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Forget Protest. Trump's Actions Warrant a General National Strike |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43811"><span class="small">Francine Prose, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Tuesday, 31 January 2017 09:18 |
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Prose writes: "Since Trump's election, we've seen dozens of demonstrations - most notably, the Women's March on Washington - that have reinforced our sense of solidarity and provided encouraging evidence of how many Americans oppose our government's fundamentally anti-American agenda. But the trouble is that these protests are too easily ignored and forgotten by those who wish to ignore and forget them."
People gather in front of the White House to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump. (photo: Andrew Stefan/RSN)
Forget Protest. Trump's Actions Warrant a General National Strike
By Francine Prose, Guardian UK
31 January 17
Political movements rarely succeed without causing discomfort and inconvenience
 n the morning after Donald Trump’s so-called Muslim ban went into effect – preventing all Syrians from entering the US, halting refugee admissions for 120 days and banning the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days – I received an affecting email featuring the photographs and names of Jewish men, women and children who died in Nazi concentration camps because “the US turned me away at the border in 1939”.
Now, America is repeating its mistakes of the past. But our fellow citizens did not stand by idly as this happened. On Saturday, a large crowd of protesters had gathered outside Terminal Four at John F Kennedy international airport, and similar demonstrations were in progress at airports across the country.
These protests succeeded in several significant ways. Two Iraqi men, Hameed Khalid Darweesh (a former interpreter for the US military) and Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi were released, through the valiant efforts of ACLU lawyers. Ann Donnelly, a federal judge in Brooklyn, as well as federal judges in Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington, ruled that those still being held in detention could not be sent back to their home countries.
But what was also extremely important was that the demonstrators at the airports – and the thousands more cheering them on from home – had been given concrete, inspiring evidence that their protests had made a difference. Their active refusal to let innocent people be sent home, perhaps to die, had mattered.
Since Trump’s election, we’ve seen dozens of demonstrations – most notably, the Women’s March on Washington – that have reinforced our sense of solidarity and provided encouraging evidence of how many Americans oppose our government’s fundamentally anti-American agenda.
But the trouble is that these protests are too easily ignored and forgotten by those who wish to ignore and forget them. The barriers go up, the march takes place, the barriers come down. Everyone goes home happier.
One reason that Saturday’s protests were so effective was that, while peaceful, they were disruptive. Terminal Four was closed, incoming flights were delayed. One traveller wrote, on Twitter, that his fellow passengers applauded when their pilot announced the reason why their plane would be landing an hour behind schedule.
Taxi drivers went on strike in solidarity with the detainees, and arriving passengers were forced to find alternate ways on getting home. Many used Uber, a company whose CEO, Travis Kalanick, serves on Trump’s economic advisory board, and which thoughtfully suspended “surge pricing” to make it easier and cheaper to subvert the taxi strike.
The struggles for civil rights and Indian independence, against apartheid and the Vietnam war – it’s hard to think of a nonviolent movement that has succeeded without causing its opponents a certain amount of trouble, discomfort and inconvenience.
And economic boycotts – another sort of trouble and inconvenience – have proved remarkably successful in persuading companies to cease supporting repressive governments. Of course, nonviolence has often been met with violence, but one can only hope that our hearts have not so hardened that we, as a nation, would not be troubled and shamed by the spectacle of peaceful people being arrested and bloodied, as they were in Selma and Birmingham.
So what can we do to protest our current government’s callousness about our environment and our health, its rampant greed, its disrespect for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
I believe that what we need is a nonviolent national general strike of the kind that has been more common in Europe than here. Let’s designate a day on which no one (that is, anyone who can do so without being fired) goes to work, a day when no one shops or spends money, a day on which we truly make our economic and political power felt, a day when we make it clear: how many of us there are, how strong and committed we are, how much we can accomplish.
Meanwhile, I’m deleting my Uber account and adding Lyft (which donated generously to the ACLU) in its stead. Leaving Uber is not uncomplicated, and it’s taken me the better part of a day to persuade them to let me go. But in the process, the site asks subscribers why they are leaving, and it’s a pleasure – a small pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless – to let them know.
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Free Range Is a Con. There's No Such Thing as an Ethical Egg |
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Tuesday, 31 January 2017 09:16 |
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Newkey-Burden writes: "Meat eaters may think vegans look down on them - but actually no one is more scornful of carnivores than the meat industry that feeds them."
Cruelty has been normalized. That's why they hide the truth. (photo: Alamy)
Free Range Is a Con. There's No Such Thing as an Ethical Egg
By Chas Newkey-Burden, Guardian UK
31 January 17
Slapping ‘free range’ on a box of eggs simply hides the catalogue of routine horrors that are allowed under this reassuring banner
 eat eaters may think vegans look down on them – but actually no one is more scornful of carnivores than the meat industry that feeds them. While frontline workers slaughter 22 million animals each day in the UK alone, teams in the back office rebrand those carcasses, packaging them up and using inventive words to hide the truth from the consumer.
Of all their cons, the “free range” egg is perhaps the most audacious. You’d need Disney-level imagination to believe the UK can produce more than 10bn eggs each year without inconveniencing any chickens. But by slapping “free range” on the label, and perhaps a nice pastoral scene with a few chickens roaming free, most consumers never realise how the eggs came to be in the box.
The question of the ethical egg is back on the agenda after the government ordered that, in the face of bird flu, poultry must be kept indoors until at least the end of February. This means “free range” eggs may have to be renamed “barn eggs”. Yet whatever they’re called, few shoppers realise what “free range” means and what routine horrors are allowed under its reassuring banner.
Beak trimming is commonplace in the UK. Almost all young hens have part of their beaks burned off without anaesthetic to stop them pecking at the other hens in their cramped, traumatised flocks. Free range sheds can contain up to nine birds per square metre – that’s like 14 adults living in a one-room flat. Some multi-tier sheds (still “free range”) contain 16,000 hens. So while these poor birds can theoretically go outdoors, they can also be too crammed in and too traumatised to find the few exit holes.
What hell we put them through: hens in the wild lay just 20 eggs per year but modern farms with high protein feed and near-constant lighting push them to lay closer to 500 eggs annually. Their exhausted bodies are then discarded within months – routinely sent to slaughter having lived less than one-tenth of their natural lifespan.
And that’s a long life compared to the male chicks. They are financially worthless to egg farmers and therefore killed within hours of their birth. On a daily basis unimaginable numbers get unceremoniously tossed into a machine and ground up alive, or gassed by carbon dioxide, or simply dumped in a bin bag and left to suffocate. So yes, let’s talk about the ethics among all this cruelty.
One way to avoid eggs laid by beak-trimmed hens is to buy them from organic farms certified by the Soil Association, which bans the practice. Yet that does not address other welfare concerns, not least the fate of male chicks.
Researchers within the industry are proposing a genetically modified approach under which female embryos are identified prior to hatching by making them fluoresce under UV light. This means the male chicks could be identified and crushed in their shells prior to hatching. For some people this is a step forward, but for many the proposal merely produces a new moral dilemma.
Meanwhile, the question of ethical eggs remains a popular touchstone of the defensive meat eater. Such carnivores will ask a vegan: “Tell me this, if I kept chickens, which were allowed to roam free and live their full lives, would you eat their eggs?”
Oh, how the flesh guzzler loves a side order of hypothetical scenario: if a pig lived a happy life, lovingly tended to 24 hours a day in perfect, blissful conditions, and then gently stroked as it was put to sleep, would you eat its meat? If you were trapped on a desert island and could only survive by eating animals, would you eat them?
It’s just self-indulgent displacement, performed by people who want to turn their faces away from the horrors of factory farms and animal slaughter but fund it anyway. The people who describe this theoretical egg production don’t actually run such operations, nor even buy their eggs from such farms. Indeed, very few people even buy organic: of the 12.2bn eggs sold in the UK in 2015, just 2% were organic.
From a vegan perspective, the answer is more holistic and philosophical: we should stop regarding animals as commodities. We should cease our global war on animals and learn to live in harmony. So for vegans the very concept of the ethical egg is essentially oxymoronic.
Or maybe not entirely. One of my vegan friends makes alternative “eggs” using balls of flax seeds and mashed banana. If that sounds a bit bizarre (and I confess it does to me) remember what “real” eggs represent – millions of animals enduring painful, miserable lives so humans can consume the product of chicken periods as a source of protein, or to make nice cakes. Cruelty has been normalised. That’s why they hide the truth.
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The Muslim Ban Has Brought the US Close to Constitutional Crisis |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29990"><span class="small">Trevor Timm, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 30 January 2017 14:05 |
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Timm writes: "Donald Trump's White House is plunging the United States into a full-blown constitutional crisis a little more than a week into his administration."
People pray in the baggage claim at DFW airport. (photo: Laura Buckman/Reuters)
The Muslim Ban Has Brought the US Close to Constitutional Crisis
By Trevor Timm, Guardian UK
30 January 17
A series of troubling events since Friday’s order have pushed the country into uncharted territory – and Stephen Bannon was central to the chaos
 onald Trump’s White House is plunging the United States into a full-blown constitutional crisis a little more than a week into his administration. One of the prime culprits seems to be his controversial chief strategist: Steve Bannon, whom Nancy Pelosi called a white nationalist.
Massive protests sprouted up around the country on Saturday following Trump’s unconstitutional executive order banning all refugees and all travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries – including those with valid visas. But somewhat lost in that news was Bannon’s central role in the controversy and move to consolidate even more power within the government.
On Saturday, Trump installed him on the influential National Security Council (NSC) as part of a radical re-shuffling of the influential White House board of advisers that usually is composed of intelligence and military officials who provide the White House with guidance.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence were removed from the NSC. As journalist Sarah Jeong put it on Twitter, national security “is such an emergency you have to ban Muslims. But also let’s replace chairman of joint chiefs with some guy with a garbage website.”
Meanwhile, chaos reigned on Saturday as dozens of immigrants were detained after the executive order was put into force immediately. As CNN reported Saturday night, the mayhem seems to be Bannon’s doing.
CNN reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agency which oversees Customs and Border Protection, did not even know about the executive order until it was being released to the public. Nor did its lawyers, who did not do a legal analysis of it until after it was in effect. DHS lawyers reportedly determined that it did not apply to green card holders and permanent residents, but the White House – led by Steve Bannon – overruled that objection and kept the restrictions on green card holders in place, allowing exemptions on a case by case basis.
Thankfully, several judges put an immediate stay on deporting legitimate green card holders stuck in airports on Saturday night and ordered those still detained get access to lawyers. But the situation got even more bizarre and Orwellian on Sunday: CBP officials at some airports – in direct violation of the court orders – were reportedly still refusing lawyer access and apparently not responding to congressional representatives who were trying to figure out what was going on.
While some immigrants were released from detention, others weren’t even allowed to see volunteer lawyers who had showed up at airports around the country to provide free representation. Democratic congressman Don Beyer tweeted on Sunday afternoon: “We have a constitutional crisis today. Four Members of Congress asked CBP officials to enforce a federal court order and were turned away.”
As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wrote: “$64,000 question is: are they being told to violate the court order by the White House?” If the White House is, in fact, directing DHS and CBP to violate a crystal clear court order, the rule of law has completely broken down and we are in a truly unprecedented situation here.
In the face of the massive protests, on Sunday night, new DHS secretary John Kelly released a statement saying all permanent residents will be let in the country, yet there was still no word from lawyers on the ground whether it is actually being obeyed.
The White House, meanwhile, is still pretending that its executive order is not technically a “Muslim ban”. Beyond the obvious fact that Trump campaigned on such a ban, his crony Rudy Giuliani laid those questions to rest on Fox News late Saturday night, claiming Trump asked him to figure out how to make his Muslim ban campaign promise “legal” – confirming it’s a Muslim ban in all but name.
No matter your political views, the fact that the White House is attempting to circumvent legal advice, install dubious appointees to incredible powerful national security positions and violate court orders is outrageous and despicable, so let’s be clear: Congress needs to quickly move towards impeachment if this is true.
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FOCUS: Trial Balloon for a Coup? |
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Monday, 30 January 2017 13:18 |
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Zunger writes: "The administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored."
![From 'The Day After Tomorrow.' I [Yonatan Zunger] resisted the temptation to use the analogous shot from 'Planet of the Apes.' (photo: The Day After Tomorrow)](/images/stories/article_imgs24/024298-trial-balloon-coup-013017.jpg "From 'The Day After Tomorrow.' I [Yonatan Zunger] resisted the temptation to use the analogous shot from 'Planet of the Apes.' (photo: The Day After Tomorrow)")
From 'The Day After Tomorrow.' I [Yonatan Zunger] resisted the temptation to use the analogous shot from 'Planet of the Apes.' (photo: The Day After Tomorrow)
Trial Balloon for a Coup?
By Yonatan Zunger, Medium
30 January 17
 he theme of this morning’s news updates from Washington is additional clarity emerging, rather than meaningful changes in the field. But this clarity is enough to give us a sense of what we just saw happen, and why it happened the way it did.
I’ll separate what’s below into the raw news reports and analysis; you may also find these two pieces from yesterday (heavily referenced below) to be useful.
News Reports
(1) Priebus made two public statements today. One is that the ban on Muslims will no longer be applied to green card holders. Notably absent from his statement was anything about people with other types of visa (including long-term ones), or anything about the DHS’ power to unilaterally revoke green cards in bulk.
The other was that the omission of Jews from the statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day was deliberate and is not regretted.
A point of note here is that Priebus is the one making these statements, which is not normally the Chief of Staff’s job. I’ll come back to that below.
(2) Rudy Giuliani told Fox News that the intent of yesterday’s order was very much a ban on Muslims, described in those words, and he was among the people Trump asked how they could find a way to do this legally.
(3) CNN has a detailed story (heavily sourced) about the process by which this ban was created and announced. Notable in this is that the DHS’ lawyers objected to the order, specifically its exclusion of green card holders, as illegal, and also pressed for there to be a grace period so that people currently out of the country wouldn’t be stranded?—?and they were personally overruled by Bannon and Stephen Miller. Also notable is that career DHS staff, up to and including the head of Customs & Border Patrol, were kept entirely out of the loop until the order was signed.
(4) The Guardian is reporting (heavily sourced) that the “mass resignations” of nearly all senior staff at the State Department on Thursday were not, in fact, resignations, but a purge ordered by the White House. As the diagram below (by Emily Roslin v Praze) shows, this leaves almost nobody in the entire senior staff of the State Department at this point.
As the Guardian points out, this has an important and likely not accidental effect: it leaves the State Department entirely unstaffed during these critical first weeks, when orders like the Muslim ban (which they would normally resist) are coming down.
The article points out another point worth highlighting: “In the past, the state department has been asked to set up early foreign contacts for an incoming administration. This time however it has been bypassed, and Trump’s immediate circle of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Reince Priebus are making their own calls.”
(5) On Inauguration Day, Trump apparently filed his candidacy for 2020. Beyond being unusual, this opens up the ability for him to start accepting “campaign contributions” right away. Given that a sizable fraction of the campaign funds from the previous cycle were paid directly to the Trump organization in exchange for building leases, etc., at inflated rates, you can assume that those campaign coffers are a mechanism by which US nationals can easily give cash bribes directly to Trump. Non-US nationals can, of course, continue to use Trump’s hotels and other businesses as a way to funnel money to him.
(6) Finally, I want to highlight a story that many people haven’t noticed. On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown. This was done through a dizzying array of shell companies, so that the most that can be said with certainty now is that the money “paying” for it was originally loaned out to the shell layers by VTB (the government’s official bank), even though it’s highly unclear who, if anyone, would be paying that loan back; and the recipients have been traced as far as some Cayman Islands shell companies.
Why is this interesting? Because the much-maligned Steele Dossier (the one with the golden showers in it) included the statement that Putin had offered Trump 19% of Rosneft if he became president and removed sanctions. The reason this is so interesting is that the dossier said this in July, and the sale didn’t happen until early December. And 19.5% sounds an awful lot like “19% plus a brokerage commission.”
Conclusive? No. But it raises some very interesting questions for journalists to investigate.
What does this all mean?
I see a few key patterns here. First, the decision to first block, and then allow, green card holders was meant to create chaos and pull out opposition; they never intended to hold it for too long. It wouldn’t surprise me if the goal is to create “resistance fatigue,” to get Americans to the point where they’re more likely to say “Oh, another protest? Don’t you guys ever stop?” relatively quickly.
However, the conspicuous absence of provisions preventing them from executing any of the “next steps” I outlined yesterday, such as bulk revocation of visas (including green cards) from nationals of various countries, and then pursuing them using mechanisms being set up for Latinos, highlights that this does not mean any sort of backing down on the part of the regime.
Note also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP continued to deny all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct contravention to the court’s order, citing “upper management,” and the DHS made a formal (but confusing) statement that they would continue to follow the President’s orders. (See my updates from yesterday, and the various links there, for details) Significant in today’s updates is any lack of suggestion that the courts’ authority played a role in the decision.
That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.
Yesterday was the trial balloon for a coup d’état against the United States. It gave them useful information.
A second major theme is watching the set of people involved. There appears to be a very tight “inner circle,” containing at least Trump, Bannon, Miller, Priebus, Kushner, and possibly Flynn, which is making all of the decisions. Other departments and appointees have been deliberately hobbled, with key orders announced to them only after the fact, staff gutted, and so on. Yesterday’s reorganization of the National Security Council mirrors this: Bannon and Priebus now have permanent seats on the Principals’ Committee; the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have both been demoted to only attending meetings where they are told that their expertise is relevant; the Secretary of Energy and the US representative to the UN were kicked off the committee altogether (in defiance of the authorizing statute, incidentally).
I am reminded of Trump’s continued operation of a private personal security force, and his deep rift with the intelligence community. Last Sunday, Kellyanne Conway (likely another member of the inner circle) said that “It’s really time for [Trump] to put in his own security and intelligence community,” and this seems likely to be the case.
As per my analysis yesterday, Trump is likely to want his own intelligence service disjoint from existing ones and reporting directly to him; given the current staffing and roles of his inner circle, Bannon is the natural choice for them to report through. (Having neither a large existing staff, nor any Congressional or Constitutional restrictions on his role as most other Cabinet-level appointees do) Keith Schiller would continue to run the personal security force, which would take over an increasing fraction of the Secret Service’s job.
Especially if combined with the DHS and the FBI, which appear to have remained loyal to the President throughout the recent transition, this creates the armature of a shadow government: intelligence and police services which are not accountable through any of the normal means, answerable only to the President.
(Note, incidentally, that the DHS already has police authority within 100 miles of any border of the US; since that includes coastlines, this area includes over 60% of Americans, and eleven entire states. They also have a standing force of over 45,000 officers, and just received authorization to hire 15,000 more on Wednesday.)
The third theme is money. Trump’s decision to keep all his businesses (not bothering with any blind trusts or the like), and his fairly open diversion of campaign funds, made it fairly clear from the beginning that he was seeing this as a way to become rich in the way that only dedicated kleptocrats can, and this week’s updates definitely tally with that. Kushner looks increasingly likely to be the money-man, acting as the liaison between piles of cash and the president.
This gives us a pretty good guess as to what the exit strategy is: become tremendously, and untraceably, rich, by looting any coffers that come within reach.
Combining all of these facts, we have a fairly clear picture in play.
- Trump was, indeed, perfectly honest during the campaign; he intends to do everything he said, and more. This should not be reassuring to you.
- The regime’s main organizational goal right now is to transfer all effective power to a tight inner circle, eliminating any possible checks from either the Federal bureaucracy, Congress, or the Courts. Departments are being reorganized or purged to effect this.
- The inner circle is actively probing the means by which they can seize unchallenged power; yesterday’s moves should be read as the first part of that.
- The aims of crushing various groups — Muslims, Latinos, the black and trans communities, academics, the press — are very much primary aims of the regime, and are likely to be acted on with much greater speed than was earlier suspected. The secondary aim of personal enrichment is also very much in play, and clever people will find ways to play these two goals off each other.
If you’re looking for estimates of what this means for the future, I’ll refer you back to yesterday’s post on what “things going wrong” can look like. Fair warning: I stuffed that post with pictures of cute animals for a reason./p>
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es, we’re in a constitutional crisis. The crisis has many elements that arose during the first week of the Trump presidency. These include illegal enrichment, complicity in war crimes, and most spectacularly, the immigration attack on Muslims.
