Chris Hedges's Blog, page 628

Israel Rejects Calls for Probe of Gaza Violence

JERUSALEM—Israel’s defense minister on Sunday rejected international calls for an investigation into deadly violence along Gaza’s border with Israel, saying troops acted appropriately and fired only at Palestinian protesters who posed a threat.

Fifteen Palestinians were killed and over 700 wounded in Friday’s violence near the Israeli border, according to Palestinian health officials. It was the area’s deadliest violence since a war four years ago.

Human rights groups have accused the army of using excessive force, and both the U.N. secretary-general and the European Union’s foreign policy chief have urged an investigation.

In an interview, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Israel would not cooperate with a U.N. inquiry if there were one.

“From the standpoint of the Israeli soldiers, they did what had to be done,” Lieberman told Israeli Army Radio. “I think that all of our troops deserve a commendation, and there won’t be any inquiry.”

Friday’s mass marches were largely led by Gaza’s ruling Hamas group and touted as the launch of a six-week-long protest campaign against a stifling decade-old blockade of the territory. Israel and Egypt have maintained the blockade since Hamas, an Islamic militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction, seized control of Gaza in 2007.

In Friday’s confrontations, large crowds gathered near the fence, with smaller groups of protesters rushing forward, throwing stones and burning tires.

Israeli troops responded with live fire and rubber-coated steel pellets, while drones dropped tear gas from above. Soldiers with rifles were perched on high earthen embankments overlooking the scene.

Protests have continued since Friday but at a far smaller scale. On Sunday, one person was seriously wounded by gunfire, Palestinian medical officials said.

The military has said it responded only to violent attacks aimed at troops and the border fence.

But video from the scene showed at least a handful of incidents in which people appear to have been shot either far from the border or while they were not actively rioting.

In one video that spread on social media, a young man was fatally shot from behind while running away from the border area carrying a tire.

The Israeli military accused Hamas of releasing videos that were either incomplete, edited or “completely fabricated.” It said troops had followed strict rules of engagement, and that protesters were putting themselves in “harm’s way” by operating in a dangerous area.

In the case of the man with the tire, the army said the video told only part of the story, and said he was a Hamas militant who had been involved in violence just moments before he was shot. It gave no additional evidence to support the claims.

In the interview, Lieberman said those who protested peacefully were not harmed, saying claims that peaceful protesters were harmed were “lies and inventions.”

“Whoever didn’t get close to the fence was not shot,” he said.

The Israeli military has said those killed by troops were men who were involved in violence and who belonged to Hamas and other militant factions. The army later released the names and ages of 10 of the dead, including what it said were eight members of Hamas and two from other militant groups. It also accuses Gaza health officials of exaggerating the number of wounded.

Four of the 15 dead were members of the Hamas military wing, Hamas said Saturday. The group said a fifth member who was not on the Health Ministry list was killed near the border, and that Israel has the body. It said another man is also missing in the border area.

The protests are to culminate in a large border march on May 15, the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding. The date is mourned by Palestinians as their “nakba,” or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands were uprooted in the 1948 Mideast war over Israel’s creation. Most of Gaza’s 2 million people are descendants of Palestinian refugees.

Gaza’s continued border closure has made it increasingly difficult for Hamas to govern. Life in the coastal strip has deteriorated further in recent months, with rising unemployment, grinding poverty and daily blackouts that last for hours.

Hamas has been further weakened by international isolation and financial pressure by the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, along with three wars against Israel. It appears to be taking a gamble by using the protests to draw attention to Gaza without sparking another painful war.

Israel has warned that it will not allow the border to be breached. It also accuses Hamas of trying to use protests as a cover for planting explosives and staging attacks. On Saturday, Israel’s military said it will target militant groups inside Gaza if the border violence drags on.

It appears unlikely that large-scale protests will continue daily, with larger turnouts only expected after Friday noon prayers, the highlight of the Muslim religious week.

Inside Israel, most of the country has lined up solidly behind the army. Still, on Sunday, dozens of Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv against the violence, criticizing Israel for its response.

#MeToo Movement Looms Over Jury Selection in Cosby Case

PHILADELPHIA—The #MeToo movement will be looming over the proceedings when jury selection gets underway Monday in Bill Cosby’s sexual assault retrial. But experts say that could cut both ways for the comedian.

It could make some potential jurors more hostile toward him and others more likely to think men are being unfairly accused.

“We really have had this explosion of awareness since that last trial, and it has changed the entire environment,” said Richard Gabriel, a jury consultant who has worked on over 1,000 trials. “It is a huge challenge for the defense, but it could also provide an avenue and open up the topic.”

A jury deadlocked last June at the former TV star’s first trial after Cosby’s lawyers managed to sow enough doubt in the minds of a few jurors. That was before the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct started toppling famous men in rapid succession, among them Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey and Sen. Al Franken.

Veteran lawyers and jury consultants say #MeToo will make the process of picking 12 jurors more complex and raise the stakes even higher.

The defense is likely to use attitudes toward the movement to weed out jurors.

“There may be a juror who says, ‘I don’t have an opinion about Cosby, but the #MeToo is very important to me,'” said Melissa M. Gomez, a jury expert and author of the book “Jury Trials Outside In.” ”That person is still very dangerous to the defense.”

Cosby, 80, is charged with drugging and molesting Andrea Constand, a former Temple University athletics administrator, at Cosby’s suburban Philadelphia home in 2004.

Last year, after more than 52 hours of jury deliberations over six days, the judge declared a mistrial. One juror said the panel was split 10-2 in favor of conviction, while another said the group of seven men and five women was more evenly divided.

A juror who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity said he was suspicious of Constand’s story, questioning why she waited to tell authorities about the alleged assault and suggesting the clothing she wore to Cosby’s house had influenced his view of their encounter.

The AP does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.

In the first trial, jury selection was moved to Pittsburgh over defense fears that widespread publicity could make it difficult to find unbiased jurors in the Philadelphia area. Cosby has a retooled legal team, led by former Michael Jackson lawyer Tom Mesereau, which didn’t seek such measures this time.

Last year’s case was mostly he-said-she-said, but the judge agreed last month to let the jury at the retrial hear from an additional five women who have accused Cosby, giving prosecutors a chance to portray the man once known as “America’s Dad” as a serial predator.

“It’s going to be much more difficult for the defense to chip away at all six, especially if there is a common thread and story,” Gomez said. “That shows a pattern of behavior.”

Typically prosecutors and defense attorneys can take what happened at the first trial, learn from it and improve on it in the retrial. But some experts say the climate surrounding sexual assault has changed so thoroughly that both sides should go back to the drawing board.

“There is no question that this is a very difficult time to try someone who has been accused of sexual assault,” said Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz. “For some jurors the whole movement will be on trial, because Cosby has been the poster person for this kind of accusation.”

At a hearing last month, Cosby lawyer Becky James argued it would be difficult to find an impartial jury in this climate: “There’s no way we will get a jury that hasn’t heard these allegations against not just Mr. Cosby but many other celebrities.” But Judge Steven O’Neill scoffed at the notion Cosby cannot get a fair trial.

Jury experts said the key is getting potential jurors to open up about their personal experiences surrounding sexual assault and misconduct, something that might be better done behind closed doors, in the judge’s chambers, where people might be more likely to speak freely.

“Without getting it out in the open, it can be underneath the surface,” Gabriel said. “The hidden bias is always the most dangerous bias.”

Philip K. Anthony, CEO of trial consultant firm DecisionQuest, said he has found jurors often don’t know as much about newsy topics like the #MeToo movement as lawyers might anticipate. He also said he has found jurors want to do the right thing.

“In a case with a lot of notoriety, jurors work even harder to reach a fair and impartial decision,” he said.

Trump Threatens End to Deal for ‘Dreamers’

PALM BEACH, Fla.—President Donald Trump declared Sunday that a deal to help “Dreamer” immigrants was “NO MORE” and threatened to pull out of a free trade agreement with Mexico unless it does more to stop people from crossing into the U.S. He claimed they’re coming to take advantage of protections granted certain immigrants.

“NO MORE DACA DEAL!” Trump tweeted one hour after he started the day by wishing his followers a “HAPPY EASTER!”

He said Mexico must “stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!” The U.S., Canada and Mexico are currently renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement at Trump’s insistence.

“Mexico has got to help us at the border,” Trump told reporters before he attended Easter services at an Episcopal church near his Palm Beach, Florida, home. “A lot of people are coming in because they want to take advantage of DACA.”

Former President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to protect from deportation hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally after they were brought here as children. Trump ended the program last year, but gave Congress six months to pass legislation enshrining it. A deal has so far proved elusive.

It was not immediately clear what Trump was referring to when he said people are coming to take advantage of the program, which granted the immigrants work permits.

The government is not issuing new permits, though existing ones can be renewed. Anyone who wanted to participate had a set period of time in which to sign up, and the program is no longer open to new entrants. Proposed DACA deals crafted by lawmakers also were not open to new participants.

Trump did not explain his thinking when reporters asked as he entered the Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea with his wife, Melania, and daughter Tiffany. The White House also did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

Trump, who addressed reporters briefly before entering the church, again blamed Democrats for the failure to reach an agreement on the “Dreamers.”

“They had a great chance. The Democrats blew it. They had a great, great chance, but we’ll have to take a look,” he said. “Mexico has got to help us at the border. They flow right through Mexico, they send them into the United States. It can’t happen that way.”

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Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap

Recycling War Criminals

A barely noticed anniversary slid by on March 20th. It’s been 15 years since the United States committed the greatest war crime of the twenty-first century: the unprovoked, aggressive invasion of Iraq. The New York Times, which didn’t exactly cover itself in glory in the run-up to that invasion, recently ran an op-ed by an Iraqi novelist living in the United States entitled “Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country,” but that was about it. The Washington Post, another publication that (despite the recent portrayal of its Vietnam-era heroism in the movie The Post) repeatedly editorialized in favor of the invasion, marked the anniversary with a story about the war’s “murky” body count. Its piece concluded that at least 600,000 people died in the decade and a half of war, civil war, and chaos that followed — roughly the population of Washington, D.C.

These days, there’s a significant consensus here that the Iraq invasion was a “terrible mistake,” a “tragic error,” or even the “single worst foreign policy decision in American history.” Fewer voices are saying what it really was: a war crime. In fact, that invasion fell into the very category that led the list of crimes at the Nuremberg tribunal, where high Nazi officials were tried for their actions during World War II. During the negotiations establishing that tribunal and its rules, it was (ironically, in view of later events) the United States that insisted on including the crime of “waging a war of aggression” and on placing it at the head of the list. The U.S. position was that all the rest of Germany’s war crimes sprang from this first “crime against peace.”

Similarly, the many war crimes of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush — the extraordinary renditions; the acts of torture at Guantánamo, Bagram Air Basein Afghanistan, and CIA black sites all over the world; the nightmare of abuse at Abu Ghraib, a U.S. military prison in Iraq; the siege and firebombing (with white phosphorus) of the Iraqi city of Fallujah; the massacre of civilians in Haditha, another Iraqi city — all of these arose from the Bush administration’s determination to invade Iraq.

It was to secure “evidence” of a (nonexistent) connection between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda attackers of 9/11 that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld upped the ante at Guantánamo in his infamous memo approving torture there. The search for proof of the same connection motivated the torture of Abu Zubaydah at a CIA black site in Thailand. If not for that long-planned invasion of Iraq, the “war on terror” might have ended years ago.

But Wasn’t That Then?

Fifteen years is an eternity in what Gore Vidal once called “the United States of Amnesia.” So why resurrect the ancient history of George W. Bush in the brave new age of Donald Trump? The answer is simple enough: because the Trump administration is already happily recycling some of those Bush-era war crimes along with some of the criminals who committed them. And its top officials, military and civilian, are already threatening to generate new ones of their own.

Last July, the State Department closed the office that, since the Clinton administration, has assisted war crimes victims seeking justice in other countries. Apparently, the Trump administration sees no reason to do anything to limit the impunity of war criminals, whoever they might be. Reporting on the closure, Newsweek quoted Major Todd Price, who worked at Guantánamo as a judge advocate general (JAG) defense attorney, this way:

“It just makes official what has been U.S. policy since 9/11, which is that there will be no notice taken of war crimes because so many of them were being committed by our own allies, our military and intelligence officers, and our elected officials. The war crime of conspiring and waging aggressive war still exists, as torture, denial of fair trial rights, and indefinite detention are war crimes. But how embarrassing and revealing of hypocrisy would it be to charge a foreign official with war crimes such as these?”

Guantánamo JAG attorneys like Price are among the real, if unsung, heroes of this sorry period. They continue to advocate for their indefinitely detained, still untried clients, most of whom will probably never leave that prison. Despite the executive order President Obama signed on his first day in office to close GITMO, it remains open to this day and Donald Trump has promised to “load it up with some bad dudes,” Geneva Conventions be damned.

Indeed, Secretary of Defense James (“Mad Dog”) Mattis has said that the president has the right to lock up anyone identified as a “combatant” in our forever wars, well, forever. In 2016, he assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that any detainee who “has signed up with this enemy” — no matter where “the president, the commander-in-chief, sends us” to fight — should know that he will be a “prisoner until the war is over.” In other words, since the war on terror will never end, anyone the U.S. captures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Niger, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, or elsewhere will face the possibility of spending the rest of his life in Guantánamo.

Recycling War Criminals

Speaking of Mattis and war crimes, there’s already plenty of blood on his hands. He earned that “Mad Dog” sobriquet while commanding the U.S. Marines who twice in 2004 laid siege to Fallujah. During those sieges, American forces sealed that Iraqi city off so no one could leave, attacked marked ambulances and aid workers, shot women, children, and an ambulance driver, killed almost 6,000 civilians outright, displaced 200,000 more, and destroyed 75% of the city with bombs and other munitions. The civilian toll was vastly disproportionate to any possible military objective — itself the definition of a war crime.

One of the uglier aspects of that battle was the use of white phosphorus, an incendiary munition. Phosphorus ignites spontaneously when exposed to air. If bits of that substance attach to human beings, as long as there’s oxygen to combine with the phosphorus, skin and flesh burn away, sometimes right into the bone. Use of white phosphorus as an anti-personnel weapon is forbidden under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the U.S. has signed.

In Iraq, Mattis also saw to it that charges would be dropped against soldiers responsible for murdering civilians in the city of Haditha. In a well-documented 2005 massacre — a reprisal for a roadside bomb — American soldiers shot 24 unarmed men, women, and children at close range. As the convening authority for the subsequent judicial hearing, Mattis dismissed the murder charges against all the soldiers accused of that atrocity.

Mattis is hardly the only slightly used war criminal in the Trump administration. As most people know, the president has just nominated Deputy CIA Director Gina Haspel to head the Agency. There are times when women might want to celebrate the shattering of a glass ceiling, but this shouldn’t be one of them. Haspel was responsible for running a CIA black site in Thailand, during a period in the Bush years when the Agency’s torture program was operating at full throttle. She was in charge, for instance, when the CIA tortured Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was waterboarded at least three times and, according to the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture report, “interrogated using the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.” (The report provided no further details.)

Haspel was also part of the chain of command that ordered the destruction of videotapes of the torture of Abu Zubaydah (waterboarded a staggering 83 times). According to the PBS show Frontline, she drafted the cable that CIA counterterrorism chief José Rodríguez sent out to make sure those tapes disappeared. In many countries, covering up war crimes would itself merit prosecution; in Washington, it earns a promotion.

More on Trump and Torture

Many people remember that Trump campaigned on a promise to bring back waterboarding “and a whole lot worse.” On the campaign trail, he repeatedly insisted that torture “works” and that even “if it doesn’t work, they [whoever “they” may be] deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.” Trump repeatedhis confidence in the efficacy of torture a few days after his inauguration, saying that “people at the highest level of intelligence” had assured him it worked.

Trump’s nominee to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state is former Tea Party congressman and CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Known for his antipathy to Muslims (and to Iran), he once endorsed calling his Indian-American electoral opponent a “turban topper.”

Pompeo is as eager as Trump to restore torture’s good name and legality, although his public pronouncements have sometimes been more circumspect than the president’s. During his CIA confirmation hearings he assured the Senate Intelligence Committee of what most of its members wanted to hear: that he would “absolutely not” reinstitute waterboarding and other forms of torture, even if ordered to do so by the president. However, his written testimony was significantly more equivocal. As the British Independent reported, Pompeo wrote that he would back reviewing the ban on waterboarding if prohibiting the technique was shown to impede the “gathering of vital intelligence.”

Pompeo added that he planned to reopen the question of whether interrogation techniques should be limited to those — none of them considered torture techniques — found in the Army Field Manual, something legally required ever since, in 2009, President Obama issued an executive order to that effect. (“If confirmed,” wrote Pompeo, “I will consult with experts at the [Central Intelligence] Agency and at other organizations in the U.S. government on whether the Army Field Manual uniform application is an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country.”) Unlike many of Trump’s appointees, Pompeo is a smart guy, which makes him all the more dangerous.

When President Trump lists his triumphs, often the first one he mentions is the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice. Gorsuch, too, played a small but juicy role in the Bush torture drama, drafting the president’s signing statement for the Detainee Treatment Act when he worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel back in 2005. That statement officially outlawed any torture of “war on terror” detainees, and yet left open the actual practice of torture because, as Gorsuch assured President Bush, none of the administration’s self-proclaimed “enhanced interrogation techniques” (including waterboarding) amounted to torture in the first place.

Still, of all Trump’s recycled appointments, the most dangerous of all took place only recently. The president fired his national security advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, and replaced him with John Bolton of Iran-Contra and Iraq invasion fame.

Under George W. Bush, Bolton was a key proponent of that invasion, which he’d been advocating since at least 1998 when he signed an infamous letter to Bill Clinton from the Project for a New American Century recommending just such a course of action. In 2002, Bolton, while undersecretary of state for arms control, engineered the dismissal of José Bustani, the head of the U.N.’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was involved in overseeing Iraq’s disarmament process. A former Bolton deputy told the New York Times that Bolton was dismayed because Bustani “was trying to send chemical-weapons inspectors to Baghdad in advance of the U.S.-led invasion.” Presumably Bolton didn’t want the U.N. trumpeting the bad news that Iraq had no active chemical weapons program at that moment.

Nor has Bolton ever forgotten his first Middle Eastern fascination, Iran, although nowadays he wants to attack it (along with North Korea) rather than conspire with it, as President Reagan and he did in the 1980s. He’s argued in several editorials and as a Fox News commentator — wrongly as it happens — that it would be completely legal for the United States to launch first strikes against both countries. Naturally, he opposes the six-nation pact with Iran to end its nuclear weapons program. When that agreement was signed, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Bolton entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” It should (but doesn’t) go without saying that any first strike against another country is again the very definition of the initial crime on that Nuremberg list.

Recycling War Crimes

We can’t blame the Trump administration for the decision to support Saudi Arabia’s grim war in Yemen, a catastrophe for the civilians of that poverty-stricken, now famine-plagued country. That choice was made under Barack Obama. But President Trump hasn’t shown the slightest urge to end the American role in it either. Not after the Saudis threw him that fabulous party in Riyadh, projecting a five-story-high portrait of him on the exterior of the Ritz Carlton there. Not after his warm embrace of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman during his recent visit to the United States. In fact, at their joint press conference, Trump actually criticized former president Obama for bothering the Saudis with complaints about human rights violations in Yemen and in Saudi Arabia itself.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to fund and support the Saudi military’s three-year-old war crime in that country, providing weaponry (including cluster bombs), targeting intelligence, and mid-air refueling for Saudi aircraft conducting missions there. The conflict, which the New York Times has called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” has killed at least ten thousand people, although accurate numbers are almost impossible to come by. As of December 2017, the Yemen Data Project had catalogued 15,489 separate air attacks, of which almost a third involved no known military targets and another 4,800 hit targets that have yet to be identified. Hospitals and other health facilities have been targeted along with crowded markets. Government funding for public health and sanitation ended in 2016, leading to a cholera epidemic that the Guardian calls “the largest and fastest-spreading outbreak of the disease in modern history.”

Through the illegal blockading of Yemen’s ports, Saudi Arabia and its allies have exposed vast numbers of Yemenis to the risk of famine as well. Even before the latest blockade began in November 2017, that country faced the largest food emergency in the world. Now, it is in the early stages of a potentially devastating famine caused entirely by Saudi Arabia’s illegal war, aided and abetted by the United States. In addition, Trump has increased the number of drone assassinations in Yemen, with their ever-present risk of civilian deaths.

Yemen is hardly the only site for actual and potential Trump administration war crimes. In response to requests from his military commanders, the president has, for instance, eased the targeting restrictions that had previously been in place for drone strikes, a decision he’s also failed to report to Congress, as required by law. According to Al-Jazeera, such drone strikes in countries ranging from Libya to Afghanistan will no longer require the presence of an “imminent threat,” which means “the U.S. may now select targets outside of armed conflict,” with increased risk of hitting noncombatants. Also relaxed has been the standard previously in place “of requiring ‘near certainty’ that the target is present” before ordering a strike. Drone operators will now be permitted to attack civilian homes and vehicles, even if they can’t confirm that the human being they are searching for is there. Under Trump, the CIA, which President Obama had largely removed from the drone wars, is once again ordering such attacks along with the military. All of these changes make it more likely that Washington’s serial aerial assassinations will kill significant numbers of civilians in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other target countries.

Defense Secretary Mattis has also loosened the rules of engagement in Afghanistan by, for example, removing the “proximity requirement” for bombing raids. In other words, U.S. forces are now free to drop bombs even when the target is nowhere near U.S. or Afghan military forces. As Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee last October,

“If they are in an assembly area, a training camp, we know they are an enemy and they are going to threaten the Afghan government or our people, [Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. Forces Afghanistan,] has the wherewithal to make that decision. Wherever we find them, anyone who is trying to throw the NATO plan off, trying to attack the Afghan government, then we can go after them.”

Under such widened rules for air strikes — permitting them anytime our forces notice a group of people “assembling” in an area — the chances of killing civilians go way up. And indeed, civilian casualties rose precipitously in Afghanistan last year.

And then there’s always the chance — the odds have distinctly risen since the appointments of two raging Iranophobes, Pompeo and Bolton, to key national security positions — that Trump will start his very own unprovoked war of aggression. “I’m good at war,” Trump told an Iowa rally in 2015. “I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war. I love war in a certain way, but only when we win.” With Mike Pompeo whispering in one ear and John Bolton in the other, it’s frighteningly likely Trump will soon commit his very own war crime by starting an aggressive war against Iran.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

Melting Permafrost Raises New Fears Among Scientists

Methane emissions are the source of the greenhouse gas which, after carbon dioxide, probably causes climatologists more sleepless nights than any of the other gases. And now it appears they have quite a lot more to bother them than they had realised.

Methane is reckoned to be at least 30 times more powerful than CO2 at warming the Earth, with some estimates putting its potency much higher still. The good news, research has suggested, is that there is far less methane than CO2 in the atmosphere to worry about.

The bad news, announced by an international research team, is that previous calculations may have been seriously wrong, and that thawing permafrost is likely to be producing appreciably more methane than anyone had thought.

The researchers were headed by Christian Knoblauch of the Centre for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN) at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, make it possible to predict better how much of this significant gas may be released by the thawing of the Arctic permafrost.

Methane and carbon dioxide are both produced in thawing permafrost as dead animal and plant remains decompose. But methane is formed only in the absence of oxygen. Until now, scientists had also thought that more greenhouse gases were formed when the ground was dry and well aerated – in other words, when oxygen was available.

So they did not expect much methane to be produced by the thawing permafrost.

What Dr Knoblauch and his colleagues have now shown is that water-saturated permafrost soils without oxygen can be twice as harmful to the climate as dry soils – which means the role of methane has been greatly underestimated.

They have, for what they say is the first time, measured in the laboratory the long-term production of methane in thawing permafrost. The team had to wait for three years before their roughly forty-thousand-year-old samples from the Siberian Arctic finally produced methane.

They observed the permafrost for a total of seven years and found that, without oxygen, equal amounts of methane and CO2 were produced.

Gigaton Estimate

A co-author of their report, Susanne Liebner, from the Helmholtz Center Potsdam – GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, said: “By combining process-based and molecular-microbiological methods, our study shows for the first time that the methane-forming micro-organisms in the thawing permafrost have significant influence on the greenhouse gas budget.”

The team used the new data to improve a computer model that estimates how much greenhouse gas is produced in permafrost in the long term – and they compiled a first forecast: the permafrost soils of northern Europe, northern Asia and North America, they say, could produce up to one gigaton (one billion tons) of methane, and 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide, by 2100.

Earlier studies have expressed concern about the interplay between permafrost and global warming, and this latest research will be exhaustively scrutinised as other teams try to corroborate, modify or contradict it. That is how science works. And there are certainly uncertainties that need resolving.

For example, how deep will the soil actually have thawed by the end of the century? Will it be wet or dry? What is certain, the team concludes, is that the new data will enable more accurate predictions to be made about the impacts of thawing permafrost on the climate.

The Pope, in His Easter Vigil, Baptizes Immigrant-Hero

VATICAN CITY—Pope Francis on Saturday urged Catholics to not remain paralyzed in the face of the injustices around them as he baptized eight adults, including a Nigerian beggar who became a hero in Italy for having disarmed a thief with his bare hands.

In an Easter Vigil homily, Francis challenged Catholics to not remain silent, as Jesus’ disciples were after his crucifixion. Rather, he urged Catholics to “break out” of their routines and let God in.

It wasn’t clear if he had a particular reference in mind, but John Ogah certainly didn’t stand by speechless as he witnessed a supermarket robbery on Sept. 26.

According to Italian news reports, Ogah had been begging for spare change outside the Carrefour market in Rome’s Centocelle neighborhood when a masked thief, armed with a meat cleaver, tried to make off with 400 euros ($493) he had stolen from the cashiers.

Security cameras captured Ogah’s courageous next steps: With nothing more than his bare hands, he confronted the thief, wrested the cleaver away and held him by the collar until police arrived, after the man fell from his attempted getaway motorcycle.

Ogah then disappeared, fearing he would be deported because he didn’t have his papers in order. But Rome police authorities sought to reward his courage and within a month had given him a coveted Italian residency permit that had been denied him when his asylum bid failed.

According to the ANSA news agency, he now has a job with the Italian Red Cross and a place to call home. In preparing for his baptism, he reportedly asked the Rome police captain who handled his case to be his godfather.

In an interview soon after the theft, Ogah told La Repubblica newspaper that his dream was to be legally resident in Italy and have a job so he wouldn’t have to beg to support his child back home in Nigeria. Ogah had left Nigeria and, after a stay in Libya, set off for Italy on a migrant smuggler’s boat in May 2014.

“If Pope Francis or the president of the republic could do something for me I would be the happiest man in the world,” he was quoted as saying. “I don’t want to be a hero. I just want to be legal, work and have a dignified life in Italy.”

On Saturday, Francis baptized him during the solemn pomp of one of the holiest nights in the Catholic liturgical calendar.

Ogah chose as his baptismal name “Francesco.”

Sacramento Kings, NBA Players Back Protests in Stephon Clark Killing

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—The struggling Sacramento Kings find themselves in the national spotlight and it has nothing to do with another disappointing NBA season in their new, 2-year-old arena.

The Kings—like many nationwide—have turned their attention to demonstrators who have joined hand-in-hand on game nights to block entrances to the building.

A wave of protests has followed the March 18 fatal shooting by police of Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old unarmed black man.

Current and former Kings players, as well as other NBA players around the league, have been supportive of both the Clark family and the protesters.

Clark “could have been any of us,” Kings player Garrett Temple said Friday at a community gathering to support black youth that the Kings helped organize.

Temple joined teammate Vince Carter and former Kings player Doug Christie at a South Sacramento church. Temple said he believes he is meant to speak out about Clark because “I want to make sure that these mistakes that keep happening have consequences.”

Former Kings players DeMarcus Cousins and Matt Barnes have offered to pay for Clark’s funeral. Barnes, a Sacramento native who spent part of last season with the Kings, was also a pallbearer at the funeral and has organized a march prior to Saturday’s Kings game against the Golden State Warriors.

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Sacramento police shot Clark eight times—seven from behind, according to autopsy results paid for by the family that were released Friday.

The protests have been mostly non-violent and created few problems except for blocking traffic in downtown Sacramento. But they’ve been costly for the Kings.

Protesters also twice blocked entrances to Golden 1 Center, forcing the arena into a lockdown mode. Only 2,400 fans made it inside for the March 22 game against the Atlanta Hawks and 4,000 got in for the March 27 game against the Boston Celtics.

Fans were able to attend Thursday’s game with the Indiana Pacers after the team revved up security to make sure only ticket-holders entered the arena plaza.

For a team that has drawn an average crowd of 17,500 this season, the lost revenue from ticket sales alone is more than $1 million by conservative estimates after refunds were offered to those fans who did not get in. That does not include lost income from concession stands and merchandise sales.

However, owner Vivek Ranadive made an impassioned pledge of support for the protesters and the community at large following the first round of demonstrations on March 22 after first consulting with his players.

Ranadive, the first person of Indian descent to own an NBA franchise, said after the Hawks game, “We stand here before you, old, young, black, white, brown, and we are all united in our commitment.”

The NBA team has partnered with Black Lives Matter Sacramento and the Build Black Coalition to create a multiyear partnership that supports the education of young people and to help workforce preparation and economic development efforts in the community.

“That’s what it’s all about, raising awareness,” Carter said after a recent game. “Regardless of this being a professional basketball game, the bigger picture and what really matters is what was going on outside and the reason they were out there.”

Other players around the league who have played in Sacramento since the protests began expressed their concerns over the situation while praising the Kings for getting involved, including Harrison Barnes and Dirk Nowitzki of the Mavericks and Terry Rozier of the Celtics.

“The beauty of the game is that we have this platform to be able to speak about these things and to be able to speak about police brutality, citizen-police relationships, disproportionate amount of African-Americans getting killed,” said Harrison Barnes, who spent his first four seasons playing in Oakland about 90 minutes south of Sacramento. “It’s important that we use that platform to talk about these things.”

The Cult of Trump

“A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence … anyone who wishes to produce an effect upon it needs no logical arguments; he must paint in forcible colors, must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing again and again. … (The group) wants to be ruled and impressed, and to fear its masters. … And, finally, groups have never thirst after truth. … They are almost as influenced by what is not true as by what is true. … A group is an obedient herd, which could never live without a master.”

—Sigmund Freud

“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

—George Orwell

All that Freud and Orwell asserted about groups and political language has been proven anew with the improbable ascendancy of Donald Trump to President of the United States, an apparent doppelgänger of Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard—from his hair to his flair for revenge.

In a few short months of campaigning and governing, the pride of Mar-a-Lago has seemingly wiped out the last vestiges of civility, honesty and common sense in presidential politics and turned the Oval Office into a Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey side show.

And yet, after all the lies, position flip-flops, erratic behavior, brazen conflicts of interest, childish, thin-skinned attacks on the media, offensive comments about minorities, women and the entire Middle East, not to mention the investigations into his curious relationship with Russia that has led us to the doorstep of impeachment, many of those who voted for him still maintain their unflagging support.

For the love of sanity, how is this possible?

I’ve been repeating that phrase for many months now, after each unconscionable act, events that would have torpedoed any other political campaign. And yet, here we are, on the precipice of calamity, with Trump eviscerating regulations that will loose the beasts of Wall Street and the energy industry, threatening to build a wall that will waste billions of dollars, spreading chaos in health and education, proposing massive cuts to programs that benefit the poor and promising to shut down any program or agency that could protect us from climate change and environmental abuses. Do you remember the megalomaniacal general played by Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove? Don’t look now, but he’s President and commander-in-chief, the man with his finger on the button. Isn’t that a sobering thought?

Of course, you want to know who to blame for this mess. But be careful what you wish for, because here’s the awful truth: Go look in the mirror. We elected this guy, something for which we will all have to atone. But for a variety of reasons, we may not have been in our right minds, a condition that must be fixed if we are to extricate ourselves from this Trumped-up world.  After all, this has been the repeated course of history.

First, think about the world that confronted contestants in the 2016 Presidential election. Our two controlling political parties were locked in a death spiral of gridlock, threatening the modest economic gains eked out of the long and slow recovery from the 2008 collapse. Our education system has long been in decline from general societal woes and a crippling decline in funding. Our general level of civility and morality has also taken a hit, exemplified by the black hole into which our culture has plummeted. Gone are the days of the Greatest Generation and the Golden Rule. We have become a society in which accomplishments of substance have been trumped by celebrity worship, real relationships have been trumped by vulgar and voyeuristic televised displays of family and group dysfunction and sanity, reason and thoughtful discourse have been trumped by, well, Trump.

In such turbulent times, people reach out desperately for alternative solutions. In the 1930s, a lingering World War, and Great Depression stirred greater interest in “isms”—unionism, socialism, communism and Nazism. In the “60s, youthful rebellion against the Vietnam War and a generation of seekers trying to find their better selves led to a societal surge of spiritualism, so-called mind-expanding drugs, communes and the inevitable rise of oppressive cults whose narcissistic leaders claimed that only they knew the path to a glorious new world.

In the traumatic aftermath of  9/11, this country experienced a period of mass panic and fear unmatched in its history. As the twin towers melted away like the wicked witch, a new reality materialized: We were vulnerable to cult fanaticism—this time represented by terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. To quell that terrible feeling, we were willing to sacrifice almost anything—even our beloved personal liberty. What’s more, our then–President, George W. Bush, proclaimed that he was on a mission from God to avenge the dead, and like all tyrannical leaders, he issued an ultimatum: the world was “either with us or against us.”

So we looked the other way when the government discarded the presumption of innocence for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and allowed “aggressive” questioning. As the populace rallied around the flag, those who spoke against torture and a war in Iraq built on lies and deception were vilified.  Not until the administration exposed an undercover spy because her husband dared to criticize the invasion of Iraq did the media wake up and take back its mandate to question government actions, leading to what amounted to a mass deprogramming of the American people.

The manipulators that arose during these chaotic eras all used variations of a concept which has existed throughout history, but wasn’t defined until Mao Tse-tung refined it and used it on imprisoned U.S. soldiers during the Korean War.  The process was dubbed “brainwashing” by a writer seeking a simplistic explanation for his readers, but it is more complex and chilling than that. In his book about Mao’s experiment on U.S. prisoners, Dr. Edgar Schein called it “coercive persuasion.” Dr. Robert J. Lifton called it “thought reform.” I prefer the term “totalist thinking.”

Dr. Schein also summarized the traits of a person capable of implementing such a regime—a leader who would initiate programs to liquidate those who are useless, to re-educate those needed in the new society, to purge the unfaithful to reaffirm the faith and to consolidate his power, satisfying the leader’s insecurity demands for unanimity and loyalty; a need to upgrade self to savior and judged favorably by history. If that does not sound familiar you have not been reading Trump’s tweets nor listening to his sound bites.

It’s the key to understanding the growth of cults and the manipulation of groups in general. What I have learned in my 40-year career as an attorney, most of it spent freeing people from the oppressive cults, is that totalist thinking infiltrates our everyday lives in ways both mundane and terrifying.

First paranoia will lead to destroying opponents , even murder as Trump’s heros have done, Putin and Kim. He admires the loyalty they receive. Then he must admire Charles Manson. Who received more loyalty than him?

Forget what you think you know about brainwashing. It isn’t a mind trick, or a way to induce people to do unthinkable things, as in the so-called brainwashed assassin in The Manchurian Candidate, whose murderous instincts were triggered by a playing card. What Mao had discovered were tools—repetitive catchphrases, exhaustive schedules filled with didactic lectures, frequent exercises and little sleep, accompanied by constant peer pressure—that broke down people emotionally and psychologically and left them vulnerable to his ideas. His subjects didn’t become hypnotized robots, they became true believers, convinced that the master knew the path to righteousness.

Destructive versions of this coercive persuasion can include churches proselytizing for new members, political parties seeking to sway undecided voters, even sports coaches persuading their young charges to “buy in” to their philosophy. So are advertising and marketing, the massive economic engines that seek to mold our consuming habits in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Then there’s the military. How else can young soldiers be convinced to charge up hills and kill strangers?

It’s part of human nature to seek out common cause through groups of peers. But it’s also human nature to over-identify with these causes, which makes us vulnerable to manipulators. For years, I have seen the specter of totalist thinking in everything from self-help groups to religious fanaticism and even the overreaching fiats of our prior two Presidents. It didn’t surprise me. In times of social upheaval, we desperately seek clarity; so we attach ourselves to the appealingly simplistic messages of fanatics and, in our fervor to create a better world, vilify doubters as enemies who need to be conquered.

And so, I give you—I should say, we gave ourselves—Donald Trump, who told us he could drain the swamp, make us winners again, make America great again. The banners and slogans may be somewhat different from tyrants of old but are similar as never backed by facts while violence and revenge is approved. And in Trump’s words, I hear the chilling echoes of Adolf, Stalin and Mao. Is America First that much different from Deutschland uber alles?

Trump recently asked a group of UN ambassadors whether they liked the U.S. envoy he appointed to the body, Nikki Haley, who had been getting stellar reviews in the press. “Otherwise, she can easily be replaced,” he said. Long-time Trump observers said the joke was a common Trump ploy to keep popular underlings uncomfortable.

Tyrants have always displayed these traits. Messrs. Putin and Kim Jong Un know something about disposing of threats to their power, don’t they? Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, who represented a threat to his agenda, echoes when Scientology’s David Miscavige took control after Hubbard’s death;  he “retired” Hubbard’s wife as well as the president of Scientology– they were no longer heard from.  Synanon’s Charles Dederich said “you’re fired” to many followers who became too popular and declared a holy war against the press after a Time magazine article declared Synanon, which began as a drug rehab center, a “kooky cult.” Jim Jones murdered those who would expose him. And don’t forget Trump’s campaign threats to imprison Hillary Clinton after he was elected. “I would say it’s chilling that Donald Trump thinks that the presidency is like some banana republic dictatorship where you can lock up your political opponent,” Robby Mook, Ms. Clinton’s campaign manager, told CBS This Morning.

What really troubles me is how willingly we fell into this and how many people still believe he is our savior. It’s easy to look at cults and say it couldn’t happen to you. Jim Jones could never have convinced you to drink that Kool-Aid at the Jonestown Massacre. But 900 people did. And Trump was elected despite media exposing him.

The truth is, the Jonestown victims weren’t bad people, for the most part, and neither are the Trump voters (just misguided). Both groups were and are convinced that they’re doing the right thing. But under the right circumstances, unfortunately, right-minded people can be induced into doing wrong-headed things. In 1974, for example, psychologist Stanley Milgram, attempting to make sense of atrocities like the Holocaust, induced volunteers to deliver increasingly heavy electric shocks to patients who answered questions wrong. The volunteers were told they were contributing to an important study aimed at improving people’s memories under stress. While the shocks were faked, along with the patients’ screaming, 92% of the volunteer pool who tested as “obedient—about two-thirds of the total pool—were willing to deliver lethal doses when paired with more aggressive, willing partners. And these subjects weren’t feeble or addled; they were drawn from a typical working class pool, including professionals and manager.

Likewise, Trump supporters, most far from being the “incorrigibles” described by Ms. Clinton, are largely honest, working-class folks who are angry and frustrated and have every right to be. Their country has passed them by without even acknowledging their pain and their government has largely failed them. No wonder they are ripe for the tempting, easy-to-digest buzzwords served up by Trump along with the straw men—mostly foreigners–he set up to take the fall. “Bad hombres” from Mexico who come to rob and sell drugs; terrorists from the Middle East coming to kill us; foreign leaders from Asia who foisted their terrible trade deals on us and supposed allies from Europe who won’t won’t pay their fair share of NATO costs.

But did we realize he would appoint a Royal Family?  He is like a six-year-old cuddling the title President, secretly preferring to be King, Emperor or Pharaoh. Everyone obeys them and dissenters exiled to towers, chains or death.

So where do we go from here?

America must concentrate on solving the very real, monumental problems we’re facing today and do it with reason and civility. If we continue to demonize those who don’t think like us—which has been a pox on both of our political parties—we will continue to wallow in gridlock. It starts with teaching more than just the structure of government in schools. We have to get the next generation actively involved in the political process and informed on issues. Political candidates should be required to take the MMPI exam. From my personal perspective, we need to stop the worship of sociopaths and cut off their supply of fresh young minds. And the only way to do that is to teach our children the history of tyrants, the emotional hold of movements and the effects of their use of undue influence to sway minds. This is real-world stuff and our kids have to be ready for it.

We can keep blaming the Pharaohs, Emperors, Hitler, Stalin, Manson, Dederich, Jones, Hussein, drug lords. Putin, Bin Laden and ISIS and keep spinning our wheels, or we can point to ourselves and do something about it. The seeds of this revolution are starting to sprout. A young kid has organized a plan for saving the ocean from plastics  Thousands are marching on D.C. and in other locales. Local groups are demanding town hall meetings with their government representatives to keep their feet to the fire. High school kids raised money to stop Trump from destroying the earth. Another group got a school district to declare school grounds a sanctuary for minorities. Scientists have started a foundation to teach scientists how to run for office.

It’s the 60’s again. Our future lies in these grass roots movements. So make a list of companies using fossil fuels, poisoning water or polluting the atmosphere and don’t buy their products. We, as consumers, hold the fate of these companies in our hands. If we want to influence their behavior, we have to organize and leverage our financial power. Pick a day of the week when people all over the country boycott airlines. As they say, vote with your feet—and your dollars.

And, of course, vote. And I don’t mean just show up and guess. Inform yourselves on issues that really matter and the candidates who stand for what you really believe in. Don’t just listen to buzzwords and simplistic solutions. Even Mr. Trump is learning how wrong-headed that is.

Among the tyrants Trump admires, apparently, now includes Andrew Jackson, our seventh President. Jackson, not such a great guy, once ruined the budding congressional career of one of my personal heroes, Davy Crockett, because the old frontiersman opposed the segregation of Indians on reservations. Crockett, who had quit as Jackson’s scout many years before because of Old Hickory’s wanton slaughter of innocent Indians, couldn’t be swayed. “Go to hell,” he reportedly told Jackson. “I’m going to Texas.”

So who would you rather be? Trump’s hero Jackson, or my man Crockett? Because as Trump’s reign grinds on, we’re all going to be forced to make that choice even if Trump himself doesn’t make it to the next election. Even more important that 2020, however, are the elections of 2018, our next chance to reshape Congress. So vote for people who are interested in serving the people and not themselves.

The next time you vote, be Davy Crockett—“Make sure you’re right, then go ahead.”

If you don’t New York may soon resemble Venice, Italy. Sink or swim.

50 Years After MLK’s Death, Lucrative Jobs Still Elude Blacks

BOSTON—Jonathan Garland’s fascination with architecture started early: He spent much of his childhood designing Lego houses and gazing at Boston buildings on rides with his father away from their largely minority neighborhood.

But when Garland looked around at his architectural college, he didn’t see many who looked like him — there were few black faces in classroom seats, and fewer teaching skills or giving lectures.

“If you do something simple like Google ‘architects’ and you go to the images tab, you’re primarily going to see white males,” said Garland, 35, who’s worked at Boston and New York architectural firms. “That’s the image, that’s the brand, that’s the look of an architect.”

And that’s not uncommon in other lucrative fields, 50 years after the Rev. Martin Luther King — a leader in the fight for equal-employment opportunities — was assassinated.

An Associated Press analysis of government data has found that black workers are chronically underrepresented compared with whites in high-salary jobs in technology, business, life sciences, and architecture and engineering, among other areas. Instead, many black workers find jobs in low-wage, less-prestigious fields where they’re overrepresented, such as food service or preparation, building maintenance and office work, the AP analysis found.

In one of his final speeches, King described the “Other America,” where unemployment and underemployment created a “fatigue of despair” for African-Americans. Despite economic progress for blacks in areas such as incomes and graduation rates, some experts say many African-Americans remain part of this “Other America” — with little hope of attaining top professional jobs, thanks to systemic yet subtle racism.

The AP analysis found that a white worker had a far better chance than a black one of holding a job in the 11 categories with the highest median annual salaries, as listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ratio of white-to-black workers is about 10-to-1 in management, 8-to-1 in computers and mathematics, 12-to-1 in law, and 7-to-1 in education — compared with a ratio of 5.5 white workers for every black one in all jobs nationally. The top five high-paying fields have a median income range of $65,000 to $100,000, compared with $36,000 for all occupations nationwide.

In Boston — a hub for technology and innovation, and home to prestigious universities — white workers outnumber black ones by about 27-to-1 in computer- and mathematics-related professions, compared with the overall ratio of 9.5-to-1 for workers in the city. Overall, Boston’s ratio of white-to-black workers is wider than that of the nation in six of the top 10 high-income fields.

Boston — where King had deep ties, earning his doctorate and meeting his wife — has a history of racial discord. Eight years after King’s assassination, at the height of turbulent school desegregation, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from an anti-busing rally at City Hall showed a white man attacking a black bystander with an American flag.

The young victim was Theodore Landsmark. He’s now 71, a lawyer, an architect and director of Northeastern University’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy.

He said “structural discrimination” is the overarching cause of disproportionate race representation in high-paying fields. Landsmark and others say gains are elusive for myriad reasons: Substandard schools in low-income neighborhoods. White-dominated office cliques. Boardrooms that prefer familiarity to diversity. Discriminatory hiring practices. Companies that claim a lack of qualified candidates but have no programs to train minority talent.

Some also say investors are more likely to support white startups. When Rica Elysee — a lifelong Boston resident who grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods — brought her idea of an online platform linking beauty professionals with customers for in-home appointments to investors, she was shunned, she said.

“They said I didn’t belong in the program, that they couldn’t identify with it because they weren’t black,” said Elysee, 32, who initially marketed BeautyLynk to black women like herself. “I remember crying pretty harshly. They couldn’t relate to what I was doing.”

Some even advised her to move out of Boston, which had a booming innovation economy but was “not encouraging minorities in the tech space,” she said. Three years later, Elysee said BeautyLynk is slowly growing but still needs capital.

Most American metro areas are like Boston, with AP’s analysis showing that racial disparities in employment are indifferent to geography and politics. California’s Silicon Valley struggles to achieve diversity in computer fields. In Seattle, home to Amazon, whites outnumber blacks nearly 28-to-1 in computer- and math-related fields. Financial powerhouse New York has a 3-to-1 ratio of white-to-black workers in all occupations, but nearly 6-to-1 in business and finance. Hollywood shows inequality in entertainment, with almost nine whites for every black worker.

In Atlanta, King’s hometown, the proportional representation of black-to-white workers is close to even in many fields. Many reasons are cited. Atlanta has historically black colleges and universities such as King’s alma mater, Morehouse; the first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, pressed for policies helping black professionals after his 1973 election; and events like the 1996 Olympics opened doors for entrepreneurs of all races.

Atlanta is an exception. For nearly all of the past half-century, black unemployment nationally has hovered at about twice that of whites.

President Donald Trump touted on Twitter that December’s 6.8 percent unemployment rate for blacks was the lowest in 45 years — a number critics say ignores a greater reality. For example, in an economy that increasingly demands advanced degrees, Department of Education data shows that black representation among graduates in science, tech, engineering and mathematics peaked at 9.9 percent in 2010 and has been slowly declining.

In Boston, Democratic Mayor Marty Walsh said in a recent speech that the city is addressing the issue and is committed to placing 20,000 low-income residents in “good-paying jobs” by 2022.

Landsmark said stronger role models may be a solution. As Boston Architectural College’s president, he mentored Garland. They discussed race issues in the professional world — as when Garland, trying to land jobs in his neighborhood, realized many people who looked like him were unfamiliar with the very concept of architecture. He once had to explain to a homeowner who wanted his roof reframed: “I’m not a builder, I’m an architect.”

Today, Garland speaks at high schools and works at the DREAM Collaborative, which focuses on projects in low-income neighborhoods.

“I know the barriers exist in other folks’ minds, and I have to disprove that,” he said. “I keep myself focused on the issues.”

___

Associated Press writer Jeff Martin contributed from Atlanta.

Here Comes Bolton, There Goes Arms Control

John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser to President Donald Trump is the latest blow to hopes for a less confrontational U.S.-Russia relationship that would include new talks on arms control. Mutual trust is now hanging by a very thin thread.

One wag suggested to me that the Bolton appointment should not really come as a surprise, since it fits the recent Washington pattern — if White House chaos can be considered a pattern. For Kremlin leaders, though, White House zig-zags are no laughing matter. Let’s try to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine how the unfolding of recent events may have looked to them.

On March 1 in his state-of-the-nation address, President Putin revealed several new strategic weapons systems that Russia developed after the Bush/Cheney/Bolton administration abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had been the cornerstone of strategic stability for the previous 30 years. (John Bolton is included in that august company because, as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, he was Vice President Dick Cheney’s enforcer to put the kibosh on the ABM Treaty.)

You would not know it from the “mainstream media,” but in that same speech Putin offered to “sit down at the negotiating table” and “work together … to ensure global security” — taking into account the strategic parity Moscow claims.

Referring to what he called “our duty to inform our partners” about Russia’s claimed ability to render ABM systems “useless,” Putin added: “When the time comes, foreign and defense ministry experts will have many opportunities to discuss all these matters with them, if of course our partners so desire.”

One “Partner” So Desires

On March 20, two days after Putin was re-elected President of Russia, President Trump decided to congratulate the winner — as is the custom — without insulting him. For this he was excoriated by mainstream media for squandering the chance to point his finger, once again, at alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Sitting atop Mark Landler’s New York Times article that day was this headline: “Trump Congratulates Putin, but Doesn’t Mention Meddling in U.S.”

That was not Trump’s only offense. He also disregarded instructions to berate Putin with the evidence-and-logic-free accusation that Moscow poisoned, for no apparent reason, a former Russian spy and his daughter living in the UK. Landler lamented, “Instead, Mr. Trump kept the focus of the call on what the White House said were ‘shared interests’ — among them, North Korea and Ukraine — overruling his national security advisers …”

Parsing the NYT

The Times’ initial report included “arms control” in the headline and quoted Trump: “We had a very good call … We will probably be meeting in the not-too-distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control.” It was not long, however, before the NYT pared down that last sentence to “We will probably be meeting in the not-too-distant future.”

Landler did include (buried in paragraph 25 of 29) the following: “During their call on Tuesday, a senior official said, Mr. Trump told Mr. Putin he had been concerned by a recent speech in which Mr. Putin talked about Russia developing an “invincible” intercontinental cruise missile and a nuclear torpedo that could outsmart all American defenses.”  But Landler (or his editors) took pains to omit any mention of Trump’s actual reaction in suggesting an early summit to discuss arms control.

Parsing what is allowed to appear in the NYT (sometimes in altered iterations) is not very different from the “Kremlinology” tools that we analysts used to apply, back in the day, to eke insights out of the turgid prose in Pravda, Izvestiya, and other Soviet media.

More important, how the NYT played Trump’s reaction to Putin’s re-election — specifically, his swiftly excised suggestion of an arms control summit, probably did not escape notice among present-day Russians who do analysis of U.S. media. It requires little imagination to conclude that for the U.S. Establishment, for which the NYT is a mouthpiece, arms control is off the table, despite anything the President may have said.

Lots of $ For Arms Dealers

There are a lot of powerful people making a lot of money profiteering from arms manufacture and sales, with a portion of the profits going to senators and representatives in Congress, who get re-elected and then oblige by appropriating still more funding for what Pope Francis warned Congress are the “blood-drenched arms traders.”

On March 26 President Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats the U.S. identified as intelligence agents and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, in response to Russia’s alleged role in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the former Russian spy now living in England. Russia responded tit for tat, expelling 60 U.S. diplomats and closing the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg. Russian culpability for the poisoning is far from proven.

Doesn’t Make Sense

Writing on March 28, Gary Leupp, history professor at Tufts University, put it this way: “Why follow up that cordial call [the congratulatory one] to Putin with the expulsion of so many diplomats? What the hell. Doesn’t make sense.” Leupp worries that as President Trump’s political situation deteriorates, “he will be more prone to lean on his generals … while also heeding the horrific Bolton. This is a very bad situation.”

Another encomium came this week from author Daniel Lazare, who pretty much summed it up:

“John Bolton is without doubt a dangerous man. Not only did he champion the war against Saddam Hussein, but, even before U.S. troops had set foot in Iraq, he told Israeli leaders that the next step would be to take out Syria, Iran, and North Korea, a goal he has pursued with single-minded consistency ever since. For Bolton, the aim is to create a growing cascade of Third World wars so as to propel the U.S. into a position as unchallenged military dictator of the entire globe.  The more numerous the conflicts, the more he’s convinced that the U.S. will come up on top.”

Bolton’s Return

There is great — and justified — concern that John Bolton will have the President’s ear and reinforce Trump’s worst inclinations. A Yale law school graduate, Bolton has not shown much respect for the law. His record places him toward the top of the list of “crazies,” the sobriquet we all used for those who later became known as neoconservatives. I discussed this background in a recent interview on The Intercept. (See 16-minute segment beginning at minute 35.)

Back in the day, I recalled, when I was working at CIA in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we didn’t talk about neocons, we talked about “crazies.” We noted that George H.W. Bush was careful in keeping “the crazies” in check, giving them positions in government with prestigious job titles but where they couldn’t do great harm to the country.

When George Bush, Jr. came in, he put the crazies in positions of power. Under John Bolton’s influence, George W. Bush took the extreme step of scrapping the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was the bedrock for strategic stability since 1972 when it was signed. Bolton was also one of the prime movers behind the Iraq invasion.

Despite Trump calling the Iraq war “a big fat mistake,” apparently he now admires Bolton for his many Fox News appearances, and he is, of course, the darling of the “blood-soaked arms traders.”

Negotiating Style

Let me add one new vignette regarding his negotiating style: A senior U.S. diplomat recently shared with me that, when Bolton was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, a colleague diplomat provided a rather revealing insight into Bolton’s attitude toward international treaties.

That colleague had just returned home from arms control talks between Bolton and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mamedov, and described how surreal and embarrassing it had been to hear Bolton lecture Mamedov about how international treaties are worthless, with the Russian arguing strongly that treaties are important and should be taken seriously.

Just the guy for the job. Strap yourself in.