Chris Hedges's Blog, page 559
June 12, 2018
Jared and Ivanka Are Raking In Tens of Millions as Public Servants
Amid ongoing concerns about Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s perceived conflicts of interest as the married couple continues to serve as unpaid senior advisers to her father, President Donald Trump, new financial disclosure filings reveal they raked in at least $82 million in outside income last year.
The figure alone as well as the contrast with limitations on and past practices by other government officials are raising the question of whether they are behaving as “humble public servants.” As NPR reporter Susan Davis pointed out on Twitter, “For comparison, members of the U.S. House and senior House staff can’t earn more than $28,000 in outside income in 2018.”
Members of the administration and people close to the couple have often mentioned the “sacrifices” they have made to take their positions at the White House. In a recent interview, Jared’s father Charles Kushner—who served time in prison for tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign donations—lamented all that his son and daughter-in-law have purportedly “sacrificed to go into government,” and claimed ethics watchdogs are “jerks” who “can’t get a real job.”
WH spokesman Hogan Gidley in Jan. 2018: Ivanka and Jared are “serving this nation, sacrificing in their service.”
Their sacrifice was earning $82 million last year, including $3.9 million from the Trump Hotel in D.C. https://t.co/WHAx6x68uu
— Chris Lu (@ChrisLu44) June 11, 2018
Trump earned millions from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.—which ethics experts have accused her father of improperly benefiting from during his time in office—as well as the trust that oversees her eponymous clothing brand and her severance from the Trump Organization, while Kushner took in at least $70 million from dozens of companies connected to his family’s real estate firm.
However, alluding to the fact that Kushner has revised his federal ethics disclosure filing due to mistakes and omissions at least 40 times, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) pointed to public skepticism about whether his reported income will change.
Jared Kushner’s minimum wealth rose last year, according to his financial disclosure. Of course, that number might change if he suddenly realizes that he “inadvertently omitted” some assets again.https://t.co/XfaVi87tQo
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) June 12, 2018
A spokesman for Abbe Lowell, the couple’s ethics counsel, claimed to the Washington Post that Trump and Kushner “have complied with the rules and restrictions as set out by the Office of Government Ethics” since joining the administration, and “their net worth remains largely the same, with changes reflecting more the way the form requires disclosure than any substantial difference in assets or liabilities”—but concerns about their financial dealings persist.
As the New York Times noted, the filing also shows that during their first year serving in the White House, the pair “remained investors through various vehicles and trusts, which bought and sold as much as $147 million of real estate and other assets,” activity that has some ethics experts warning about conflicts of interest.
“We don’t have insight into who is buying and selling stuff, so we don’t know if it’s market value,” said Virginia Canter, the executive branch ethics counsel at CREW, and an associate counsel in the Obama and Clinton administrations. “Who is financing these transactions? Is it some unknown LLC? How do we know it isn’t a sovereign wealth fund from Saudi Arabia or some other place?”
Observers also called into question the timing of the release. The filings were made public Monday night, as the president was gearing up to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore for one of the most closely watched diplomatic summits in recent memory.
Weird coincidence that Jared and Ivanka’s $82 million payday was made public right before TV news began eight hours of non-stop blather about the Trump-Kim summit
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) June 12, 2018
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June 11, 2018
After Summit, Trump Praises Kim as ‘Very Smart Negotiator’
SINGAPORE — The Latest on the summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump in Singapore (all times local):
2:05 a.m.
President Donald Trump is praising North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as a “very worthy, very smart negotiator” on behalf of his people as the two leaders bid each other farewell after their historic summit.
Trump was asked by reporters in Singapore during his final appearance with Kim on Tuesday what surprised him most during their meetings.
Trump says Kim has a “great personality” and is “very smart. Good combination.”
Trump also says he learned Kim is “a very talented man” and “loves his country very much.”
He’s wrapping up the summit by saying the two had “a terrific day” and “learned a lot about each other and about our countries.”
He says he expects they’ll meet again many times.
___
1:55 a.m.
President Donald Trump says he “absolutely” would invite North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to the White House.
After Kim and Trump signed what Trump called a “pretty comprehensive” document, Trump was asked about a possible invitation. Trump said “absolutely, I would” invite Kim.
Before Tuesday’s summit in Singapore, Trump had dangled the prospect of a White House visit for Kim.
Both leaders characterized the document they signed as historic though neither provided details. Trump said the details would come later.
Trump and Kim commented as they closed a historic first meeting between a sitting U.S. president and a leader of North Korea.
___
1:50 a.m.
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have signed what Trump says is a “very important” and “pretty comprehensive” document.
But Trump is refusing to tell reporters what the declaration says. The document is set to be handed out to reporters later.
Trump said Tuesday as the leaders wrapped up their historic summit in Singapore that he and Kim “have developed a very special bond” during their day together.
And he says, “Both sides are going to be impressed with the result.”
Kim told reporters that “the world will see a major change,” though it’s unclear how.
The summit marked the first between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader.
___
1 a.m.
President Donald Trump has given North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a rare peek inside the U.S. presidential limousine.
As the two leaders strolled around the grounds of the Singapore resort where they’re having their summit Tuesday, they walked up to the U.S. limousine nicknamed The Beast.
Trump can be seen talking and gesturing before a Secret Service agent opens the door and the leaders look in.
It wasn’t immediately clear how Kim felt about the presidential tour, but he seemed to be smiling.
Trump says he and Kim will be signing a document shortly, but he declined to specify what that document would say.
___
12:55 a.m.
President Donald Trump says he and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will be signing a document shortly.
Trump declined to specify what exactly the leaders would be signing.
Trump said after emerging from hours of talks with Kim on Tuesday in Singapore that “we’re going right now for a signing.”
Asked what he’d be signing, Trump said: “We’re going to be announcing that in a couple of minutes.”
Trump also said that the meeting was “going great” and that they had made “a lot of progress.” He says he thinks it was “better than anybody could imagine.”
___
12:45 a.m.
President Donald Trump says his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un went “better than anybody could imagine.”
The leaders emerged from a working lunch and strolled together down a paved walkway Tuesday before stopping and posing before the waiting news media.
Trump said the meeting is “going great. We had a really fantastic meeting.”
He added that there has been “a lot of progress. Really very positive. I think better than anybody could imagine.”
The working lunch was the final official event scheduled for the leaders before they go their separate ways.
Trump is scheduled to address the press corps and then begin the journey back to Washington.
___
12:25 a.m.
President Donald Trump joked about his appearance as he prepared to sit down to lunch with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Trump said to photographers at Tuesday’s summit in Singapore: “Getting a good picture, everybody? So we look nice and handsome and thin? Perfect.”
A video feed provided by the summit host showed Trump, Kim and their aides taking their places at a long table. Salad courses were prepositioned on the table along with flower bouquets.
Trump took his spot in the middle of the table, and Kim opposite him. Trump was joined by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and a few other aides.
The lunch menu includes beef short ribs, sweet and sour crispy pork, and braised codfish.
___
12:15 a.m.
The White House has restricted journalists’ access to parts of President Donald Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un despite long-standing arrangements intended to ensure the public is kept fully abreast of key presidential moments.
Under standard rules agreed to by the White House and the press corps, a full pool of reporters travels with the president at all times and is allowed at any meetings where press access in granted. The group includes media representatives who then pool the information they gather with other news outlets that couldn’t attend.
During the photo-op at the start of Trump’s one-on-one meeting with Kim, text reporters for newswires The Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg were kept out of the pool, as were the designated representatives for radio and the foreign press corps.
___
12:05 a.m.
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have started a working lunch meeting in Singapore.
A video feed provided by the host of the summit showed Trump, Kim and their aides walking into a room and taking their places at a long table. Salad courses were prepositioned on the table along with flower bouquets.
Trump took his spot in the middle of the table, and Kim opposite him. Trump was joined by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and a few other aides.
Independent journalists covering Trump’s summit were not allowed in to witness the start of the lunch in Singapore.
___
11:45 a.m.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in says he “hardly slept” in anticipation of the United States-North Korea summit in Singapore.
Moon and other officials watched the live broadcast of the summit before a South Korean Cabinet meeting in his presidential office Tuesday.
Moon smiled and nodded as he watched President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un meet.
Moon has met Kim twice in recent months and helped arrange the U.S.-North Korean summit.
Moon said he “ardently aspires” for the success of the summit and hopes it brings complete denuclearization and peace to the Korean Peninsula.
Fighting in the Korean War ended with an armistice in July 1953. That armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty, leaving the peninsula in a technical state of war.
___
11:35 a.m.
Former NBA star Dennis Rodman says all the pressure is on President Donald Trump in the historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Rodman told The Associated Press on Tuesday that it’s up to Trump to prove he can be trusted by Kim and the North Korean people. The basketball Hall of Famer says it will take multiple visits for the countries to have any hope of a peaceful relationship.
Rodman joked that he should be pushing for the Nobel Peace Prize, or “at least give me a piece of it.” He struck up an unlikely friendship with Kim over their shared love of basketball and has visited North Korea several times but had no official role in the summit.
Rodman says he expects to meet with Trump after the summit.
___
11:25 a.m.
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are set to chat over a lunch of beef short ribs, sweet and sour crispy pork, and braised codfish.
Details released by the White House show that lunch will begin Tuesday with a prawn cocktail and avocado salad, and green mango kerabu with honey lime dressing and octopus.
Side dishes included potato dauphinois, steamed broccolini, fried rice and Asian vegetables.
Dessert included dark chocolate tartlet and Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream.
Among those joining the leaders on the U.S. side were Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House chief of staff John Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton. The North Korean delegation included Kim Yong Chol, a top aide to Kim Jong Un who recently met Trump at the White House.
___
10:30 a.m.
Former NBA star Dennis Rodman says he received a call from the White House ahead of President Donald Trump’s historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Rodman told CNN from Singapore on Tuesday that a White House staffer called the former “Celebrity Apprentice” contestant to tell him the president was proud of him.
Rodman struck up an unlikely friendship with Kim over their shared love of basketball, but he says former President Barack Obama never took him seriously.
Rodman described Kim as a “big kid” who wants to see the world. The former basketball player was very emotional in the interview, openly weeping as he spoke.
Rodman is in town for the summit, but the White House had said he will play no official role.
___
10:10 a.m.
President Donald Trump is sounding optimistic about his ability to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program after a lengthy one-on-one meeting with leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump said Tuesday at the beginning of expanded discussions with aides from both countries that “We will solve a big problem” and “a big dilemma.”
He talked about the pair achieving “tremendous success together” and predicts that “it will be successful. It will be done.”
It was hard to hear the president and Kim over the constant clicking of camera shutters, and it remains unclear precisely what he was referring to.
But Kim appeared to echo the president’s optimism.
___
9:55 a.m.
President Donald Trump says that his one-on-one meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was “very, very good” and that the two have an “excellent relationship.”
Trump and Kim met for about 40 minutes Tuesday one-on-one, joined only by interpreters.
Trump made the comments as he and Kim walked together along balcony as they headed to a larger meeting with aides.
Trump was flanked in the larger meeting by chief of staff John Kelly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton. They sat across the table from Kim and his team.
___
9:20 a.m.
President Donald Trump is predicting that he and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will have “a terrific relationship” as they meet face to face for the first time.
Trump said Tuesday after meeting Kim that he’s feeling “really great.” He says, “We’re going to have a great discussion and a terrific relationship.”
Kim says through an interpreter that it “was not easy to get here” and that there “were obstacles but we overcame them to be here.”
The two men are expected to meet on their own for the better part of an hour, with only a pair of interpreters in the room.
That decision has raised concerns about the risk of holding such a monumental meeting with barely anyone to bear witness.
___
9:05 a.m.
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are sharing a historic handshake as they meet for the first time.
The two clasped hands for a long while Tuesday as they posed for photos in front of a row of U.S. and North Korean flags. Trump then directed Kim to walk down a hallway, where they briefly spoke.
It’s the first ever meeting between a sitting U.S. president and North Korean leader.
Trump and Kim arrived not long ago on Singapore’s Sentosa Island, the site of their unprecedented summit. It’s aimed at settling a standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal.
The two will huddle alone for roughly 45 minutes before being joined by aides for a larger meeting and working lunch.
Trump has said he’ll know within minutes whether a deal can be made.
___
8:35 a.m.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has arrived at Singapore’s Sentosa Island, where he’ll be meeting shortly face-to-face with President Donald Trump.
The two men are expected to share a handshake before they meet alone with a pair of interpreters for roughly 45 minutes while their entourages wait nearby.
After the intimate huddle, they’re scheduled to hold a larger meeting and working lunch. Trump’s chief of staff, national security adviser and secretary of state are among those expected to join.
The meeting is the first sit-down between a sitting U.S. president and North Korean leader and is meant to settle a standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
Trump earlier defended his decision to meet with Kim, tweeting that North Korea has already released three detainees and that missile tests have halted.
___
8:20 a.m.
President Donald Trump has arrived on Singapore’s Sentosa Island for his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump’s motorcade pulled into the grounds of the Capella Hotel at 8:13 a.m. Tuesday local time.
He is scheduled to meet Kim for the first time at 9 a.m.
Kim is also en route to Sentosa Island for the meeting to discuss the fate of his country’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
___
8:15 a.m.
Kim Jong Un’s entourage has left for the luxury Singapore island resort where the North Korean leader will meet with President Donald Trump.
Kim’s black armored limousine with two large North Korean flags was surrounded Tuesday by police vehicles, their lights flashing, and other black cars.
There’s excitement surrounding the summit but also skepticism that the North will relinquish a nuclear weapons program it spent decades building despite crushing sanctions.
Kim and Trump are scheduled to meet alone, with their interpreters, after greeting each other at the resort.
___
7:50 a.m.
North Korea’s state media has reported on Kim Jong Un’s late-night tour of Singapore with unusual speed.
Pyongyang’s official Rodong Sinmun on Tuesday filled its front page with photos of his visits to Singapore’s landmarks, including the Flower Dome at Gardens by the Bay and the Marina Bay Sands resort.
The North’s Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim as saying that Singapore is “clean and beautiful and every building is stylish” and that he will learn “a lot from the good knowledge and experience of Singapore in various fields in the future.”
It’s rare that security-obsessed North Korea reports on Kim’s activities within hours. When Kim visited China for meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in March and May, state media didn’t report on the trips until after he returned home.
Some experts say North Korea is trying to keep up with the speed of the Western media in Singapore.
___
7:05 a.m.
President Donald Trump is sitting down with Fox News host Sean Hannity after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Fox News says the interview will take place Tuesday at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island in Singapore. Trump and Kim are set to meet on Sentosa Island on Tuesday morning for roughly 45 minutes while their entourages wait nearby.
The interview is set to air on Fox’s “Hannity” at 9 p.m. Tuesday on the U.S. East Coast, which is 9 a.m. Wednesday in Singapore.
Fox News says Trump will talk about the meeting with Kim and future relations between the two countries.
Hannity is a friend and confidant of the president and speaks out in support of Trump on his show.
___
6:20 a.m.
President Donald Trump says the “haters & losers” are complaining that his meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is a “major loss,” but he notes that the U.S. has gotten its three captives returned and that the North’s nuclear missile launches have stopped.
Trump tweeted early Tuesday from Singapore, just hours before his face-to-face with Kim.
He says, “The fact that I am having a meeting is a major loss for the U.S., say the haters & losers.” But he says “our hostages” are back home and testing, research and launches have stopped.
He says, “These pundits, who have called me wrong from the beginning, have nothing else they can say!”
Critics have argued that Kim has notched a win by getting a sit-down with the U.S. president.
___
5:30 a.m.
President Donald Trump says “we will all know soon” whether he can reach a deal with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to end its nuclear program.
Trump is tweeting hours before the leaders’ historic face-to-face that, “Meetings between staffs and representatives are going well and quickly.”
But he says that, “in the end, that doesn’t matter. We will all know soon whether or not a real deal, unlike those of the past, can happen!”
Before leaving Washington for Singapore, Trump said his gut instincts will guide him when he gets into the room with Kim.
He told reporters he’ll know almost immediately whether a deal can be made, saying: “I will know, just my touch, my feel. That’s what I do.”
Their meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. Singapore time.
Sessions Excludes Domestic, Gang Violence From Asylum Claims
SAN DIEGO — Immigration judges generally cannot consider domestic and gang violence as grounds for asylum, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday in a ruling that could affect large numbers of Central Americans who have increasingly turned to the United States for protection.
“Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-government actors will not qualify for asylum,” Sessions wrote in 31-page decision. “The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes — such as domestic violence or gang violence — or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim.”
The widely expected move overruled a Board of Immigration Appeals decision in 2016 that gave asylum status to a woman from El Salvador who fled her husband. Sessions reopened the case for his review in March as the administration stepped up criticism of asylum practices.
Sessions took aim at one of five categories to qualify for asylum – persecution for membership in a social group – calling it “inherently ambiguous.” The other categories are for race, religion, nationality and political affiliation.
Domestic violence is a “particularly difficult crime to prevent and prosecute, even in the United States,” Sessions wrote, but its prevalence in El Salvador doesn’t mean that its government was unwilling or unable to protect victims any less so than the United States.
Sessions said the woman obtained restraining orders against her husband and had him arrested at least once.
“No country provides its citizens with complete security from private criminal activity, and perfect protection is not required,” he wrote.
The government does not say how many asylum claims are for domestic or gang violence but their advocates said there could be tens of thousands of domestic violence cases in the current immigration court backlog.
Karen Musalo, co-counsel for the Salvadoran woman and a professor at University of California Hastings College of Law, said the decision could undermine claims of women suffering violence throughout the world, including sex trafficking.
“This is not just about domestic violence, or El Salvador, or gangs,” she said. “This is the attorney general trying to yank us back to the dark ages of rights for women.”
Sessions sent the case back to an immigration judge, whose ruling can be appealed to the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals and then to a federal appeals court, Musalo said. She anticipates other cases in the pipeline may reach the appeals court first.
Fifteen former immigration judges signed a letter calling Sessions’ decision “an affront to the rule of law.”
“For reasons understood only by himself, the Attorney General today erased an important legal development that was universally agreed to be correct,” they wrote. “Today we are deeply disappointed that our country will no longer offer legal protection to women seeking refuge from terrible forms of domestic violence from which their home countries are unable or unwilling to protect them.”
The decision came hours after Sessions’ latest criticism on the asylum system in which he and other administration officials consider rife with abuse. The cases can take years to resolve in backlogged immigration courts that Sessions oversees and applicants often are released on bond in the meantime.
An administration official said last month that the backlog of asylum cases topped 300,000, nearly half the total backlog. Despite President Donald Trump’s tough talk on immigration, border arrests topped 50,000 for a third straight month in May and lines of asylum seekers have grown at U.S. crossings with Mexico.
“Saying a few simple words — claiming a fear of return — is now transforming a straightforward arrest for illegal entry and immediate return into a prolonged legal process, where an alien may be released from custody into the United States and possibly never show up for an immigration hearing,” Sessions said at a training event for immigration judges. “This is a large part of what has been accurately called ‘catch and release.’”
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Italy’s New Leaders Get Tough on Migrants; Rescue Ship Docks in Spain
ROME — Italy’s new “Italians first” government claimed victory Monday when the Spanish prime minister offered safe harbor to a private rescue ship after Italy and Malta refused to allow it permission to disembark its 629 migrant passengers in their ports.
The Aquarius, a rescue vessel operated by aid group SOS Mediterranee, has been stuck in the Mediterranean Sea since Saturday, when Italy refused its crew permission to dock and demanded that Malta do so. Malta refused on Sunday.
Spain’s new Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sanchez stepped in Monday, ordering authorities in Valencia to prepare for the ship’s arrival.
“It’s our duty to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe and offer a secure port for these people,” Sanchez said.
Both the ship and its passengers were caught up in a political dispute that might not have happened weeks ago.
One of the coalition partners in the populist government that took over in Italy on June 1, the right-wing League, promised voters other European Union countries would be made to share the burden of caring for asylum-seekers who set out for Europe on unseaworthy smugglers’ boats.
“Evidently it pays to raise one’s voice, something Italy hasn’t done as long as one can remember,” Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader, said Monday at party headquarters.
For those aboard the Aquarius, Spain’s offer of docking rights at the port of Valencia was welcome news, although it did not provide a quick or easy solution. By Monday evening, the ship was more than 1,400 kilometers (over 750 nautical miles) from Valencia and still awaiting formal instructions to head to Spain as weather forecasts predicted worsening conditions.
It was unclear if the days of sailing west it would take to get to Spain were feasible, SOS Mediterranee Maritime Operations Manager Antoine Laurent said. The traumatized, exhausted passengers include 120 minors, many of them traveling alone, and seven pregnant women. Several migrants had water in their lungs, suffered hypothermia or burns from a mix of boat fuel and seawater while in their traffickers’ boats.
Malta had food and water ferried Monday to the Aquarius, which was running out of supplies.
“The situation is stable but it cannot run” on forever, Laurent said.
A doctor aboard the ship, David Beversluis, said one passenger had to be revived after he was rescued.
“All the survivors are exhausted and dehydrated because they spent many hours adrift in these boats,” he said.
Even as the Aquarius’ crew grappled with the logistics, Italy vowed to block other rescue boats, including the Dutch-flagged Sea-Watch 3, another aid group’s boat. Like the Aquarius, the Sea-Watch 3 rescued migrants in the waters off Libya, where human smugglers are based and asylum-hopefuls have reported torture, beatings, rape and scarce rations in migrant detention centers.
“Little changes if the boat is called Aquarius or Sea-Watch 3,” Salvini, the interior minister, said. “We want to put an end to this traffic in human beings. And, so, as we have raised the problem for the Aquarius, we’ll do it for all the other boats.”
Even as he drew his line, an Italian coast guard vessel with 936 migrants and two migrants’ bodies on board was headed toward Catania, Sicily, where it was expected to dock on Tuesday evening, Italian news agency ANSA said. The passengers were rescued in seven separate operations.
The exulting by Salvini, who is also deputy premier, nearly eclipsed the satisfaction expressed by his fellow deputy, Luigi Di Maio, who leads the governing coalition’s senior partner, the euroskeptic 5-Star Movement.
Spain’s offer is “important news, since it signals a turning point,” Di Maio said.
The vast majority of the people traveling on the Aquarius — 400 — were rescued by Italian coast guard and navy vessels as well as cargo ships in the waters off Libya. They were transferred to the Aquarius on Saturday before the standoff developed.
Given that the aid ship had no emergency, Italy decided to appeal to other European countries “so they don’t leave Italy alone yet again in managing the migratory flows, which is a phenomenon that is all of Europe’s business,” Di Maio said in a Facebook post.
Under a European Union agreement, the country where asylum-seekers arrive and are identified must care for them until their asylum requests are decided, a process that can take a couple of years.
The refusals by Italy and Malta, leaving the Aquarius unable to quickly bring the migrants to a safe port, dismayed others.
“The duty of a democratic government is not to look away” in a humanitarian crisis, said Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, who also offered her port as a potential solution to the standoff.
Italy had argued that Malta, a tiny island nation that also is an EU member, was the safest, closest port to the ship. Malta, which in the last few years has only accepted a few hundred migrants, refused, retorting that it bore no responsibility because Italy had coordinated the rescues in Libya’s search-and-rescue zone.
Maltese Premier Joseph Muscat accused Italy of violating international norms governing sea rescues and said the government’s stance risked “creating a dangerous situation for all those involved.” He thanked Spain for stepping in.
Italy’s premier, Giuseppe Conte, a political novice who backs the 5-Star Movement, on Monday was touring towns in struck by a 2016 quake. He hailed Spain’s decision as a “gesture of solidarity” on behalf of the European Union.
The decision by Sanchez “to exceptionally allow a rescue ship, Aquarius, to dock in his country is courageous and welcome,” the head of the United Nations refugee agency, Filippo Grandi, said.
Doctors Without Borders tweeted a video of some of the women aboard the ship praying Monday morning. “Thank you, Lord,” the women sang.
The passengers, with many migrants from Sudan among them, were apparently unaware of they had become pawns of sorts in Europe’s new political equilibrium.
“Italy has stopped bowing our heads and obeying,” Salvini said in a Facebook post. “This time we say no.”
___
Aritz Parra in Madrid, Nicole Winfield in Rome, Keffrey Schaffer in Paris and Stephen Calleja in Valletta, Malta contributed.
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Henry Giroux Puts a Lens on the Nightmare of Neoliberal Fascism
Is there a chance to defeat the forces of neoliberal fascism? Henry A. Giroux explains why we must understand the historical and contemporary context of fascism to understand what we are up against.
Mark Karlin: Why is it important to have an historical understanding of fascism to shed light on the age of Trump?
Henry A. Giroux: The conditions leading to fascism do not exist in some ethereal space outside of history. Nor are they fixed in a static moment in the past. As Hannah Arendt reminds us, the protean elements of fascism always run the risk of crystallizing into new forms. Historical memory is a prerequisite to the political and moral witnessing necessary to successfully counter growing fascism in the United States today. As Richard Evans, the renowned historian of modern Germany, observes, the Trump administration may not replicate all the features of Germany and Italy in the 1930s, but the legacy of fascism is important because it echoes a “warning from history” that cannot be dismissed. What historians such as Evans, Timothy Snyder and others have suggested is that it is crucial to examine history in order to understand what tyranny and authoritarianism look like and how we can use the past to fight against such forces. While the United States under Trump may not be an exact replica of Hitler’s Germany, the mobilizing ideas, policies, passions and ruthless social practices of fascism, wrapped in the flag and discourses of racial purity, ultra-nationalism and militarism, are at the center of power in the Trump administration. When selected elements of history are suppressed and historical consciousness and memory no longer provide insights into the workings of repression, exploitation and resistance, people are easily trapped in forms of historical and social amnesia that limit their sense of perspective, their understanding of how power works and the ways in which the elements of fascism sustain themselves in different practices. Fascism is not unvarying and expresses its most fundamental attacks on democracy in different arrangements, which is all the more reason for people to develop what Timothy Snyder calls “an active relationship to history” in order to prevent a normalizing relationship to authoritarian regimes such as the United States under Trump’s rule. Surely, a critical understanding of history would go a long way in enabling the American people to recognize the elements of a fascist discourse in much of Trump’s racist tweets, speeches and policies.
History unexpurgated provides us with a vital resource that helps inform the ethical ground for resistance, an antidote to Trump’s politics of disinformation, division, diversion and fragmentation. Moreover, history reminds us that in the face of emerging forms of authoritarianism, solidarity is essential. If there is one thing that the important lessons of history in the work of writers such as George Orwell have taught us, it is that we must refuse to be complicit in the mockery of truth. This is especially crucial in the current historical moment, given the way the Trump administration — along with far-right media giants, such as Infowars, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Fox News and Breitbart News Network — work to aggressively propagate a vast disimagination machine. With the death of historical memory comes the nightmare we had thought was no longer possible to witness again. The lessons of history are crucial because they can readily be put to use in identifying present-day abuses of power and corruption. History not only grounds us in the past by showing how democratic institutions rise and fall, it is also replete with memories and narratives of resistance that pose a dangerous threat for any fascist and authoritarian system. This is particularly true today, given the ideological features and legacies of fascism that are deeply woven into Trump’s rhetoric of retribution, intolerance and demonization; its mix of shlock pageantry, coercion, violence and impunity; and the constant stoking of ultra-nationalism and racial agitation. Memory as a form of historical consciousness is essential in repaying our burden to the dead and the current victims by holding accountable those who … retreat from any sense of moral responsibility in the face of their reprehensible actions, if not crimes. Given the danger of right-wing populism and the incendiary rise of fascism in our time, Hannah Arendt is useful in reminding us that thinking and judging must be connected to our actions. Moreover, such thinking must grasp the underlying causes of the economic and political crisis at hand while acting collectively to fight neoliberal fascism and its embrace of white supremacy, social and economic inequality, and its hatred of democracy. That is why historical memory as a register of critical thinking is so dangerous to Trump and his acolytes.
How are state violence and white nationalism related?
Under the Trump regime, state violence and white nationalism are two sides of the same register of white supremacy and domestic terrorism. Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again,” his slogan “America First” and his emphatic call for a “law and order” regime are shorthand for legitimating state violence against Black people, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, and those “others” who do not fit into his racist notion of ultra-nationalism and his attempts to resuscitate a white public sphere as emblematic of American white supremacy. Ta-Nehisi Coates is right in stating that, “Trump’s ideology is white supremacy.” The merging of state sanctioned racism and state violence is the ideological signpost that informs Trump’s notion of white Christian nationalism, which allows him to assemble a broad coalition of bigots, white supremacists, super-patriots, apocalyptic populists and militarists. Under Trump, identity politics has surfaced with a revenge as the Republican Party unabashedly embraces itself as the white people’s party. Under such circumstances, Trump’s supportive response to incidents of violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, should surprise no one, given the history of racism in the United States in general, and in the Republican Party (and Democratic Party as well) in particular. This is a racist legacy that extends from Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and George W. Bush’s treatment of the Black victims of Hurricane Katrina, to Clinton’s welfare and “law and order” policies to current Republican efforts at expanding the carceral state and suppressing the voting rights of Black Americans.
Trump not only embraces white supremacy, he elevates it. How else to explain his administration’s announcement that it would no longer “investigate white nationalists, who have been responsible for a large share of violent hate crimes in the United States?” How else to explain his willingness to lift restrictions imposed by the Obama administration on local police departments’ acquisition of military surplus equipment, such as armed vehicles, bulletproof vests and grenade launchers? How do we explain the endless tsunami of racist tweets and comments that he produces relentlessly with gleeful relish? Clearly, such actions deliver on Trump’s Jacksonian approach to “law and order,” escalate racial tensions in cities that are often treated like combat zones, and reinforce a war culture and notions of militarism over community-building among police officers.
Such behaviors do more than reinforce Trump’s endorsement of white nationalism; they send a clear message of support for a system of violence, amounting to acts of domestic terrorism. Moreover, they indicate a resounding contempt for the rule of law, and an endorsement not just of racist ideology, but also of institutional racism and the primacy of the racially-based incarceration state. Trump’s “law-and-order” regime represents a form of domestic terrorism because it is a policy of state violence designed to intimidate, threaten, harm and instill fear in particular communities. His relentless rhetoric of bigotry, racism and demonization of selected groups not only plays to his white nationalist base, it also normalizes support for state violence and signals an official position regarding racialized assaults against immigrants, especially Latin Americans. In addition, Trump’s conduct emboldens right-wing extremists, giving them the green light to support profoundly intolerant legislation and ideologies, and in some cases, engage in acts of violence against those who oppose their racist views. Trump’s overt racism and militant views have also inspired a number of overt white supremacists and neo-Nazis to run for public office. Trump’s overt nod to right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis is evident in his deportation policies, his cruel “law and order” policies that separate children from their immigrant parents, his renewed call for racial profiling, his silence in the face of voter suppression in a number of states, and his endorsement of white nationalists and overt racists running for public office.
How have we devolved into a nation of civic illiteracy?
Donald Trump’s ascendancy in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making. It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish — from public schools and alternative media to health care centers — there is also a serious erosion of the discourse of community, justice, equality, public values and the common good. At the same time, reason and truth are not simply contested or the subject of informed arguments as they should be, but wrongly vilified — banished to Trump’s poisonous world of “fake news.” Under the Trump administration, language has been pillaged, truth and reason disparaged, and words and phrases emptied of any substance or turned into their opposite, all via the endless production of Trump’s Twitter storms and the ongoing clown spectacle of Fox News. This grim reality points to a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public good. What we are witnessing is not simply a political project to consolidate power in the hands of the corporate and financial elite, but also a reworking of the very meaning of literacy and education as crucial to what it means to create an informed citizenry and democratic society. In an age when literacy and thinking become dangerous to the anti-democratic forces governing all the commanding economic and cultural institutions of the United States, truth is viewed as a liability, ignorance becomes a virtue, and informed judgments and critical thinking are demeaned and turned into rubble and ashes. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of alleged common sense, literacy is regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data and science is confused with pseudo-science. Traces of critical thought appear more and more at the margins of the culture as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society.
Under the 40-year reign of neoliberalism, civic culture has been commodified, shared citizenship eroded, self-interest and a survival-of-the-fittest ethos elevated to a national ideal. In addition, language has been militarized, handed over to advertisers, and a political and culturally embarrassing anti-intellectualism sanctioned by the White House. Couple this with a celebrity culture that produces an ecosystem of babble, shock and tawdry entertainment. Add on the cruel and clownish anti-public intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson who defend inequality and infantile forms of masculinity, and define ignorance and a warrior mentality as part of the natural order, all the while dethroning any viable sense of agency and the political.
The culture of manufactured illiteracy is also reproduced through a media apparatus that trades in illusions and the spectacle of violence. Under these circumstances, illiteracy becomes the norm and education becomes central to a version of neoliberal zombie politics that functions largely to remove democratic values, social relations and compassion from the ideology, policies and commanding institutions that now control American society. In the age of manufactured illiteracy, there is more at work than simply an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can the reign of manufactured illiteracy be solely attributed to the rise of the new social media, a culture of immediacy and a society that thrives on instant gratification. On the contrary, manufactured illiteracy is a political and educational project central to a right-wing corporatist ideology and set of policies that work aggressively to depoliticize people and make them complicitous with the neoliberal and racist political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives…. There is also the workings of a deeply malicious form of 21st century fascism and a culture of cruelty in which language is forced into the service of violence while waging a relentless attack on the ethical imagination and the notion of the common good. In the current historical moment, illiteracy and ignorance offer the pretense of a community in the form of a right-wing populism, which provides a gift to the cloud of fascism that has descended upon the United States.
How does capitalism suppress an educational system that nurtures a robust democracy?
Increasingly, neoliberal regimes across Europe and North America have waged a major assault on higher education and those faculty and students who view it as crucial to producing the modes of learning and formative cultures necessary in the struggle for a strong and healthy democracy. For instance, in the United States, higher education is being defunded, devalued and privatized while also restricting access to working- and lower-middle-class students. Those underprivileged students who do have access to some form of post-secondary education are too frequently burdened with financial debts. Increasingly, universities are being turned into accountability factories designed to mimic the values of casino capitalism. Disciplines and courses that are not organized around market principles are either being underfunded, cut or refigured to serve market values. Disciplines, such as Women’s Studies, Afro-American Studies, Labor Studies and Latino Studies have lost much of their funding, have been closed or marginalized, while at the same time, the humanities and liberal arts increasingly disappear or are marginalized. The attack on higher education has a long history. Since the 1980s, the democratic principles of the university have been under assault by right-wing billionaires such as the Koch brothers, a select financial elite and big corporations, “leading to a blurring of the lines between the university and the corporate world.” Increasingly, the object of higher education is the individual consumer rather than the public good.
Under such circumstances, power is concentrated in the hands of a managerial class that too often views education simply through the lens of a market-driven culture that harnesses matters of governance, teaching and learning to the instrumental needs of the economy. Evidence of the corporate takeover of higher education is manifest in the emergence of governing structures that mimic the culture of business and modes of leadership defined almost entirely in entrepreneurial terms. Not only are these structures hierarchical and disempowering for faculty and students, but they produce massive levels of inequality among different faculty, staff and students in regards to salaries, resources and choices. Everything about education that matters appears to be absorbed into the discourse of business, metrics and a reductionist notion of efficiency. Research is increasingly shaped, valued and rewarded to the degree that it reflects corporate interests and is defined in measurable terms. Academic rewards, promotions and access to power are now tied to getting grants or outside corporate funding. Numerical signifiers and commercial values shape policies and practices at almost all levels of university life. For instance, university services are increasingly outsourced, students are defined as entrepreneurs and the culture of education morphs into the culture of business. In this instance, the distinction between knowledge and information, ideas and data diminish under the economic imperative to value knowledge in instrumental terms and to devalue ideas that serve the common good.
In addition, faculty in public universities have lost much of their power and autonomy and have been relegated to the role of part-time laborers, defined largely by the same type of workplace logic that characterizes Walmart and other service industries. The latter is designed — as Noam Chomsky points out — “to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility.” This casualization of faculty also functions to undercut academic freedom and free expression, as many part-time and adjunct faculty are rightly afraid to speak out and address important social issues in and out of their classrooms for fear of being fired. Judith Butler is right in stating that faculty have increasingly lost the “financial and institutional support” along with “the guarantee and the conditions upon which freedom — both academic freedom and freedom of political expression — relies.” Many adjunct faculty not only have few job protections in such a precarious environment, they are also reduced to wages that in some cases force them to seek welfare and food assistance. As the university succumbs to an audit culture, it increasingly weds itself to a market-driven notion of customer satisfaction, metrics and performance measures that represses a genuine critical education, not to mention any viable notion of dissent. As critical education is subordinated to the task of reproducing and benefiting the corporate order, education collapses into training and the role of faculty is instrumentalized and devoid of any democratic vision. The attack on higher education as a democratic public good and faculty as public and engaged intellectuals has a long history in the United States.
Under this market-driven notion of governance, faculty both lose their power and autonomy. Under the reign of neoliberalism, students are often saddled with high tuition rates and a future predicated on ongoing uncertainty, economic instability and ecological peril. In addition, as democratic visions are removed from higher education, they are replaced by an obsession with a narrow notion of job-readiness and a cost accounting instrumental rationality. This bespeaks to the rise of what theorists such as the late Stuart Hall called an “audit” or “corporate” culture, which serves to demoralize and depoliticize both faculty and students, often relieving them of any larger values other than those that reinforce their own self-interest and retreat from any sense of moral and social responsibility. More specifically, as higher education both denies and actively abandons its role as a democratic public sphere, it tends to provide an education in which the citizen is transformed into a consumer, laying the foundation for the development of self-seeking agents who inhabit orbits of privatization and are indifferent to the growth of despotic power around them. Under such circumstances, education collapses into training, and the only learning that is valued is reduced to that which is measurable.
One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students and others is the need to address the question of what is the role and mission of education in a time of tyranny. What should it attempt to accomplish in a society at a historical moment when society is slipping over into an abyss of fascism? Central to such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy. What will it take for higher education not to abandon its role as a democratic public sphere? What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? What kind of language is necessary for higher education to redefine its mission, one that enables faculty and students to work toward a different future than one that echoes the present, to confront the unspeakable, to recognize themselves as agents, not victims, and to muster up the courage to act in the service of a substantive and inclusive democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic values and impulses, what will it take to educate young people and the broader polity to challenge authority and hold power accountable?
What is the “culture of cruelty in Trump’s America” and why is it important to analyze?
The United States has a long history in which the culture of cruelty has both undermined and challenged its professed claims to the democratic principles of equality, freedom, compassion and justice. The hardening of the culture and the emergence of a social order driven by a collapse of ethics, an unchecked celebration of self-interest, and a Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all have been increasingly nurtured in the last 40 years under the rise of a neoliberal form of gangster capitalism, more aptly called neoliberal fascism. Yet, this history of cruelty is not unique to the Trump administration. The attack on the welfare state, a numbing social atomization, the rise of a survivalist ethic and a growing indifference to human suffering have long been supported by both major political parties. Before Trump’s election, [the US’s] culture of cruelty resided rhetorically on the margins of power, hidden under the false rhetoric of liberal and conservative politicians who benefited from exploiting the vulnerable in order to further advance the interests of the rich and their own power.
But such attacks have taken on a more aggressive and organizing role under the Trump presidency. This is evident as Trump devotes an inordinate amount of tyrannical energy to the notion that the market and state violence are the primary solution to all social problems and constitute the only legitimate pillars of governance. This descent into the practice of cruel power, cruelty and barbarism no longer hides in the shadows and is employed without apology in most of Trump’s activities since he was elected. Trump revels in the discourse of bullies. He calls his critics “losers,” insults world leaders with belittling language and tacitly supports the violent actions of white supremacists. He endorses state torture, has remilitarized the police, relishes representations of violence and in one instance, tweeted an edited video showing him body-slamming and punching a man with the CNN logo superimposed on his head during a wrestling match. He has executed policies that bear the weight of domestic terrorism, which partly include breaking up immigrant families and separating young children from their parents while expanding the racially charged reach of the carceral state under his call for “law and order.” He has called Latinos “animals,” Mexicans “rapists” and “drug dealers,” and a number of African nations “shithole countries,” all of which echoes the dangerous, racially charged rhetoric of the Nazis in the 1930s.
Trump’s embrace of the culture of cruelty also drives policies rooted in an ongoing process of dehumanization, rancor and a racially-inspired hatred — one that views with disdain basic human emotions, such as compassion, empathy and care for the other. How else to explain his $1.3 trillion tax cut for the ultra-rich and big corporations along with a massive increase in military spending? This dreadful and harmful legislation accompanies policies that produce unprecedented cuts in low-income housing, impose punitive work requirements for those on welfare, eliminate job training programs, slash food assistance programs for the poor, decrease quality health care for the poorest populations, cut nutrition programs for new mothers and their infants, and remove billions from desperately needed programs such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). All of these policies serve to redistribute wealth upward while an alarming 43 percent of American families cannot afford basic needs, such as housing, child care, food or even a cell phone, and millions of the most vulnerable Medicaid recipients risk losing their health care. Philip Alston, the United Nations monitor on poverty, in an interview with the Guardian, has warned that Trump is not only producing policies that reward the ultra-rich, he is also punishing the poor and most vulnerable as a result of “a systematic attack on America’s welfare program that is undermining the social safety net.” And states that by removing “any sense of government commitment, you quickly move into cruelty.”
It gets worse. A new level of hatred, exhibition of ferocity and state-sanctioned cruelty are on full display in Trump’s willingness to end the Dreamers program, risking the expulsion of over 700,000 immigrants brought to the country as children. Moreover, Trump has put in play executive orders that end temporary protected status for more than 425,000 immigrants, including 86,000 Hondurans and 200,000 people from El Salvador, many of whom have lived in the US for decades. There is a genocidal mentality at work here, amplified by a hatred that suggests a disgust for those who do not fit into Trump’s embrace of racial purity, white nationalism and a “cleansed” public space.
This culture of cruelty has a long history in the United States and has to be connected with the intensifying and accelerating practices of a neoliberal fascism, which is more than willing to exercise cruel power in the interest of accumulating capital and profits without any consideration of social costs to humanity or the planet itself. The culture of cruelty is not simply about character…. On the contrary, it has to be connected to structural and ideological forces in the service of a financial elite. Rather than simply produce moral outrage, the culture of cruelty should point to a convergence of power, politics and newly emerging structures of domination that are as unjust as they are cruel. Gangster capitalism is the root cause of such cruelty because of its concentration of power, ongoing destruction of democratic values and ongoing production of a machinery of terminal exclusion, disposability, social abandonment and social death.
Neoliberalism fascism, as a form of extreme capitalism, views democracy as the enemy, the market as the exclusive arbiter of freedom, and the ethical imagination as an object of disdain. It is a form of zombie politics that produces a ruling elite that represents a 21stcentury version of the walking dead. To paraphrase New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, these zombie politicians and power-brokers serve as a dystopian “reminder of not only our fears but [also] what we have become.” The coarsening of American culture and society has solidified into a state-sanctioned language in which the tyranny of authoritarian zombies has become domesticated, if not normalized. What we are now witnessing is the death of compassion, a repudiation of our obligations to the most vulnerable, the death of the social and a dishonorable discharge from the obligations of a democracy. Under neoliberalism’s form of gangster capitalism, the United States has lost its sense of decency and collapsed into a society of lawlessness and moral indifference. Trump is the endpoint of a country that has become a criminogenic society, one which, as Pankaj Mishra has written, promotes “a widely sanctioned ruthlessness … that does not make for an understanding of the tangled roots of human suffering.” The current culture of cruelty is both a symptom of the war on democracy and a mirror that reveals the collapse of the United States into the abyss of fascism.
In your new book, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism, you argue that there is a connection between neoliberalism and fascism. Can you speak to that connection?
Actually, I bring the two terms together in the phrase “neoliberal fascism,” which I define as both a project and a movement. Neoliberalism is an enabling force that weakens, if not destroys the commanding institutions of a democracy while undermining its most valuable principles. It is part of what Sheldon Wolin called a totalitarian imaginary that constitutes a revolutionary break from democracy. This is a form of fascism in which state rule is replaced by corporate sovereignty and a culture of fear, insecurity and precarity reinvigorates executive power and the rise of the punishing state. Consequently, neoliberalism as a form of gangster capitalism provides a fertile ground for the unleashing of the ideological architecture, poisonous values, and racist social relations sanctioned and produced under fascism. Neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the worst excesses of capitalism with fascist ideals: the veneration of war and a hatred of reason and truth; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture which promotes lies, spectacles of disparagement and a demonization of the other; a discourse of decline, brutal exploitation and ultimately, state violence in heterogeneous forms. All vestiges of the social are replaced by an idealization of individualism and all forms of responsibility are reduced to individual agents. Neoliberalism creates a failed democracy, and in doing so, opens up the fascists’ use of fear and terror to transform a state of exception into a state of emergency. As a project, it destroys all the commanding institutions of democracy and consolidates power in the hands of a financial elite. As a movement, it produces and legitimates massive economic inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies and individualizes all social problems. In addition, it transforms the political state into the corporate state, and uses the tools of surveillance, militarization and “law and order” to discredit the critical press and media, and undermine civil liberties, while ridiculing and censoring critics. Moreover, what is quite distinctive about neoliberal fascism is its aggressive war on youth, especially Black youth, its war on women, and its despoiling of the planet.
In addition, corporate control of the cultural apparatuses provides the public with endless spectacles of violence, toxic and banal illusions, the celebration of market-driven values, and an empty obsession and worship of celebrity culture. With the collapse of the social state, the punishing neoliberal fascist state emerges in full force, criminalizing a range of behaviors that are in fact expressions of social problems such as homelessness and poverty. The model of the prison and the state-sanctioned embrace of violence and lawlessness are now unleashed with impunity on youth, people of color, undocumented immigrants and all those others considered disposable. Massive inequality horribly accentuated by neoliberal policies that destroy basic social services, needed infrastructures and essential public goods provide a fertile ground for advancing a sinister turn toward a collective anger and resentment open to a newly charged populism willing to embrace white supremacist ideology, state violence and authoritarian beliefs. Neoliberalism is the face of a new fascism. After decades of the neoliberal nightmare both in the United States and abroad, the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s and 1940s. Extreme capitalism has destroyed any vestige of a substantive democracy, produced massive economic suffering, tapped into a combination of fear and a cathartic cruelty, and emboldened a brutal lawlessness aimed at those considered “disposable.” It is time to repudiate the notion that capitalism and democracy are the same thing, renew faith in the promises of a democratic socialism, create new political formations around an alliance of diverse social movements and take seriously the need to make education central to politics itself. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, fascism is the product often of failed democracies, and under the reign of neoliberalism, we are in the midst of not simply a dysfunctional democracy, but in the grip of an extreme form of gangster capitalism wedded to unbridled forms of corporate power that produce massive inequalities in wealth and power, and aggressively wage war on everything crucial to a vibrant democratic society.
Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout. He served as editor and publisher of BuzzFlash for 10 years before joining Truthout in 2010.
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Judge Spars With Justice Dept. Lawyer on Foreign Favors Suit
GREENBELT, Md. — Lawyers for Maryland and the District of Columbia accused President Trump in federal court Monday of “profiting on an unprecedented scale” from foreign government interests using his Washington, D.C., hotel, but a Justice Department lawyer insisted Trump isn’t breaking the law because he provided no favors in return.
At issue is the Constitution’s “emoluments” clause, which bans federal officials from accepting benefits from foreign or state governments without congressional approval. The plaintiffs argue Trump’s D.C. hotel, which has become a magnet for foreign governments, harms area businesses because of the president’s financial ties to its operations. No previous case on the subject has made it this far.
“This is the first oral arguments focused on the meaning of the emoluments clause in American judicial history,” said Norman Eisen, chairman of the left-leaning Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, which is co-counsel with the two jurisdictions.
U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte peppered lawyers for both sides over their arguments Monday, and had a particularly pointed exchange over Justice Department lawyer Brett Shumate’s view that emoluments required a clear, provable “quid pro quo” — an exchange for an official action.
“Wouldn’t that be bribery?” Messitte countered. “Another clause in the Constitution makes bribery a basis for impeachment. Are you saying that Congress could consent to bribery?”
Shumate stood his ground, saying “ultimately it’s a question for Congress to decide, whether to consent or not,” adding that there needs to be corrupt intent for bribery.
But the judge pressed on, questioning whether “as long as the president takes the money without a corrupt intent, then it’s OK?”
Trump administration lawyers have argued that earnings from such business activity, including hotel room stays, don’t qualify as emoluments. They have argued that under Maryland and D.C.’s interpretation of an emolument, no federal official would even be able to own stock from a foreign company that provides profits or collects royalties.
Lawyers for Maryland and D.C. have maintained that no actual influence is necessary to establish an emoluments clause violation. Steven M. Sullivan, the solicitor general for Maryland, said that Trump’s quid-pro-quo interpretation “requires circumstances that amount to bribery or an employment contract.” Sullivan added: “That definition serves to protect the financial interests of Donald Trump.”
So far in Trump’s presidency, his hotel, which is in a former post office just steps from the White House, has become a popular meeting place for groups tied to foreign governments, including Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. The Philippines, which is negotiating a new trade deal with the U.S., is holding its Independence Day celebration there Tuesday.
“The president’s interpretation is that the Trump post office hotel is a giant straw that he can use to suck payments from foreign governments from all over the world and use them for his benefit,” Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said outside court.
Messitte ruled earlier this year that Maryland and the District could proceed with their lawsuit against Trump’s Washington hotel but he rejected their effort to target Trump Organization properties outside of the immediate area.
The judge said he planned to rule by the end of July on whether to allow the case to go forward. If he does, plaintiffs say they plan to advance quickly to a “broad” discovery, aiming to collect a trove of tax and financial records, emails and possibly depositions with Trump company executives and even the president’s relatives.
The case in Messitte’s court is one of three emoluments lawsuits against Trump. Last week, a federal judge in the District heard arguments in a lawsuit pressed by nearly 200 congressional Democrats. A third case was rejected by a federal judge in New York and is now on appeal.
D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine said last week that a handful of other states have consulted with the plaintiffs about possibly pursuing emoluments cases against other Trump properties and businesses. “We’ve had conversations. They are carefully observing and following our case,” Racine said.
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De Niro Apologizes to Canada for ‘Idiotic Behavior’ of Trump
TORONTO—Robert De Niro apologized to Canadians on Monday for the “idiotic behavior of my president” a day after the actor launched an expletive at Donald Trump at the Tony awards.
De Niro said Trump’s remarks about Canada are a “disgrace” and apologized to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and others who attended the Group of Seven summit of leaders in Canada. Trump called Trudeau “dishonest” and “weak” following the summit on Saturday. Trump advisers also ripped Trudeau, branding him a back-stabber.
De Niro made his comments at a groundbreaking for a new restaurant and hotel complex in Toronto.
At the Tony awards, De Niro launched an expletive at Trump and pumped his arms for emphasis. Many in the audience stood and cheered, while TV censors quickly bleeped out the offending words.
Trudeau has not issued any public remarks about Trump’s latest attacks. Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said her nation “does not conduct its diplomacy through ad hominem attacks.”
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U.S. Launches Bid to Find Citizenship Cheaters
LOS ANGELES — The U.S. government agency that oversees immigration applications is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press in an interview that his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.
Cissna said the cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. In some cases, government attorneys could bring criminal charges related to fraud.
Until now, the agency has pursued cases as they arose but not through a coordinated effort, Cissna said. He said he hopes the agency’s new office in Los Angeles will be running by next year but added that investigating and referring cases for prosecution will likely take longer.
“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
He declined to say how much the effort would cost but said it would be covered by the agency’s existing budget, which is funded by immigration application fees.
The push comes as the Trump administration has been cracking down on illegal immigration and taking steps to reduce legal immigration to the U.S.
Immigrants who become U.S. citizens can vote, serve on juries and obtain security clearance. Denaturalization — the process of removing that citizenship — is very rare.
The U.S. government began looking at potentially fraudulent naturalization cases a decade ago when a border officer detected about 200 people had used different identities to get green cards and citizenship after they were previously issued deportation orders.
In September 2016, an internal watchdog reported that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security database that is used to check immigrants’ identities. The same report found more than 800 immigrants had been ordered deported under one identity but became U.S. citizens under another.
Since then, the government has been uploading these older fingerprint records dating back to the 1990s and investigators have been evaluating cases for denaturalization.
Earlier this year, a judge revoked the citizenship of an Indian-born New Jersey man named Baljinder Singh after federal authorities accused him of using an alias to avoid deportation.
Authorities said Singh used a different name when he arrived in the United States in 1991. He was ordered deported the next year and a month later applied for asylum using the name Baljinder Singh before marrying an American, getting a green card and naturalizing.
Authorities said Singh did not mention his earlier deportation order when he applied for citizenship.
For many years, most U.S. efforts to strip immigrants of their citizenship focused largely on suspected war criminals who lied on their immigration paperwork, most notably former Nazis.
Toward the end of the Obama administration, officials began reviewing cases stemming from the fingerprints probe but prioritized those of naturalized citizens who had obtained security clearances, for example, to work at the Transportation Security Administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University law school.
The Trump administration has made these investigations a bigger priority, he said. He said he expects cases will focus on deliberate fraud but some naturalized Americans may feel uneasy with the change.
“It is clearly true that we have entered a new chapter when a much larger number of people could feel vulnerable that their naturalization could be reopened,” Chishti said.
Since 1990, the Department of Justice has filed 305 civil denaturalization cases, according to statistics obtained by an immigration attorney in Kansas who has defended immigrants in these cases.
The attorney, Matthew Hoppock, agrees that deportees who lied to get citizenship should face consequences but worries other immigrants who might have made mistakes on their paperwork could get targeted and might not have the money to fight back in court.
Cissna said there are valid reasons why immigrants might be listed under multiple names, noting many Latin American immigrants have more than one surname. He said the U.S. government is not interested in that kind of minor discrepancy but wants to target people who deliberately changed their identities to dupe officials into granting immigration benefits.
“The people who are going to be targeted by this — they know full well who they are because they were ordered removed under a different identity and they intentionally lied about it when they applied for citizenship later on,” Cissna said. “It may be some time before we get to their case, but we’ll get to them.”
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Supreme Court: Voters Who Skip Elections Can Be Purged From Rolls
The Supreme Court on Monday upheld Ohio’s efforts to purge its voter rolls, a 5-4 ruling with broad implications for voting rights in multiple states ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
Ohio sends notices to registered voters who have not voted in a two-year period. If voters fail to return the notices and do not vote in another election for four years, Ohio cancels their registration.
The court’s conservative majority held that this practice does not violate federal voting rights laws. Ohio defended its practice by citing a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that states can remove potential voters from their lists and cancel registrations if they move.
The case centered around Larry Harmon, an Ohio resident who sat out the 2012 presidential election, as well as the 2010 and midterm elections, but wanted to vote on a ballot initiative concerning whether to legalize marijuana. When he tried, Harmon found his name had been purged.
An Ohio appeals court ruled in Harmon’s favor in 2016, saying, as The New York Times notes, “Ohio had violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by using the failure to vote as a ‘trigger’ for sending the notices.”
On behalf of Harmon, lawyers from the liberal think tank Demos wrote in a brief that “the ballots of more than 7,500 eligible Ohioans would have gone uncounted in the November 2016 election” had the appeals court decision not been in force at the time. The Times cites a Reuters study showing that recent Ohio voter purges disproportionately impacted Democrats and people of color.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, defended Ohio’s practice as being in line with Congress’ intention in 1993: “The dissenters may not think that the failure to send back the card means anything, but that was not Congress’s view.”
In addition, as Politico notes in its coverage of the decision, “Alito rejected the notion that the notice resembles the kind of junk mail that many people throw away without opening. ‘It was Congress’s judgment that a reasonable person with an interest in voting is not likely to ignore notice of this sort,’ he wrote.”
The decision has wide-ranging implications for voting rights, especially in red states. Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at Demos, told Politico, “Today’s decision threatens the ability of voters to have their voices heard in our elections.” It’s also a reversal of years of Justice Department precedent.
As the Times points out, “The Justice Department for decades took the position that failing to vote should not lead to disenfranchisement. In the appeals court, the Obama administration filed a brief supporting Mr. Harmon.”
By contrast, under the Trump administration, the department switched sides.
Ohio is already encouraging other states to follow its lead. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted told Buzzfeed that Monday’s decision “is a victory for election integrity, and a defeat for those who use the federal court system to make election law across the country.”
He continued, “This decision is validation of Ohio’s efforts to clean up the voter rolls and now with the blessing nation’s highest court, it can serve as a model for other states to use.”
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Rose McGowan Says Depression Caused Anthony Bourdain’s Death, Defends Asia Argento
The shock from Friday’s news about Anthony Bourdain’s suicide was still reverberating Monday, following a weekend of tributes and artfully written eulogies from friends and fans of the globally minded chef, author and “Parts Unknown” host. The sudden passing of such a familiar and larger-than-life public personality could not help but cause questions and speculation to circulate, predictable reactions that have only been amplified and multiplied by social media.
Actor Rose McGowan, who knew Bourdain and is a close friend of his partner, Asia Argento, released a statement Monday in the interest of clarifying some of those ongoing discussions while shutting others down. In a missive she circulated to news sources and confirmed on Twitter as her own, McGowan offers details that fill in some missing details about Bourdain’s death and urges readers to avoid placing blame where it is neither helpful nor warranted.
More specifically, McGowan comes to Argento’s defense, admonishing those who would zoom in on Bourdain’s two-year relationship with the Italian actor-director and thus pull focus from where McGowan believes it should stay—on the true cause of the tragedy. That would be depression, not Argento, McGowan argues.
Like McGowan, Argento has been a forceful activist in the #MeToo movement, and another member of the entertainment industry to accuse indicted former producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. Bourdain was vocally supportive of #MeToo and made frequent remarks about Weinstein, as well as about prominent men in the restaurant business and the “meathead bro culture” to which he’d once contributed.
Read McGowan’s statement below:
Dear Fellow Humans,
Sitting across from me is the remarkable human and brave survivor, Asia Argento, who has been through more than most could stand, and yet stand she does. She stood up to her monster rapist and now she has to stand up to yet another monster, suicide. The suicide of her beloved lover and ally, Anthony Bourdain. I write these truths because I have been asked to. I know so many around the world thought of Anthony Bourdain as a friend and when a friend dies, it hurts. Many of these people who lost their ‘friend’ are wanting to lash out and blame. You must not sink to that level. Suicide is a horrible choice, but it is that person’s choice.
When Anthony met Asia, it was instant chemistry. They laughed, they loved and he was her rock during the hardships of this last year. Anthony was open with his demons, he even wrote a book about them. In the beginning of their relationship, Anthony told a mutual friend, “He’s never met anyone who wanted to die more than him.” And through a lot of this last year, Asia did want the pain to stop. But here’s the thing, over their time together, thankfully, she did the work to get help, so she could stay alive and live another day for her and her children. Anthony’s depression didn’t let him, he put down his armor, and that was very much his choice. His decision, not hers. His depression won. Anthony and Asia had a free relationship, they loved without borders of traditional relationships, and they established the parameters of their relationship early on. Asia is a free bird, and so was Anthony. Was. Such a terrible word to write. I’ve heard from many that the past two years they were together were some of his happiest and that should give us all solace.
Anthony was 61, the same age my father was when he died. My father also suffered from intermittent deep depression, and like Anthony, was part of a “pull up your bootstraps and march on” generation. The a “strong man doesn’t ask for help” generation. I know before Anthony died he reached out for help, and yet he did not take the doctor’s advice. And that has led us here, to this tragedy, to this loss, to this world of hurt. Do NOT do the sexist thing and burn a woman on the pyre of misplaced blame. Anthony’s internal war was his war, but now she’s been left on the battlefield to take the bullets. It is in no way fair or acceptable to blame her or anyone else, not even Anthony. We are asking you to be better, to look deeper, to read and learn about mental illness, suicide and depression before you make it worse for survivors by judging that which we do not understand, that which can never fully be understood. Sometimes we are stuck in the unknowable, and that is where we are now, a massive wave of darkness that threatens to swallow everyone in its wake.
As I watch Asia do her job on set today, I see a pillar of strength who continues to work to put food on her children’s table. I see Elizabeth Taylor carrying on filming Cat on a Hot Tin Roof despite her love, her husband, dying in a plane crash. I see all of us who have carried on. Please join me in sending healing energy to Anthony on his journey, and to all who’ve been left behind to journey on without him. There is no one to blame but the stigma of loneliness, the stigma of asking for help, the stigma of mental illness, the stigma of being famous and hurting.
We must do more and be better. Anthony, our friend, would want it that way.
To the media and to the random commenter, Anthony would never have wanted Asia to be hurt, I’d like to think he would want us to have the collective conversation that needs to be had about depression. Blame is NOT a conversation, it is the shutting down of our collective growth. Which is where we are now. We have a choice as humans, shrink to our smaller, uglier selves, or be better and grow as only true Phoenixes can. I urge you to be that Phoenix.
With great sadness and even greater hope, I remain,
Rose McGowan
cc: Asia Argento
If you are considering suicide, reach out. We need you here. You matter. You exist. You count. There is help a phone call away, reach out.
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