Chris Hedges's Blog, page 566

DeVos Says School Safety Panel Won’t Explore Role of Guns

WASHINGTON—Education Secretary Betsy DeVos says the federal commission on school safety set up after a Florida high school shooting won’t be looking at the role of guns in school violence.

DeVos is telling a congressional hearing that’s not part of the commission’s charge.

She adds, “We are actually studying school safety and how we can ensure our students are safe at school.”

At the same time, a fact sheet posted on the White House web site says the commission will study “age restrictions for certain firearm purchases” among other topics. The discrepancy was not immediately clear.

DeVos is chairing the panel that President Donald Trump created following the February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen students were killed.

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Trump’s Ambassador to Germany Aims to Empower Europe’s Far Right

From Sweden to Greece to Poland and Hungary, neofascism is on the rise across Europe, and at least one Trump administration official appears bent on seeing its proponents occupy the halls of power. In an exclusive interview with Breitbart London, U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell intimated he would work to unseat Germany’s existing conservative government.

“There are a lot of conservatives throughout Europe who have contacted me to say they are feeling there is a resurgence going on,” he told Breitbart’s Chris Tomlinson. “I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders. I think there is a groundswell of conservative policies that are taking hold because of the failed policies of the left.”

While the statement might appear benign on its face, Germany’s parliament is already controlled by the center-right Christian Democratic Union; the party’s leader, Angela Merkel, has served as the country’s chancellor since 2005. As Vox’s Zach Beauchamp observes, the remarks “[suggest] that Grenell views his job not merely as representing America’s policies to the German government but also working to actually strengthen German—and other European—factions that he and the Trump administration approve.”

The one-time Republican operative also mentioned that he is a “big fan” of Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, calling him a “rock star.” The chairman of the Austrian People’s Party, Kurz has enforced a ban on the use of burqas in public and opposed the resettlement of refugees within the nation’s borders, among other xenophobic policies.

Grenell’s interview has sparked an uproar in the Bundestag, with German officials demanding he clarify his comments. As of this writing, the Trump appointee has yet to do so.

“When I raised concerns to Grenell about politicizing this post, he personally assured me that once he became Ambassador he would stay out of politics,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Ct., tweeted Monday. “This interview is awful—Ambassadors aren’t supposed to ’empower’ any political party overseas.”

A former spokesman for George W. Bush’s ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, Grenell has a long history of provocation. According to the Advocate, “Grenell once tweeted that Rachel Maddow ‘needs to take a breath and put on a necklace.” … Other women he insulted included Calista Gringrich, whom he accused of having hair that she ‘snaps on.’ ” At the time of his confirmation, several Democrats voiced their concern about Grenell’s ability to work with Merkel, Germany’s first woman chancellor.

This latest controversy couldn’t come at a worse time. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) made huge gains in the 2017 elections, winning 88 of a possible 630 seats to become the country’s third largest political party. (Over the weekend, its lead official attempted to downplay the Holocaust, calling it a “speck of bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”)

Meanwhile, the anti-immigrant Lega (formerly Lega Nord) has ascended in Italy after forming a coalition with the Five-Star Movement—a development that has delighted former White House adviser and self-styled Leninist Steve Bannon.

Grenell’s remarks offer just the latest reminder where this administration’s true sympathies lie.

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U.N. Expert Calls U.S. Income Inequality a ‘Political Choice’

GENEVA — A U.N.-supported human rights expert has blasted the yawning gap between rich and poor in the United States, insisting in a new report that the world’s richest country “is now moving full steam ahead to make itself even more unequal.”

The United Nations’ human rights office said Monday that Philip Alston, an independent expert commissioned to examine “extreme” poverty, prepared a report on the U.S. that faults “successive administrations” in Washington for failing to uphold treaty commitments to economic and social rights.

The Australian-born New York University law professor specifically criticized the $1.5 trillion worth of income tax cuts that President Donald Trump has trumpeted as a key accomplishment of his administration, saying the plan approved in December “benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality.”

Alston, who was commissioned by the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council, built the report around a two-week trip to Alabama, California, Georgia, Puerto Rico, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. He acknowledged that “no magic recipe” exists to end acute poverty.

“At the end of the day, however, particularly in a rich country like the United States, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power,” Alston wrote. “With political will, it could readily be eliminated.”

Ultimately, he concluded that American democracy is being “steadily undermined” by power-wielders and other vested interests. He decried “caricatured narratives” that elevate the rich to the drivers of economic progress, and stereotypes that paint the poor as “wasters, losers and scammers.”

An official at the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Geneva said Monday that diplomatic staff there had not yet reviewed Alston’s report in full, but that “the Trump Administration has made it a priority to create economic opportunities for all Americans.” The official said the U.S. values the work of U.N. experts “to raise attention to important issues around the globe.”

The Alston report is short on recommendations, mentioning only five. One, entitled “Get real about taxes,” insists that most Americans should recognize that “taxes are not only in their interest, but also perfectly reconcilable with a growth agenda.”

Alston also called on the United States to “decriminalize the poor.” He cited the American Civil Liberties Union’s findings that judges in 26 states had issued arrest warrants for alleged debtors at the request of private debt collectors, saying such moves were illegal and violated human rights standards.

Above all, the report’s subtext was how the world’s biggest economic powerhouse neglects its poor.

“The United States already leads the developed world in income and wealth inequality, and it is now moving full steam ahead to make itself even more unequal,” he wrote.

In a telephone interview, Alston said he’s received “a lot of hate mail” since posting a link to the report on his Twitter feed on Friday. His report was only officially flagged by the U.N. human rights office on Monday.

“The way in which people living in poverty are treated across the U.S. system amounts to a violation, in effect, of their civil and political rights,” he said.

“The Trump administration is frantically exacerbating the situation, but it’s true that much of what I describe pre-dated it,” he said.

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While Our Police Kill Thousands, Congress Works to Protect the Police

As you read this, an American police officer will kill someone.

Or at least—statistically speaking—it’s likely that in the next few hours an American police officer will extinguish the life of a fellow American. And it’s an almost certainty that that person will not need to die.

How do I know this? Because our police kill roughly three people per day. American police murder more citizens in an average two-week period than cops in the United Kingdom killed in the entire 20the century. (But in their defense, for a lot of the 1900s, British bobbies were only armed with a stick. So I imagine murdering citizens took quite a lot of time and commitment, perhaps multiple guys working in shifts. Point is, there were likely very few accidental murders at the business end of the stick.)

But now the world’s police almost all have guns, and this problem has become exponentially worse in America. At the beginning of May, U.S. police had already killed 400 people in 2018. To give you something to compare that with, in the 12 months preceding April 2016, British cops killed only three people and fired their weapons only seven times. Seven times in a year! (I imagine your average American cop discharges his or her weapon seven times just to open a beer can when the little metal tab breaks off. And once they get it open, they fire three more shots in the air to celebrate.)

So right now you’re thinking, “I’ve read 15 columns on how many police murders we have. I don’t need another one.” However, this column is different. This one comes on the heels of Congress actually standing up and doing something about this issue in a bipartisan move (more on that in a moment).

What makes the ongoing slaughter of American people at the hands of our police so troublesome—as if that’s not enough—is how incredibly rare it is for any cop to end up in jail for one of these murders. Of all of the 1,147 police killings in 2017, officers were charged with a crime in only 13—1 percent of all killings by police.

Well over half of all those killings began with police responding to suspected nonviolent offenses or scenarios in which no crime was reported. Think about that for a moment. Half the time police officers murder someone, they weren’t handling a violent crime and often were dealing with no crime at all. Basically, they thrust themselves into somebody’s life, things escalated—as they tend to do when dudes with guns show up—and it ended with a state-sanctioned murder.

In a little over half of the killings, the victim had a gun. Most who were completely unarmed were people of color. This is an important point, because proponents of police murder (I don’t think they call themselves that, but I do) argue that cops kill more white people than black people and therefore these killings are not racist. (For the moment, I’ll put aside how odd it is to argue, “Don’t worry—we’re all being killed for no reason. So it’s fine.”) Yes, it is true that cops kill a lot of white people. They kill more white people than Wendy’s trademarked Baconator sandwich. However, cops kill more people of color than the population percentages would dictate, and they’re more likely to kill people of color who aren’t armed at all. So while whites do lose their lives in our current police state at a ridiculous rate, they are far more likely to be waving around a gun when it happens.

Clearly, part of the problem is that U.S. police officers have almost no fear that murdering someone could land them in trouble. Another piece of the problem is that, on average, police recruits get eight hours of training on how to de-escalate a situation. They get 58 hours of training on how to shoot things. So it appears that shooting things is roughly seven times more important than trying to avoid shooting things!

Let’s be honest. Eight hours of training is nothing. I received more than eight hours of training on how to put on a condom in sixth-grade sex ed—which I guess could also be called “gun safety.” Granted, this particular gun-safety training was pressed upon our young minds by the gym coach who doubled as our sex ed teacher (this, by the way, is one of the most horrific experiences any kid can go through. Inevitably, the first question from the most annoying kid in the class is, “Um, coach, how do we get a girl to want to have the sexual intercourse with us?” And the coach will respond, “Son, if I knew that I wouldn’t be teaching fuckin’ frisbee to groups of shit-for-brains! I’d be a millionaire selling books on how to get laid. My dog learned how to play ball quicker than you sorry sons of bitches”).

Where was I? Ah, yes, de-escalation. If police had not shot those who weren’t armed with a gun, 638 more Americans would have lived to see 2018. That’s a 57 percent decrease in police killings.

In any profession other than that of police officer, this would be wholly unacceptable. If roofers or baristas or hair stylists were murdering more than 1,000 people a year, hundreds of them unarmed, I don’t think our society would be slow to respond (and I, for one, would want to know what the hell the haircuts looked like that people were still willing to brave the procedure).

But luckily, we are an evolved country. We have elected representatives who stand up for the people and defend the voters when something like this is happening. And sure enough, the House of Representatives did indeed pass a bill a couple weeks ago concerning police.

They passed the Protect and Serve Act of 2018, with only 35 representatives voting against it. This is impressively shocking considering that our current Congress usually reserves that level of bipartisanship for bills giving themselves a raise or approving war criminals for Cabinet positions. But rather than helping innocent civilians, the Protect and Serve Act creates enhanced penalties for anyone who intentionally causes harm to law enforcement officers.

Does that mean up until now it was legal to harm a law enforcement officer? I had no idea.

Seriously, what problem is this solving? Were loads of people punching cops in the face and then yelling, “Ha Ha! You may not like it, but it’s well within my rights to beat the shit out of a cop!” No, I don’t think that was a problem at all. As The Intercept put it, “[Blue Lives Matter] bills exemplify the very worst sort of legislation: at once unnecessary and pernicious.”

The bill is intentionally vague on what qualifies as a law enforcement officer and what qualifies as “intentionally causing harm,” opening the door for even more draconian punishment of activists and protesters who get caught up in a melee and are charged with assaulting a cop, as was Occupy Wall Street protester Cecily McMillan.

But it is true that even a single officer getting killed is too many, and therefore, thank goodness Congress finally made murdering police officers illegal. Oh wait, it was already highly illegal. When was the last time you saw a cop killer in the courtroom with his lawyer saying, “But your honor, it was just a police officer. It’s not like the defendant murdered a mailman or a window washer or an adorable bunny rabbit.”

As professor Alex Vitale states in his excellent book, “The End of Policing,” uniformed police officers average only one felony arrest a year, meaning that most of what police do is stand around trying to find citizens to harass for small or nothing crimes. They slam heads against the pavement for such violations as having an open beverage or causing a disturbance. The vast majority of cops are not fighting comic book villain Lex Luthor. And on the rare occasion you see police dressed up in their storm trooper riot outfits, they’re usually getting ready to “deal with” peaceful protesters, or maybe some Native Americans who have the gall to demand clean water, or perhaps some black people who have the nerve to be black people.

So if thousands of Americans were killed by police over the past decade—about half of them not even holding a gun at the time of their murders—why did Congress just fall all over itself to make assaulting police even more illegal? As Natasha Lennard put it in The Intercept, “In our justice system, ‘blue lives’ are already considered to matter the most—which is why police appropriation of the call for black lives to matter is so sickening. … The same ideological commitment to police-as-persecuted underpins FBI efforts to frame Black Lives Matter activists as potential ‘black identity extremists’—a designation, conjured from thin air, that claims anti-racist activism is breeding a terroristic targeting of cops.”

The solution? We need to heavily decrease and demilitarize our police forces. We don’t need men and women with guns—above the law—running around our streets at all times. We should largely switch to community policing, in which unless it’s a truly deadly situation, you don’t call the cops. You don’t invite armed maniacs with a single lazy afternoon of de-escalation training into your neighborhood. Don’t call the cops because your neighbor’s music is too loud or some kids are fighting or you smell marijuana or a pig won’t stop following you home.

Yes, last week an Ohio man called the police on a pig that was following him home. He apparently thought, “The only people who can handle this situation are dudes with guns.”

How much do you want to bet that the guy who called those cops is white? Only a white guy figures the cops will help him in such a situation. If a black man called the cops to deal with a wayward pig, they’d probably shoot him. And then the following day, the cover of the local newspaper would read, “Violent African-American Shot by Police While Trying to Steal Award-Winning Pig.”

If you liked this column, please share it. And check out Lee Camp’s television show “Redacted Tonight” and podcast “Common Censored.”

Bolton Flunky Fleitz Raises Stakes for Iran

Editor’s note: This piece, originally published on Consortiumnews on April 12, 2016, has been reposted in response to the recent news that Fred Fleitz has been chosen as the National Security Council’s chief of staff, reporting to White House National Security Adviser John Bolton. McGovern reports that with Bolton’s old “enforcer” Fred Fleitz as NSC chief of staff, the odds of war with Iran stand to increase exponentially.

On a recent TV appearance, I was asked about whistleblowing, but the experience brought back to mind a crystal-clear example of how, before the Iraq War, CIA careerists were assigned “two bosses”—CIA Director George Tenet and John Bolton, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, the arch-neocon who had been thrust on an obedient Secretary of State Colin Powell.

CIA “analyst” Frederick Fleitz took the instructions quite literally, bragging about being allowed to serve, simultaneously, “two bosses”— and becoming Bolton’s “enforcer.” Fleitz famously chided a senior intelligence analyst at State for not understanding that it was the prerogative of policymakers like Bolton—not intelligence analysts—to “interpret” intelligence data.

In an email from Fleitz in early 2002, at the time when one of his bosses, the pliable George Tenet, was “fixing” the intelligence to “justify” war on Iraq, Fleitz outlined the remarkable new intelligence ethos imposed by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their subordinates who were reshaping the U.S. intelligence community.

Apparently, senior State Department intelligence analyst Christian Westermann “had not gotten the memo” on how things had changed. Rather, he was performing his duties like a professional analyst under the old rules. Westermann had the temerity to block coordination on a speech in which Bolton wanted to make the spurious assertion that Cuba had a developing biological weapons program.

On Feb. 12, 2002, after a personal run-in with Westermann, Fleitz sent Bolton this email: “I explained to Christian [Westermann] that it was a political judgment as to how to interpret this data and the I.C. [Intelligence Community] should do as we asked.” Fleitz informed Bolton that Westermann still “strongly disagrees with us.”

At this point, Bolton became so dyspeptic that he summoned Westermann to his office for a tongue-lashing and then asked top officials of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to fire him. Instead, they defended him, and this was not the only time intelligence managers at State—virtually alone in the Intelligence Community—gave the Bush-43 White House and political hacks like Bolton the clear message not to count on managers and analysts at INR to acquiesce in the politicization of intelligence.

Exaggerating Iran Threat

Later, Fleitz went on to bigger and better things. In 2006, he became “senior adviser” to House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan. Bowing to desires of the White House to portray Iran as a strategic threat, Hoekstra had Fleitz draft an almost comically alarmist paper titled “Recognizing Iran as Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States.” Fleitz was told not to coordinate his paper with the Intelligence Community.

The objective was to pre-empt a formal National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear weapons program—an NIE that the Senate had just commissioned. Fleitz and Hoekstra feared the NIE might come to unwelcome conclusions, contradicting the kinds of stark warnings about Iran’s nuclear program that the White House wanted to use to stir up fear and justify action against Iran. Iraq déjà vu.

The Fleitz-Hoekstra gambit failed. Their over-the-top paper made them the subject of ridicule in professional intelligence circles.

Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence Thomas Fingar was named to manage the formal NIE on Iran, and, mirabile dictu, he was not only a seasoned professional but also a practitioner of the old-time ethos of objective, non-politicized intelligence.

Worse still for Bush, Cheney and their sycophants, the NIE of November 2007, endorsed by all 16 agencies of the Intelligence Community began: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

That Estimate holds the distinction of being the only NIE of which I am aware that demonstrably played a key role in preventing an unnecessary war—the war on Iran that Cheney and Bush were planning for 2008. Bush pretty much admits this in his memoir “Decision Points,” which includes a highly instructive section that he must have written himself.

Indeed, nowhere in his memoir is Bush’s bizarre relationship to truth so manifest as when he describes his dismay at learning that the Intelligence Community had redeemed itself for its lies about Iraq by preparing an honest NIE that stuck a rod in the wheels of the juggernaut rolling toward war with Iran.

Bush complains bitterly that the “eye-popping” NIE “tied my hands on the military side,” adding that the “NIE’s conclusion was so stunning that I felt it would immediately leak to the press.” He writes that he authorized declassification of the key findings “so that we could shape the news stories with the facts.” Facts?

A disappointed Bush writes, “The backlash was immediate. [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad hailed the NIE as a ‘great victory.’” Bush’s apparent “logic” here is to use the widespread disdain for Ahmadinejad to discredit the NIE through association, i.e. whatever Ahmadinejad praises must be false.

An Embarrassment

How embarrassing it must have been for Bush and Cheney! Here before the world were the key judgments of an NIE, the most authoritative genre of intelligence report, unanimously approved “with high confidence” by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and signed by the Director of National Intelligence, saying, in effect, that Bush and Cheney were lying about the “Iranian nuclear threat.” Just a month before the Estimate was issued, Bush was claiming that the threat from Iran could lead to “World War III.”

In his memoir, Bush laments: “I don’t know why the NIE was written the way it was. … Whatever the explanation, the NIE had a big impact —and not a good one.” Spelling out how the NIE had tied his hands “on the military side,” Bush included this kicker:

“But after the NIE, how could I possible explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?”

Yet, that didn’t stop neocon warmongers from trying. The NIE was subject to virulent criticism by those disappointed that it did not provide justification for a “preventive” attack on Iran.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey, who has proudly described himself as the “anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA),” called the Iran NIE “deceptive.” Hoekstra called it “a piece of trash.”

Greg Thielmann, a former State Department official who had managed strategic intelligence analysis but quit before the intelligence debacle on Iraq, could not resist commenting on this bizarre set of circumstances from his new position as a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association: “There is some considerable irony in hearing such criticism from those intimately familiar with the inner workings of the intelligence community, who seemed to have sleep-walked through the serious professional lapses of the 2002 NIE on Iraq WMD.”

But the neocons were deprived of the Iran war for which they had been lusting (just as, six years later, they were deprived of the war on Syria, into which they almost mouse-trapped President Barack Obama).

Still, you need not worry about any negative consequences for the compliant Bush-Cheney “analysts” who were willing to “fix” more intelligence around war policies. As usually happens in Official Washington, they landed on their feet. For instance, Fleitz is now Senior Vice President for Policy and Programs with the Center for Security Policy, a think tank founded by Frank Gaffney, Jr., an archdeacon of neocon-dom, who is still its president.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A former Army officer and CIA analyst, McGovern co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) in January 2003, in an attempt to expose the corruption of intelligence under the Cheney-Bush regime.

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Business Economists Suggest the U.S. Could Face a Recession in 2020

The media, along with the president, were awash in positive superlatives to describe the Labor Department’s May 2018 jobs report on Friday. Donald Trump was so excited he tweeted about it over an hour before the report was released, breaking years of federal protocol. The New York Times’ Upshot blog ran a headline stating: “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are.”

Friday’s optimism has given way to Monday’s reality, however, as a new report from The Associated Press suggests that perhaps the economy, while buoyant for now, may be headed for a recession in 2020.

The National Association for Business Economists (NABE) indicates in its latest quarterly outlook that although Trump’s tax cuts are on track to give the economy a boost for a year, NABE researchers “worry that by 2020, the country could be entering a new recession.”

The panel of 45 economists who composed the report say they are “slightly less optimistic about the U.S. economy in 2018 than they were three months ago,” according to NABE Vice President Kevin Swift, chief economist at the American Chemistry Council.

The panel was particularly concerned about trade. As the AP explains:

Three-fourths of the NABE panel believes that current trade policies will have a negative impact on the economy. Trump last week imposed penalty tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from major U.S. trading partners—the European Union, Canada and Mexico—and he has threatened tariffs on up to $200 billion in Chinese imports, moves that could trigger a global trade war as the targeted nations pledge to retaliate.

The NABE brain trust thinks the economy will grow by 2.7 percent in 2019, below the level of 3 percent annually over the next decade that the Trump administration is touting. Some analysts fear that retiring baby boomers and weak productivity will exacerbate a potential downturn.

Two-thirds of the panel think the recession could hit in 2020, but 18 percent think it could happen even earlier, toward the end of 2019. Meanwhile, though headlines touted a 3.8 percent unemployment rate and a net gain of 223,000 jobs, overall labor force participation is down, and wages, even in those coveted newly created jobs, are not rising as predicted.

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Did Mark Zuckerberg Lie to Congress About Facebook’s User Privacy?

At least one member of Congress regarded new information about Facebook’s data-sharing partnerships with tech companies as evidence that the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, lied to lawmakers in April about the control users have over their information on the social media platform.

Sure looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress about whether users have “complete control” over who sees our data on Facebook. This needs to be investigated and the people responsible need to be held accountable. https://t.co/rshBsxy32G

— David Cicilline (@davidcicilline) June 4, 2018

The New York Times reported Sunday that Facebook formed deals with at least 60 makers of cell phones and other devices allowing them access to users’ personal information and that of their Facebook friends, without explicit consent.

Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Samsung were among the companies Facebook reached agreements with, allowing the companies to access users’ relationship status, religion, political views, and upcoming events they attend.

The deals may have breached Facebook’s compliance with a 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ordering the company to keep users’ information private.

The companies’ access remained in tact even after Facebook realized in 2015 that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had exploited its access to tens of millions of users’ personal information.

Facebook has faced intense scrutiny in recent months over the Trump-linked firm’s profiling of U.S. voters in order to target them with personalized political ads, using personal information it obtained from Facebook.

Facebook prohibited tech developers from accessing the data of users’ friends after discovering the Cambridge Analytica breach in 2015, but the makers of cell phones and other devices were not subject to the restriction.

“It’s like having door locks installed, only to find out that the locksmith also gave keys to all of his friends so they can come in and rifle through your stuff without having to ask you for permission,” Ashkan Soltani, a research and privacy consultant, told the Times of the new revelations.

The Cambridge Analytica controversy led lawmakers to demand that Zuckerberg testify before two Congressional committees in April, during which he claimed, “Every piece of content that you share on Facebook you own. You have complete control over who sees it and how you share it.”

Sandy Parakalis, a former advertising and privacy official at Facebook who left the company in 2012 and has raised concerns over its use of users’ data, posted on twitter about Zuckerberg’s earlier statements and urged lawmakers to hold the CEO accountable for the newly uncovered privacy breach.

6/ And this April, Mark Zuckerberg told Congress: “So now, when people sign in to an app, you do not bring some of your friends’ information with you. You’re only bringing your own information and you’re able to connect with friends who have also authorized that app directly.”

— Sandy Parakilas (@mixblendr) June 4, 2018

7/ This statement to Congress was not correct. Some apps (these device makers) still have access to friend data. Even users who had turned platform off to avoid this kind of abusive data collection could have their data accessed, the Times found, a serious violation of privacy.

— Sandy Parakilas (@mixblendr) June 4, 2018

8/ This wasn’t a small misstatement — the crux of Facebook’s argument was that they fixed the friend permission problem in 2014. They shouldn’t be allowed to qualify that now after getting caught breaking their promise. Lawmakers must hold Facebook accountable.

— Sandy Parakilas (@mixblendr) June 4, 2018

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Is America Barreling Toward a Second Civil War?

Imagine that an impeachment resolution against Trump passes the House. Trump claims it’s the work of the “deep state.” Fox News’s Sean Hannity demands every honest patriot take to the streets. Rightwing social media call for war. As insurrection spreads, Trump commands the armed forces to side with the “patriots.”

Or it’s November 2020 and Trump has lost the election. He charges voter fraud, claiming that the “deep state” organized tens of millions of illegal immigrants to vote against him, and says he has an obligation not to step down. Demonstrations and riots ensue. Trump commands the armed forces to put them down.

If these sound far-fetched, consider Trump’s torrent of lies, his admiration for foreign dictators, his off-hand jokes about being “president for life” (Xi Xinping “was able to do that,” he told admirers in March. “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot some day.’), and his increasing invocation of a “deep state” plot against him.

The United States is premised on an agreement about how to deal with our disagreements. It’s called the Constitution. We trust our system of government enough that we abide by its outcomes even though we may disagree with them. Only once in our history – in 1861 – did enough of us distrust the system so much we succumbed to civil war.

But what happens if a president claims our system is no longer trustworthy?

Last week Trump accused the “deep state” of embedding a spy in his campaign for political purposes. “Spygate” soon unraveled after Republican House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy dismissed it, but truth has never silenced Trump for long.

Trump’s immediate goal is to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. But his strategy appears to go beyond that. In tweets and on Fox News, Trump’s overall mission is repeatedly described as a “war on the deep state.”

In his 2013 novel “A Delicate Truth,” John le Carré describes the “deep state” as a moneyed élite — “non-governmental insiders from banking, industry, and commerce” who rule in secret.

America already may be close to that sort of deep state. As Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University found after analyzing 1,799 policy issues that came before Congress, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Instead, Gilens and Page concluded, lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy individuals and moneyed business interests.

Gilens’ and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens United” decision. It’s likely to be far worse now.

So when Trump says the political system is “rigged,” he’s not far off the mark. Bernie Sanders said the same thing.

A Monmouth Poll released in March found that a bipartisan majority of Americans already believes that an unelected “deep state” is manipulating national policy.

But here’s the crucial distinction. Trump’s “deep state” isn’t the moneyed interests. It’s a supposed cabal of government workers, intelligence personnel, researchers, experts, scientists, professors, and journalists – the people who make, advise about, analyze, or report on public policy.

In the real world, they’re supposed to be truth-tellers. In Trump’s conspiracy fantasy they’re out to get him – in cahoots with former members of the Obama administration, liberals, and Democrats.

Trump has never behaved as if he thought he was president of all Americans, anyway. He’s acted as if he’s only the president of the 63 million who voted for him – certainly not the 66 million who voted for Hillary or anyone who supported Obama.

Nor has he shown any interest in unifying the nation, or speaking to the nation as a whole. Instead, he periodically throws red meat to his overwhelmingly white, rural, and older base.

And he has repeatedly shown he couldn’t care less about the Constitution.

So what happens if Trump is about to be removed – by impeachment or even an election?

In early April, Sean Hannity predicted that if impeachment began, “there’s going to be two sides of this that are fighting and dividing this country at a level we’ve never seen” – “those that stand for truth and those that literally buy into the corrupt deep state attacks against a duly elected president.”

Last summer, Trump consigliore Roger Stone warned of “an insurrection like you’ve never seen,” and claimed any politician who voted to oust Trump “would be endangering their own life.”

A second civil war? Probably not. But the way Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine serious social unrest. That’s how low he’s taken us.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the  Poor People’s Campaign . Please help us by  making a donation .

This Peaceful Army Can Wage a ‘Revolution of Values’

Editor’s note: Truthdig has launched a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us provide firsthand accounts of this activism by making a donation.

The fourth week of the Poor People’s Campaign kicks off in Lansing, Mich., where the theme of the week is “The Right to Health and a Healthy Planet: Ecological Devastation and Health Care.”

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For the previous three weeks of the Poor People’s Campaign, Truthdig reported from the front lines as thousands of activists and civil rights advocates gathered in Washington, D.C. (Week 1), Chicago (Week 2) and North Carolina (Week 3) in an effort to relaunch Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight against poverty, war and income inequality. May 14 was the first of 40 days of action planned across the nation. The campaign’s goals include federal and state living-wage laws, an end to anti-union and anti-workers’ rights efforts, welfare programs for the poor, equity in education, Medicaid expansion and accessible housing.

See Truthdig’s multimedia coverage of the actions for Week 1, Week 2 and Week 3. Read Truthdig photojournalist Michael Nigro’s piece about the movement and view his audio photo essays for Week 1, Week 2 and Week 3.

With funding support from our readers, Nigro is reporting live in Lansing on the first day of action this week. Scroll down to see Truthdig’s live multimedia updates.

7:40 p.m. PDT: Earlier in Lansing, 29 Poor People’s Campaign activists were arrested after going to Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality parking garage and blocking employee exits.

1:36 p.m. PDT: The goal of the Poor People’s Campaign is to build a “peaceful army to wage a revolution of values.” It is the same goal Martin Luther King Jr. had.

“I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,” Dr. King said in 1967 in his “Why I Am Opposed to the Vietnam War” speech. “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.”

America still has time to heed the call for a revolution of values. But the clock is ticking.

Could the Poor People’s Campaign be the unifying movement?

1:34 p.m. PDT: Lansing police have not made any arrests of protesters as the Poor People’s Campaign action winds down.

1:32 p.m. PDT: A passionate speaker says there are three types of people in the world. Those that dwell in love. Those that dwell in fear. And those that struggle between the two. Those who dwell in love, he declares, must make everyone else more aware and awake to save humanity and create a pathway to continue as the human race.

1:15 p.m. PDT: The U.S. population is 328 million people. The Poor People’s Campaign produced a report called “The Souls of Poor Folk” and found that 140 million Americans, or 42 percent of America, are living on or below the poverty line.

The issues confronted in The Souls of Poor Folk drive the day-to-day struggles of the poor and dispossessed. These issues demand that we dispel the notion that systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the war economy hurt only a small segment of our society. More than 40,600,000 Americans subsist below the poverty line; this report additionally shows that there are close to 140 million people dealing with some combination of these crises every day. Nearly half of our population cannot afford a $400 emergency, which presents a structural crisis of national proportion that ties poverty to things like healthcare and housing. The devastation cuts across race, gender, age, and geography. It has carved a dangerous and deepening moral chasm in America and inflicts a tragic loss of purpose, even among the affluent.

1:05 p.m. PDT: Protesters at Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality have wrapped the area with yellow caution tape, calling the place a crime scene. One woman exiting the DEQ building, presumably an employee, had scissors in her hands, cut the caution tape, pulled a rabbi’s shawl and draped it over his head. Then she said, “You guys are awesome.” It was a strange act of violence in an otherwise nonviolent day of protest.

12:51 p.m. PDT: Chanters say, “The MDEQ has got to go.” The MDEQ is Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, which gave Nestlé the right to pump 400 gallons of water a minute from White Pine Springs in Michigan and sell the water. According to Popular Science, “the company will then bottle, brand like Nestlé Pure Life Purified Water or Ice Mountain 100% Natural Spring Water, and sell (at least in New York) for about $2.50 a pop.”

In other words, Nestlé will profit from clean water while other Michigan residents have to pay for dirty, poisoned water.

What is wrong with this picture?

12:36 p.m. PDT: Some street theater is taking place in Lansing. In that drama, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is on trial. The people of Flint, represented by children, are the plaintiffs. The charges include poisoning Flint’s water, killing people and pets and poisoning life for seven generations. The people find Snyder guilty as charged. He is arrested and taken away in a demonstration. Will reality imitate art?

12:33 p.m. PDT: About 50 people will be risking arrest in Lansing.

12:19 p.m. PDT: A disabled man crystallizes why America needs a moral revival.

What we have here is a dis-understanding. This dis-understanding is between Americans and what is called America. America is a thing. Americans are people. Living, breathing people. America is a bunch of systems that impact the lives of real Americans. We cannot expect a thing to behave with compassion. This is why we need a Poor People’s Campaign. That is why we need a moral revival. When systems and policies become more important than people, we have a dis-understanding.

12:15 p.m. PDT: A diverse group of protesters in Lansing is speaking truth to power about health and the health of our planet.

Water is life.

Water a human right.

Health care is a human right.

We will keep fighting for clean water and universal health care until we can’t fight anymore.

People think that because we are poor, we can’t do anything.

These dry bones can walk, and these dry bones can walk over you.

Do you know what the Hippocratic Oath is?

11:55 a.m. PDT: Thirty-eight states and the District of Colombia are participating in the Poor People’s Campaign. The Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, explains why the movement is in Lansing today. “The state of Michigan is ground zero for the water crisis that is taking place across America. We are four years since the Flint water crisis, and people still do not have clean water.”

The Poor People’s Campaign demands the water situation in Flint changes.

11:46 a.m. PDT: A chant of “Lock Him Up” begins for Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who said he would fix the water problems in Flint. That has not happened, even though Snyder released a statement in April to justify closing Flint’s free bottled water distribution centers.

“Nearly two years of LCR [Lead and Copper Rule] data and thousands of other tests show that Flint’s water is testing the same as or better than similar cities across the state,” Snyder said. “Flint’s water is now well within the standards set by the federal government.”

Truthdig ran an important investigation by journalist Jordan Chariton on the Flint water issue and how flawed science has declared the crisis over.

Downtown Flint, Mich. (U.S. Department of Agriculture)

11:38 a.m. PDT: Protesters join in song in front of the Michigan state Capitol:

“Somebody’s poisoned the water, and it’s gone on far too long. Somebody’s hurting our children, and it’s gone on far too long. Somebody’s hurting our elders, and it’s gone on far too long. Somebody’s hurting our earth, and it’s gone on far too long. Somebody’s hurting our people, and it’s gone on far too long. And we won’t be silent anymore.”

11:11 a.m. PDT: The live stream has begun. Truthdig correspondent Michael Nigro is documenting what’s happening on the ground in Lansing.

11:20 a.m. PDT: About 450 people are marching to the Michigan state Capitol to make their voices heard.

10:57 a.m. PDT: Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder brought his water. Good thing he’s staying hydrated. Word on the street is that it gets hot where he’s going.

Michael Nigro / Truthdig

10:55 a.m. PDT: Truthdig correspondent Michael Nigro will be live streaming video from the Lansing Capitol building in about five minutes. You can follow the stream at Truthdig’s Facebook page.

10:01 a.m. PDT: This morning, state police gave the Poor People’s Campaign notice that it would limit Capitol access to two people at a time. That means that if any other protesters want to enter the building, the two already inside have to leave. In previous weeks, they’ve allowed dozens of protesters to rally in the rotunda—even allowing protesters to sleep in the Capitol building overnight with no consequences.

In response to the state of Kentucky trying to silence poor people, clergy and advocates who are part of the Poor People’s Campaign, the Rev. Dr. William Barber, campaign co-chair, issued the following statement:

The state of Kentucky is trying to change the rules to prevent people from speaking out—in violation of its own Constitution. The rules that need to be changed are not the ones that allow for peaceful, nonviolent protest, but the ones that rob the poor of the right to healthcare and allow billion-dollar companies to pollute our water and environment. Politicians in Kentucky are afraid to hear a true critique of their policies, but we will not be silenced by their descent into authoritarianism.

Here is an excerpt of the Kentucky Constitution that was referenced in the statement: “The right of assembling together in a peaceable manner for their common good, and of applying to those invested with the power of government for redress of grievances or other proper purposes, by petition, address or remonstrance.”

9:57 a.m. PDT: In addition to Lansing, protest actions will be taking place across the United States today in other cities, including Frankfurt, Ky., Sacramento, Calif., and Washington. D.C.

9:33 a.m. PDT: The Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, will lead hundreds of poor people, clergy and advocates in protest today at the Michigan State Capitol to highlight the state’s ongoing water crisis.

Michael Nigro / Truthdig

Trump Claims ‘Absolute Right’ to Pardon Himself

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump asserted his presidential power and escalated his efforts to discredit the special counsel Russia probe Monday, declaring he has the “absolute right” to pardon himself and attacking the investigation as “totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!”

Trump’s comments on Twitter came a day after attorney Rudy Giuliani played down the possibility that the president could pardon himself, suggesting he might have that authority but would be unwise to use it.

“Pardoning himself would be unthinkable and probably lead to immediate impeachment,” Giuliani, a member of Trump’s legal team, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “And he has no need to do it, he’s done nothing wrong.”

On Twitter Monday, Trump said: “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” He then again decried special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe as a “never ending Witch Hunt.”

Trump later added that the “appointment of the Special Councel is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL! Despite that, we play the game because I, unlike the Democrats, have done nothing wrong!”

Trump’s legal team is making clear that it will combat any effort to force the president to testify in front of a grand jury. Giuliani on Sunday underscored one of the main arguments in a newly unveiled letter sent by Trump’s lawyers to Mueller back in January: A president can’t be given a grand jury subpoena as part of the investigation into foreign meddling in the 2016 election.

But Giuliani, in a series of television interviews, broke with one of their bolder arguments in the letter that a president could not have committed obstruction of justice because he has ultimate authority over any federal investigation.

Yet the former New York City mayor, who was not on the legal team when the letter was written, added that Trump “probably does” have the power to pardon himself, an assertion challenged by legal scholars. He says the president’s legal team hasn’t discussed that option, which many observers believe could plunge the nation into a constitutional crisis.

“I think the political ramifications would be tough,” Giuliani told ABC’s “This Week.” ”Pardoning other people is one thing, pardoning yourself is tough.”

Trump has issued two unrelated pardons in recent days and discussed others, a move that has been interpreted as a possible signal to allies ensnared in the Russia probe.

The letter is dated Jan. 29 and addressed to Mueller from John Dowd, a Trump lawyer who has since resigned from the legal team. Mueller has requested an interview with the president to determine whether he had criminal intent to obstruct the investigation into his associates’ possible links to Russia’s election interference.

Giuliani said Sunday that a decision about an interview would not be made until after Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on June 12 in Singapore, and he cast doubt that it would occur at all.

“I mean, we’re leaning toward not,” Giuliani told ABC. “But look, if they can convince us that it will be brief, it would be to the point, there were five or six points they have to clarify, and with that, we can get this — this long nightmare for the — for the American public over.”

In addition to the legal battles, Trump’s team and allies have waged a public relations campaign against Mueller and the Justice Department to discredit the investigation and soften the impact of the special counsel’s potential findings. Giuliani said last week that the special counsel probe may be an “entirely illegitimate investigation” and need to be curtailed because, in his estimation, it was based on inappropriately obtained information from an informant and Comey’s memos.

In reality, the FBI began a counterintelligence investigation in July 2016 to determine if Trump campaign associates were coordinating with Russia to tip the election. The investigation was opened after the hacking of Democratic emails that intelligence officials later formally attributed to Russia.

Trump’s team has requested a briefing about the informant, but Giuliani said Sunday that the president would not order the Justice Department to comply because it would negatively affect public opinion. But he continued to cast doubt on the special counsel’s eventual findings, suggesting that Trump has already offered explanations for the matters being investigated and that the special counsel was biased against the president.

“For every one of these things he did, we can write out five reasons why he did it,” Giuliani said. “If four of them are completely innocent and one of them is your assumption that it’s a guilty motive, which (Trump) would deny, you can’t possibly prosecute him.”

Trump’s legal team has long pushed the special counsel to narrow the scope of its interview. Giuliani also suggested that Trump’s lawyers had been incorrect when they denied that the president was involved with the letter that offered an explanation for Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians who offered damaging information on Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“This is the reason you don’t let the president testify,” Giuliani told ABC. “Our recollection keeps changing, or we’re not even asked a question and somebody makes an assumption.”

If Trump does not consent to an interview, Mueller will have to decide whether to go forward with a historic grand jury subpoena. His team raised the possibility in March of subpoenaing the president, but it is not clear if it is still under active consideration.

A court battle is likely if Trump’s team argues that the president can’t be forced to answer questions or be charged with obstruction of justice. President Bill Clinton was charged with obstruction in 1998 by the House of Representatives as part of his impeachment trial. And one of the articles of impeachment prepared against President Richard Nixon in 1974 was for obstruction.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.