not the crude people. They are actually—I mean, I guess there are a few that are, like the French finance minister and so forth. But generally, they talk a good game. And yet they can’t possibly believe, they could not possibly—Robert Rubin was at Citigroup. Treasury secretary under Clinton. He could not possibly have believed that you could trust Citigroup or Goldman Sachs or any of these others to actually take this free money—that’s what your book is about. All over the world, these bankers who had screwed the economy, screwed people, were given free money while everyone else was told, oh, you’re going to lose the house because you can’t make the payment—you’re out, sorry, bad decision, you bought a liar’s loan, you’re wrong, move the kids, you know, it’s over now and your whole life savings is wiped out. And as I say, it particularly hit in the United States black and brown people, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis has done a very good study on that. OK. So you’re going to screw these people, you know these gonifs, you know—you, like you, Nomi Prins, you worked with them. You were at Goldman Sachs, you’ve been at these places. How in the world can people who have been there, and then come out running government, whether it’s Janet Yellen, whether it’s Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton—how could they possibly believe we could, just now, after the damage these banks have done, we’re going to give them all this money by adding the zeroes you talked about, and they’re going to do the right thing. How could they possibly believe that?

NP: You know, if you threw them in front of a lie detector test, might be able to pass that. But on the other hand they are literally so clueless that they might actually have convinced themselves that this time is different. I mean, that’s the sort of crisis situation brewing, that somehow now banks were rewarded so substantially for screw-ups they made [Laughs], both in their own institutions and to the rest of the population, so royally that they’ve learned their lesson. I mean, I agree with you—it is a ridiculous thing to assume. It is ridiculous to assume they actually think this. And yet, they are in the position to speak as if they think it, and to affect policies that enable it to play out. And that’s the real danger. The Congress just now deregulated an already weak banking restriction, the Dodd Frank bill, which did not bring back Glass-Steagall; it did not actually effectively change the trading nature of any of these institutions; it did not make them smaller; it didn’t do a lot of things. But even with that, it did require them to at least say that in the event of another crisis, we have something called the living will which requires us to tell the Fed, to tell the treasury department, to tell the American people what we will do in the event of another crisis. That they don’t even have to do anymore, for the most part, on certain size institutions under this current legislation. It wasn’t just something pushed by republicans; it was something voted upon by certain democrats as well. You would think they would understand. I speak to them in Congress on a regular basis on both sides of the aisle; I lay out sort of corporate defaults happening, what banks are doing, which is very similar to the mortgage crisis, but they’re now doing it with loans to companies, to major companies, and those are starting to feel faulty, and those are being repackaged into things that could also implode the economy going forward. And they nod, they look like they get it, but then they don’t have the capacity to do anything about it, because at the end of the day, they don’t want to be kicked out of their own club, and they are just paralyzed by this sort of inability to take a stand. And these are the people that run these institutions, these are the people that run many countries, these are the people that run many legislative bodies, and that is a deep problem. Whether they believe it or not at the core almost doesn’t matter, because unfortunately, they’re in a position where they don’t have to. They can just continue with this false narrative that what we did fixed everything. This time it’s different. This time, ultimately, it’s going to trickle down into the real economy, even though there has been no policy we have enacted that will divert it to doing so. It’s a real problem.

RS: It’s a real problem. It’s a culture of corruption, collusion, as you describe it. And read the book. Nomi Prins, Collusion. Thanks for doing this. OK, well, that’s it. We’ve run out of time for Scheer Intelligence. Our producers are Josh Scheer and Rebecca Mooney. Our engineers here at KCRW are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. And see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

 

Could Making Fuel From CO2 Slow Climate Change?

North American scientists may be one step nearer to the dream solution to low-carbon energy, new fuel from CO2, if they can suck it straight from the air and convert it directly into gasoline, diesel or jet fuel.

That is, they could deliver instant fossil fuels. They could do what nature has done – all coal, oil and natural gas began with carbon dioxide absorbed by living tissue – without the time and expense of deep burial for a hundred million years or so.

In principle, they could also use their direct air capture technology to draw the greenhouse gas from the air, turn it into liquid and store it in a secure geological formation. …

Since the search for low-carbon technologies is driven by the environmental and climate costs of global warming and climate change as a consequence of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion, the trick of converting atmospheric carbon into fuel directly would go some way to limiting climate change.

As ever, the only barrier to such ingenuity would be the cost and the challenge of turning the technology from laboratory prototype to commercial success on an industrial scale.

David Keith, a Harvard researcher who founded a Canadian start-up called Carbon Engineering, and colleagues report in the journal Joule that they have a design for a process that could capture a million tons of carbon dioxide a year in a continuous process, using a fan system and some clever chemistry to absorb and concentrate the captured CO2.

They also calculate that the cost per ton captured will work out somewhere between $94 a ton of carbon dioxide and $232.

And from that point, the captured carbon dioxide could become a feedstock for the manufacture of liquid fuel. Scientists have argued for nearly a decade that the exhausts from power stations and combustion engines should be considered as an asset to be exploited, and researchers around the world have been racing to find ways to take surplus atmospheric carbon and turn it into something that will power a truck or tractor or get a commercial flight airborne.

Argument persists

They have shown in principle that atmospheric carbon dioxide can be converted to rock, potentially for burial, but although other groups have shown that long-term storage of captured carbon dioxide should be possible, there is still argument over whether such storage is either practical or economic.

Some researchers are convinced that the world’s needs could be delivered entirely by renewable energy such as wind and sunlight, but wheeled transport needs portable fuel. So other groups have looked closely at the idea of deriving energy from natural resources.

Others have explored the “bionic leaf” that could mechanically turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into biofuel or fertiliser; or into jet fuel.

The latest study offers another way to close the loop, by “inhaling” air, trapping the carbon dioxide with an absorbent liquid, and turning it, with hydrogen, into fuel, using technologies and techniques already commercially in use. But, of course, it requires energy – from natural gas or direct electricity – to power the process that will turn carbon dioxide from spent fossil fuel back into fuel again and keep levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide down.

Reductions possible

Something like one-fifth of the global carbon dioxide emissions that are changing the atmosphere and heating the globe are from transport. If the direct-air capture technique could be linked directly to wind or solar energy, those emissions could be reduced.

“Electricity from solar and wind is intermittent; we can take this energy straight from big solar or wind institutions at great sites where it is cheap and apply it to reclaim and recycle carbon dioxide into new fuel,” said Professor Keith.

“Making fuels that are easy to store and transport eases the challenge of integrating renewables into the energy system.”

No, Saudi Arabia Can’t Save Trump From High Gas Prices

President Trump has tweeted that King Salman of Saudi Arabia has promised to increase Saudi oil production by 2 million barrels a day. Trump says he feels this is important because US gasoline prices are “too high.” Trump is aware that high gasoline prices have tracked since the 1970s with public disapproval of the party in power, and is probably afraid that going into the midterms with a high price at the pump will result in heavy Republican losses in congressional races.

King Salman, however, cannot save Trump from the oil markets, even if he really wanted to, which is doubtful.

As Reuters noted, although Saudi Arabia has a theoretical ability to produce 12 million barrels a day, it can’t just do so on a dime. It would take up to a year to ramp up production that much. Nor is there evidence of Saudi ability to produce at that level in the medium to long-term.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia is a member of OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), which has just set member quotas and asked members to increase production slightly. World production should go up about 700,000 barrels a day. That is all Trump can hope for.

Worse yet for Trump’s ambitions for cheaper oil over the next five months, domestic turmoil is taking some production off the market. Oil markets are supply and demand. Libya’s Gen. Hiftar is trying to get control of Libya’s oil fields, but in the attempt has provoked fighting that has shut most of them down. There is also trouble in Venezuela. And, if Trump succeeds in strong-arming some consuming countries into not buying Iranian oil, it may stay in the ground, which sends prices up.

It is long past the time when Saudi Arabia or even OPEC can set oil prices. They account for only a third of the global daily production. They can affect prices at the margins.

Finally, there is the demand side. If the world economy heats up this fall, for instance if there is an uptick in China, Indonesia and India, people there will drive more and put upward pressure on prices. Lots of presidents have wished for a magic bullet on petroleum prices (maybe that was why Bush-Cheney invaded Iraq, according to Rupert Murdoch), but there isn’t one.

Except, you could put in a lot of solar panels in the Deep South, which votes for Trump and is as sunny as you could want. And then you could switch to electric cars. Then the gasoline price is irrelevant. You run the cars off the panels. The fuel is free.

—–

 

American History for Truthdiggers: The Forgotten and Peculiar War of 1812

Editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “Make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

Below is the 12th installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 12 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”

See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9, Part 10,  Part 11.

* * *

“Strange indeed did it appear to me to find so many names, familiar household words, as enemies—the very names of officers in our own army. … How uncomfortably like a civil war.” —British Lt. John Le Couteur upon visiting an American Army camp (1813)

Americans, sadly, know little of their own history. Who among us recalls anything about the War of 1812? Few, if any. What those few do tend to remember are patriotic anecdotes from a long-ago war: Andrew Jackson mowing down foolish redcoats at the Battle of New Orleans; Dolly Madison saving the portrait of George Washington just before the British burned down the capital; Francis Scott Key penning “The Star Spangled Banner” as he observed the bombardment of Fort McHenry.

These are carefully selected snapshots in an otherwise hazy war. None of this comes together—except in the minds of academic historians—into anything resembling a coherent tale. Why did we fight? Was it necessary? Did we win? The cherry-picked anecdotes of jingoism answer none of these vital questions, but ask them we must. The decision to take a nation to war, to send young men into combat, is a solemn one indeed. And the War of 1812 is one of only five wars the United States has officially declared.

The conflict deserves our attention for the last reason alone, but also because the war and its complexities are instructive to today’s engaged citizen. Though it is rarely remembered this way, in some ways this was a civil war, fought between men who spoke the same language, practiced the same religion and had remarkably similar customs. It was also a war of conquest, suffered worst by the native peoples of the Ohio Country and Upper Canada. It was, too, a sideshow theater of the broader Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815); as historian Gordon Wood wrote, “The U.S. was born amidst a world at war.”

This much is certain: It was a peculiar war, full, in equal measure, of paradox and farce. Thousands died, but little was gained. In some cases brother fought brother. And, in a strange tinge of irony, the side that best championed liberty was not always American. For all its complexity, perhaps because of it, the War of 1812 deserves a fresh look, and our attention.

An Unnecessary War? The Strange Path to Conflict

“[The War of 1812 was] a metaphysical war, a war not for conquest, not for defense, not for sport, [but rather] a war for honour, like that of the Greeks against Troy.” —Republican politician John Taylor of Virginia

Why fight another war with Great Britain? Why fight it in 1812? These are, and were, important questions for the leaders of the nascent American republic. Most histories, and most rhetoric of the day, focused on British insults inflicted upon the American state. Much of the controversy was naval, and involved the American struggle to protect its neutral rights to trade with any and all of the warring parties in Europe. Impressment—the British practice of boarding U.S. merchant ships and capturing or forcing the enlistment of American sailors (the Brits claimed they were all British navy deserters)—was considered the most heinous affront of all.

Still, this was an odd grievance to start a war over. After all, the British Empire had a massive army and unparalleled naval strength. The young American republic was unprepared for war and nearly defenseless. Besides, the British had a point. Though they often captured genuine American citizens, America’s own secretary of the treasury estimated that up to one-third of American sailors were indeed British deserters. And it makes sense: The U.S. paid more, had lower standards of discipline and wasn’t at war! The British were at war; in fact they were engaged in an existential struggle with French Emperor (and continent conqueror) Napoleon Bonaparte. They needed those deserters back to man the navy that protected the British Isles. Stranger still, soon after the U.S. declared war (this was a war of choice!), Britain repealed the Orders in Council, the very policy that resulted in impressment. Once President James Madison received word of this reversal, the U.S. might have rescinded the declaration and saved thousands of lives. It did not.

Part of the reason is this: The War of 1812 was about honor as much as anything else. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides claimed that nations go to war for either “fear, honor, or interest.” Wars fought primarily for honor rarely appear in the course of history, but this was one such case. The Americans felt the British had disrespected them, were trying to maintain the U.S. as a de facto colonial dependency. Many Republican (the party of Thomas Jefferson and Madison) leaders became avid “war hawks”—adding that term forever to the American lexicon—and believed that war with Britain would be a regenerative, purifying and unifying act. They would be proved wrong, but not before thousands perished in two and a half years of combat.

There were other motives for this war besides the affirmation of neutral rights and the reclamation of national honor. Many Westerners (who tended to be avid Republicans) had long coveted Canada, then a British colony. In fact, the Continental Army had previously attempted, unsuccessfully, to conquer Canada during the Revolutionary War. And, strikingly, the first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation, claimed the province of Canada as a future state within the expanding American union. In 1812, “Free Canada!” became a rallying cry, and the U.S. would spend most the war in this fruitless endeavor. We were the invaders!

Other American Westerners, especially in the Ohio and Michigan Country, feared and loathed the Native Americans who had the gall to demand autonomy. Ever-expansive settlers wanted all land east of the Mississippi and saw war with Britain as a means to that end. The Brits, after all, were allegedly arming and funding the very native peoples who had the propensity to raid American settlements. The powerful native confederation—recently brokered by the Shawnee chief Tecumseh—had to be broken. War would make that possible.

Seen through a wider lens, the American declaration of war is discomfiting. By attacking Britain, the young republic was now tacitly allied with the dictator Napoleon Bonaparte of France in his ongoing war with the United Kingdom—a hypocrisy the British relished in pointing out.

There were many other ironies to this war. The British didn’t want it, and the weaker Americans insisted upon it. The war didn’t unite the country. On the contrary it fiercely divided the Federalist (which dominated in New England) and Republican (powerful in the South and West) political factions. Indeed, the Senate vote on the declaration of war was the closest in American history. The paradoxes just piled up. The Southern and Western senators voted for war, even though the impressment of American sailors most affected New England. The Republicans clamored for war even though their party supposedly hated standing armies and militarism. To wage this war, Madison and the Republicans would have to restrict trade, build a military establishment and coerce obedience—the very actions most abhorred in Republican ideology.

This would prove to be a strange conflict indeed.

David or Goliath: The Myths of 1812

“Many nations have gone to war in pure gayety of heart, but perhaps the United States were the first to force themselves into a war they dreaded, in the hope that the war itself might create the spirit they lacked.” —Henry Adams, great-grandson of President John Adams, in 1891

In Americans’ collective memory, then and now, the U.S. played David to Britain’s Goliath. Our fragile little republic, so the story goes, stood up to the bullying British and—just barely—saved our independence from the imperial enemy. But is it so? Just who was David and who was Goliath? That, of course, depends on one’s point of view.

In point of fact, the British were busy and spread thin. They had been at war with the powerful French on a global scale for some 19 years. The only British force within striking distance of the U.S. was in Canada, and this—in a stunning reversal of the popular myth—represented a stunning mismatch. There were barely 500,000 citizens in Canada, compared with about 8 million in the United States. The British had only a few thousand regular troops to spare for the defense of this massive Canadian landmass. The Americans might be unprepared, and might prove “bad” at war, but by no means was the initial deck stacked against the large and expansive American republic.

The myth of American defensiveness is also belied by a number of other inconvenient facts. The United States declared this war, a war that Britain had no interest in fighting. Furthermore, despite the exaggerated claims of war hawks and patriots of all stripes, this was not a Second War of Independence. There is no evidence that the British sought to reconquer and colonize the mammoth American republic. Any land seizures were planned to be used only as bargaining chips at an eventual peace settlement. Tied down in an existential war of its own, Britain had neither the capacity nor intent to resubjugate their former colonists.

‘Free Canada’: Civil War in the Northern Borderlands

“The acquisition of Canada, this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching.” —Thomas Jefferson (1812)

“People speaking the same language, having the same laws, manners and religion, and in all the connections of social intercourse, can never be depended upon as enemies.” —Baron Frederick de Gaugreben, British officer, in 1815

No one seems to know this (or care), but the United States had long coveted Canada. In two sequential wars, the U.S. Army invaded its northern neighbor and intrigued for Canada’s incorporation into the republic deep into the 19th century. Here, on the Canadian front, the conflict most resembled a civil war.

Canada was primarily (though sparsely) populated by two types of people: French Canadians and former American loyalists—refugees from the late Revolutionary War. Some, the “true” loyalists, fled north just after the end of the war for independence. The majority, however, the “late” loyalists, had more recently settled in Upper Canada between 1790 and 1812. Most came because land was cheaper and taxes lower north of the border. Far from being the despotic kingdom of American fantasies, Canada offered a life rather similar to that within the republic. Indeed, this was a war between two of the freest societies on earth. So much for modern political scientists’ notions of a “Democratic Peace Theory”—the belief that two democracies will never engage in war. Britain had a king, certainly, but also had a mixed constitution and one of the world’s more representative political institutions.

In many cases families were divided by the porous American-Canadian border. Loyalties were fluid, and citizens on both sides spoke a common language, practiced a common religion and shared a common culture. Still, if and when an American invasion came, the small body of British regular troops would count on these recent Americans—these “late” loyalists—to rally to the defense of mother Canada.

And came the invasion did. Right at the outset of the war in fact. Though the justification for war was maritime and naval, the conflict opened with a three-pronged American land invasion of Canada. The Americans, for their part, expected the inverse of the British hopes—the “late” loyalists, it was thought, would flock to the American standard and support the invasion. It never happened. Remarkably, a solid base of Canadians fought as militiamen for the British and against the southern invaders. Most, of course, took no side and sought only to be let alone.

It turned out the invading Americans found few friends in Canada and often alienated the locals with their propensity for plundering and military blunder. Though the war raged along the border—primarily near Niagara Falls and Detroit—for nearly three years the American campaign for Canada proved to be an embarrassing fiasco. Defeats piled up, and Canada would emerge from the war firmly in British hands. In the civil war along the border, the Americans were, more often than not, the aggressors and the losers.

Indians, Britons, Slaves and the Real Losers of the War of 1812

“[The Indians] have forfeited all right to the territory we have conquered.” —Gen. Andrew Jackson

“My people are no more! Their bones are bleaching on the plains of the Tallushatches, Talladega, and Emuckfau.” —Creek Chief Red Eagle

The U.S. was a republic, Britain a monarchy. Thus, in Americans’ collective memories the United States must have been fighting for liberty, for democracy. But was it? Britons saw matters rather differently. They argued that their mixed constitution, providing for a king and the Houses of Lords and Commons, best protected liberty and stability at home and abroad. The British actually believed (not without some merit) that only they protected Europe, and by extension America, from the expansive tyranny of Napoleonic France and that the Americans were ungrateful for this sacrifice.

Furthermore, when it came to treatment of blacks and Native Americans, it seems the British better upheld our modern conceptions of liberty and equality. Most Americans felt a mix of fear and hatred for the local Indian tribes. Settlers perceived the threat of Tecumseh’s Indian confederation to be existential. These Westerners called for a conquest of Canada to remove British support for the tribes and exterminate the Indians once and for all.

“A Scene on the Frontiers as Practiced by the Humane British and Their Worthy Allies.” This 1812 American propaganda image depicts British officers paying Indians for American scalps.

The British viewed the Native Americans in a completely different way. And the natives saw the Brits as much less of a threat than the more populous and encroaching Americans. The British supplied, funded and generally respected the autonomy of the Canadian and Ohio Country tribes. With so few English settlers in the colony, British leaders counted on native allies to defend Canada and were more than happy to accept and recognize an Indian buffer state on the frontier. They did so, no doubt, out of self-interest but were still far more congenial to the tribes than the hated American settlers.

Therefore, in a replay of the Revolutionary War, the vast majority of natives actively sided with, and often fought for, the British. This would prove to be a fateful mistake. Tecumseh’s confederation was eventually defeated (and Tecumseh himself killed) at the Battle of the Thames, and the Creek Indians were devastated by the brutal tactics of Andrew Jackson in the South. The Indians emerged from the war defeated and without the reliable support of the British, who quickly sold them out at the peace conference. Never again would native tribes maintain any autonomy east of the Mississippi or prove able to stand up to the far more numerous Americans. The War of 1812, was, for the native peoples, an unmitigated disaster.

In yet another replay of the Revolution, black American slaves deeply rejected American proclamations of a war for liberty and equality. The ascendant American Republicans running the country were powerful in the South and respected the fears of slaveholders in that region. Though desperately short of recruits, the Americans refused to enlist free blacks or slaves into the Army. On the contrary, many slaves escaped their plantations and either ran to British lines or (in many cases) swam to British ships—places where they were much more likely to find the liberty that the Americans falsely professed for all. The British offered freedom, an enlistment bounty and free land to runaways who joined up. Some 600 free blacks or slaves became Royal Marines!

If the War of 1812 was a war for freedom, it was for a very narrow and limited freedom indeed. Republicans extolled their commitment to liberty and equality, but those sentiments extended only to the white men of the young republic. Britain, which had already abolished slavery, would for blacks and Indians prove the better beacon of liberty.

Treason at Home? Federalists, Republicans and the Politics of War

“The Hartford Convention, or Leap no Leap.” This 1814 pro-Republican political cartoon shows Federalist delegates committing treason by jumping into the arms of Britain’s King George III.

The War of 1812 also constituted a political civil war at home between the ruling Republican Party and the opposition Federalist Party. The Federalists had much to lose and little to gain from the war. They predominated in New England and in coastal ports and relied on trade with Britain to earn a decent living. They had few visions of grandeur about western land annexations or a conquest of Canada. Furthermore, the more aristocratic Federalists favored Britain in its war with revolutionary and then Napoleonic France, seeing Britain as a rock of stability against a tide of chaos and conquest from dictatorial France.

Many Federalists continued to illegally trade with the Brits, smuggled goods to Canada and seemed to actively oppose the war. Republicans dubbed them traitors, while the Federalists saw themselves as prudent realists. Some Federalists even considered secession from the union and the formation of an independent New England republic. Most, however, never went that far.

Still, in 1814, after two years of indecisive war, the Federalist Party would unknowingly sign its own death warrant. New England Federalists sent delegates to a convention in Hartford, Conn., that meant to oppose the war and recommend new amendments to the Constitution. And, in truth, these amendments weren’t all bad. They called for the repeal of the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as partial humans for representation sake and gave extra political weight to the South. They also sought to require a (sensible?) two-thirds majority in Congress to declare future wars, and to limit presidents to a single term in office.

Was this, as some claimed, tantamount to treason during a period of active hostilities? Indeed, some Federalists actively discouraged military enlistment and the withholding of federal taxes to fund the war, and some New England governors refused to send their state militias on offensive campaigns. But was this treason or principled opposition to an ill-advised war? The country was divided in answering the question, similar to some issues that remain with us.

The Federalists might have been right, in fact, both ethically and constitutionally, but the Hartford Convention’s luckless timing destroyed them politically. Just as the delegates were meeting, the Republicans were securing a status quo peace treaty and Gen. Andrew Jackson was winning a staggering victory over the British at New Orleans (a few weeks after the treaty had been signed but before word of the peace reached the Americas). The Republicans waved the bloody shirt and painted the Hartford Convention as a treasonous betrayal. The Federalists would never again gain a majority in either house of Congress or run a viable presidential candidate. They were finished. Perhaps opposition to war, even a less than popular war, never pays politically.

Ironic Outcomes: A Costly Draw

“The War of 1812 is the strangest war in American history.” —Historian Gordon Wood (2009)

The Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war, changed nothing. There was no change of borders, and the British said nothing about impressment—the purported casus belli! So just what had those thousands died for?

Certainly it was no American victory that forced the British to the peace table. By 1814 the war had become a debacle. Two consecutive American invasions of Canada had been stymied. Napoleon was defeated in April 1814, and the British finally began sending thousands of regular troops across the Atlantic to teach the impetuous Americans a lesson—even burning Washington, D.C., to the ground! (Though in fairness it should be noted that the Americans had earlier done the same to the Canadian capital at York.) The U.S. coastline was blockaded from Long Island to the Gulf of Mexico; despite a few early single ship victories in 1812, the U.S. Navy was all but finished by 1814; the U.S. Treasury was broke and defaulted (for the first time in the nation’s history) on its loans and debt; and 12 percent of U.S. troops had deserted during the war.

The Americans held few victorious cards by the end of 1814, but Britain was exhausted after two decades of war. Besides, they had never meant to reconquer the U.S. in the first place. A status quo treaty that made no concessions to the Americans and preserved the independence of Canada suited London just fine.

So who were the winners and losers of this indecisive war? American land speculators and frontiersmen, to be sure, for they had broken Indian power and opened up millions of acres for western settlement. The biggest losers, of course, were those very Indians, who saw their last hopes for autonomy fade away. They were now, once and for all, a conquered people. The Federalists lost too, as a political party, and as a viable ideology. Republicans would remain ascendant—with no serious opposition—for some two decades after the war. So if New England and the natives lost, the Republicans, Southerners and Westerners emerged victorious.

Nor is it clear which side truly fought for anything resembling (our modern conception of) liberty. And, in the end, after thousands had died (more from disease than combat) on both sides, Canada remained British and nothing had been done about neutrals’ rights on the high seas. Indian power had been broken and the Federalists disappeared, but little else changed.

Perception and Reality: Remembering the War of 1812

“[The War of 1812] has revived, with added luster the renown which brightened the morning of our independence: it has called forth and organized the dormant resources of the [American] empire: it has tried and vindicated our republican institutions … which consists in the well earned respect of the world.” —“A Republican citizen of Baltimore” writing in a newspaper (1815)

“We Owe Allegiance to No Crown,” by John Archibald Woodside (1814), depicts an American sailor standing proud as Lady Liberty places a leafy crown on his head. The sailor’s foot has smashed the British crown and British chains.

Still, perhaps inevitably, both sides would claim a victory of sorts. Nationalist sentiment exploded among ascendant American Republicans, who claimed they had won a “second revolution” and smitten an empire. The decisive victory at the Battle of New Orleans, fought after the treaty had been negotiated, gave Americans the impression of victory. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars made the issues of impressment and neutrals’ rights moot, the Republicans could also claim victory on the seas—even though the British agreed to nothing of the sort in the Treaty of Ghent. To a fervently patriotic American majority, the war seemed to vindicate both the nation’s independence and its republicanism. Indeed, more American towns and counties (57) are now named for President Madison than any other president—including George Washington!

Canadians, too, claimed a victory and developed a new nationalism and origins myth around their collective defeat of the American invaders. Americans may know and care little about the War of 1812, but not so the Canadians. In Canada, the war is widely seen as a pivotal, patriotic event, a noble defense of the northland against marauding American invaders. The British, well, they were mostly just glad all these wars were over; they never gave much attention to the American sideshow in the first place. From their perspective, they had punished the petulant Americans (even burning their capital!) and conceded nothing at the negotiating table.

So ended and so was remembered an utterly peculiar conflict.

* * *

It was a dumb war, in retrospect: unnecessary and ill-advised. Some wars, even American wars, have proved to be just that—wasteful. At best the War of 1812 resulted in a draw; a draw that cost the lives of many thousands; a draw that destroyed any hope of Indian autonomy east of the Mississippi. Still, like most wars, this conflict stirred up patriotism and jingoism, among Americans and Canadians. War, many politicians (usually miles away from the fighting) believe, can be a regenerative act, renewing the spirit of patriotism and uniting competing factions. That is a myth. It is almost never this way. Wars tend to be messy, divisive and inconclusive, and that was especially true of this conflict. Things are lost when a nation embarks on combat: civil liberty at home, human empathy at the front, all sense of realism and proportion in the combatants’ capitals.

American mythmakers (two centuries worth of them) have spun the War of 1812 into a nationalistic yarn. They have focused on the victories of Andrew Jackson, ignored the U.S. debacles in Canada and turned an obscure song (set to the tune of a British drinking ballad)—“The Star Spangled Banner”—into a national anthem. How ironic, then, that the anthem, a war song—which today stirs up so much controversy on football Sundays—emerged from a conflict that should never have been fought and that we didn’t really win.

* * *

To learn more about this topic, consider the following scholarly works:

• James West Davidson, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle and Michael B. Stoff, “Experience History: Interpreting America’s Past,” Chapter 9: “The Early Republic, 1789-1824” (2011).

• Alan Taylor, “The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies” (2010).

• Gordon Wood, “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815″(2009).

Maj. Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his new podcast, “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henrikson.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

NSA Deletion of Call Records Is Raising Questions

WASHINGTON—The National Security Agency is deleting more than 685 million call records the government obtained since 2015 from telecommunication companies in connection with investigations, raising questions about the viability of the program.

The NSA’s bulk collection of call records was initially curtailed by Congress after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing extensive government surveillance. The law, enacted in June 2015, said that going forward, the data would be retained by telecommunications companies, not the NSA, but that the intelligence agency could query the massive database.

Now the NSA is deleting all the information it collected from the queries.

The agency released a statement late Thursday saying it started deleting the records in May after NSA analysts noted “technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunication service providers.” It also said the irregularities resulted in the NSA obtaining some call details it was not authorized to receive.

That points to a failure of the program, according to David Kris, a former top national security official at the Justice Department.

“They said they have to purge three years’ worth of data going back to 2015, and that the data they did collect during that time—which they are now purging—was not reliable and was infected with some kind of technical error,” said Kris, founder of Culper Partners, a consulting firm in Seattle. “So whatever insights they were hoping to get over the past three years from this program of collection … is all worthless. Because of that, they are throwing all the data away and basically starting over.”

Christopher Augustine, an NSA spokesman, disagreed with the claim that the program had failed.

“This is a case in which NSA determined that there was a problem and proactively took all the right steps to fix it,” he said.

The agency has reviewed and re-validated the intelligence reporting to make sure it was based only on call data that had been properly received from the telecommunication providers, he said. The agency declined to assign blame, and said the “root cause of the problem has since been addressed.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a staunch advocate of privacy rights, placed the blame on the telecom companies providing the NSA with call records.

“This incident shows these companies acted with unacceptable carelessness, and failed to comply with the law when they shared customers’ sensitive data with the government,” he told The Associated Press in a written statement Friday.

Under law, the government can request information, such as the type of details that might be printed on a phone bill: the date and time of a call or text, a telephone calling card number, the duration of a call and to what phone number it was made. The details provided to the government do not include the content of any communications, the name, address or financial information of a customer, cell site location or GPS information.

If government investigators have reasonable suspicion that a certain phone number is being used by a terrorist, who might be in the U.S. or overseas, the government asks the phone companies which other numbers have been in touch with the suspicious number — something known as the “first hops” — and then which numbers are in touch with those numbers, the “second hops.”

The NSA collected more than 534.4 million details of calls and text messages in 2017 from American telecom providers like AT&T and Version, according to the most recent government report covering NSA surveillance activities that year. That was more than three times the 151.2 million collected in 2016.

The call records were part of an intelligence collection effort aimed at 42 targets in 2016 and 40 targets in 2017, according to the report. It defines a target as an individual, group of individuals, organization or entity.

Annual reports to Congress from the intelligence community are now required under the 2015 surveillance reform legislation. The law also requires the government to seek a court order to collect call records to obtain intelligence. Requests for records of U.S. citizens must be based on an investigation being conducted to protect against terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities and the probe cannot be conducted solely on activities protected by the First Amendment.

However, despite the reforms, the NSA still received some data from the telecommunications companies that the agency was not authorized to see and some of that data was erroneous, Augustine said.

“We cannot go into greater detail because those details remain classified. However, at no point in time did NSA receive the content of any calls, the name, address or financial information of a subscriber or customer, nor cell site location information or global positioning system information,” he said.

Privacy and civil rights advocates said the NSA announcement raised further concerns about the program.

“This is another in a series of failures that shows that many NSA spying programs have ballooned out of control and have repeatedly failed to meet the basic limits imposed by Congress and the FISA court,” said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. Guliani was referring to a U.S. federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to oversee requests for surveillance warrants.

She said the public has a right to know more about the cause and scope of the problem, such as how many of the records were obtained in error and whether the NSA notified any individuals that their information improperly ended up in the agency’s hands.

Protesters Take to Streets Nationwide Over Trump Immigration Policy

NEW YORK—The Latest on nationwide protests over the Trump administration’s policy of detaining and separating immigrant families (all times EDT):

6:45 p.m.

Thousands have marched peacefully in downtown Atlanta as part of a nationwide protest of a U.S. immigration policy that has separated children from their parents.

An estimated 4,000 people braved the heat Saturday to walk roughly a half-mile from the Atlanta City Detention Center to a federal building.

U.S. Rep. John Lewis and others denounced the Trump administration for separating more than 2,000 children from their parents as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration at the Mexican border.

The Atlanta march was one of hundreds nationwide urging the Trump administration to reunite families.

Although President Donald Trump has signed an order ending the policy, children remain in detention centers and apart from their families.

___

6:45 p.m.

Thousands of people protested the Trump administration’s family separations in Portland, Oregon, and across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, blasted President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and asked the crowd what score the president would get for his zero tolerance policy. The crowd shouted back, “Zero!”

The policy of prosecuting people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally led officials to separate children from their parents. Hundreds of rallies nationwide opposed the now-abandoned policy.

In Seattle, several thousand protesters rallied outside the SeaTac Federal Detention Center that holds immigration detainees. More than 25 rallies were planned across Washington state on Saturday.

The group Patriot Prayer is planning what they call a “freedom rally” in Portland later Saturday.

___

5:40 p.m.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets of San Francisco to oppose the Trump administration’s family separations at the border.

Drums beat and horns played Saturday as marchers held flags and signs, some saying “Deport Trump” and “I Really Care, Do You?”

Barry Hooper of San Francisco said he attended the protest with his wife and two daughters to “let the president know that this is not acceptable.”

His 7-year-old daughter Liliana clutched a sign she made saying, “Stop the separation.”

Marchers arrived at City Hall shortly before noon and gathered to listen to politicians and activists denounce the now-abandoned policy.

Across the San Francisco Bay, hundreds of protesters turned up at a similar rally in Berkeley.

Police in both cities said the rallies appeared peaceful and reported no arrests.

___

5:30 p.m.

Thousands of people spanning at least six downtown blocks marched in Minneapolis to protest U.S. immigration policies.

Some protesters set up a makeshift cage Saturday and others carried signs saying, “We as a country are in a moral crisis, not a border crisis,” ”Moms Against Baby Prisons” and “Abolish ICE.”

Ken Kirwin carried a sign showing Vladimir Putin wearing a hat with President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and another reading, “Make America SANE again keep families together.”

The 77-year-old told the Star Tribune that it’s the first demonstration he’s marched in since protesting the war in Iraq during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Light-rail service downtown was temporarily shut down because of demonstrations blocking tracks.

The rally is among hundreds nationwide urging the Trump administration to reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

___

This item has been corrected after the newspaper updated its story to show Kirwin didn’t wear a hat with President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, but instead carried a sign showing Vladimir Putin wearing the hat.

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5:30 p.m.

Dallas police say five people have been arrested outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building during a protest of federal immigration policies.

News station KXAS-TV reports that dozens of people were protesting outside the ICE building Saturday. Police say it began peacefully before protesters began to block lanes of a service road. Police blocked off one lane for the demonstrators, but they then moved into the other lanes.

A police supervisor said five people were arrested when they refused police orders to move.

Dallas police confirmed the arrests to The Associated Press but declined to provide details on the charges the five are facing.

The rally is among hundreds nationwide urging the Trump administration to reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

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5 p.m.

Thousands of protesters have gathered in downtown Los Angeles to protest an immigration policy from President Donald Trump’s administration.

Singer John Legend serenaded the crowd Saturday, and Democratic politicians who have clashed with Trump spoke against separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters called for impeachment, while Sen. Kamala Harris pointed to how migrant children taken from their parents will suffer lifelong trauma.

Protesters, many dressed in white and some holding babies, carried signs reading, “Asylum not abuse” and “No human is illegal.”

Robin Jackson of Los Angeles noted the “absolute cruelty” of the administration. She says she was heartbroken when her parents worked second shifts at night and can’t imagine what it’s like for the migrant children who don’t know when their parents are coming back.

The rally is among hundreds across the U.S.

___

5 p.m.

A rally outside City Hall in Portland, Maine, grew so large that police had to shut down part of a street as about 2,000 people chanted, cheered and prayed.

People held signs saying, “Make America Kind Again,” ”Love Has No Borders” and “Diversity is Strength.”

Robert O’Brien, of Peaks Island, Maine, held aloft an upside-down U.S. flag, the symbol of distress, to show his disapproval for Trump’s immigration policies, including separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

He called it “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The protest is among hundreds across the U.S. urging the Trump administration to reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

___

4:40 p.m.

A crowd estimated by organizers to be in the thousands converged on a Richmond, Calif., jail Saturday to protest mass incarceration and the separation of immigrant children from their parents.

The jail, known as the West County Detention Facility, is administered by the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department. The department is under fire from human rights groups for its $3 million-a-year contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hold immigrants and asylum-seekers facing possible deportation.

Coinciding with Saturday’s anti-ICE protests from coast to coast, the Richmond rally was the latest in a series of monthly events dubbed “Let Our People Go.” Among the scheduled speakers was Lourdes Barraza of San Francisco-based Mujeres Unidas y Activas, whose husband, Fernando Carrillo, was detained at the jail for seven months.

Another speaker was Hillary Brooks of the San Francisco Bay Area organizing group Kehilla Community Synagogue Immigration Committee. Brooks has charged that immigrant communities are being “terrorized” by ICE.

3:40 p.m.

Crowds faced down a heat index of as high as 110 degrees in downtown Chicago to protest the Trump administration’s immigration policy, surrounding a stage in Daley Plaza and shouting “Si se puede!” (“Yes, you can!”).

Margo Chavez-Easley, a 39-year-old Chicago resident who emigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala when she was 9, carried a sign that read, “What lengths would you go for your children?”

Chavez-Easley told the Chicago Tribune that as an immigrant and an American, she feels a mix of pride and shame.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin was in attendance, saying it was “a place I had to be.”

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3:40 p.m.

Hundreds of people gathered in Detroit and 22 other Michigan cities to add their voices to nationwide protests over the detention of immigrant families.

Detroit police estimated that more than 250 people marched Saturday through the city’s downtown before holding a rally at Hart Plaza in sweltering, 95-degree heat.

The Detroit News reports that Democratic U.S. Rep. Sander Levin told the gathering that the detention of young immigrant children and the Trump administration’s other immigration policies “are a danger to American society.”

Saturday’s rally was among hundreds across the U.S. urging the Trump administration to reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

___

3:20 p.m.

A central Iowa father says he was inspired to organize a rally in support of immigrant families after seeing news on Father’s Day of children separated from their parents who had recently crossed the U.S. border.

About 125 people turned out Saturday for the rally in Marshalltown organized by Steve Adelmund. Adelmund recalled being brought to tears when seeing the news on June 17 of immigrant children being separated from parents and held in cage-like structures at the border.

Adelmund, who says he identifies as a Democrat but sometimes votes Republican, said he believes the country is at a dangerous ideological turning point and that the time to speak out is now.

Adelmund said part of his motivation in organizing the rally was to show his 10-year-old daughter what democracy looks like and that one person can make a difference.

___

2:45 p.m.

Neela Jayaraman was among thousands of people gathered for a second rally protesting family separation in Boston.

The 39-year-old says that as an Indian immigrant, and a social worker, President Donald Trump’s family separation and detention policies devastate her. She says as a mother, she can’t look at the cages, referring to where some children have been detained.

Cradling her 8-month-old baby Akira, Jayaraman says she has hope looking around the Boston Common. She says she hopes to keep public officials accountable.

Thousands of people marched from the Boston City Hall “Rally against Family Separation” where several elected officials, including Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, spoke out against Trump’s immigrant detention policies. Organizers are demanding local government agencies stop cooperating with federal immigration authorities.

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2:10 p.m.

A protest over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies has converged near the golf course where he is spending the weekend.

Demonstrators have gathered Saturday on a street corner near Trump’s golf resort at Bedminster, New Jersey.

They are waving signs with the messages, “Do you know where our children are?” and “Even the Trump family belongs together.”

It’s not known if Trump saw the protest. It was among hundreds of rallies around the country urging the Trump administration to reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In Washington, many thousand protesters have begun marching to the U.S. Department of Justice.

___

2:10 p.m.

At least one person has been arrested when protesters blocked a downtown Columbus, Ohio, street after about 2,000 people attended a two-hour rally outside the Statehouse.

The Columbus Dispatcher reports that police initially tried to shepherd the protesters from the intersection Saturday. A woman was taken away by police after a scuffle.

Melissa Myers, a nurse, told those gathered for the rally, “You don’t have to be a parent to be outraged. You just have to be a decent human being.” She said she’s never attended a rally before, much less organized one.

The protest is among hundreds across the U.S. urging the Trump administration to reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

___

1:55 p.m.

Hundreds of people gathered near the Indiana Statehouse in downtown Indianapolis to protest the detention of immigrant families.

Protesters carried signs saying, “Try to walk in their shoes,” ”We are all immigrants” and “Families belong together.” The rally Saturday is among hundreds across the U.S. urging the Trump administration to reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Patricia Carlin, a grandmother of nine from Danville, Indiana, said she was protesting to show her solidarity with immigrant families and that their detention has made her angry and afraid.

She says her “heart breaks for them” and that the U.S. “is going to be paying for this injustice.”

___

1:55 p.m.

Hundreds of demonstrators slowly streamed through downtown Dallas streets, reciting chants and carrying a sea of protest signs criticizing an immigration policy from President Donald Trump.

Protesters on Saturday chanted, “Vote them out” and “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here” along the march route, which began outside Dallas City Hall.

The rally is among hundreds across the U.S. urging the Trump administration to reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Ratisha Smith, 35, walked with her 6-year-old son. Smith said she was protesting the separations and wants to see families back together.

She says hearing reports of young immigrant children taken from their family pushed her to protest, calling it was the last straw.

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1:45 p.m.

People symbolically wearing foil blankets are among over 4,000 people at a boisterous rally in downtown Denver.

U.S. authorities gave similar blankets to children they separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. The rally Saturday is one of hundreds across the U.S. urging the Trump administration to reunite families.

Brenda Villa of Commerce City, Colorado, says “you want to have faith” that President Donald Trump’s administration will do so as promised.

Protesters held signs saying, “Keep the kids, deport the racists,” and “Break walls, build families.”

Joan Culwell of the city of Littleton says she had never been to a protest but decided to go after first lady Melania Trump recently wore a coat that read, “I really don’t care, do u?” while traveling to visit migrant children.

Culwell wore a T-shirt saying, “I care!! Do you?”

___

1:05 p.m.

Thousands of protesters have gathered in the West Texas city of El Paso to condemn what speakers describe as unconstitutional overreach by the Trump administration and heavy-handed tactics by immigration agents.

Many of the protesters, monitored by several law enforcement personnel, converged Saturday on the international bridge that carries traffic between El Paso and Juarez, Mexico.

They carried signs with slogans like “We are all immigrants” as they chanted “Love, not hate, makes America great!” and other sayings.

The rally was one of several being held in Texas cities that included Dallas, Houston and McAllen.

___

12:55 p.m.

Several dozen protesters gathered in front of the Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, near a detention center where migrant children were being held in cages.

People held American and Texas flags and signs Saturday depicting a migrant father, mother and child as the Holy Family with haloed heads traveling through the desert.

Rio Grande Valley-based attorney Jennifer Harbury says parents separated from their children are being held in “prison-like” conditions in nearby Port Isabel.

She says children separated at the border should have alien registration numbers linked to their parents, but attorneys are “having terrible trouble finding these kids.”

___

12:40 p.m.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling for swift reunification of children and parents at a Massachusetts immigration rally.

Warren says Saturday, “This is about children held in cages.” She also said, “This is about mamas who want their children back.”

Thousands of people opposed to President Donald Trump’s controversial policy of separating migrant families are in Boston for two planned protests. Warren recently visited a Border patrol processing center in McAllen, Texas.

The “Rally against Family Separation” began with a morning march from City Hall to Boston Common, where a large rally is about to take place. The protest is timed with other protests nationwide and is also meant to oppose Trump’s ban on travelers from certain Muslim-majority nations.

Organizers are demanding local government agencies stop cooperating with federal immigration authorities.

___

12:25 p.m.

Thousands of people gathered in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, to protest the Trump administration’s immigration policies, calling for an end to the detention of immigrant families.

The crowd also included many who’ve been protesting Trump since his election in 2016. They voiced concerns about everything from abortion rights and the future makeup of the Supreme Court to what if any influence Russia might have on American politics.

Margarita Perez of Albuquerque held up a small Mexican flag as speakers addressed the crowd. Accompanied by her daughter, she said she was concerned about the children who were being detained and for those parents who did not know where their children were taken.

Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, a Democrat, told the crowd of his trip to the US-Mexico border, where he and other mayors were denied a tour of a shelter at the Tornillo port of entry outside of El Paso, Texas. He elicited a roar from the crowd when he said “We are here to push back, to resist.”

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12:05 p.m.

Thousands have gathering on a square across from the White House to protest the Trump administration’s immigration policy.

The crowds on Lafayette Square chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” as speakers denounced the separation of children from parents after they entered the U.S. illegally.

Protesters waved signs in English and Spanish. The slogan on one English sign demanded, “Where are the children?”

“Melania & Ivanka, stop the child abuse,” another slogan declared.

Protesters were due to march on the Justice Department later, in one of scores of immigration demonstrations around the country.

___

11:20 a.m.

Hundreds of protesters in downtown Dallas are calling for a clear plan to reunify families separated under President Donald Trump’s policy of separating immigrant families.

The protesters, many donning white T-shirts and clothing, carried protest signs and gathered in mass outside Dallas city hall.

One protest sign read, “Compassion not cruelty” while another said simply: “Vote”

Another sign said, “November is coming.”

Protest organizer Michelle Wentz says opposition to the policy has seemed to cross political party lines. She called it a “barbaric and inhumane” policy.

Protesters continued to stream in to the area as people registered demonstrators to vote.

The hum of side conversations gave way to chants of “We care!” outside city hall.

___

10:30 a.m.

Protesters are chanting “shame!” and singing “shut detention down!” at the kickoff of a New York City march denouncing the Trump administration’s policy of separating families of people caught crossing the border illegally.

Crowds gathered in sweltering 86-degree morning heat on Saturday at a Manhattan park before a planned march across the Brooklyn Bridge to Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn, near the federal courthouse. The crowd provided a refrain of “shame” as an organizer ran down a list of people marchers are blaming for the family separations.

Among their targets: President Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the agencies Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

___

9:40 a.m.

Thousands of people opposed to President Donald Trump’s controversial policy of separating migrant families are descending on Boston for two planned protests.

Saturday’s “Rally against Family Separation” begins with a morning march from City Hall to Boston Common, where a large rally will take place. The protest is timed with other protests nationwide and is also meant to oppose Trump’s ban on travelers from certain Muslim-majority nations.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Joe Kennedy III, both Democrats, will be among the attendees.

The second demonstration starts Saturday afternoon with a march from Wellington Common Park to the South Bay House of Correction, a county jail in Boston which houses immigrants apprehended by federal officials.

Organizers are demanding local government agencies stop cooperating with federal immigration authorities.

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1:10 a.m.

PORTLAND, Ore.—Liberal activists, parents and first-time protesters motivated by accounts of children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border plan to rally in hundreds of cities nationwide Saturday to press President Donald Trump’s administration to reunite the families quickly.

More than 600 marches could draw hundreds of thousands of people across the country, from immigrant-friendly cities like Los Angeles and New York City to conservative Appalachia and Wyoming under the banner Families Belong Together.

Though many who show up will be seasoned anti-Trump demonstrators, others will be new to immigration activism, including parents who say they feel compelled to show up after heart-wrenching accounts of children forcibly taken from their families as they crossed the border illegally. In Portland, Oregon, for example, several stay-at-home moms have organized their first rally while caring for young kids.

“I’m not a radical, and I’m not an activist,” said Kate Sharaf, a Portland co-organizer. “I just reached a point where I felt I had to do more.”

Immigrant advocacy groups say they’re thrilled — and surprised — to see the issue gaining traction among those not tied to immigration.

“Honestly, I am blown away. I have literally never seen Americans show up for immigrants like this,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, political director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents nannies, housekeepers and caregivers, many of whom are immigrants. “We just kept hearing over and over again, if it was my child, I would want someone to do something.”

Saturday’s rallies are getting funding and support from the American Civil Liberties Union, MoveOn.org, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and The Leadership Conference. But local organizers are shouldering on-the-ground planning, many of them women relying on informal networks established during worldwide women’s marches on Trump’s inauguration and its anniversary.

Tyler Houlton, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, welcomed interest in the immigration system and said only Congress has the power to change the law.

“We appreciate that these individuals have expressed an interest in and concern with the critical issue of securing our nation’s borders and enforcing our immigration laws,” Houlton said. “As we have indicated before, the department is disappointed and frustrated by our nation’s disastrous immigration laws and supports action.”

Trump took to Twitter on Saturday morning to show his support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement amid calls from some Democrats for major changes to immigration enforcement.

Tweeting from New Jersey, Trump said that Democrats “are making a strong push to abolish ICE, one of the smartest, toughest and most spirited law enforcement groups of men and women that I have ever seen.” He urged ICE agents to “not worry or lose your spirit.”

In Portland, Sharaf and other mothers who organized the rally hope to attract 5,000 people.

Right-wing activists with the group Patriot Prayer also have a permit to march later in the day Saturday and the Portland Police Bureau said Friday they planned to have a heavy police presence.

Sharaf and co-organizer Erin Conroy have coordinated with immigrant advocacy groups.

“This is not my wheelhouse,” Conroy said. “As far as I’m concerned, this is a national emergency that we all need to be focused on right now.”

That passion is heartening for the broader anti-Trump coalition, which hopes marches will attract people who have otherwise been on the sidelines, said David S. Meyer, a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has authored books on U.S. political protest.

“There are people who have all kinds of other grievances or gripes with the Trump administration and they’re quite happy to use this one as the most productive and salient for the moment,” he said.

Immigration attorney Linda Rivas said groups have met with U.S. authorities, congressional representatives and other leaders to discuss an escalating immigration crackdown that they say began decades ago. But the family separation policy has been a watershed for attracting a broader spectrum of demonstrators, she said.

“To finally have people on board wanting to take action, marching, taking to the streets, it’s been motivating for us as advocates because we have to keep going,” Rivas said.

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Taxin reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press reporter Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Bob Lentz in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

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Justice Kennedy Let the Sheepdogs Out

The minute Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, recriminations and hand-wringing could be heard and seen around the nation. Thousands of partisans on all sides of the political divide latched on to the U.S. Supreme Court as a means to “sheepdog” their ever-pliable followers. Hyperbole ruled the day as both Democrats and Republicans took to the airwaves to declare the end of the republic as we know it should the “other side” win.

The Democrats were first out of the chute as they ran faster than Usain Bolt to turn the upcoming judicial hearings into a carrot for their adherents and a stick to bash anyone who dares think for themselves. Bereft of any ideas and exposed as a party of courtiers, they have become a one-trick donkey that stokes fear in order to bamboozle their voters. Justice Kennedy retiring was a gift for the Democrats for this reason: They now have another way to coerce their base to stick with a party that works actively against Democratic voters’ self-interests.

Not to be outdone, the Republicans jumped on Kennedy’s retirement with gusto as they, too, sold dreams to their devotees to gin up votes and raise cash from gullible conservatives. Republican senators, congresspeople and conservative pundits were downright giddy at the thought of Donald Trump appointing a new justice who might tilt the Supreme Court to the right for the next generation or more. The dream was sold with a heaping of fear: This golden chance will become a missed opportunity if Republicans don’t keep the Senate and House in the midterm elections.

Overall, Kennedy’s pending retirement is a boondoggle for the politico-media complex. Yet again, complex issues that require somber thinking and rational conversations are turned into political footballs as rank opportunists take center stage to feign outrage and manufacture dissension. Abortion, guns, gay marriage and a litany of hot-button issues will be thrown as red meat to all sides to slice and dice America into a land of gang colors. This is how we are conditioned to accept a duopoly as a democracy and why the status quo remains fixed—regardless of how many Americans disapprove of the two-party racket that is passed off as a government.

Before you buy into the propaganda of partisan shills and get hoodwinked by Supreme Court rhetoric that will be flooding your social media and email inboxes for the next couple of months, please pause and consider these few things. First and foremost, the root of most injustices in America is economic inequality. On this front, the Supreme Court has not just been unhelpful. It has been the main driver of the disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

Time after time, liberal and conservative justices have sided with corporations and moneyed interests at a cost to the public. This is not a recent development. Throughout America’s history, the robbed judges have morphed into robbing juntas as they came down on the side of big business and stuck a knife in the backs of the poor, working and middle classes. The 14th Amendment—which was enacted to give standing to former slaves as citizens—was used by the Supreme Court in 1886 to give corporations legal personhood when it decided Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in favor of the oligarchy.

Remember when Mitt Romney said “corporations are people, my friend” and got mocked roundly by the press? As tone deaf as Mitt sounded, in a world according to the Supreme Court, corporations like McDonald’s and Amazon are, in fact, considered people and afforded the same legal rights as humans. The number of cases in which the Supreme Court sided with corporations is so numerous that it would take volumes of books to detail the full scale of nepotism that takes place in the federal judiciary.

In this continued abrogation of justice and the swindling of our nation, both parties and all nine justices have been compliant. The Citizens United decision brought to surface what has been happening below the radar for a long time—that our nation has been hijacked by plutocrats and shattered by kleptocrats.

Alas, the establishment does not want us to focus on this fact. So many swine are feeding from the trough that few dare point out we’re being led by the treasonous and the self-serving. Instead, we will be treated to a kabuki dance of irrelevance as Democrats and Republicans run around with their hair on fire to incite their loyalists. The drama will garner water-cooler talk and big ratings, because we are a nation addicted to politics.

Let me spoil the ending for you: No matter which party controls the House or Senate this coming election, Trump will get his Supreme Court pick, our policies of endless wars and wealth transference to the uber-wealthy will remain constant, and the hot-button issues of abortion, guns and gay marriage will not be resolved in either direction by the Supreme Court.

Why, you ask? Because these wedge issues are sources of fortunes for too many. And more important, they keep us perpetually distracted from realizing how we are being fleeced—irrespective of our differences.

America’s Regime Change Toolbox

Regime change here, regime change there. Officials argue for or against it and the press and media routinely report on it. There are good guys (the U.S. and its current allies) and bad ones. Although the list shifts—today North Korea is trustworthy, Canada is not—one thing is unchanged: Regime change is a basic part of the American toolbox.

Not surprisingly, mainstream voices don’t mention that regime change pushed by one country against another is illegal—although the U.S. ratified the United Nations Charter, which says that a country can intervene militarily only after it has been attacked.

Also, the U.S. signed the Organization of American States charter in 1948, which says, “Every state has the right to choose, without external interference, its political, economic and social system and must abstain from intervening in the affairs of another country.”

These laws are, of course, ignored. Since the end of the 19th century, when the U.S. embarked on empire, it has, one way or another, overthrown almost all the governments it didn’t like.

During the four-decade Cold War and afterward, U.S. plots were designed to remove regimes that had socialist/communist allies or took nationalist/independent positions that rebuffed American notions of global correctness. Often, the path involves connecting with a regime’s opponents.

It does it covertly, by inciting or supporting coups, or bankrolling/training forces opposed to a regime (as with the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s) that create enough chaos to push the regime out in elections.

It also does it overtly, sending in troops, as in the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Iraq, or with war games near the offending country: These are “joint exercises” such as the ones the U.S. stages with South Korea. Or it uses economic sanctions: In Iraq, U.N. sanctions adopted from 1990 to 2003 and enforced by the U.S. were said to have caused the death of 500,000 children (though the number is debated). In response, three U.N. humanitarian coordinators in Baghdad resigned. One, Hans Von Sponeck, called the sanctions “a human tragedy.”

Besides offing those in office, America meddles in elections to block regimes it would later want to overthrow. Dov Levin, a political scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, says the U.S. intervened in 81 elections from 1946 to 2000, including in Italy (1948), Japan (1950s and 1960s), the Philippines (1953), and Lebanon (1957). Levin says Russia came in second, but the difference isn’t even close: He says it intervened only in 1936 in the Spanish Civil War.

To discredit Italy’s Communist Party candidates who stood a good chance of winning the 1948 elections—because they were the backbone of the resistance during World War II—the CIA circulated millions of embarrassing forged letters. It also blanketed the country with radio broadcasts and leaflets warning of catastrophe if the Communists won.

The list of interventions is long. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. toppled elected leaders in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965-1967), the Dominican Republic (1965), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1973), Grenada (1983), Haiti (1991) and Ukraine (2014). If the list were backdated to the end of the 19th century, it would be twice as long.

It also ousted non-elected governments—in Panama (1941 and 1989), Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011).

Until the 1990s, most regime change strategies were secret. The covert methods, which were quite creative, included explosive cigars, poisoned food, ballpoint pens and even a scuba diving suit, to kill Fidel Castro. To oust Indonesia’s President Sukarno in 1965—because he was a nationalist pushing an independent path—CIA agents made a pornographic film with someone wearing a Sukarno mask, to discredit him. It wasn’t used, but the idea had some panache. Resources also included assassination squads.

Documents released by the National Security Archive in 2013 reveal the mindset of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who secretly helped topple Salvador Allende, Chile’s elected president, in 1973. In a conversation with President Nixon, Kissinger was perfectly clear: “The example of a successful Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on … other parts of the world … [and] significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.”

If caught, the CIA mantra is to admit nothing—a routine task, since staff take a course called “Deception and Denial.” And current and past White Houses hide behind “plausible deniability.” Us? We know nothing!

After the mid-1990s, secrecy has often been scrapped. In a 1998 New York Times op-ed, William Kristol and Robert Kagan proposed a new playbook to deal with Saddam Hussein. They wrote that the U.S. needed “to bring his regime down … to ensure America’s greatness in the next century.”

Kagan and Kristol were part of a larger group, the Project for a New American Century, that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Richard Perle, all of whom joined the Bush II administration and championed regime change. No need to pussy-foot around: The U.S. should intervene around the globe when necessary to remove regimes that rejected Washington’s roadmap.

To keep the record straight, not all U.S. schemes succeeded—those launched against the Bolshevik regime (starting in 1918), or the leaders in Cuba and Venezuela, up to the present, did not.

Today’s targets are Iran and, until a few weeks ago, North Korea. The president, along with Mike Pompeo, the new U.S. Secretary of State, and John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, are utterly upfront. Do X and Y, and we won’t attack you. Don’t, and you can expect the worst. Pompeo suggests the U.S. could adopt the Libya solution, which it fashioned in 2011 (Gadhafi gave up his nuclear stock and was later killed in the street).

Regime change is the rule. Rudolph Giuliani, now Trump’s main legal maven, recently assured an anti-Iran activist group that “we have a president who is as committed to regime change as we are.”

No matter who is in the White House, some things don’t change.

Republicans Propose Using Online Sales Tax Money for New Tax Cuts

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — A U.S. Supreme Court ruling making it easier to collect online sales taxes could yield billions of dollars for state and local governments — if they decide to keep it.

Rather than spend the windfall on schools, prisons or other government services, some Republican governors and lawmakers are proposing to give it away in the form of tax cuts.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, running for re-election this year, has suggested the extra revenue could be used to expand tax breaks for seniors or households with children. Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, also on the November ballot, wants to put it toward property tax relief.

Some Kansas lawmakers are eyeing a reduction in the food sales tax; the Tennessee House speaker wants to lower the state’s 7 percent sales tax rate; and a Missouri lawmaker plans to sponsor an individual income tax reduction to negate the sales tax expansion.

“To just take that revenue would be a tax increase,” said Missouri Sen. Andrew Koenig, echoing the reasoning of many tax-adverse Republicans leery of simply spending or saving the expected influx.

The court ruled June 21 that South Dakota could enforce a law compelling many out-of-state businesses to collect taxes on sales made to its residents. The ruling overturned a decades-old precedent stating that businesses without a physical presence in a state — like a store, office or warehouse — didn’t have to collect sales taxes on behalf of the state. In such cases, customers technically were responsible for paying the tax, but most didn’t.

As online commerce has grown, some large retailers such as Amazon already had begun collecting sales taxes for all 45 states that charge them. But others with a physical presence in only a few places haven’t been doing so.

How quickly that will change could vary by state. In the past two years, 15 states have enacted laws attempting to require out-of-state companies to collect sales taxes, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Many other states may have to wait until legislatures reconvene in 2019 to set specific requirements for out-of-state sellers. Most states already have set their budgets for the 2019 fiscal year.

State and local governments stand to gain $8 billion to $13 billion annually by collecting taxes from all remote sellers, according to a report issued last fall by the Government Accountability Office. Other estimates have been even higher.

Most states will see revenue gains equaling 1 percent to 2 percent of their total state tax collections, though states that rely more on sales taxes instead of income taxes could gain more, said Moody’s Investors Service.

In Tennessee, which ranks high in sales tax reliance, Republican legislative leaders already are discussing ways to offset the anticipated surge in revenue with a new tax reduction.

“I think it’s an opportunity for us to do something that I’ve wanted to do for some time now, which is lower our sales tax” rate, House Speaker Beth Harwell, who is running for governor, said during a recent candidate debate.

Tennessee’s Democratic gubernatorial candidates suggested the money could go toward higher pay for public school teachers.

How states decide to use sales tax revenue may depend on their overall financial situation and could be complicated by varying estimates of how much to expect, said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

“The amount of money is uncertain, and that would suggest states would want to be a little careful before they go and spend it,” he said.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, has said he will ask lawmakers to earmark the extra revenue for transportation.

In Kansas, lawmakers also may face pressure to use at least part of the money to comply with a court order to boost school funding, said House Taxation Committee Chairman Rep. Steven Johnson, a Republican.

In neighboring Missouri, however, the Supreme Court ruling could provide justification to continue a tax-cutting spree. A corporate income tax cut was signed into law in June. Legislation deepening an already planned individual income tax cut is pending before the governor. And Koenig said he will sponsor a bill during the 2019 session to use the online sales tax collections to offset yet another proposed cut to the individual income tax rate.

In some states, the ruling could lead to automatic tax cuts.

A 2016 South Dakota law raising the sales tax rate from 4 percent to 4.5 percent requires it to be scaled back by one-tenth of a percent for every additional $20 million the state reaps, if it’s able to collect from out-of-state online retailers. The rollback is likely to be a top issue next legislative session. Though a Democratic senator wants to use the money to reduce food sales taxes, Republican Sen. Jeff Partridge, who sponsored the provision, said his goal remains to “give the money back to the people.”

A 2013 Wisconsin law mandates an equal cut in state income taxes if federal law requires the collection of online sales tax. Walker said his administration is examining whether the Supreme court ruling triggers that provision.

“One way or the other,” Walker said, “we’d want to get that back to the hardworking taxpayers.”

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Associated Press writers Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey; Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tennessee; and James Nord in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, contributed to this report.