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Cornel West: We Live in One of the Darkest Moments in American History |
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Saturday, 30 December 2017 09:33 |
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Reese writes: "'We live in one of the darkest moments in American history,' Cornel West begins his new introduction to the 25th-anniversary edition of Race Matters, published on December 5, 2017."
Professor Cornel West. (photo: VICE)
Cornel West: We Live in One of the Darkest Moments in American History
By Hope Reese, JSTOR
30 December 17
  e live in one of the darkest moments in American history,” Cornel West begins his new introduction to the 25th-anniversary edition of Race Matters, published on December 5, 2017. West, a philosopher, political activist, and one of America’s most provocative public intellectuals, wrote Race Matters a year after the LA race riots, which left more than 50 people dead and more than 2,000 injured in the spring of 1992.
But while West told me he was on the “edge of hope” when the book first came out, he believes that the outlook on racial relations in America is even bleaker now. Rather than citing President Trump as the problem, West calls him a “sign of our spiritual bankruptcy.” He is equally critical of President Obama, who West cites as a symbol of the neoliberal establishment, especially when it comes to his Wall Street bailout and drone strikes.
I spoke with West, currently a professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University, about why he thinks that Obama’s ascension should not be seen as a culmination of Malcolm X’s activism, the role of race in Trump’s election, and his feelings about the American flag. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
When you wrote Race Matters, it was a dark time in terms of what was happening with black Americans after the LA race riots. Now it’s 25 years later. Did you expect things would improve? Are you surprised by where the country is, in terms of racial relations?
History is always open-ended––unfinished and incomplete. I was hoping that we would be able to move in a much stronger direction that tilts towards empowering the weak and vulnerable in our society, but we’ve moved in the exact opposite direction. I was at the edge of hope when I wrote Race Matters 25 years ago. I have even less hope now, which means we just have to fight that much more intensely. There’s a sense in which hope is as much a consequence of action as it is a cause of action.
As things become more hopeless, we have to fight more intensely because of issues of integrity, honesty, decency, truth, justice. You have to choose ways of being in the world, even when it looks as if you have very little chance of being victorious at the present moment.
You notice that discourse is shifting from poverty to diversity. Why do you see that as a problem?
It’s neoliberalism, which is this obsession with smartness and richness and bombs dropped on other parts of the world and sometimes bombs dropped here. It tends to put the stress much more on access to middle-class status and making that access more diverse––rather than attacking poverty, ensuring jobs with a living wage, quality education, single-payer healthcare. So the shift from attacking poverty––let’s say Martin King in 1968––to this obsession with diversity that you’re getting in the Supreme Court in relation to affirmative action, was a dilution and a domesticating of the issue.
One of the ways of making sure you sanitize any talk about racism is to talk about diversity.
You write that the “Black managerial and middle class must take responsibility for too often being callous and indifferent to its Black poor and working class citizens.” Can you explain that a little more?
We lost sight of attacking issues of poverty, class––with the death of Martin—and moved into an obsession with having black faces in high places. As long as we had those black faces in high places, the poor could live symbolically through them, vicariously through them. Or those black faces themselves, middle class and upper middle class, could claim that somehow they were the index of progress. Whereas the real index of progress is ensuring that when you’re living in poverty, you have a quality education for everybody––not ensuring you have more kids at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
Now it’s a beautiful thing when you’ve got black kids at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but if that’s your index of progress, then we forget about the masses of everyday black people.
Thank God we’ve got William Barber and Liz Theoharis leading the poor people’s campaign during the Trump years, but the issue of focusing on poverty is something that ought to hold across the board if we are to have any moral authority. Same is true in terms of Martin Luther King Jr.: concerned about bombs dropped in Vietnam killing Vietnamese babies. He knew he was going to be unpopular, but he had to preserve his moral integrity. So it is with the drone strikes. Under Bush, we had what? 53 drone strikes. That was a war crime because they were killing innocent people.
You got more than 550 under President Obama, and [the C.I.A.] said, “We have not killed one civilian.” It turns out they were lying. Those are war crimes, too, but we lose our moral authority as a people and as a movement if all we can engage in is strategic language rather than serious moral critique of evil and injustices.
President Obama represented a symbol of the highest achievement for a Black American. Is there a danger of complacency by reading too much into his election and forgetting everything that needs to be done to improve race relations?
It’s very clear that under Obama, you had a bonanza for black middle-class folk that had careers in the academy. Who got books. Who got careers on TV. Who got jobs. Remember all the black folk who were on TV under Obama? They were doing very well, but the black poor or the black working class was still getting devastated. See, the police were still going after them. They were privatizing schools under Arne Duncan, Obama’s secretary of education. They were tightening up national security and surveillance to keep track of different folks. Only one Wall Street criminal went to jail. You can see how twisted the rule of law was.
The black middle classes are celebrating because they had the black face with the highest place, The White House, so they’ve got access to diversity jobs and so on. Magazines, TV, newspapers hiring black folk like I don’t know what. What I call the “rent a Negro” phenomenon. They wouldn’t last that long, which [they haven’t]. Look on TV now––you hardly see any black people. You ended up with this upper middle class renaissance, but our poor and working class were forgotten. When Tavis [Smiley] and I raised the issue of poverty and poor people, it looked like we were hating Obama, as opposed to loving black poor people.
It was cast in personal terms rather than cast in the moral terms of, as a people, we, at our best, [have] always been concerned about all of us––not just the top, highly successful ones. I have nothing against black success, but I can’t stand black success when it generates an indifference toward black poor people.
You write that you worry about academics maintaining a critical perspective while still maintaining an allegiance to the institution. Can you talk about that boundary?
Well, the best of the academy is a love of truth, goodness, and beauty. The worst of the academy is the commodification of the academy, the marketization of the academy. It becomes nothing but careerism and opportunism. That’s true for anybody in the academy, not just black people. We’ve seen the academy become so thoroughly corporatized that it’s very much market-driven. It makes it difficult to make sure we’re committed to deep education as opposed to just market-driven schooling. And there’s the connection between the academy and television, radio, social media, where everybody’s for sale.
Therefore, the sellout becomes the norm. People can’t wait to sell themselves because they can’t wait to be visible and highly public. We end up losing a lot of serious moral substance, integrity, honesty, and courage. Why? Because people want popularity. Integrity is pushed back.
I’ve been very blessed 40 years in the academy. But I certainly intend on being true to my calling, not just my career. I’ve been trying to tell the truth about the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, Harvard, Yale, Princeton. The truth about anything. The Black church, the black bourgeoisie. I’m not perfect, so I fall on my face like everybody else. But that’s what it is to be part of the legacy of the Martin Luther King, Junior and Fannie Lou Hamers. Of John Coltrane, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone. Black musicians set the standard. Radical freedom and love; radical love and freedom.
What do you see as the role of race in the election of Trump?
There’s no doubt that the vicious legacy of white supremacy was a major factor in the Trump victory. The major factor, but not the only factor. The other factor was the neoliberal policies that allowed for a massive redistribution of wealth from poor and working people to the top one percent. People were hungry for a populist message.
Then Trump comes along with a pseudo-populist message, tied to white supremacy, but also tied to male supremacy. The issue of misogyny in this election is fundamental. It amazes me how people could talk as if it’s all about racism and not say a mumbling word about patriarchy. Patriarchy played a very important role. Homophobia and transphobia, too. That’s not to downplay racism––but it’s not the only factor.
Issues of class are very important. The issue of homophobia is very important. And, in foreign policy, this imperial machismo identity that Trump had played an important role.
Do you see parallels between the Black movement and the women’s movement? How do they inform each other?
The similarity between white supremacy and male supremacy is that you have elites who think they can do anything and treat anybody anyway they want with no accountability, no answerability, no responsibility. With sexual harassment, what you have is this misogyny, patriarchy, in which men are treating women as if they can do anything they want with no accountability at all and get away with it year in, year out, decade in, decade out. And they got caught. Thank God for voices that call for accountability. You see all these intellectuals, actors, politicians across the board because we know patriarchy shot through every institution in our society.
Well, male supremacy and white supremacy are the same. You treat black people, brown people, red people, anyway you want and can get away with it. No responsibility. And Trump is the symbol of that. If anybody is a gangster, to be a gangster is to exercise arbitrary power over others in an abusive way and get away with it; to feel as if there’s no accountability, no answerability, no responsibility. Trump is the ultimate American gangster right now. There’s no doubt about it.
Movements like Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement sprung up and have been facilitated by social media. What does it take for these to be successful and long-lasting?
The movement for black lives now [includes] more than 40 organizations. You’ve got many standing committees throughout the country meeting regularly. We had a wonderful gathering in Boston just a few weeks ago––not a lot of visibility but still very much consolidating, solidifying. Same with Standing Rock, with our indigenous brothers and sisters, continually organizing––not just around the pipeline, but around a variety of different issues trying to preserve sacred land and the respect of indigenous peoples.
Same with the feminist movement from below. In January, [it was] very much corporate feminists. Then in March, feminism [came] from below––poor women, working class women, lesbians, trans, and others, that those movements are trying to institutionalize. They are very much alive, and they’re the ones to keep an eye on because they’re getting at the most fundamental issues and willing to pay the major costs.
Your great-great uncle was lynched when you were just nine years old and hung in an American flag. Colin Kaepernick recently made waves by refusing to salute the flag––a gesture meant to bring light to the oppression of Black Americans. What are your own feelings about the flag?
I want to salute brother Colin and brother Eric and the others––those courageous, visionary athletes––to make this issue a crucial one. I am first and foremost a Christian. For me, every flag is under the cross. So often, the flag becomes an idol to worship or fetishize, to defer before––whereas for a Christian like me, the cross signifies unarmed truth, unconditional love. The flag is always a national symbol, and that national symbol is under unconditional truth, unconditional love––so the cross is always a critique of the flag. I never really thought that the flag required my uncritical allegiance.
I acknowledge that the flag has been a symbol that people have been willing to live and die for, in the name of the nation. And that’s a beautiful thing, relative to what the causes in the war are. Some wars are unjust, you know. But without that unarmed truth and unconditional love, you end up with a narrow nationalism, a chauvinism, a form of idolatry that worships a nation rather than worships, for me, a God, as a Christian.
We’re at such a deeply divided time in our country. The two political camps cannot seem to agree on facts or understand each other. How can we bridge the divide?
Commit to acknowledging that each and every human being is made in the image of God, regardless of what evil choices they make; that there’s still something that’s worthy of a person being treated with love no matter how cruel they are. That doesn’t mean that you don’t count on their evilness and keep track of their evilness, but it doesn’t preclude or foreclose your ability to stay in contact with their humanity. Also, everybody has a capacity to change. They don’t have to be frozen at the moment. A young gangster like Malcolm Little can become a great prophetic voice in 20th century America called Malcolm X––but it’s all love that does that. Love can play a fundamental role in changing people from gangsters to freedom fighters.
You’ve been critical of Ta-Nehisi Coates, saying that he is an example of trying to “fit into” the neoliberal establishment. Can you explain your criticism of his work?
His third book begins with the good negro government, with the reconstruction governments, and goes directly to Obama as an example of good negro government. I’m critical of that formulation precisely because you got war crimes in the form of drone strikes. One percent of the population got 95 percent of the income growth the first four years of the Obama administration. You had a refusal to focus on the new Jim Crow for seven years, and Wall Street got off scot free, with no criminal going to jail, with free money, interest free, for three years, but students have to pay interest rates and bail out Wall Street (and not bail out Main Street). Now, if that’s good negro government, I’m still critical of it.
On page 103 in [Coates’] text, he says that Barack Obama is a culmination of Malcolm X’s legacy, and there’s another figure that one can talk about––how he is our shining Black prince. It’s a flagrant misreading of black history. Barack Obama is in no way the culminating moment of Malcolm X’s legacy, and I’ll fight over that ‘til the day I die.
That’s a larger discussion. I’d like to sit down and talk to the brother. Don’t allow anybody to think that a moderate neoliberal head of an American empire is the culminating moment of one of the greatest critiques of White supremacy and capitalism and the American empire, Malcolm X. Barack Obama’s relation to Malcolm X is about as tight as the relation of John Coltrane to some bluegrass singer. Just because they’re the same color doesn’t mean that they’re in the same trajectory.
Do you think that Obama’s unique position made his race more salient? He couldn’t just be a president, but he was seen to be a Black president or representative? So there was no other way to even look at him, where people felt like they had to choose a side?
That’s absolutely right. He’s head of a white supremacist empire, but the important thing is if all you see is his color, and you don’t see his policies to what’s going on with those drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and Pakistan, if you don’t see the Wall Street friendly people coming, the Tim Geithners and Larry Summers, who are running his economic team. If you don’t see [Joel] Brenner, who’s coming out of Bush’s counter-terroristic group and heading Obama’s counter-terroristic group, if you don’t see those continuities and all you’re seeing is skin color, then you’re missing much of the picture. It’s not just white supremacy. It’s white supremacy situated in a relation to empire predatory capitalism, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, and it’s not just ideological. It’s a matter of the truth, and you’re going to mislead people if you think that it’s all about race.
At one point, brother Coates says Obama was such a deeply moral human being and one of the great Presidents, and you’re thinking, “But what is your definition of morality, because he assassinated three American citizens with no due process?”
If George Bush did that, he wouldn’t say that. But [Obama is] a black man. He’s let off the hook. I don’t let anybody off the hook.
You want to hold everyone to the same standard.
The same moral standard. Absolutely. That’s what makes Black people who we are. We are one of the greatest peoples in the modern world because we have been one of the most hated people, but we’ve taught the world so much about love and morality. That’s what Martin Luther King, Jr. stands for. That’s what Franny Lou Hamer stands for. Once we lose that, then we lose our moral credibility and our spiritual integrity, and we become nothing but just folk obsessed with power like everybody else. That’s not who we are at our best.
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Tallying the Damage of Trump's Presidency in 2017 |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37115"><span class="small">Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone</span></a>
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Saturday, 30 December 2017 09:30 |
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Stuart writes: "Last week, after the mad dash to pass the GOP tax bill and last-minute scramble to fund the government, President Trump finally had a moment to pause and reflect on his first year in office. And, as he does when he has a thought, he tweeted about it: 'So many things accomplished by the Trump Administration, perhaps more than any other President in first year.'"
President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty Images)
Tallying the Damage of Trump's Presidency in 2017
By Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone
30 December 17
Though the tax bill was the only piece of major legislation Trump was able to get passed this year, the 45th president got plenty done
 ast week, after the mad dash to pass the GOP tax bill and last-minute scramble to fund the government, President Trump finally had a moment to pause and reflect on his first year in office. And, as he does when he has a thought, he tweeted about it: "So many things accomplished by the Trump Administration, perhaps more than any other President in first year. Sadly, will never be reported correctly by the Fake News Media!"
The thing is: he's not entirely wrong. It's true the tax bill was the first and only piece of major legislation he was able to get passed this year – an almost unimaginable reality, considering his party has control of both chambers of Congress – but even without many actual bills to his name Trump has gotten quite a bit done this year. Starting with his very first act in office.
The Federal Housing Administration was poised to cut mortgage fees the week Trump was sworn in, a move that would have made home ownership more accessible and less expensive for everyone across the board, but especially for the poorest Americans – "the forgotten men and women" he often spoke of on the campaign trail. Mortgage lenders, home builders and real estate agents were united in their support for the move, but Trump scrapped it an hour after the inauguration. His reason, outlined in a letter from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was vague: "more analysis and research" was needed to assess how "potential market conditions in an ever-changing global economy" could impact future rates, the agency said.
Reportedly, there was no reason. The decision was motivated by the fact that Trump didn't want anything – no matter how popular or uncontroversial – going through if it was endorsed by President Obama. The FHA decision was, ultimately, emblematic of Trump's first year in office: a symbolic move chiefly motivated by spite that had serious, negative consequences for actual people. In this case, the change would mean as many as 40,000 buyers couldn't buy a home in 2017, according to estimates by the National Association of Realtors; the week after the decision, mortgage applications dropped 3.2 percent.
Ironically, Trump has been most successful at the very thing he criticized Obama for – extensive use of executive orders to achieve his policy goals. And, for all his high-profile legislative belly flops, since assuming office nearly a year ago he's managed to do an incredible amount of damage – to the environment, health, education, civil and labor rights – entirely outside of Congress.
Here's a rundown.
Health care
Trump failed, repeatedly, to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but with the help of a Republican-controlled Congress, he has found ways to undermine the law. The tax bill Congress hastily approved just before the end of the year included a provision repealing Obamacare's individual mandate to buy insurance. The mandate, originally devised by the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation, imposes a penalty on anyone who doesn't buy insurance as a way to incentivize more individuals to get coverage, expand the risk pool and drive down costs. It's unclear what repealing the mandate will do, but economists believe it will drive up health care premiums, causing the ranks of the uninsured to swell by almost one-third, or an estimated 41 million people, by 2026, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Those premium increases will be in addition to ones that were already anticipated after the Trump administration announced in October it would stop paying for subsidies that offset out-of-pocket costs for low-income Americans. (Insurance companies warned the decision could force them to stop offering plans on the Obamacare exchanges.) That's fine with Trump's Department of Health and Human Services, which is actively working to discourage enrollment in the exchanges. The agency shrank its budget for ACA advertising by 90 percent, slashed funding to groups that help with enrollment by 40 percent and cut the enrollment period in half – a move that will automatically re-enroll some Americans in plans they no longer want before they're eligible to switch to another.
In 2017, Trump also reinstated and expanded the so-called global gag rule, a Reagan-era relic banning foreign aid to NGOs that advocate for abortion access, offer abortion services or even discuss abortion with clients. The move imperils a range of programs around the world aimed at addressing outbreaks of HIV, malaria and Zika. Plus, Trump reversed a rule here in the U.S. that banned states from withholding federal funds from clinics that provide abortion, withdrew a rule that would have reimbursed active-duty military and their family for travel to medical appointments, and revoked another rule that banned the mentally ill from buying guns.
Immigration
John Kelly's tenure as the head of the Department of Homeland Security was a short but busy one. He oversaw the implementation of and court challenges to Trump's Muslim ban. The Supreme Court ruled in December that the full revised ban, restricting travel to the U.S. from six majority-Muslim countries plus North Korea, could go into effect while challenges to the law work their way through the court system. (A handful of government officials from Venezuela and their family members are also banned by the order.)
The Muslim ban has received the most attention, but Trump also has managed sweeping reversals of Obama-era immigration policies. Under Trump, ICE is hiring thousands of new agents (it plans to double in size by 2023) and enlisting the help of local police, expanding the criteria for deportation and fast-tracking deportation hearings. Kelly withdrew an Obama-era memo, never implemented, that would have protected the parents of U.S. citizens from deportation and suspended a proposed visa that would have encouraged entrepreneurs from other countries to remain in the U.S.
Pending action by Congress, Trump will end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which granted protected status to 690,000 people who came to the U.S. as children.
He ended a program that granted temporary legal residence to children who fled to the U.S. from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, impacting more than 2,700; ordered 2,500 Nicaraguans and 60,000 Haitians with provisional residency to leave the country over the next two years; slashed the number of refugees the U.S. would accept by more than half, from 110,000 to 45,000; and imposed new screening procedures that could drive that number even lower. Refugee resettlement this year dropped precipitously – as of October, 1,242 and arrived in the U.S. in 2017, compared to 9,945 the previous year.
Education
Under Trump – the former proprietor of Trump University – the Department of Education has moved swiftly to dissolve rules on for-profits colleges and dismantle protections for student borrowers. First the agency withdrew a slate of policy memos designed to increase accountability for student loan servicers, then it gutted two Obama-era policies that would have offered relief to students misled or defrauded by colleges and withheld federal student aid from programs that habitually left students with more debt than they could repay. The agency has abandoned work on joint lawsuits with several states against for-profit schools, too. (The DOE official in charge of policing such predatory behavior is a former dean of DeVry, a for-profit school prosecuted for predatory practices.)
The Trump Department of Education also withdrew guidance for addressing sexual assault complaints on college campuses, discontinued a grant designed to increase socioeconomic diversity in public school districts, revoked 72 policy papers on the rights of students with disabilities and rescinded protections for transgender students.
Labor
Under Trump, the Department of Labor has aggressively abandoned rules governing exposure to harmful chemicals. Among others, it delayed a rule on silica, which is linked to lung disease and cancer, and abandoned ones that would have imposed exposure limits on styrene, another cancer-causer, and 1-bromopropane, a neurotoxin. At the same time, the agency did away with regulations designed to keep track of workplace injuries and deaths. The administration also nixed a rule designed to help close the wage gap by requiring companies to report what they pay by race and gender, and ordered a review of a rule meant to protect workers from bad retirement saving advice.
Civil rights
Since taking the helm at the Justice Department, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has undermined the rule of law while preaching a tough-on-crime philosophy. He ordered a review of agreements struck between problematic police departments and the DOJ's civil rights division, instructed federal prosecutors to pursue the heaviest penalties possible for all defendants, ended a program to improve forensic science standards and rescinded a directive to stop using private prisons.
A legendary hardliner on immigration, Sessions also instructed DOJ lawyers to pursue felony charges not only against immigrants re-entering the country – formerly a misdemeanor crime – but also against anyone who gives them a ride or offers them a place to sleep. And he changed the department's position on a high-profile case about voter ID laws in Texas. (The Department of Justice under Obama contested the law on grounds that it was discriminatory; under Trump, the department has decided it's not.)
Sessions reversed discrimination protections for transgender workers and did away with a rule that would have ensured homeless transgender individuals could choose to stay at the sex-segregated shelter that matched their gender identity. He also issued new guidance on the interpretation of religious freedom, a move that civil rights advocates worry will give religious groups grounds to discriminate against LGBT people.
Environment
Under Trump, the U.S. withdrew from the Paris climate accord, and is now the only country in the world that is not party to the non-binding agreement to address global warming. The administration also announced it would cease payments to the U.N.'s Green Climate Fund and disbanded a federal advisory panel on climate change, while the Energy Department banned the use of the phrase "climate change" itself.
Trump's EPA greenlit completion of both the Dakota Access and the Keystone XL pipelines. The Keystone XL, according to a report produced by Obama's EPA, will increase and accelerate the rate at which greenhouse gases are emitted into the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Construction also threatens habitats of a number of endangered species, including the whooping crane and swift fox. The Dakota Access pipeline threatens the safety of drinking water.
Trump's EPA overturned, threw out or otherwise abandoned rules that banned lead bullets from National Wildlife Refuges and the sale of plastic water bottles at National Parks, created standards for recycling aerosol cans, protected whales and sea turtles, restricted what coal companies could dump into streams, reduced pollutants at sewage treatment plants, and limited methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. The agency also delayed implementation of rules aimed at preventing accidents at chemical plants and limiting power plants' ability to dump heavy metal-laden toxic waste into public waters. Against the advice of its own scientists, the EPA chose not to ban a widely used insecticide believed to harm children's mental development.
Trump reduced Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments by two million acres, introducing the possibility of future oil and natural gas exploration, mining and logging in an area sacred to local Native American tribes. He lifted an Obama-era moratorium on coal mining on public lands, signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to re-examine a ban on offshore drilling and revoked an order protecting the northern Bering Sea region in Alaska.
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Trump Made a Revealing, Off-the-Cuff Comment That Could Explain Why He Hasn't Fired Mueller |
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Friday, 29 December 2017 14:16 |
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Bertrand writes: "While Trump said he expected Mueller would treat him 'fairly,' his remark about how the investigation had galvanized his supporters is perhaps a better indicator of why Trump may have taken firing Mueller off the table, for now."
Donald Trump. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
Trump Made a Revealing, Off-the-Cuff Comment That Could Explain Why He Hasn't Fired Mueller
By Natasha Bertrand, Business Insider
29 December 17
 resident Donald Trump told The New York Times in an interview published Thursday that the investigation into potential collusion between his campaign team and Moscow had strengthened his base and prompted some "great congressmen" to begin "pointing out what a witch hunt the whole thing is."
Trump told The Times that he did not intend to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel leading the investigation.
But while Trump said he expected Mueller would treat him "fairly," his remark about how the investigation had galvanized his supporters is perhaps a better indicator of why Trump may have taken firing Mueller off the table, for now, as it suggests he is aware of, and confident in, his allies' ongoing campaign to undermine and discredit the special counsel.
"Virtually every Democrat has said there is no collusion," Trump told the newspaper.
He continued:
"There is no collusion. And even these committees that have been set up. If you look at what's going on — and in fact, what it's done is, it's really angered the base and made the base stronger. My base is stronger than it's ever been. Great congressmen, in particular, some of the congressmen have been unbelievable in pointing out what a witch hunt the whole thing is. So, I think it's been proven that there is no collusion."
The most recent attacks on the FBI by Trump and his supporters began after news surfaced that the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General discovered text messages exchanged by two FBI employees, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, during the campaign that expressed disdain for Trump and other political leaders.
Strzok, a veteran counterintelligence agent, was among those overseeing the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server last year. He and Page and were also members of Mueller's team, but Strzok was removed in late July after the texts were discovered, and Page left for unrelated reasons.
A senior Justice Department official and his wife, meanwhile, have come under fire for their reported ties to Fusion GPS — the opposition-research firm that funded the collection of memos known as "the dossier" outlining alleged Trump-Russia collusion. The official, Bruce Ohr, was recently reassigned.
There is no evidence so far that these revelations have affected the public's perception of Mueller or the Russia investigation. A CNN poll released earlier this week found that more Americans approved of how Mueller was handling the investigation than disapproved.
But the incidents have fueled GOP lawmakers' calls either for FBI Director Chris Wray to clean house or for Mueller to resign.
Republican Rep. Francis Rooney on Tuesday said he wanted to see the upper ranks of the FBI purged of politically motivated agents whom he believes were working for "the deep state."
Another Florida congressman, Rep. Matt Gaetz, has accused Mueller and his team of staging a "coup d'etat" against Trump. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio has called the FBI "corrupt" and claimed recently that the bureau was "putting together a plan" last year "to keep Donald Trump from becoming the next president of the United States."
Jordan said earlier this month that he'd been in touch with the White House about Mueller. Gaetz, the first lawmaker to openly demand Mueller's firing, discussed the special counsel's investigation with Trump aboard Air Force One earlier this month ahead of a rally in Florida.
Rep. Ron DeSantis, a House Judiciary Committee member who put forward a provision in August that would have severely limited the scope and funding of Mueller's investigation, was also on the flight with Gaetz and Trump.
GOP Rep. Andy Biggs recently slammed what he called Mueller's "unlimited reach" and "unvetted hires," accusing the special counsel of making "blatantly partisan hires that place the direction of his probe under a cloud of suspicion" and calling on him to "step aside."
Republican Sen. Rand Paul tweeted last week that it was "time to investigate high ranking Obama government officials who might have colluded to prevent the election of @realDonaldTrump! This could be WORSE than Watergate!"
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Inequality Neither Inevitable Nor Irreversible in 2018 |
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Friday, 29 December 2017 14:09 |
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Bousquet writes: "Once upon a time it was impossible to even think of what inequality looked like around the world. Today, it's being assessed globally - and the pictures emerging are all too ugly."
Man sleeps on a bench. (photo: Getty)
Inequality Neither Inevitable Nor Irreversible in 2018
By Earl Bousquet, teleSUR
29 December 17
With 2018 on our doorstep, developing countries can still adopt new approaches to sustainable and sustained future development.
 nce upon a time it was impossible to even think of what inequality looked like around the world. Today, it's being assessed globally – and the pictures emerging are all too ugly.
The latest World Inequality Report, published on December 14, indicates that since 1980 the world's richest 0.1 percent (7,000,000 people) have boosted their wealth by as much as the poorest half of mankind: 3.8 billion people. Since then, the richest 1 percent have 'captured' 27 percent of the world's wealth growth; the 0.1 percent have gained 13 percent and the very top 000.1 percent (76,000 people) have 'collected' 4 percent.
Turbo-charged Inequality
The 100 researchers worldwide who contributed to the report found that inequality has worsened in both the European Union and the United States in the 40 years under review, but the situation is much worse in the United States.
The current annual income of the super-rich 1 percent in the United States has risen since 1980 by 205 percent, while for the top 000.1 percent it has ballooned by 636 percent. At the same time, the average annual wage of the bottom 50 percent (117 million adults) has stagnated at about US$16,000.
The report says the stark difference in wealth distribution in the United States is because "the tax system has become less progressive; the federal minimum wage has collapsed; unions have been weakened, and access to higher education has become increasingly unequal." In addition, "deregulation in the finance industry and overly-protective patent laws have contributed to booms on Wall Street and in the healthcare sector, which now make up 20 percent of national income."
U.S. President Donald Trump's highly vaunted 'Christmas gift' tax bill, the report says, will not only reinforce this trend, but "will turbocharge inequality in America" because what's presented as "a tax cut for workers and job-creating entrepreneurs" is instead "a giant cut for those with capital and inherited wealth." It will therefore "overwhelmingly benefit shareholders who can reap their additional profits without any extra work."
While inequality has also increased in Western Europe, the researchers found, it's been at a lower rate "as wage inequality has been moderated by educational and wage-setting policies relatively more favorable to low- and middle-income groups."
Hidden Hooks
Former U.S. presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders has exposed the hidden hooks in Trump's fishy tax plan. He says that in order to curb a US$1.4trillion deficit accumulated over 10 years, the Trump plan to railroad US$1.5 trillion in tax cuts through Congress will eventually amount to early and permanent payback rewards for the super-rich who backed his 2016 election campaign, eventually condemning the middle-class and poor to eternal economic damnation.
Sanders posits that while the tax cuts for the corporations and the super-rich are permanent, benefits to working families will eventually expire after a few years, leaving as many as 83 million middle-class families paying more taxes, but Sanders is not the only critic of the loaded Trump tax bill.
Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, was equally scathing in his condemnation of the Trump administration's policies and their effect on America's poor.
After touring six American states during a two-week period, he not only denounced growing inequality in the world's richest country, but also accused President Trump of racing to turn the United States into "the world champion of extreme inequality."
But exactly who are the world's richest and poorest: the 1 percent and the 99 percent?
Richest of the Rich
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the world's richest person is Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, with his US$98.8billion fortune. In the space of the past year, his wealth has increased by a whopping US$33billion.
The world's five richest people are Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway boss Warren Buffet, Zara owner Amancio Ortega and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, in that order. Between them, they own US$425billion in assets, equivalent to one-sixth of the entire GDP of the UK. And Bezos, Buffet and Gates – the top three – own as much as half the entire U.S. population.
Across the Atlantic in the UK, the richest on record is the Hinduja family, which controls a conglomerate of businesses including car manufacturers and banks and is worth US$15.4 billion: just half of Bezos' earnings in a year.
Poorest of the Poor
In the United States, the world's richest country, there are officially 41 million people. Almost 13 percent of the population is living in poverty, including 13 million children, with 19 million adults (almost half the total) living in deep poverty and 9 million with no cash income at all.
Blacks comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population, of which 23 percent are officially documented as living in poverty, comprising 39 percent of the nation's homeless. A lesser-known statistic is that the majority living in poverty across the United States – some 27 million – are white.
The UK poverty picture is hardly different. Poverty rates increased to 16 percent for pensioners and 30 percent for children last year, while one in five people (20 percent) are living in poverty.
One in eight UK workers, amounting to 3.7 million people, are not earning enough for their needs, while 40 percent of working-age adults living in poverty have no qualifications, making it even harder to earn better pay.
No Hope
The UK government is being urged by charities and trade unions to unfreeze benefits; increase training for adult workers, and embark on a more ambitious house-building program to provide affordable homes for struggling families, but none of this seems to be even close to happening anytime soon.
Take the state of the British government's response to the plight of the victims of the west-London Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 70 people – including 18 children – and displaced 210 families in June.
A memorial mass was held at St Paul's Cathedral on December 14 to mark the six-month anniversary of the tragic inferno, attended by representatives of the British Royal Family, as well as Prime Minister Theresa May and Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbin.
The very same day, London health authorities indicated that while thousands of affected extended families and relatives are still mourning, survivors of the disaster face a new wave of post-traumatic stress, with chances of treatment hampered because so many remain homeless.
Only 45 of the more-than 200 affected families have been permanently resettled. Victims still cannot begin proper psychological treatment to address symptoms that include horrific flashbacks. In addition, 426 adults and 110 children are still in treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other trauma-related issues.
Unhealthy Choices
It's not just in the United States and the UK that poverty is causing people to make stark choices. Almost 100 million people worldwide are pushed into extreme poverty each year because of debts accrued through healthcare expenses.
A report published by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank on December 13 found that the poorest and most vulnerable people are routinely forced to choose between healthcare and other household necessities, including food and education, subsisting on US$1.90 a day.
The report says that more than 122 million people are forced to live on US$3.10 a day – the benchmark for "moderate poverty" – due to healthcare expenditure. Since 2000, this number has increased by 1.5 percent every year.
The report says that 800 million people spend more than 10 percent of their household budgets on "out-of-pocket" health expenses. Almost 180 million spend 25 percent or more: a number increasing at a rate of almost 5 percent per year, with women among those worst affected.
In addition, only 17 percent of women in the poorest 20 percent of households around the world have adequate access to maternal and child health services, compared to 74 percent of women in the richest 20 percent of households.
Taxation Not Enough
"Progressive income-tax regimes not only reduce post-tax inequality, they shrink pre-tax inequality by discouraging top earners from capturing higher shares of growth via aggressive bargaining for higher pay," the report's authors conclude.
They also note, however, that taxation alone is not enough to tackle the problem "as the wealthy are best placed to avoid and evade tax, as shown by the recent Panama Papers revelation that 10 percent of the world's wealth is profitably parked in tax havens."
Taxation of the richest – commensurate with their fortunes – can always go a long way, but this is hardly ever treated with the seriousness necessary, especially when politicians depend on the super-rich for contributions in pursuit of power, as with the Trump tax bill.
Instead of trapping tax-evaders in their countries of origin, the overwhelming gubernatorial tendency in rich countries is to pursue and punish those poor countries that seek to overcome their inherited economic difficulties by offering healthy incentives for investment.
For example, the EU recently published a list of countries it's threatening to punish for not doing enough to dissuade rich tax evaders. All of them are small nations, mainly present and past European and American colonies left to fend for themselves after centuries of exploitation.
The rich, punishing nations harbor ambiguous laws assuring the super-rich that "tax avoidance is legal, but tax evasion isn't." They also compete to attract the most profitable multinational corporations to their shores by offering over-generous tax-free incentives, allowing them to pay the lowest wages to the greatest numbers of poor workers.
Such ingrained guarantees will continue to widen existing inequality gaps everywhere, until the impoverished majority creates the mechanisms for taking full and real control of their destinies instead of investing their blood, sweat and tears in re-electing parties that promise the best and always deliver the worst.
What Can Be Done?
Across the world, the same questions arise: What's to be done? Who's to do it? And where to begin?
There is a definite need everywhere to protect poor family households by ensuring the breadwinners not only have jobs, but that salaries ensure they can adequately take care of their families.
The authors of the World Inequality Report argue that never mind all these deadly facts, inequality is not inevitable. They argue that given the divergent paths documented, "it is possible for institutions and policymakers to tame the un-equalizing forces of globalization and technological change.
"Just as the policymakers in the United States have made the distribution of income there less equal, they also have the power to make economic growth more equal again." They also advise that "given the stagnant wages among the bottom 50 percent since the 1980s, governments should focus on how to create a fairer distribution of human capital, financial capital and bargaining power rather than limiting themselves to the redistribution of national income after taxes."
This, the Inequality Report says, "will involve improving access to education; reforming labor market institutions to boost workers' bargaining power; raising the minimum wage; changing corporate governance to give workers a greater say in how profits are distributed, and making tax systems more progressive."
The researchers conclude that "the United States has run a unique experiment since the 1980s – and the results have been uniquely disastrous. Bad policy can have a real impact on millions of lives for decades, but what government have done, they can still undo."
With 2018 on our doorstep, developing countries can still adopt new approaches to sustainable and sustained future development. Rather than perpetuating dependence on handouts from the super-rich to the extremely poor through the failed "trickle-down" economic formula, poor nations should devise new means of using their inherent natural and human resources to their maximum potential.
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lmost one year in, it’s time for another update for Trump voters on his election promises:
