Chris Hedges's Blog, page 80

Britain’s Grim Lesson for America

T his article o rigin ally appeared o n Salon.

British general elections have a tendency to deliver last-minute surprises, and the U.K.’s third in less than five years did not disappoint. Unfortunately for the Labour Party, the British left and the anti-Brexit forces, the surprise of 2019 appears to be a catastrophic wipeout.

Polls leading into Thursday’s election had suggested a tightening race that could end in a “hung parliament.” Lines — sorry, queues — at polling places were lengthy, and British social media buzzed with the possibility that left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn might win just enough seats to forge a coalition government with the Scottish National Party, ousting preening, Trump-flavored Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party and paving the way for a second Brexit referendum.

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None of that will happen now. As Johnson told a cheering crowd at Conservative Party headquarters in London, the Tories had won a “stonking” victory, which will ensure that the U.K. leaves the European Union sooner rather than later, and will lock down the right’s hold on power in Britain for the next several years.

With most votes counted early on Friday morning, the BBC reports that the Tories will win an outright majority of roughly 364 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, a gain of 47 from the indecisive 2017 election.

If possible, the news for Labour and Corbyn, its controversial leader, is even worse than that. While the Conservative vote share is only slightly higher than it was in 2017, Labour’s vote has declined by roughly 8 percent. After gaining 30 seats in 2017 for a total of 261 — its biggest electoral gain for 20 years — Labour stands to lose 57 or 58 seats this time around, potentially its worst overall election result since World War II.

There are several interesting footnotes to this election, including a big comeback by the Scottish National Party, who have won at least 48 seats, virtually wiping out both Labour and the Tories north of the border and reigniting the push for Scottish independence. The centrist Liberal Democrats, who had hoped to thrive by being the only party clearly against Brexit, remain irrelevant, with party leader Jo Swinson losing her seat to the SNP.

But for Labour and the overall British left, no sugarcoating is possible. This election is an unmitigated disaster.

As author and journalist David Kogan told me in a recent interview, the British left saw Corbyn’s unexpected victory in the Labour leadership campaign of 2015 as a historic opportunity to pursue systemic progressive change. That opportunity is gone now, and for years to come. Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that for many people in Britain and around the world, this is a crushing blow.

Whatever you make of Jeremy Corbyn, he is a person of great moral decency and unbending principle, who engaged and aroused a generation of young activists. For practical purposes his political career is now over: Late on Thursday, Corbyn said he intended to remain as leader for a period of “reflection,” although many in the party would clearly prefer he quit immediately. He certainly will not try to lead Labour into another election.

Exactly why did this election go so badly south for Labour, and what lessons does this debacle hold for Americans who yearn to defeat Donald Trump next November? It’s way too early to offer definitive answers to those questions — especially from thousands of miles away — but if you spent any time on political Twitter on Thursday evening, you know that plenty of people gave it a try.

The fairest answer is probably that damn near everything went wrong for Labour, and that outside observers will draw whatever lessons they like, mostly the ones that support whatever they already believe. Democratic “moderates” in the U.S. are already using the Corbyn catastrophe, for instance, to warn darkly that their own party must not take a chance on a leftist or progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in 2020. Whatever the merits of that argument, it doesn’t have much to do with what just happened across the pond.

It’s perfectly true that Corbyn was the most prominent leftist leader of any major political party in any major Western democracy over the last several years, and that he pushed an unrepentant progressive agenda. But that agenda — expanding public services and ending the era of austerity — was widely popular in almost every detail, and was not the reason Labour lost this election so badly.

Corbyn himself, as a political personality, is another matter. Four years as party leader have exposed the fact that he was a lifelong activist with no management experience. He has alternately seemed too weak and too autocratic — and has also been subjected to relentless vilification by the pro-Tory press. Fairly or not, people in Britain who didn’t adore him had largely come to fear and dislike him. So far, it seems that many Labour candidates think Corbyn’s presence at the top of the party is the biggest reason they lost, but not necessarily because middle-ground voters perceived him as too radical.

It was hugely damaging that Corbyn refused to take a clear position on Brexit, the overarching political issue that dominated  this election. To be fair, he didn’t have great options, and his promise to act as a “neutral referee” on Brexit reflected an awkward split within his party’s base. To oversimplify the equation slightly, traditional working-class Labour voters in the north of England tended to support Brexit, while affluent, cosmopolitan Labour voters in and around London overwhelmingly opposed it. Still, if the party’s leader had taken a clear position and stuck with it (as in fact he did in the 2017 campaign), the results might have been different.

Corbyn also appeared indecisive, or somewhat worse than that, when it came to Labour’s burgeoning anti-Semitism scandal, in which some Jewish Labour MPs or candidates were targeted for abuse by pro-Palestinian leftists. As David Kogan puts it, there was no evidence that Corbyn himself harbored hateful views, but also no evidence that he cared about the problem all that much or understood how badly it had damaged the party’s reputation.

There are no precise parallels to either of those things in American politics, although there are certainly echoes. To this point, allegations of anti-Semitism against Democratic members of Congress have done no lasting damage — largely because their source, one might say, is compromised. But Brexit, I suppose, is metaphorically similar to Donald Trump’s border wall, which is more or less the instrument he used to pry Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania away from the Democrats.

In both cases, we’re talking about a political party struggling to adapt to rapid change, so far without success. One analysis of the British election I encountered late on Tuesday night suggested that Labour might actually gain a few previous Tory seats in London, while losing many more longtime Labour seats in what was once the party’s working-class northern heartland. (This appears accurate so far.) That would be England’s version of the Big Sort, in which geography, educational level and generational identity — along with race, of course — become the dominant social dividing lines and political signifiers.

Jeremy Corbyn and the British left just experienced a painful illustration of this cultural and demographic shift in action, and of how it nourishes a politics of rage and resentment that can undermine and endanger democracy. Americans already know about this: You can feel certain you’re on the right side of history, and still end up, shocked and dismayed, on the wrong side of electoral arithmetic. The trick, of course, is to find a way to win without sacrificing your essential principles. Does anyone ever do that?

William F. Buckley Never Fooled James Baldwin

The following is an excerpt from Nicholas Buccola’s “The Fire Is Upon Us.” Listen to Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer’s interview with Buccola here.

By mid-1968, James Baldwin’s hope was in a precarious state. Just three months earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by a white supremacist in Memphis, Tennessee. “Since Martin’s death,” Baldwin explained later, “something has altered in me, something has gone away.” That “something,” he confessed, was his faith that people can be better than they are. King’s death “forced me,” Baldwin wrote, “into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make.” Baldwin had spent decades trying to convince people to treat one another as “miracles” despite “the disasters” they had become, but after King’s death he was finding it difficult to heed that advice. It would be too much to say that the bullet that murdered King also killed Baldwin’s hope, but it is fair to conclude that the event led him to undergo a radical transformation as a thinker and artist. Like all the other bloody moments in the history of the civil rights struggle, Baldwin’s focus was not on the perpetrator of the crime but instead on the circumstances that produced him and led his life to intersect with King’s. The moral corruption of a country that could produce this event, he thought, was beyond question. Baldwin had done all he could to avert the fire next time, but he was now accepting that the fire was upon us, and there was much that deserved to burn.

In the days and weeks after the King assassination, William F. Buckley Jr. was appalled. What upset him was not the murder itself—horrific though it was—but rather the reaction to it. In an attempt to “atone for the crime against Martin Luther King,” Buckley lamented, Americans were blaming themselves. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors called “Did You Kill Martin Luther King?” that Buckley delivered just two weeks after the assassination, his thesis was clear: those who, like Baldwin, thought the death of King revealed the corruption of the American soul were saying something that was “philosophically dangerous.” By asking Americans to reflect on their complicity in King’s death, Buckley declared, Baldwin and his ilk were simply coming up with another way to promote their “Hate America” message. In the wake of these criticisms, Buckley said that moments like these made him swell with pride for his country. The big story, he argued, was not the alleged moral corruption that led to such an event but instead “that we bred the most widely shared and the most intensely felt sense of grief ” in response to the murder. The most important thing one could do in the aftermath of an event like the King assassination, Buckley said, was to cling even tighter to one’s faith in America. The country, he concluded, “needs us all as [the] devoted bodyguards” of her ideals and institutions.

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These disparate reactions to the King assassination bring into relief the gulf that forever separated Buckley and Baldwin, and continues to separate so many in American politics. This gulf can be explained by a fundamental disagreement between the two men about what it means to love one’s country. Baldwin’s reaction to the murder of King, Buckley believed, revealed his lack of love—indeed, his hatred—for the country. Buckley’s reaction to the assassination, Baldwin believed, revealed the falseness and emptiness of his love for the country. For Buckley, love of country was displayed by one’s gratitude for it, despite its flaws. For Baldwin, one’s love for the country was revealed by one’s willingness to “criticize her perpetually.” Buckley’s love was a love of devotion, much like a child’s love for his parents. Baldwin’s love was a love of confrontation. “Love is a battle,” he insisted, “love is a war. Love is a growing up.”

Buckley’s name seldom passed Baldwin’s lips in the years after their encounters in 1965. Late in life, though, as Baldwin found himself so deeply alienated from Ronald Reagan’s America, Buckley was back on his mind. During a discussion of “Blacks and Jews” in 1984, Baldwin explained that he felt a “certain bitterness” toward his Jewish “ex-running buddies” who had become “neoconservatives.” Unlike “William Buckley, from whom obviously I expect nothing,” Baldwin was disappointed by the fact that some American Jews had come under the spell of “a peculiarly vindictive form of American neofascism.” Buckley’s neofascism, Baldwin seemed to be suggesting, was to be expected; his “old running buddies” should have known better.

In Baldwin’s last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, he made reference to what was almost certainly his June 1965 appearance with Buckley on David Susskind’s Open End television show. “People can be defined by their color only by the beholder,” he explained, “who, in order to arrive at this definition, must will himself blind.” There is “not a racist alive,” he continued, “who is not a liar and a coward, the proof being that they imagine reality to be at the mercy of their will—or, rather, of their terror.” As an illustrative example of this phenomenon, Baldwin described what happened when he and Buckley left the set of Open End:

I remember a very celebrated American patriot . . . proud issue of Yale, who, after a somewhat stormy TV interview on which we had both appeared, upon discovering one of my brothers and myself and a friend in the elevator, hurried, with his friends, down the stairs. He will say, of course, if challenged, that the elevator was crowded, but I remember the split second—the twinkling of an eye—in which he looked at me and he saw me looking at him. Okay. But I would have gotten on the elevator.

Racist. Liar. Coward. These are the words that came into Baldwin’s mind when he thought about Buckley.

From Baldwin’s point of view, Buckley’s moral failure was rooted in his unwillingness to see “the life, the aspirations, [and] the universal humanity hidden behind the dark skin.” Buckley often claimed that the inviolability of the individual was at the heart of his political philosophy, but this commitment was nowhere to be found in his reactions to the civil rights revolution. He worried about abstract individuals who might one day be violated by “Big Government” while paying little mind to the destruction of real individuals right in front of him. To respect the humanity of another, Baldwin argued, one must make a good faith effort to view the world through their eyes. This was something that Buckley was unwilling to do. When he discussed race matters, he failed—time and again—to think through issues from the standpoint of the oppressed. Even in moments when he seemed to concede the justice of their cause, Buckley invariably pivoted from this sympathy to a position of resistance. Yes, it’s unfortunate that you are not allowed to send your children to that school, but you must wait until white parents feel comfortable with their sons and daughters being educated alongside yours. Yes, racially motivated violence is repulsive and the failure of the legal system to punish it is indefensible, but the federal government has no business doing anything about it. Yes, it is unfair that you are excluded from the right to vote because of your skin color, but should you really be voting anyway?

Although Baldwin often displayed a tremendous amount of forgiveness for oppressors—for example, Sheriff Jim Clark—who he saw as more scared than evil, he had little patience for Buckley and his ilk. In Baldwin’s view, men like Clark were trapped in a web of mythology they did not really understand and could not envision how to escape. What was happening to the moral lives of men such as these, Baldwin argued, was one of the most sinister things imaginable. He thought men like Buckley were in a different moral category. These men, he claimed, were not unwitting and frightened human beings trapped in webs of delusion; they were responsible for creating and maintaining these webs in order to advance agendas that had little to do with the well-being of Clark or anyone like him. Buckley, Baldwin believed, knew better and had the ability to exert a considerable amount of influence in the world. Indeed, Buckley’s work as a guardian of white supremacy was, from Baldwin’s perspective, more sinister than that of the most hardened racists in American politics. Time and again, Buckley’s ends were the same as the racist demagogues he was always sure to condemn; his primary objection to these men was the means they chose to use on behalf of “the cause of white people.” For these reasons, Baldwin concluded, some of the blood shed as a result of the American racial nightmare was on Buckley’s hands.

Johnson Claims Brexit Mandate in Sweeping Conservative Victory

LONDON—Boris Johnson’s gamble on early elections paid off as voters gave the UK prime minister a commanding majority to take the country out of the European Union by the end of January, a decisive result after more than three years of stalemate over Brexit.

Johnson’s promise to “get Brexit done” and widespread unease with opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership style and socialist policies combined to give the ruling Conservative Party 365 seats in the House of Commons, its best performance since party icon Margaret Thatcher’s last victory in 1987. Corbyn’s Labour Party slumped to 203 seats, 59 fewer than it won two years ago, vote totals showed Friday.

The results offer Johnson a new mandate to push his EU withdrawal agreement through Parliament. Since taking office in July, he had led a minority government and, after the House of Commons stalled his Brexit deal at the end of October, he called the election two years ahead of schedule in hopes of winning a clear majority.

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“I will put an end to all that nonsense, and we will get Brexit done on time by the January 31 – no ifs, no buts, no maybes,” he said as supporters cheered. “Leaving the European Union as one United Kingdom, taking back control of our laws, borders, money, our trade, immigration system, delivering on the democratic mandate of the people.”

Johnson also offered an olive branch to Britons who want to remain in the EU, saying he will respect their “warm feelings” and build a “new partnership” with the bloc as “friends and sovereign equals.”

Speaking Friday outside 10 Downing Street, he pledged to end acrimony over Brexit and urged the country to “let the healing begin.” He said he would work to repay voters’ trust.

The scale of Johnson’s success also marked a stinging defeat for Corbyn, who had promised to lead Labour to victory with the “biggest people-powered campaign our country has ever seen.”

Instead, voters rejected his attempt to bridge divisions over Brexit by promising a second referendum on any deal with the EU. The vote also turned away the rest of the party’s agenda, which included promises to raise taxes on the rich, increase social spending and nationalize industries such as water delivery, railroads and the Royal Mail.

Corbyn, who spent his entire career as a backbench gadfly until unexpectedly winning a party leadership election in 2015, was criticized for silencing critics within the party and failing to root out anti-Semitism among his supporters. Centrist Labour politicians were quick to call for Corbyn to step down, though he has said he will stay on during a period of “reflection” and that an internal election to choose a new leader would take place early next year.

“Obviously, it is a very disappointing night for the party,” he said after retaining his own seat in Parliament. ”But I want to say this, in the election campaign we put forward a manifesto of hope. However, Brexit has so polarized debate it has overridden so much of normal political debate.”

Phil Wilson, the former Labour lawmaker from Sedgefield who lost his seat to the Conservatives, said blaming the party’s wipeout on Brexit was “mendacious nonsense.”

Corbyn’s leadership “was a bigger problem,” he tweeted. “To say otherwise is delusional. The party’s leadership went down like a lead balloon on the doorstep. Labour’s leadership needs to take responsibility.”

In an election where differences over Brexit cut across traditional party lines, several big names lost their seats the House of Commons.

Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson pledged to cancel Brexit if she were elected prime minister, but she was defeated by the Scottish National Party in her constituency north of Glasgow and resigned as party leader. Chuka Umunna was a one-time Labour Party leadership candidate, who left the party in February because of differences with Corbyn. Running as a Liberal Democrat, he lost out to the Conservatives in the cities of London and Westminster. Nigel Dodds led the Democratic Unionist Party in the House of Commons as the party supported the government in hopes of winning concessions on Brexit for Northern Ireland. He lost his Belfast North seat to Sinn Fein.

But those individual defeats may be a sign of longer-lasting shifts in the U.K.’s electoral landscape.

Johnson owes his success, in part, to traditionally Labour-voting working class constituencies in northern England that backed the Conservatives because of the party’s promise to deliver Brexit. During the 2016 referendum, many of the communities voted to leave the EU because of concerns that immigrants were taking their jobs.

Early in the campaign, pundits said the election would turn on these voters, who were dubbed the “Workington man” after the onetime steel-making community in northwestern England.

The Conservatives won Workington on Thursday by more than 4,000 votes. The constituency had supported Labour candidates since 1918, with only one short interruption in the 1970s.

Mathew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent, said Johnson matched a bit of leaning to the left on the economy with a similar lean to the right on Brexit, migration and crime.

“Johnson, for his part, appears to have grasped one of the new unwritten laws in politics: It is easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on identity and culture,” he wrote on his blog.

The question now is whether the Conservatives can address the economic and social concerns of these voters and hold on to their support in future elections.

Conversely, some traditionally Conservative-supporting communities in southeastern England flipped to Labour as the pro-EU sentiments of middle class voters outweighed other issues.

One of these was the London district of Putney, home to many professionals and the starting point of the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Labour won the seat by 4,774 votes on Thursday, overturning a Conservative majority of 1,554.

But the next flashpoint for U.K. politics may be Scotland, where the Scottish National Party won 48 of the 59 seats up for grabs on Thursday.

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon delivered the landslide victory with a campaign focused on demands for a second referendum on Scottish independence. Johnson has flatly rebuffed the idea of another vote, saying Scotland already rejected independence in 2014.

But Sturgeon argues that the U.K.’s decision to leave the EU against the wishes of the Scottish people has materially changed the landscape. Some 62 percent of Scottish voters backed remaining in the EU during the 2016 referendum on membership.

She said she plans to publish a detailed democratic case next week for a transfer of power that would clear the way for a second independence vote.

“It is the right of the people of Scotland. And you, as the leader of a defeated party in Scotland, have no right to stand in the way,” she said.

Johnson’s sweeping victory in the UK will give him room to maneuver on such issues, particularly involving the fraught details of Brexit. Jim O’Neill, chairman of the Chatham House think tank, said the size of the Conservative Party victory gives it a clear mandate to execute the first stage of departing the EU by passing the withdrawal bill as desired.

“But it also gives a majority where the government can explore its future trade relationship with the EU with more time” and extends the transition period, he said ”Even more importantly, in principle, this majority gives the prime minister the leeway to be bold and reveal his true desires for both domestic and global Britain.”

__

Gregory Katz, Sheila Norman-Culp and Jo Kearney in London, and Angela Charlton, Raf Casert and Adam Pemble in Brussels contributed to this report.

___

Follow AP’s full coverage of Brexit and British politics at https://www.apnews.com/Brexit.

Judiciary Committee Sends 2 Articles of Impeachment to Full House

WASHINGTON—Impeachment charges against President Donald Trump went to the full House on Friday, following approval by the House Judiciary Committee.

The House is expected to take up the two articles of impeachment next week.

The abuse of power charge stems from Trump’s July phone call with the Ukraine president pressuring him to announce an investigation of Democrats as he was withholding US aid. The obstruction charge involves Trump’s blocking of House efforts to investigate his actions. Trump has denied wrongdoing.

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The vote in the House panel was split along party lines, with 23 Democrats voting in favor and 17 Republicans opposed.

Trump is accused, in the first article, of abusing his presidential power by asking Ukraine to investigate his 2020 rival Joe Biden while holding military aid as leverage, and, in the second, of obstructing Congress by blocking the House’s efforts to probe his actions.

Voting came quickly after two days of hearings at the Capitol and a rancorous 14-hour session that was abruptly shut down late Thursday when the Democratic majority refused to be forced, after a long and bitter slog through failed Republican amendments aimed at killing the impeachment charges, into midnight voting. Instead, the impeachment charges against Trump were aired in full view of Americans.

Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who had said he wanted lawmakers to “search their consciences” before casting their votes, gaveled in the landmark morning session.

Trump took to Twitter early Friday to praise the panel’s Republicans, saying “they were fantastic yesterday.”

“The Dems have no case at all, but the unity & sheer brilliance of these Republican warriors, all of them, was a beautiful sight to see,” he tweeted. “Dems had no answers and wanted out!”

Pete Buttigieg’s Progressive Early Backers Demand a Refund

Though they initially viewed South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg as an intriguing and progressive newcomer when he began his presidential campaign early this year, the #RefundPete hashtag began trending Thursday morning on social media as a growing number of former donors started requesting their donations back in the wake of recent revelations about the 2020 Democratic candidate.

Kristen Hill, a volunteer community leader for the presidential primary campaign of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in North Carolina, was one of the first voters to kick off the viral hashtag #RefundPete.

“If Pete Buttigieg fooled you into thinking he was a progressive at the beginning of his campaign and you donated what he thinks is pocket change, you can ask for a refund by emailing your receipt to info@peteforamerica.com,” Hill tweeted.

Pro-tip: If @petebuttigieg fooled you into thinking he was a progressive at the beginning of his campaign and you donated what he thinks is pocket change, you can ask for a refund by emailing your receipt to info@peteforamerica.com. #RefundPete

— Kristen Hill (@KristenAbigail) December 11, 2019

In October, Buttigieg criticized his progressive opponents, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for running their campaigns on “pocket change” by accepting mostly small donations of under $200.

Buttigieg has raised 52% of his $50 million campaign dollars through large contributions, and has so far been outraised by both Sanders and Warren.

“Just got my refund from Pete’s campaign,” wrote one social media user as the #RefundPete hashtag took off. “It was just pocket change so he won’t miss it.”

Another shared the email they sent to the campaign as the hashtag took off.

“On March 19th of 2019 I made a ten-dollar donation to your campaign,” wrote Quinn Rattan. “I was thrilled to donate to him alongside a few other candidates I determined were progressive and trying to restructure our broken political system.”

“In the passing months, Mayer Buttigieg has repeatedly run disinformation campaigns about his opponents’ plans for improving healthcare and public college…I also found his answer on big money in politics to be borderline disqualifying,” Rattan added.

If you, like me, donated to Pete Buttigieg last spring no when he was pretending to be progressive they will give you your money back!

Just got a refund. Will be donating to either Sanders or Warren depending on who is in the best position to take down Biden. pic.twitter.com/tV4uU7Qyoo

— Quinn Rattan (@Qtip60) December 11, 2019

According to testimonials by other former donors, the campaign has agreed to refund requests. 

This past summer, upon reading about his excessive private jet use and seeing his response to Eric Logan’s death, I asked for a refund. I’m glad we are using our “pocket change” to send a message. Power in our collective rebuttal to his lack of transparency. #RefundPete pic.twitter.com/c44D8WWrZa

— Jenny Tinch (@jennytinch) December 11, 2019

I just requested my refund from Buttigieg. #RefundPete

— Dave Johnson (@dcjohnson) December 12, 2019

Progressives have denounced the mayor in recent weeks over what many have viewed as his disingenuous attacks on Medicare for All and universal tuition-free public college. Under pressure from progressive critics concerned about his lack of transparency regarding high-dollar fundraisers, Buttigieg finally announced Monday that he’d open the events to reporters.

Buttigieg’s increasing attacks on Medicare for All presented a sharp contrast to his early campaign, when he urged the Democratic field to push for bold, far-reaching changes to the U.S. political and economic system. During the Democratic debate in July, he said, “It’s time to stop worrying about what the Republicans will say…Let’s stand up for the right policy, go up there and defend it.”

Buttigieg also said early in the campaign that he was open to packing the Supreme Court and lower courts and abolishing the Electoral College.

But since then, a number of critics have in recent months pointed to Buttigieg’s alignment with corporate interests as evidence that he will do little to further progressive goals. 

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee highlighted the viral #RefundPete trend on Thursday.

The honeymoon is over. As Mayor Pete comes under increased scrutiny, some don’t like what they see and are asking his campaign to refund their contributions. #RefundPete has been trending.

The Dire Warnings Hidden Within the Impeachment Articles

This piece originally appeared in The Progressive. 

Barring a last-minute failure of nerve by House Democrats, Donald John Trump will become only the third President in U.S. history to be impeached. That’s welcome news for anyone concerned with defending the Constitution, upholding the separation of powers among the branches of the federal government, and safeguarding the rule of law in general. It’s also welcome news for anyone interested in ensuring the integrity of our 2020 elections.

But for progressives and liberals, there is also a measure of disappointment because of the narrow focus on Ukraine in the two articles of impeachment that have been introduced in the House Judiciary Committee, and which will be voted on in the coming days by the entire legislative chamber. If either article is passed by the House, an impeachment trial likely will be held in the Senate sometime in January.

Together, the Trump articles of impeachment comprise a mere nine pages of text. That’s not much, considering the track record of malfeasance Trump has amassed in his first three years in office for everything from using the presidency for personal economic gain in violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on the acceptance of foreign and domestic “emoluments” to incarcerating immigrant children in cages along the southern border and obstructing justice in connection with the investigation conducted by former special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.

Still, the Trump articles comprise a narrative of corruption, and on close inspection may not be as constrained as they appear at first glance.

Article 1 sketches the well-publicized outlines of the Ukraine scandal. In legalistic but no less stinging terms, it charges Trump with “abuse of power” for “soliciting” the government of Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 American elections by announcing that it would launch investigations aimed at digging up political dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, and promoting the discredited rightwing conspiracy theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, meddled with the 2016 American election. It charges Trump with conditioning both the release of $391 million in military assistance and a “head of state meeting” at the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on such announcements.

“In so doing,” Article 1 asserts, Trump acted with the “corrupt purpose” of obtaining the “personal political benefit” of weakening an electoral opponent “in a manner that compromised the national security of the United States and undermined the integrity of the United States democratic process.”

Perhaps most ominously of all, the first article alleges that even after the promised military aid to Ukraine was released following public revelations of the solicitation scheme, Trump “has persisted in openly and corruptly urging and soliciting Ukraine to undertake investigations for his personal benefit.”

Article 1 concludes with a dire warning—that Trump will “remain a threat to national security and the Constitution if he is allowed to remain in office.” The message, though slightly sub-textual, is simple and clear: Trump must be stopped now before he sabotages the next election.

The second article of impeachment charges Trump with “obstruction of Congress” for directing an “unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives pursuant to its ‘sole Power of Impeachment’ under the Constitution.” It accuses Trump of ordering federal agencies to withhold documentation sought by the House, and barring all executive-branch employees—including acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who is explicitly cited along with eight other administration officials—from cooperating with the impeachment inquiry.

“In the history of the Republic,” Article 2 asserts, “no President has ever ordered the complete defiance of an impeachment inquiry or sought to obstruct and impede so comprehensively the ability of the House of Representatives to investigate ‘high Crimes and misdemeanors.’ ”

Both articles of impeachment allege that the President’s conduct in abusing his power and obstructing Congress on Ukraine was “consistent” with his “previous invitations of foreign interference in U.S. elections,” and his “previous efforts to undermine investigations” into such interference.

These are, of course, thinly veiled references to the Mueller probe, without mentioning the probe by name. They are, in my view, the product of clever draftsmanship, and will permit the House managers selected to prosecute Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate to introduce elements of the Mueller probe to corroborate Trump’s corrupt intent in his dealings with Ukraine.

Reasonable minds can dispute the wisdom of restricting the scope of the Trump impeachment articles. Going small has the tactical advantage of appealing to moderate House Democrats, especially those who represent swing districts that turned blue in 2018 and fear that going big on impeachment will endanger their own reelection prospects. Going small also has the virtue of allowing a clear and easily understood case to be presented against the president, and offers the albeit-slim possibility of shaming a few conscience-stricken Republicans into voting for conviction in the Senate.

Going small, however, runs the danger of losing sight of the enormity of Trump’s crimes, and of losing support from segments of the public with little specific interest in Ukraine. Any way you analyze it, the decision on how best to proceed is anything but easy.

History, as they say, will be the ultimate judge of the course the Democratic leadership has charted.

In the meantime, there can be little doubt that we, as a nation, have reached another historical inflection point. As James Madison argued during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the country’s legal charter needed the remedy of impeachment to hold in check a President who “might betray his trust to foreign powers.” Elaborating on Madison’s reasoning a year later in Federalist (Paper) No. 65, Alexander Hamilton described impeachable offenses as arising from “the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

Donald Trump has clearly met that standard. He is the nightmare the Founders dreaded. Though surgical and narrow, the Trump impeachment articles deserve our support.

 

Politicians Stand in the Way of a Global Green Energy Revolution

Often blamed for society’s problems, politicians have now been brought to book for the slow take-up of renewable forms of energy.

These are now so cheap that installation worldwide is happening faster than governments have allowed for in their national plans for action, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

This shows, IRENA says, that it is politicians, many of whose election campaigns are still financed and overly influenced by the fossil fuel lobby, that are the barrier to tackling climate change, rather than any lack of available technology.

A report by IRENA, using calculations made by Carbon Action Tracker, says that as a result the so-called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that each government is supposed to produce to show how they will cut greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Agreement of 2015 are woefully inadequate.

Even if implemented in full, they would still allow the world to warm by 2.6°C, 70% more than the 1.5°C regarded as desirable by the Agreement,  and well above the agreed danger level of 2°C. As it is, governments are not even reaching their declared NDC targets.

“By adopting targets to transform the global energy system, policymakers could finally begin to turn the tide against global warming”

A “profound transformation” is required, the report says. Higher renewable energy deployment amounting to 7.7 TW, or 3.3 times the current global capacity, could be achieved cost-effectively, and would bring considerable social and economic benefits.

“Given the competitiveness of technologies and the multiple benefits they bring the economy (e.g., job creation) renewables are a readily-available and cost-effective option to raise NDC ambitions today.”

“By adopting targets to transform the global energy system, policymakers could finally begin to turn the tide against global warming.”

The national plans that governments have produced to try to stem climate change currently allow for only a 4% annual growth in wind and solar power between 2015 and 2030 – even though annual renewable power growth averaged 5.8% between 2010 and 2014.

With current growth, the targets governments had set for 2030 would be met by 2022. According to the agency’s calculations, the progress made already means there could be 3.3 times as much global capacity installed by 2030.

Political refusal

The report, released during the current UN climate talks in Spain, is designed to show that combatting the climate emergency by using renewables to electrify the power system is well within the grasp of governments − if only politicians were prepared to endorse the idea.

The issue becomes critical next year at the climate summit due to be held in Glasgow, in the UK, when governments are due to ratchet up their commitments to tackle the climate crisis. The report notes that, despite the lack of government support, many financial institutions are already moving towards investment in renewables and climate-resilient investments.

However, this on its own will not achieve the estimated US$110 trillion dollars that need to be invested in the energy sector by 2050. There have to be positive policies from governments to switch from fossil fuels – what the report calls addressing “economic and social misalignments.”

At the moment the report notes it is not reluctance on the part of wider society that is preventing this change, merely the lack of action by politicians. For example, executives who run companies are driving the renewable energy build-up by buying renewables for their businesses.

In 75 countries, with 2,400 businesses, surveyed for the report, more than half said they actively looked for renewable energies to power their activities. These decisions were driven by the environmental and social benefits that renewables brought.

Afghanistan Papers Confirm That the Longest War Is a Lie

The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers, detailing a true history of the nation’s longest official war, reveals nothing new about the war’s futility or about the fact that it was doomed to failure from almost the beginning. The Post fought a legal battle for three years to obtain the documents from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a federal government watchdog agency that interviewed hundreds of officials about their honest assessments of the war.

What the Afghanistan Papers do offer is a confirmation of what critics had already been asserting for nearly two decades: that there is no clearly defined goal or endpoint to the war to help determine when to stop fighting, and that our efforts have been futile at best and deeply destructive at worst.

More than 10 years ago I wrote, together with James Ingalls, a critical assessment of the Afghanistan war. The title of our book was Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories, 2006). Those last three words, “the Propaganda of Silence,” are a direct reference to poor media coverage and the irresponsible manner in which the press took an uncritical view of the war. The evidence was there for all to see that the U.S. war was doomed to failure once you scratched beneath the surface of officials’ rosy rhetoric.

The most important function of the Afghanistan Papers is to confirm that government officials have been utterly dishonest with the public about U.S. achievements and progress in Afghanistan. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General at SIGAR, admitted to the Post that the documents prove that “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

The picture that emerges of how insiders have viewed the war is startlingly similar to how critics have portrayed it over the years. Earlier this year I wrote a “Brief History” of the Afghanistan war for Truthdig in which I assessed the early years of the conflict:

The Bush plan to build a stable Afghan government as a bulwark against the Taliban and al-Qaida failed for reasons that had as much to do with imperial hubris as it did with the practical shortcuts taken by an outsider to patch together a precarious government—as if that were a sufficient substitute for real democracy.

In comparison, one economist told SIGAR, as revealed in the Afghanistan Papers, that he:

… blamed an array of mistakes committed again and again over 18 years — haphazard planning, misguided policies, bureaucratic feuding. Many said the overall nation-building strategy was further undermined by hubris, impatience, ignorance and a belief that money can fix anything.

In my history of the war, I also wrote: “Obama’s strategy included a temporary increase in troops, as if throwing more American soldiers at the problem would help any one of his goals stick.” But, I continued, “The Taliban appears to have had a ‘wait it out’ strategy with respect to Americans, stringing along the U.S. and the Afghan government over several years of talks until it had the upper hand to return to power.”

By comparison, the Afghanistan Papers revealed that “Obama’s strategy was also destined to fail,” as it relied on “a massive counterinsurgency campaign, backed by 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops.” In the end, I concluded: “Obama tried to set artificial dates for ending the war before it was over. All the Taliban had to do was wait him out.”

In 2015 I wrote in another piece for Truthdig titled “We Have Failed Afghanistan Again and Again,” that:

Despite spending billions of dollars—the U.S. offered its largest share of foreign aid to Afghans last year—there is little to show for it. Nearly $10 billion was spent on arming and training Afghan forces. But as the dismal state of the Afghan National Army shows, that money may as well have been poured down the drain.

By comparison, the Afghanistan Papers reveal that officials privately knew they were fueling corruption, and that “Much of the money … ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.S.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair, if they were built at all.”

The U.S. has also been lining the pockets of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, who have a long and bloody history going back to the era of Soviet occupation, when the CIA doled out cash to fight its Cold War enemy. In my 2006 book, my co-author and I warned against this practice, devoting a whole chapter to it, titled “Replacing One Brutal Regime With Another.” We suggested that instead of rewarding them with cash and government positions, the U.S. ought to disarm the warlords and help Afghans bring them to justice. The U.S. did the opposite, and the result was entirely predictable.

The Afghanistan Papers confirm that:

According to the interviews, the CIA, the U.S. military, the State Department and other agencies used cash and lucrative contracts to win the allegiance of Afghan warlords in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Intended as a short-term tactic, the practice ended up binding the United States to some of the country’s most notorious figures for years.

One senior government official told SIGAR, “We were giving out contracts to pretty nasty people, empowering people we shouldn’t have empowered, in order to achieve our own goals.” American tax dollars have lined the pockets of mass killers to an unimaginable extent. In my 2015 article, I referred specifically to Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was elevated to the position of vice president even though he had been “implicated in numerous atrocities and mass killings.” Among the few new revelations from The Washington Post’s investigative report is the assertion that “the United States and other sources had been giving Dostum $100,000 a month ‘to not cause trouble.’ ”

Now the Trump administration is hoping to resume peace negotiations with the Taliban with a plan to reinstall the very regime the U.S. claimed was harboring terrorists and harming Afghans. If the point of the war was to go from point A to point B and then back to point A, with an unimaginably high death toll in between, then by that measure alone the U.S. war in Afghanistan has been a success.

What American officials and the mainstream media has consistently failed to do in Afghanistan is actually pay attention to what ordinary Afghans say and want. The biggest toll of the failed American war has been the death and destruction of lives in a country that was already torn apart by years of war in 2001. We may never get a full accounting of how many Afghans have died or been maimed for life as a direct result of a war that insiders knew was a mistake.

But what we do know is all armed forces in Afghanistan are implicated in war crimes. In 2018, in a little-covered story, Afghans submitted a whopping 1.17 million complaints to the International Criminal Court that “include accounts of alleged atrocities, not only by groups like the Taliban and the ISIS, but also Afghan Security Forces and government-affiliated warlords, the U.S.-led coalition, and foreign and domestic spy agencies.”

The Post’s investigative series is a welcome addition to mountains of evidence that the Afghanistan war is a failure. But it was clear to those of us who had been paying attention that U.S. officials were lying about the war for nearly two decades. The important question today is: Will the Afghanistan Papers bring about the end of the longest war?

The NFL Groomed Us for President Trump

Because everything is so Trumpian these days, there’s less air or space for the only other mass entertainment that promotes tribalism and toxic masculinity while keeping violence in vogue: football.

In the age of The Donald, it’s hard to remember that football was once the nation’s greatest television reality show. Because real people actually got really hurt in real time, you could be sure it wasn’t fake news. Now, football is just another runner-up to President Trump, whose policies actually get people killed.

And yet football is still here, in plain sight, waiting to resume its cultural dominance once Trump is gone.

To avoid any further erosion of its base, it is cosmetically modifying itself at every level with “reforms” focused on the image of increased safety. From small rural high schools to the Fifth Avenue offices of the National Football League (NFL), plans are being generated to protect America’s most popular and prosperous sport from the two things that could destroy it — the players’ mortal fear of having their brains scrambled and the fans’ moral fear of awakening to their complicity in such a process.

The players, mostly black and conditioned to believe football is their best ticket out of modern Jim Crow, have not yet fully awakened. But fans, despite being conditioned to believe that supporting your local team is little short of a civic responsibility, have more options. They are, after all, mostly white and not as likely to need to sacrifice their health for their short-term livelihood. There’s hope that, in the end, those fans will come to understand, for example, that watching the Super Bowl is casting a vote for the values that have helped bring us the show most dangerous to our survival as a civilization, the Trump administration.

Football’s Playbook

As a voter’s guide, here are the six ways in which football groomed us for Trumpball and is still trying to keep us in its grasp:

1. Inflame Racial Divisions: Helping to spread America’s primary disease, racism, is Trump 101, but the NFL got there first. Seventy per cent of its players are African-American. At the start of this season, only four head coaches and two general managers of the 32 teams were men of color. Only two owners were not white men: the Jacksonville Jaguars’ Pakistani-American Shahid Khan and the Buffalo Bills’ Korean-American Kim Pegula (a woman).

So, who would have thought that the same year — this one! — would mark not only the 100th anniversary of the NFL but the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on the soil of what became the United States of America? Somehow, neither milestone has been celebrated all that much this year — and never together. In his indispensable book on race and sports, Forty Million Dollar Slaves, former New York Times columnist William Rhoden maintains that, by cutting off black athletes from their history and communities, the sports industry has managed to control them. “The power relationship that had been established on the plantation,” he wrote, “has not changed even if the circumstances around it have.”

To make sure the NFL owners would stand firm against players kneeling during the national anthem, President Trump called Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to say, according to a sworn deposition given by Jones and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”

No wonder that these days, whole teams or many members of them refuse invitations to the White House.

2. Crush Dissent: The CliffsNotes saga of former San Francisco 49er quarterbackColin Kaepernick is pretty straightforward — a star (though not a superstar) refuses to stand for the pre-game national anthem as a protest against racism, particularly of the white-police variety. His act is spun as disrespect to the nation and its flag. Thereafter, no team will hire him because he would be a “distraction.” That was three years ago and, ever since, Kaepernick has kept himself in playing shape, becoming a martyr to some, a loser to others, and one of the genuine heroes of this generation of racial activists. He has collected millions of dollars (and given away more than a million of them) from both a Nike campaign and a settlement with the NFL in return for withdrawing a collusion case he had brought against the league. More recently, a league-sanctioned open workout, hastily organized for him to audition for a new quarterback job, collapsed amid bad intentions and confusion.

Perhaps most interesting is the striking lack of support Kaepernick has received from many of his fellow players. Are they against his demonstration or fearful of antagonizing their owners and endangering their own jobs (which only last, on average, slightly more than three years)? After all, at a 2017 rally, Trump told those same owners (a striking number of them donors of his) that they should respond to protesting players by saying, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired. He’s fired!”

He really didn’t have to tell them. They understood that holding the line against the Kaepernicks of this world means keeping the progressive barbarians at bay, something already baked into the game. The canceling of the Other, of anyone not on the team (so to speak), be they rivals, uncooperative college faculty, or most women who aren’t moms, cheerleaders, or girlfriends who understand that the team comes first, remains the norm.

3. Normalize Brutality: Football was born in brutality. In 1909, the year 26 football players died, former Confederate colonel John Mosby reportedly called the sport a “barbarous amusement” that “develops the brute dormant in man’s nature and puts the player on a level with… a polar bear.” This from a cavalry raider once known as the “Gray Ghost.”

Although the game has since been made safer, it’s always been a contest battled out man-to-man and based on the violent aggrandizement of territory. Attempts to create rules to avoid, say, crippling blocks and tackles have generally been met by howls of anguish from chickenhawk fans who cried out: don’t sissify football.

Particularly in the warfare between offensive and defensive lines, football is a game of domination by bullies. The most notorious of contemporary bullies (and yes, he’s a Trump supporter) is Richie Incognito. As an all-star offensive lineman at Nebraska, he picked fights that probably would have ended his career at most other universities. But he was such a good player that Nebraska sent him to the Menninger Clinic for anger-management counseling. This, however, proved no cure for the six-foot-three-inch, 300-pounder and Incognito eventually was kicked off the team. While some pro teams refused to draft him on the basis of “character” issues, the St. Louis Rams did so in 2005. He played well (and with bad character). He was routinely picked for all-pro teams, while, in 2009, being voted the “dirtiest player in the league.” In 2013, he bullied a fellow 300-pound Dolphin, Jonathan Martin, off the team and eventually out of football.

Not surprisingly, the NFL is as practiced when it comes to reaching out to bad boys as the present administration is. (Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, one of three SEALs tried for war crimes, whom President Trump intervened repeatedly to protect, has been referred to as the Richie Incognito of the SEALS.) Incognito, who continues to pile up a police record, played this season with the Oakland Raiders while Martin, a Stanford graduate, still struggles with his depression.

4. Sustain Inequality: Recent legislation in California allowing college athletes to share in any profits from the sale of their images has been both hailed and attacked as revolutionary. It’s the beginning of a fair new deal in the saga of the “unpaid professionals” and the end of amateur sports as we knew it. There was always a very good reason for keeping jocks on an unguaranteed dole called “scholarships”: control. But an even better reason was keeping all the profits for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the colleges, the apparel companies, and the retailers.

The crushing economic inequality in college athletics (especially in football and basketball, the so-called revenue sports) has been justified by the “free” education that “student-athletes” — a term concocted by former NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers — receive, if indeed they go to class and graduate. If indeed they even have time.

The ripping-off of college athletes has been carefully ignored by legislators, universities, and fans. Later in life, Byers would aptly call the NCAA “a nationwide money-laundering scheme,” but this phenomenon runs through all of sports. The 32 NFL teams collect more than $13 billion in revenue annually and protect themselves with elaborate “salary caps,” so that no team can start spending too wildly on players or launch the football equivalent of an arms race. Of course, by the time you turn pro, the least you can make is $495,000 (this year’s rookie minimum) with millions more for first-round draft picks.

As Colonel Mosby pointed out so long ago, the real problem still begins in college. As he put it, “It is notorious that football teams are largely composed of professional mercenaries who are hired to advertise colleges. Gate money is the valuable consideration.”

5. Apply the Lie: In the deadly tradition forged by Big Tobacco and climate deniers, the NFL relentlessly insisted that there was no relation between brain trauma and the game, even as middle-aged former players slipped into early dementia, Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), and Parkinson’s disease. For years, the league was dismissive and stonewalled on the issue. In all of this, the media and a cult of faux masculinity were accomplices. Those head-banging hits you’ve been wincing at on TV? Just dingers a real man should be able to shake off.

It took a young New York Times reporter, Alan Schwarz, a young pathologist, Bennett Omalu, and the brothers Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru-Wada, with the help of a PBS Frontline documentary, “League of Denial,” to finally get the story out in full. And it would prove a particularly hard sell for fans invested in the game. They generally didn’t want to give up their viewing pleasures, however guilty, and tried to justify them by claiming that the players were well aware of the risks and well compensated for them, even if the settlements crafted by NFL lawyers have never seemed adequate to the damage done.

As Americans learned that the damage was usually caused by thousands of hits to the head — from pee-wee football through high school and college — youth football participation started to drop. Even successful pros began to say that they wouldn’t allow their sons to play football.

More troubling yet to the NFL have been decisions by stars like Andrew Luck, a 29-year-old quarterback who quit while he could still walk and think.

6. Control the Media: Covering football from high school to the pros can be a walk in the park or a slog through hell, depending on whether the reporter is considered part of the booster squad or a “ripper,” out to score his or her own points in opposition to the team’s brand image. Admittedly, even in this heightened moment for sports journalists, few reporters have been physically attacked by coaches or athletes, although intimidation, micro-aggressions, and attempts at shunning have always been common. Lately, real-time access to key players has been harder to come by and has led to more speculative coverage, which, in turn, often results in adversarial writing, sometimes in defiance of media employers.

Not surprisingly, then, leading a recent “stick to sports” campaign have been football’s media partners, not its players or fans. Anything that seems remotely political, even if posted on private social-media platforms, has been subject to being shut down. Jemele Hill, an ESPN star now writing for the Atlantic, may be the most striking example so far of a good journalist ousted in this way, but many have also been lost to devastating lay-offs at ESPN, Deadspin, and other sports sites where real coverage has been giving way to cheaper, uncontroversial puff pieces.

Ultimately, in such a climate, political figures, too, may feel ever more comfortable expressing themselves aggressively to journalists on critical coverage. Here, as David French described it, is a possible harbinger of such a future:

“In 2017, the congressional candidate Greg Gianforte ‘body-slammed’ the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs after Jacobs tried to ask him questions about health-care policy. It was a cowardly, criminal act. Not long after, Trump praised him. At a campaign rally, the president of the United States said of Gianforte, ‘Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy.’”

“My guy,” by the way, went on to win his Montana seat in the House of Representatives.

For those who remain unconvinced that an unqualified vote for football is a vote for Trump, the Jock Culture Department of TomDispatch suggests you follow Richie Incognito to the Menninger Clinic. For those who promise to at least remain open on such subjects, however, we’re prepared to look the other way while you watch the Super Bowl in a SportsWorld made ever more toxic by the racism, sexism, classism, and violence encouraged, or perhaps more accurately, marketed by Donald Trump. And while you’re watching the festivities (and the head-banging to follow), hang on to the possibility that this will be the president’s last Super Bowl as national head coach.

U.S. and China Near Deal That Would Suspend Planned Tariffs

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration and China are close to finalizing a modest trade agreement that would suspend tariffs that are set to kick in Sunday, deescalating their 17-month trade war.

“We’re close to a deal,” said Myron Brilliant, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s head of international affairs, who has been briefed by both sides.

Brilliant said the administration has agreed to suspend Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on $160 billion in Chinese imports Sunday and to reduce existing tariffs, though it wasn’t clear by how much.

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In return, Beijing would buy more U.S. farm products, increase Americans companies’ access to the Chinese market and tighten protection for intellectual property rights.

The deal awaits final approval from President Donald Trump.

Trump took to Twitter early Thursday to declare: “Getting VERY close to a BIG DEAL with China. They want it, and so do we!”‘

Earlier Thursday, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Commerce, Gao Feng, had told reporters that “the economic and trade teams of both sides have maintained close communication.” He offered no additional details to release.

Beijing had threatened to retaliate if Trump proceeded with plans to raise tariffs on $160 billion of Chinese imports Sunday.

The two sides are negotiating a so-called Phase 1 agreement as part of the effort to resolve their sprawling trade dispute.

Still, the truce leaves unsettled the toughest and most complex issues that have divided the two sides.

The administration accuses Beijing of cheating in its drive to achieve global supremacy in such advanced technologies as driver-less cars and artificial intelligence. The administration alleges — and independent analysts generally agree — that China steals technology, forces foreign companies to hand over trade secrets, unfairly subsidizes its own firms and throws up bureaucratic hurdles for foreign rivals.

Beijing rejects the accusations and contends that Washington is simply trying to suppress a rising competitor in international trade.

Since July 2018, the Trump administration has imposed import taxes on $360 billion in Chinese products. Beijing has retaliated by taxing $120 billion in U.S. exports, including soybeans and other farm products that are vital to many of Trump’s supporters in rural America.

On Sunday, the U.S. is scheduled to start taxing another $160 billion in Chinese imports, a move that would extend the sanctions to just about everything China ships to the United States.

Repeated rounds of negotiations had failed to achieve even a preliminary agreement. The prolonged uncertainty over Trump’s trade policies has slowed U.S. business investment and likely held back economic growth. Many corporations have slowed or suspended investment plans until they know when, how or even whether the trade standoff will end.

A far-reaching agreement on China’s technology policies will likely prove difficult. It would require Beijing to scale back its drive to become a global powerhouse in industrial high technology, something it sees as a path to prosperity and international influence.

Efforts to acquire foreign technology are a theme that runs through Chinese law and government. Security researchers have asserted that Beijing operates a network of research institutes and business parks to turn stolen foreign technology into commercial products.

The Trump administration has been seeking a way to enforce any significant trade agreement with China, reflecting its contention that Beijing has violated past promises. One way to do is to retain some tariffs as leverage.