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FOCUS: Trump's Nationalists Triumphant After Europe Trip |
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Sunday, 09 July 2017 11:14 |
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Crowley writes: "President Donald Trump's trip to Europe was a victory for his nationalist advisers over their so-called globalist rivals as the two camps gird for more showdowns this summer."
In Poland, President Donald Trump delivered a speech that reflected the strong views of both Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. (photo: AP)
Trump's Nationalists Triumphant After Europe Trip
By Michael Crowley, Politico
09 July 17
Advisers like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller gain new momentum in the White House’s ongoing ideological battle.
 resident Donald Trump’s trip to Europe was a victory for his nationalist advisers over their so-called globalist rivals as the two camps gird for more showdowns this summer.
In Warsaw, Trump delivered a starkly nationalist speech lauding the right-wing Polish government’s defense of “civilization” from foes like refugees and European Union bureaucrats. At the G-20 summit in Germany, Trump stuck to his dissent from a global climate change consensus, befriended Russian President Vladimir Putin and weighed potential new steel tariffs that a top European Union official angrily branded “protectionist.”
In each instance, the influence of nationalist White House advisers, like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — along with Trump’s own raw instincts — were on clear display. And all represent setbacks for the likes of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, who are trying to steer Trump’s policies in a more conventional direction.
“Overall the trip embraced nationalism much more than internationalism,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “There was further rejection of free trade, nothing on climate change, disrespect of free media, and a pro forma pushback versus Russian interference in our politics.”
The internal struggle will continue to unfold this month, as Trump makes an expected decision on steel tariffs and returns to Europe next weekend to for a visit with French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently defeated a nationalist candidate Trump had subtly supported.
Emboldening the nationalists in the White House will be the way Trump’s stops in Poland and Germany resonated with his conservative supporters.
“Mr. Trump finally offered the core of what could become a governing philosophy,” gushed the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page about Trump’s Warsaw speech, which celebrated tight borders and strong national and cultural identity. “It is a determined and affirmative defense of the Western tradition.”
Emboldening the nationalists in the White House will be the way Trump’s stops in Poland and Germany resonated with his conservative supporters.
“Mr. Trump finally offered the core of what could become a governing philosophy,” gushed the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page about Trump’s Warsaw speech, which celebrated tight borders and strong national and cultural identity. “It is a determined and affirmative defense of the Western tradition.”
The Journal happily noted that Trump had “shocked Washington.”
Nor did Trump backers mind the exasperation of G-20 leaders over his departure from their otherwise unanimous support for the Paris climate accords and free trade expansion.
“Trump Versus the Rest,” declared an approving headline on Breitbart News, the conservative, pro-nationalist outlet once run by Bannon.
Mainstream foreign policy experts take a dimmer view, warning that Trump is dangerously isolating the U.S. — even as he empowers Putin, who delights in the friction between Trump and America’s European allies on issues like trade, the EU and NATO.
Trump believes that the U.S. “will be stronger going it alone,” said Stephen Sestanovich, a former U.S. ambassador and State Department official now at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Eventually it will be clear that Trump isn’t making America great again, but making it weaker, more isolated, less able to deal effectively with international challenges, a less necessary part of other countries’ calculations,” Sestanovich added. “For Putin, an American president who diminishes the power of the U.S. in this way is a geopolitical bonanza.”
Many of Trump’s top economic and foreign policy advisers agree that America’s traditional alliances are critical, and that restricting trade is a dangerous game. They include McMaster, Cohn, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
That camp did score some victories in Europe. In Warsaw, Trump reaffirmed his support for the collective-defense provision of the NATO treaty known as Article 5, which he has questioned in the past.
And in Hamburg, Trump joined a G20 communiqué affirming the importance of global trade, although it commits him to no specific action.
But there were more setbacks than wins for the globalist-establishment wing.
In Poland, Trump delivered a speech that reflected the strong views of both Bannon and Miller, believers in strong national borders and the defense of a Judeo-Christian identity against liberal multiculturalism. The speech hailed a right-wing government that France’s Macron has said is not “an open and free democracy.”
Also in Poland, Trump sharply criticized NATO allies for not spending more on defense, while also taking credit for pressuring them to increase their contributions.
And he again cast public doubt on whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election, as U.S. intelligence officials believe. On Saturday, White House officials would not refute a claim by Russia’s foreign minister that Trump had accepted Putin’s denial on the question during a meeting between the two leaders.
In Germany, Trump would not budge on his rejection of the 2015 Paris climate accord nor assure nervous leaders that he will not impose steel tariffs that could trigger a larger trade battle. Most of Trump’s cabinet, along with Cohn, strongly oppose such a move. But Bannon, Miller, and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro are reportedly in favor.
The current mood in the Trump White House is a reversal of fortune for the globalist faction, which appeared dominant in early spring after Trump decided not to withdraw from the NAFTA free trade pact; suggested he might honor the Paris accord; declined to label China a currency manipulator; and allowed top officials like Mattis and Vice President Mike Pence to offer strong support for the EU and NATO.
But in late May, Mattis, McMaster and Tillerson were embarrassed when Trump visited NATO headquarters in Brussels and omitted a passage in his speech affirming Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Trump announced he would withdraw from the Paris agreement a few days later.
The battle is far from over, with the two sides struggling over the decision on steel tariffs — which could come at any time — and for control over Trump’s symbolic July 14 visit to Paris for Bastille Day.
Macron was elected in May after a tight race against a right-wing nationalist, Marine Le Pen. Macron sharply critiqued Le Pen’s hostility to immigrants and her skepticism of the EU and NATO.
In the final days of the race, Trump posted tweets that suggested support for Le Pen, although Trump has since claimed that he wanted Macron to win.
An appearance in Paris on Bastille Day likely holds a special appeal for Bannon, a European history buff fascinated by the French Revolution, and who has expressed support for nationalist candidates across Europe.
What role Bannon or his ally Miller might play in shaping Trump’s visit to Paris, and any remarks he might make there, is unclear.
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The Looming Catastrophe of Trump and North Korea |
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Sunday, 09 July 2017 08:14 |
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Dreyfuss writes: "Can we count on Donald Trump to respond calmly and carefully to North Korea's provocations, including the recent blastoff of what appears to be an ICBM?"
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
The Looming Catastrophe of Trump and North Korea
By Bob Dreyfuss, The Rolling Stone
09 July 17
With Trump in office, world leaders are concerned that the United States might take unilateral military action now
 an we count on Donald Trump to respond calmly and carefully to North Korea's provocations, including the recent blastoff of what appears to be an ICBM? Is the president, who recently descended into kindergarten-like twitterstorms of invective against a pair of MSNBC morning show hosts and reposted a video of himself punching a CNN-headed figure to the ground, likely to respond with statesmanship to a country whose dictator said that the missile launch was designed to "slap the American bastards in their face"?
The question answers itself.
Which is why world leaders, from South Korea and Japan to Russia and China, are concerned that the United States might take unilateral military action now. On Sunday, in a phone call with President Xi Jinping of China, Trump reportedly told Xi that he'd had enough of China's inability or unwillingness to deal with North Korea, and that the United States is ready to act "on its own."
In the face of the intricately complex, three-dimensional chess problem that is North Korea's accelerating nuclear threat, since his January inauguration President Trump has unleashed a machine gun-like burst of 140-character responses that display an unhinged, mercurial state of mind. It's bad enough when one country is led by a leader who's often appeared to be on the edge of mental illness – earlier this year, Sen. John McCain called Kim Jong-un a "crazy fat kid," though Psychology Today deemed Kim "power-addled" but "rational." In the case of the U.S-North Korea standoff, not only North Korea but the United States too is led by a man who exhibits a "dangerous mental illness," according to a panel of psychiatrists at a Yale University conference, who called him "paranoid and delusional."
None of this inspires confidence in the outcome of the growing tension between the two nuclear-armed states. The crisis itself is real: faster than anyone, including intelligence experts, expected, North Korea has developed and fired off an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of more than 4,000 miles, making it capable of striking Alaska, and perhaps Hawaii. It has exploded nuclear weapons in tests five times, including twice in 2016, and its short- and medium-range missiles may already be capable of carrying atomic weapons to hit targets in South Korea and Japan, including American forces. It may have as many as 10 to 16 nuclear weapons already, according to the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. And, by all accounts, Kim Jong-un has no intention of giving any of it up.
Since taking office, when he was warned by then President Obama that North Korea would be his most urgent problem, Trump emphasized again and again that he would be able to persuade China to handle North Korea for him. Having repeatedly declared during his presidential campaign that China can "solve that problem for us," after meeting Xi at the presidential retreat in Mar-A-Lago Trump apparently realized that it's more complicated than it looks. "After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it's not so easy," Trump said. "I felt very strongly that they had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it's not what you would think." Soon after that, Trump declared that he was sending "an armada" steaming toward North Korea, and tensions have steadily escalated ever since. And, after the North Korean ICBM launch, the United States and South Korea flexed military muscle, conducting a live-fire, joint military exercise in the waters off the Korean peninsula.
But if Trump is angling for a military showdown with North Korea, the most likely result would be catastrophic. In addition to its nuclear arms, North Korea reportedly has 8,000 pieces of artillery and rocket launchers trained on South Korea and Japan, capable of firing a staggering 300,000 rounds in the first hour of war. Estimates of the number of people killed in South Korea, including Americans, suggest as many as 300,000 dead in just days. And if North Korea's Kim suspects that even a limited, preemptive American military strike is ultimately aimed at decapitating the regime and toppling his government, he's likely to unleash not only his nukes but an array of chemical and biological weapons, too, resulting in casualties in the millions.
In Germany later this week, Trump will meet with world leaders, including China's Xi, the leaders of the NATO alliance, the presidents of Japan and South Korea, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Should he choose to do so, the U.S. president can use these meetings to cool down the crisis and to set into motion the wheels of diplomacy. "The important thing is that Donald Trump doesn't let himself be backed into a corner and that he understands that there are long-term options to contain, constrain, and deter the regime," said Adam Mount, an expert at the Center for American Progress in Washington.
And cooler heads – former U.S. officials and diplomats, editorial writers, and area specialists on Korea – are pretty much agreed that to avoid a shooting war, the United States has to keep its powder dry and seek a negotiated solution. Six top former officials and experts, including former Secretary of State George Shultz and former Secretary of Defense William Perry, wrote to Trump in June urging exactly that. "As experts with decades of military, political, and technical involvement with North Korean issues, we strongly urge your administration to begin discussions with North Korea in the near future," they wrote. "In our view, this is the only realistic option to reduce dangers resulting from the current high state of tensions and prevent North Korea's ongoing development and potential use of nuclear weapons."
Both Russia and China have weighed in as well. In a July 4th meeting in Moscow in advance of their encounters with Trump at the G20 meeting this week, Putin and Xi jointly proposed the idea of a North Korean freeze of its nuclear weapons and missile-testing program in exchange for a freeze on U.S. and South Korean military exercises. According to The Independent, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who'll meet with Trump as well, will also appeal to China and Russia to support diplomacy.
A freeze-freeze solution wouldn't solve everything, of course, since North Korea will retain its nuclear arsenal. But it isn't likely that Kim Jung Un will easily abandon his newfound military power, especially under the threat of U.S. attack. (The U.S.-Iran deal, much denounced by Trump, was only accomplished when the United States realized that Iran would never abandon its nuclear enrichment program – even under American threats that "all options were on the table," so the only option was an agreement to vastly reduce, constrain and monitor it.) And Kim knows well the example of Libya, which gave up its nuclear program only to fall victim to a U.S. regime-change attack and the parallel lesson of Iraq, whose regime was toppled in part not because it had nuclear weapons, but because it didn't.
In the end, the only lasting solution will probably be the complete and total denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, with North Korea giving up its nukes in exchange for an American promise to eliminate the U.S. nuclear capability in and around South Korea and to pledge not to seek the overthrow of Kim's oppressive government. That could take many years, along with intensive diplomatic support from the United Nations, Russia, China and other powers, to be achieved. In the meantime, the sort of freeze-freeze proposal suggested by Beijing and Moscow would be a good first start.
Trump and Kim, however, may have other ideas.
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There's a Voter Suppression SWAT Team From the Bush Administration on the Loose |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Saturday, 08 July 2017 14:03 |
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Pierce writes: "If you're itching to despair more deeply for the future of the country, check out Pema Levy's extensive reporting in Mother Jones on how former members of the vote-suppressing Bush 43 Justice Department have privatized the ethical swamp they all made out of it, and how they're now engaged as private citizens in money-whipping poor - and largely minority - counties into purging their voter rolls."
Former members of the vote-suppressing Bush 43 Justice Department are engaged as private citizens in money-whipping poor - and largely minority - counties into purging their voter rolls. (photo: Getty Images)
There's a Voter Suppression SWAT Team From the Bush Administration on the Loose
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
08 July 17
They're purging voter rolls in counties across the country.
 f you're itching to despair more deeply for the future of the country, check out Pema Levy's extensive reporting in Mother Jones on how former members of the vote-suppressing Bush 43 Justice Department have privatized the ethical swamp they all made out of it, and how they're now engaged as private citizens in money-whipping poor—and largely minority—counties into purging their voter rolls. The details are as sorry as you can expect them to be.
In June 2014, Miller and her four fellow election commissioners received a letter threatening legal action if they did not purge voters from the rolls. The letter came from the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), a Virginia-based group that has fashioned itself in recent years as a conservative counterpart to the ACLU. The ACRU requested that the commissioners reduce the number of registered voters by the midterm elections that fall because, it claimed, there were more people registered than there were voting-age citizens in the county. The commissioners wanted to fight back, but lacking the funds to hire an attorney, they decided not to respond and waited to see what would happen next.
The letter they had received was one of many that the ACRU had started sending to small, rural counties across Mississippi, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arizona the year before. These letters were part of a legal campaign spearheaded by three former Justice Department officials from the George W. Bush administration to purge voter rolls across the country. The effort began in remote areas with few resources for legal defense, but recently it's expanded to include population centers in key swing states.
Recall that the scandal involving the firing for political purposes of several U.S. Attorneys happened because those lawyers refused to chase phantom voter fraud at the behest of the Bush White House. As it turns out, some familiar characters never left the stage.
At the time Noxubee County got its letter, the ACRU's legal work was led by J. Christian Adams, a former staff attorney in the Voting Section of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Adams joined the department in 2005, when high-ranking official Bradley Schlozman was found by the department's inspector general to be illegally using political ideology to fill the Civil Rights Division with conservative lawyers. Adams, a conservative attorney from South Carolina, was "exhibit A" of Schlozman's hiring practices, a former department official who participated in Adams' job interview later said.
Adams' early cases at the ACRU were assisted by Christopher Coates, Adams' former boss at the Justice Department. Previously an attorney for the ACLU, Coates appears to have undergone an ideological conversion while at the Justice Department; one colleague suggested this might have been spurred in part by the promotion of a black attorney to a job he wanted. In 2007, with Bush in office, he rose to Voting Section chief. Like Adams, Robert Popper joined the Voting Section in 2005 and later became Coates' deputy. When he left the department in 2013, he joined the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, an early player in spearheading voter purge cases.
Basically, the scam works this way: This bunch sends a threatening letter to an impoverished local election commission. Do what we say, the letter says, or we'll find some plaintiffs and sue you down to your socks and underwear. Often, these election commissions don't have the dough to pay a single billable hour to a decent lawyer. So, rather than face the lawsuit, the commission agrees to sign a "consent degree" by which it agrees to do what the Washington freebooters want it to do.
It's a shakedown, pure and simple. And it works.
In November 2015, the ACRU filed a lawsuit against the commission in federal court, alleging that there were 9,271 names on the registered voter list in a county with just 8,245 eligible voters. The case docket was notably one-sided. The ACRU would file motions, and the commission—still lawyer-less—would fail to respond. Five months after filing the suit, the ACRU moved for a default judgement against the commission. The judge said the commission should have an attorney to go over the terms of the agreement, and the county paid a local attorney about $1,000 to help the commissioners resolve the suit, according to two of the commissioners. (An attorney for the ACRU also recalled that the county hired the lawyer, but the county's Board of Supervisors told Mother Jones it had no record of hiring or paying an attorney in this case.) Some of the commissioners viewed him as ineffectual.
"He didn't know as much about it as my daughter do," Miller says. His advice was to sign the decree. "They had our backs up against the wall," recalls John Bankhead, the commission's chairman. Under pressure, three of the five commissioners finally signed the consent decree. Miller and one other refused. The judge declined to accept it without all five on board, and the ACRU renewed its push for a default judgement. "We are not gonna get those [voter] cards back," Miller told her colleagues. "I promised my voters I would look out for them, and to me, that's not looking out for them."
Noxubee County is 71 percent black. Its residents have a median yearly family income of a little more than $27,000, and 32 percent of the people there live below the poverty line. In Macon, the county seat, that number rises to almost 50 percent. Meanwhile, the ACRU gets about $2 million in grants every year from the usual suspects like the Bradley Foundation. So Adams and his group picked their target well.
If you read the story carefully, you will find the ACRU hooked up in its efforts with True The Vote, another voter suppression outfit. TTV got famous because it was the main "victim" in the IRS screw-up regarding the tax-exemptions of "nonpartisan social welfare" organizations like True The Vote. It turns out that the ACRU is one of those nonpartisan social welfare operations, too. Our election laws are a farce.
Lose an election, get funded and carry out your policies in the private sector. Never stop.
Ni shagu nazad, as Stalin said.
Not one step backwards.
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Why Single-Payer Health Care Saves Money |
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Saturday, 08 July 2017 13:42 |
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Frank writes: "Lingering uncertainty about the fate of the Affordable Care Act has spurred the California legislature to consider adoption of a statewide single-payer health care system."
A patient in Colorado looks over paperwork with a doctor. (photo: Craig F. Walker/Denver Post)
Why Single-Payer Health Care Saves Money
By Robert H. Frank, The New York Times
08 July 17
 ingering uncertainty about the fate of the Affordable Care Act has spurred the California legislature to consider adoption of a statewide single-payer health care system.
Sometimes described as Medicare for all, single-payer is a system in which a public agency handles health care financing while the delivery of care remains largely in private hands.
Discussions of the California measure have stalled, however, in the wake of preliminary estimates pegging the cost of the program as greater than the entire state government budget. Similar cost concerns derailed single-payer proposals in Colorado and Vermont.
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n Thursday July 6th, activists sat in 28 Senate offices in 21 states demanding senators vote no on the GOP healthcare plan. Across the country, nearly 50 people were arrested for speaking out against draconian cuts to Medicaid in order to give billions of dollars in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, according to Our Revolution. 
