|
FOCUS: Arms and the Very Bad Men |
 |
|
Tuesday, 23 October 2018 11:45 |
|
Krugman writes: "A few days ago, Pat Robertson, the evangelical leader, urged America not to get too worked up about the torture and murder of Jamal Khashoggi, because we shouldn't endanger '$100 billion in arms sales.'"
Economist Paul Krugman. (photo: Getty Images)
Arms and the Very Bad Men
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
23 October 18
Trump’s rationale for going easy on Saudi Arabia is a shameful lie.
 few days ago, Pat Robertson, the evangelical leader, urged America not to get too worked up about the torture and murder of Jamal Khashoggi, because we shouldn’t endanger “$100 billion in arms sales.” I guess he was invoking the little-known 11th Commandment, which says, “On the other hand, thou shalt excuse stuff like killing and bearing false witness if weapons deals are at stake.”
O.K., it’s not news that the religious right has prostrated itself at Donald Trump’s feet. But Trump’s attempt to head off retaliation for Saudi crimes by claiming that there are big economic rewards to staying friendly with killers — and the willingness of his political allies to embrace his logic — nonetheless represents a new stage in the debasement of America.
It’s not just that Trump’s claims about the number of jobs at stake — first it was 40,000, then 450,000, then 600,000, then a million — are lies. Even if the claims were true, we’re the United States; we’re supposed to be a moral beacon for the world, not a mercenary nation willing to abandon its principles if the money is good.
That said, the claims are, in fact, false.
First, there is no $100 billion Saudi arms deal. What the Trump administration has actually gotten are mainly “memorandums of intent,” best seen as possible future deals rather than commitments. Many of these potential deals would involve production in Saudi Arabia rather than the U.S. And the sales, if they did materialize, would be spread over a number of years.
It looks unlikely, then, that deals with Saudi Arabia will raise U.S. annual arms exports by more than a few billion dollars a year. When you bear in mind that the industries involved, mainly aerospace, are highly capital intensive and don’t employ many workers per dollar of sales, the number of U.S. jobs involved is surely in the tens of thousands, if that, not hundreds of thousands. That is, we’re talking about a rounding error in a U.S. labor market that employs almost 150 million workers.
READ MORE
 |
|
RSN: Rampant, Racist Voter Suppression in Georgia Goes to Federal Court |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Tuesday, 23 October 2018 10:52 |
|
Boardman writes: "If Brian Kemp wins the 2018 election for governor of Georgia, it will be one more triumph for the massive corruption Republicans have brought to American voting for the past 20 years or more."
Brian Kemp. (photo: John Amis/AP)
Rampant, Racist Voter Suppression in Georgia Goes to Federal Court
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
23 October 18
… almost a quarter of a million previously registered voters who may want to vote in this election who will find their registrations cancelled based on an assumption that they had moved when they had not.
This is a travesty for the people of Georgia whose fundamental right to vote has been taken without any formal notice that their registrations have been cancelled.
 f Brian Kemp wins the 2018 election for governor of Georgia, it will be one more triumph for the massive corruption Republicans have brought to American voting for the past 20 years or more. Brian Kemp is currently Georgia’s secretary of state. Part of the secretary’s job, as chair of the State Elections Board, is to make decisions that determine who can vote, where they can vote, when they can vote, and whether their votes will be counted accurately – in other words, the whole voting process.
As a secretary of state running for governor, Kemp has a clear conflict of interest, since any of his decisions about voting rights could help his campaign. Many of them already have. Previous secretaries of state who ran for governor have taken themselves out of the voting rights conflict. Kemp has refused to do so. His corruption is so blatantly transparent, his spokesman dishonestly proclaims that “Kemp is fighting to protect the integrity of our elections and ensure that only legal citizens cast a ballot.”
The claim of illegal voting by non-citizens has been a Republican Big Lie for a long time now. It works, it scares people who don’t know any better, but it’s not true and has never been true. In 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice analyzed 23.5 million votes for taint. Out of 23 million votes, only a handful of ballots were flagged for investigation or prosecution. OK, it was a big handful – out of 23,500,000 ballots they found 30 – thirty! – that were suspect. Presumably their intimidation tactics work or Republicans wouldn’t work so hard to suppress the vote, even with recent (October 20), baseless presidential tweets.
Middle-aged white male Brian Kemp’s opponent for governor is a progressive Democrat, Stacey Abrams, a middle-aged black woman and Yale Law School graduate who would be the first-ever African-American governor of Georgia. She founded the New Georgia Project, registering some 200,000 voters of color since 2014. Kemp has been disqualifying voters of color even faster. With Kemp recently holding a two-point lead (48-46), their race is considered a toss-up.
The lawsuit cited above grew out of a records request to the secretary of state on March 2, 2018. The request was made under both the Georgia Open Records Act and the 1993 federal National Voter Registration Act (52 U.S.C. 20501 et seq.), the primary purpose of which is “to establish procedures that will increase the number of eligible citizens who register to vote in elections for Federal office.” [emphasis added] Republicans like Kemp have spent a quarter century in more or less open defiance of this federal law, based on Congressional findings that would be unimaginable today:
(1) the right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right;
(2) it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right; and
(3) discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can have a direct and damaging effect on voter participation in elections for Federal office and disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.
The plaintiffs in the federal case against Kemp are reporter Greg Palast of Los Angeles and civil rights activist Helen Butler of Atlanta. Palast has built an international reputation with his investigative reporting, especially his reporting on voting rights issues that others in the media (and the Democratic Party) tend to ignore. Butler is the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda, which has organized state coalitions in more than half a dozen other southern states.
The initial request for legally public records included a request for information about how Georgia uses the Interstate Voter Crosscheck System in managing Georgia’s voter rolls. Crosscheck, which has a built-in racial bias against non-white voters, has been used since 2005, especially by Republican secretaries of state seeking to purge voters rolls into a more Republican-friendly form (led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach). Crosscheck purports to identify “duplicate” voters in different states using only two data points: name and birthdate (different middle names, for example, are considered irrelevant). In 2017, Crosscheck claimed to find 7.2 million duplicate voter registrations out of 98 million analyzed in 28 states. Despite Crosscheck’s claim of the potential for over seven million voters to vote twice, only 4 – four! – double-voters were identified. Crosscheck is now dormant. The damage is lasting.
Kemp’s office did not respond to the request forthrightly. Instead, Kemp’s office demanded exorbitant payment in advance before providing redacted records. Other states acted similarly to stonewall legal “open records” requests.
On June 12, 2018, plaintiffs Palast and Butler filed a new request using only the National Voter Rights Act. The request allowed Kemp 90 days to reply. Kemp did not reply promptly to detailed questions about Crosscheck’s lists provided to Georgia in 2016 and 2017, as well as the “list of names and addresses of all those purged or changed to inactive in 2016 and 2017 and the basis for each individual being removed from the voter rolls….”
Kemp’s office did not respond in June. Kemp’s office did not respond in July. On August 14, plaintiffs sent Kemp a letter reminding him that his 90-day deadline for lawful compliance would expire on September 10. On September 4, Kemp provided a partial response, omitting any information about Crosscheck. In their October filing to compel a complete response to their questions, they wrote:
Plaintiffs were shocked when they saw that over a half a million Georgians had their registrations automatically cancelled through the inactivity process utilized by the Georgia Secretary of State.
Claiming that Georgians had not voted during a three-year period, Kemp’s office in 2017 cancelled the voter registrations of 534,517 Georgians for that reason alone. That is roughly one in 12 Georgians disenfranchised for not voting. That reason is illegal. That reason violates federal law – the National Voting Rights Act – which requires that state voting procedures “shall not result in the removal of the name of any person from the official list of voters registered to vote” solely because the person did not vote. Further reasons for removal include moving out of state, being convicted of a felony, or death.
Further analysis of the data showed that of the half-million-plus voters whose registrations were cancelled because they had supposedly moved, at least 340,134 of them – 61% of the total – still lived at the same address. These 340,134 persons did not know their registrations had been cancelled by the state. Palast posted all their names on his website in hopes that some might re-register before the October 9 deadline.
The cancellation of 340,134 registrations of people who have not moved is another violation of the National Voting Rights Act, which requires the state to keep voter rolls that are accurate and current.
This case is now before federal district judge Eleanor Louise Ross, an Obama appointee confirmed in 2014. In an interview with the Atlanta Tribune, Judge Ross said:
I believe this century has seen enormous strides by women and minorities in general. My having made history as the first African-American female on the U.S. Federal District Court in Atlanta, and one of the first two in the entire state, just continues to blow my mind. There are so many well-rounded, qualified candidates whom are ready to also jump in, if provided with the right opportunity. I think it is crucial that those of us already appointed and elected continue to work together to keep making history until it is not history anymore. It just is!
From that, one might infer that the judge is ready to rule for plaintiffs and deal a blow to Georgia’s corrupt voter management system. Restoring the voting rights of 340,134 purged voters would surely be the right thing to do. But even the plaintiffs have not asked for that kind of legal relief. The plaintiffs have asked only that Kemp be found in violation of the National Voter Rights Act and be compelled to provide all the information plaintiffs have requested.
That outcome would award corruption. That outcome would reward a state official for defying the law until the last possible minute. That outcome would leave purged voters with little useful recourse. That outcome might enable a corrupt secretary of state to become a corrupt governor. That outcome would allow Republicans to crow over protecting the integrity of the vote, when the truth is that they just went on corrupting it.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience
in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20
years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers
Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life
magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television
Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for
this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a
link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
|
If You're Suffering From Climate Grief, You're Not Alone |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37482"><span class="small">Eric Holthaus, Grist</span></a>
|
|
Tuesday, 23 October 2018 08:23 |
|
Holthaus writes: "There's no one-size-fits-all approach for taking in something like the looming existential threat of climate change."
'We will need to know not only how we can survive in this new world, but how we will live.' (photo: BBC)
If You're Suffering From Climate Grief, You're Not Alone
By Eric Holthaus, Grist
23 October 18
 ast week’s U.N. climate report gave a terrifyingly clear picture of a world on the brink of locking in catastrophe. It told us what was needed and the horrors that awaited if we failed to mobilize. As a scientific report, it was dazzling. But it didn’t tell us how to process, cope, and adapt our lives to the grief of that overwhelming knowledge.
In 1969, after interviewing hundreds of terminally ill patients, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying, a milestone text on how humans process permanent loss. Kübler-Ross’ description of those reactions — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — are now famous, but they were never meant to be an orderly progression of “stages.” There is no “correct,” linear way to grieve. Our reactions are complicated because people are complicated.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for taking in something like the looming existential threat of climate change. I’ve been listening to a lot of ’90s country music. One of my colleagues has substantially upped her sleep, while one of our Grist editors “stress bakes.” What we feel is what we feel, and it determines our reality — and importantly, our response, to the news. And that response is more important than ever.
What we need now is a major mobilization on climate change. That would require, in the words of the IPCC, “rapid and far-reaching transitions” in “all aspects of society.” We’re taking much more than just solar panels and reusable shopping bags here. After decades of delay, the scale of changes that are necessary will force us to rethink everything. To put in the changes necessary, we have to be able to connect our emotions to our actions. We have to process our grief. We have to somehow move through it, and we have to do all that together.
Last week, Scott Williams of Climate-KIC, a group affiliated with the European Union, wrote a short essay with the headline: “Do we need an IPCC special report for humans?” He explores what it would take to act on the U.N. report and asks provocative questions, like: “What does it mean when every coal mine town has no jobs in five years’ time? What does it mean when in ten years’ time if no airlines can fly over Europe? How do we feed our families if there’s an extended drought which causes mass crop failure? What is the point of putting away money into a pension fund if that fund is investing in a way that just makes things worse? And what are we going to do about it?”
For those of us dealing with climate grief, these questions are familiar. I get dozens of them every week, and I’m never sure exactly how to respond. My go-to reply is: Find a friend and talk about it. But in truth, although it works for me, I have no idea whether or not this is the right advice for everyone.
There are scant few people currently working on this. Kate Schapira, a climate activist in Rhode Island, has taken it upon herself to set up a Peanuts-style counseling booth each summer in a public park in Providence. Renee Lertzman, a psychologist and leader in this field, wrote a book on the subject called Environmental Melancholia — but in interviews, she admits there’s much more to learn.
The best guide I’ve seen so far is Josh Fox’s impressively named documentary How to let go of the world and love all the things climate can’t change. In it, Fox speaks with climate activists as they come to grips with the literal dying of a world they thought would last forever, and dedicate their lives to the struggle, not knowing exactly what the end goal might be. Through that catharsis, the activists re-engage with their role in helping avert the largest crisis in human history — and wind up aiming to build a different, better world. But others, we know, remain disengaged — some, overtly hostile to change — even as the stakes continue to rise.
We’ll need more than this. We’ll need a comprehensive crash course on human psychology to deal with the massive changes we’re seeing; a guide to self-care for the most important decade in human history. We need to know how climate change will change us as social beings, how we can deal with grief, how to go about the process of imagining a new society. We will need to know not only how we can survive in this new world, but how we will live.
This is a necessarily messy process and it won’t be easy, but I’m not sure what could be more important.
|
|
Some Presidential Lies Are Impeachable Offenses |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=49375"><span class="small">Bob Bauer, The Atlantic</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 22 October 2018 13:35 |
|
Bauer writes: "Will Trump's statements on Russia come back to haunt him?"
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort arrives at the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., for a hearing on June 15, 2018. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Some Presidential Lies Are Impeachable Offenses
By Bob Bauer, The Atlantic
22 October 18
Will Trump’s statements on Russia come back to haunt him?
 resident Trump is a committed liar, as even his most dependable supporters openly concede. The Washington Post columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen recently wrote that “the president lies all the time,” and he included this candid assertion in a piece favorable to the president. A serious question is whether Trump’s lies have put him at risk of impeachment.
Of course, politicians are not generally celebrated for their scrupulous adherence to fact or avoidance of hyperbole. Presidents before Trump have had troubled histories with the truth. But the scale of Trump’s lying—his resort to the lie as a central feature of leadership style—sets him apart from his predecessors.
What a president lies about makes all the difference in judging whether his falsehoods rise to the level of an impeachable offense. Some blatant misrepresentations, while reprehensible, matter only in the court of public opinion and at the polls. Trump’s list of reprehensible-but-not-impeachable lies is long.
For example, Trump has lied about how he made his money and built his business. The claim that his father launched him in life with a loan of $1 million and no more is false. He also lied in denying that he arranged to buy the silence of women with whom he had extramarital affairs. He has fabricated entire claims about public-policy matters, as he did most recently by inventing an “open borders” immigration bill ostensibly supported by “every single” Democrat in the Senate. About statements of these kinds, it might be said “caveat emptor,” buyer beware.
Some lies, however, may represent a dereliction of constitutional duty, and these cannot be left to the political marketplace.
As Philip Bobbitt shows in his supplement to Charles Black’s landmark study of impeachment, a “conspiracy to pervert the course of a presidential election” by “acting in league with a hostile foreign power” is clearly a basis for removal. So, too, is any false statement made to impede an investigation into this kind of conspiracy—including false statements to the public. A clear precedent is the article of impeachment on obstruction passed by the House Judiciary Committee in the proceedings against Richard Nixon. It included a charge that Nixon had made “false and misleading public statements,” which were “contrary to his trust as president and subversive of constitutional government.”
It is entirely possible that Trump has made “false and misleading public statements” of exactly that sort.
The president has repeatedly denied not only any legal offense of “collusion” with Russia leading up to the 2016 election—however he may understand the term—but also any contact at all between his campaign and the Kremlin. In November 2016, Hope Hicks spoke for him and his campaign in saying that there was “no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.”
But there was indeed such communication, including at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, when high-level campaign officials met with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer and her associates offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Although the president now takes the position that if there were contacts, he did not authorize them and knew nothing of them at the time, there are people who could falsify that claim.
Prominent among these witnesses is the former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is now cooperating with the special counsel in charge of the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller.
Contrary to the suggestion still periodically made in the president’s defense, collusion that consists of a campaign’s receipt of value from a foreign national, including but not only value in exchange for future policy concessions, would squarely present a violation of federal law.
But to put his onetime boss in jeopardy of impeachment, Manafort would not have to provide evidence of actual collusion—only that Trump knew of attempts to collude in one way or another, and repeatedly, publicly lied about them.
Manafort could, for example, shed light on what the president knew of the Trump Tower episode in advance, and when he learned about the results. On June 7, 2016, two days before the planned meeting, the president indicated that he would deliver a “major speech” about Hillary Clinton. Manafort might know if the president was getting ahead of himself, believing that Russians were on the way with “dirt” that Trump could use for such a speech. It has never seemed likely that if a foreign individual described as a “Russian government attorney” came to the United States for the declared purpose of sharing opposition research, the candidate would not have been informed. Manafort may have been the one to inform him, or would know who did.
Manafort may also have testimony to offer on what the president knew of other campaign initiatives to enlist Russian support for the campaign. Nothing on the public record would lead a reasonable observer to believe that the Trump campaign took a single meeting with Russians, for campaign purposes, and then dropped the subject, allegedly disappointed in the results on that one occasion.
Ever since April 2016, when the campaign adviser George Papadopoulos learned from a Russian contact that the Kremlin might have “thousands” of Hillary Clinton emails, the campaign would have been encouraged to think that the Russians had a trove of useful information on Clinton. Donald Trump Jr.’s now-public emails reflect his enthusiasm for obtaining this material, and in the month after the June 2016 meeting, the president publicly called for the Russians to locate and release what they might have.
Did the president ask his campaign manager to explore every avenue for obtaining this information? Manafort had lines of communication with the Russian government. Most notably, he had contacts over that period with his longtime associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who the special counsel has identified as having had active ties to Russian intelligence services. Did Manafort suggest to the president that he would do what he could through this contact and others to encourage assistance from Moscow? And did he try to signal the Trump campaign’s openness to a mutually beneficial relationship with the Kremlin—such as by directing revisions in the Republican Party platform on Ukraine?
If Trump looked to the Russians to aid his election campaign and then lied to the public about it, an impeachment inquiry would be fully justified—quite apart from the separate question of whether he achieved his goals. Donald Trump Jr. is among those who may know, but may never tell. Paul Manafort may know, too, and he’s talking.
|
|
ust in time for the Nov. 6 election, President Trump is posting some of the best job approval numbers of his presidency. His approval rating is currently 43.1 percent, according to the 
