Chris Hedges's Blog, page 637

Congress OKs $1.3 Trillion in Spending, Averts Shutdown

WASHINGTON—Congress gave final approval Friday to a giant $1.3 trillion spending bill that ends the budget battles for now, but only after late obstacles skirted close to another shutdown as conservatives objected to big outlays on Democratic priorities at a time when Republicans control the House, Senate and White House.

Senate passage shortly after midnight averted a third federal shutdown this year, an outcome both parties wanted to avoid. But in crafting a sweeping deal that busts budget caps, they’ve stirred conservative opposition and set the contours for the next funding fight ahead of the midterm elections.

The House easily approved the measure Thursday, 256-167, a bipartisan tally that underscored the popularity of the compromise, which funds the government through September. It beefs up military and domestic programs, delivering federal funds to every corner of the country.

But action stalled in the Senate, as conservatives ran the clock in protest. Then, an unusual glitch arose when Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, wanted to remove a provision to rename a forest in his home state after the late Cecil Andrus, a four-term Democratic governor.

At one point, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., stepped forward to declare the entire late-night scene “ridiculous. It’s juvenile.”

Once the opponents relented, the Senate began voting, clearing the package by a 65-32 vote a full day before Friday’s midnight deadline to fund the government.

“Shame, shame. A pox on both Houses – and parties,” tweeted Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who spent the afternoon tweeting details found in the 2,200-page bill that was released the night before. “No one has read it. Congress is broken.”

Paul said later he knew he could only delay, but not stop, the outcome and had made his point.

The omnibus spending bill was supposed to be an antidote to the stopgap measures Congress has been forced to pass — five in this fiscal year alone — to keep government temporarily running amid partisan fiscal disputes.

Leaders delivered on President Donald Trump’s top priorities of boosting Pentagon coffers and starting work his promised border wall, while compromising with Democrats on funds for road building, child care development, fighting the opioid crisis and more.

But the result has been unimaginable to many Republicans after campaigning on spending restraints and balanced budgets. Along with the recent GOP tax cuts law, the bill that stood a foot tall at some lawmakers’ desks ushers in the return of $1 trillion deficits.

Trump only reluctantly backed the bill he would have to sign, according to Republican lawmakers and aides, who acknowledged the deal involved necessary trade-offs for the Democratic votes that were needed for passage despite their majority lock on Congress.

“Obviously he doesn’t like this process — it’s dangerous to put it up to the 11th hour like this,” said Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., who opposes the bill and speaks regularly to Trump. “The president, and our leadership, and the leadership in the House got together and said, Look, we don’t like what the Democrats are doing, we got to fund the government.”

White House legislative director Sen. David Perdue framed it as a compromise. “I can’t sit here and tell you and your viewers that we love everything in the bill,” he said on Fox. “But we think that we got many of our priorities funded.”

Trying to smooth over differences, Republican leaders focused on military increases that were once core to the party’s brand as guardians of national security.

“Vote yes for our military. Vote yes for the safety and the security of this country,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., ahead of voting.

But even that remained a hard sell. In all, 90 House Republicans, including many from the conservative House Freedom Caucus, voted against the bill, as did two dozen Republicans in the Senate.

It was a sign of the entrenched GOP divisions that have made leadership’s job controlling the majority difficult. They will likely repeat on the next budget battle in fall.

Democrats faced their own divisions, particularly after failing to resolve the stalemate over shielding young Dreamer immigrants from deportation as Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program has left it for the courts to decide.

Instead, Trump won $1.6 billion to begin building and replacing segments of the wall along the border with Mexico. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus opposed the bill.

Also missing from the package was a renewal of federal insurance subsidies to curb premium costs on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Trump ended some of those payments as part of his effort to scuttle President Barack Obama’s health care law, but Republicans have joined Democrats in trying to revive them.

Bipartisan efforts to restore the subsidies, and provide additional help for insurance carriers, foundered over disagreements on how tight abortion restrictions should be on using the money for private insurance plans. Senate Republicans made a last-ditch effort to tuck the insurance provisions into the bill, but Democrats refused to yield on abortion restrictions.

Still, Democrats were beyond pleased with the outcome. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., chronicled the party’s many gains, and noted they could have just have easily withheld votes Republicans needed to avert another shutdown.

“We chose to use our leverage to help this bill pass,” Pelosi said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said as the minority party in Congress, “We feel good.” He added, “We produced a darn good bill.”

___

Associated Press writers Matthew Daly and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

Follow Mascaro on Twitter at https://twitter.com/LisaMascaro and Fram at https://twitter.com/AsFram

Love Live Marielle Franco

The assassination of Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco sent huge crowds of outraged mourners into the streets of Brazil, the western hemisphere’s “blackest” nation, where more than half of the 210 million inhabitants describe themselves as preto (black) or pardo (partly African). The 38 year-old member of the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) and her driver were ambushed by hit men firing police-issued bullets, sending “a message to all black bodies that fight for rights in the favela,” the besieged ghettos of Brazil’s cities, said Black activist Marcelle Decothé.

Shaun King, writing in The Intercept, described Franco as, “for all intents and purposes, a leader of the country’s parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S.”

In this week’s issue of Black Agenda Report, Black Brazilian journalist and anthropologist Jaime A. Alves describes Franco, a lesbian with a 19-year-old daughter, as “fearlessly vocal against police terror. Days before her killing,” Alves writes, “she denounced on twitter the disappearance of two youth kidnapped by the police in the neighboring favela of Acari. She was also leading the human rights commission to monitor police and military abuse during the military intervention decreed by president Michel Temer.”

The Brazilian military ruled with an iron hand—and U.S. backing—from 1964 to 1985. The Temer regime remains hugely unpopular more than two years after the “legislative coup” that unseated the Workers Party government of Dilma Rousseff, throwing the nation into political turmoil. Some fear President Temer’s handover of policing in Rio to the generals amounts to a creeping military coup. “I believe that this is one more step along the road of being able to restore security, order and, above all, confidence to residents of Rio de Janeiro state,” said top Temer advisor Wellington Moreira Franco. “This spirit is being mobilized so that … this methodology can spread throughout Brazil.”

It is almost immaterial whether Marielle Franco was killed by the military or civilian police, or other henchmen; she was cut down by a white supremacist Brazilian state that is even more lethally racist than its counterpart in the northern hemisphere. Her death is an occasion for serious examination of the similarities and differences in the Black condition in Brazil and the United States, especially regarding police.

BAR contributor Jaime Alves believes the transfer of police duties to the military is a “test case for Brazil as a whole.” But, he emphasizes, for Black activists, the favelas have always been under occupation. “Despite the regime of citizenship, decolonization is still to be completed” in the last major country in the world to abolish slavery, in 1888.

According to the official numbers, Brazil’s police kill 4,224 civilians a year. Alves asks us to “imagine a country where twelve civilians are ‘legally’ killed by the police on a daily basis.” Seventy-six percent of the dead are Black, meaning nine Black men or boys are killed by Brazilian police every day (99 percent are male). Alves notes that these statistics “do not count the ‘disappeared’ and ‘unknown’ that have turned poor and predominantly black urban communities in Brazil into macabre geographies.”

In the United States, cops killed 1,129 people in 2017, according to a Mapping Police Violence study, 305 of them Black people. That amounts to one Black person killed by cops every 29 hours—less than one a day.

Brazil’s Black population is over 100 million, two and a half times the U.S. Black population of 40 million. If the Black USA were as large as Black Brazil, the rate of cop killings of Blacks would be one every 11 and a half hours, or a little more than two deaths per day—still far below the Black Brazilian daily death toll of nine, but horrific on any national scale other than that which is weighted down by centuries of slavery, the organized mass grinding up and murder of entire peoples. Black lives in both Brazil and the U.S. are terminated by the state on a low-intensity warfare scale.

Clearly, the Brazilian state is conducting an even more lethal war against its Black population than its northern counterpart’s militarized oppression of U.S. Blacks. There is plenty of room for debate on why this is so, but I submit that the historical militancy and relative solidarity of Blacks in the U.S. has been a great shield and spear against an unrelentingly hostile white society and state. Although Blacks in the U.S. constantly complain of a lack of solidarity and waning militancy among our people, the truth is that, compared to other populations of the African diaspora, we are collectively fierce! That’s why Shaun King speaks of Marielle Franco as, “for all intents and purposes, a leader of the country’s parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S.“—and not the other way around. There are Black Panther Party “parallels” in India—and, as we note in this issue of BAR, in Puerto Rico—and Black Americans are the model of Black militancy in most of the world. No other Black national group has waged repeated urban rebellions in the major cities of a modern, white-led capitalist state. The resilience of Black U.S. solidarity and militancy means there are political, economic and, sometimes, blood prices to be paid for crimes against this people—and the state knows it.

A key factor that distinguishes Black people in the U.S. from others in the diaspora is the historical absence of an independent mulatto class. The relatively high prices brought by the heavily securitized and fantastically profitable slave “stock” in the U.S. discouraged slaveholders from allowing the creation of such a class, while constantly reinforced white majorities eliminated the need to formalize a “buffer” population of mixed race persons in the United States. The slave descendants here are uniformly “Black”—and consciously so. Our super-exploitation—with no means to escape by “lightening” the race—was transformed into a near-unique level of solidarity.

Black Brazil is belatedly transforming, too—as is dramatically evident in the census numbers, themselves. There are many more “self-declared black” people—as Alves describes Marielle Franco—in Brazil than ever before, despite long periods of massive European immigration to that country, thanks to a Black movement largely inspired by its brothers and sisters in the United States.

All power to the people of the favelas! Love Live Marielle Franco!

Glen Ford is the executive editor for Black Agenda Report. He can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

America Remains Drunk on Power

“Data mining is not a new phenomenon. In fact, before Cambridge Analytica, Barack Obama mined data during his 2012 presidential campaign, and he was hailed as a political pioneer.

Remember any of these headlines?

“Friended: How the Obama Campaign Connected With Young Voters,” from Time.

But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85 percent of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”

“Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election,” from The Guardian.

A unified computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of potential voters is at the forefront of campaign technology—and could be the key to an Obama win.

“How Obama’s Team Used Big Data to Rally Voters,” from MIT Technology Review.

After the voters returned Obama to office for a second term, his campaign became celebrated for its use of technology—much of it developed by an unusual team of coders and engineers—that redefined how individuals could use the Web, social media, and smartphones to participate in the political process. A mobile app allowed a canvasser to download and return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign office; a Web platform called Dashboard gamified volunteer activity by ranking the most active supporters; and “targeted sharing” protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.

But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.

Facebook, according to Obama’s product manager, even condoned the work.

 

Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.

— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018

 

They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.

— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018

That might have been why Facebook changed its targeting rules in 2014.

Of course, Obama campaign advisers say they used Facebook data the right way. That may be true, by the letter of the law. What’s also true, as some people have noted, is the double standard in the way the privacy and Facebook stories—Obama in 2012 and Cambridge Analytica in 2018—have been reported.

Stand-up comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore pointed out the other side of the story (starting at 7:20 in the video below).

In November 2017, Forbes ran an article about Cambridge Analytica titled “This Big Data Marketing Firm Claims To Have A Perfect Track Record In Winning Elections.”

Fast-forward to today, and Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, discovered that SCL Ltd—the British company that owns Cambridge Analytica—“does exactly the same activities in the UK that Cambridge Analytica was undertaking in the US.” Even more than that, SCL “is as Establishment as a company can get,” with a board member who is a “direct descendant of Queen Victoria” and another who “makes large donations to the Tory Party.”

But don’t expect to hear wall-to-wall coverage about how England meddled in the 2016 election. “They’re still not saying that,” Dore said. “They still won’t say ‘meddled in the election,’ ‘colluded with a foreign national.’ They don’t say that. They don’t say ‘a foreign government’ or ‘a foreign company working in collusion.’ I saw Rachel Maddow do an hour on this. She connected Cambridge Analytica to Russia. Why aren’t they saying ‘meddling’? Why aren’t they saying ‘colluded’? Interesting, right? Because it makes me think that the rest of the stuff they’re saying about Russia meddling and colluding is bullshit.”

It’s the same reason a young, white male who blows up people with homemade bombs or goes on a shooting rampage with a weapon of war in America is called a “challenged young man,” and not a terrorist, which is what he is. Labeling white killers terrorists has a certain connotation. It triggers a certain emotion. Fear. The power structure in America does not want Americans to be afraid of white people. That doesn’t fit the political narrative. Americans need to be afraid of nonwhites. Those scary browns and blacks are the terrorists.

The same goes for those evil “Russkies.” The British red coat is the proper shade of red.

Questioning “Russiagate” does not make someone a “Putin fan” or a “Kremlin stooge.” No, questioning an investigation that still has yet to produce “smoking gun” evidence makes some people conscious Americans—those who care about truth, justice and peace. War is profitable for warmongers, and having a big, bad enemy like Russia is good for business.

As Carl Sagan said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.”

Most of the news these days is political theater. The “official narrative” scriptwriters, like the best Hollywood scribes, are well compensated.

America has a terrible double standard. Democrats and Republicans are in the same club. That’s why the Obama and Trump campaigns both mine data. That’s why “Russia meddles in U.S. elections” and Britain doesn’t. Until the majority of Americans wake up from our “American dream,” we will continue on a path of endless war, greed and destruction.

We are all in this crazy race against the doomsday clock together. It’s not too late to put down the nukes and save humanity, but we must stop pointing the finger at “the other” and look within ourselves.

The Roman Empire fell because of a variety of internal and external challenges: declining morals and values, public health and environmental problems, political corruption, unemployment, inflation, urban decay, military spending and an overextended army. Sound familiar? Our addiction to empire is killing us. This planet is big enough for every global citizen to have a patch of serenity.

America is not perfect. Trump is not perfect. Obama is not perfect. No country or person is. We have to accept that reality, sober up and learn how to live again.

If we continue to live in denial, the ending wouldn’t be happy.

The Unmitigated Failure of the Iraq War

We were always caught in the middle. We still are. As a young man, a new lieutenant, and a true believer, I once led a US Army scout platoon just south of Baghdad. It was autumn 2006, and my platoon patrolled—mainly aimlessly – through the streets and surrounding fields of Salman Pak. To our north lay the vast Shia heartland of East Baghdad, to our south and east, the disgruntled and recently disempowered Sunnis of the rural hinterlands. Both sides executed teenagers caught on the wrong side of town, leaving the bodies for us to find. Each side sought to win American favor; both tried to kill us.

It was a battle of attrition; a war for land, yes, but more importantly a war for the mind. Each day, the platoon had the distinct honor to drive our HMMWVs past the impressive ruins of an ancient Persian (Iranian) empire – the Sassanid. Some 1500 years earlier, Salman Pak was known as Ctesiphon and was the populous capital of a powerful civilization. The Iraqi Shia were proud of this past; the local Sunnis were not. Sunni insurgents still called the Shia “Sassanids,” or “Persians,” and they meant it as a pejorative. History was present and alive in Iraq. Still, few of my young soldiers knew—or cared—about any of this. They merely sought survival.

The Sunni fighters, once ascendant under Saddam Hussein’s regime, were backed by Saudi Arabia and other sympathetic Gulf states. In nighttime raids and daytime searches, we found Saudi “Wahhabi” Islamist propaganda on the floor of car bomb factories. Back then, the local Sunni insurgents called themselves TWJ (Tawhid al Jihad – Monotheism and Holy War). This group, a nonfactor at the time of the 9/11 attacks, would rebrand several times in the ensuing years: Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), and, finally, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The Shia militiamen, JAM (Jaysh al Mahdi—The Mahdi Army), were backed by another regional player: Iran. They utilized their demographic plurality and fought the Sunnis for power in the new, US-imposed Iraqi “democracy;” occasionally, they found time to shatter our HMMWVs (and our bodies) with Iranian supplied explosive penetrators. The US Army battled each side, and feared them both.

Salman Pak, my own little war, was a microcosm of a failed policy. When the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal of neoconservatives (along with a core of complicit “liberals” on Capitol Hill) collaborated to topple Saddam, the US became the proud owner of a fractured, ethno-sectarian basket case. The invasion and occupation of Iraq inserted the US military square in the middle of the ongoing regional proxy war between (Shia) Iran and (Sunni) Saudi Arabia.

Decades earlier, the US had actually backed Saddam’s Iraq in its war with Iran (1980-88), utilizing Iraqi troops as a buffer between the Islamic Republic and the oilfields of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In March 2003, in the ever-so-euphemistically titled Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF), a war which was never a vital national security interest, the US government placed America’s cherished servicemen squarely in the middle of two nefarious regional competitors.

The story has been told so many times, that the tragedy doesn’t warrant a full recounting. Here’s the short version: poor intelligence and dubious evidence was used by gang of neocon ideologues to sell Americans on the need for regime change in Iraq (a country that had not been involved in the 9/11 attacks). Frightened, naïve, and ill-informed, the American people—and esteemed outlets like the New York Times—went along for the ride. We were told it’d be easy (a “cakewalk”) and self-financing. It was neither.

A civil war broke out. Tens of thousands of civilians and thousands of US troopers died. By the time I arrived, in October 2006, the place was aflame. Fear not, we were told: Bush and his new, brainy general—some Petraeus guy—would “surge” troops and win the day after all. Violence did—briefly—decline; the Iraqi government, however, failed to garner legitimacy. Still, we were told we’d won. The last American soldiers marched out in December 2011. A day later, the Shia prime minister tried to arrest the Sunni vice president. Sectarian relations soured again until a new version of an old group – ISIS – preyed on Sunni resentment and conquered a third of Iraq in 2014. The war hawks—Dems and Republicans—on Capitol Hill squawked, and soon enough US planes, then boots, were back in Iraq.

It has been 15 years since OIF, and there – in Iraq and Syria – US servicemen remain, wedged between Saudi-backed Sunni Islamists, and Iranian-backed Shia militiamen. Some 4500 American soldiers have already died, with upwards of 30,000 more wounded. And, like a bad sitcom, the US military still spends most of its time fighting spin-off wars (Syria, Iraq 2.0, ISIS, Yemen) of the original Iraq disaster. That ill-fated farce of an invasion either created the conditions, or exacerbated the existing tensions, which inform today’s regional wars.

If bin Laden himself had authored it, he could hardly have written a more dreadful quagmire for the US military. Osama, in fact, didn’t initially expect the Iraq invasion, though once it bogged the Americans down, he labeled that country “a point of attraction and the restorer of our energies.” Chalk up a big V for Al Qaeda. I’m convinced that’s part of the reason there remain so many 9/11 “truthers:” because the “storm” seems so “perfect.” If the goal of the neocons and military-industrial complex was – and I don’t personally subscribe to this – to engulf the US in self-perpetuating forever wars in the Mideast, they sure scripted it perfectly. This is the stuff which feeds conspiratorial thinking.

The “war on terror”—particularly its crown jewel, IRAQI FREEDOM—was, and is, ultimately counterproductive. It makes enemies faster than even the world’s greatest military can kill them. It feeds itself; it morphs; it grows; it, in the prescient words of bin Laden, “restores” Islamist energies.

America, the guileless behemoth, brimming with hubris, somehow cannot seeit. The sheer irrationality of the whole endeavor borders – 15 years later – on the absurd. The only real winners in Iraq have been a chauvinist brand Iranian Shi’ism, and the trademark Wahhabi Sunni Islamism of Saudi Arabia. Neither is a true friend to US interests or values. Neither cares whether US soldiers live or die. Each has its own agenda and plays US policymakers and generals like so many fiddles. The rational move for America is to opt out; do less; and walk away before sinking farther into the next quagmire. Unfortunately, compressed so narrowly between adversarial forces, and obtuse as ever, American “statesman” can’t see the way out.

These wars won’t end well for the United States, just as matters didn’t end well for my platoon, wedged, as it was, between micro-factions of these same adversaries: Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The Sunni precursors of ISIS shot Sergeant Ty Dejane through the spine – he’s still in a wheel chair. The Shia militiamen aligned with Iran exploded a massive bomb which unleashed shrapnel that tore apart three other young men. Sergeant “Ducks” Duzinskas lost most of an arm. Sergeant Alex Fuller and Specialist Mike Balsley lay dead. They never knew what hit them, just as our platoon never knew who, or what, exactly, we were fighting.

My boys were sacrificed on the altar of American hubris. That’s the war I remember, and the one the US still fights—futilely—in the Fertile Crescent. Perhaps the citizenry should ponder that … before the next escalation in Iraq.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Teen Palestinian Protester Gets 8 Months in Prison

OFER MILITARY PRISON, West Bank — Palestinian teenage protest icon Ahed Tamimi on Wednesday was sentenced to eight months in prison for slapping and kicking a pair of Israeli soldiers outside her West Bank home, capping a case that sparked uproar in Israel, turned the 17-year-old girl into a Palestinian hero and attracted international attention.

Tamimi’s Israeli lawyer, Gaby Lasky, said Tamimi agreed to the sentence as part of a plea deal with prosecutors that allowed her to avoid more serious charges that could have imprisoned her for years. Under the deal, she is due to be released in the summer. She is also being fined the equivalent of about $1,400.

Lasky called the legal proceedings a “farce.” She said “they are trying to deter other Palestinian youth from resisting occupation as Ahed did.”

The judge agreed to a similar plea deal for Tamimi’s mother Nariman, who has been charged with incitement.

“This is injustice, this court is designed to oppress the Palestinians,” her father Bassem said. He said they agreed to the deal because they had been threatened with three years in jail. Bassem had visited his daughter and wife for the first time in prison the day before. He said Ahed spends her time doing school work.

An Israeli supporter of Tamimi slapped a prosecutor after the ruling and was later arrested by police.

Tamimi was arrested in December after video surfaced of her kicking the soldiers outside her West Bank home. While some praised the soldiers for showing restraint, hard-line politicians criticized what they felt was a weak response and called for tough action against the girl, whose family has a long history of run-ins with the Israelis.

But the full-throttle prosecution of Tamimi, who turned 17 behind bars, has drawn widespread international criticism. An Israeli official’s revelation that he had once had parliament investigate whether the blond, blue-eyed Tamimis are “real” Palestinians drew accusations of racism and helped stoke additional interest in the case.

The case touches on what constitutes legitimate resistance to Israel’s rule over millions of Palestinians, now in its 51st year, in territories it captured in the 1967 war.

“No justice under occupation and we are in an illegal court,” Tamimi said to reporters in court.

Ahed Tamimi’s supporters see a brave girl who struck the soldiers in anger after having just learned that Israeli troops seriously wounded a 15-year-old cousin, shooting him in the head from close range with a rubber bullet during nearby stone-throwing clashes.

In Israel, she is seen either as a naive youth manipulated by her elders or a threat to Israel’s military deterrence. The incident also sparked debate about the soldiers’ refusal to act.

Israel has treated Tamimi’s actions as a criminal offense, indicting her on charges of assault and incitement that carry up to 14 years in prison.

Since 2009, residents of Tamimi’s village of Nabi Salah have staged regular anti-occupation protests that often end with stone-throwing clashes. Ahed Tamimi has participated in such marches from a young age, and has had several highly publicized run-ins with soldiers.

One photo shows the then-12-year-old raising a clenched fist toward a soldier towering over her.

Following her latest arrest, images of the girl became popular on posters in the West Bank. Some 1.7 million people worldwide have signed a petition calling for her release.

The case has drawn attention to Israel’s military court system, which is used to try Palestinians in the West Bank. Israeli West Bank settlers, on the other hand, are tried under Israeli civilian courts.

The dueling justice systems have drawn criticism from international rights groups. The military courts have a near 100 percent conviction rate, in part because so many Palestinians agree to plea bargains. Critics say the system gives Palestinians few rights, and they are often coerced into plea deals. Hundreds of Palestinian minors are processed by the military court system each year.

“Ahed will be home in a few months, but Israel is putting this child behind bars for eight months for calling for protests and slapping a soldier, after threatening her with years in jail,” said Human Rights Watch Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson.

March for Our Lives Kicks Off Saturday

After a gunman killed 17 students and faculty members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last month, students from the high school rallied together to launch the #NeverAgain movement and to organize a nationwide protest demanding sensible gun control laws. According to the March for Our Lives website: “… the kids and families of March For Our Lives will take to the streets to demand that their lives and safety become a priority and that we end gun violence and mass shootings in our schools today.”

We are Here for you, students of Great Mills

Phony Democracy Lives in Darkness

More dire warnings about Social Security from Paul Ryan exemplify the basic dishonesty of political discourse in America. Michael Phalen of Social Security Works (see Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson’s excellent book of the same name) promptly called for vigilance and donations to resist Ryan’s renewed scheme for another “Simpson-Bowles” group—to jump-start Ryan’s pet project.

Phalen writes:

It’s particularly appalling that Ryan’s proposal came at an event promoting Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut, which overwhelmingly favors the wealthy. We always knew this was their plan: give money to the super-rich, then cry poor as an excuse to cut programs that provide a foundation of economic security to regular Americans. The reality is that Social Security has a $2.8 trillion surplus, can pay out 100% of earned benefits owed for the next 17 years and approximately 80% of benefits after that. And all we need to do is require the wealthy to pay their fair share and we’ll be able to protect and expand benefits for millions of Americans. Paul Ryan knows that Americans won’t stand for cuts to our vital programs, so instead of proposing legislation, they propose fast track commissions that shield Congress from accountability on important issues.

Politicians like Ryan manufacture anxiety about the future as part of a larger strategy to pit one demographic of American citizens against another, in this case fatalistic young workers against the elderly—knowing that many in the millennial and Generation X age groups think they’ll never get Social Security when they need it and like the seductive simplicity of libertarianism. Ryan’s promotion of angst about Social Security is a “sign” of an ever deeper societal pathology that enables right-wing propagandists like the Koch brothers to subvert unity among voters and erode our democracy for their own agenda.

Ryan would have nothing to complain about had Congress not dipped into our Social Security surplus to fund wars and pork barrel for decades. Yet its failure to replenish that Social Security trust fund is ignored. A minor adjustment in the Social Security tax to include higher incomes cannot even be mentioned in the right-wing dystopia of Washington, D.C. Ryan’s manipulation passes for truth with many, even though Social Security does, in fact, work. Medicare also works. Our family structure—and thereby our entire society—benefits from these prudent measures responsible leaders crafted in a bygone era of centrism and moderation.

Even in our current gilded age, with widening rich-poor inequality, there is still enough collectivism left in America to keep Koch and other oligarchs worried and seeking more erosion of our democracy. Far-right “talking points” are broadcast continually, to confuse, polarize and lure malleable voters into their winner-take-all fear zones. These tactics have worked famously, and the far-right machine is currently “mom and apple pie” all over our divided nation. Long ago, Fox News and conservative, AM-radio mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh perfected the polarizing manipulations of current events. Now Sinclair’s media empire looks poised to be made stronger yet, by the FCC’s willingness to end net neutrality. Unlike Teddy Roosevelt, the right today is unphased by deregulation, monopoly or even more dangerous oligopoly.

Extreme right-wingers in D.C. secretly dismiss many of the ideals and wisdom of our Constitution. Our founders’ intentions included fair and equal treatment for all, expressed in our Bill of Rights as promotion of “The General Welfare.” They envisioned growing opportunities for hard-working citizens to achieve security and perhaps prosperity, in a society where community spirit and assisting one another nurtured the “common good.” Libertarian code words now sow distrust of all these traditions among us, by referring to billionaires and oligarchs as benefactors—the “job creators” or “makers” (of prosperity). Using these talking points, FDR’s New Deal social safety net gets demonized, portrayed as an “entitlement,” often associated with handouts given to no-account “takers.” The fact is, we pay lifelong for these safety nets, also known as insurance policies. Yet no one in the right wing or the corporate media dares to draw a correlation with the myriad political gifts bestowed upon our corporate billionaires and oligarchs through special-interest legislation bought and paid for by their campaign donations.

Give-away legislation crafted by our pay-to-play political culture to benefit the “half of 1 percent” elites is the core sign of our pathological leadership system. This dependency relationship between big money donors and our political parties—to pay for winning office in national elections that now cost double-digit billions of dollars—cannot continue without destroying our traditional American way of life. Fairness and genuine “free market capitalism” are regularly trampled in faux elections like 2016’s, where meaningful content and deep discussions of our societal issues could not happen. There is an unspoken acquiescence to our elections remaining as charades, where campaign money raised, yammering about political process and vile attack ads dominate all else.

We live in a complex society. Voting well is a challenge. Yet the mainstream media leaves education and depth of content to chance. Perhaps everyone will start watching C-SPAN four hours a day to understand our enigmatic nation. But I doubt it.

Survey the wreckage of just a few of the crashes brought on within the context of phony democracy and irrational leadership—made inevitable by two-party acrimony. We do not talk about our historical elephants in the room, our record of bad decision-making. We deny the fundamental reality that Washington’s adversarial political culture is what brings us repeatedly to the edge of a cliff (usually fiscal, but perhaps existential). George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D rejected basic principles of capitalism to reward Big Pharma, by denying Medicare price competition for drugs. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was originally a Republican idea. But with Obama and the Democrats voting for it, political expedience made it poison for the right. A basic necessity for our nation remains a political football, and we all suffer from adversarial theatrics on both sides of the aisle.

Bush and Dick Cheney fabricated a war against Iraq with visions of enriching U.S. corporations (an abysmal blunder we’re all still paying for, by propagating new terrorists and widespread Middle East violence), and we give them busts in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Saudi Arabia’s radical schools have been the source of much of the Islamic terror we fear, and they are handed state-of-the-art arms to battle Yemen/Iran. Iran had a legitimate, elected leader whom we removed to install the hated Shah, leading to the revolt of 1979 and our U.S. hostage humiliation.

Like Fidel Castro in Cuba, we never forget an insult or our need for Saudi oil, and so we continue to ignore Saudi misdeeds and obsess about Iran’s sins. The worsening population displacements from Syria and Africa threaten to destabilize several European governments, with radical right-wing elements gaining strength. Brexit remains an unsolved quandary. And Washington ignores the risks of worsening population migrations, pretending the warming data from scientists worldwide, including Exxon’s and the fears of our own Defense Department for climate refugee crises, can be denied by labeling global warming a hoax.

Today, we await the likely downsides of an extravagant Trump tax law that experiments irresponsibly with disproven “trickle down” theories—rightly called “voodoo economics” by George Bush Sr. Recycled conservative and laissez-faire economic theories have devastated U.S. jobs for decades, via offshoring plants, robotics, sales tax favors for Amazon and tax havens or loopholes for all big corporations. Artificial intelligence is poised to become the next enrichment driver for a few and a job loser for the many. Ronald Reagan’s debt exploding adventurism in the 1980s and Bill Clinton’s inept leadership that later sabotaged a developing democracy in the former Soviet Russia by “shock doctrine” and other Milton Friedman-esque economic meddling (elsewhere worldwide as well, like Chile) are ignored, even in an era when Russia and Vladimir Putin are mentioned on mainstream media dozens of time a day.

But in a perfect world, where American citizens learn to protect their own prosperity and fight for economic justice through the power of knowledge, my short list and innumerable other stories of incompetent leadership would live on—and remain dinner-table fascinations for growing numbers of sophisticated voters. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brother, well-informed conversations should include the obscene riches showered upon Wall Street perps (instead of jail for fraud), by Bush Jr. and Obama—during decade-long Fed support of Big Money elites, long after their 2008 “Too Big to Fail” bailouts.

“We the people” are routinely subordinated and harmed by our adversarial political system, flip-flopping almost comically from right to left and back again. It is a political system that chooses “party over country” policies consistently, that sabotages rational centrist collaboration and hypocritically serves the interests of our monied elites—all while pretending gentlemanly pomp and circumstance.

Payback for campaign donations and blind service to ideologies like Koch-financed libertarianism defines the incompetent governance that largely dominates Washington, D.C. Trump White House chaos, “Russiagate,” mass murders in schools and in Las Vegas, and sex scandals du jour are, in fact, the “symptoms and signs” of a society under siege from disconnected ideology, from hypocritical liars in power, from obsession with a “fast buck” economy and more. All of this is traceable to a system of leadership so broken that virtually no one sees a way to reinvent it. Even the most obvious cancer on our leadership system, Citizens United—another Koch Frankenstein—is growing more lethal. And, yet, it is accepted as incurable.

Read “Democracy in Chains” by history professor Nancy MacLean to learn of the Kochs’ stealth libertarian sabotage of traditional democracy, using the economic theories of James Buchanan.

As conservative columnist David Brooks wrote recently for The New York Times, the Trump administration may be so egregiously flawed and unprincipled that our self-righteous symbols of civilized propriety, parliamentary customs and the rule of law may never recover from the Damon Runyon theatrics we’re subjected to today from D.C. (as Brooks asserts is now the case in Italy, where political decadence has persisted post-Silvio Berlusconi).

It’s time to get involved. A “We Too” movement can “Make American Function Again.” Educated and confident in the power of knowledge, voters can elect rational leaders to a reinvented system of governance.

McMaster Out, Bolton In as Trump’s National Security Adviser

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is replacing national security adviser H.R. McMaster with the former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, injecting a hawkish foreign policy voice into his administration ahead of key decisions on Iran and North Korea.

Trump tweeted Thursday that McMaster has done “an outstanding job & will always remain my friend.” He said Bolton will take over April 9.

Bolton will be Trump’s third national security adviser. Trump has clashed with McMaster, a respected three-star general, and talk that McMaster would soon leave the administration had picked up in recent weeks.

His departure follows Trump’s dramatic ouster of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week. It also comes after someone at the White House leaked that Trump was urged in briefing documents not to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putin about his recent re-election win. Trump did it anyway.

In a statement released by the White House, McMaster said he would be requesting retirement from the U.S. Army effective this summer, adding that afterward he “will leave public service.”

The White House said McMaster’s exit had been under discussion for some time and stressed it was not due to any one incident.

Bolton, probably the most divisive foreign policy expert ever to serve as U.N. ambassador, has served as a hawkish voice in Republican foreign policy circles for decades. He met with Trump and White House chief of staff John Kelly in early March to discuss North Korea and Iran. He was spotted entering the West Wing earlier Thursday.

Bolton has served in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and served as a Bush lawyer during the 2000 Florida recount.

A strong supporter of the Iraq war and an advocate for aggressive use of American power in foreign policy, Bolton was unable to win Senate confirmation after his nomination to the U.N. post alienated many Democrats and even some Republicans. He resigned after serving 17 months as a Bush “recess appointment,” which allowed him to hold the job on a temporary basis without Senate confirmation.

Tension between Trump and McMaster has grown increasingly public. Last month, Trump took issue with McMaster’s characterization of Russian meddling in the 2016 election after the national security adviser told the Munich Security Summit that interference was beyond dispute.

“General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems,” Trump tweeted Feb. 17, alluding to frequent GOP allegations of impropriety by Democrats and Hillary Clinton.

Tillerson’s exit also forecast trouble for McMaster, who had aligned himself with the embattled secretary of state in seeking to soften some of Trump’s most dramatic foreign policy impulses.

McMaster told The New York Times last year that Trump’s unorthodox approach “has moved a lot of us out of our comfort zone, me included.”

The military strategist, who joined the administration in February 2017, has struggled to navigate a tumultuous White House. Last summer, he was the target of a far-right attack campaign, as conservative groups and a website tied to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon targeted him as insufficiently supportive of Israel and not tough enough on Iran.

McMaster was brought in after Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was dismissed after less than a month in office. White House officials said he was ousted because he did not tell top advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, about the full extent of his contacts with Russian officials.

__

Associated Press writer Zeke Miller contributed to this report.

Stocks Dive on Trade War Fears After China Sanctions

NEW YORK — Stocks plunged Thursday after the Trump administration slapped sanctions on goods and investment from China. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped more than 700 points as investors feared that trade tensions between the world’s largest economies would escalate.

The planned sanctions include tariffs on $48 billion worth of Chinese imports as well as restrictions on Chinese investments. Trump said he’s taking those steps in response to theft of American technology, and the Chinese government said it will defend itself. Investors are worried that trade tensions would hurt U.S. companies and harm the world economy.

On Thursday they fled stocks and bought bonds, which sent bond prices higher and yields lower. With interest rates falling, banks took some of the worst losses. Technology and industrial companies, basic materials makers and health care companies also fell sharply.

Peter Donisanu, an investment strategy analyst for the Wells Fargo Investment Institute, said the risk of a damaging trade war is still low because the Trump administration is targeting specific goods that aren’t central to China’s economy. That could change if it puts tariffs on products like electronics or appliances imported from China.

“If the Trump administration really wanted to hurt China and start a trade war, then they would go after those larger sectors,” he said. Still, Donisanu said that after last year’s rally, investors are looking for new reasons to feel optimistic about stocks. With trade tensions in focus over the last month, they’ve had trouble finding any.

The S&P 500 index skidded 68.24 points, or 2.5 percent, to 2,643.69. The Dow Jones industrial average sank 724.42 points, or 2.9 percent, to 23,957.89. The Nasdaq composite gave up 178.61 points, or 2.4 percent, to 7,166.68. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks lost 35.43 points, or 2.2 percent, to 1,543.87.

Construction equipment maker Caterpillar fell $8.90, or 5.7 percent, to $146.90, for its worst loss since mid-2016. Aerospace company Boeing slid $17.49, or 5.2 percent, to $319.61.

Investors also sold some of the market’s biggest recent winners. Among technology companies, Microsoft fell $2.69, or 2.9 percent, to $89.79 and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, fell $40.85, or 3.7 percent, to $1,053.15. Online retailer Amazon slid $36.94, or 2.3 percent, to $1,544.92.

Earlier this month the Trump administration ordered tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, and stocks dropped as investors worried about the possibility of tougher restrictions on international trade and smaller profits for corporations.

Their fears eased when the administration said some countries will be exempt from the tariffs. That continued Thursday, as U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the tariffs won’t apply to the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Australia.

Donisanu, of Wells Fargo, said the Trump administration isn’t hostile to trade necessarily, but wants to get other countries to revise the terms of America’s trade deals.

“This is probably intended to get China to get more serious in discussions around violations of intellectual property rights and addressing those issues,” he said.

Bond prices climbed, sending yields lower. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note slipped to 2.82 percent from 2.88 percent. Falling bond yields are bad for banks because they force interest rates on loans lower. Bank of America lost $1.32, or 4.1 percent, to $30.55 and JPMorgan Chase gave up $4.79, or 4.2 percent, to $109.95.

Utility companies and real estate investment trusts moved higher. When bond yields decline, investors often bid up those stocks and others that pay big dividends.

The decline in rates comes a day after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and said the U.S. economy and the job market continued to improve over the last two months. The Fed expects to raise rates three times this year, although some investors think a fourth increase is possible. The Fed also said it might raise rates three more times next year instead of two.

Overseas markets closed mostly lower. Germany’s DAX lost 1.7 percent and the CAC 40 in France shed 1.4 percent. Britain’s FTSE 100 dropped 1.2 percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 1.1 percent. The Nikkei 225 in Japan index gained 1 percent and the South Korean Kospi added 0.4 percent.

AbbVie plunged after it reported disappointing results from a study of its cancer therapy Rova-T. AbbVie canceled its plans to ask for faster approval of Rova-T as a treatment for small cell lung cancer, but other studies are continuing. AbbVie shed $14.35, or 12.8 percent, to $98.10. Other health care stocks also sank.

Benchmark U.S. crude oil shed 87 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $64.30 a barrel in New York. Brent crude, used to price international oils, fell 56 cents, or 0.8 percent, to $68.91 a barrel in London.

Wholesale gasoline remained at $2.01 a gallon. Heating oil lost 1 cent to $1.99 a gallon. Natural gas lost 3 cents to $2.62 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Gold edged up $5.90 to $1,327.40 an ounce. Silver fell 3 cents to $16.39 an ounce. Copper lost 4 cents to $3.02 a pound.

The dollar fell to 105.61 yen from 106.10 yen. The euro rose to $1.2307 from $1.2332.

Are Social Media Companies Anti-Social?

In 1964, the novelist Eugene Burdick published “The 480.” The best-selling book described, as Burdick wrote in his preface, “people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorize and reproduce this information at the press of a button.”

The title refers to 480 categories of voters, defined by demographic characteristics, created by the Simulmatics Corp., a real company, as a way of targeting appeals to small subgroups. The novel’s drama centers on data manipulation’s role in lifting a dark-horse candidate toward the Republican presidential nomination.

We’re told of five different campaign mailings directed “to five carefully selected groups that shared only one quality: they were likely to turn out to vote and they had a special grievance.” I suppose that’s two qualities, but you get Burdick’s point. And, yes, the author’s engaging tale was based on reality: John F. Kennedy used Simulmatics in his 1960 campaign.

“The 480” speaks to how long Americans have worried about the manipulation of our political decisions by tech magicians with access to mounds of information.

The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal takes our paranoia to a whole new level. But paranoia, implying psychologically unhealthy delusions, is the wrong word. There is nothing disordered about the outrage created by the invasion of an estimated 50 million Facebook accounts for the ultimate benefit of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The upshot is that private companies that traffic in the enormous amounts of personal data we voluntarily give them are not living up to their obligations both to each of us as individuals and to the common good.

Data mining, as Burdick’s book shows, is not new. But today’s social media companies do it more extensively and more efficiently. Consider an imperfect but instructive analogy. Any campaign can acquire your listed land-line number. But no campaign is permitted access to your hopes, fears, worries, passions or day-to-day business by way of a phone tap. Facebook’s accumulated information may not be quite like a tap. But the company sure knows a whole lot about you.

So we have a right to worry about the ability of a researcher to use voluntary answers to a survey of 270,000 Facebook users to “scrape” information on 50 million people, later used by Trump’s campaign. We have a right to be outraged about Facebook’s failure to inform users that their data had been harvested. “They keep saying, ‘Trust us, we can take care of our own people and our own website,'” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “Well, that’s not true.” She and Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., have called for Judiciary Committee hearings, and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia also called on Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress.

Far from obviating his need to testify, Zuckerberg’s statement Wednesday afternoon acknowledging “mistakes” and pledging to “work through this” largely repeated what we already know. He’ll have to do much more.

Related Articles









Zuckerberg Breaks Silence on Cambridge Analytica, Apologizes for Data Breach



by Jordan Riefe















Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower: How We Influenced U.S. Voters (Video)



by Eric Ortiz

Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee investigating Russian interference in our election, has been properly cautious about connecting the Cambridge Analytica story to Russia. But as Justin Hendrix, the executive director of NYC Media Lab argued on Slate, there is evidence giving plausibility to the idea “that Cambridge Analytica helped spur the Russian disinformation operation during the 2016 election.” And the close ties between Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign, beginning with Steve Bannon’s role as vice president and secretary of the company, mean that inquiries into such links are inevitable.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump warned on Wednesday of the dangers of seeking a “Grand Theory of Russia Collusion.” Fair enough. Let’s learn more. But we should expect the social-media giants to cooperate in helping us do this.

We must decide when Facebook and comparable companies should be held accountable as public utilities. And when do they look more like publishers who bear responsibility for the veracity of the “information” they spread around?

We also need to confront conflicts between the public interest and the ways that social-media companies make their profits. Where do privacy rights come in? Are they unduly blocking transparency about how political campaigns are conducted and who is financing them? Were they indifferent to their manipulation by foreign powers?

In his preface to “The 480,” Burdick said he hoped his book would illustrate “the political realities of today and the political hazards of tomorrow.” Well, tomorrow is here and its hazards outstrip even Burdick’s prophetic imagination.