The Republican Establishment doesn’t want much in life, just for the wealthy to have ever lower taxes, for polluting industries to have ever less regulation, and for the health and welfare of the nation’s poor and workers to be someone else’s responsibility, preferably that of the poor and workers themselves.
People like Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee supported Donald Trump for president because they thought he could help them hit the trifecta. And the truth is that on lowering taxes, for the super-wealthy, on unleashing the full polluting potential of coal and other industries, and on sticking it to the working people of this country, Trump is delivering on his pledges, big time. That is why Corker campaigned so hard for Trump. It was service to his social class and his filthy rich backers.
The 0.1% should be delirious with joy.
There’s just one problem. They are terrified of Trump, of his erratic behavior, his taunting of nuclear-armed enemies, his staff upheavals at the White House. They represent Capital, and Capital thrives on order. Corker and his colleagues see disorder and they quake.
In Johann von Goethe’s play “Dr. Faust,” a man eager to taste of all human experience makes a bargain with Mephistopheles, i.e. with Satan, signing his soul away in blood for his intellectual and emotional thrill-seeking. The devil remarks,
MEPHISTOPHELES
“Nor goal, nor measure is prescrib’d to you,
If you desire to taste of every thing,
To snatch at joy while on the wing,
May your career amuse and profit too!
Only fall to and don’t be over coy!”
Mephistopheles is Corker’s Trump. Trump promised a wild ride, but a ride to the heart’s desire of conservatives– a hierarchical society with the rich firmly on top and further enriched by the hour through the abolition of graduated taxes.
He will fulfill his vow. But alongside these startling and unprecedented triumphs for the billionaires in the class war, Mephistopheles/ Trump offers something else.
Corker now thinks Trump’s volatility and ill-considered Tweet storms threaten us with World War III:
However much Corker is going to like the tax cuts on the rich in Trump’s budget this fall, he is also clearly deeply disturbed at Trump’s bellicosity. He worries that the White House staff have to spend all their time containing Trump. He worries that the president will order up Navy Seals and set them to trying to sequester North Korea’s nuclear stockpiles.
Such a mission is highly unlikely to succeed. And when it fails, what is the likely NK response?
And what will be the value of those tax cuts if Trump’s adventurism spooks the markets or attracts dramatic violence down on our country?
By Olga Pierce and Kate Rabinowitz | ( ProPublica) | – –
The Wisconsin case before the Supreme Court claims to be about partisanship. But race is a factor in this case and many others nationwide.
The Wisconsin voting rights case before the Supreme Court has been cast as the definitive test of whether partisan gerrymandering is permitted by the Constitution. But a closer look at the case and others like it shows that race remains an integral element of redistricting disputes, even when the intent of those involved was to give one party an advantage.
Consider Gill v. Whitford, the Wisconsin case that was argued last week before the nation’s highest court.
During its journey through the legal system, the case has turned on whether Republicans secured an impermissible advantage over Democrats in the way Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature redrew district lines after the 2010 census.
But because of the deep racial divides that pervade American politics, the story is not that simple.
Wisconsin’s Democratic Party includes a substantial number of African-American and Latino voters, particularly in cities like Milwaukee. When you look more closely at redistricting plans drawn in Wisconsin and elsewhere, you see that both parties have improved their statewide prospects by diminishing the political power of minority voters.
As they fight in court over lines drawn after the 2010 census, Democrats and Republicans alike are anxiously waiting to see what the decision in the Wisconsin case will let them do after the 2020 census.
Michael Li, senior counsel at the Democracy Program at New York’s Brennan Center, said the ruling carries extra weight because we can expect the most sophisticated chicanery yet.
“I’m worried about a record level of gamesmanship in 2021,” said Li. “There could be an unprecedented redistricting war, and both sides are going into it fully armed.”
Paul Smith, the attorney presenting oral arguments on behalf of the voters challenging the Wisconsin map, echoed this sentiment.
“What the court needs to know is it’s — this is a cusp of a really serious, more serious problem,” Smith told the justices. As computing power and data for redistricting continue to improve, he said, “you’re going to have a festival of copycat gerrymandering the likes of which this country has never seen.”
While many voters would be affected by such a festival, not all voters would be affected equally.
The record shows that the reliably Democratic voters in communities of color are crucial chess pieces in the partisan game that is redistricting. Republicans often benefit from packing such voters into districts, making other districts safer for Republican candidates. Conversely, a state’s Democratic Party can benefit if it divides communities of color among many districts, giving each a reliable majority of voters who will support the party’s candidates. This technique, known as “cracking” in map drawers’ argot, often harms minorities, voters who might have greater clout if they were kept in a single district. In some cases it has proved politically expedient for the party drawing the lines to both crack and pack minority voters.
The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder largely ended prior review of district lines by the Justice Department. That, along with rapidly improving technology that makes it ever easier to hide manipulation of communities of color for partisan gain, and the influx of massive amounts of dark money into redistricting, have put some of the voting power of minorities in jeopardy.
If the Supreme Court upholds the lower court decision in Gill, it will allow judges to evaluate, and possibly reject, redistricting maps based on a mathematical formula intended to identify partisan gerrymandering. It could offer those suing on behalf of minority voters a tool for fighting racial discrimination that wouldn’t require the high standard of proof and commitment of resources a typical Voting Rights Act case would, said Leah Aden, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Upholding the lower court ruling in Gill would also reduce the incentive for political parties to use perverse (some would say cynical) interpretations of the Voting Rights Act and Constitution as a way to defend or attack partisan maps, Aden said. In Wisconsin, and also in Texas and North Carolina, gerrymandered maps have been defended by parties with an argument Aden called “The VRA Made Me Do It.”
Gill v. Whitford features a novel variation of this tactic. A brief filed by the Republican Party contends that using the suggested mathematical formula to flag districts drawn for partisan reasons would violate the Voting Rights Act because districts with a majority of minority voters — Democratic districts — could get flagged as unfairly drawn.
At times, Democrats have also invoked the Voting Rights Act for partisan reasons, according to Smith, the attorney who argued the Democrats’ side in Gill v. Whitford. The formula endorsed by the lower courts would allow Democrats to challenge redistricting lines without classifying their objections as a defense of minority voting rights, Smith said during oral arguments. This would reserve the important tools for protecting minority voting rights for cases in which they are legitimately needed.
Let’s start with Wisconsin. It may indeed be a partisan gerrymander, but it still illustrates the complex intersection of race and politics.
Manipulating a map to move around Wisconsin Democrats also means manipulating a map to move around Wisconsin voters who are not white, said Malia Jones, an applied demographer at The University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Wisconsin is one of the most segregated states in the nation,” Jones said. “When we are talking about geography we are also talking about race.”
One example can be seen in an assembly district on the western edge of Milwaukee, a city infamous for its near-perfect division between downtown African-American neighborhoods and white affluent suburbs. In an unprecedented move, Republican map drawers crossed the Milwaukee County line to loop 60 percent minority city neighborhoods into a sprawling suburban district that is, after the redistricting, 87 percent white, according to a ProPublica analysis.
In Highly Segregated Areas Like Milwaukee, Race Always Plays a Factor in Redistricting
Proportion of white, black, and Hispanic residents in Milwaukee County
This is, in fact, a dilution of Democratic voting power. But it also places thousands of African-American and Latino citizens in a heavily white district where they have little hope of electing a candidate who will represent their interests.
“Clearly there is an impact on minority populations,” Jones said.
As in many gerrymandering cases, the attorneys defending the state’s redistricting have argued that the map reflects, among other considerations, an effort to comply with the Voting Rights Act and protect minority voters.
The first test of the Wisconsin map was a successful challenge arguing racial discrimination. In Baldus v. Brennan, federal judges ruled that two state assembly districts in the Latino area of Milwaukee were an example of cracking.
Depositions given by the Republican map drawers as part of the case show that this was hardly an accident. They sought input from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, but then disregarded it in order to limit consideration of Latino voters to two assembly districts and keep the rest of the map intact.
Emails surfaced showing the map drawers had worked with a political science professor in Oklahoma to manipulate the difference between the number of voting-age Latino residents in a district and the number who are citizens and eligible to vote.
While the court found that Latino voters’ rights had been violated, they only changed the two assembly districts.
The outcome of Gill comes at a time when minority voters are facing obstacles they haven’t faced in decades.
Before 2013, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required states and municipalities with a history of discrimination against minority voters to submit redistricting plans to the Department of Justice for review by attorneys, investigators, data analysts and sometimes political scientists.
The Department of Justice could reject the plan, preventing the proposed districts from ever being used in an election. The state or municipality could challenge the decision in federal court, but would be up against the formidable resources of the department.
Though it was imperfect, “there’s no doubt preclearance had a significant deterrent effect,” said John Powers, a former Section 5 analyst at the agency who now works for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
It also forced jurisdictions to report changes to districts, Powers said. While a change to a congressional district is unlikely to go unnoticed, a change at the local level might — even though those lines can have a huge impact on citizens’ lives. “Now, they can make changes and it’s possible no one will even know.”
In 2013, however, the Supreme Court ended many protections of the law. Though Section 5 is still in place, nearly all jurisdictions once subject to preclearance are no longer.
States and other jurisdictions did not even wait for the next census to get to work on re-engineering their political maps. The state of Georgia and municipalities in Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas drew new lines, prompting immediate lawsuits. All would have required pre-approval before the Shelby ruling.
For example, Georgia currently faces a lawsuit from the NAACP over two changes in their mid-decade redistricting. Ahead of the 2016 election, legislators shifted over a thousand African-American and Hispanic voters out of Georgia House District 105, one of the most contested seats in the state, to a majority-white neighboring district with an uncontested seat. The Republican incumbent in District 105 won by fewer than 250 votes.
Republicans were “trying to shore up districts that were too close for comfort by moving around African-Americans,” said Li.
Georgia’s Mid-Decade Redistricting Plan Moved Around Minority Voters to Secure a Republican Seat
Georgia Assembly Districts, 2014 vs. 2016
The effective end of preclearance shifted the burden of policing the system from the government to privately funded lawsuits, and it allowed contested maps to come into effect while those costly lawsuits wended their way through the courts — often, for years.
Anita Earls, an attorney who has handled many redistricting lawsuits — including the ongoing suit in North Carolina — said even simple cases that do not go to trial can cost tens of thousands of dollars. A recent lawsuit over city council redistricting in Pasadena, Texas, cost plaintiffs over a million dollars. Larger cases, like North Carolina House and Senate redistricting, can run up legal bills of millions of dollars and take many years. In some cases, the defendants can eventually be compelled by the court to pay the plaintiffs’ legal bills, but plaintiffs are required to front the money. Reimbursements are by no means guaranteed.
Earls said her group, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, has had to turn down requests for help.
“There are a lot of different cases where we have to tell them we don’t have money and staff,” she said. “There are places where people end up just kind of living with the unfair plan.”
Redistricting lawsuits also take time — often years — a phenomenon that supporters of the Whitford plaintiffs hope will be ameliorated by removing the complication of challenging districts one at a time.
While the court challenges drag on, interim lines often remain in effect as votes are cast. North Carolina has gone through three election cycles using state legislative lines later found to be discriminatory.
In 2017, 19 North Carolina House Districts Were Overturned for Packing Black Voters
Black population by North Carolina House Districts and overturned districts
When party operatives and legislators draw maps, they are aware that it could take years to overturn a redistricting plan, and intentionally use delaying tactics to make sure elections take place under the most favorable circumstances, Earls said.
In North Carolina, she said, state officials “at every step of the way tried to delay litigation, did everything they could to stretch this out.”
As ProPublica has previously reported, donors who supported the racially gerrymandered plan even used a front group to manipulate state judicial elections, so as to ensure redistricting cases would be heard by a Republican panel of judges.
Pressure on state judges further delayed the legal process, forcing the litigants contesting North Carolina’s redistricting plan to turn to the federal courts, Earls said.
Such delays can pay political dividends. During the years North Carolina’s maps were being challenged in court, the legislature under the disputed map passed laws that substantially affected African Americans. Lawmakers imposed stricter rules for voter ID and eliminated the state’s earned income tax credit, a provision that lowers the taxes paid by the poorest residents.
“North Carolina has had a crazy few years in terms of legislation,” said Li of the Brennan Center. “You can’t turn back the clock, what’s happened has happened.”
While citizen groups struggle to find resources to mount redistricting battles, state legislators use money from the state treasury to defend their redistricting maps. Regardless of the outcome, the taxpayers, not the political parties or campaign committees, end up on the hook for legal costs.
North Carolina’s redistricting saga also illustrates the false distinction between race and politics that permeates redistricting.
In their secret map-drawing process, Republican operatives were explicit about their plan to achieve their desired political outcome: a “10-3” map that had 10 safe Republican congressional districts with only three for Democrats, a big change for a state that at the time had a delegation with seven Democrats and six Republicans.
And they were also pretty explicit — at least to each other — about how they planned to achieve their desired party breakdown.
In an email circulating two proposed maps, Tom Hofeller, a Republican redistricting expert sent in by the national Republican Party wrote that both “incorporate all the significant concentrations of minority voters in the northeast into the first district.”
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court affirmed lower court decisions that found North Carolina’s congressional and state legislative maps discriminated against minority voters, specifically by packing minorities into a small number of districts to achieve the maximum number of Republican-friendly seats.
Required to draw new maps, Republican state party leadership announced they would achieve the same 10-3 congressional delegation breakdown, and the same healthy majority in the state legislature, without looking at race at all.
“Race was not among the criteria we considered when we drew these maps,” David Lewis, the Republican member of the state assembly who served as the redistricting point person, told the Associated Press.
Hofeller, the same consultant who drew the original maps, would redraw the maps only looking at political data, with an eye to protecting incumbents elected under previous maps, Lewis said.
In other words, a strictly partisan gerrymander.
But the groups who originally sued against the racially gerrymandered maps said the new maps had simply become discriminatory against African-American voters elsewhere in the state. Once again, they asked the courts to strike those maps down. The case is pending.
“You can’t comply with Voting Rights Act and avoid racial bias by simply ignoring race altogether,” said Bob Hope, Executive Director of Democracy NC.
Some states have been found to violate the civil rights of minority voters during multiple redistricting cycles. Texas’ district lines — drawn by both Republican and Democrat-controlled legislatures — have been thrown out on racial-discrimination grounds for nearly 30 years — during the redistricting of the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s.
Texas Is No Stranger to Overturned Gerrymanders
Three decades of struck-down congressional district maps
Emails between those who drew the maps in 2010 show intentional exploitation of Hispanic voters to achieve partisan goals.
In a series of emails between map drawers, they discuss a phenomenon called “OHRVS,” an acronym which stands for Optimal Hispanic Republican Voting Strength. That acronym was defined by Eric Opiela, a Republican party operative, as “a measure of how Hispanic, and Republican at the same time we can make a particular census block.”
By substituting groups of Hispanic voters with low voter turnout for those with high turnout, Republicans were able to draw hypothetical maps that would create seemingly impossible political districts. One example is a 67 percent Hispanic congressional district that the map drawers projected would nonetheless likely have been won by John McCain or former Republican Gov. Rick Perry.
Texas, which in the 1990s was run by Democrats, also contradicts the notion that Democratic party interests necessarily align with those of minority voters, Aden said.
“In current politics Republicans dominate state legislatures, so more recently it’s Republicans that have been accused of undermining the redistricting process,” she said, but before this recent turn, districts in Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi drawn by Democrat-controlled legislatures were found to be discriminatory.
Though scrutiny of statewide partisan redistricting (one of Gill’s possible outcomes) could be a useful tool to keep state parties from going overboard — and also to fight racial gerrymandering — it cannot detect the subtleties of racial gerrymandering like those that took place in Georgia and Wisconsin.
Those gerrymanders will still have to be challenged the old-fashioned way, and in order to do that, challengers will need access to information about how decisions were made in drawing maps.
But transparency in redistricting is the exception, not the rule.
One thing the states we reviewed have in common is that the public map-drawing process was largely a charade. Emails and documents that subsequently emerged showed the real drawing was done behind closed doors by party operatives and consultants.
In Wisconsin, for instance, the maps were drawn at a law firm associated with the Republican Party, and vetted by the Republican National Committee before anyone in the general public was even allowed to see them.
In North Carolina, the maps were also drawn at a non-government site and a wealthy donor was allowed to see drafts and offer input.
In Texas, Republicans in the state legislature turned to consultants operating in secret.
As more donor money flows into the process and mapmaking tools get more sophisticated, the importance of map drawing in the public eye will only become more important, said the Brennan Center’s Li.
Regardless of the outcome of Gill v. Whitford, experts say it will be important for the public to have a detailed picture of the redistricting process. That goal, they say, can only be achieved when the map drawing process is truly public.
“If communities aren’t being heard, or shut out, if a redistricting plan is rammed through or rushed,” Aden said, “That is a step that needs to be exposed.”
Map Sources: National Conference of State Legislatures, The Brennan Center, U.S. Census Bureau, Georgia General Assembly
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The US and Turkey have ceased processing non-immigrant visas for one another’s citizens. That’s right. If you’re an American and were planning to visit Istanbul this fall, unpack your bags.
In a world of abnormal goings-on, this one is really weird.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has used the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016, as a pretext for moving his country away from democracy and toward an illiberal authoritarianism. He has closed universities and newspapers, jailed journalists, dissidents and academics, and fired 150,000 people from government jobs. The Turkish government maintains that the coup was led by military officers from the Hizmet movement of Fethullah Gulen, a rightwing religious leader who fled Turkey in the late 1990s and lives in Pennsylvania. Only a fraction of those persons targeted, however, have been Gulencis (200,000 people did not act as coup plotters).
Members of the Turkish cabinet have openly charged Barack Obama with having been behind the coup, which is ridiculous. A billionaire crony of Erdogan attempted to buy influence with Trump by hiring the security firm of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Adviser. Flynn allegedly thought seriously about kidnapping the elderly Gulen and rendering him back to Turkey for trial. As it happened, Flynn was fired for not disclosing the extent of his foreign emoluments.
Since Flynn’s departure, US relations with Turkey have plummeted. Ankara abhors the US strategy of depending on the Syrian Kurds to defeat ISIL in Raqqa, fearing that armed and trained Kurds will turn separatist and make trouble over the border in Turkey. Erdogan’s bodyguards have beaten protesters on US soil whenever he has come to the US, viewing all of them as Gulenist terrorists, and the bodyguards were indicted, causing Erdogan to squawk.
But then a couple of weeks ago, Turkey arrested a US embassy employ of Turkish origin on grounds of being a Gulenist and hence a terrorist.
You can’t go around arresting embassy employees; international law frowns on that sort of thing.
So the US cut off all Turks from coming to the US except on immigration visas. Trips for tourism or business are no longer possible. Then Turkey reciprocated.
All this hurts Turkey economically in a way it does not hurt the US. Some 13 percent of Turkey’s GDP comes from tourism, which has taken severe hits the last couple of years. American tourists are a small percentage of the total traveling to Turkey, but American businessmen have lots of investments in the country. Erdogan boasted of having attracted $20 billion in foreign investment in his first decade in power as prime minister.
One of those investors who can no longer go off to inspect his property in Istanbul is Donald J Trump.
Turkey and the United States have been allies since the beginning of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. Turkey was a recipient of Marshall Plan rebuilding funds and was brought into NATO. Turkish troops fought alongside American ones in the Korean War and the Afghanistan War. Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base has been a key asset for US air power in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Neoconservatives of the early 2000s even counted Britain and Turkey, both allies of the US and of Israel, as the only two permanent friends the United States has.
Now the US-Turkey special relationship is in shambles.
As far as I can tell, the main blame for the deterioration of relations between the US and Turkey lies with the paranoid style of Erdogan and his officials.
It may also be, however, that Trump has cut such a bizarre figure that neither Turkey nor anyone else is afraid of the full might of the US at all any mor
!. Renewables comprised 66% of all new net electricity capacity additions in 2016. Two-thirds of added capacity, in other words, consisted of photovoltaic solar cells, wind turbines and biofuels.
2. 165 gigawatts of new solar was added in 2016.
3. In 2016, new solar photovoltaic capacity globally grew by 50 percent.
4. China accounted for half of this additional solar capacity and for 42% of all new renewables additions.
5. Solar additions grew faster than any other fuel, leaving coal in the dust.
6. By 2022, the IEA expects nearly 1000 gigawatts of new solar to have been added internationally, an increase of 42 percent over today, in just 5 years.
7. Developments in India are also startling. By 2022 that country is expected to double its renewables electricity generation capacity (mainly wind and solar), a lightning fast pace of growth that is higher than the forecast for Europe.
8. Indian energy auctions yielded remarkably low prices for both wind and solar projects. In some Indian states, recent bids have been among the world’s lowest, and in some cases so low as to compete successfully with coal.
9. In the industrialized world, Denmark will be the vanguard of renewable energy by 2022, with 70% of its electricity generated by wind, solar and other renewables.
10. In several major European states, the share of wind and solar in electricity generation will come to 25%.
The Voice of America reports that on Thursday, Trump met with US military leaders to discuss Iran and North Korea, then staged a photo opportunity with them. He asked the journalists,
“You guys know what this represents? . . . Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”
What storm?
“You’ll find out.”
Trump has menaced North Korea with “fire and fury” and is now said to be determined to decertify Iran on compliance with the nuclear deal (the International Atomic Energy Agency, which inspects Iran’s nuclear facilities, says Iran is in compliance).
Trump is a blowhard and you can’t pay too much attention to his bluster or you’d never get any sleep.
But what is worrying is that Trump’s poll numbers are cratering in a way unprecedented for any modern president, as a just-released Associated Press poll makes clear:
In March, 42 percent of respondents approved of Trump’s handling of his job.
In late September, only 32 percent said they approved of Trump’s job performance.
67 percent or over 2/3s say they disapprove. Let’s just underline that a 2/3s majority is required in Congress to impeach a president.
Even among Republicans, his approval numbers fell from 80 percent last spring to 67 percent today. (Two-thirds of Republicans apparently wouldn’t care if Bozo the Clown was president as long as he said he was a Republican).
The conjuncture of these two pieces of news– Trump making cryptic but dire threats and Trump’s astonishing unpopularity–creates the threat of a wag the dog scenario.
Americans rally around the flag when the US goes to war, and presidents know this. The 1997 dark comedy film directed by Barry Levinson, “Wag the Dog,” gave its name to this strategy (in the movie, a phony war with Albania is used as a means of distracting the public from a candidate’s sex scandal).
George W. Bush was widely viewed as a buffoon before 9/11 and the Iraq War, and only in 2006 did the buffoon image return to some extent. The war likely saved his presidency, and that may be one of the reasons Bush launched it.
Trump is having the kind of fall from grace politically that typically tempts presidents into some sort of military action.
And that is why we should take his “calm before the storm” threat seriously.
Trump appears likely to attempt to derail the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA]), next week. The deal curbs Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and prevents it from using the program to do more than create fuel for power plants. Trump will argue that the sanctions relief Iran obtained from the United States and the United Nations for signing the agreement in summer of 2015 is undeserved. The deal is monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency of the UN, which reports Iran to be in compliance. Since the Republican Congress did not want the deal, preferring war with Iran, it set up its own certification process every 90 days. The US congressional “certification” is not part of the deal, which was concluded between Iran and the UN Security Council plus Germany (representing the European Union).
Trump will decertify Iran on grounds of its missile program and “terrorism,” which are not part of the deal in the first place. The US accuses Iran of terrorism for supporting Hizbullah in Lebanon (which the Lebanese cabinet has designated its national guard for the south) but never accused the Israelis of terrorism for illegally invading and occupying Arab territory and then kicking families out of their homes and terrorizing them. If Israel hadn’t behaved that way in Lebanon there likely would be no Hizbullah.
The JCPOA closed off all the avenues for Iran to produce a nuclear weapon, something Khamenei forbade anyway. It reduces the number of centrifuges to 6,000, it caused the planned Arak heavy water reactor to be abandoned and bricked in, it required the casting of uranium enriched to 19.5% for the medical reactor in a form that does not allow further enrichment. The US got everything in this deal, Iran got bupkes. Iran was not trying to make a bomb anyway. Khamenei repeatedly gave fatwas (binding legal opinions) against nuclear weapons as incompatible with Islamic law and values, since they kill masses of innocent civilians.
The rest of the world will just ignore Trump and the hawks on Capitol Hill. Europe, Russia and China are eager to do business with Iran, a country with the population of Germany and the gross domestic product of Poland that is virgin territory for foreign investment. European governments are already putting in place plans to protect European firms that invest in Iran from any attempted US Department of Treasury sanctions.
The erratic mood swings of Washington will come as no surprise to Iran’s leader (he isn’t called the “supreme” leader in Persian–that is Western journalistic propaganda). Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been a consistent critic of negotiations with the United States on the grounds that it is a warmongering inconsistent imperialist power, which will always go back on its word and find some pretext to inflict harm on Iran.
Khamenei said as nuclear talks kicked off in 2014, “I have said before … I am not optimistic about the negotiations. It will not lead anywhere, but I am not opposed either . . . What our foreign ministry and officials have started will continue and Iran will not violate its (pledge) … but I say again that this is of no use and will not lead anywhere.” “>.
He added, “The nuclear issue is an excuse for America to continue its animosity. Now, the American spokesmen are bringing up the issues of human rights and missiles.”
Remember, this speech in Tabriz was at the start of serious negotiations in early 2014. It now seems prophetic.
At the time, the Brookings Institution made fun of Khamenei. Suzanne Maloney wrote that on the eve of the talks, “Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered one of his trademark jeremiads against Washington. His remarks were laced with suspicion and indifference to the ostensible purpose of the dialogue, the resolution of the nuclear impasse, and they underscore the challenge of devising a detailed, rigorous agreement that can withstand the brunt of the entrenched rancor from Iran’s highest authority.”
I don’t mean to pick on Brookings, which tilts liberal and where I have friends, or on Ms. Maloney, who was writing in a different era. But Khamenei had some reason for his suspicions, and he did not actually display “entrenched rancor” toward the negotiations. He just was under no illusions that even if they succeeded they would mean the end of US attempts to overthrow the Iranian government again, as it did in 1953.
His “trademark jeremiad” turns out to have been perfectly sensible. Maloney is right that Khamenei has a lot of crazy conspiracy theories about the US (it did not create or back ISIL) and has a weak grasp on historical accuracy. But on this particular issue, he was right. The US does promote “war” and “poverty” when they suit the American political elite and business classes. The US is the major reason for which 4 million occupied Palestinians can be crushed under the jackboot of the Israeli far right and driven into poverty. The US adventuristic invasion and occupation of Iraq destabilized the region. US covert operations, from coups to drone strikes, have spread turmoil. (On the other hand the USAID has done good work in malaria elimination and US inventions have made millions of lives easier).
Iran entered into the negotiations on the grounds that sanctions would be lifted. Those sanctions were harming the country’s economy and putting lives at risk (Iran Air’s fleet of planes was aging e.g.). While international sanctions have been lifted, the GOP Congress has ratcheted up sanctions, as Khamenei foresaw. Many European firms are afraid of US sanctions and so have not invested in Iran. Iran gave up a major deterrent tool (a nuclear program serves to discourage invasion plans even if no bomb is actually assembled) and got almost nothing for it.
Now, Trump and far right hawks like Sen. Cotton intend to see if the US can renege on the deal entirely, essentially unsigning it and reversing its commitments.
The only reason for reneging on the JCPOA is to prepare the way for a war of aggression against Iran.
Iran is three times bigger geographically, much more rugged, and 2.5 times as populous as Iraq. For anyone who is too young to remember that one, let us just say it did not go well, cost a lot of money and lives, and produced no tangible benefit for the US public.
As for Khamenei, he also observed after the JCPOA was signed, , “Today, even the diplomatic officials and those who were present in the [nuclear] negotiations reiterate the fact that the US is breaching its promises, and while speaking softly and sweetly [to Iran], is busy obstructing and damaging Iran’s economic relations with other countries . . . The JCPOA, as an experience, once again proved the futility of negotiations with the Americans, their lack of commitment to their promises and the necessity of distrust of US pledges.”
It isn’t surprising that Khamenei feels this way. What is dangerous is that with Trump at our helm, the whole world may come to view the United States in this light, and nothing could be more damaging to US national security.
Carol E. Lee at NBC reported Wednesday that last summer Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, called Trump a “f*cking moron.” The remark came after a number of incidents in which Trump had contradicted Tillerson on policy, and directly after Trump made salacious remarks to a crowd of boy scouts. Tillerson at one point had led the Boy Scouts.
The justice of Tillerson’s remark is obvious. Here are some examples:
1. Trump joined with Saudi Arabia in beating up on little Qatar, calling the small Gulf monarchy “terrorists.” Qatar hosts the US Air Force base al-Udeid and helped capture Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, proving itself a key ally in fighting extremism. For Saudi Arabia to accuse Qatar of fostering extremism is a bit rich, but Trump joined in.
2. The Iran nuclear deal is one of the more successful such negotiations in modern history and a model for how the UN Security Council could curb nuclear proliferation. Trump is determined to undermine the deal, which would reinforce the suspicions and militancy of countries such as North Korea, making it even more difficult to handle.
3. Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords on the grounds that they are too constricting and detract from US sovereignty. But the accords allow each nation to set its own priorities! Even Tillerson, who when it comes to climate change, is Satan incarnate, wanted to stay in Paris (I presume because it could be used as a fig leaf for inaction on carbon dioxide emissions).
4. Trump went to Puerto Rico on Tuesday and made the presidency a laughingstock. He maintained that Katrina had been a much more devastating storm than Irma and that because they weren’t actually dead the Puerto Ricans weren’t suffering as much. We don’t know the death toll in Puerto Rico because 95 percent of the island doesn’t have electricity and not all the dead have been found by institutions of the commonwealth. Moreover, catastrophic hurricanes are not a race where one state wins and another loses. Then Trump gave out supplies at a church, including flashlights, but he remarked to recipients that they didn’t need flashlights any more. They do. He made hurricane relief all about himself instead of about the victims. It was so bizarre a performance that “moron” doesn’t begin to cover it.
5. Trump gave away US foreign policy to Exxon Mobil, the big oil company, which had been led by Mr. Tillerson up until his move to the State Department. The US should be making a frantic and concerted effort to get off fossil fuels, not coddling Big Oil interests. Appointing Tillerson to run the State Department, and letting him gut it in favor of lucrative oil deals for his former corporation is just about the most moronic thing you could imagine.
Germany funds foundations for its political parties. If the far right gets one, we’re one step closer to globalizing the alt-right.
Germany got its very own electoral shock this week when the far right won 13 percent of the vote in country’s parliamentary elections.
For the first time in more than half a century, the far right will be represented in the German parliament, with more than 90 seats. Although it’s now Germany’s third most popular party — behind the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SDP) — the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is still too toxic to become part of a ruling coalition.
But the AfD will have influence well beyond its numbers. “In a nutshell,” Deutsche Wellereports, “things are about to get a lot nastier.”
The AfD’s electoral victory has destroyed the taboo in Germany that has kept the far right on the fringes. It will inevitably pull the ruling Christian Democrats further to the right, particularly on social issues like immigration. It may even have an impact on the ongoing discussions about the fate of the European Union.
Beyond Germany, the AfD’s success will give a shot in the arm to other far-right formations, particularly after the National Front’s losses in the last French elections. Looking a little further down the road, if it manages to return to parliament in the next election, the AfD will qualify for government money to create its own party foundation, which will enable Germany’s far right to spread its message all over the world.
Europe’s rebellion against liberalism — in both its economic and social versions — is continuing to shake up politics as usual. An equally unsettling question, though, is how much it will shake up geopolitics as usual.
What the AfD Wants
The far right in Germany has followed much the same script as the Tea Party and the Trump movement in the United States.
It began in 2013 with several academics angry about the Eurozone (and, by extension, the European Union). But just like economist Dave Brat was an obscure political hopeful until he started talking about the so-called “threat” of immigrants in Virginia — and ended up taking House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s seat in 2014 — the AfD only became truly popular by stoking anti-immigrant sentiment.
As Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats welcomed refugees into Germany in 2015 — an influx, to date, of around 1.3 million people — the AfD began to peel away support from the center-right CDU. Even the purportedly moderate faces of the AfD, like Jorg Muethen, have made statements like, “in some German cities, I struggle to find Germans on the streets,” thus equating German citizenship with skin color or other external markers.
The party has advocated border controls — effectively abrogating the Schengen system of free movement within many EU member states — as well as new border patrols. Frauke Petry, a party leader who is also considered a moderate, has said that these new border police units should shoot at migrants if necessary as they try to make it into the country.
Central to the anti-immigrant message has been Islamophobia. The party plastered the streets of Germany with posters like one that showed two young, bikini-clad women from behind that read, “Burkas? We like bikinis.” On Facebook, it distributed an ad showing bloody tire tracks with the caption, “The tracks left by the world chancellor in Europe,” linking Merkel’s refugee policy to terrorist attacks around the continent.
The party has other deeply disturbing positions, like its denial of climate change. But what has caused some division within the party is its attitude toward German history. One party leader, Bjorn Hocke, has called for a “180-degree turnaround” in German attitudes about the Nazi era. Since current German policy is firmly in the camp of condemnation of Nazis, it’s quite sobering to imagine the kind of policy that Hocke prefers.
This German corollary to Trump’s appeal to white supremacists and neo-Nazis has divided the party. Frauke Petry abruptly walked out of an AfD press conference this week after announcing that she wouldn’t sit in parliament with the party faction. Reportedly, Petry has wanted to purge the party of its extremist elements — at least those who take an extremist position on the history question — just as Marine Le Pen attempted to clean up the National Front by kicking her anti-Semitic father out of the French far-right party.
According to Spiegel’s analysis of AfD’s likely MPs, 35 of 94 are “right wing extremists.” So, it’s not just about a purge of one or two bad apples. Expect the AfD to split along the same realo and fundi — realist vs. fundamentalist — fault line of the Greens.
A key connection between AfD and Trump, the UK Independence Party, and right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is their ad man, Vincent Harris. He’s responsible for the bikini and tire tracks ad campaigns. He’s adept at fusing anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and race-baiting messages. But with one of his suggestions for the AfD, Harris went too far. The party rejected his suggestion of “Germany for Germans” as a campaign slogan. Perhaps it will resurface in the next election, if the so-called moderates abandon the party.
Finally, what would a modern election be without Russian interference?
In the lead-up to the election, several major newspapers noted that Russian involvement in the German vote was scant. Perhaps they spoke too soon. First to consider are the Russian speakers, those with German heritage who’ve relocated to Germany since the 1980s — the right kind of immigrants from AfD’s point of view. The AfD estimates that fully one-third of its support comes from this constituency, and it has helped the party become the second most popular one in former East Germany.
Then there was the obligatory visit to Moscow, as Petry made her pilgrimage last February and met with, among others, the truly beyond-the-pale politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. As the election entered its last phase, the usual trolls and Twitter bots came out to play, at least some of them Russians supporting AfD.
Again, as with Trump, the Kremlin isn’t interested in promoting a particular party in the hopes that it will win or reorient the country’s foreign policy. It simply wants to shake up a status quo that it perceives as tilted against Russia.
Has the Right Already Won?
Even though the radical right has lost some recent elections — notably in France and in the Netherlands — it has nevertheless transformed the debate in Europe.
Consider the immigration situation. This month, the two-year program to relocate 160,000 migrants from Greece and Italy to other EU member states came to an end. It managed to relocate only 28,000 people, and only with great effort. Some countries — notably Poland and Hungary — refused to locate a single migrant. More than 20 member states failed to meet their obligatory target by 50 percent.
Far right populists poisoned the discourse on immigration, denouncing millions of people as well as linking this “scourge” to the EU, multiculturalism, and liberal politics more generally. Throughout the continent, EU member states are tightening their immigration laws, increasing the number of deportations, and sweeping away informal settlements like the “Jungle” in the northern French town of Calais.
“The right-wing populists have already won the upcoming elections in Europe, no matter what the outcome is,” writes Krsto Lazarevic in Deutsche Welle. “The EU has done away with human rights and Western standards of civilization by cooperating with the Libyan coastguard, African dictators, and deporting people back to war zones.”
Then there’s the issue of helping countries like Greece exit their perpetual financial crisis. Discussions this week between Athens and Eurozone officials seem to point the way toward fresh loans and the prospect of Greece becoming fiscally independent by next August. But if Merkel has to bring the Free Democrats into a coalition government, she’ll have to reckon with that party’s “red line” on reforming the Eurozone to facilitate “fiscal transfers” to countries like Greece. The Euroskeptic AfD will rejoice.
Elsewhere in Europe
The French turned back the tide of hatred in the last presidential and parliamentary elections. The National Front, once seemingly on an unstoppable roll, now has only eight seats in parliament, and its leader Marine Le Pen presides over a fractious party.
In the wake of Le Pen’s losses, pundits wondered if Trump has had a bracing effect on Europe. Europeans see how Trump has transformed the United States into a three-ring circus, and they want none of it.
But that’s France. Elsewhere, the far right continues its march.
In Norway, for instance, the right-wing Progress Party pulled in a respectable 15 percent in September elections, good enough for it to continue as a coalition partner with the Conservative Party. But perhaps that’s because the Progress Party, despite its anti-immigrant and pro-nationalist approach, isn’t quite as crazy as the National Front.
A more authentically radical right is poised to take over in Austria in elections next month. There, the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) is polling even better than the AfD — in the low 20s. It would be doing even better if the center-right People’s Party hadn’t started to take up its anti-immigration, Islamophobic message. The bullet dodged at the end of last year when independent Alexander Van der Bellen defeated Freedom Party leader Norbert Hofer seems to have taken a boomerang trajectory.
Worse, the center right in Austria, unlike its counterpart in Germany, has no problems with forming a government with the far right. Given that one-third of Austrians don’t want to live next to Muslims — more than in Germany or France or Switzerland — it can count on considerable popular support for such a coalition.
In the Czech Republic, meanwhile, a certifiably Trump-like figure is likely to win next month’s presidential election. Andrej Babis, currently the finance minister, is a billionaire who’s skeptical of the European Union and wants to close the EU’s borders to keep out immigrants. His involvement in a corruption scandal involving one of his enterprises illegally receiving EU subsidies — oh, the hypocrisy! — doesn’t seem to have harmed his popular standing.
The AfD’s win may well encourage this political trajectory in Europe and beyond. It’s still hard to imagine the party successfully pushing through legislation or having much impact on governance. But if the party gets above 5 percent of the vote in the next parliamentary elections, it will win the right to form its own international foundation. Of course, the Bundestag might deploy various stalling tactics to prevent such an official funding stream — as it did when the left-wing Die Linke qualified — but there’s a strong bias in German political culture to observe the rules.
I’ve worked with German foundations all over the world: Friedrich Ebert (Social Democrats), Friedrich Naumann (Free Democrats), Heinrich Boll (the Green Party), and Rosa Luxemburg (Die Linke). Funded by German taxpayers, they’ve all provided valuable support for civil society and in promoting useful exchange of ideas.
The prospect of German government money helping to spread far right-wing politics globally is a nightmare scenario. Germany just took one step closer to helping globalize the alt-right and recycle from history’s dustbin something that ought never again see the light of day: a Fascist International.
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.
The recent mass shooting in Las Vegas that left dozens of people dead and hundreds injured raises two important questions: How do dangerous people get their guns? And what should the police and courts be doing to make those transactions more difficult?
The fact is that, even leaving aside the assault in Las Vegas and terrorist attacks like the one in San Bernardino, California, in 2015, gun violence is becoming almost routine in many American neighborhoods. The U.S. homicide rate increased more than 20 percent from 2014 to 2016, while last year’s 3.4 percent rise in the violent crime rate was the largest single-year gain in 25 years.
The guns carried and misused by youths, gang members and active criminals are more likely than not obtained by transactions that violate federal or state law. And, as I’ve learned from my decades of researching the topic, it is rare for the people who provide these guns to the eventual shooters to face any legal consequences.
How can this illicit market be policed more effectively?
Undocumented and unregulated transactions
The vast majority of gun owners say they obtained their weapons in transactions that are documented and for the most part legal.
When asked where and how they acquired their most recent firearm, about 64 percent of a cross-section of American gun owners reported buying it from a gun store, where the clerk would have conducted a background check and documented the transfer in a permanent record required by federal law. Another 14 percent were transferred in some other way but still involved a background check. The remaining 22 percent said they got their guns without a background check.
The same is not true for criminals, however, most of whom obtain their guns illegally.
A transaction can be illegal for several reasons, but of particular interest are transactions that involve disqualified individuals – those banned from purchase or possession due to criminal record, age, adjudicated mental illness, illegal alien status or some other reason. Convicted felons, teenagers and other people who are legally barred from possession would ordinarily be blocked from purchasing a gun from a gun store because they would fail the background check or lack the permit or license required by some states.
Anyone providing the gun in such transactions would be culpable if he or she had reason to know that the buyer was disqualified, was acting as a straw purchaser or if had violated state regulations pertaining to such private transactions.
The importance of the informal (undocumented) market in supplying criminals is suggested by the results of inmate surveys and data gleaned from guns confiscated by the police. A national survey of inmates of state prisons found that just 10 percent of youthful (age 18-40) male respondents who admitted to having a gun at the time of their arrest had obtained it from a gun store. The other 90 percent obtained them through a variety of off-the-book means: for example, as gifts or sharing arrangements with fellow gang members.
Similarly, an ongoing study of how Chicago gang members get their guns has found that only a trivial percentage obtained them by direct purchase from a store. To the extent that gun dealers are implicated in supplying dangerous people, it is more so by accommodating straw purchasers and traffickers than in selling directly to customers they know to be disqualified.
The supply chain of guns to crime
While criminals typically do not buy their guns at a store, all but a tiny fraction of those in circulation in the United States are first sold at retail by a gun dealer – including the guns that eventually end up in the hands of criminals.
That first retail sale was most likely legal, in that the clerk followed federal and state requirements for documentation, a background check and record-keeping. While there are scofflaw dealers who sometimes make under-the-counter deals, that is by no means the norm.
If a gun ends up in criminal use, it is usually after several more transactions. The average age of guns taken from Chicago gangs is over 11 years.
The gun at that point has been diverted from legal commerce. In this respect, the supply chain for guns is similar to that for other products that have a large legal market but are subject to diversion.
In the case of guns, diversion from licit possession and exchange can occur in a variety of ways: theft, purchase at a gun show by an interstate trafficker, private sales where no questions are asked, straw purchases by girlfriends and so forth.
What appears to be true is that there are few big operators in this domain. The typical trafficker or underground broker is not making a living that way but rather just making a few dollars on the side. The supply chain for guns used in crime bears little relationship to the supply chain for heroin or cocaine and is much more akin to that for cigarettes and beer that are diverted to underage teenagers.
There have been few attempts to estimate the scope or scale of the underground market, in part because it is not at all clear what types of transactions should be included. But for the sake of having some order-of-magnitude estimate, suppose we just focus on the number of transactions each year that supply the guns actually used in robbery or assault.
There are about 500,000 violent crimes committed with a gun each year. If the average number of times that an offender commits a robbery or assault with a particular gun is twice, then (assuming patterns of criminal gun use remain constant) the total number of transactions of concern is 250,000 per year.
Actually, no one knows the average number of times a specific gun is used by an offender who uses it at least once. If it is more than twice, then there are even fewer relevant transactions.
That compares with total sales volume by licensed dealers, which is upwards of 20 million per year.
All in the family
So how do gang members, violent criminals, underage youths and other dangerous people get their guns?
A consistent answer emerges from the inmate surveys and from ethnographic studies. Whether guns that end up being used in crime are purchased, swapped, borrowed, shared or stolen, the most likely source is someone known to the offender, an acquaintance or family member.
For example, Syed Rizwan Farook – one of the shooters in San Bernardino – relied on a friend to get several of the rifles and pistols he used because Farook doubted that he could pass a background check. That a friend and neighbor was the source is quite typical, despite the unique circumstances otherwise.
Also important are “street” sources, such as gang members and drug dealers, which may also entail a prior relationship. Thus, social networks play an important role in facilitating transactions, and an individual (such as a gang member) who tends to hang out with people who have guns will find it relatively easy to obtain one.
Effective policing of the underground gun market could help to separate guns from everyday violent crime. Currently it is rare for those who provide guns to offenders to face any legal consequences, and changing that situation will require additional resources to penetrate the social networks of gun offenders.
Needless to say, that effort is not cheap or easy and requires that both the police and the courts have the necessary authority and give this sort of gun enforcement high priority.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on Jan. 15, 2016.
The move would hurt Palestine’s aspirations of statehood.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has backed legislation that would lead to the annexation of nearly 19 Palestinian settlements and uproot some 125,000 to 150,000 Palestinian people.
Israel’s prime minister expressed his support during the Likud meeting at Ma’aleh Adumim, the largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
The legislation is expected to come into effect in the winter session of Israeli’s parliament the Knesset.
The legislation pushed by the right-wing MPs, was written by Yisrael Katz, a member of Netanyahu’s cabinet and Israel’s Knesset.
It will support the “Greater Jerusalem bill” that seeks to add territories of Efrat Betar Illit, Givat Ze’ev and Ma’aleh Adumim to Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries, expanding the area to create a greater metropolitan region and effectively grabbing the land and adding those settlements to Israel.
The city of Ma’aleh Adumim is the largest bloc of Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank and has a population of some 40,000 people. Israel is planning to build at least 4,000 Jewish-only houses in the soon to be marked territory, to create a greater metropolitan region. The move would effectively thwart Palestine’s aspirations of statehood.
“Ma’ale Adumim will always be part of Israel and in addition, I support the Greater Jerusalem bill,” Netanyahu said during the meeting.
“We will intensify the development Ma’ale Adumim,” Israel’s leaders added. “We will add the industrial zone needed and the expansion needed to allow for the advanced development of this place … This place will be part of the state of Israel.”
Trump administration has repeatedly requested Israel hold off on creating new settlements, but Netanyahu has continued with the expansion operations.
If the “Greater Jerusalem bill” is passed, nearly new 125,000 Israeli settlers already living on the outskirts of the West Bank will be added to the new area created, also roughly cutting off at least 100,000
Palestinians administratively who are currently living in parts of Jerusalem neighborhoods, just outside West Bank’s separation wall.
Nabil Shaath, a senior adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, called Netanyahu’s latest move, “totally unacceptable.”
This is an updated version of an article originally published on Jan. 15, 2016.