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Having a Torturer Lead the CIA |
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Thursday, 15 March 2018 08:33 |
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Excerpt: "President Trump has displayed enthusiasm for brutality over the past year."
This March 30, 2010 file photo shows US military guards as they move a detainee inside Camp VI at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (photo: Paul J/ Richards/Getty)
Having a Torturer Lead the CIA
By NY Times Editorial Board
15 March 18
 resident Trump has displayed enthusiasm for brutality over the past year. He has told the police to treat suspects roughly, praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for murdering people suspected of drug ties and called for the execution of drug dealers.
But one of his most unsettling beliefs is still his acceptance of the value of torture. “In my opinion, it works,” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News early last year.
Previously, anyone alarmed by Mr. Trump’s cavalier embrace of government-sanctioned cruelty was reassured by his vow to accept the advice of his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, who opposes torture and promised at his Senate confirmation hearing that he would uphold American and international laws against it.
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God, Cocaine, Money and Forgetting: A Look at Donald Trump's New Economic Advisor |
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Thursday, 15 March 2018 08:25 |
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Burleigh writes: "The story of the man who might rewrite America's tax plan if Donald Trump is elected is, as the mogul might say, really, really fantastic, just terrific."
Larry Kudlow, a CNBC commentator, speaks about the economy during a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation on December 18, 2014, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty)
God, Cocaine, Money and Forgetting: A Look at Donald Trump's New Economic Advisor
By Nina Burleigh, Newsweek
15 March 18
 he story of the man who might rewrite America’s tax plan if Donald Trump is elected is, as the mogul might say, really, really fantastic, just terrific.
It’s a story of God, cocaine, money and forgetting—but maybe not in that order. Born at the beginning of the baby boom in 1947, Lawrence Alan "Larry" Kudlow—whom Trump recently turned to for a revision of his tax package—grew up to be lefty, hairy and against the Vietnam War. He worked on Democratic political campaigns alongside Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton future campaign chairman John Podesta before he had his first conversion, veered hard right and soon found himself working in Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget.
After this stint in D.C., Kudlow returned to the private sector in 1987, headed to Wall Street and spent some years like every other debauched executive with an excess of cash and a waterbed in the tail end of the Me Decade: on weeklong cocaine binges. His drug problem caused him to resign from the investment bank Bear Stearns in 1994.
Conservative intellectual godfather William Buckley, never one to let a fine right-wing mind go to waste, soon scooped him off the sidewalk and appointed him senior economics editor at National Review, the nation’s preeminent conservative publication.
“I loved that, because of National Review’s intellectual atmosphere and interesting people,” Kudlow told the Catholic publication Crisis Magazine in 2000. “And there is a certain Catholicism that permeates the place.”
But Kudlow kept drinking and snorting, and National Review fired him after a year. He hit rock bottom in 1995 and shipped out for five months in a Minnesota rehab. There, he ditched the coke and booze for good. Upon leaving rehab, he signed up for some Catholic Opus Dei retreats and found he liked the rigor of a conservative, and what some call "cult-like," group that has been likened to Scientology, with ties to fascist organizations in Italy, and which offered spiritual succor to the likes of the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
In 1997, Kudlow was on his knees in a chapel at St. Thomas More Church in New York City, bawling and converting to Catholicism in front of the whole lock-jawed National Review gang, including Buckley, Kate O’Beirne and Peggy Noonan.
“As soon as I saw Christ on the cross, I felt at one with it,” said Kudlow, who was bar mitzvahed at age 13.
He soon found his other true calling as the King of All Right-Wing Economic Media, and today he is a CNBC senior contributor, has his own live radio program, the syndicated Larry Kudlow Show, airing every Saturday from 10 a.m to 1 p.m. ET, and publishes comments “roughly” once or twice a week to “present detailed economic research analysis of recent economic and political trends and developments,” according to his website.
He also dispenses wisdom privately to “clients” through Kudlow & Company, according to his website.
Those investors apparently don’t know or care that Kudlow has been spectacularly wrong on the biggest economic turning points in modern history. Just before the real estate crash that provoked the 2008 global financial meltdown, he ridiculed people predicting that outcome as “bubbleheads” and was still assuring his listeners and viewers after the financial crash that there was nothing to worry about. As late as 2011, he predicted that the Obama administration stimulus program would create “1970s-style stagflation.” Meanwhile, the country has been seeing the lowest inflation in two generations and the lowest interest rates in history.
Trump’s original tax plan—released to ridicule from mainstream economists on both sides of the political spectrum last September—would have cost $10 trillion and given massive tax cuts to the rich. He has since brought on Kudlow and former American Heritage senior economist Stephen Moore—another supply-side disciple—to tinker with it. The two new advisers have, according to Bloomberg, pared down the cost of the plan to $3.8 trillion by raising his top tax rate to 28 percent from 25 percent. This is still an epic bonanza for the super-rich, since the current top tax rate is 39.6 percent. The plan keeps the capital gains tax rate at 15 percent across income levels and lets companies use “immediate expensing of equipment” for tax purposes.
Trump himself has still not released his own tax returns, and on Tuesday he reiterated that he probably will not do so, making him the first presidential candidate in 40 years not to. A Clinton-aligned super PAC on Wednesday said he is less transparent than Richard Nixon—who did release his taxes, even while under audit.
Kudlow has periodically toyed with the idea of running for U.S. Senate in Connecticut, where he has a home. He is not known to have revised his own theories about the trickling down of money from untaxed wealth since the working class revolted against the GOP’s supply-side-hypnotized establishment and nominated Trump.
Kudlow, Moore and Art Laffer (he of the risible “Laffer Curve,” a Reagan-era economics graphic that supposedly proved the poor benefit as the rich get richer) formed a “Committee to Unleash American Prosperity” that wielded some influence over the now-vanquished 2016 GOP candidates. Kudlow even hosted vetting dinners in New York last summer and was among the early cheerleaders for the doomed candidacy of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
The summer of 2015 is a long, long time ago now. And while he remembers his Catholic conversion day “really clearly,” Kudlow conceded to Crisis: “I don't remember many things anymore.”
The supply-side purists have been able to maintain the fig leaf that their billionaire patrons needed during the decades in which wealth inequality in America kept rising. Trump himself appears to have benefited from the long-delayed awakening of the middle-class Republican electorate about the economic philosophy that’s robbed them of their prosperity. By selecting two of the discredited Laffer Curve’s biggest cheerleaders as his economic brain trust, Trump is sending up a smoke signal to the party bosses in Washington and in the Koch mansions that he’s still, wink-wink, one of them.
If he’s lucky—and he has been so far—his working- and middle-class supporters have as many holes in their memory as Kudlow does.
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ICE Deserves to Be Abolished |
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Thursday, 15 March 2018 08:23 |
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Roberts writes: "Those appalled by the prospect of losing ICE, which has hardly existed since time immemorial, ask who would perform its essential functions in its absence."
ICE Agent makes an arrest. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
ICE Deserves to Be Abolished
By Molly Roberts, The Washington Post
15 March 18
 veryone loves a litmus test, and because abortion has proved too thorny these past few years, some on the left have proposed another bright line for candidates to toe: the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The clarion calls to excise ICE from the executive corpus have rung especially clear of late. First, an essay by Sean McElwee in the Nation last week probed whether “an unaccountable strike force executing a campaign of ethnic cleansing” is compatible with democracy. (His answer: No.) Then, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked potential 2020 presidential contender Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) if the agency, which Harris says has abused its power, should exist. (Her answer: Yes.)
To Harris’s further-left detractors, the resignation Tuesday of San Francisco’s ICE spokesman after the Trump administration put out false public statements about a recent raid offered one more reason that she’s wrong. Of course ICE is abusing its power, they argue – that’s what it was created to do. And anyone who plans to lead the Democratic Party should say so and fight to defund it. Conservative and more moderate commentators, on the other hand, act as if they’ve never heard a proposition so radical. Take a government agency and just … get rid of it? Who’d ever suggest something so extreme?
Well, almost every Republican ever. President Trump’s 2019 budget blueprint proposes slashing funding for 22 agencies and programs to zero. His 2018 document targeted 19. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) want to get rid of the Internal Revenue Service. Rick Perry famously campaigned on cutting the departments of Commerce, Education and “oops” in 2011. (“Oops” turned out to be Energy, which Perry now heads.) The list goes on; in fact, Republicans have recommended the elimination of nearly every Cabinet agency at some point in time.
And while Democrats are generally less eager to lop off bureaucratic limbs, Barack Obama did attempt to eliminate the Commerce Department toward the beginning of his presidency. (Republicans had already tried the same thing in 1995.)
Those appalled by the prospect of losing ICE, which has hardly existed since time immemorial, ask who would perform its essential functions in its absence. That question doesn’t seem to concern them when it comes to other departments; they just assume those functions aren’t actually essential. Those who want to abolish ICE have a strong argument. They’re not saying the agency is useless, and they’re not saying it’s a money-sink. They’re saying it does active harm.
ICE was created in 2003 as part of the post-9/11 panic-induced increase in domestic surveillance. ICE’s animating idea was that immigrants were an existential threat. Never has ICE come close to its initial strategy goal of “a 100% rate of removal for all removable aliens,” but today’s administration seems to want to reach it more than ever – and it has more technological tools than ever, too.
Every week there’s another story. It’s a 39-year-old landscaper living near Detroit who has been here since he was 10 and hasn’t even run a stop sign. It’s a 10-year-old with cerebral palsy sitting in an ambulance on the way to the hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery. It’s the 92 Somalis who were beaten and threatened and forced to urinate on themselves on a deportation flight that ended up returning to the United States, and who are now still being held in abusive detention.
It may seem odd, or even radical, that Democrats are asking for an agency to get the ax. Small government has always been a Republican principle. But the Democrats have some principles too, and one of them rests on that old concept of the United States as a nation of immigrants. Prospective presidential candidates claim they’d like to enact comprehensive reform to restore that vision. There’s no reason reform shouldn’t include disbanding a deportation squad (and transferring duties such as customs investigations elsewhere).
What’s happening today is happening because of Trump, but it’s also happening because of what ICE was always meant to be: an immigrant disposal system. The agency isn’t after “good” guys or “bad” guys. It’s after everyone. “The shackles [are] off,” as Trump said, but the beast they were holding back was born 15 years ago. Being a good Democrat might just mean killing it.
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Saudi Crown Prince Implicated: Credible Reports of Torture and Murder in Ritz Carlton: NYT |
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Thursday, 15 March 2018 08:21 |
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Cole writes: "This Marxist fantasy of bourgeois abuse was carried out by the young prince in the name of an anti-corruption campaign."
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (photo: AP)
Saudi Crown Prince Implicated: Credible Reports of Torture and Murder in Ritz Carlton: NYT
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
15 March 18
he late Saudi Maj. Gen. Ali al-Qahtani is said to have shown up at the morgue from the Riyadh Ritz Carlton where he had been imprisoned by Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, 32, with a broken neck, bruises and swelling all over his body, and burn marks from electric shock.
Ben Hubbard, David D. Kirkpatrick, Kate Kelly and Mark Mazzetti at The New York Times confirm through extensive interviewing the horror stories that leaked out of the Ritz Carlton this past fall, about the cream of the Saudi business class being imprisoned and tortured until they signed over their assets to Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman. This Marxist fantasy of bourgeois abuse was carried out by the young prince in the name of an anti-corruption campaign, but it appears to have been a bid to weaken the relatives of the late King Abdullah and to feather the nest of the future king.
The NYT report reveals that the some 200 victims of this arbitrary seizure of their property are still more or less under house arrest, forced to wear electronic bracelets, and that they and their close family members have not been allowed to leave the country. Many signed over virtually all their assets to gain their freedom, but no legal attachment of their property has yet been carried out, so they are in limbo, sitting in homes they do not know if they own and on no-fly watchlists.
Inside the Ritz Carlton, shower rods and glass doors were removed from the bathrooms to prevent suicide attempts. Detainees were systematically abused, 17 of them so badly they were sent to hospital.
Al-Qahtani, taken into custody in early November, had been the security chief for Prince Turki Bin Abdullah, a son of the late King Abdullah who may have been viewed by Bin Salman as a rival for power from a different branch of the royal family. The Arabic press has alleged that al-Qahtani’s phone conversations with Turki Bin Abdullah and Abdul ‘Aziz Bin Abdullah, both sons of the late king were the reason for the torture. The Saudi regime wanted to know the substance of those conversations. If this report is true, it suggests that Bin Salman, like Saddam Hussein, suffers from extreme paranoia. The sons of Abdullah pose no threat to him.
Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the world’s wealthiest men, allegedly had to hand over some $6 bn of his $18 bn fortune (this is from other sources not the NYT), and the grasping Crown Prince’s attempt to seize the assets of Kingdom Holding Co. outside Saudi Arabia were thwarted because those businesses required Alwaleed to come to the premises in person to sign them away and because a counter-signature was needed from foreign partners. Apparently, however, Alwaleed and his family are still being monitored in Saudi Arabia and have their movements restricted. Alwaleed, a notorious health nut, said in a Reuters interview on the eve of his release that he had been wandering around the Ritz Carlton eating fast food, which friends took as a signal that he was being coerced in his affirmation that he had not been abused. He had clearly lost a great deal of weight and looked as though he had been under severe pressure if not open abuse.
Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman is on a victory tour to Britain and the US, where he is hoping to drum up foreign investment in his country. The Tory government of Theresa May has just agreed to sell him large quantities of fighter jets, a move that is controversial because he is using them to bomb Yemen back to the stone age.
In Latin, Caveat Emptor means, “Buyer beware.”
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