Chris Hedges's Blog, page 643

FBI Official McCabe Is Fired Two Days Before His Retirement Date

WASHINGTON—Attorney General Jeff Sessions says he has fired former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, a regular target of President Donald Trump’s anger and criticism, just two days before his scheduled retirement date. McCabe immediately decried the move and suggested it was part of the Trump administration’s “war on the FBI.”

The Friday dismissal was made on the recommendation of FBI disciplinary officials and comes ahead of an inspector general report expected to conclude that McCabe had authorized the release of information to the news media and had not been forthcoming with the watchdog office as it examined the bureau’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

“The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and accountability,” Sessions said in a Friday night statement.

In an extraordinary rebuttal released immediately after the attorney general’s announcement, McCabe said his credibility had been attacked as “part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally” but also the FBI and law enforcement.

“It is part of this administration’s ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the special counsel investigation, which continue to this day,” he added, referring to Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe into potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. “Their persistence in this campaign only highlights the importance of the special counsel’s work.”

McCabe also asserted that he was being singled out because of the “role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey.” Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s actions, including firing Comey as FBI director last May, constitute obstruction of justice, and McCabe, a close Comey confidant, could be an important witness. McCabe said the release of the findings against him was accelerated after he told congressional officials that he could corroborate Comey’s accounts of his conversations with the president.

Though McCabe had spent more than 20 years as a career FBI official, and had played key roles in some of the bureau’s most recent significant investigations, Trump had repeatedly condemned him over the last year as emblematic of an FBI leadership he contends is biased against his administration. He appeared to revel in the termination, tweeting early Saturday that it was a “great day for Democracy” and a “great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI.”

The dismissal is symbolic to an extent since McCabe had been on leave from the FBI since January, when he abruptly left the deputy director position. But it comes just ahead of his planned retirement, on Sunday, and likely jeopardizes his ability to collect his full pension benefits upon his departure. It could also add to the tumult that has enveloped the law enforcement agency in the last year amid the firing of former director James Comey in May and an ongoing FBI probe of the Trump campaign that the White House has dismissed as a hoax.

The firing arises from a wide-ranging inspector general review into how the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation. That inquiry view focused not only on specific decisions made by FBI leadership during the probe, but also on news media leaks.

McCabe came under particular scrutiny over an October 2016 news report that revealed differing approaches within the FBI and Justice Department over how aggressively the Clinton Foundation should be investigated. The watchdog office has concluded that McCabe authorized FBI officials to speak to a Wall Street Journal reporter for that story and that he had not been forthcoming with investigators, which McCabe denies.

In his statement, McCabe said he had the authority to share information with journalists through the public affairs office, a practice he said was common and continued under current Director Christopher Wray. He said he had honestly answered questions about whom he had spoken to and when, and that when he thought his answers were misunderstood, contacted investigators to correct them.

The media outreach came at a time when McCabe said he was facing public accusations of partisanship and followed reports that his wife, during a run for state political office, had received campaign contributions from a close Clinton ally. McCabe suggested in his statement that he was trying to “set the record straight” about the FBI’s independence against the background of those allegations.

Despite his defense, officials at the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommended the firing, leaving Justice Department leaders in a difficult situation. Sessions, whose job status has for months appeared shaky under his own blistering criticism from Trump, risked inflaming the White House if he decided against firing McCabe. But a decision to dismiss McCabe days before his firing nonetheless carried the risk of angering his rank-and-file supporters at the FBI.

McCabe enjoyed a rapid career ascent in the bureau after joining in 1996. Before being named FBI deputy director last year, he led the bureau’s national security branch and also the Washington field office, one of the its largest.

But he became entangled in presidential politics in 2016 when it was revealed that his wife, during an unsuccessful bid for the Virginia state Senate, had received campaign contributions from the political action committee of then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close Clinton ally. The FBI has said McCabe received the necessary ethics approval about his wife’s candidacy and was not supervising the Clinton investigation at the time.

He became acting director following the firing last May of Comey, and immediately assumed direct oversight of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

He quickly found himself at odds with the Trump administration.

As a congressional hearing days after Comey’s dismissal, McCabe contradicted White House assertions that the Trump campaign investigation was one of the “smallest things” on the FBI’s plate and strongly disputed the administration’s suggestion that Comey had lost the support of the bureau’s workforce.

“I can tell you that the majority, the vast majority of FBI employees, enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey,” McCabe said.

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Mexicali’s ‘Water Defenders’ Take the Fight to Big Alcohol

In January 2017, the Mexican government implemented a 20 percent hike in gasoline prices, setting the stage for a nationwide rebellion and a people’s mobilization against the tightening screws of neoliberalism. To a population already struggling with poverty and low wages, this blatant exercise of power and greed was a wake-up call heard across Mexico.

Today, the struggle continues, but in the desert border city of Mexicali it has expanded to the protection of water, as the people face off with a United States-based multinational corporation known as Constellation Brands. In a familiar scenario in which capitalism seeks to privatize the commons, and through secret backroom deals with corrupt politicians, Constellation Brands wants access to Mexicali’s precious water to produce alcohol for exclusive export to the U.S.

At a time of increased precariousness around anthropogenic climate disruption, we are witnessing the front-line battles where dwindling natural resources are being contested, where capitalism’s insatiable appetite for profits is like a drunk frantically wringing a damp cloth for a few more drops of alcohol, and where people are fighting back and organizing against a soulless and rapacious economic system.

It is no accident that we are hearing similar slogans in Mexicali that we heard at Standing Rock, where Native American communities faced off with Wall Street oil predators, and reminded us that water is life.

The people of Mexicali Resiste have been organizing now for over a year, and the battle to defend their water is escalating. There are now calls for an organized boycott of Constellation Brands.

At the beginning

Mexicali, the capital of Baja California, is a quintessential NAFTA city, with a long history of capitalist interest in its workforce and natural resources. On Jan. 4, 2017, this modern rebellion manifested itself when people blocked the Pemex distribution plant at La Rosita, leaving gas stations closed and the city paralyzed.

At the same time as the federal hike in gasoline prices, the state imposed a transportation and environmental tax on license plate renewals. This combination of being hit with both a federal and state tax increase was too much for people to bear, sparking a blockade of a tax collection center at city hall that escalated into an organized march on Jan. 12, 2017, of nearly 12,000 people in the civic center of Mexicali, where Baja California’s federal, state and municipal offices are concentrated.

The sight of the angry crowd in the largest protest to that date scared the shit out of several Congress members, so much so that they began to flee the civic center. Blockades of both City Hall and Congress followed, giving birth to camps not too dissimilar from Occupy Wall Street.

Later that week, on Jan. 15, as a part of the national resistance against the gas hike, another march took place and became the largest protest in Mexicali history, with upward of 75,000 people attending. The sheer number of people who took part reinforced the idea of a total government blockade, as five more camps were setup.

As federal, state and local police were sent in to clear the civil disobedience groups, organizers dug in for the long haul. Over the next year, the struggle would continue with many different groups being spawned from the initial rebellion.

Groups such as Mexicali Consciente, Baja California Resiste, Conciencia Civil Cachanilla and Tecate en Pie de Lucha were formed in Baja California, and all are a part of a growing people’s movement, despite different ideological and methodological organizing models.

As the camps remained intact, organizers created multiple working groups, or committees, for various tasks, including research and communications, with weekly assemblies open to the public. This allowed the movement to serve as a vigilant watchdog against the government. And it was this vigilance that led to their most important discovery—namely, that the city government cut a secret water supply deal with the multinational corporation, Constellation Brands.

Mexicali Resiste—Locally Made. Constellation Brands—Made in the USA.

Out of this initial rebellion, a people’s resistance movement calling itself Mexicali Resiste was born. Predominantly known for its incessant opposition to the establishment of the Constellation Brands brewery in Mexicali, an effort that has warranted them the title of “water defenders,” Mexicali Resiste has been closely monitoring the government for fraud and corruption.

Constellation Brands is a U.S.-based corporation and NAFTA beneficiary headquartered in New York that produces and markets alcohol (beer, wine and spirits), distributing brands such as Corona Extra, Corona Light, Modelo Especial, Negra Modelo, Pacifico, Victoria and Ballast Point. In collusion with Francisco “Kiko” Vega de Lamadrid, the governor of the state of Baja California, they negotiated a backroom deal giving them access to Mexicali’s water supply in the heart of the farmlands just south of the U.S. border.

Needless to say, granting a foreign corporation guaranteed access to public water in a secret, unreleased agreement fueled the movement and its 24/7 civic center occupation in front of Congress. Concerns over the legitimacy and transparency of the deal were ignored, as were requests for public records and copies of the contracts.

This theft of public water for private profit would later result in multiple physical blockades of the brewery construction site, reinforcing the people’s commitment to preserving Mexicali’s water through nonviolent, direct action.

Corporate and Ruling-Class Collusion First—Repression Second

It is estimated that Constellation Brands would use 20 million cubic meters of water per year throughout its 50-year contract. That’s 38,000 liters per minute, 634 liters per second, or 140 gallons per second.

As in California, the people of Baja California are concerned about drought and the ecological impacts such water consumption would have in the desert region, as Colorado River expert Alfonso Cortés methodically explains in his writings. The movement has attracted the attention of farmers, hydrologists, geologists and oceanographers, all being asked to contribute relevant research to the fight.

How is it possible such a secret deal could be struck in the first place? A recently enacted law known as the Public and Private Associations law, or PPP (in English, Public-Private Partnership), basically allows the state to make business deals with the private sector with very few regulations.

Due to increasing public pressure, however, Gov. “Kiko” on Jan. 17, 2017, repealed the tax on license plates, and apparently, a vague “water law” that would have increased the price of city water use, essentially a tax on the population.

As the pressure and vigilance of the movement continued, several tactics were used to break the blockades of government offices and remove the camps. In one case, on Jan. 28, 2017, shortly after a provocation by the governor and his security team, who showed up unannounced to break the blockades, enraged members of the camps chased the governor and his security team into their cars. His response was to order undercover police into the camps in the wee hours of the morning to break them up.

Watch video of people surrounding Gov. “Kiko” Vega:

At 3 a.m. on Jan. 30, as 300 uniformed police and about 100 secret police surrounded the camps, the people mobilized the city using a combination of live streaming, texting and alerts, narrowly preventing what would have been a violent crackdown. In the aftermath, a compromise deal was struck between the movement and the state: The blockade of government offices would be removed, but the camps must remain.

Watch video of the 3 a.m. police raid:

The ever-present eyes of the people were not going to leave these kleptocratic PANistas (Mexico’s politically conservative party supporters and pro-business elite) alone. The monitoring had to continue.

Congress Watchdogs and State Repression

Under the increasing public scrutiny of the government’s actions, sessions of the Congress were often held in the middle of the night (in one case at 2 a.m.), with limited or no access for citizens. Public access to sessions of Congress is protected by law, but in the case of Baja California, it was illegally blocked.

One of the most outrageous measures the Mexicali City Council tried to pass was a motion to forgive at least 132 million pesos (approximately $7.1 million) in property taxes owed by large corporations, almost twice the amount of the municipal government’s public investment budget. Attempts to pass this kind of legislation behind the backs of the people prompted organizers at the camps to call on the general public to mobilize.

Watch video of the city attempts to wipe away corporate debt:

After several failed attempts to meet with Mexicali Mayor Gustavo Sanchez and his municipal government, resistance groups decided to block access to the civic center once more, resulting in a violent crackdown by police forces on Feb. 13, 2017, that grew to be called “Lunes Negro,” or “Black Monday”

Two school buses full of police, canine and intelligence units arrested 14 people inside city hall. There was a high level of concern for their safety as several movement members were nowhere to be found, particularly in a country where forced disappearances are often utilized as a method of control against civil resistance.

As those arrested were transferred to several different jails, some managed to transmit messages live on social media from inside the police vans, alerting comrades to their whereabouts and mobilizing them to aid in their release.

Social media documentation had such a negative impact on the government’s image that it initiated further intimidation tactics. In one such case, movement member Tania Gallaga’s house was attacked with a Molotov cocktail after she had confronted a female police officer on Black Monday.

On July 4, 2017, Mexicali Resiste communication and media offices were broken into. Several hard drives were stolen and paper files containing months of documentation and research disappeared. Later, the pressure and antagonism grew to such levels that Congress erected a see-through barrier wall to keep an angered and awakened public at bay, but public ridicule in the media forced them to remove the barriers—such a visible symbol of tyranny.

To the Blockades

Blockades have been an integral tactic of the movement in Mexicali. When Constellation Brands’ machinery was spotted being transported into the city, blockades were set up at the brewery’s construction site. Movement organizers visited the site unannounced, revealing the grim conditions facing workers from southern Mexico, who had to pay for their own transportation to get to the border city and sleep on the floors of the construction site.

Just like the oil companies at Standing Rock, Constellation Brands justifies its presence in the region under the worn-out trope of providing jobs to workers, while simultaneously neglecting legal employment regulations by paying workers under the table, or hiring nonuniformed security forces wearing ski masks and bandanas.

Not surprisingly, rumors began to spread on state-friendly media claiming that the contract allowing the deal was public and legitimate. Everything is OK, now just go back to sleep. To this day, no one has seen the paperwork.

As huge water-tank containers were being brought in from Ensenada on flatbed trucks, organizers mobilized to block their entry onto the brewery premises. Seeing the determination and bravery of those on the blockade, the hired truck drivers left their cargo out on the road for weeks, until police and their threat of violence paved the way for the delivery.

Watch video of the huge water tanks, and the words of Don Raymundo (Indio Zapoteco):

Constellation, realizing they are up against a committed social movement in Mexicali valley, hired henchmen to patrol the perimeter of the brewery in camouflage, clearly hoping to prevent any kind of direct action on the property. But Filberto Sanchez, a member of Resistencia Civil de Baja California (one of Mexicali’s resistance groups), climbed the Constellation construction crane to initiate a hunger strike before being brought down by police.

Watch video of action to stop the transport of the water tanks:

The most recent and probably most notorious clash with police forces occurred at Rancho Mena on the boundary between ejido El Chorizo and El Choropo (where Constellation Brands is being built) on Jan. 16, 2018, just days after Mexicali Resiste had been commemorating its one-year anniversary of resistance. As water defenders attempted to stop the machinery by throwing rocks, 200 police entered the private ranch and a fierce confrontation with 50 protesters ensued.

Watch video of the confrontation with police during the last blockade:

While this confrontation resulted in injuries and violent arrests, it also reignited the battle to awaken public consciousness, both regionally and internationally. As Gov. Vega deployed the security forces to protect a foreign corporation, an already irate community garnered renewed strength, calling on people worldwide to join in solidarity with the struggle in Mexicali.

As anthropogenic climate disruption is being exacerbated by a capitalism run amok, we must unite across borders and support movements fighting against the destruction of the biosphere, against resource exploitation, and for dignity.

Boycott Constellation Brands

In Mexicali, we defend our water. Boycott Constellation Brands for taking away this resource. This is our mission statement:

To the community and the immigrants of the United States and to the different nations around the world:

The city of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, needs your help. Constellation Brands Brewing Company insists on depriving us of our own water in order to export it to the United States as beer. Because of this, we are asking you to help us boycott Constellation Brands in defense of our water, and we ask you not to consume any Constellation Brands product. This company is also owner of Grupo Modelo in the United States. If money is what drives the economic interests of this corrupt company, we must strike where it hurts the most: economically.

We’re asking you to help us boycott Constellation Brands because we are tired of being the petty-cash country of the United States, economic superpower to which the Mexican government has given mining, oil, beaches, land, and, finally, our water.

But because water is a nonrenewable and vital natural resource for all life on this planet. To fight for it is also a fight for sovereignty and national security, as well as a struggle for the defense of our territory. This foreign company has arrived only to find anything of value in Mexico and take it as money to its banks and money safes.

We’re asking you to help us boycott Constellation Brands because this brewing company has come to Baja California to dry us out, just as it did to the municipality of Nava, Coahuila, Mexico.

We’re asking you to help us boycott Constellation Brands because they come to Mexico to pay almost no taxes, to buy land at ridiculous prices, and to displace the Mexicali Valley farmers with threats and violence.

We’re asking you to help us boycott Constellation Brands because they come to pay low wages and take our water without any regards, and then want to pay for it as if they were a regular client due to a decree by Gob. Francisco “Kiko” Vega de Lamadrid, benefiting the U.S. company with the lowest water rate available.

We’re asking you to help us boycott Constellation Brands because of the repeated massive security deployments of every police force of the state to protect a beer company. And we remind you that these are police forces who are paid for with tax money from every Baja California citizen, thus placing the economic interests of the United States before Mexican citizens’ right to public safety.

We’re asking you to help us boycott Constellation Brands because the construction companies that are doing this job belong to politicians like Victor Hermosillo Celada and state-related companies that have benefited from illegal tax exemptions, like Grupo Cadena, supporting themselves on their political influence with the Baja California government for many years.

We’re asking you to help us boycott Constellation Brands because this is a monument to corruption around the world and to the unlawful influence of U.S. economic interests and the Mexican political and economic elite.

We’re asking you to help us boycott Constellation Brands because the corrupt company by the name of Constellation Brands is taking away our water and is spilling our blood: blood of us Mexicans who put our bodies before the local and state police of Baja California, both of them bought by foreign money.

We’re asking you to help us boycott Constellation Brands because the Latino community in the United States and abroad is being sold a marketed image of Mexican pride when the purchase of these Grupo Modelo/Constellation Brands products in the United States are indeed hurting their Mexican brothers and sisters, their families.

This is how we ask for your help to share and spread this information to all the corners of the United States and the world.

Stop dispossession, abuse, corruption, and the impunity of corrupt industries and politicians.

Not a single isolated struggle anymore.

Wholeheartedly,

Grupo-Colectivo Mexicali Resiste

Water is life, and capitalism is death.

For more information, visit the Mexicali Resiste website, Facebook page, or contact Mexicali Resiste organizers at resistenciamexicali@gmail.com.

Anniversary of Mexicali resistance march. (Courtesy of Mexicali Resiste)

Chris Burnett hosts the weekly radio show “Indymedia On Air” on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles, based on the global Indymedia network, and has been a longtime organizer in anti-authoritarian movements. You can email him at chris@indymedia.org.

Marco Vera is the founder and director of Mexicali Rose Media/Arts Center, a grass-roots communitarian organization dedicated to providing free access to artistic media for the community youth of Mexicali, Baja California.

The War on the Post Office

The U.S. banking establishment has been at war with the post office since at least 1910, when the Postal Savings Bank Act established a public savings alternative to a private banking system that had crashed the economy in the Bank Panic of 1907. The American Bankers Association was quick to respond, forming a Special Committee on Postal Savings Legislation to block any extension of the new service. According to a September 2017 article in The Journal of Social History titled “ ‘Banks of the People’: The Life and Death of the U.S. Postal Savings System,” the banking fraternity would maintain its enmity toward the government savings bank for the next 50 years.

As far back as the late 19th century, support for postal savings had united a nationwide coalition of workers and farmers who believed that government policy should prioritize their welfare over private business interests. Advocates noted that most of the civilized nations of the world maintained postal savings banks, providing depositors with a safe haven against repeated financial panics and bank failures. Today, postal banks that are wholly or majority owned by government are still run successfully, not just in developing countries, but in France, Switzerland, Israel, Korea, India, New Zealand, Japan, China and other industrialized nations.

The U.S. Postal Savings System came into its own during the banking crisis of the early 1930s, when it became the national alternative to a private banking system that people could not trust. Demands increased to expand its services to include affordable loans. Alarmed bankers called it the “Postal Savings Menace” and warned that it could result in the destruction of the entire private banking system.

Rather than expanding the Postal Savings System, the response of President Franklin Roosevelt was to buttress the private banking system with public guarantees, including FDIC deposit insurance. That put private banks in the enviable position of being able to keep their profits while their losses were covered by the government. Deposit insurance, along with a statutory cap on the interest paid on postal savings, caused postal banking to lose its edge. In 1957, under President Eisenhower, the head of the government bureau responsible for the Postal Savings System called for its abolition, arguing that “it is desirable that the government withdraw from competitive private business at every point.” Legislation to liquidate the Postal Savings System was passed in 1966. One influential right-wing commentator, celebrating an ideological victory, said: “It is even conceivable that we might transfer post offices to private hands altogether.”

Targeted for Takedown

The push for privatization of the U.S. Postal Service has continued to the present. The USPS is the nation’s second-largest civilian employer after Walmart and has been successfully self-funded without taxpayer support throughout its long history, but it is currently struggling to stay afloat. This is not, as sometimes asserted, because it has been made obsolete by the internet. In fact, the post office has gotten more business from internet orders than it has lost to electronic email.

What has pushed the USPS into insolvency is an oppressive congressional mandate that was included almost as a footnote in the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA), which requires the USPS to prefund health care for its workers 75 years into the future. No other entity, public or private, has the burden of funding multiple generations of employees yet unborn. The prefunding mandate is so blatantly unreasonable as to raise suspicions that the nation’s largest publicly owned industry has been intentionally targeted for takedown.

What has saved the post office for the time being is the large increase in its package deliveries for Amazon and other internet sellers. But as The Nation notes in a February 2018 article by Jake Bittle titled “Postal-Service Workers Are Shouldering the Burden for Amazon,” this onslaught of new business is a mixed blessing. Postal workers welcome the work, but packages are much harder to deliver than letters, and management has not stepped up its hiring to relieve the increased stress on carriers or upgraded their antiquated trucks. The USPS simply does not have the funds.

Bittle observes that for decades, Republicans have painted the USPS as a prime example of government inefficiency. But there is no reason for it to be struggling since it has successfully sustained itself with postal revenue for two centuries. What has fueled conservative arguments that it should be privatized is the manufactured crisis created by the PAEA. Unless that regulation can be repealed, the USPS may not survive without another source of funding, since Amazon is now expanding its own delivery service rather than continuing to rely on the post office. Postal banking could fill the gap, but the USPS has been hamstrung by the PAEA, which allows it to perform only postal services such as delivery of letters and packages and “other functions ancillary thereto,” including money orders, international transfers and gift cards.

Renewing the Postal Banking Push

Meanwhile, the need for postal banking is present and growing. According to the Campaign for Postal Banking, nearly 28 percent of U.S. households are underserved by traditional banks. Over 4 million workers without a bank account receive pay on a payroll card and spend $40-$50 per month on ATM fees just to access their pay. The average underserved household spends $2,412 annually—nearly 10 percent of gross income—in fees and interest for non-bank financial services. More than 30,000 post offices peppered across the country could service these needs.

The push to revive postal banking picked up after January 2014, when the USPS inspector general released a white paper making the case for postal banks and arguing that many financial services could be introduced without new congressional action. The cause was also taken up by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and polling showed that it had popular support.

In a January 2018 article in Slate, “Bank of America Just Reminded Us of Why We Need Postal Banking,” Jordan Weissman observes that Bank of America has now ended the free checking service on which lower-income depositors have long relied. He cites a Change.org petition protesting the move, which notes that Bank of America was one of the sole remaining brick-and-mortar banks offering free checking accounts to its customers. “Bank of America was known to care for both their high income and low-income customers,” said the petition. “That is what made Bank of America different.” But Weissman is more skeptical, writing:

What this news mostly shows is that we shouldn’t rely on for-profit financial institutions to provide basic, essential services to the needy. We should rely on the post office.

In spite of what some of its customers may have thought, Bank of America never cared very much about its poorer depositors. That’s because banks don’t care about people. They care about profits. And lower-middle class households who have trouble maintaining a minimum balance in a checking account are, by and large, not very profitable customers, unless they’re paying out the nose in overdraft fees.

Those modest accounts won’t be hugely profitable for the Postal Service either, but postal banking can be profitable through economies of scale and the elimination of profit-taking middlemen, as postal banks globally have demonstrated. The USPS could also act immediately to expand and enhance certain banking products and services within its existing mandate, without additional legislation. According to the Campaign for Postal Banking, these services include international and domestic money transfers, bill pay, general-purpose reloadable postal cards, check-cashing, ATMs, savings services and partnerships with government agencies to provide payments of government benefits and other services.

A more lucrative source of postal revenue was also suggested by the inspector general: The USPS could expand into retail lending for underserved sectors of the economy, replacing the usurious payday loans that can wipe out the paychecks of the underbanked. To critics who say that government cannot be trusted to run a lending business efficiently, advocates need only point to China. According to Peter Pham in a March 2018 article for Forbes titled “Who’s Winning the War for China’s Banking Sector?”:

One of the largest retail banks is the Postal Savings Bank of China. In 2016 retail banking accounted for 70 percent of this bank’s service package. Counting about 40,000 branches and servicing more than 500 million separate clients, the Postal Savings Bank’s asset quality is among the best. Moreover, it has significantly more growth potential than other Chinese retail banks.

Neither foreign banks nor private domestic retail banks can compete with this very successful Chinese banking giant, which is majority owned by the government. And that may be the real reason for the suppression of postal banking in the United States. Bankers continue to fear that postal banks could replace them with a public option—one that is safer, more efficient, more stable and more trusted than the private financial institutions that have repeatedly triggered panics and bank failures, with more predicted on the horizon.

U.S.-Russia Nuclear Arms Racing: Still Crazy After All These Years

President Vladimir Putin’s major address on March 1 to Russia’s Federal Assembly was candid about the economic and social challenges facing Russians. What attracted attention in the United States, however, was a detailed description, complete with video animations, of an array of new nuclear weapons delivery systems, including a nuclear-powered cruise missile and an underwater drone.

A month earlier, on Feb. 2, the Trump administration released its Nuclear Posture Review. The review’s assessment of prospects for U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control is grim. It proposes two new capabilities, both aimed at Russia, a low-yield warhead deployed on submarine-launched missiles, and a sea-based, nuclear-armed cruise missile. It also endorses existing plans to sustain and upgrade existing nuclear forces and infrastructure to the tune of well over a trillion dollars over the next three decades.

While not as sensational as the weapons described by Putin, the Pentagon’s proposals manifest a commitment to an increasing and long-term reliance on nuclear arms. The review also lowers the threshold for use of nuclear weapons, emphasizing the role of such weapons in responding to “non-nuclear strategic attacks,” notably cyberattacks. The recommendation for increased nuclear weapons spending comes at a time when Congress has approved a budget deal providing for military spending of $700 billion in 2018 and $716 billion in 2019, figures well above those in play just last year.

For most Americans, the emergence of a renewed nuclear arms race with Russia comes as a surprise. Since the end of the Cold War, public discussion about nuclear weapons in the U.S. has been dominated by purported threats of nuclear weapons in the hands of nonstate actors or regional adversaries. In 2010, President Barack Obama proclaimed: “Today, the threat of global nuclear war has passed, but the danger of nuclear proliferation endures. …” As recently as 2013, the Defense Department declared the most pressing nuclear dangers to be proliferation and “nuclear terrorism.”

The crisis precipitated by the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s government and Russia’s annexation of Crimea was, for the U.S. public, the first intimation that great-power nuclear arsenals still pose catastrophic dangers. For the first time since the Cold War, Russian and American nuclear-armed forces were conducting exercises and patrols in the same region, while each backed opposing factions in a civil war. As the Ukraine confrontation settled into a tense stalemate, it disappeared from the front pages along with the dangers posed by the immense nuclear arsenals still deployed by the U.S. and Russia. Donald Trump’s ascendance, featuring disturbingly misinformed campaign comments and then his profoundly alarming confrontation with North Korea, brought nuclear weapons back into mainstream public discussion—but U.S. and Russian nuclear forces still remained in the background, out of focus.

Origins of the Current Confrontation

Despite appearances, plans for new Russian nuclear weapon systems are not a response to the Nuclear Posture Review or to Trump’s casual rhetoric about U.S. nuclear might. The causes of the resurgent confrontation between the two countries that possess over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons extend back decades, to decisions made in the early 1990s. The disintegration of the Soviet Union also marked the end of the Cold War—a titanic, half-century confrontation for which no formal settlement ever was negotiated, only a series of piecemeal arms control measures and political agreements. The spirit and in some cases the letter of this partial Cold War settlement was ignored by the U.S. and its NATO allies.

Instead of engaging Russia as a partner in a new, potentially more cooperative order, they instead took every opportunity to exploit the political and economic weakness of the post-Soviet states. Despite assurances from Western governments that NATO would not be expanded to the East, the military alliance now includes not only many of Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies but also the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Even today, NATO membership for Georgia remains on the table, and an effort at some point to include Ukraine is not out of the question.

NATO’s expansion eastward proceeded in tandem with the economic subordination of former Warsaw Pact countries. It was driven as well by the interests of Western arms makers seeking new markets for their wares, and new rationales for endless high-tech weapons development in a post-Cold War world. For them, the confrontational aspect of NATO expansion was and continues to be an opportunity, not a risk.

Confident that Russia no longer presented a significant military challenge, both Republican and Democratic administrations squandered the crucial post-Cold War opportunity to eliminate the existential threat to humanity posed by huge nuclear arsenals. Beginning in the mid-1990s, when Russian economic and military power was at its nadir, the United States embarked on a long-term effort to modernize its nuclear weapons, as well as the laboratories and factories that sustain them. U.S. military spending began to climb out of its brief post-Cold War trough at the same time, with the U.S. developing and deploying an array of powerful, accurate conventional armaments and stealthy delivery systems. Many of these were battle-tested in the wars that the U.S. has been conducting continuously since 1991. These conventional systems, which could destroy some targets previously only vulnerable to nuclear weapons, were seen as a strategic threat by both China and Russia.

Meanwhile, the U.S. nuclear weapons modernization program was applying incremental upgrades to warheads and delivery systems. Perhaps most important of these was an upgrade of submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads beginning in 2009 that increased their capability to destroy hardened targets like missile silos and command centers. Long-time observers of U.S. nuclear weapons programs characterized the changes as “revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the U.S. ballistic missile arsenal.” They concluded: “This increase in capability is astonishing—boosting the overall killing power of existing U.S. ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.”

Despite its unparalleled conventional military dominance in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the U.S. government failed to seize the opportunity to pursue elimination of nuclear weapons or at least the reduction of arsenals to very low levels. Informal agreements in the early 1990s took entire categories of tactical nuclear weapons out of service, but still left large numbers of operational nuclear weapons deployed. Although negotiations continued throughout the 1990s, no new bilateral arms control treaty entered into force. Subsequently, the Russia-U.S. nuclear arms agreements completed during the Bush and Obama administrations did little to change the fundamental character of either country’s nuclear arsenal, leaving in place forces still capable of ending human civilization in short order.

In an early sign of an emerging U.S. rejection of multilateral approaches to arms control, in 1999 the Senate refused to approve ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). In 2000, Russia ratified the treaty. Since then it has periodically stressed that U.S. ratification is essential to advancing nuclear disarmament and global security. A commitment to complete negotiation of the CTBT had been central to a 1995 decision to extend indefinitely the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The current Nuclear Posture Review says that the U.S. will not ratify the CTBT, and does not rule out resumption of nuclear explosive testing.

U.S. Withdrawal From the ABM Treaty

In late 2001, the Bush administration announced that the U.S. was withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which since 1971 had placed stringent limits on U.S. and Russian missile defenses. Just a year and a half earlier, the U.S. under the Clinton administration, Russia, and other participating states had agreed to a commitment in an NPT review outcome document to “preserving and strengthening the [ABM Treaty] as a cornerstone of strategic stability and as a basis for further reductions of strategic offensive weapons.”

In his 2018 annual presidential address, Putin characterized the ABM Treaty in similar fashion, stating that Russia saw it as “the cornerstone of the international security system.” Together with U.S.-Russia agreements limiting nuclear arms, said Putin, “the ABM Treaty not only created an atmosphere of trust but also prevented either party from recklessly using nuclear weapons, which would have endangered humankind, because the limited number of ballistic missile defense systems made the potential aggressor vulnerable to a response strike.” As Putin said, and as former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov elaborated, Russia made strenuous attempts to dissuade the U.S. from ending the ABM Treaty, and subsequently sought to make new arrangements limiting missile defenses, all to no avail.

Putin portrayed the continuing development and ever wider deployment of U.S. ballistic missile defense systems in the wake of the U.S. termination of the ABM Treaty as a growing threat: “However, in light of the plans to build a global anti-ballistic missile system, which are still being carried out today, all agreements signed within the framework of New START are now gradually being devaluated, because while the number of carriers and weapons is being reduced, one of the parties, namely, the U.S., is permitting constant, uncontrolled growth of the number of anti-ballistic missiles, improving their quality, and creating new missile launching areas. If we do not do something, eventually this will result in the complete devaluation of Russia’s nuclear potential.”

U.S. officials over the years have maintained that U.S. missile defenses pose no threat to Russia’s nuclear forces due to their large number of deliverable warheads. But the Russians have some reason for concern. Together with U.S. nuclear warhead upgrades that put Russia’s missile silos and command centers at risk, unlimited development of ballistic missile defense systems, despite the technical challenges, in the long run perhaps could threaten Russia’s primarily land-based nuclear forces. Even moderately effective missile defenses that could significantly limit a depleted second strike would complicate an already dangerous strategic calculus, perhaps raising incentives on both sides to strike first and harder in a crisis.

U.S. development and deployment of missile defenses already have had deleterious effects on nuclear arms control. Following the conclusion in 2010 of negotiations on New START, which yielded modest reductions in deployed long-range, “strategic” nuclear weapons, Russia refused engagement on the ambitious follow-on program of bilateral nuclear arms reductions—to include non-strategic nuclear arms and, for the first time, verified dismantlement of warheads—proposed by the Obama administration. As Russian representatives repeatedly explained, concerns motivating its position included U.S. missile defense programs and development of U.S. conventional long-range strike capabilities. The Russian position was deplorable, but it was also predictable.

Russia’s Plans for New Nuclear Weapons Systems

It is against this background that Putin announced the development of Russia’s new nuclear weapons delivery systems. All of the new systems were framed as means to evade existing missile defenses, which are designed primarily to target ballistic missiles that follow a high-arcing, non-maneuvering flight path. These include a new, very long-range, multiple warhead missile that could take unconventional flight paths; a hypersonic, maneuvering air-launched cruise missile; and a gliding, maneuverable hypersonic delivery vehicle with a non-ballistic flight path. Similar hypersonic technologies, it should be noted, are being researched or are under development by both the U.S. and China.

Two more exotic systems that caught the attention of both specialists and the general media are nuclear-powered cruise missiles that are claimed to have unlimited range and nuclear-powered “unmanned underwater vehicles.” Putin characterized the unmanned submersible vehicles as suitable for attacking a range of targets, including “coastal fortifications and infrastructure,” and stated that the “the tests that were conducted enabled us to begin developing a new type of strategic weapon that would carry massive nuclear ordnance.” Although similar concepts had been explored by the U.S. and the Soviet Union (and in the case of a nuclear-armed torpedo designed to destroy shore installations, even briefly deployed by the Soviet Union), they struck many observers as outlandish.

Detonating a “massive nuclear ordnance” at harbor level would devastate any harbor city, and would mobilize immense amounts of radioactive debris into the atmosphere. A nuclear-powered cruise missile likely would leave a trail of radioactive contamination in its wake, and would be dangerous even to flight test (what happens, for example, at the end of the test?). Some speculated that they might be “Potemkin village” weapons, propaganda creations intended to underscore the Russian leadership’s displeasure with U.S. policies or ersatz chips to be bargained away in some future round of arms control negotiations.

Aside from arguable marginal scenarios, the use of nuclear arms of any type would violate international humanitarian law. That law requires the use of violence in war to be necessary, proportionate, and discriminate, with effects on both civilian populations and the natural environment part of the assessment. The U.S. Nuclear Posture Review asserts in passing that “the conduct of nuclear operations would adhere” to those requirements. On the contrary, above all, nuclear weapons cannot be used in compliance with the requirement of discrimination, because their massive and uncontrollable effects—blast, heat, short- and long-term radiation, and, in urban areas, firestorms—make it impossible to distinguish between military targets and civilian populations and infrastructure.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was negotiated in 2017 by 122 states, not including, however, any nuclear-armed states. Its preamble “considers” that use of nuclear weapons would violate international humanitarian law and “reaffirms” that such use “would also be abhorrent to the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience”—factors with legal as well as moral value.

As the treaty’s reference to “principles of humanity” suggests, in many circumstances, certainly in attacks on cities, use of nuclear weapons goes so far beyond the boundaries of warfare that it likely would constitute not only violations of international humanitarian law but also crimes against humanity as most recently defined in the Statute of the International Criminal Court. Use of a submersible drone carrying “massive nuclear ordnance” and of the radiation-trailing nuclear-powered cruise missile are examples—not the only ones—of this extreme deviation from the normal conduct of warfare. They likely would only be used in general nuclear war, and in this sense are true “doomsday” weapons. Even designing them is an implicit acknowledgement that once nuclear weapons are used, even in “limited” fashion, escalation may be difficult or impossible to control.

Erosion of International Law

There is another extremely important component of international law that Putin’s speech and the Nuclear Posture Review blatantly disregard. That is the obligation under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” According to a unanimous conclusion of the International Court of Justice in its 1996 Advisory Opinion, “Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons,” the obligation requires states “to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.” The obligation was reinforced by an NPT review conference “unequivocal undertaking … to accomplish the total elimination” of nuclear arsenals. It was to be implemented in part through fulfillment of another review conference commitment, diminishing the role of nuclear weapons in order to minimize the risk of their use and to facilitate disarmament.

The Russian and U.S. plans for new nuclear weapons systems—and the lack of negotiations about them—plainly violate the obligation regarding “cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date,” as well as the commitment to reduce the role of nuclear weapons. The U.S. expansion of the circumstances in which nuclear weapons might be used additionally violates that commitment.

Moreover, the clear intent of both Russia and the U.S. to maintain large, diversified nuclear forces for decades to come betrays a lack of good faith in relation to the obligation to negotiate the elimination of nuclear arsenals. In the case of the United States, the Nuclear Posture Review fails to identify any concrete steps to pursue on nuclear arms control and disarmament. As to the U.S.-Russian relationship, emphasis is placed upon a claimed Russian violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. The review does not even endorse extension of New START for five years when it expires in 2021, a step which Russia has supported. Additionally, in his speech Putin said: “Let us sit down at the negotiating table and devise together a new and relevant system of international security and sustainable development for human civilization.” Rhetoric perhaps, but why not test it?

Whether or not Russia’s program to develop nuclear-powered cruise missiles and underwater drones delivering massive nuclear warheads are “real,” even the fact that one of the world’s two leading nuclear-armed states is willing to threaten to build them is a worrisome development. It is a definitive marker that what opportunity there was in the post-Cold War period to eliminate humankind’s self-created mechanism of annihilation on a civilization scale was missed. We are in a new, far more dangerous age, and must discover anew the urgency of nuclear disarmament, and again take the first tentative steps that might lead us there.

Both Russia’s program and the Nuclear Posture Review display a kind of contempt for treaty obligations and for international law generally, underscoring an observation by the International Court of Justice in its 1996 opinion that today seems prophetic: “In the long run, international law, and with it the stability of the international order which it is intended to govern, are bound to suffer from the continuing difference of views with regard to the legal status of weapons as deadly as nuclear weapons.”

Twenty-two years later, the corrosive effect on international law and the stability of the international order of nuclear weapons and differing views regarding who is entitled to have them is evident. Nuclear weapons and the threat of their proliferation has been used as a stalking horse for the geopolitical agendas of the world’s most powerful states. It has sparked an unlawful war based on questionable intelligence. In the confrontation between the United States and North Korea, it has brought us again to the brink of war between nuclear-armed countries.

As the court concluded: “It is consequently important to put an end to this state of affairs: the long-promised complete nuclear disarmament appears to be the most appropriate means of achieving that result.”

The interests of the world’s populations and their governments are as far apart as they have been in a long time. This reflects the growing disparities in wealth and power between those who rule and the rest of us, and the erosion of what democracy had been achieved. Extreme nationalist elements are ascendant worldwide, their common characteristic being a politics that redirects the emotions evoked by those developments—fear, resentment, and a pervasive sense of loss—against vulnerable minorities at home and enemies abroad. Authoritarian nationalists are in power in Russia and in several ex-Warsaw Pact NATO states, and also hold the presidency and constitute a substantial, perhaps dominant, portion of the majority party in the Congress of the United States.

The revanchist intentions of Russia’s government and ruling oligarchs have been exaggerated in the U.S. press due to the peculiar entanglement of U.S.-Russia relations with domestic partisan politics in this moment. This does not mean, however, that no such aims exist. Neither the elites nor the general populations of Eastern Europe see renewed Russian dominance as an attractive option, and authoritarian nationalist governments in front-line NATO states have their own reasons for whipping up fear of a resurgent Russia. Beyond Europe, there are other regions where encounters between U.S. and Russian policies and deployed forces could go awry, from Syria to the border most forget Russia shares with North Korea. With a U.S. government that appears adrift at the top but that still possesses a formidable and well-organized military, this is a combustible mix, with ample opportunities for each side to misjudge the intentions, and the fears, of the other.

The Nuclear Dilemma

The Korea crisis, and the recent hopeful signs regarding its resolution, should be taken as both an urgent warning and as an opportunity to rethink the meaning of nuclear weapons. We will never know how close to disaster we have come in recent months, and still may come. As that danger grew, discussion of the immeasurable horrors of a full-scale warfare between two large modern militaries in densely populated Northeast Asia—even if nuclear weapons were not used—grew more concrete. A full-scale war between Russia and the United States would dwarf our worst imaginings about war between the U.S. and its regional allies and North Korea.

In thinking about the deeper nature of our nuclear dilemma, it is significant that South Korea has taken the lead in seeking—and, as it looks now, achieving—a diplomatic breakthrough with its North Korean counterparts that could end the immediate crisis, and that might lead eventually to a more lasting peace on the peninsula. As was the case for Europeans during the Cold War, South Koreans found themselves trapped between nuclear-armed adversaries, one an ally. And as was the case of NATO countries hosting U.S. nuclear missiles, they faced the possibility that a nuclear war could be fought on their soil without their own government’s consent. This raises a question seldom asked by inhabitants of nuclear-armed countries: Whose nuclear weapons are they, really? Whose interests do they protect?

This question then leads naturally to others. As E.P. Thompson, a founder of European Nuclear Disarmament, asked in 1981 in “A Letter to America,” “Is nuclear war preferable to being overcome by the enemy? Are the deaths of fifteen or twenty million and the utter destruction of the country preferable to an occupation which might offer the possibility, after some years, of resurgence and recuperation?” and finally, “Are we ourselves prepared to endorse the use of such weapons against the innocent, the children and the aged, of an ‘enemy’?” The people of every nuclear-armed country should be asking these questions today.

There are other lessons we should have learned by now. No system or country is immune to corruption, or collapse. No country can guarantee that a class of leaders will not rise to power who are shortsighted and self-serving, and who place their own welfare above that of their people, or of humanity itself. No system or “way of life” is so perfect that its preservation merits risking humanity’s future, and thinking it to be so is a form of madness. Recent events may have sharpened our focus on these realities, but they have been true all along. Nuclear weapons are unsafe in any hands.

South Korean Report on Summit Discredits U.S. Elites’ Assumption

Media coverage of and political reactions to Donald Trump’s announcement of a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have been based on the assumption that it cannot succeed, because Kim will reject the idea of denuclearization. But the full report by South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s national security adviser on the meeting with Kim last week—covered by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency but not covered in U.S. news media—makes it clear that Kim will present Trump with a plan for complete denuclearization linked to the normalization of relations between the U.S. and North Korea, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

The report by Chung Eui-yong on a dinner hosted by Kim Jong Un for the 10-member South Korean delegation on March 5 said the North Korea leader had affirmed his “commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” and that he “would have no reason to possess nuclear weapons should the safety of [his] regime be guaranteed and military threats against North Korea removed.” Chung reported that Kim expressed his willingness to discuss “ways to realize the denuclearization of the peninsula and normalize [U.S.-DPRK] bilateral ties.”

But in what may be the most important finding in the report, Chung added, “What we must especially pay attention to is the fact that [Kim Jong Un] has clearly stated that the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was an instruction of his predecessor and that there has been no change to such an instruction.”

The South Korean national security adviser’s report directly contradicts the firmly held belief among U.S. national security and political elites that Kim Jong Un would never give up the DPRK’s nuclear weapons. As Colin Kahl, former Pentagon official and adviser to Barack Obama, commented in response to the summit announcement, “It Is simply inconceivable that he will accept full denuclearization at this point.”

But Kahl’s dismissal of the possibility of any agreement at the summit assumes, without saying so, a continuation of the steadfast refusal of the Bush and Obama administrations for the United States to offer any incentive to North Korean in the form of a new peace treaty with North Korea and full normalization of diplomatic and economic relations.

That pattern of U.S. policy is one side of the still-unknown story of the politics of the North Korean issue. The other side of the story is North Korea’s effort to use its nuclear and missile assets as bargaining chips get the United States to strike a deal that would change the U.S. stance of enmity toward North Korea.

The Cold War background of the issue is that DPRK had demanded that the United States military command in South Korea stop its annual “Team Spirit” exercises with South Korean forces, which began in 1976 and involved nuclear-capable U.S. planes. The Americans knew those exercises scared the North Koreans because, as Leon V. Sigal recalled in his authoritative account of U.S.-North Korean nuclear negotiations, “Disarming Strangers,” the United States had made explicit nuclear threats against the DPRK on seven occasions.

But the end of the Cold War in 1991 presented an even more threatening situation. When the Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia disengaged from former Soviet bloc allies, North Korea suddenly suffered the equivalent of a 40 percent reduction in imports, and its industrial base imploded. The rigidly state-controlled economy was thrown into chaos.

Meanwhile, the unfavorable economic and military balance with South Korea had continued to grow in the final two decades of the Cold War. Whereas per capita GDP for the two Koreas had been virtually identical up to the mid-1970s, they had diverged dramatically by 1990, when per capita GDP in the South, which had more than twice the population of the North, was already four times greater than that of North Korea.

Furthermore, the North had been unable to invest in replacing its military technology, so had to make do with antiquated tanks, air defense systems and aircraft from the 1950s and 1960s, while South Korea had continued to receive the latest technology from the United States. And after serious economic crisis gripped the North, a large proportion of its ground forces had to be diverted to economic production tasks, including harvesting, construction and mining. Those realities made it increasingly clear to military analysts that the Korean People’s Army (KPA) no longer even had the capability to carry out an operation in South Korea for longer than a few weeks.

Finally, the Kim regime now found itself in the uncomfortable situation of being far more dependent on China for economic assistance than ever before. Faced with this powerful combination of threatening developments, DPRK founder Kim Il-Sung embarked immediately after the Cold War on a radically new security strategy: to use North Korea’s incipient nuclear and missile programs to draw the United States into a broader agreement that would establish a normal diplomatic relationship. The first move in that long strategic game came in January 1992, when the ruling Korean Workers’ Party Secretary Kim Young Sun revealed a startling new DPRK posture toward the United States in meetings with Undersecretary of State Arnold Kanter in New York. Sun told Kanter that Kim Il Sung wanted to establish cooperative relations with Washington and was prepared to accept a long-term U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula as a hedge against Chinese or Russian influence.

In 1994, the DPRK negotiated the agreed framework with the Clinton administration, committing to the dismantling of its plutonium reactor in return for much more proliferation-proof light water reactors and a U.S commitment to normalize political and economic relations with Pyongyang. But neither of those commitments was to be achieved immediately, and the U.S. news media and Congress were for the most part hostile to the central trade-off in the agreement. When the North Korea’s social and economic situation deteriorated even more seriously in the second half of the 1990s after being hit by serious floods and famine, the CIA issued reports suggesting the imminent collapse of the regime. So Clinton administration officials believed there was no need to move toward normalization of relations.

After Kim Il Sung’s death in mid-1994, however, his son Kim Jong Il pushed his father’s strategy even more energetically. He carried out the DPRK’s first long-range missile test in 1998 to jolt the Clinton administration into diplomatic action on a follow-up agreement to the agreed framework. But then he made a series of dramatic diplomatic moves, beginning with the negotiation of a moratorium on long-range missile tests with the U.S. in 1998 and continuing with the dispatch of a personal envoy, Marshall Jo Myong Rok, to Washington to meet Bill Clinton himself in October 2000.

Jo arrived with a commitment to give up the DPRK’s ICBM program as well as its nuclear weapons as part of a large deal with the United States. At the White House meeting, Jo handed Clinton a letter from Kim inviting him to visit Pyongyang. Then he told Clinton, “If you come to Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il will guarantee that he will satisfy all your security concerns.”

Clinton quickly dispatched a delegation led by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang, where Kim Jong Il provided detailed answers to U.S. questions on a missile accord. He also informed Albright that the DPRK had changed its view about the U.S. military presence in South Korea, and that it now believed that the U.S. played a “stabilizing role” on the peninsula. He suggested that some within the North Korean army had expressed opposition to that view, and that would be resolved only if the U.S. and DPRK normalized their relations.

Although Clinton was prepared to go to Pyongyang to sign an agreement, he didn’t go, and the Bush administration then reversed the initial moves toward a diplomatic settlement with North Korea initiated by Clinton. Over the next decade, North Korea began to amass a nuclear arsenal and made major strides in developing its ICBM.

But when former President Clinton visited Pyongyang in 2009 to obtain the release of two American journalists, Kim Jong Il underlined the point that things could have been different. A memo on the meeting between Clinton and Kim that was among the Clinton emails published by WikiLeaks in October 2016, quoted Kim Jong Il as saying, “[I]f the Democrats had won in 2000 the situation in bilateral relations would not have reached such a point. Rather, all agreements would have been implemented, the DPRK would have had light water reactors, and the United States would have had a new friend in Northeast Asia in a complex world.”

U.S. political and security elites have long accepted the idea that Washington has only two choices: either acceptance of a nuclear-armed North Korea or “maximum pressure” at the risk of war. But as the South Koreans have now been able to confirm, that view is dead wrong. Kim Jong Un is still committed to the original vision of a deal with the Americans for denuclearization that his father had tried to realize before this death in 2011. The real question is whether the Trump administration and the broader U.S. political system are capable of taking advantage of that opportunity.

How to Build a Progressive Movement in a Polarized Country

Whether it’s assault rifles, racial justice, immigration or fossil fuels, the country is rocked by conflicting narratives and rising passions. In a recent national poll, 70 percent of Americans say the political divide is at least as big as during the Vietnam War.

In December, I completed a year-and-a-half book tour in over 80 towns and cities in United States. From Arizona to Alaska to North Dakota to Georgia, I heard a worry in common from people active in struggles for justice. They talk about the political polarization they see around them.

Many assume that polarization is a barrier to making change. They observe more shouting and less listening, more drama and less reflection, and an escalation at the extremes. They note that mass media journalists have less time to cover the range of activist initiatives, which are therefore drowned out by the shouting. From coast to coast activists asked me: Does this condition leave us stuck?

My answer included both good news and bad news. Most people wanted the latter first.

The bad news about divisiveness

We are not dealing with a passing fad or temporary trend. The research of a trio of political scientists found that political polarization follows the curve of economic inequality. For decades after World War II, white male inequality in the United States was relatively low and governance was largely bi-partisan in spirit. But, as income inequality began to polarize, so too did our politics. Not surprisingly, perhaps, by 2015, income inequality was greater than at any other point in U.S. history, according to economists Jeffrey Gale Williamson and Peter Lindert.

The tax bill passed in January will add even more fuel to the fire.

Progressives need to breathe deeply and make our peace with the reality. Division expresses an economic arrangement, and it’s not something we can fix through urging more civil discourse. Even though we’ll want to use our conflict resolution skills in order to cope, we can also expect more drama at the extreme ends of our polarizations, and more ugliness and violence.

Even some of the people who carry progressive values like anti-oppression can be expected to become harsher and more dogmatic, as if inspired by the witch-hunting Massachusetts Puritans of yore. The dynamic of polarization is contagious—it doesn’t confine itself to tweeting public officials, radio talk shows and political junkies. I believe there’s little point in blaming our progressive movement comrades who pick up the infection around us. Instead, it helps to remember that this trend is much, much bigger than we are. We might as well forgive ourselves and each other, and focus on the positive openings that are given to us in this period.

The good news about polarization

In the 1920s and ’30s, the United States and European countries polarized dramatically. In Italy and Germany, fascists were marching and communists were organizing for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even on Europe’s northwest periphery, Sweden and Norway faced the most extreme polarization they’d ever had, complete with Nazis marching in the streets.

The outcomes of polarization for those four countries were, however, very different. In Germany and Italy, Hitler and Mussolini came to power. In Sweden and Norway democratic socialist movements pushed their economic elites off their pedestals and invented the egalitarian Nordic economic model. Saying goodbye to their old class-ridden days of poverty, Swedes and Norwegians generated historically new levels of equality, individual freedom and shared abundance.

The contrasting outcomes could not be more dramatic. All four countries experienced extreme polarization in the 1920s and ’30s. Two fell into disaster, and two climbed out of poverty and oppression to the top tier of progressive national achievement. From these examples we can see that polarization may guarantee a big political fight, but it doesn’t determine whether the outcome will be dictatorship or democracy.

U.S. history also shows that polarization does not determine outcomes. In the United States in 1920s and ’30s, the Ku Klux Klan was riding high as well as a growing Nazi movement. On the radical left, movements grew as well. The outcome was not fascist dictatorship, but instead Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” Out of that polarization came the most progressive decade of the first half of the 20th century in the United States.

Fast forward to the divided 1960s, which boiled over into the ’70s, when environmentalists, feminists and LGBT people joined the ferment initiated by the civil rights and other movements of the ’60s. Once again the Nazis grew along with the Ku Klux Klan, while on the left we remember the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Nevertheless, in the midst of strong polarization, the United States made its greatest progress in the second half of the 20th century.

Letting the heat work for progress

While book touring in England, I stayed with a metal sculptor who showed me his blacksmith’s hearth, essential for creating the beautiful designs that filled his studio. I saw a useful metaphor: Progressives need polarization like blacksmiths and artists need heat to make cold hard metal flexible enough to change its shape.

Heat creates volatility, in metal and in society. It breaks up crystalized patterns. It makes possible something new to replace the rigid oppressive structures that express themselves through sexual and racist violence, endemic poverty alongside extreme wealth, environmental destruction, political corruption and militarism.

Since we can expect more polarization ahead, how can we use its heat and volatility to create something as serviceable as a horseshoe, or even a sculpture of beauty? We can give ourselves a head start by learning what worked in previous periods of polarization and strengthening them for our context.

Because planning is an empowering practice, I’ve organized what’s worked for others into a kind of roadmap, consisting of five stages. There is some reason to the sequence, but not enough to be rigid about it.

A roadmap to transformation

1. Tell people you meet that we are creating a plan. Acquaintances may believe you are simply “a protester” or like to hang out with your activist friends—they may not know it’s even possible to create a plan to work together to get ourselves out of this mess. According to the American Psychological Association, 63 percent of Americans say that concerns about the nation’s future are a major source of stress in their lives.

Planning is on the side of positivity, capability and empowerment. Tell people how those are showing up in your life by participating in the plan.

2. Build the infrastructure of the new society. Governmental dysfunction in the United States is becoming ever more obvious. Tourists come back with tales of wonder from Scandinavia, while people stateside see inept responses to disasters like lead poisoning and Hurricane Katrina. The Pew Research Center found that only 19 percent of Americans trust the government to do the right thing.

A century ago the Nordics also had low trust. Organizers supported them to work together through cultural groups and co-ops, empowering themselves to meet each others’ needs. Americans may be ready for this: The same Pew study found that 55 percent believe ordinary Americans would “do a better job of solving problems” than elected officials.

Make the most of this opportunity to reach “beyond the choir,” building groups and institutions with people who didn’t previously know each other. Increasing your range of connection may be easier if people know you are thoughtful about everyone.

3. Build movements through bold nonviolent direct action campaigns. The teenagers in Florida instinctively knew what most adults in the gun control lobby refused to accept—it takes bold direct action to open doors. To keep the doors open, the teens will learn, it takes direct action campaigning. In the process they may turn the lobby into a movement.

Most Swedes and Norwegians came to realize that the economic elite ruled their countries and that their parliaments were pretend democracies. Loving efficiency, they preferred to skip the middlemen and go straight to the top, by focusing their campaigns on the owners rather than the politicians. Making this shift in the United States will help each movement to become sharper and clearer, more visionary, and—by refusing to be co-opted by a political party—more ready to align with others to build a movement of movements. They may also, as did the Nordics, stay close to the alternative infrastructure being built on a local level.

4. Gain unity among movements around a broad vision of what will replace dysfunctional and unjust institutions. Many Nordics understood that politicians’ promises of small reform steps were inadequate, even insulting—something incrementalist Hillary Clinton discovered in the 2016 U.S. election. The large majority of Americans who tell pollsters that the country is “headed in the wrong direction” increasingly match their words with their deeds and stay away from the polls.

The Nordic democratic socialists succeeded because their vision was radical, showed deep respect for the people and made sense at the same time. One example was promising universal services instead of programs for the poor.

Few people want to go with you if they don’t know where you’re going. Nordic movements grew partly because organizers explained the destination. By sharing the vision, organizers showed they respected people more than manipulative politicians. Fortunately, in the United States, the Movement for Black Lives has already offered a vision, and more are emerging. When there is vision, stronger movements may grow out of nonviolent direct action campaigns.

5. Build a movement of movements powerful enough to dislodge the 1 percent from dominance. That’s what the Swedes and Norwegians did. Movements worked together to raise the level of nonviolent struggle to that point, even though their opponents tried to repress them with violence. Movements cooperated because they saw that their individual goals were opposed by the same force—the economic elite.

This is just as true in the United States, where the aspirations of both white and black workers, women and sexual minorities, immigrants and activists for climate justice, students and gun reform activists are all frustrated by the 1 percent. Cooperation for deep struggle becomes more likely when we create a vision in common that speaks to diverse interests.

So, where are we with this roadmap? The good news is that people are hard at work on the second and third steps already. As we gain confidence, we’ll tackle the fourth as well, which will increase our credibility and invite the gain in numbers that makes the fifth possible.

What about polarization?

I lived in Norway 25 years after the struggle that resulted in a power shift. I observed a remarkably peaceful society with a high degree of consensus. The whole political spectrum had shifted significantly to the left—the politics of the Norwegian right-wing was to the left of America’s Democratic Party. The overall direction of the economy was decided by the people as a whole. They enjoyed lively debates about the issues of the day, confident that the majority’s decisions would be carried out without corruption. And they hoped some day, without spending much money on it, to win a lot of Olympic medals.

George Lakey co-founded Earth Quaker Action Group which just won its five-year campaign to force a major U.S. bank to give up financing mountaintop removal coal mining. Along with college teaching, he has led 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s 2004 book “Globalize Liberation”. His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and most recent was with Earth Quaker Action Team while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.

Syria Says Over 40,000 Have Left Ghouta

BEIRUT — The Latest on developments in Syria’s seven-year civil war (all times local):

6:05 p.m.

Syria’s U.N. ambassador says more than 40,000 civilians left the rebel-held Damascus suburbs of eastern Ghouta in a single day through a new security corridor opened by the government in the city of Hamouria.

Bashar Ja’afari told the U.N. Security Council on Friday that following the government takeover of Hamouria from “terrorists” on Thursday the government was assisting the evacuation of civilians “who were taken as human shields by terrorist groups.”

He said the government and Syrian Red Crescent were coordinating to facilitate the safe transport of people from eastern Ghouta “to temporary shelters that are equipped with all the necessary equipment.”

Ja’afari said the government will allow convoys with medical supplies and other aid into the area “if the security circumstances allow.”

He accused the U.N. and other governments of doing nothing to alleviate the suffering “of tens of thousands of people who have tried to flee terrorism.”

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5:45 p.m.

A Syrian monitoring group says more than 100 civilians have been killed in government, Russian, and Turkish airstrikes and shelling on towns inside Syria.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says government and Russian forces have been bombing rebel-towns areas outside Damascus throughout Friday, killing 64 people in Kafr Batna and another 12 in Saqba.

The Syrian Civil Defense search-and-rescue group reported 61 fatalities in Kafr Batna.

The Syrian government is determined to seize Kafr Batna, Saqba, and the rest of the besieged eastern Ghouta region from rebels, after 7 years of war.

The Observatory says Turkish shelling and airstrikes have killed another 27 people in the Kurdish-held town of Afrin, in north Syria.

Turkey is waging a war on a Syrian Kurdish militia that controls Afrin and the surrounding region.

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5:30 p.m.

Syrian state media is reporting that government forces have captured a town on the southern edge of rebel-held eastern suburbs of the capital Damascus.

The government-controlled Syrian Central Military Media said troops captured Jisreen on Friday after battles with opposition gunmen.

The capture of Jisreen brings government forces closer to the rebel strongholds of Saqba and Kafr Batna where dozens of people were killed in airstrikes earlier Friday.

Syrian government forces have captured more than half of the area known as eastern Ghouta and have cut it into three parts over the past three weeks.

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3:15 p.m.

A U.N. spokeswoman says the world body is receiving “deeply alarming” reports from the Kurdish enclave of Afrin about civilian deaths and injuries due to airstrikes and ground-based strikes.

Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, added in a statement Friday it is also getting reports that civilians are being prevented from leaving the area by Kurdish fighters.

Shamdasani said hundreds of thousands of civilians are at risk, including those recently displaced from other areas captured by Turkish-led forces.

She said that the humanitarian situation is reportedly worsening, “with tremendous pressure on Afrin hospital – the only medical facility equipped for major operations.”

She said parties to the conflict should must allow civilians to leave and take precautions to avoid loss of civilian lives.

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1:50 p.m.

A Syrian war monitoring group says Russian and Syrian government airstrikes on a town in the besieged eastern Ghouta enclave, just outside of Damascus, have killed 46 people.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the town of Kafr Batna was hit with cluster munitions, napalm-like incendiary weapons, and conventional explosives on Friday.

Government forces are advancing on towns inside the rebel-held enclave, prompting a massive exodus of civilians.

A medical charity supporting hospitals in the Ghouta region, the Syrian American Medical Society, says doctors in Kafr Batna are treating patients for severe burn wounds. The charity says it recorded 40 casualties on Friday.

The Syrian Civil Defense search-and-rescue group says it has identified 42 bodies so far. It says the streets are strewn with body parts and that it expects the death toll to rise.

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12:30 p.m.

Syrian Kurdish forces say that Turkish shelling and airstrikes in the northern Syrian town of Afrin have killed at least 20 civilians.

Redur Khalil, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces, also says 30 people have been wounded as Turkish forces shelled the Ashrafieh neighborhood of the town on Friday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitors put the death toll at 18. It released a video showing four lifeless bodies lying on the streets of Afrin.

Turkish forces have nearly encircled Afrin in an effort to drive out Kurdish fighters from the town and the surrounding region. Residents say they are facing bread, water, and electricity shortages.

Hundreds of civilians were seen leaving the town to neighboring villages on Thursday looking for relief. Tens of thousands of civilians are believed to still be inside.

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11:40 a.m.

Turkey’s military says it’s dropped flyers in Arabic and Kurdish on the northern Syrian town of Afrin, asking residents to stay away from “terrorist positions” and urging Syrian Kurdish militiamen to surrender.

The fliers were dropped on Friday as Turkish troops and allied Syrian opposition fighters press Ankara’s seven-week offensive to drive Syrian Kurdish forces from the enclave of Afrin and its main town of the same name.

The leaflets say Afrin civilians wanting to leave would be “under the guarantee” of the Turkish military. They also call on locals not to allow themselves to be used as “human shields.”

The leaflets urge Syrian Kurdish fighters to “trust the hand we extend to you.” They say: “Come surrender! A calm and peaceful future awaits you in Afrin.”

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10:05 a.m.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says the Russian military and the Syrian government are extending a cease-fire in Damascus’ rebel-held suburbs as long as it takes to allow all the civilians to leave the area.

Lavrov spoke in Kazakhstan on Friday, saying the cease-fire will be extended “until all (civilians) leave” the enclave known as eastern Ghouta.

The Russian Defense Ministry said that 2,000 people had exited the rebel-held suburbs by early morning.

Thursday saw the largest single-day exodus of civilians in Syria’s civil war. Tens of thousands emerged from Hamouria and other opposition towns to escape the onslaught.

The civilians were fleeing as Syrian government troops, backed by Russian aircraft, pushed further into eastern Ghouta.

Elsewhere, Turkish forces are pushing their way into the northern Kurdish-held town of Afrin.

Jeff Flake Eyes 2020 Primary Challenge to Stop Trump

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Jeff Flake has a direct message for the Republicans of New Hampshire: Someone needs to stop Donald Trump. And Flake, a Republican senator from Arizona, may stand up against the Republican president in 2020 — either as a Republican or an independent — if no one else does.

“It has not been in my plans to run for president, but I have not ruled it out,” the 55-year-old Flake said Friday in his first solo political appearance in New Hampshire. The state is expected to host the nation’s first presidential primary election in less than two years.

“I hope that that someone does run in the Republican primary, somebody to challenge the president,” Flake said. “I think that the Republicans want to be reminded what it means to be a traditional, decent Republican.”

After attacking Trump in a speech that spanned nearly 20 minutes, Flake earned a standing ovation from the packed room that gathered for the esteemed “Politics and Eggs” speaker series at Saint Anselm College.

Flake is among a very small group of Republican elected officials speaking out against the Trump presidency with increasing alarm.

He has already written a book that slams Trump. He condemned Trump on the Senate floor and charged in a speech on Thursday at the National Press Club that his party “might not deserve to lead” because of its blind loyalty to Trump. By visiting New Hampshire, Flake is now declaring the possibility of another tactic: a 2020 primary challenge.

On the ground in the Granite State, a full year before presidential candidates typically begin courting local voters, there is already an expectation among top Republicans that Trump will face a challenge from within his own party in the next presidential contest. Yet few think Trump could be defeated, even under the worst circumstances.

Steve Duprey, who represents New Hampshire at the Republican National Committee, said: “It’s virtually impossible to beat an incumbent for the nomination. But that doesn’t prevent people from trying with various degrees of seriousness.”

“I think there will be some primary,” he added. “Whether it’s a serious contender or a protest candidate that the president’s team would have to take seriously, it’s too early to tell.”

Despite Flake’s fiery pronouncements, he would start out as an underwhelming presidential contender on paper.

He is not well-known, he has little money of his own and a disdain for fundraising, and because he is retiring from the Senate at year’s end, he has no political organization to help fuel his ambitions.

Flake has powerful friends who could help, however, including the outspoken anti-Trump billionaire Mark Cuban.

“I’m a Jeff Flake fan,” Cuban told The Associated Press.

The billionaire, who is considering a presidential bid of his own, acknowledged that he doesn’t know much about Flake’s political ambitions. “But as a citizen of this great country, the more candidates for the office of president the better,” Cuban said.

In an interview with the AP on the eve of his Friday speech, Flake acknowledged Trump was probably too popular among the Republican base to lose a primary in the current political climate.

“Not today, but two years from now, possibly. Things can unravel pretty fast,” Flake said, suggesting that a disastrous midterm election season for the GOP could realign voter loyalty. “As soon as he’s viewed as one who loses majorities in the House and the Senate, and there’s no chance that someone in the 30s can win re-election, people might move on.”

And if Trump’s standing with the base doesn’t fade, Flake would consider a presidential bid as an independent. As Ralph Nader and Ross Perot have shown, a third-party candidate can profoundly affect a presidential contest, even by drawing only a fraction of the general election vote in a few key states.

“I’m not ruling that out, either,” Flake said. “There are going to be a lot of other people in the party looking for something else.”

He continued, “If you end up with Trump on one side, (Bernie) Sanders or (Elizabeth) Warren on the other, there’s a huge swath of voters in the middle that make an independent run by somebody a lot more realistic.”

Trump has a special relationship with New Hampshire.

The state gave him his first victory of the 2016 Republican primary season. His political future was very much in question when he dominated the competition with 35 percent of the vote. Second-place finisher, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is also weighing a 2020 run, earned just 15 percent.

On Monday, just three days after Flake’s visit, Trump is expected to make his first appearance in the state since winning the 2016 election. The visit was arranged after Flake’s speech was scheduled. And Vice President Mike Pence is set to appear in New Hampshire later in the week as well.

Republican National Committee spokeswoman Cassie Smedile dismissed Flake’s potential challenge.

“President Trump won because of his vision to make America great again, and we’re confident that as he continues to deliver on the promises he made, voters will re-elect him in 2020,” Smedile said.

Losing Not Just One World, but Two

“Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown”

“Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown from Crown”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

A book by Lauren Hilgers

Reviewed by Elaine Margolin

Upon first glance at Lauren Hilgers’ life as a poet from Austin, Texas, who fled to New York as a young woman, she seems an unlikely candidate to immerse herself in the troubled lives of undocumented Chinese immigrants in Flushing, New York. But Hilgers, best known for her poetry, has written “Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown,” a wondrously compelling work, imbued with an innate empathy and curiosity. She left for Shanghai in 2006 where she worked as a journalist for six years, writing stories about the political scandals in Beijing. She eventually made it to Wukan province, where enraged rural villagers were protesting local corruption and land grabs that had made their already difficult lives more desperate.

The protesters in the streets were catching the attention of the world press, and carrying placards that pleaded for democratic reform. Zhuang Liehong, the protagonist of “Patriot Number One,” was one of the protesters. He realized what was happening in 2008, when he saw an online advertisement offering Wukan’s real estate for sale. The advertisement claimed, falsely, that each of Wukan’s villagers had received the equivalent of 10,000 U.S. dollars in exchange for their land. Further research uncovered that the village chief had been selling off land since the 1990s. He knew that no one in Wukan had received a cent, and opened an anonymous instant messaging account on QQ to inform his fellow villagers of his findings. He dubbed himself “Patriot Number One.” The response was overwhelming. Soon Zhuang and others had organized and were taking to the streets—something intolerable to the Chinese government. Hilgers reveals the ruthless measures taken by the Communist government to squash dissent. Local governments or hired thugs were often allowed to silence any opposition before it became an embarrassment. Many of Zhuang’s close friends and fellow protesters were arrested, beaten and imprisoned for several years. One died under mysterious circumstances in prison. Zhuang was arrested for 21 days but mysteriously released, perhaps by mistake. But he knew his fate was in serious jeopardy. He had to escape, along with his wife Little Yan, and their infant son. He spent days inside his tea shop with the windows shuttered, thinking of how to get out.

Around this time, Zhuang met Hilgers while she was reporting in Wukan. He sought her counsel in his shop. She didn’t believe he would ever be allowed to leave China. But she was moved by his plight.

When he somehow managed to secure permission to go to America on a tour group, he knew he would break away and escape into the underground world of undocumented immigrants in New York. He convinced his wife that she should join him, persuading her to leave their child with her parents until they could find a way to bring him over too. She reluctantly agreed. In New York, he called Hilgers and asked for her help. She agreed.

Zhuang’s plan, once he reached New York, was to apply for political asylum, and find sanctuary in Flushing, where over 200,000 Chinese residents lived, believing it was “the best landing spot for the truly rootless.” He was already nourishing glorious fantasies of reinventing himself in America, where he believed opportunities he had not yet dreamed about would be open to him. Hilgers describes his initial optimism: “He felt sure, when he considered the plan, that the Americans would be sympathetic to his situation. He was a lover of democracy trapped in a corrupt corner of Guangdong Province.” He knew from the moment he planned his escape that America would have to be his destination: “It had an allure no other country could match. It was a country of justice and freedom, a place with values that paralleled his own. He had to whisper it when he said it: America. He had heard its asylum policies there were favorable, and he understood it to be a wealthy country that took care of its citizens. Work would be easy to find there. People would be friendly. Some might even know his name. He imagined a warm welcome from Western democracy advocates. He thought of returning to Wukan later, a success. He envisioned himself on a boat passing Liberty Island, a little windblown and visibly, palpably free.”

But the reality of America was heartbreaking. He was a 30-year-old Chinese man who had not even graduated junior high school. He knew almost no English. Even with Hilgers’ engaged help in finding work, housing and filing the paperwork needed to secure his green card and political asylum as well as apply for his son’s release from China, it was quickly evident to Zhuang that the fantasy he envisioned was just that. He struggled to hold on to jobs as a Chinese deliveryman, a taxi driver, and a driving teacher, and floundered at finding suitable housing for him and his wife. He moved frequently, irritated to be living in a dingy single room with loud neighbors and a shared kitchen and bathroom. He remained obsessed with Wukan, spending hours online each day searching for news. His marriage became increasingly strained. His wife found steady work in a nail salon but came home each day nauseated from the fumes. The couple stopped talking to each other.

Zhuang eventually connected with Chinese pro-democracy activists in Flushing, and befriended another dissident named Tang Yuanjun. Tang ran an office that served as a meeting place to make plans for future, largely futile, dissent. Hilgers explains Zhuang’s mindset and the attitude of his peers:

If engaging with life in Flushing was difficult for the majority of Chinese immigrants, the pro-democracy activists who made up Tang’s supporters and friends struggled more than most. Some had left after watching fellow students and innocent bystanders die in Tiananmen Square or after suffering mistreatment in prison. Others had escaped, fearing for their lives, and had been granted asylum. The min yun, a shorthand term used frequently in Flushing for China’s pro-democracy activists [from the words minzhu, meaning ‘democracy,’ and yundong, meaning ‘campaign’], taken as a whole, were a stubborn group of people: Tiananmen Square activists, China Democracy Party members, human rights defenders, and grassroots organizers. They might have had comfortable lives had they ignored government corruption or stopped agitating for democracy. The simple fact of being in the United States did not often shake their resolve; their interests and obsessions were firmly planted in China. Their bodies were in New York, but their thoughts were elsewhere.

Zhuang’s aching sense of dislocation comes from losing not just one world, but two. His wife, Little Yan, had a different temperament. She missed China, her family, and her son greatly. Hilgers believes, “If Little Yan shared Zhuang’s sense of predestination—that she would live a different life, somewhere far away from home—she felt none of his pride of origin. She didn’t grow up wanting to impress anyone. She felt no drive to rebel against the realities of her life: rebellion wouldn’t get her far anyway. There had never been any question that her mother and father would make all her most important decisions.” Little Yan found her husband’s behavior in America infuriating. He seemed to her just a fumbling man who couldn’t find steady work.

Even when Zhuang and Little Yan finally receive political asylum and are reunited with their son in New York, the essential problems of survival persisted. Zhuang, like many Asians and Asian-Americans, felt invisible in America, and fantasized about his heroic days back home, when life felt meaningful to him. Hilgers explains that during those years, “Zhuang felt as if he had found his purpose. The protesters looked to him for instruction, volunteering to help him gather evidence of land grabs. …”

“Patriot Number One” startles the reader with its brutal revelations about China’s restrictions and mechanisms of repression. But it ignores the country’s historical context. This is a nation still reeling from the aftereffects of Mao’s madness, which has only in recent decades come to light. When I was in college in the late 1970s, I took a course called “Communism and China.” My professor assigned Mao’s Red Book and pontificated enthusiastically on the glorious revolution taking place in China. We were taught how the masses had been put in control of their society and allowed to make the necessary changes to help their country thrive. There were many class discussions on the wondrousness of the collective spirit and the concept of self-criticism that the Chinese citizenry took part in regularly as part of their attempt to create a perfect world. I recall being impressed, and it was only years later, when the truth was revealed about Mao and the Cultural Revolution, that I was forced to reassess all I had been taught.

The current President Xi of China was a victim of Mao’s regime. Xi’s father had been one of Mao’s top commanders. But when Mao purged his elite lieutenants, a teenage Xi was thrust onto the streets. His father was tortured and imprisoned for many years.  His sister committed suicide. Xi survived. He was sent to a rural province to be reeducated, and lived in a cave for seven years amid rural Chinese peasants, working feverishly among them. This time, he claims, taught him to understand poverty and suffering. When he became president, many hoped he would bring reform, but he proved to be a cautious leader. He has attempted to crack down on corruption and worked to improve maternal mortality and promote mass literacy, but does so while strictly enforcing the supreme power of the Chinese Communist Party, which he rules with an iron hand. Hilgers’ book would have benefited from some historical context, since Zhuang and Little Yan, born after Mao, still carry within them the emotional baggage that was inflicted upon their parents and grandparents during Mao’s reign. Her book seems oblivious to these underpinning psychological forces and their long-term effects. Chinese life under Mao is now seen by historians as a calamitous event, with harrowing consequences comparable to the suffering inflicted by Stalin and Hitler.

Finally, Hilgers sometimes seems a step too removed from her own narrative. She can feel at times like an invisible presence, and we long to hear more about what drives her. We never learn what possessed her to go to Shanghai as a young woman in 2006 in the first place. Or why she was willing, as a new wife and mother in Brooklyn, to become so entrenched in Zhuang and Little Yan’s lives when they arrived. Her emotional reticence hinders her otherwise stunning narrative.

U.S. Wildlife Protection Panel Stuffed With Trophy Hunters

WASHINGTON—A new U.S. advisory board created to help rewrite federal rules for importing the heads and hides of African elephants, lions and rhinos is stacked with trophy hunters, including some members with direct ties to President Donald Trump and his family.

A review by The Associated Press of the backgrounds and social media posts of the 16 board members appointed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke indicates they will agree with his position that the best way to protect critically threatened or endangered species is by encouraging wealthy Americans to shoot some of them.

One appointee co-owns a private New York hunting preserve with Trump’s adult sons. The oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., drew the ire of animal rights activists after a 2011 photo emerged of him holding a bloody knife and the severed tail of an elephant he killed in Zimbabwe.

The first meeting of the International Wildlife Conservation Council was scheduled for Friday at the Interior Department’s headquarters in Washington. Council members aren’t being paid a salary, though the department has budgeted $250,000 in taxpayer funds for travel expenses, staff time and other costs.

Trump has decried big-game hunting as a “horror show” in tweets. But under Zinke, a former Montana congressman who is an avid hunter, the Fish and Wildlife Service has quietly moved to reverse Obama-era restrictions on bringing trophies from African lions and elephants into the United States.

Asked about the changes during a congressional hearing Thursday, Zinke said no import permits for elephants have been issued since the ban was lifted earlier this month. The Fish and Wildlife Service said permits for lion trophies have been issued since October, when imports from Zimbabwe and Zambia were first allowed, though they could not immediately provide a number for how many.

A licensed two-week African hunting safari can cost more than $50,000 per person, not including airfare, according to advertised rates. Advocates say money helps support habitat conservation and anti-poaching efforts in some of the world’s poorest nations, and provides employment for local guides and porters.

In a statement last year, Zinke said, “The conservation and long-term health of big game crosses international boundaries. This council will provide important insight into the ways that American sportsmen and women benefit international conservation from boosting economies and creating hundreds of jobs to enhancing wildlife conservation.”

But environmentalists and animal welfare advocates say tourists taking photos generate more economic benefit, and hunters typically target the biggest and strongest animals, weakening already vulnerable populations.

There’s little indication dissenting perspectives will be represented on the Trump administration’s conservation council. Appointees include celebrity hunting guides, representatives from rifle and bow manufacturers, and wealthy sportspeople who boast of bagging the coveted “Big Five” — elephant, rhino, lion, leopard and Cape buffalo.

Most are high-profile members of Safari Club International and the National Rifle Association, groups that have sued the Fish and Wildlife Service to expand the list of countries from which trophy kills can be legally imported.

They include the Safari Club’s president, Paul Babaz, a Morgan Stanley investment adviser from Atlanta, and Erica Rhoad, a lobbyist and former GOP congressional staffer who is the NRA’s director of hunting policy.

Bill Brewster is a retired Oklahoma congressman and lobbyist who served on the boards of the Safari Club and the NRA. An NRA profile lauded Brewster and his wife’s five decades of participation and support for hunting, and his purchase of a lifetime NRA membership for his grandson when the boy was 3 days old.

Also on the board is Gary Kania, vice president of the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, a group that lobbies Congress and state governments on issues affecting hunters and fishermen.

Zinke described the purpose of the council as representing the “strong partnership” between federal wildlife officials and those who hunt or profit from hunting. Council paperwork said the panel’s mission was “to increase public awareness domestically regarding conservation, wildlife law enforcement, and economic benefits that result from United states citizens traveling to foreign nations to engage in hunting.”

In its charter, the council’s listed duties include “recommending removal of barriers to the importation into the United States of legally hunted wildlife” and “ongoing review of import suspension/bans and providing recommendations that seek to resume the legal trade of those items, where appropriate.”

In a letter this week, a coalition of more than 20 environmental and animal welfare groups objected that the one-sided makeup of the council could violate the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires government boards to be balanced in terms of points of view and not improperly influenced by special interests. The groups said they nominated a qualified representative, but Zinke didn’t select him.

“If Trump really wants to stop the slaughter of elephants for trophies, he should shut down this biased, thrill-kill council,” said Tanya Sanerib, a spokeswoman for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The administration can’t make wise decisions on trophy imports if it only listens to gun-makers and people who want to kill wildlife.”

Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift said the makeup of the council fully complies with the law.

“There are members on the council that represent all areas of conservation and varying opinions,” Swift said.

CONNECTIONS TO TRUMP

Among Zinke’s appointees is Steven Chancellor, a longtime Republican fundraiser and chairman of American Patriot Group, an Indiana-based conglomerate that includes a company that supplies Meals Ready to Eat to the U.S. military.

According to Safari Club member hunting records obtained in 2015 by the Humane Society, Chancellor has logged nearly 500 kills — including at least 18 lions, 13 leopards, six elephants and two rhinos.

In early 2016, records show Chancellor filed for a federal permit to bring home the skin, skull teeth and claws from another male lion he intended to kill that year in Zimbabwe, which at the time was subject to an import ban imposed by the Obama administration.

Later that same year, Chancellor hosted a private fundraiser for then-candidate Trump and Mike Pence at his Evansville, Indiana, mansion, where the large security gates leading up the driveway feature a pair of gilded lions.

Chancellor did not respond to a phone message seeking comment on Thursday.

In the fight to win approval for imports of lions from Zimbabwe, Chancellor was represented by Conservation Force, a non-profit law firm in Louisiana. It was founded by John Jackson III, a lawyer and past Safari Club president who also has been appointed to the advisory council by Zinke.

Chris Hudson, a lawyer and past president of the Dallas chapter of the Safari Club, also was appointed. He made headlines in 2014 when the club auctioned off a permit for $350,000 to kill an endangered black rhino in Namibia. Hudson later joined with Jackson in providing legal representation to the winning bidder, who sued Delta after the airline refused to fly the rhino’s carcass back to the United States.

‘HUNTING LIFESTYLE’

Appointees include professional hunters. Peter Horn is an ex-vice president of the Safari Club International Conservation Fund and a vice president for high-end gun-maker Beretta. He runs the company’s boutique in Manhattan, where well-heeled clients can drop as much as $150,000 for a hand-engraved, custom-made shotgun.

Horn wrote in his 2014 memoir that he co-owns a hunting property in upstate New York with Trump Jr. that has a 500-yard range “put together” by Eric Trump.

The AP reported last month that the Trump sons were behind a limited-liability company that purchased a 171-acre private hunting range in the bucolic Hudson Valley in 2013, complete with a wooden tower from which owners and their guests shoot at exploding targets.

Horn did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Trump Jr. also is friendly with another member of the advisory council — hunting guide and TV show personality Keith Mark. He helped organize Sportsmen for Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and recently posted photos on his Twitter page of himself with Trump Jr. and Zinke, standing before an array of mounted big-horn sheep and a bear.

“I see the world from a hunting lifestyle,” Mark told the AP, adding that he has no preconceived agenda for his service on the conservation council. “It’s the most pure form of hands on conservation that there is. I will approach all decision-making with my background.”

Also named to the board is Cameron Hanes, a celebrity archer who advocates for trophy hunting. In a podcast last month, he said hunting allows animals such as elephants to “have value.”

But while supportive of African trophy hunting as an aid to conservation, he said he is more interested in North American wildlife management and sees the council as a way to represent hunters’ interests. He said he hopes to take Zinke out to the archery range.

“We’re trying to make that happen,” he said. “If you have somebody’s ear, you want to tell them what’s important to you.”

Hanes also said he knows Trump Jr. and has been speaking with him about hunting for “quite a while.”

EXTREME HUNTRESS

Also on the council is Olivia Opre, a TV personality and former Miss America contestant who received Safari Club’s top prize for female hunters, the Diana Award.

Opre, who co-produces a competition called Extreme Huntress, has killed about 90 different species on six continents, bringing home some 150 animal carcasses. Many are stuffed and mounted in her house, she told the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2016.

“I’m tired of hearing the words ‘trophy hunter’,” she told the paper. “We’re helping to preserve wildlife; we hunt lions because we want to see populations of wildlife continue to grow.”

Opre, who did not respond to messages seeking comment, has previously recounted killing a hippo, buffalo, black rhino and lion, all in Africa.

She said in the NRA’s Women’s Leadership Form newsletter published last year that she and another Diana Award winner, Denise Welker, had “shed tears over her appreciation for life in all its forms.”

Welker also has been appointed to the conservation council. She shot and killed an African elephant from just five paces away, according to a blog post on the Safari CIub-affiliated site, Hunt Forever. Included was a photo of a smiling Welker posing next to the carcass of the big bull, a large bullet hole visible between its eyes.

She also has hunted animals across the U.S., in Mexico, New Zealand and Cameroon, posting photos of herself with a dead leopard, eland and Greenland musk ox, according to a post she wrote on Hunt Forever three years ago.

On the website scout.com, Gayne Young wrote that he hunted elephants with Denise, her husband, Brian, and hunter and tracker Ivan Carter in Botswana in 2013.

Carter — a British citizen who runs a non-profit anti-poaching initiative alongside his guide business — also was appointed to the conservation council. He is a Rhodesian-born professional hunting guide who resides in the Bahamas. On social media postings, he has said banning elephant imports does not reduce how many elephants are hunted, and wrote an article after the infamous shooting of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe declaring that anti-hunting forces were on the march.

“This event and the subsequent events have been the ‘Twin Towers’ of the hunting world — our 9-11,” he wrote in a 2016 article, deploring airlines’ move to stop accepting hunting trophies as air cargo. He proposed fighting back in a war of public opinion, with hunters as infantrymen, organizations like Safari Club International as generals and the pro-hunting media as “a machine gun that can spew thousands of bullets into the opposition’s fighting force.”

In an interview with AP on Thursday, he described himself as a conservationist first and a hunter second. He said he did not have a problem with the council’s membership skewing toward trophy hunters.

“They are what makes the wheel turn in the form of bringing big dollars” to conservation, he said. Without trophy-hunting revenue, the governments of African nations will turn over conservation land to private interests for development, he said.

“The business model doesn’t work with the closure of lion and elephant imports,” he said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service declined to provide information on Thursday on whether any appointees to the advisory committee had applied for or received import permits for animal trophies over the last year. Agency spokesman Gavin Shire suggested filing a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of the permits, a process that can take years.

ANIMAL EXPERTS

One of two non-hunters named to the board is Terry Maple, a former director of the Atlanta zoo. Legally importing rare live animals also requires government permits issued by Fish and Wildlife. Maple helped write “A Contract with the Earth,” a book by Newt Gingrich making the politically conservative case for environmentalism.

The other is Jenifer Chatfield, a zoo and wildlife veterinarian professor who has family ties to the exotic animal trade.

The book “Animal Underworld: Inside America’s Black Market for Rare and Exotic Species” accused her father, John Chatfield, of diverting zoo animals to the private market, where they would become pets or stock private hunting ranches.

In one 1997 instance — reported by the AP — the elder Chatfield ended up in possession of endangered lemurs and pronghorn antelopes that were to have gone to a zoo in Indiana. Simultaneously, Chatfield listed lemurs and pronghorn antelope for sale in a publication called “Animal Finders.”

An investigation of the zoo director’s activities resulted in his expulsion from the American Zoological Association. Chatfield denied any wrongdoing at the time. He did not respond to a request for comment from the AP on Thursday.

The Chatfield family since has moved to Dade City, Florida, where they operate a facility housing nearly 200 exotic animals that state business records show Jenifer partly owns. In 2013, Florida Fish and Wildlife officials cited the farm for improperly storing kangaroos after one escaped, then died after being tranquilized and shocked by sheriff’s deputies. According to the state’s report, Chatfield initially denied that the kangaroo was his — but accepted responsibility after the fish and wildlife inspector proposed DNA testing. The inspector noted that Chatfield was unable to say how many kangaroos he currently had.

Though Jenifer Chatfield is a part owner of the exotic animal facility and was present at the time of the kangaroo escape, state wildlife officials did not cite her for a violation along with her father.

She did not return messages seeking comment.

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Pearson reported from New York.

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Follow Associated Press investigative reporters Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck , Pearson at http://twitter.com/JakePearsonAP and Horwitz at http://twitter.com/JeffHorwitz