Chris Hedges's Blog, page 565

Secret Obama-Era License Let Iran Tap Dollars

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly sought to give Iran access — albeit briefly — to the U.S. financial system by sidestepping sanctions kept in place after the 2015 nuclear deal, despite repeatedly telling Congress and the public it had no plans to do so.

An investigation by Senate Republicans released Wednesday sheds light on the delicate balance the Obama administration sought to strike after the deal, as it worked to ensure Iran received its promised benefits without playing into the hands of the deal’s opponents. Amid a tense political climate, Iran hawks in the U.S., Israel and elsewhere argued that the United States was giving far too much to Tehran and that the windfall would be used to fund extremism and other troubling Iranian activity.

The report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations revealed that under President Barack Obama, the Treasury Department issued a license in February 2016, never previously disclosed, that would have allowed Iran to convert $5.7 billion it held at a bank in Oman from Omani rials into euros by exchanging them first into U.S. dollars. If the Omani bank had allowed the exchange without such a license, it would have violated sanctions that bar Iran from transactions that touch the U.S. financial system.

The effort was unsuccessful because American banks — themselves afraid of running afoul of U.S. sanctions — declined to participate. The Obama administration approached two U.S. banks to facilitate the conversion, the report said, but both refused, citing the reputational risk of doing business with or for Iran.

“The Obama administration misled the American people and Congress because they were desperate to get a deal with Iran,” said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, the subcommittee’s chairman.

Issuing the license was not illegal. Still, it went above and beyond what the Obama administration was required to do under the terms of the nuclear agreement. Under that deal, the U.S. and world powers gave Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for curbing its nuclear program. Last month, President Donald Trump declared the U.S. was pulling out of what he described as a “disastrous deal.”

The license issued to Bank Muscat stood in stark contrast to repeated public statements from the Obama White House, the Treasury and the State Department, all of which denied that the administration was contemplating allowing Iran access to the U.S. financial system.

Shortly after the nuclear deal was sealed in July 2015, then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew testified that even with the sanctions relief, Iran “will continue to be denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market.” A month later, one of Lew’s top deputies, Adam Szubin, testified that despite the nuclear deal “Iran will be denied access to the world’s most important market and unable to deal in the world’s most important currency.”

Yet almost immediately after the sanctions relief took effect in January 2016, Iran began to complain that it wasn’t reaping the benefits it had envisioned. Iran argued that other sanctions — such as those linked to human rights, terrorism and missile development — were scaring off potential investors and banks who feared any business with Iran would lead to punishment. The global financial system is heavily intertwined with U.S. banks, making it nearly impossible to conduct many international transactions without touching New York in one way or another.

Former Obama administration officials declined to comment for the record.

However, they said the decision to grant the license had been made in line with the spirt of the deal, which included allowing Iran to regain access to foreign reserves that had been off-limits because of the sanctions. They said public comments made by the Obama administration at the time were intended to dispel incorrect reports about nonexistent proposals that would have gone much farther by letting Iran actually buy or sell things in dollars.

The former officials spoke on condition of anonymity because many are still involved in national security issues.

As the Obama administration pondered how to address Iran’s complaints in 2016, reports in The Associated Press and other media outlets revealed that the U.S. was considering additional sanctions relief, including issuing licenses that would allow Iran limited transactions in dollars. Democratic and Republican lawmakers argued against it throughout the late winter, spring and summer of 2016. They warned that unless Tehran was willing to give up more, the U.S. shouldn’t give Iran anything more than it already had.

At the time, the Obama administration downplayed those concerns while speaking in general terms about the need for the U.S. to live up to its part of the deal. Secretary of State John Kerry and other top aides fanned out across Europe, Asia and the Middle East trying to convince banks and businesses they could do business with Iran without violating sanctions and facing steep fines.

“Since Iran has kept its end of the deal, it is our responsibility to uphold ours, in both letter and spirit,” Lew said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2016, without offering details.

That same week, the AP reported that the Treasury had prepared a draft of a license that would have given Iran much broader permission to convert its assets from foreign currencies into easier-to-spend currencies like euros, yen or rupees, by first exchanging them for dollars at offshore financial institutions.

The draft involved a general license, a blanket go-ahead that allows all transactions of a certain type, rather than a specific license like the one given to Oman’s Bank Muscat, which only covers specific transactions and institutions. The proposal would have allowed dollars to be used in currency exchanges provided that no Iranian banks, no Iranian rials and no sanctioned Iranian individuals or businesses were involved, and that the transaction did not begin or end in U.S. dollars.

Obama administration officials at the time assured concerned lawmakers that a general license wouldn’t be coming. But the report from the Republican members of the Senate panel showed that a draft of the license was indeed prepared, though it was never published.

And when questioned by lawmakers about the possibility of granting Iran any kind of access to the U.S. financial system, Obama-era officials never volunteered that the specific license for Bank Muscat in Oman had been issued two months earlier.

According to the report, Iran is believed to have found other ways to access its money, possibly by exchanging it in smaller quantities through another currency.

The situation resulted from the fact that Iran had stored billions in Omani rials, a currency that’s notoriously hard to convert. The U.S. dollar is the world’s dominant currency, so allowing it to be used as a conversion instrument for Iranian assets was the easiest and most efficient way to speed up Iran’s access to its own funds.

For example: If the Iranians want to sell oil to India, they would likely want to be paid in euros instead of rupees, so they could more easily use the proceeds to purchase European goods. That process commonly starts with the rupees being converted into dollars, just for a moment, before being converted once again into euros.

U.S. sanctions block Iran from exchanging the money on its own. And Asian and European banks are wary because U.S. regulators have levied billions of dollars in fines in recent years and threatened transgressors with a cutoff from the far more lucrative American market.

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Republican Wins Spot in Runoff for California Governorship

LOS ANGELES—Democrat Gavin Newsom won Tuesday’s primary in the race for California governor and Republican John Cox finished in a strong second place, ensuring Republicans won’t be shut out of the race to replace retiring Gov. Jerry Brown.

With a major boost from President Donald Trump’s endorsement, Cox consolidated Republicans and edged past Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa, an early favorite to advance.

But Cox faces long odds in deeply liberal California, where Republicans are increasingly marginalized in state politics.

The race is one of hundreds of contests across the state that could solidify Democratic dominance and reshape the fight for control of the U.S. Congress.

Newsom, the former San Francisco mayor, was the first candidate to announce a bid for governor more than three years ago and was strongly favored for the top slot. He leaned heavily on his decision in 2004 to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in San Francisco, touching off years of debate over gay marriage in California and around the country.

In victory, Newsom wasted no time framing the general election as a fight with Trump.

“We’re engaged in an epic battle, and it looks like voters will have a real choice this November — between a governor who is going to stand up against Donald Trump and a foot solider in his war on California,” Newsom told cheering supporters at his victory rally in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Because of California’s “jungle primary ,” the top two vote-getters — regardless of party — advance to a runoff in November.

The election is pivotal for Republicans looking to end their mounting struggles and gain a stronger foothold in the nation’s largest state. For Democrats, who risk getting shut out of key congressional races, it has massive implications for their push to retake control of the U.S. House.

Democrats need to gain 23 districts nationally to flip the majority in the House, and a key part of their strategy is expanding their 39-14 advantage in the home state of Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

The key battlegrounds are seven districts, mostly in Southern California, where Hillary Clinton defeated then-candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race, making the districts targets this year.

Democrats hope to avoid their nightmare scenario — the vote is split among a crowded field of Democrats and two Republicans get the only slots in the November election.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is seeking another six-year term at age 84 and is expected to cruise into November when her likely opponent will be fellow Democrat Kevin de Leon, the former state Senate leader. There are 11 unknown Republicans in the race and none was backed by the party.

Elsewhere, San Francisco will choose a new leader following the sudden death of Mayor Ed Lee, and a Northern California judge, Aaron Persky, faces a recall for the light sentence he gave a former Stanford University swimmer who sexually assaulted a drunken woman.

In the race for governor, Cox defeated Villaraigosa, who was an early favorite to advance but trailed in recent months despite more than $20 million in spending on his behalf by charter school advocates.

Cox, a businessman from San Diego has run unsuccessfully for a number of offices in his native Illinois but gained footing among California Republicans as the campaign progressed. He and Travis Allen both aligned with Trump — Allen repeatedly noted Cox voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson in the 2016 presidential election; Cox said he regrets the choice.

“This is only the first step to turning around this state and taking back California for all Californians,” Cox told supporters in San Diego.

Trump is a popular punching bag for Democrats and unpopular with independents but maintains strong support and loyalty from the GOP base.

“I don’t think there will be a blue wave at all,” registered Republican Keith Smith, 66, said outside a Solana Beach polling place where he voted for Cox.

The campaign played out largely under the radar despite millions of dollars in spending by candidates and their independent supporters. The closing days of the race were marked as much by dueling complaints over that spending as by differences between the candidates, their priorities and their styles of governing.

Sean Spicer, 42, a San Diego resident who works in marketing, said he voted because it’s a civic duty — though he doesn’t like California’s top two primary system and said it is showing its shortcomings this year.

“We have 7,000 candidates vying for governor and so the top two primary system means you end up voting for people who you think can win not who you believe in,” he said.

Evelyn Corado, a 50-year-old preschool teacher from Huntington Beach and naturalized U.S. citizen from El Salvador, chose Villaraigosa for governor.

“He was already mayor of Los Angeles and I saw him do a lot for the Hispanic community,” she said after casting her ballot.

___

AP reporters Julie Watson in San Diego, Amy Taxin in Huntington Beach, Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco, and Amanda Lee Myers and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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The Next Gay Rights Fight May Be Over Adoption

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 Monday in favor of a Colorado bakery’s right to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because to do so would violate the owner’s religious beliefs. The decision was a narrow one, and it allowed the court to avoid a wider ruling on whether private businesses can discriminate against gays and lesbians. In the wake of that case, a new one is brewing, Reuters reports, this time over whether religion-based adoption agencies can discriminate against gay couples wishing to adopt.

Nine states already allow these agencies to refuse adoptions to gay families: Alabama, Mississippi, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Kansas and Oklahoma

Multiple state courts have already seen challenges to these laws, which could eventually go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Of those cases, Reuters reports:

Advocates for gay, bisexual and transgender people sued in Michigan last year over that state’s restrictions, imposed in 2015, while a sweeping law passed in Mississippi a year later has already survived one legal challenge.

Separately, Catholic Social Services in Philadelphia sued the city last month after municipal officials stopped placing children with the group, part of the city’s Roman Catholic archdiocese, over its religious objections to gay marriage.

Although this week’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission decision was on narrow grounds, it’s giving ammunition to right-wing groups in the adoption fight.

Matt Sharp, a lawyer who represented the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, told Reuters, “In my experience, a lot of the rhetoric being tossed around to justify why (private) agencies shouldn’t be given (government) contracts has been that they are ‘religious bigots,’ a lot of the same language directed against Jack,” Sharp said, meaning Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop. “That type of hostility is not permissible.”

This means that opponents of adoption by gay persons could argue that forcing private agencies to allow gay couples to adopt or even foster children would constitute religious discrimination.

 

 

 

 

The Two-Party Scam

They are back at it again. The Democrats are peddling change and hope as they promise a “better deal” if only they are entrusted with power. Nancy Pelosi has been touting the newest Democratic National Committee platform while pretending to be outraged about the excesses of Republicans. She promises to empower voters, strengthen ethics laws and fix campaign finance once she regains the speaker’s gavel.

What Pelosi is banking on is that voters are beset by “collective recollection deficit.” Never mind that Democrats had solid majorities in both houses of Congress and did the opposite of what she is now promising. Pay no attention to the fact that Barack Obama had a mandate when he made history in 2008. In a world according to neoliberals, iniquities took root on Jan. 20, 2017—and now all the ills of the world can be traced to Donald Trump.

We are witnessing the tried-and-true tactic of imprisoning voters in the moment. The duopoly continues to thrive because the media-politico establishment has conditioned us to have short-term outrage and disregard the connective nature of the two-party racket. Both parties are co-opted by corporations and the plutocrat class. They differ on the margins, but at their core, Democrats and Republicans’ primary purpose is to transfer wealth from the masses to the neo-aristocracy.

Malcolm X once said that Republicans are like wolves, while Democrats are like foxes. The former show you their teeth and have no problem revealing their mendacity. The latter smile and pretend to be your friends while they stick a shiv in your chest. The Blue Wave is the newest shiv Democrats are sharpening. They will promise the world until the first Tuesday of November, then they will kick their voters to the curb the minute the last vote is counted.

This two-faction scam works only because establishment voices sheepdog the citizenry to accept a binary view of socio-political issues. We are given limited choices and told to vote for one of two equally malicious parties. There is a reason why over 40 percent of Americans who can otherwise vote refuse to do so. That number seems to go up every election cycle. More and more people are waking up to the ruse and realizing that a ballot limited to two parties is not a republic; it’s a tyranny of false choices.

But for those who say enough to the facade of a representative democracy, over 50 percent remain wedded to the status quo. A system that has been given a vote of no-confidence by abstention is afforded a cover of legitimacy by a league of Charlie Browns who insist on voting against their self-interest. Every two, four, and six years, Lucy van Pelts like Pelosi, Donald Trump and others hold out footballs in the form of false hopes and counterfeit talking points.

Invariably, the football is withdrawn from the bases of both parties as promises are broken and pledges are nullified by dark money and corporate extortion. Parenthetically, do you know how insulting it is to be called “the bases”? The political classes are telling their most loyal voters that their backs are the foundations on which politicians and pundits are building their status and wealth. The illusion of change is the only thing that keeps Americans from rising up against a government comprised mostly of millionaires and controlled by the checkbooks of billionaires. Democrats and Republicans have mastered the art of pointing fingers at each other publicly, only to unite in private to work for their corporate patrons.

Sloganeering and political ads are not governance. We need to focus on ideas and on the policies being implemented in our names. The time has come to stop voting for people based on identities and ideologies. More importantly, to stop endorsing politicians based on affinity and/or political loyalty. Put away emotional decisions, and support people based on whether they will go beyond meaningless speeches and symbolic photo ops to fight for your interests.

The other option is to keep lining up every election cycle to kick Lucy’s football.

We all know how that ends.

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Donald Trump’s Immigration Policy Is Even More Sadistic Than It Looks

This week, between disinviting the Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles to the White House and stumping to keep the country “out of the hands of High Tax, High Crime [sic] Nancy Pelosi,” Donald Trump took to Twitter to blame the Democratic Party, again, for his own brutal immigration policy. “Separating families at the Border is the fault of bad legislation passed by the Democrats,” he tweeted. “Border Security laws should be changed but the Dems can’t get their act together! Started the Wall.”

As numerous political analysts have pointed out, the president’s claim is complete bunk; there is no law requiring the border patrol to snatch a 53-week-old infant from his mother, just a brutal method of deterrence the White House has advocated for and adopted. While President Barack Obama helped assemble the lethal deportation machine that Trump is currently operating, forcibly expelling as many 2.5 million people, the cruelty of such a policy has no precedent. And as a new Vox report makes clear, the sadism of the Trump administration extends well beyond its prosecution of those seeking asylum without documentation.

There are two means by which refugees can find haven in the United States: They can present themselves at an official port of entry, such as an airport or a highway checkpoint, or they can eschew these ports and enter the country on their own. (Although this method of entry is technically illegal, it has no bearing on their claims of asylum.)

As part of its “zero tolerance” policy, the Trump administration has elected to prosecute those who enter or re-enter the country illegally, even as their asylum claims are being processed. Ostensibly this is to discourage immigrants and refugees alike from evading Customs and Border Protection. In practice, officials have made it increasingly difficult for the latter group to find legal asylum altogether.

“Some immigrants who try to seek asylum the ‘right way’ are being turned away and told there’s no room for them now,” writes Vox’s Dara Lind. “And there’s evidence that border agents are physically blocking some asylum seekers from setting foot on U.S. soil—in other words, from triggering a legal right to claim asylum in the U.S.—to begin with.”

Citing Texas Monthly’s Robert Moore, Lind reflects on a caravan of Guatemalan emigres who recently attempted to cross a bridge connecting Ciudad Juárez in Mexico to El Paso, Texas. In Moore’s telling, CBP officials turned the group back at the physical border of the United States, claiming that the nearest port of entry had no room to process asylum claims. (The three who managed to cross over were reluctantly ushered through.)

Federal law guarantees that anybody seeking refuge without legal status is entitled to an interview to determine the credibility of his or her claim, while international law prohibits the U.S. from denying entry to those escaping persecution or from returning them to their home countries.

Although Lind acknowledges the CBP “simply [doesn’t] have room to house all the people who come in seeking asylum while they’re initially processed,” she nonetheless observes that the federal government has no plans to marshal resources to its checkpoints, even as its draconian new practices should, in theory, direct more asylum seekers their way. “The only way that wouldn’t result in more people coming through at ports of entry,” she concludes, “would be if asylum seekers ended up not trying to come to the U.S. at all.”

On Monday, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., was physically barred from entering a detention center run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in Brownsville, Texas, where children who had been separated from their parents at the border were reportedly incarcerated. At another, he claims to have seen “big cages made out of fencing.”

“I wanted to be able to visit the facility where apparently upwards of 1,000 children are being held in that massive building, a former Walmart,” he told CBS. “The federal government, President Trump and team, Attorney General Sessions, Homeland Security, they do not want members of Congress or the public to know what’s going on.”

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Saudi Women Gain the Right to Drive … as Women’s Rights Advocates Are Arrested

After decades of activism, women in Saudi Arabia were finally granted the right to drive by a royal decree in September 2017. This week, 10 women obtained licenses, which they will be able to use starting June 24. The victory is tempered by the arrests of activists who had fought for years to lift the driving ban.

Seventeen women’s rights activists were arrested by Saudi authorities in May, just weeks before the law they worked so hard for was set to go into effect. Among those arrested, Vox reports, “were Loujain al-Hathloul, an activist with a large social media presence; Eman al-Nafjan, a blogger and activist; and Aisha al-Manea, a veteran driving activist—all three women were public leaders in the campaign to end the driving ban.” They were initially detained on changes of undermining security and stability, according to Bloomberg.

Eight of the 17 have been released, at least temporarily, but human rights groups remain wary. “The lifting of the ban on driving is a real contradiction when we see the activists who have dedicated their campaign efforts remain in detention,” Samah Hadid, Middle East director of campaigns at Amnesty International, told NBC on Monday.

Activists suspect the arrests are an attempt by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to silence dissent. Until now, the kingdom was the only country in the world to ban women from getting behind the wheel, a public relations nightmare for a prince who wants to be recognized for modernizing Saudi Arabia.

The young prince made headlines across the world with his October 2017 speech promising a return to a moderate form of Islam, but these arrests have done little to comfort activists who believe his reforms are an attempt to conceal his quest to silence critics and consolidate power.

“What the Saudi authorities seem to be trying to do is to make it clear that firstly, any reform taking place is only due to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” Rothna Begum, the women’s rights researcher on the Middle East and North Africa for Human Rights Watch, told Vox. She continued, “They are attempting to revise the history of the actual activism that took place by these women’s rights activists.”

While women will soon be allowed to drive, protests are still illegal in Saudi Arabia, and all major decisions are made by the royal family.

Trump Outlook: Stormy Now, but Summer’s Coming

A legal process that ultimately crippled the Bill Clinton presidency is advancing in a New York courtroom.

On Tuesday, a judge set a deadline for depositions (sworn testimony) to be taken from President Donald Trump and Summer Zervos, who accuses Trump of defamation. It was former President Clinton’s lie in a deposition in the Monica Lewinsky scandal that led to the perjury charge that was a key to his impeachment in 1998.

While the media glare has been fixed on Stormy Daniels’ $130,000 “hush money” beef with Trump, the Zervos case has advanced more rapidly. Zervos, who was a contestant on Trump’s former reality TV show “The Apprentice” in 2006, says Trump defamed her on the campaign trail when he publicly accused her and other women of being liars.

Zervos has alleged that Trump groped her when she sought career advice from him in 2007. Trump has claimed that Zervos and more than a dozen other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct are lying. “He specifically contested Zervos’ allegations in a statement and retweeted a message that included her photo and described her claims as a ‘hoax,’ ” The Associated Press reports.

New York state Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Schecter set a Jan. 29, 2019, deadline for depositions from Zervos and Trump. It was Schecter who wrote, in a March 20 hearing on the Zervos case:

“No one is above the law. It is settled that the president of the United States has no immunity and is ‘subject to the laws’ for purely private acts.”

The case she referred to is the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1997 decision in Clinton v. Jones. The court ruled that a sitting president has no immunity from civil litigation in federal court and that such cases may not be delayed until the president leaves office.

The AP’s Jennifer Peltz writes:

Lawyers for President Donald Trump argued in court Tuesday that a former “Apprentice” contestant should not be able to obtain information on his campaign’s discussions of other women who have also accused him of sexual misconduct.

The court hearing was the first since a Manhattan judge turned down Trump’s bid to dismiss Summer Zervos’ defamation lawsuit or delay it until after his presidency. …

“It’s a defamation case,” Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz told … Schecter. As for information about other women who aren’t part of the case, “those claims, that evidence … is irrelevant,” he said.

Mariann Wang, the lawyer representing Zervos, said outside court that the other women’s accusations were indeed relevant: “It’s a defamation case, so we are required to prove the falsity of the statements, and his statements include statements about other women.”

Zervos’ lawyers have issued subpoenas seeking a range of information about Trump’s behavior toward women, including any “Apprentice” material that features Zervos or Trump talking about her or discussing other female contestants in a sexual or inappropriate way.

They also have requested any Trump campaign records concerning Zervos, any other woman who has accused Trump of inappropriate touching or the 2016 emergence of a 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording of Trump talking about aggressively groping women.

Zervos’ lawyers also have subpoenaed security video, records of Trump’s stays and some other information from the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Zervos says Trump made some of his unwelcome advances toward her.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz told Schecter that because of the “significant attendant duties” of the presidency, his client may want more time to comply with the deposition order.

If and when Trump sits down for the deposition, he has to tell the truth or face a possible perjury charge. When Clinton denied in his January 1998 testimony that he had “sexual relations” with former White House aide Monica Lewinsky, he was caught in a lie, charged with perjury and later impeached by the House of Representatives. He survived as president, but with his reputation sullied and his political agenda in tatters.

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Jewish Supporters of Trump Put Democracy at Risk

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his conservative Republican Jewish supporters in the United States and President Donald Trump are trying to influence the upcoming U.S. elections with a toxic mixture of religion and right-wing politics, helping to turn the country against constitutional protections for ethnic minorities, including Jews.

The effort to shape the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential contest is being overlooked by much of the media, which is occupied with Trump and the investigation of Russian interference in the last election. But it’s a story too important to be ignored.

The alliance among Netanyahu, Trump and conservative Republican Jewish Americans poses a threat to democratic institutions. The Justice and Homeland Security departments’ anti-immigrant campaign provides an example of how that works. They are stopping endangered immigrants from applying for amnesty, imprisoning them in crowded detention centers and separating them from their children. This violates the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. American Jews are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Jewish support for a president who orders such treatment betrays the history of a country that welcomed their forebears from oppressive regimes.

Jews have relied on the Constitution and laws implementing it for protection against the anti-Semitism that brought so many of them to the United States. Such protections are starting to lose their effectiveness now that xenophobia has become a national disease, spread by Trump. Still, people of color, as well as Jews, continue to benefit from laws against racial attacks.

I’m a Jew and a supporter of a Jewish state of Israel, but that does not persuade me to join hands with this Trump-Netanyahu crew. Likud is no more my party than is the Republican right wing. I actually believe there should be two states—one Jewish, the other Palestinian.

Polls indicate that only a minority of American Jews support Trump. An American Jewish Committee poll last September showed that 55 percent disapproved of Trump’s handling of Israel; only 40 percent approved. A total of 57 percent identified themselves as Democrats, 20 percent as Independent and 15 percent as Republican. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton was backed by 64 percent Jews, compared to 18 percent for Trump.

According to a Gallup Poll in February, “Americans’ stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as strongly pro-Israel as at any time in Gallup’s three-decade trend. Sixty-four percent say their sympathies in the dispute lie more with the Israelis, tying the high previously recorded in 2013 and 1991.”

But Israel has become a partisan issue. The Pew Research Center reported the results of its own survey in January, saying, “Since 2001, the share of Republicans sympathizing more with Israel than the Palestinians has increased 29 percentage points, from 50% to 79%. Over the same period, the share of Democrats saying this has declined 11 points, from 38% to 27%.”

Months before the November election, it’s an imprecise numbers game. But Jewish Republicans are already campaigning against Democrats by portraying their opponents as anti-Israel.

That was clear in a Times of Israel interview with David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel who was Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and is a fierce critic of Jews who favor a peaceful, two-state solution to the Jewish-Palestinian conflict.

“There is no question Republicans support Israel more than Democrats,” he said. “There is a large Democratic constituency right now that is not pro-Israel.”

Friedman has attacked one of the most prominent supporters of the two-state idea, the nonprofit organization J Street, in virulent terms. In 2016, in the publication Arutz Sheva, he wrote that J Street supporters “are far worse than kapos—Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps. The kapos faced extraordinary cruelty and who knows what any of us would have done under those circumstances to save a loved one? But J Street? They are just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas—it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition, a leader in the Jewish pro-Trump campaign, supported Friedman’s appointment, which was generally opposed by Democrats.

The coalition’s chair, former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, helped raise $30 million from big Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate, for this year’s GOP congressional campaigns. Adelson and his wife, Miriam, own Israel Hayom, a widely read Israeli paper that is a staunch supporter of Netanyahu. She is the publisher.

Chemi Shalev, columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote last month that the Netanyahu-Trump alliance is a threat to democracy.

“Both rely on a radical, nationalist base that disdains liberal democracy and demands total loyalty to the leader, ” Shalev said. “Both wield their power bases as a whip, with which they have changed their ruling parties from independent ideological forums into ongoing spectacles of flattery and fawning. Both torment the rule of law and seek to tame their Supreme Courts for ideological as well as personal reasons. Both are assaulting the free media, aided and abetted by loyalist journalists who disseminate their lies while delegitimizing their liberal colleagues.”

In her new book, “Fascism: A Warning,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “If we think of fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab. … [W]e have not had a president in the modern era whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals. …

“From the early stages of his campaign and right into the Oval Office Donald Trump has spoken harshly about the institutions and principles that make up the foundation of open government. In the process he has systematically degraded political discourse in the United States, shown an astonishing disregard for facts, libeled his predecessors, threatened to ‘lock up’ political rivals, referred to mainstream journalists as ‘the enemy of the American people,’ spread falsehoods about the integrity of the US electoral process, touted mindless nationalistic economic and trade policies, vilified immigrants and the countries from which they come and nurtured a paranoid bigotry toward the followers of one of the world’s foremost religions.”

Albright is Jewish, and she and her family fled when her native Czechoslovakia was taken over by Hitler and the Nazis. The Nazis and their fellow fascists imposed an iron grip on Europe. Albright understands fascism, both that of Hitler and of Italy’s Mussolini.

There is, by the way, a version of history that says Mussolini was much easier on Jews than Hitler. It’s true he didn’t run death camps, but, as The New York Times noted in 1938, “Mussolini’s Fascist government forbade Jewish children to attend public or private schools, ordered the dismissal of Jews from professorships in all universities, and banned Jews from the civil service and military as well as the banking and insurance industries. …. [M]ore onerous laws in 1939 and 1940 revoked peddlers’ permits and shopkeepers’ licenses, and required Jewish owners of businesses—as well as stock or bond holders—to sell those assets to ‘Aryans.’ ”

That, Albright fears, is where Trump could be taking us. Read Merriam-Webster’s definition of fascism: “a political philosophy, movement, or regime … that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”

The definition fits Trump. It is counter to democracy. The American Jews who are rallying around him and his ideological brother Netanyahu are betraying the ideals of their people, who were drawn to America by the freedom it offered. Without such freedom, America is not safe for Jews or other ethnic minorities.

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The ‘Two Bobbys’: The Short, Complicated Political Life of RFK

Editor’s note: Robert F. Kennedy was fatally wounded by a gunman on June 5, 1968. To honor Kennedy’s legacy 50 years after his death, Truthdig is posting this edited excerpt from a piece by Robert Scheer that first ran in The Nation on Feb. 3, 2000. Scheer was the last journalist to interview Robert Kennedy. The essay below is extracted from a review of Ronald Steel’s book on Kennedy, “In Love With the Night.”

Anyone who has ever been even mildly curious about Bobby Kennedy knows of his early association with Senator Joe McCarthy, his enthusiasm for the cold war, his blind loyalty to Kennedy family power, overwhelming political ambition and conversion quite late in his short life to goals of social justice.

The conventional liberal in the 1968 presidential primary season was known to all to be Eugene McCarthy, and the competition with Bobby for the Democratic nomination was not over the purity of the progressive agenda; rather, it was caused by the momentum that Bobby brought to what even back then had come to be seen as a compromised and forlorn cause.

Bobby’s challenge was not to revive the world of liberalism but rather to put some political muscle into a new alliance, enlisting the likes of Paul Schrade of the UAW and Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers to stand with the antiwar students in turning the domestic social engineering and incessant foreign interventionism of cold war liberalism to human purpose.

To take the money paying for the carpet-bombing of Vietnamese farmland by B-52s and devote it instead to programs for poor Native Americans, blacks and Latinos in this country was the mantra of Bobby’s last years—in short, to save President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty from his war on poor peasants. So, too, for Gene McCarthy; but the fey Senator from Minnesota, an ever-quirky, aloof and indelibly patrician politician, failed to convey the life-and-death implications, the bleeding human dimension, of his challenge to Johnson. Not so that ordinary folk could grasp it, anyway.

What Bobby was, and McCarthy never could be, was exciting. He could galvanize people into action, particularly younger people, to work in the black ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant when it suited his needs as a senator from New York, or later to support Native Americans or Latino farmworkers during his presidential primary campaign. One runs into people to this day, not the least being the actual progeny of Bobby, who retain that commitment to action.

Undoubtedly, Bobby could be cynical, but there was something infectious about this Kennedy’s enthusiasm, which made it believable not only to his audience but to Bobby himself. Those of us who covered him understood the contradiction well, and Steel acknowledges that it was the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, certainly a pre-eminent liberal commentator all these years, and a McCarthy delegate, who endlessly poked fun at “the two Bobbys.” But that second Bobby, moved by a visit to an Indian reservation or farm labor camp, was also real.

Maybe it was no more than the ability (which Bill Clinton also has) to combine a raging opportunism with the solid commitment to opportunity for all, a commitment born of his own experience. Bobby’s history was the opposite of bitter poverty. But certainly after the assassination of his brother, this was a fellow who felt some important things deeply. Bobby wrestled with the contradictions and incompleteness of the JFK years and the disgrace of LBJ’s escalation in Vietnam. While that may not have made him a less deliberately centrist President than Clinton, it is difficult to believe that the emotional content of either man’s rhetoric is all fake.

As Steel mentions, I was one of Bobby’s critics from the left, and he quotes me saying in the pages of Ramparts that Bobby was “a very charming and alive man for a politician,” who offered the “illusion of dissent without its substance,” and cautioning that “he could easily co-opt prevailing dissent without delivering to it.” All true as a warning, but I also frequently gave the man his due for growth, as in his questioning of the Vietnam War and even his brother’s and his own earlier Cuba policy. Bobby was no saint, but he was indeed attuned in his last years to the hurt of people and open to the prospect that things did not have to be this way.

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California Mayor Has a Radical Plan to Fight Poverty

Universal basic income has gained traction as a weapon in the war against poverty. The policy, often referred to as UBI, nearly made it all the way onto Hillary Clinton’s policy platform as she ramped up her 2016 presidential campaign. Clinton claimed in a 2017 interview with Vox that she “couldn’t make the numbers work” nationally, but Michael Tubbs, the 27-year-old mayor of Stockton, Calif., is starting smaller.

As Reuters reports in a story published Monday, Tubbs is planning to offer a group of city residents a no-strings-attached income of $500 per month as part of a campaign to fight poverty. The experimental program should start in early 2019, with an as-yet-undecided number of Stockton residents in the test pool. The program is being funded by the Economic Security Project, a philanthropic network started by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Over the course of 18 months, the organization and the city will analyze how people use the money. Then, Tubbs told Reuters, “maybe, in two or three years, we can have a much more informed discussion about the social safety net, the income floor people deserve and the best way to do it because we’ll have more data and research.”

Reuters’ article takes into account the interest in universal basic income across the globe, pointing to a program in Finland. That program, as the BBC points out, is ending after this year. One the experiment’s designers says the interest has dried up, and the government claims it’s exploring other anti-poverty options.

For his part, Tubbs is drawing inspiration from somewhere slightly closer to home.

In Alaska, Reuters notes, “each resident has long received an annual dividend check from oil revenues from the Alaska Permanent Fund. … Last year, the payout in Alaska was $1,100 [per qualified person].”

The Economic Security Project approached Tubbs with the idea of a universal basic income, which he “jumped on” because he “ ‘felt almost a moral responsibility’ to do something ‘a little bit out the box.’ ”

It’s a high-stakes project for a struggling city—one that declared bankruptcy in 2012. A Politico article on the UBI program blames the bankruptcy on “years of big spending on showcase projects, like a sparkling new marina where yachts could dock.”

As Tubbs echoed in an interview with Politico’s Off Message podcast, “So much of the investment strategy in the past was, ‘Let’s create this image of the city,’ while really neglecting investing in people.”

Critics of universal basic income often say it discourages citizens from finding work, and deprives them of the dignity of employment. To that argument, Tubbs responds, “Work does have some value and some dignity, but I don’t think working 14 hours and not being able to pay your bills, or working two jobs and not being able—there’s nothing inherently dignified about that.”

The mayor’s investment in the program is also personal. Having grown up poor himself (“My mom was on welfare for the first five, six years of my life,” he told Reuters), he knows firsthand the struggles of many of Stockton’s residents.

Not all residents are fans of the young mayor. There’s even a group of locals collecting signatures to prevent him from finishing his term, claiming he’s raised taxes, contributed to an increase in crime, accepted too much private money and violated transparency laws. Still, his backers remain bullish on the guaranteed income concept.

Hughes believes the government should give Americans earning less than $50,000 a year $500 a month. To pay for it, he suggests a 50 percent tax rate on income and capital gains for Americans earning more than $250,000.

Should the Stockton experiment go forward as planned, it will offer evidence to help determine whether Hughes’ idea could become a reality.

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