Chris Hedges's Blog, page 551

When It Comes to Visionary Peacemakers, Trump Is No Henry Wallace

Some progressives want to glorify Donald Trump as a peacemaker trying to end a new Cold War. When I see this, I think of how badly the president compares with a little-remembered opponent of the past Cold War: Henry Wallace, who resolutely fought for liberal causes as vice president of the United States from 1941 to 1945 and as a Progressive Party presidential candidate in 1948.

Why recall Wallace now? Because he was everything Trump isn’t. What Wallace advocated should be a benchmark for progressives judging Trump today. It’s important, at this moment in time, to go back in history and consider the Progressive Party candidate of 70 years ago.

This column isn’t addressed to the majority who carry the progressive banner. I am thinking of the minority who are being seduced by Trump.

Old-time progressives still recall crowding into Wallace’s 1948 Los Angeles rally at Gilmore Field, a major event of post-World War II politics. A few years ago, I met Bert Will, a main organizer of the event, and he reminisced with pride about what the Wallace movement meant.

Wallace got less than 3 percent of the popular vote, but, as Occidental College professor Peter Dreier wrote in HuffPost, he “framed the debate between progressives and conservatives.”

“Wallace was ahead of his time on most issues,” Dreier wrote. “He opposed the Cold War, the arms race with the Soviet Union and racial segregation. He was a strong advocate of labor unions, national health insurance, public works jobs and women’s equality. … He would have been, without question, the most radical president in American history.”

Influenced by Democratic conservatives, Southern segregationists and big-city bosses, Franklin D. Roosevelt dumped Wallace from the 1944 ticket in favor of Harry Truman.

Wallace was prescient. Dreier wrote, “In April, 1944, Wallace penned an article in [T]he New York Times, ‘The Danger of American Fascism,’ that warned about the growing right-wing movement in the United States—words that resonate today with the emergence of extremists like the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party and the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party. Wallace wrote: ‘The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. … Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.'”

This accurately describes the Trump administration.

But first, let’s be fair and consider Trump’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Is it better to talk, even if the results are vague, than for Trump and Kim to be hurling nuclear threats at each other? Wasn’t the meeting such a great accomplishment that it overwhelms the harm Trump is doing to the country?

Not if the praise of Trump ignores the increasingly brutal treatment of thousands of undocumented immigrants—adults and children—seeking refuge from their dangerous home countries. Many of the children, as has been well documented, are being taken from parents, in some cases from mothers’ arms. These children are then locked up, many with inadequate care. Targeted at Latinos, the operation brushes aside immigrants’ few rights.

This operation smacks of the racism that characterizes the Trump administration. Such racism is as vile as that suffered by Latino youths during the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots during World War II and by Japanese-Americans imprisoned at the beginning of that conflict.

That’s not all. We progressives shouldn’t forget health care as a basic human right, a progressive goal since before Wallace. Trump is working through the courts and Congress to wipe out the Affordable Care Act. This would deprive millions, including those with pre-existing conditions, of medical care.

Rather than mention these unpleasant facts, Trump’s liberal defenders are giving us a rosy picture of the Singapore meeting. Here is a sampling:

Lindsay Koshgarian, who directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in a piece published on OtherWords: “Trump’s foreign policy instincts have had me white-knuckled for the past year and a half. But against a backdrop of possible nuclear war, it would be overly cynical not to recognize the meeting’s potential for good.

“At best, the meeting set the stage for North Korea’s denuclearization—and possibly even an end to the nearly 70-year-old, stalemated Korean War. If you’re against war, this is a good development.”

Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer wrote: “President Trump gave peace a chance like few presidents before him, and if his critics cannot respect that fact, shame on them. … That’s the real news here, a profound example of risking peace instead of war, and it should be celebrated in a nonpartisan spirit as a victory for sanity in world politics, whatever one’s prejudice against President Trump.”

Tim Shorrock’s report in The Nation was headlined, “Trump Meets Kim, Averting Threat of Nuclear War—and US Pundits Are Furious.”

Here’s how he described the event: “The mood was electric, and the reporters from Japan, Vietnam, Germany, Russia, France, and many other countries seemed genuinely excited about the prospects of peace in Korea. The feeling of camaraderie in covering a historic event was palpable; frequently during my two days there, reporters from one country could be seen interviewing crews from another.

“At the nearby White House press center at the Marriott, the atmosphere was far more subdued.”

In an interview in The Nation with radio talk show host Jon Weiner, historian and University of Chicago lecturer Bruce Cumings said, “There’s a silver lining in having Trump as president: He is untethered to anybody, especially the Washington establishment, and in a curious way he may be able to make a lot of progress when all those other folks would raise all kinds of problems and insist on a laundry list of all the things North Korea has to do to please us. We seem to be in a different realm now. I don’t think much was accomplished at the summit, but Trump is a person who likes to get to know people, and he seemed to cotton up to Kim Jong Un. I’m fairly optimistic at this point.”

In the face of all this support, should we give the guy some credit? Should we forget about the plight of the immigrants for the moment? Is it churlish to criticize what may one day be known as “The Miracle in Singapore”?

I think it’s our duty to bring up the treatment of immigrants at the border. And it’s not wrong to keep reminding everyone of Trump’s efforts to kill health care guarantees. And there’s more. Before Trump signed the skeleton Singapore agreement, he withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, designed to control and reduce the nuclear threat from Iran, a nation with a more dangerous war-making potential than North Korea.

Professor Juan Cole, a noted Middle East expert, wrote, “It is likely that Trump’s violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal signed between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, was intended to set the stage for a push to contain Iran.”

That—or Iranian regime change—is the goal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By breaking the Iran deal, Trump was currying favor with him and his American Jewish right-wing Republican supporters. In taking their side, he is backing a cause opposed by most progressives and increasing the possibility of Middle Eastern combat that would probably draw us in.

Oh, well. Make a deal with Kim, make a deal with Netanyahu, make a deal with Putin. It’s all the same to Trump.

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‘The Good Fight’ Shows Us a Better Reality on TV

Angry, uncivil tweets pass for leadership and news. Billionaire lawmakers yawn at gaping inequality. Administration officials lie incessantly, as if for sport.

Meanwhile, the makers of CBS’ terrific tragicomic legal show “The Good Fight” pack their plots to the breaking point, with storylines involving issues ranging from immigration to impeachment, police brutality to states’ rights, everyday infidelity to #MeToo infractions, hacker/bot abuses to dubious legal ethics.

But our nation’s breaking point is largely what this show explores. The still-life success symbols and caricatured leaders in its title sequence warn of a possible explosion in every episode.

There’s an absurdist whiff to the ensuing bedlam, and the writers help their characters escape tight story corners a bit too often, à la deus ex machina. Nevertheless, the show presents an apt response to the roiling ghost-of-Roger-Ailes world and a cunning cross-examination of our once-and-future democracy.

Beyond integrating unpresidential performance politics with other callous actions of America’s most powerful classes, this thrumming series delivers something significant, unique and long overdue in television: a racially integrated, gender-balanced dramatic landscape. It has little in common with the world that most American professionals have had the opportunity to take part in during their lifetimes—but much to suggest about our potential for cooperative harmony.

The show’s majority African-American law firm, Reddick, Boseman and Lockhart, is no nirvana. But its creators have imagined a microcosm that is pragmatic and mostly plausible as well as intelligent, competitive and committed to justice. Most importantly, it demonstrates how and why to not give up any fight after a first-round loss.

Set in Chicago, like its soapier precursor “The Good Wife,” the series’ location is demographically believable, if not quite accurate. (Chicago is roughly a third black, a third white and a third Hispanic. Hispanic representation on the show is minimal.) It’s also a timely setting, especially regarding issues involving the law, its enforcement, and race. While not central to the series, the persistent, unsolved status of these problems is integral to the show’s weave of critical American themes. It is established early on, for example, that the firm largely made its name winning police misconduct cases.

What sets “The Good Fight” apart, and ahead of many headline-oriented shows, is that creators Robert King, Michelle King and Phil Alden Robinson have invented an arena that is aspirational in its makeup and its mission. (Aspirational for anyone who roots for equality, democracy and the ideal of forming a more perfect union.) And although the characters do not pretend colorblindness, they are written and played as if they work in an essentially ethical meritocracy, in which each stands on solid, supported ground—at least when within the interior boundaries of the firm’s offices.

Inside, they strategize about how to level the landscape for their clients and ways to win compensation for victims of bias and lawbreaking of all kinds. Outside its glass walls, the firm’s black team members again become susceptible to the perils of the unjust, unequal society in which they, and we, live.

This hyper-textured imaginarium plays out as a kind of about-time, duh, cultural moment. Because, of course, life in these Unites States could be less rancorous, as well as more humane and productive, if we’d stop denying history and welcome the strengths and advantages that diverse experiences bring to almost any situation. But as a response to “trumpy” times, the series is a weekly repudiation of the unleashed racial animosity that is arguably a foundation on which the president built his campaign and won, and which has become stridently pervasive since the election.

The opposite of a cynical dream team, the show’s legal firm remains a dream thus far. (Hollywood should take notes, because its culture machine constructs the mirror through which much of America sees itself. More often than not, it dreams of winning awards rather than equality.)

Considering the dark and devious forces with which the fictional firm wrangles, the show’s tone is surprisingly buoyant, sometimes madcap and often very funny. Not since the film “Bulworth” has so much humor been wrought from dramatizing racial politics. The filmmakers seem committed to levity, mining laughs in inventive and timeless ways, from onomatopoeic character names to artfully timed expletives.

And is using magic mushrooms the way to manage being sentient in these trying times? The writers slowly unwind this joke into a serious question, through Diane Lockhart’s professional, political, and private dilemmas. As Diane, whom “The Good Wife” watchers will remember, Christine Baranski melds smoothly with the talented acting ensemble and gets just enough screen time to warrant her top billing. She appears to be infused with bursts of energy as she rises from the dust of her previous stuffier life, microdosing mushrooms, re-evaluating her choices and searching for her own strength as she watches the country deteriorate. Seeing her resurgence, one argument at a time with a steely level gaze—as when she refutes weaselly Trump appointee Mike Kresteva’s (Matthew Perry) lies—is a thrill. For her, fighting the good fight becomes invigorating and transformative.

The series’ production values are stellar, and watching it is like enjoying a dessert that’s also nutritious. But the costume design is in a cinematic class all its own, boldly elevating theme, conflict and character. The colors, combos and textures are often wild and inspired, always reflective of subtext and personality. For the firm’s leader, Adrian Boseman, and its top investigator, Jay Dipersia (Delroy Lindo and Nyambi Nyambi, perfectly cast), the clothing choices align with their converging and diverging spirits and styles. Adrian dons elegant three-piece suits of all shades, punctuated with joyful tropical colors; Jay stays subtle in current earth-toned styles. Both are fair-minded and far-thinking, committed to the team and the fight.

The female characters’ strengths and challenges correlate to all aspects of wardrobe. Indomitable Lucca Quinn (Cush Jumbo) speeds between legal crises and colleague rescues in mixed patterns, miniskirts and flats, sure of her brilliance. And crazy-like-a-fox Elspeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) frequently throws the seriousness of the moment off balance to compliment friend and foe alike—on earrings, jackets, lipstick, you name it—each time with a psychedelic zest in her voice to match her embroidered blazers.

A refreshing detail is that the unbalancing four- and five-inch heels seen so often on today’s screens are less visible in “The Good Fight.” The woman most often shod in this form of self-torture is the greenest of the group, Maia (Rose Leslie) who, luckily, is also Diane’s goddaughter.

Diane appears less upscale-matron, more devil-may-care maven in this spinoff, as when she wears a knockout black-and-blue plaid jacket that’s haphazardly patched, much like her new life. Attorney Barbara Kolstadt (Erica Tazel) assumes the role of matron, in wardrobe and carriage, and rarely misses a chance to remind Diane of her place, despite Adrian’s admonitions. (Their competitive conflicts present opportunities to look closely at power and how it’s maneuvered.)

So, three tips of a fabulous hat to lead costume designer Daniel Lawson and his team, who have designed, found or retro-engineered a fiery, funky visual pallet of textiles, patterns and shades that correlate to the range of richness our multi-colored, diverse America offers. The legal defenders they dress don’t always win, but they’re committed, wicked smart and ever resourceful.

By the season two finale, the story lines have careened and twisted into a dangerous mess of chaos and cruelty, just like America today. Even a new baby, usually symbolic of hope in narrative fiction, is born to Lucca in a storm of crazy cursing, and his homecoming leaves us off-kilter because his parents just can’t come together right now.

“The Good Fight” may not be transformative, but it’s invigorating and inspiring entertainment for our unnaturally disastrous times.

The U.S. Has Split Up Families Throughout Its History

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Some critics of the forced separation of Latino children from their migrant parents say the practice is unprecedented. But it’s not the first time the U.S. government has split up families, detained children or allowed others to do so.

Throughout American history, during times of war and unrest, authorities have cited various reasons and laws to take children away from their parents. Here are some examples:

SLAVERY

Before abolition, children of black slaves were born into slavery and could be sold by owners at will. Black women could do little to stop the sale of children and often never saw them again after they were sent away.

Owners also split apart parents who had no legal rights to prevent their sale. To resist, slave families regularly ran away together but faced harsh physical punishment, even death, if caught by slave hunters.

Last week, both White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Attorney Jeff Sessions cited the Bible in defending the policy of forced separation of Latino migrant children. Sessions referenced Romans 13, which urges readers “to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.” The same passage was cited before the Civil War to justify slavery, to allow slave hunters to return runaway slaves to their owners and to pull slave children away from mothers.

NATIVE AMERICAN BOARDING SCHOOLS

After the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, when the Army slaughtered 150 Lakota men, women and children in the last chapter of America’s long Indian wars, authorities forced Native American families to send their children to government- or church-run boarding schools. The objective, as Carlisle Indian Industrial School founder Capt. Richard H. Pratt put it, was to “kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

At 150 or so Indian schools around the country, officials made Native American children cut their hair and outlawed all Native American languages. They forced children to adopt Christianity and attempted to “Americanize” children by introducing them to white customs and white history.

Native American children returned home almost unrecognizable to their parents.

Still, some children resisted the boarding school experience by setting fires to buildings, running away or taking their own lives. Others continued to speak their native language in secret. Some Navajo “code talkers,” who used a code based on their native language to transmit messages in World War II, were products of military-style boarding schools as children.

POVERTY

During the early 1900s, states sometimes pulled children from poor families and placed them in orphanages. But reformers in the 1920s and 1930s began promoting the idea that children should not be separated from their families, according to “In the Shadow Of the Poorhouse: A Social History Of Welfare In America” by Michael B. Katz.

However, local and state authorities still used poverty as a reason to take children away from Native American and black families, McClain said. Sometimes the ordered separation came over concerns about a parent’s mental health.

Malcolm X in his autobiography recalled welfare workers coming to take him and his siblings away as children from his struggling single mother after their father, an outspoken black preacher, was mysteriously murdered. The future civil rights leader lived in various foster homes and boarding houses. His mother, without her children, had a breakdown and was sent to a mental institution.

IMMIGRATION

During the Great Depression, local authorities in California and Texas participated in a mass deportation of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans whom they blamed for the economic downturn. Between 500,000 and 1 million Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans were pushed out of the country during the 1930s repatriation, as the removal is sometimes called.

Some families hid children away from relatives in the U.S. to prevent them from being sent to a foreign country they had never visited, according to Francisco Balderrama, a Chicano studies professor at California State University-Los Angeles and co-author of “Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s.”

Many families felt they were being forced to separate from their children, who were U.S. citizens.

“And many children,” Balderrama said, “never saw their parents again.”

JAPANESE INTERNMENT CAMPS

Starting in 1942, when the U.S. was at war with Japan, around 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were ordered by the U.S. government into prison camps around the country. An estimated 30,000 were children.

The 1999 documentary “Children of the Camps” highlighted the trauma children faced while being detained with their grief-stricken parents. Some older children waited to turn 18 so they could volunteer to fight for the U.S. to prove their families’ loyalty despite not wanting to be separated from their parents. Diaries and later interviews show many of those who went into the military did so reluctantly.

Kiyoshi K. Muranaga, whose family was interned at Granada Relocation Center in Colorado, joined the U.S. Army but was killed in Italy. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Bill Clinton.

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U.S. Government Meddling Machine Boasts of ‘Laying the Groundwork for Insurrection’ in Nicaragua

While some corporate media outlets have portrayed the violent protest movement gripping Nicaragua as a progressive grassroots upswell, the country’s own student leaders have suggested otherwise.

In early June, Nicaragua’s leading young activists went on a junket to Washington, DC, on the dime of the US government-funded right-wing advocacy group Freedom House. The Nicaraguan student leaders were there to beseech Donald Trump and other right-wing US government officials to help them in their fight against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

On the excursion to the US capital, the young activists posed for photo-ops with some of the most notorious neoconservatives in the US Congress: Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The Nicaraguan student leaders were also shepherded to meetings with top officials from the State Department and the US government soft power organization USAID. There, they were reassured that they would have Washington’s full-throated support.

A month before the student protesters’ meetings with ultra-conservative lawmakers in Washington, a publication funded by the US government’s regime change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), bluntly asserted that organizations backed by the NED have spent years and millions of dollars “laying the groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua.

This article openly boasting of US meddling was published in the Latin America-focused news website Global Americans, and was authored by US academic Benjamin Waddell, the academic director of the School for International Training in Nicaragua. Following publication of this piece, Global Americans replaced the term “insurrection” with the more innocuous word “change.” The original headline can however still be seen in the article’s URL.

Despite the cosmetic alteration, Waddell’s article offers a remarkably candid assessment of the impact of the National Endowment for Democracy’s sustained investments in Nicaraguan civil society. The author’s conclusions inadvertently echoed those of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his supporters, who have framed the protests as a carefully staged plot backed to the hilt by Washington.

“International press has depicted the rapid escalation of civil unrest in Nicaragua as a spontaneous explosion of collective discontent, triggered by the government’s changes to its insolvent social security system and rooted in more than a decade of authoritarian rule by the Ortega-Murillo family,” Waddell wrote. “And while the underlying causes of the turmoil are rooted in government mismanagement and corruption, it’s becoming more and more clear that the U.S. support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.”

In another striking passage, Waddell concluded, “the NED’s current involvement in nurturing civil society groups in Nicaragua sheds light on the power of transnational funding to influence political outcomes in the 21st century.”

A history of meddling

The NED is a leading agent of US soft power that has meddled in other countries’ affairs since its founding at the height of the Cold War, in 1983. Its first success took place in Nicaragua, where it incubated anti-Sandinista media outfits like the La Prensa newspaper through a cut-out, PRODEMCA, that was also covertly funded by allies of Oliver North.

In 1990, the Sandinistas were defeated at the polls by the right-wing candidate Violeta Chamorro, whose family happened to own La Prensa. Chamorro’s victory represented the culmination of nearly $16 million dollars in NED grants to anti-Sandinista political parties and media outlets.

“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” Allen Weinstein, a founder of the NED, commented in 1991.

In the years that followed, the NED and its partners have helped swing elections for right-wing neoliberal candidates in Russia and Mongolia in 1996; fomented a coup that drove Haiti‘s democratically elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide from power; and directed millions towards dismantling Venezuela‘s socialist government, an ongoing effort complimented by crushing US sanctions.

The protests that have erupted in Nicaragua have brought the NED’s influence back into focus all over again. According to Waddell, the NED has spent $4.1 million in the country since 2014, helping grow 54 groups into major players on the political scene and “laying the groundwork for insurrection.”

Me reuní con líderes de la Coalición Universitaria de Nicaragua y Migueliuth Sandoval, Viuda de Gahona, hablamos sobre las atrocidades cometidas por el régimen de #Ortega. Apoyo su lucha por la democracia y la libertad en #Nicaragua pic.twitter.com/10he6P6E6P

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 6, 2018

The US-backed network behind the protests

The unrest that has paralyzed Nicaragua was triggered by the announcement by President Daniel Ortega of reforms to the nearly bankrupt social security system. The International Monetary Fund and a local business umbrella group had insisted on changes that would have raised the retirement age and gradually privatized health clinics, threatening some of the most significant gains of the Sandinista revolution.

When Ortega countered with a proposal that would have demanded a greater contribution into the system from businesses and retirees, with business owners paying the lion’s share, a sector of the public exploded with outrage. The angry reaction to Ortega’s plan, reinforced with intensive coverage by opposition media sources, became the spark for rolling protests that have set the country on fire — literally, in many cases.

The most visible faces of the anti-Ortega movement have not been retirees impacted by the social security reforms, but urban, politically unaffiliated students seeking a total victory. They have forged an alliance with the traditional right-wing, pro-business opponents of Sandinismo, along with a marginal sector of former Sandinistas alienated by Ortega’s rapid consolidation of power.

Meanwhile, masked men toting homemade mortars and firearms have formed the front line of the tranque road blocks that have already drained Nicaragua’s economy of some $250 million in revenue. To date, some 170 people have been killed in the chaos. As the death toll mounts on both sides, talk of a new civil war seems like a more than remote possibility.

Muy inspirada en reunirme c Victor y Zayda, valientes líderes universitarios q anhelan una #Nicaragua #libre y #democrática. Estos estudiantes representan la voz de tantos jóvenes en protestar y denunciar la violencia del régimen de #Ortega. #EEUU los escucha y los vamos a apoyar pic.twitter.com/hOW98xLoHJ

— Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (@RosLehtinen) June 6, 2018

Since the unrest began, the NED has taken measures to conceal the names of the groups it funds in Nicaragua on the grounds that they could face reprisals from the government. But the main recipients of backing from Washington were already well known in the country.

Hagamos Democracia, or Let’s Make Democracy, is the largest recipient of NED funding, reaping over $525,000 in grants since 2014. The group’s president, Luciano Garcia, who oversees a network of reporters and activists, has declared that Ortega has turned Nicaragua into a “failed state” and demanded his immediate resignation.

The Managua-based Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policy (IEEPP) has received at least $260,000 from the NED since 2014. The grants have been earmarked to support the IEEPP’s work in training activists on “encouraging debate and generating information on security and violence.” The funding has also covered efforts to monitor the “increased presence of Russia and China in the region,” an obvious priority for Washington.

As soon as the violent protests against Ortega were ignited, IEEPP director Felix Mariadiaga brought his agenda out into the open. A former World Economic Forum Young Global Leader educated at Yale and Harvard, Mariadaga was hailed by La Prensa for having “sweated, bled and cried alongside the young students who have led the protests in Nicaragua that continue from April until the end of May.”

Asked by La Prensa if there was any way out of the violence without regime change, Mariadaga was blunt: “I can not imagine a way out at this moment that does not include a transition to democracy without Daniel Ortega.”

“We have given ourselves a terrible image”

This June, Mariadaga led an opposition delegation to Washington to denounce Ortega’s rule before the General Assembly of the Organization for American States. He was joined by Anibal Toruno, director of Radio Dario — another longtime recipient of support from NED (PDF), and one of the key hubs of anti-Ortega media in the Nicaraguan city of Leon.

While Mariadaga was in Washington, he was charged by the Nicaraguan police with overseeing an organized criminal network that has murdered several people during the violent unrest that has gripped the country. Mariadaga slammed the allegations as a “political persecution” and a “ridiculous accusation,” but postponed his return to Nicaragua. The US State Department backed him up with a statement of vehement support.

At the same time, a group of Nicaraguan student leaders of the anti-Ortega protests were in Washington to lobby the Trump administration for help in bringing their country’s leader down.

Among the US officials to receive the students was USAID director Mark Green. “We need to stand with those who are standing up for things that we need to believe in,” Green said of the students, in an interview with McClatchy.

Aside from NED, USAID has been the most active promoter of regime change against socialist-oriented governments in Latin America. In Nicaragua, USAID’s budget topped $5.2 million in 2018, with most of the funding directed towards training civil society and media organizations.

The Nicaraguan students’ junket to Washington was paid for by Freedom House, a US government-funded NED partner whose agenda typically aligns with the neoconservative wing of the American foreign policy establishment.

Freedom House crafted an itinerary for the students that culminated with a photo-op with some of the most hawkish Republicans in Washington: Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

Back in Managua, another prominent student leader, Harley Morales, reeled in disgust at his peers’ appearance on Capitol Hill. “It was terrible,” Morales told the newspaper El Faro. “They (Cruz, Rubio, and Ros-Lehtinen) are the extreme Republican right. We are very unhappy with this trip; they were paid for by the United States and an agenda was imposed on them. We have given ourselves a terrible image.”

Though he hoped for “an error correction plan,” Morales conceded that the grip of powerful outside interests on the student protesters was tightening. “All movements now have advisors,” he lamented. “Movers and shakers. Children of politicians, businessmen… They have a very clear political line.”

 

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Drawings Expose Sexual Torture in UAE-Run Prisons in Yemen

CAIRO—The 15 officers who arrived at the prison in southern Yemen hid their faces behind head dresses, but their accents were clearly foreign—from the United Arab Emirates. They lined up the detainees and ordered them to undress and lie down. The officers then searched the anal cavity of each prisoner, claiming that they were looking for contraband cell phones.

The men screamed and wept. Those who resisted were threatened by barking dogs and beaten until they bled.

Hundreds of detainees suffered similar sexual abuse during the event on March 10 at Beir Ahmed prison in the southern city of Aden, according to seven witnesses interviewed by The Associated Press. Descriptions of the mass abuse offer a window into a world of rampant sexual torture and impunity in UAE-controlled prisons in Yemen.

The UAE is a key U.S. ally whose secret prisons and widespread torture were exposed by an AP investigation last June. The AP has since identified at least five prisons where security forces use sexual torture to brutalize and break inmates.

The AP first asked the Pentagon about grave rights abuses committed by the UAE one year ago. But despite well-documented reports of torture reported by the AP, human rights groups and even the United Nations, Marine Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the U.S. has seen no evidence of detainee abuse in Yemen.

“U.S. forces are required to report credible allegations of detainee abuse,” he said. “We have received no credible allegations that would substantiate the allegations put forth in your line of question/story.”

U.S. officials have acknowledged that American forces receive intelligence from UAE partners and have participated in interrogations in Yemen. But Rankine-Galloway said he could not comment on intelligence sharing with partners.

“Department of Defense personnel are expected to adhere to the highest standards of personal and professional conduct,” he said.

UAE officials did not respond to requests for comment.

In Yemen’s three-year civil war, UAE forces that are purportedly fighting on behalf of Yemen’s government have overtaken wide swaths of territory, towns and cities in the south. They have swept up hundreds of men into a network of at least 18 hidden prisons on suspicion of being al-Qaida or Islamic State militants. The prisoners are held without charges or trials.

Witnesses said Yemeni guards working under the direction of Emirati officers have used various methods of sexual torture and humiliation. They raped detainees while other guards filmed the assaults. They electrocuted prisoners’ genitals or hung rocks from their testicles. They sexually violated others with wooden and steel poles.

“They strip you naked, then tie your hands to a steel pole from the right and the left so you are spread open in front of them. Then the sodomizing starts,” said one father of four.

From inside the prison in Aden, detainees smuggled letters and drawings to the AP about the sexual abuse. The drawings were made on plastic plates with blue ink pen.

The artist told the AP that he was detained last year and has been in three different prisons. “They tortured me without even accusing me of anything. Sometimes I wish they would give me a charge so I can confess and end this pain,” he said. “The worst thing about it is that I wish for death every day and I can’t find it.”

He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of further abuse.

The drawings show a man hanging naked from chains while he is being electrocuted, another inmate on the floor surrounded by snarling dogs as several people kick him, and graphic depictions of anal rape.

“Naked after beating,” one Arabic caption says. Another drawing shows a man’s rectum being forced open.

“This is how they search the prisoners,” the caption reads.

Of the five prisons where the AP found sexual torture, four are in Aden, according to three Yemeni security and military officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

One is at the Buriqa base — the headquarters for the Emirati forces. A second is at the house of Shallal Shaye, the Aden security chief closely allied with the UAE, and a third is at a nightclub-turned-prison called Wadah. The fourth is at Beir Ahmed, where the March atrocities occurred.

U.S. personnel have been seen at the Buriqa base, along with Colombian mercenaries, according to two prisoners and two security officials. The detainees could not say whether the Americans, some of whom wear military uniforms, are members of the U.S. government or mercenaries.

Yemen’s war began in 2015, after Iranian-backed Houthi rebels took over much of northern Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, and forced out the government of Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. The Saudi-led coalition, armed and backed by the United States, has sought to bomb the rebels into submission with a relentless air campaign in support of the Hadi government.

But it is the UAE that has taken the lead in southern Yemen.

The humiliation of the entire prison population in March may have been triggered by a series of hunger strikes among prisoners, who are held for months or years. At least 70 detainees were ordered released earlier this year by state prosecutors but most remain in detention. The Yemeni government has said that it has no control over the UAE-run prisons and Hadi has ordered an investigation into reports of torture.

The incident in March began when soldiers opened cells at 8 a.m., ordered all detainees out to the prison yard, then lined them up and forced them to stand under the sun till noon. When the Emirati force arrived, the detainees were blind-folded, handcuffed and led in groups or individually into a room where the Emiratis were present. The Emiratis told them to undress and lie down. The UAE officers then spread their legs open, touched their genitals and probed their rectums.

“You are killing my dignity,” one prisoner was heard crying. A second screamed to the Emiratis, “Did you come to liberate us or strip our clothes off?”

The Emiratis shouted back: “This is our job!”

One prisoner said that when the Emiratis forced them to stand naked, “All I could think of was Abu Ghraib” — referring to the prison outside Baghdad where U.S. soldiers committed abuses against detainees during the Iraq war.

“They were searching for mobile phones inside our bodies,” another witness told the AP. “Do you believe this! How could anyone hide a phone in there?”

In the same city, at the UAE-run prison inside the Buriqa military base, two prisoners told the AP t they think that American personnel in uniform must be aware of the torture – either because they have heard screams or seen marks of torture.” Prisoners said that they haven’t seen Americans directly involved in the abuse.

“Americans use Emiratis as gloves to do their dirty work,” said one senior security official at the Riyan Prison in the city of Mukalla. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.

Two other security officials, who were once close to the Emiratis, said that mercenaries including Americans are present at all the Emirati military camps and sites, including the prisons. Their mission is mainly to guard.

The father of four said that sometimes the screaming from the beatings is so intense that he can feel his cell shake.

“It’s beyond imagination,” he said.

A former security chief who himself was involved in torturing detainees to extract confessions told the AP that rape is used as a way to force detainees to cooperate with the Emiratis in spying.

“In some cases, they rape the detainee, film him while raping, use it as a way to force him to work for them,” he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity, because of security concerns.

Based on the AP investigation last year, the House of Representatives voted on May 24 to require Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to determine whether U.S. military or intelligence personnel violated the law in interrogations of detainees in Yemen. The House adopted the measure as part of the 2019 defense authorization bill. The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California. The Defense Department has to submit a report within 120 days to Congress.

“We hope for a clear answer,” Khanna said. “This is not the American way of doing business.”

The U.S. provides arms worth billions of dollars in addition to logistical and intelligence support to the Saudi-led coalition. The U.S. has also intensified its drone campaign against al-Qaida and the Islamic State group in Yemen. The Pentagon has said that American forces are helping UAE and Yemeni forces in driving al-Qaida militants from southern Yemeni cities.

The war has left over 10,000 people dead, displaced millions, and pushed the already poor country to the edge of famine.

Yet instead of restoring President Hadi’s power in the southern Yemen regions liberated from the Houthis, Saudi Arabia kept him in Riyadh for more than a year. He was only allowed to return to Yemen Thursday at the beginning of an offensive led by the UAE to take control of the major port city of Hodeida, the key entry point for humanitarian aid.

The UAE’s control over southern Yemen, and the prisons, has left many Yemenis worried that innocent civilians are being pushed into the arms of the very extremists that Emirati forces claim they are fighting.

“In the prisons, they are committing the most brutal crimes,” said a Yemeni commander currently in Riyadh. “Joining ISIS and al-Qaida became a way to take revenge for all the sexual abuses and sodomization. From here, the prisons, they are manufacturing ISIS.”

He spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from the Emiratis.

One middle-aged man said he has been in prison since 2016, and has been moved across the network of secret prisons multiple times. He said he was interrogated 21 times, during which he was tortured with electricity, beatings, and attack dogs while he was blindfolded and chained.

“They beat me up with electric wires, with steel, an electric shock, or they take off the clothes except for the underwear and stomp on my body and face with their boots. The soldiers would carry you up in the air and dump you on the ground.”

The AP previously confirmed 18 detention sites, but he named 21, including 13 prisons and 8 military camps.

Another prisoner gave the AP what he said were the real names of five Emirati torturers. UAE officials did not respond to requests for comment about the men.

One of the most brutal torturers is Yemeni, a former prisoner called Awad al-Wahsh, who was detained and tortured before agreeing to work with the Emiratis, four witnesses told the AP. His supervisor, Yosran al-Maqtari, could not be reached for comment. Al-Maqtari is Aden’s chief of anti-terrorism.

Other torturers named by detainees are Emirati officers known to prisoners by their noms de guerre: Abu Udai, Abu Ismail, and Hitler.

The prisoners who were sexually abused in March had tried to fight back. They had organized three hunger strikes to protest their treatment. They had launched a campaign with their families to get human rights groups to secure their release.

That’s when the 15 Emirati officers showed up with their dogs.

___

The Associated Press reported this story with help from a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

___

Associated Press reporters Lolita C. Baldor and Desmond Butler contributed to this report.

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It’s All About the Midterms: Trump Took Those Children Hostage to Stoke His Base

Journalists have almost certainly misunderstood the Trump White House as they pen the flurry of articles and television commentary about the White House abruptly being “worried” about the fallout from the Family Separation Policy announced in May by John Kelly and reaffirmed this month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and “Eminence Grise Jr.,” Stephen Miller.

This “worry” is said to have impelled the president and his aides to have Department of Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen fly up Monday from New Orleans to tell lies about the policy, instead of having press secretary Sarah Sanders do it. (This move, despite what some reports speculate, almost certainly had nothing to do with Sanders being reluctant to go on lying about the Trump policy and attributing it to the congressional Democrats, which is a lie.)

Here is an alternative scenario. This crew are psychopaths and, as their attempt to blame the Democrats for their own policy shows, unrepentant professional prevaricators. They don’t have a kind bone in their bodies, and on the contrary, spontaneously orgasm at the thought of the opportunity to be sadistic to others. The Family Separation Policy is not something they regret or worry about, it is something that gets them off.

But it can’t be explained entirely by mere sadism, though the policy certainly wells up from that motivation.

The Trump White House is still being advised by Steve Bannon, and Bannon is on record that immigration is a winning issue for Trump– that whenever and however it becomes a headline, Trump wins and the Democrats lose.

Trump desperately needs to have the GOP do well in the November midterms. Those midterms are a big question mark. Trump has an advantage inasmuch as voters in off years, when the presidency is not being voted on, tend to be whiter, richer and older than the voters in presidential election years. Laid against that general advantage is the tendency for the president’s party to lose seats in the midterm. American voters, whether they strategize this issue or not, appear to like split government and don’t usually like to put all their eggs electorally in the basket of one party. Election years in which one party does well, such as 2004 or 2008 or 2016, are usually followed by years in which voters put the opposite party to the one in the White House in charge of Congress.

What Trump needs to win the midterms is for his base to be exercised and excited, and for the Democratic base to be prevented from voting through various forms of voter suppression. These include voter ID., purging rolls of voters in good standing, and spreading fake news about Democratic Party candidates and policies.

Ripping infants out of the arms of their mothers excites Trump’s base. Some 46% of Republicans approve of the policy, according to an Ipsos poll done for the Daily Beast. And only 32% of Republicans disagree.

Trump’s base has been primed to believe that undocumented immigration into the United States is suddenly a huge crisis. It isn’t. More Mexican-Americans, for instance, leave annually than come in. There may have been a problem in the 1980s and 1990s. But not now. The reason we should not call the policy Zero Tolerance is that the Bush and Obama administrations deported some 400,000 persons a year. There was already zero tolerance. What changed was the charging of asylum seekers and economic migrants as criminals and the consequent removal of their children to concentration camps. His base will likely agree that the situation was created by the Democrats.

If Trump’s policy is overturned, he can use that action to expand his base, by playing the martyr to liberal perfidy. He can also accuse Democrats of letting criminal gangsters (never mind that they are two years old) into the country. Trump has drunk the Bannon Kool-Aid.

So while it may be, as corporate media tells us, that only a third of Americans agree with the Family Separation Policy, that statistic is irrelevant. In a typical midterm, only about a third of the electorate comes out to vote. If 46% of Republicans come out, but, as in Ohio and elsewhere, Democratic votes can be suppressed by purging the voting registration rolls, then Trump wins. After all, that is how he got into the White House in the first place.

Trump’s base comprises evangelicals and others who often have an authoritarian mindset, who will likely believe his lie that Family Separation is a Democratic project, and based on Democratic legislation. Fox will help spread this monstrous falsehood. Nothing in the law requires Trump to prosecute refugees who seek asylum in the US for criminal misdemeanors (which triggers the family separation, since children are not allowed to accompany parents into a federal penitentiary.)

So far from fretting or regretting, Trump is using the immigration issue to whip up sentiment in his base, in hopes that it will turn into a strong showing in the midterms and allow Trump to keep control of Congress.

You might say, America is better than this.

And I will say, the proof is in the pudding.

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A Hotter World Could Also Be a Hungrier One

A hotter world could also be a hungrier one, with shrinking harvests and poorer quality plants. As planetary temperatures rise in response to ever more profligate combustion of fossil fuels, climate change could lower the yield of  vegetable and legume crops – and at the same time reduce their nutritional content.

And the same high end-of-the-century temperatures could raise the risk of massive, near-global losses for the world’s most widely grown cereal, maize.

This double blow comes close upon the evidence – from field trials over many years – that another global staple, rice, is likely to become less rich in protein and vitamins as temperatures increase.

British researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they studied 174 research papers based on 1,540 experiments in 40 countries between 1975 and 2016, on the probable effect of changes in water supplies, ozone, atmospheric carbon dioxide and ambient temperatures, on vegetables and legumes.

They found that on the basis of changes predicted for later this century, average yields of vegetables could fall by 35%, and legumes by 9%. There has been evidence that more atmospheric carbon dioxide could fertilise more plant growth, but other accompanying changes – greater extremes of heat, drought, flood and so on – could cancel out any such gains.

“As the planet warms, it becomes more likely for different countries to simultaneously experience major crop losses”

Pauline Scheelbeck, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who led the study, called the finding “a real threat to global agricultural production, with likely impacts on food security and population health.”

Scientists have been warning for at least five years of the potential impact of climate change on agriculture and food supply: other studies have shown that fruit and vegetable supplies could be at risk.

There has also been evidence that heat extremes could damage wheat yields while endangering food supplies across the whole of Africa, and at the very least test the capacity of global markets to cope with sudden harvest failures across whole regions.

US researchers report – once again, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – that they took a fresh look at the response of markets to what they call “volatility” in the global crop of just one cereal: maize, or corn.

Heavy dependence

This is grown widely: it is a staple for humans and fodder for livestock; it provides oil for cooking and has even been turned into fuel for motor cars. It is traded worldwide, but four countries – the US, Brazil, Argentina and Ukraine – account for more than 85% of all exports. The chance that all four exporters would have bad harvests in the same year right now is almost zero.

But under a warming of 2°C – a level which 195 nations agreed in Paris in 2015 to keep well below – this risk would rise to 7%. If global temperatures rise by 4°C, which is what will happen if humans go on burning ever more fossil fuels, the chance that all four maize exporters would have harvest failures at the same time rises to 86%. And, if that happened, corn prices would rise dramatically.

“When people think about climate change and food, they initially think about drought, but it’s really extreme heat that’s very detrimental for crops,” said Michelle Tigchelaar of the University of Washington, who led the research.

“We find that as the planet warms, it becomes more likely for different countries to simultaneously experience major crop losses, which has big implications for food prices and food security.”

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The New York Times’ Shameful Accommodation of Stephen Miller

On Tuesday, approximately an hour after President Trump took to Twitter to compare immigrants entering the United States to vermin, The New York Times issued a confounding statement.

“We conducted an extensive White House interview with Stephen Miller for a weekend story about the Trump administration’s border policy,” it read. “Miller was quoted, on the record, in that story. After the original story was published, producers of ‘The Daily’ [podcast] planned to … use audio excerpts from the Miller interview. White House officials objected, saying they had not agreed to a podcast interview. While Miller’s comments were on the record, we realized that the ground rules for the original interview were not clear, and so we made a decision not to run the audio.”

The weekend story in question traces the genesis of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance,” specifically how the president came to adopt the separation of immigrant children from their parents as policy. Written by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear, the piece quotes extensively from White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, who emerges as the most dogged champion of the practice.

“No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” Miller claimed. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

Of course, there is no immigration law dictating that parents be separated from their children at the border, despite the administration’s best efforts to blame the Democratic Party for its own cruel agenda. As the Times observes, “For George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the idea of crying children torn from their parents’ arms was simply too inhumane—and too politically perilous—to embrace as policy.”

But Miller has proved undaunted. In a separate piece for the Times published Saturday, Davis reveals the White House aide has adopted the president’s fraudulent claim while simultaneously claiming credit for breaking up immigrant families at the border.

“The loopholes, both legal and judicial, are now wholly owned and belong to Democrats, because they alone oppose their changing,” Miller told her. “No one in our government is willing to take moral lectures from people who support and perpetuate policies that grievously harm innocent Americans.”

Meanwhile, Politico reports that Miller, along with officials in the departments of Justice, Labor and Homeland Security and the Office of Management, is quietly plotting “fresh immigration crackdowns” ahead of the midterm elections. New restrictions currently under consideration include “tightening rules on student visas and exchange programs; limiting visas for temporary agricultural workers; making it harder for legal immigrants who have applied for welfare programs to obtain residency; and collecting biometric data from visitors from certain countries.”

The Times released its statement all the same.

It should go without saying that there is no established practice of withholding on-the-record conversations from podcast distribution, but time and again the Gray Lady has demonstrated a willingness to placate this administration in exchange for access to Trump and his inner circle. Moments like these expose the limits of transactional journalism. With the president employing rhetoric and implementing policy that echo some of the darkest chapters in modern history, the American public deserves to hear his officials explain themselves.

World Has 68.5 Million Displaced People, U.N. Agency Says

As of 2017, there were 68.5 million refugees fleeing persecution and war all over the world, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It’s a record number for a community often met with disdain and discrimination by countries it hopes might offer shelter and safety.

The UNHCR number includes 25.4 million refugees, 40 million internally displaced people and 3.1 million asylum seekers. The number of refugees in 2017 was nearly 3 million higher than the figure for 2016, The Independent reports, and only 100,000 were resettled by the international community.

“What we are seeing in this data is overall displacement at an unprecedented high six years in a row,” Matthew Saltmarsh, a UNHCR spokesman, told The Guardian. “In terms of refugee numbers it is the largest increase in a single year.”

The numbers may be swelling, but they are not being met with a corresponding increase in resettlement help and other support. In fact, it’s often the opposite.

In the United States, the Trump administration’s family separation practices are receiving intense scrutiny amid reports of young children being taken from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border and forced into detention centers. According to The New York Times, nearly 2,000 children have been detained in a six-week period. In a White House briefing Monday, President Trump defended his policy, saying that undocumented migrants “could be murderers and thieves and so much else.”

The United States’ harsh immigration policies are not unusual in today’s world. As Bloomberg reports, disagreements over whether to accept refugees are threatening to overtake an upcoming European Union summit:

In the run-up to the June 28-29 summit that is supposed to be focusing on euro-area integration and Brexit, Spain is attacking Italy’s hardening stance on refugees while French President Emmanuel Macron is calling for a revamp of the EU’s system for sharing the burden of asylum seekers. Three years after droves of people fleeing wars and chaos in the Middle East and North Africa threatened to overwhelm the EU, the immigration crisis threatens to throw European politics into disarray once more.

The outlook for the 68.5 million displaced people remains bleak.

Hungary’s new ultra-right government is considering legislation that would make giving food to refugees illegal.

Last week, Italy refused to let a rescue ship with 600 refugees dock at any of its ports. As The Independent reported, it tried to divert them to Malta, which “brushed off the request [to dock], saying it had nothing to do with the rescue operation.”

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s new interior minister, is the leader of the Northern League, which bills itself as an anti-immigration party.

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Truthdig’s Michael Nigro Talks About Being Arrested While Doing His Work

Truthdig photojournalist Michael Nigro was arrested last week in Jefferson City, Mo., while covering the Poor People’s Campaign, a 40-day event to raise awareness of economic injustice in America and to demand solutions. Nigro was officially charged for failure to obey orders, but, as he said in a podcast with Connect the Dots following his release, he believes that what he really was charged with was practicing journalism.

Just before his arrest, Nigro was reporting on more than 400 participants from across Missouri who were marching toward the Missouri Capitol and the Chamber of Commerce headquarters. A group of activists was sitting in the middle of the street and blocking traffic, a protest that Nigro attempted to document from the curb. As he reports in his June 11 live blog, police gave him three warnings to move off the sidewalk but did not tell him to stop filming. “I believe,” he said, “that they were intentionally preventing me from reporting and by arresting me were purposefully intimidating others from continuing to film.”

Nigro was arrested at 10:52 a.m. by police officers who also confiscated his equipment. His bail was set at $500, and he was released at 1:31 p.m.

The theme of the Poor People’s Campaign the week Nigro was arrested was “Everybody’s Got the Right to Live: Education, Living Wages, Jobs, Income, Housing.” A few days after his arrest, Nigro joined Alison Rose Levy of Connect the Dots to discuss the importance of that theme, his experience of being arrested while doing his job, and the broader attempts to restrict the freedom of the press in America. Listen to the episode below.

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