Chris Hedges's Blog, page 632

Trump Fires Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin

WASHINGTON — President Trump fired Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin by tweet Wednesday in the wake of a bruising ethics scandal and a mounting rebellion within the agency, and nominated White House doctor Ronny Jackson to lead the agency.

A Navy rear admiral, Jackson is a surprise choice to lead to succeed Shulkin, a former Obama administration official and the first non-veteran ever to head the VA. Trump had been considering replacements for Shulkin for weeks, but had not been known to be considering Jackson for the role.

In a statement, Trump praised Jackson as “highly trained and qualified.”

Jackson has served since 2013 as the Physician to the President, and gained a national profile earlier this year for holding a sweeping press conference on the president’s health.

Shulkin is the second Cabinet secretary to depart over controversies involving expensive travel, following former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price’s resignation last September. Trump said in a statement he is “grateful” for Shulkin’s service.

Trump has selected Robert Wilkie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, to serve as the acting head of the VA. It is government’s second largest department, responsible for 9 million military veterans in more than 1,700 government-run health facilities. The selection of Wilkie bypasses VA Deputy Secretary Tom Bowman, who has come under criticism for being too moderate to push Trump’s agenda of fixing veterans’ care.

Shulkin had continued to insist he had the full confidence of the White House amid continuing investigations over his travel and leadership of the department. He had agreed to reimburse the government more than $4,000 after the VA’s internal watchdog concluded last month that he had improperly accepted Wimbledon tennis tickets and that his then-chief of staff had doctored emails to justify his wife traveling to Europe with him at taxpayer expense. Shulkin also blamed internal drama at the agency on a half-dozen or so political appointees who were rebelling against him and Bowman, insisting he had White House backing to fire them.

But the continuing VA infighting and a fresh raft of VA watchdog reports documenting leadership failures and spending waste — as well as fresh allegations being reviewed by the IG that Shulkin used a member of his security detail to run personal errands — proved too much of a distraction.

It was the latest in a series of departures for top administration officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was fired by Trump earlier this month.

The sudden departure comes as Trump is currently seeking to expand the Veterans Choice program, a campaign promise that major veterans’ groups worry could be an unwanted step toward privatizing VA health care. His plan remains in limbo in Congress after lawmakers declined last week to include it in a spending bill.

Having pushed through legislation in Trump’s first year making it easier to fire bad VA employees and speed disability appeals, Shulkin leaves behind a department in disarray. Several projects remain unfinished, including a multibillion-dollar overhaul of electronic medical records aimed at speeding up wait times for veterans seeking medical care as well as expanded mental health treatment for veterans at higher risk of suicide.

A major veterans’ organization expressed concern over the Shulkin dismissal and Trump’s intention to nominate Jackson, whom they worried lacked experience to run the huge department.

“We are disappointed and already quite concerned about this nominee,” said Joe Chenelly, the national executive director of AMVETS. “The administration needs to be ready to prove that he’s qualified to run such a massive agency, a $200 billion bureaucracy.”

During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly pledged to fix the VA, which was still reeling after a 2014 scandal at the Phoenix VA medical center, in which veterans waited months for care even as VA employees created secret waiting lists to cover up delays. Criticizing the department as “the most corrupt,” Trump said he would bring accountability and expand access to private doctors, promising to triple the number of veterans “seeing the doctor of their choice.”

Currently, more than 30 percent of VA appointments are made in the private sector.

The son of an Army psychiatrist and grandson of a VA pharmacist, Shulkin is a former president of the Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey. He was president and CEO of the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York and chief medical officer at the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

A Second Amendment for the 21st Century

Guns don’t shoot people. People shoot people. That’s what some people say. But there are exceptions.

In 2015, for example, CNN reported on Allie Carter, who was hunting in northern Indiana with her dog when she laid her 12-gauge shotgun on the ground. Her chocolate lab stepped on it and shot her in the foot. The name of the dog was Trigger.

Clearly, we can acknowledge that in the hands of people—and, evidently, the paws of dogs—guns should be viewed as a potential threat. Today, the right of every citizen to own a gun and the extent of gun regulation are topics of much debate, especially since the Valentine’s Day tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Massacres involving children and others have occurred before and will happen again if we do not change our collective attitudes toward this ongoing threat.

Much debate revolves around the Second Amendment, which was written around 1787 by James Madison, one of our founding fathers. The role he envisioned militias should play in our “right to bear arms” has been debated exhaustively. Madison died in 1836, so we will never know for sure, especially because the Second Amendment—which states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to bear Arms, shall not be infringed“—seems a bit grammatically convoluted, compared with the way we write today.

For years, the courts and many citizens argued that only those in a militia have the right to bear arms, pointing out that the expression “bear arms” was a military term. Today, many now interpret this amendment to mean that every citizen has a right to own a gun, with minimal stipulations or limits. What type of gun is not addressed. In the past, muskets were the common choice.

For the sake of argument, let’s bring Madison into the present and consider what he might contribute to this ongoing debate. If he visited a man who owned an AR-15, he would be in shock—to him, a firing rate of three rounds per second would be incredible. Muskets rarely could fire more than two or three rounds per minute. Madison would not believe states would allow such a weapon of mass destruction to be in private hands. Realizing that the National Rifle Association has been a powerful force in spreading misrepresentation of his amendment, he would visit its headquarters.

First, Madison would remind the NRA that he wrote his amendment in the Latin ablative absolute. Encountering blank stares, he would say, “As a Latin scholar, writing the amendment in this way came naturally to me.” He would explain that this form indicates that the circumstances described in the first clause has a direct relationship to the action in the second clause—although that clarification might not eliminate the blank looks.

In modern English, he would suggest a refinement—“Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to bear Arms in a Militia shall not be infringed.” In this form, the first part is integral, so it cannot be discarded. Unfortunately, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia highjacked my amendment and did just that. He concluded in a high court decision that because there are no militias today, he could treat the first part of my amendment as purely introductory and, therefore, unimportant, and he simply got rid of the opening clause and thus misinterpreted the rest. “What he did was incorrect and very disturbing to me,” Madison would say.

After a bit of deep thought about the rights of citizens to own guns and those who would deny them, Madison, in a “why-didn’t-I-think-of-it” moment, would suggest a compromise: Replace “militias” in the Second Amendment with present-day gun clubs, which, like the original militias, are regulated by the states, not the federal government. Curiously, our government requires people to obtain a license when a certain proficiency is necessary to protect the public, be it driving an automobile, bus or train or flying an airplane. But there is no such requirement for people owning guns. A law could be passed that requires gun owners or potential buyers to join state-licensed gun clubs.

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To become a member, one would have to show proficiency in gun use, demonstrate the ability to prevent a gun from falling into the wrong hands, undergo detailed background checks, obtain insurance and report transfer of ownership.

No solution to protect the people of our great country against the misuse of guns is going to be perfect, but Madison would say that allowing all law-abiding citizens to own guns within well-regulated gun clubs is a reasonable first step.

After all, the Declaration of Independence states that we each have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. People killed by guns are denied those rights—every 15 minutes in America.

Female Candidates Stress Gender, Motherhood

ATLANTA—Women running for governor in Wisconsin and Maryland breastfeed their infants in their campaign videos. Another in Georgia tells voters that “the folks who have held the office of governor don’t look like me.”

The record number of women expected to run for office this year are already breaking barriers, upending traditional campaigning by emphasizing their gender as they introduce themselves to an electorate they hope is eager for change.

“Some say no man can beat Larry Hogan,” Maryland Democratic candidate Krish Vignarajah says into the camera as she breastfeeds her daughter. “Well, I’m no man. I’m a mom, I’m a woman, and I want to be your next governor.”

Experts are predicting a historic wave of female candidates, driven in part by Democrats frustrated over the election of President Donald Trump and actions by his administration and Republicans in Congress on issues such as health care and immigration. The Women’s March, the #MeToo movement and the surprising success of women running for the Virginia Legislature in 2017 have kept the momentum.

Vignarajah, a lawyer and former policy director for Michelle Obama, is one of seven Democrats and the only woman running in the Maryland gubernatorial primary. She said the 2016 presidential election was a “rude awakening of what happens when we become complacent” and that her video was designed to show the everyday life of many moms.

“Historically speaking, women were perhaps more hesitant to highlight their womanhood,” said Vignarajah, a Sri Lankan immigrant. “For me, I think it’s an asset.”

The candidates say their message to voters is that electing more women to office is not merely about representation. It’s about a change in priorities so that more emphasis is placed on issues such as education, health care, early childhood development, workplace equality and paid family leave.

“I would like our state to be the best place to raise a family and the best place to grow a business, and I think we can achieve that,” said Kelda Roys, a former state lawmaker seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a two-term Republican.

In her ad, Roys highlights her efforts in the state legislature to ban the chemical known as BPA from baby bottles and cups in the state. In the middle of her speech, her youngest daughter begins crying and Roys discreetly lifts her sweater to begin breastfeeding. Roys says she didn’t intend to have that moment as part of the video but realized after she saw an initial outtake that it made sense.

“This is part of who I am, and I think it’s an honest portrayal of what my life is like,” Roys said. “Men running for office have always enjoyed pretty wide latitude to present themselves as whole people, where for women there has always been pressure to conform to a pretty narrow archetype. And I feel like that’s changing.”

Whether all this enthusiasm translates into a sea change in the number of women elected to office remains to be seen. Currently, women account for a fifth of all U.S. representatives and senators, and one in four state lawmakers. There are six female governors.

So far, 220 women have filed to run for the U.S. House or Senate this year, with candidate filing deadlines still pending in half the states, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. The record is 334 female candidates set in 2012. The center’s experts say nearly 500 women are expected to run for House and Senate this year.

“For women, the expectations of gender and candidacies have often conflicted,” said Kelly Dittmar, an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers. “They spent a lot of time talking about how tough they are, how strong they are and how qualified they are to hold office.”

But female candidates have grown more comfortable in recent years branching out, Dittmar said. In New Hampshire’s hotly contested U.S. Senate race in 2016, both Republican Kelly Ayotte and Democrat Maggie Hassan highlighted their roles as mothers and featured their children prominently in ads. Ayotte’s daughter narrated a campaign ad highlighting her mom’s credentials.

Some of this year’s ads are intensely personal. Before losing her primary bid for Illinois’ 4th Congressional District, Democratic candidate Sol Flores spoke about how she fought off a sexual predator as a child and how she has dedicated her life to helping children at risk.

Katie Hill, one of several Democrats seeking to challenge Rep. Steve Knight in California’s 25th Congressional District, has a nearly five-minute video on her website detailing the time when she was 19 years old and considered having an abortion before suffering a miscarriage.

“No one can really understand what it’s like to be faced with that kind of a choice, and it’s a decision that only a woman in that situation can make,” Hill says in the video. “The government most certainly can’t make it for her.”

In a recent video, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Evans is shown walking the halls of the state Capitol holding hands with her young daughter as she prepares to file paperwork to qualify for the Democratic primary in May. The daughter of a single mother who grew up poor in rural Georgia, Evans says her top priorities are making sure children of all backgrounds have access to quality early childhood education, a strong public school system and financial support for college.

“I don’t have to worry about my daughter being taken care of during the day, but a lot of mothers have that struggle,” Evans said. “I want to make sure that all families have access to the resources they need to live a high-quality life and to go out and be successful.”

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Associated Press writer Courtney Columbus in Baltimore contributed to this report.

The Gun Industry’s Favorite Trick

Remington, the weapons giant that produced the semi-automatic rifle used in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, declared bankruptcy in a Delaware court filing Sunday. Across social media, people applauded the company’s demise following a very good run, if more than 200 years of profiteering off products with no explicit purpose other than murder can be summed up as good. Like so many gun manufacturers, Remington seems to have succumbed to a sales drop brought on by the election of the gun industry’s self-declared “true friend in the White House,” thus ending the panic-driven gun rush of the Obama era. Just days after the March for Our lives, Remington’s fall appeared as a hopeful sign that the gun industry has real weak spots. That, or an industry titan is just putting on a different shell game this time around.

On Twitter, Georgetown University law professor Heidi Li Feldman pointed out an issue largely uncommented on in other reports about Remington’s Chapter 11 filing. In 2015, one living survivor and the families of nine Sandy Hook victims filed suit against Remington, accusing the gun maker of marketing a war weapon to civilians. A Connecticut court dismissed the case in 2016, but the state’s Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to reverse that decision and allow the case to proceed. The Remington bankruptcy filing stalls the process, halting the case for a period.

“The people who own gun companies really, really do not want to see a precedent established which permits the sort of suit the Sandy Hook plaintiffs are bringing to go forward on the merits,” Feldman told me. “When you file for Chapter 11, you stay any pending litigation. That means the Connecticut Supreme Court isn’t going to hand down their decision while Remington is in Chapter 11. This gives the people who will be running the company while it’s in Chapter 11 a chance to try to negotiate a settlement with the Sandy Hook families.”

Feldman suspects that Remington, in an effort to get the Sandy Hook plaintiffs to drop the suit, might come to an agreement on any number of settlement terms. And while “Remington isn’t going to give away the store, so to speak,” Feldman notes the company may agree to some plaintiff demands as a way of effectively getting ahead of more broad-based regulation in the future. That is, Remington would likely be willing to make a deal as long as it views that agreement as low-risk for its long-term bottom line, and most importantly, a stopgap against more broad-based industry reform.

“If there’s a rising tide of hostility towards the availability of a product, and you want to minimize the chance you’ll be regulated legislatively, one thing that companies do is take the pressure off politicians to enact regulations by making various commitments,” Feldman said. “It’s a shrewd move. Just as an example, gun companies might be willing to commit to, say, age-based restrictions on who retailers can sell guns to in order to take the edge off of social pressure, and therefore political pressure, to regulate the age at which people can buy guns. They preserve more of their market by giving up a little bit of it. If you are a business operating against the background of potential regulation, you may want to avert the pressure for there to be formal legal regulations because that may be more draconian than what you would want. That way, you don’t have to be forced into a more comprehensive oversight regime. That’s what’s really going on here.”

If Remington is able to arrive at a settlement plan that ends the lawsuit brought by the Sandy Hook plaintiffs—who are likely more motivated by mission than money—there are multiple benefits for the gun maker.

“There’s a tremendous value to Remington to having the plaintiffs withdraw the suit. Which means that the issue of whether or not people can generally bring causes of action like the one the Sandy Hook plaintiffs are trying to bring would be put to one side. That’s quite valuable to Remington. It’s worth enough for them to think creatively, especially in light of the galvanization of public opinion against the manufacture and sale of assault weapons, to think about doing some self-regulation that they wouldn’t have thought about even six months ago,” Feldman says.

If the case were to move forward, so would the discovery process. And as Los Angeles Times writer Michael Hiltzik notes, “That process could unearth reams of internal communications that could be embarrassing if they indicated, say, that Remington deliberately structured its marketing to feed a market of young adults harboring fantasies of mass mayhem.”

In the meantime, as Feldman notes, Remington has plans to keep right on manufacturing and selling guns from the soft perch of Chapter 11 protection. While what precisely the company’s future holds is unclear, the example of Colt Holdings Co. might offer some insights. In June 2015, Colt filed for bankruptcy protection. Six months later, in January 2016, it emerged from Chapter 11 with a new government contract to produce M4 and M4A1 rifles for the military and a focus on expanding business and selling more guns than ever.

According to Remington’s court filings, its bankruptcy claim absolves the company of $775 million in debt. The gun manufacturer predicts it will emerge from Chapter 11 by May. Lawyers for the Sandy Hook families have said they do not anticipate Remington’s bankruptcy filing will “affect the families’ case in any material way.” Remington is also involved in another ongoing lawsuit, which charges its Model 700 rifle has a trigger defect that causes accidental shots to be fired. That class action suit is also likely to be affected by the bankruptcy filing, though how is still unclear.

Remington first announced its plans to seek Chapter 11 in February. It delayed its filing after the Parkland shooting, likely reasoning that making the move on the heels of a mass shooting would be a massive PR disaster. But with growing momentum and the impending Connecticut Supreme Court decision, the gun maker needed to make a move sooner than later.

“There’s been a cumulative sense that we may be at a turning point in terms of regulating the gun industry,” Feldman told me. “And it was in Remington’s interest to seek bankruptcy protection and do their reorganization before anything like that happened.”

Trump Says N. Korean Leader Likely to Do ‘What Is Right’

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump says there’s “a good chance” that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (kim jawng oon) will “do what is right for his people and for humanity” and make moves toward peace.

In a pair of tweets early Wednesday, Trump says Chinese President Xi Jinping (shee jihn-peeng) has told him a meeting Xi had with Kim this week “went very well.”

Trump says that according to Xi, the North Korean leader “looks forward” to meeting the American president. The White House has said Trump plans to meet Kim by May amid nuclear tensions between the two nations.

Trump says that meanwhile “and unfortunately, maximum sanctions and pressure must be maintained at all cost!”

Retired Justice Stevens Calls for Repeal of 2nd Amendment

WASHINGTON—Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment to allow for significant gun control legislation.

The 97-year-old Stevens says in an essay on The New York Times website that repeal would weaken the National Rifle Association’s ability to “block constructive gun control legislation.”

Stevens was on the losing end of a 2008 ruling in which the high court held that the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to own a gun for self-defense. He had previously called for changing the Second Amendment to permit gun control.

Stevens says the decision in that case, District of Columbia v. Heller, “has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power.” Stevens retired from the court in 2010, after more than 35 years.

In his essay published Tuesday, Stevens talks about the “March for Our Lives” events on Saturday which drew crowds in cities across the country. Stevens said the demonstrations “reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.”

He said the support “is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms.”

But Stevens called on demonstrators to “seek more effective and more lasting reform.”

“They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment,” he wrote.

Repealing the amendment would be extremely difficult. An amendment to the Constitution can only be proposed either by Congress with a two thirds vote in both houses or by a constitutional convention called for by two thirds of the state legislatures. The amendment then has to be approved by three quarters of the states.

Asked at a White House briefing whether President Donald Trump had any reaction to Stevens’ comments, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president and administration “still fully support the Second Amendment.”

“We think that the focus has to remain on removing weapons from dangerous individuals, not on blocking all Americans from their constitutional rights,” she said.

The National Rifle Association also issued a statement in response to Stevens’ essay.

“The men and women of the National Rifle Association, along with the majority of the American people and the Supreme Court, believe in the Second Amendment right to self-protection and we will unapologetically continue to fight to protect this fundamental freedom,” the statement said.

Fear Swirls Around Census Question on Citizenship

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration’s decision to ask people about their citizenship in the 2020 census set off worries among Democrats that immigrants will dodge the survey altogether, diluting political representation for states that tend to vote Democratic and robbing many communities of federal dollars.

Not since 1950 has the census collected citizenship data from the whole population, rather than just a population sample, says the Congressional Research Service. The decision to restore the question after decades prompted an immediate lawsuit from California — already tangling with Washington over immigration — and moves by other states with large immigrant populations to engage in a legal fight.

The population count, a massive effort taken every 10 years, is far more than an academic exercise. It’s required by the Constitution and used to determine the number of seats each state has in the House as well as how federal money is distributed to local communities. Communities and businesses depend on it in deciding where to build schools, hospitals, grocery stores and more.

The political stakes of undercounting segments of the population are high.

Several states that have slowing population growth or high numbers of immigrants such as California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Ohio are typically at risk of losing U.S. House seats when their congressional districts are redrawn every 10 years — depending on how fully their residents are counted.

California struck quickly, with Attorney General Xavier Becerra filing a federal lawsuit Tuesday that seeks to block Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ decision to add a citizenship question in 2020. Officials from New York and New Jersey, also Democratic-led states, were also planning on leading or participating in lawsuits. Massachusetts signaled interest, too.

“The census constitutes the backbone for planning how and where our communities will invest taxpayer dollars,” Becerra said. “California simply has too much to lose to allow the Trump Administration to botch this important decennial obligation.

The Justice Department said in a statement it “looks forward to defending the reinstatement of the citizenship question, which will allow the department to protect the right to vote and ensure free and fair elections for all Americans.” The Commerce Department said the benefits of obtaining citizenship information “outweighed the limited potential adverse impacts.”

Their argument in essence: Enforcing voting rights requires more data on the voting-age population of citizens than current surveys are providing.

Democratic lawmakers had been bracing for the decision. A bill sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. would block the addition of a citizenship question, or any major design change, unless it has undergone a certain level of research and testing, but it faces dim prospects with no Republicans signing on.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday that adding such a question “will inject fear and distrust into vulnerable communities and cause traditionally undercounted communities to be even further under-represented, financially excluded and left behind.”

Some Republican lawmakers hailed the decision on Tuesday. GOP Sens. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ted Cruz of Texas had sent a letter to the Commerce Department asking Ross to add the question.

“It is imperative that the data gathered in the census is reliable, given the wide ranging impacts it will have on U.S. policy,” Cruz said in a press release issued by the three lawmakers. “A question on citizenship is a reasonable, commonsense addition to the census.”

The Census Bureau separately conducts an ongoing survey called the American Community Survey that provides citizenship data on a yearly basis. But it only samples a small portion of the population.

Before that, citizenship or related questions were asked of about 1 in 6 households on the census “long form,” which has since been retired. The Congressional Research Service said it has been 1950 since all households were asked about citizenship.

Alabama Attorney General Steven Marshall said the American Community Survey is so small, with a correspondingly large margin of error, that it is an ineffective tool for understanding lightly populated rural areas of the country.

“It just makes sense that government has a more accurate record for the census and reinstates the practice of including a citizenship question in the next census,” Marshall said.

A joint fundraising committee for Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee highlighted the addition of a citizenship question in a fundraising pitch last week. The pitch said Trump wants the 2020 Census to ask people whether or not they are citizens, and that in another era, this would be common sense.

“The President wants to know if you’re on his side,” the solicitation asks.

Census counts are taken by mail and by workers walking neighborhoods. The Census Bureau says the 2010 census drew a massive response, with about 74 percent of the households mailing in forms and remaining households counted by workers in neighborhoods.

Information is only released publicly in the aggregate, although the government has the details. In 2010, the Obama administration offered assurances that the census data would not be used for immigration enforcement.

The Census Bureau states on its website that personal information obtained through its surveys cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court. And the disclosure by an employee of any information that would personally identify a respondent or family can lead to up to five years in prison or a fine of $250,000, or both.

Critics of the decision seemed far more focused Tuesday on the potential for intimidation and an inaccurate count than the prospect that the information could be used to target participants for deportation.

“I can only see one purpose for why this question is being added,” said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, an organization that seeks to advance Latino political engagement. It’s to “scare Latinos and others from participating in the 2020 Census.”

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Associated Press writer Amanda Lee Myers contributed to this report from Los Angeles.

Trump Floats the Idea of Using Military Funds for the Wall

WASHINGTON—Still angry about the budget deal he signed last week, President Donald Trump has floated the idea of using the Pentagon budget to pay for his long-promised border wall with Mexico, despite the fact that such spending would likely require approval from Congress.

Trump raised the funding plan with House Speaker Paul Ryan at a meeting at the White House last Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the discussion who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

And he has tweeted that building “a great Border Wall” is “all about National Defense” and has called to “Build WALL through M!” — the military.

Departments, however, have limited authority to reprogram funds without congressional approval. Pentagon spokesman Chris Sherwood referred all questions on the wall to the White House, where spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders deflected them, saying she was “not going to get into the specifics of that.”

Trump threw Washington into a tizzy on Friday when he threatened to veto the omnibus spending bill, in part because it didn’t include the $25 billion he’d tried to secure for the wall in a last-minute bargaining spree.

The $1.3 trillion funding package did include $1.6 billion in border wall spending. But much of that money can only be used to repair existing segments, not build new sections. Congress also put restrictions on the types of barriers that can be built.

Trump has tried to justify signing the deal by pointing to the boost in funding it provides for the military. But he nonetheless remains frustrated, according to people familiar with his thinking who weren’t authorized to discuss private conversations and who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Trump first publicly floated the idea of having the Pentagon pay for the rest of construction in an obscure tweet that left many confused.

“Building a great Border Wall, with drugs (poison) and enemy combatants pouring into our Country, is all about National Defense,” he wrote Sunday. “Build WALL through M!”

He retweeted his message again Monday night.

Some people close to the president have also suggested creating a GoFundMe campaign that Trump could use to raise money from the public to fund construction. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the idea, and it’s unclear whether it has gained any serious traction.

Congress, under the Constitution, has the power to determine federal appropriations, and the administration has little authority to shift funding without congressional approval. The Senate Appropriations Committee was not aware of any authority that would allow the Defense Department to fund the wall without congressional approval, said a GOP aide.

Sanders said Tuesday that Trump would work with the White House counsel to make sure any action taken was within his executive authority. And she insisted the “continuation of building the wall is ongoing and we’re going to continue moving forward in that process.”

Building the wall was one of Trump’s top campaign promises, and the idea that drew the loudest cheers from supporters at his rallies. Trump also insisted he’d make Mexico pay for the construction. But Mexico has made clear it has no intention of doing so.

Trump has also proposed making Mexico pay for the wall indirectly through measures such as increasing visa fees, imposing new tariffs and targeting remittances.

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Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro and Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

Chelsea Manning: We Need to Stop This ‘Death Machine of Power’

Chelsea Manning wants to change America. On Tuesday, the freed whistleblower appeared on “Democracy Now!” to discuss her plan with hosts Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.

The appearance was Manning’s first live television interview since President Barack Obama pardoned her in 2017. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 after leaking more than 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks in 2010 while serving as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq. The leaked materials—the largest classified data dump in United States history—included documents related to the Iraq War, the U.S. war in Afghanistan and diplomatic cables.

During her conversation with Goodman and Gonzalez, Manning discussed Iraq, dismantling the prison system, transgender rights, her run for a Senate seat and other topics.

Manning is running as a Democrat in the November elections, challenging senior Democrat Ben Cardin for his seat in Maryland. She explained her decision to run for political office:

You know, it was—I thought I was done. I thought, “OK, like I can go home now.” But I don’t feel like it’s this—I mean, in this environment, in this place, this time that we’re in is what I feared when I—because I saw, you know, and I realized it’s expanded more and more, that it’s not just the military, it’s not just the intelligence community. It’s not—it’s police. It’s the justice system. It’s immigration. Like all these systems are overlapping, and they’re suffocating people, deliberately and methodically, over decades. And this has been a continuing—you know, like people have been building this whirling death machine of power for decades now.

And you can focus in on a particular war or a particular moment or a particular controversy, but it’s the overwhelming awe of the giganticness of this system that has driven me to try to fight back. And we need to start—you know, like we don’t need to fix these systems, we need to stop them. We need to push back on them, whether it’s immigration or whether it’s the military or whether it’s the intelligence apparatus, because they’re all a part of the same system. And people are suffering. And we can’t wait. We can’t wait anymore. We can’t wait for change.

Watch the full “Democracy Now!” interview with Manning in the videos below.

Education as a Weapon

Under the regime of Donald Trump, the role of education in producing the formative cultures in and out of schools necessary to support critical thinking, civic courage, and critically engaged citizens appears to be disappearing. Words that speak to the truth and hold power accountable are in retreat as lies become normalized and the relationship between the truth and the citizen is treated either with disdain or simply ignored. The democratization of information has given way to the democratization of disinformation as disimagination machines proliferate and corporate controlled cultural apparatuses colonize the media and political landscapes. One consequence is that historical memory is not only vanishing in a culture of immediacy, sensationalism, and “fake news,” it is also being rewritten in school textbooks so as to eliminate dangerous memories and align the past with narratives that reinforce anti-democratic ideologies and social relations. In the current historical moment, memory has no place in the dark cave of civic depravity—a space where freedom is abandoned in an educational ecosystem where nothing is true, and the basis for criticizing power collapses under the spectacle of presidential bomb throwing-like tweets, endless spectacles of diversion, and high-level stretches of newspeak illiteracy.

At a time when political extremists and war mongers have moved from the margins of politics to the center of power, a culture of fear and cruelty becomes the essence of politics reinforced by the denigration and erasure of any viable notion of morality and personal and social responsibility. As notions of social justice and political visions fall prey to draconian notions of unchecked self-interest, greed is elevated to a national virtue, and the ethical imagination withers along with the public spheres that make it possible. In the age of “fake news” everything that matters disappears, and institutions that were meant to address crucial social issues and problems begin to vanish. Notions of honesty, honor, respect, and compassion are increasingly policed and those who advocate them are either muzzled or punished. How else to explain the collective silence of Vichy-like Republicans supporting Trump’s reign of horror and the cravenly actions of the mainstream media, which refuses to engage critically a society that has fallen into the abyss of fascism?

This flight from the ideal and promise of a substantive democracy is especially dangerous at a time in which a broad-based notion of authoritarian education has become central to politics, particularly in a digital age in which there is an overabundance of information and a proliferation of educational platforms from schools to the social media.  In the age of Trump, education has lost its alleged role in cultivating an informed, critical citizenry capable of participating in and shaping a democratic society. Lost also is an educational vision that takes people beyond the world of common sense, functions as a form of provocation, teaches them to be creative, exposes individuals to a variety of great traditions, and creates the pedagogical conditions for individuals to expand the range of human possibilities. Under the influence of corporate power and a growing authoritarianism in the United States, education in multiple informal and formal platforms operates increasingly in the service of lies, racism, unadulterated market values, and a full-fledged assault on critical consciousness and public values.  Under such circumstances, democracy is cast as the enemy of freedom, and politics turns dark.

These anti-democratic tendencies are evident in the ways in which neoliberalism since the 1980s has reshaped formal education at all levels into a site for training, inundating market values, and imposing commercial relations as a template for governing all of social life. Every idea, value, social relationship,  institution, and form of knowledge runs the risk of being economized, turned into either a commodity, brand, or source of profits, or all of the latter. Increasingly aligned with market forces, public and higher education are mostly primed for teaching business principles and corporate values, while university administrators are prized as CEOs or bureaucrats in an audit culture. In addition, students are viewed as clients and customers while faculty are treated like service workers. Public education is especially under assault with the appointment of Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education. DeVos hates all things public and believes that beyond privatizing public education, her role is to “advance God’s Kingdom” through the school system.

Under the Trump administration, the role of education as a medium of culture is reduced to a tool of management, conformity, and repression. Operating through a conservative social media and right-wing radio and television platforms, education under Trump has become a powerful weapon to produce and distribute hate, bigotry, and reactionary policies. Moreover, it has become a commanding tool to legitimate a range of right-wing policies that constitute an assault on the environment, transgender people in the military, and undocumented immigrants, among others. It has also become a bullhorn for spreading conspiracy theories including the ridiculous and caustic claim by a number of right wing pundits that the student leaders and survivors of the Parkland mass shooting are either “crisis actors,” bankrolled by George Soros, or pawns of left-wing gun control advocates.

Operating in the service of a strictly instrumental rationality that erodes the boundaries between economic power and politics, enables a culture of racial exclusion, and furthers a politics of repression, education in a range of formal and informal sites is used to empty politics of any substance. With regards to higher education, students are not only inundated with the competitive, privatized, and market-driven values of neoliberalism, they are also punished by those values in the form of exorbitant tuition rates, crippling astronomical debt owed to banks and other financial institutions, and lack of meaningful employment.

At the level of public education, too many students especially those marginalized by class and race are subject to disciplinary measures and oppressive forms of pedagogy that kill the imagination and increasingly criminalize student behavior. Solidarity, critical thought, and shared values are the enemy of Trump’s notion of education and pedagogy, which serves largely to disdain public values while canceling out a democratic future for too many young people. All of these forces are exacerbated in the wider society through a notion of popular education that accelerates a modern day pandemic of fear, anxiety, anger, and despair.

What is often lost on the part of the left and progressives is that the educational force of the wider culture functions through a range of what the sociologist C. Wright Mills termed cultural apparatuses, which extend from the mainstream and conservative media to digital and online platforms that largely operate in the service of a commodified and authoritarian political media sphere that has become what Mort Rosenblum calls a “cesspool of misleading babble.” Trump has managed to shape the cultural landscape in ways that have unleashed a poisonous public pedagogy of sensationalism, easy consumption, bigotry, fear, militarism, and distraction.  For instance, insightful and critical reporting is dismissed as “fake news,” while corporate profiteers accelerate a culture of instant gratification and feed off spectacles of violence.

Against this backdrop of civic illiteracy lies Trump’s 2018 budget, which adds $80 billion to the military’s bloated machinery of death.  All the while, Trump fills the Twitter world with an ongoing bombast of emotional drivel. Simultaneously, he appoints cabinet and other high ranking officials whose chief role is to dismantle those institutions central to a democracy: “its schools, courts, civil liberties, environment, natural wealth, and underlying morality.” Former chief strategist Steve Bannon makes visible and boasts about Trump’s racist politics as he travels the globe proclaiming to his fascist friends that they should not be troubled if called a racist. In fact, he announced to a gathering of the National Front party in 2018 at their annual congress in France, “Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.”

Squandering America’s moral authority, whatever is left, comes easy for Trump given his well publicised celebration of state violence and his endorsement of the use of torture.   The latter provides a context for his nomination of Gina Haspel as the head of the CIA. Haspel once headed a secret “black site” prison in Thailand where Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was water boarded three times. Haspel “also participated in the controversial decision to destroy evidence of interrogation sessions in which detainees were subjected to waterboarding.” Another egregious example of Trump’s militaristic and morally vacuous mind set can be seen in his appointment of John Bolton as Trump’s National Security Advisor, whom Juan Cole has called a “war criminal.” Bolton is a jingoistic hawk and warmonger of the first order and resembles a mix between Brig. General Jack D. Ripper, the trigger-happy war loving character out of the film Dr. Strangelove and the psychopathic, Patrick Bateman, the main character in American Psycho. Trump’s facile appointment of militarists, war criminals, and his ruthless “law and order” policies point to both a rhetoric and set of practices that provide the ideological and political foundation for acts of domestic terrorism.

Domestic terrorism, defined in part as acts designed by the state “intimidate or coerce a civilian population” now operates unapologetically at the highest levels of power as Trump rails against undocumented immigrants, advises police officers to rough up people they are arresting, and relentlessly cultivates “fear and contempt among … white citizens against immigrants, indigenous people and people of color, who are placed on the other side of ‘the law’.” In addition, Trump undermines the rule of law by attacking the courts and other legal institutions if they don’t pander to his policies. Moreover, his implementation of his “law and order” agenda is highly selective, depending upon who is the perpetrator of the alleged crime, or who is considered a friend or enemy. If it is “illegals” or anyone in his target audience of “criminals,” they should be roughed up by the police but if it is a friend such as Rob Porter, a former White House senior aide charged with abuse by both of his ex-wives, such accusations are simply dismissed by Trump.

Trump has ushered in a world of political and educational tyranny, misery, and oppression with his endless impetuous outbursts, insults, misrepresentations, corruption, and hucksterism. His emotional outbursts and unchecked narcissism provide the levers that promote a pedagogy in the service of mass illiteracy, ethical bankruptcy, and political conformity.  As the liar-in-chief, Trump collapses the distinction between facts and fiction and in doing so undermines the necessity for institutions that promote shared beliefs in facts, truth, and moral integrity, while valuing the common good above the facilitation of narrow private interests. Without some allegiance to evidence-based arguments, informed judgements, and reason, politics and the public spheres that support it begin to disappear. Moreover, morality and the ethical imagination wither as it becomes more and more difficult within Trump’s universe of “alternative facts” to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, and compassion from cruelty.

Americans live in Kafkaesque times—a time in which the fight for justice has given way at the highest levels of government to the legitimation of injustice. How else to explain Trump’s claim that there are “very fine people on both sides” when referring to the deadly violence perpetrated in Charlottesville, Virginia by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and members of the Klu Klux Klan and those protesting such hatred. While the latter is another example of Trump’s muddled politics of diversion, it is also testimony to Pierre Bourdieu’s insistence that “the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.” In this instance, the pedagogical call to think, inspire, and energize has been replaced by a discourse and pedagogical practices designed to misdirect rage, empty meaning of any substance, deaden the ethical imagination, and encourage the collective fog of unchecked nihilism, white nationalism, and a depoliticizing privatism.

Trump’s pedagogy is largely fashioned through his use of Twitter, his support by conservative media such as Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the aggressive support by tribal social media, and extreme talk radio, all of which function as thinly veiled propaganda and disimagination machines. Trump’s unrelenting pedagogical shocks to the body politics and civic culture have done more than lower the bar of civic discourse and the rules of governing, they have normalized the unimaginable. Conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan captures the damage in the following commentary in which he asserts that Trump:

[is] a cult leader of a movement that has taken over a political party [whose] twisted, compulsive insecurity requires him to use his office to attack, delegitimize and weaken every democratic institution that may occasionally operate outside his own delusional narcissism. He cannot help this. His tweets are a function of spasms, not plots. But the wreckage after only one year is extraordinary. The F.B.I. is now widely discredited; the C.I.A. is held in contempt; judges, according to the president, are driven by prejudice and partisanship (when they disagree with him); the media produce fake news; Congress is useless (including both Republicans and Democrats); alliances are essentially rip-offs; the State Department — along with the whole idea of a neutral Civil Service — is unnecessary. And the possibility of reasoned deliberation at the heart of democratic life has been obliterated by the white-hot racial and cultural hatreds that Trump was able to exploit to get elected and that he constantly fuels.

Following Arendt’s insight into the dynamics of totalitarianism, education both within and outside of institutionalized schooling has the capacity to become a tool not only to instill authoritarian convictions but also to destroy the ability of the populace to form any convictions that are on the side of justice, freedom, and thoughtfulness.  I think it is fair to argue that the nightmarish vision of an impending American-style authoritarianism is no longer a product of dystopian fiction—found in the work of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, and others.  Under the regime of Donald Trump, the language of “Newspeak” has been normalized, functions through multiple platforms, and has morphed into a giant disimagination machinery of propaganda, violence, bigotry, hatred, and war. The latter is clearly visible in Trump’s language and politics which in its various forms has a high threshold for disappearance and zones of terminal exclusion, especially for Muslims, undocumented immigrants, and African-Americans.

As a form of pedagogical regulation, intelligence is considered a liability and Trump’s White House works hard to eliminate expressions of discontent, resistance, and popular democratic struggles.  Trump’s criminogenic machinery of power is on full display in the educational landscape of the wider culture. New unapologetic forms of racist discrimination, unbridled commodification undermine the democratic mission of both formal and informal educational institutions and apparatuses in an age of increasing tyranny. Against the force of a highly militarized mode of casino capitalism in which violence and a resurgence of white supremacy are at the center of power, education as the practice of freedom is losing its ability to resist the authoritarian machinery of social death now shaping American society. The modern loss of faith in the merging of education and democracy needs to be reclaimed, but that will only happen if the long legacy of struggle over education is once again brought to life as part of a more comprehensive understanding of education being central to politics itself. Such a task is particularly urgent as the United States descends into the abyss of authoritarianism under the regime of Donald Trump.

What forces have allowed education to be undermined as a democratic public sphere, capable of producing the formative culture and critical citizens that could have prevented such a catastrophe from happening in an alleged democracy? In the more general sense, education is now viewed either as a form of mass entertainment or as a form of training, aligned to market values.  As a market driven pedagogical practice, it is wedded to a technocratic rationality dominated by the imperatives of commercial exchange.  As education becomes central to politics itself, it removes democratic values and a compassion for the other from the ideology, policies, and institutions that now control American society. At its worst, particularly regarding public education, it is reduced to an instrument of the carceral state used to warehouse young people considered suspect and disposable who become fodder for the school-to-prison pipeline.  What happens to a public that retreats into private silos and becomes indifferent to the use of language in the service of a panicked rage that stokes anger but not about issues that matter? What happens to a social order when it treats millions of illegal immigrants as disposable, potential terrorists, and criminals? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers and dies, both as an ideal and as a reality?

In the present moment, it becomes particularly urgent for educators and concerned citizens all over the world to protect and enlarge the formative cultures and public spheres that make democracy possible. The attack on the truth, honesty, and the ethical imagination, makes it all the more imperative for educators to think dangerously, especially in societies that appear increasingly amnesiac—that is, countries where forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. All of which becomes all the more threatening at a time when a country such as the United States has tipped over into a mode of authoritarianism that views critical thought as both a liability and a threat.

Given the crisis of education, agency, and memory that haunts the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which there is an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological– increasingly used to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be self-reflective and directive without being dogmatic and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means being vigilant about “that very moment in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created.”

At the same time it means educators, cultural workers, young people, and the wider public need to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied. At the heart of such a challenge is the need to ask what the role is of both formal education and the wider functions of education in a democracy? What pedagogical, political, and ethical responsibilities should educators and other cultural workers take on at a time when there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses? How can educational and pedagogical practices be connected to the resurrection of historical memory, new modes of solidarity, a resurgence of the radical imagination, and broad-based struggles for an insurrectional democracy?  The question regarding what role education should play in democracy becomes all the more urgent at a time when the dark forces of authoritarianism are on the march all across the globe.

Vaclav Havel once argued that politics followed culture. That is, politics is inextricably connected to how individual and social consciousness are shaped, experiences are narrated, and investments organized so as speak convincingly to people’s needs, anxieties, and hopes. The mix of power, culture, and everyday life imposes new demands on those of us willing to make education and pedagogy central to politics itself if we want to breathe life and hope into a future that refuses the authoritarian impulses of the present. One productive sign of the times is that women, scientists, and young people are marching and organizing against the impending violence and fascism of the Trump administration. Many individuals and groups are beginning to wage a brave fight against oppressive neoliberal modes of governance. Prison abolitionists are making their voices heard, and new groups are mobilizing to fight the rise of white nationalism, militarism, and the threat of a nuclear war. Young people are reinventing new forms of collective resistance against gun violence. What all of these groups recognize is that to be voiceless is to be powerless. They are striking, organizing, and protesting to make their voices heard, refusing to allow their grievances to go unheard and ignored by the financial elite.

A new militancy can be seen in educators such as the striking teachers in West Virginia who have demonstrated the power of the wildcat strike as a mode of organized collective struggle against a criminogenic corporate based ideologies, pedagogies or repression, and ruthless labor practices. What is crucial about this strike and its success is that it was not waged simply to improve paltry salaries and abominable labor conditions, but to also make clear that public schools are not for sale and that they represent one of the most crucial public spheres in a democracy.

But the most promising act of resistance on the horizon in the level and scope of protest against gun violence being mobilized by young people since the Parkland massacre. Not only have they exposed the toxic violence produced by the NRA but also the cowardice of those politicians, such as Senator Marco Rubio, who sell their conscience and dignity for blood money by putting profits from gun sales ahead of children’s lives. Gun deaths among children are rising in the United States as evident by the fact that “3,128 children and teens were killed with a gun 1n 2016, enough to fill 156 classrooms of 20 children.”  Yet it is young people, rather than adults, who are arousing the conscience of the nation with their demonstrations, interviews, and March for Our Lives demonstrations, in which is hundreds of thousands of students protested throughout the United States and in 800 cities around the world, all of which was designed to end “the plague of gun violence.”

State and corporate sanctioned violence comes in many forms and hopefully the issues raised by the students marching against gun violence across the United Sates will begin to expand the public’s political horizons by addressing how violence functions as a mode of domestic terrorism in a range of sites. Among others, these include: schools modeled after prisons; streets and poor cities treated as war zones by many police departments; airports that have become centers of repressive surveillance practices against immigrants; shopping centers that exclude poor minorities; debtor prisons designed to punish the impoverished; detention centers for young people whose range of behaviors is being increasingly criminalized; a carceral state that has used the prison as containing centers for racial minorities, and in a range of deadly policies that have turned civil society into a breeding ground for everyday and organized violence.

The retreat to nationalism, state sanctioned racism, the expansion of the military-industrial complex, and accelerating police violence and the growth of the carceral state, particularly with respect to the war on undocumented immigrants constitute a short list of issues to be addressed by a broad based movement of collective resistance. Hopefully, such issues will be eventually in the crosshairs of the protesters being mobilized by young people who refuse put up with the reign of domestic terrorism and gun violence at work in their schools and enabled by the Trump administration.

At a time when people’s lives are more precarious, hope for a better society seems to be in short supply. The Parkland youth protesters have put new energy into creating a new vision of hope, or what Ronald Aronson, calls “social hope.” That is, a belief in the ability to act collectively to make a better world and act “not blindly but with a sense of possibility.” They have seized upon a vision of social justice rooted in the belief that they can not only challenge oppression but also can change the fundamental nature of an oppressive social order.  Education for them becomes a way of translating personal issues into larger systemic concerns, changing the way people see things, and investing a variety of modes of communication in order to use elements of belief and persuasion as appropriate weapons of struggle. They are talking back, writing, marching, and thinking outside of the boundaries of the deadening political horizons preached by established politicians and the mainstream media. They are also using the new digital technologies and the social media in order to educate a nation about the necessity of collective struggle and a shared militancy based on the need to both change public consciousness and to inspire people to act. What these young people have made clear is that education is central to such a struggle and that it provides the foundation for turning momentary protests into broad-based movements, which cannot come fast enough in the age of Trump with its fascist investment in legitimized and organized violence.