• Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’ - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327

    The personal qualities displayed by Trump in his reaction to the cost of the Guillén funeral—contempt, rage, parsimony, racism—hardly surprised his inner circle. Trump has frequently voiced his disdain for those who serve in the military and for their devotion to duty, honor, and sacrifice. Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” (“This is absolutely false,” Pfeiffer wrote in an email. “President Trump never said this.”)

    A desire to force U.S. military leaders to be obedient to him and not the Constitution is one of the constant themes of Trump’s military-related discourse. Former officials have also cited other recurring themes: his denigration of military service, his ignorance of the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his admiration for brutality and anti-democratic norms of behavior, and his contempt for wounded veterans and for soldiers who fell in battle.

  • A Conversation With Outgoing French Ambassador Gérard Araud - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/conversation-outgoing-french-ambassador-gerard-araud/587458

    My career had started with the election of [Ronald] Reagan, and my career is finishing with Trump. From Reagan to Trump you have, more or less, the neoliberal era—taxes were bad, borders were bad, and you have to trust the market. It’s also the period of the triumphant West … that the West was in a sense doomed to win. That sooner or later all the world will march triumphantly, to the triumph of the market. And suddenly the election of Trump and the populist wave everywhere in the Western world is for me, and I may be wrong, but for me means that this period is over.

    Je ne retrouve pas cet interview où il me semble que #Gérard_Araud était plus explicite sur le refus populaire du néolibéralisme. Je reposte cette interview déjà postée dans un fil sur Israël.

  • James Mattis Denounces Trump as Threat to Constitution
    Jeffrey Goldberg - June 3, 2020 - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-mattis-denounces-trump-protests-militarization/612640

    James Mattis, the esteemed Marine general who resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 to protest Donald Trump’s Syria policy, has, ever since, kept studiously silent about Trump’s performance as president. But he has now broken his silence, writing an extraordinary broadside in which he denounces the president for dividing the nation, and accuses him of ordering the U.S. military to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens.

    “I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis writes. “The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.” He goes on, “We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

    In his j’accuse, Mattis excoriates the president for setting Americans against one another.

    “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis writes. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.” (...)

    via @CorentinSellin
    https://twitter.com/CorentinSellin/status/1268304712027090944

    Alors, là... c’est du jamais vu.
    Le général #Mattis, le plus prestigieux des conservateurs US, général des Marines vénéré dans les troupes, qui fut secrétaire à la Défense de #Trump durant 2 ans, le dénonce comme 1 menace à la nation et à la Constitution.

    Cet homme est un soldat d’élite, conservateur pur jus- tout sauf de gauche- et il traite #Trump qu’il a servi au Pentagone comme LE destructeur de la nation US

  • I Just Flew. It Was Worse Than I Thought It Would Be.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/is-flying-safe-coronavirus/611335


    Voici pourquoi je déteste prendre les avions des grandes compagnies. C"est toujours un peu comme dans cet article.

    ...flying during a pandemic turned out to be more stressful—and surreal—than I’d planned for. The scenes played out like a postapocalyptic movie: Paranoid travelers roamed the empty terminals in masks, eyeing one another warily as they misted themselves with disinfectant. Dystopian public-service announcements echoed through the airport—“This is a message from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ...” Even the smallest, most routine tasks—such as dealing with the touch-screen ticketing kiosk—felt infused with danger.

    My trip took place in two legs, and the first was weird mostly in the ways that I’d expected. All but a few of the shops and restaurants at Washington National Airport were closed. Beverage service in the main cabin was suspended (though apparently serving ginger ale to first-class passengers was ruled epidemiologically acceptable). My first flight was so empty that the pilot warned we would experience “a very rapid acceleration for takeoff.” The plane leapt into the sky and my stomach dropped. I spent much of the flight using my baggie of Lysol wipes to scrub and re-scrub every surface within reach.

    The layover at O’Hare was where my fellow travelers’ fraying nerves came more fully into view. In the restroom, men hovered over sinks like warriors returning from battle, fervently washing their hands and shooting menacing looks at anyone who got too close. At the food court, a shouting match broke out among several stressed-out strangers, and police had to intervene.

    Outside the gate, passengers sat five or six seats apart, barely acknowledging one another, let alone attempting conversation. The eerie silence wore on me after a while. When my wife texted to ask how it was going, the best description I could muster was a grimacing emoji.

    Flying has always been unpleasant, and rife with small indignities. It’s likely that I was more alert than usual to the agitation of those around me. But as America lurches awkwardly toward an economic “reopening” in the weeks ahead, my fraught travel experience highlighted an unwelcome truth: The glittering allure of “normalcy” that waits on the other end of these stay-at-home orders is a mirage.

    Illustration : Affiche du film Airplane ! de 1980 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane !

    #aviation #voyage #USA #covid-19 #tourisme

  • Coronavirus in San Francisco : How City Flattened the Curve - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-san-francisco-london-breed/609808

    London breed wasn’t going to wait around for COVID-19.

    San Francisco had yet to confirm a single case of the coronavirus when Breed, the city’s 45-year-old first-term mayor, declared a state of emergency in late February.

    (...)

    Breed ordered businesses closed and issued a citywide shelter-in-place policy effective on March 17, at a point when San Francisco had fewer than 50 confirmed coronavirus cases.

    (...) The economic hardship a shutdown would cause was not lost on Breed. She was raised in a public-housing project by her grandmother, from whom, Harris said, Breed inherited a practical streak. Breed’s sister died of a drug overdose, while her brother is currently incarcerated on a 44-year sentence for manslaughter. “Her grandmother was a tough lady,” recalled Harris, who has known Breed for years. “She was practical, practical to her core.”

    “Hindsight these days is not years later; it’s weeks later,” the senator said. “So hindsight tells us London Breed was really smart. She did the right thing at the right time, even though it’s not what people wanted to hear.”

    (...) “This virus has been ahead of us from day one,” Cuomo lamented on Thursday, as he announced that, once again, New York had seen a daily record—799—in coronavirus deaths. That may be true for Cuomo and de Blasio, who dragged their feet, not to mention Donald Trump. But it is not true for Breed.

    (...) Public-health officials in san francisco began monitoring the coronavirus outbreak around the holidays in *December*, Mary Ellen Carroll, who runs the city’s Department of Emergency Management, told me. *By late January, Breed had activated San Francisco’s emergency-operations center* in preparation for an outbreak—the first such move in any major city in the country. (...) Everyone, including Breed, wears a mask when they meet, Carroll said.

    #in_retrospect #San_Francisco

    Politiquement pas très à gauche au sein du parti démocrate :

    Breed, a Democrat aligned with the party’s establishment wing, won the mayoralty in a close special election a few months later, defeating two more progressive candidates with the help of tabulations from San Francisco’s system of ranked-choice voting. She won election to a full term in 2019, but spent much of the year battling progressives on the city’s pervasive homelessness problem and in local elections where candidates she endorsed were defeated.

  • Bloomberg needs to take down Sanders — immediately (opinion) - CNN
    https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/22/opinions/bloomberg-needs-to-take-down-sanders-lockhart/index.html

    If Bloomberg wants to make it past the Democratic National Convention in July, his strategy needs to change —quickly. His first objective is to nab the nomination, and to do that, he needs to direct his resources to take down Sanders before he even has a chance at Trump.

    As it stands, Sanders has a chance to run the table as the rest of the field fights each other for the honor of coming in second. Sanders has emerged as the Democratic front-runner, and his support stands at 25% among Democrats and independents who lean Democratic, according to the most recent Quinnipiac poll.

    But that’s not enough to win the general election. I don’t believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump. In a general election battle between two divisive figures who both preach the politics of grievance, I believe Trump will win the battle to the bottom and remain the last man standing.

    Given that the primary calendar dictates that 60% of delegates will be determined by St. Patrick’s Day, the primary race could be effectively over in less than a month. Of all the other Democratic candidates, Bloomberg may be the only one who can stop the Sanders freight train and still have a shot at winning the White House.

    But let’s not forget — Bloomberg is already skipping the first four voting states in favor of concentrating on Super Tuesday. With his disastrous performance in the Las Vegas debate, it appears he won’t be building any organic momentum in this race. He has to buy it.
    If Bloomberg has any chance of winning the nomination, he has to redirect his resources during the primary and run ads against Sanders — not Trump.

    Bloomberg needs to use the next $400 million in ad spending to attack Sanders on his potential weaknesses in a general election and highlight how far left his campaign is. Hitting him on his past record on guns is a must.

  • America’s Forgotten History of Illegal Deportations

    In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the country carried out a wave of unconstitutional raids that affected as many as 1.8 million people. Is it on the verge of doing so again?

    It was a time of economic struggle, racial resentment and increasing xenophobia. Installed in the White House was a president who had never before held elected office. A moderately successful businessman, he promised American jobs for Americans—and made good on that promise by slashing immigration by nearly 90 percent.

    He wore his hair parted down the middle, rather than elaborately piled on top, and his name was Herbert Hoover, not Donald Trump. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, under the president’s watch, a wave of illegal and unconstitutional raids and deportations would alter the lives of as many as 1.8 million men, women and children—a threat that would seem to loom just as large in 2017 as it did back in 1929.

    What became colloquially known as the “Mexican repatriation” efforts of 1929 to 1936 are a shameful and profoundly illustrative chapter in American history, yet they remain largely unknown—despite their broad and devastating impact. So much so that today, a different president is edging towards similar solutions, with none of the hesitation or concern that basic consciousness would seem to require.

    Indeed, in the last several weeks, President Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security to greatly increase not only the scope of potential deportees, but the speed at which they are being sent out of the country—a bid at “stabilization” borne of many of the same nationalist anxieties that plagued his predecessor nearly a century ago.
    More Stories

    M. J. Hegar, a candidate for Senate in Texas, shakes hand with a voter.
    The Job of Campaigning Is Extremely Family-Unfriendly
    Joe Pinsker
    A photo of a large armored tank
    Antiques Road Show: The Real State of the U.S. Military
    Thomas G. Mahnken Roger Zakheim
    Radio Atlantic: The Veteran Candidate
    Edward-Isaac Dovere
    The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Roby Waived
    Elaine Godfrey

    In his address to a joint session of Congress last week, the president painted a dark portrait of America’s immigrant population: “As we speak tonight,” he intoned, “we are removing gang members, drug dealers and criminals that threaten our communities and prey on our very innocent citizens.” It was the same foreboding message that Trump has espoused since he announced his candidacy, and yet there remains very little evidence to support it.

    Several weeks ago, Trump’s White House circulated a draft executive order aimed at “protecting U.S. jobs,” one that would shut America’s doors to immigrants most likely to require public assistance (including reduced school lunches) as well as tightly control who is able to enter the American workforce. It was very nearly Hoover’s rallying cry—American jobs for Americans—heard once again.

    In his speech on Tuesday, the president repeated this plan:

    Protecting our workers also means reforming our system of legal immigration. The current, outdated system depresses wages for our poorest workers and puts great pressure on taxpayers. Nations around the world, like Canada, Australia and many others, have a merit-based immigration system. It’s a basic principle that those seeking to enter a country ought to be able to support themselves financially. Yet in America we do not enforce this rule, straining the very public resources that our poorest citizens rely upon.

    Back in Hoover’s era, as America hung on the precipice of economic calamity—the Great Depression—the president was under enormous pressure to offer a solution for increasing unemployment, and to devise an emergency plan for the strained social safety net. Though he understood the pressing need to aid a crashing economy, Hoover resisted federal intervention, instead preferring a patchwork of piecemeal solutions, including the targeting of outsiders.

    According to former California State Senator Joseph Dunn, who in 2004 began an investigation into the Hoover-era deportations, “the Republicans decided the way they were going to create jobs was by getting rid of anyone with a Mexican-sounding name.”

    “Getting rid of” America’s Mexican population was a random, brutal effort. “For participating cities and counties, they would go through public employee rolls and look for Mexican-sounding names and then go and arrest and deport those people,” said Dunn. “And then there was a job opening!”

    “We weren’t rounding up people who were Canadian,” he added. “It was an absolutely racially-motivated program to create jobs by getting rid of people.”

    Why, specifically, men and women of Mexican heritage? Professor Francisco Balderrama, whose book, A Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s is the most definitive chronicle of the period (and, not coincidentally, one of the only ones), explained: “Mexican immigration was very recent. It goes back to that saying: Last hired, first fired. The attitude of many industrialists and agriculturalists was reflected in larger cities: A Mexican is a Mexican.” And that included even those citizens of Mexicans descent who were born in the U.S. “That is sort of key in understanding the psychic of the nation,” said Balderrama.

    The so-called repatriation effort was, in large part, a misnomer, given the fact that as many as sixty percent of those sent to “home” Mexico were U.S. citizens: American-born children of Mexican-descent who had never before traveled south of the border. (Dunn noted, “I don’t know how you can repatriate someone to a country they’ve not been born or raised in.”)

    “Individuals who left at 5, 6 and 7 years old found themselves in Mexico dealing with process of socialization, of learning the language, but they maintained an American identity,” said Balderrama. “And still had the dream to come back to ‘my country.’”

    The raids, as detailed in Balderrama’s chronicle, were vicious. With national concerns over the supposed burden that outsiders were putting on social welfare agencies, authorities targeted those Mexicans utilizing public resources. “In Los Angeles,” explained Balderrama, “they had orderlies who gathered people [in the hospitals] and put them in stretchers on trucks and left them at the border.”

    The efforts were equally chaotic. “The first raid in Los Angeles was in 1931—they surrounded La Placita Park near downtown L.A.,” Dunn recalled. “It was a heavily Latino area. They, literally, on a Sunday afternoon, rounded everyone up in park that day, took them to train station and put them on a train that they had leased. These people were taken to Central Mexico to minimize their chances of crossing the border and coming back to the U.S.”

    Dunn continued, “It was not like there was a master committee mapping out blocks. It was more fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants. As in, Here’s a park where Mexicans go, okay let’s go there.”

    Mexicans in the United States—and Americans of Mexican descent—had little understanding of what was happening, and what their rights were. Elena Herrada, one of the founders of the oral history project, “Los Repatriados: Exiles from the Promised Land,” is the grandchild of Mexican-Americans who were targeted in the raids. Her grandparents, she recalled, lived in a “mostly Mexican neighborhood” in Detroit, known as Court Town.

    “It was the welfare officials who were doing it. A worker came to the door,” Herrada said. “My father remembered his father being asked by the worker, Where are you from?”

    “My dad was really puzzled,” she said. “Because his father didn’t want to say ‘Mexico’. My father was confused because he had always been a proud Mexican.”

    The family, Herrada recounted, was “de-patriated” to Mexico.

    “My grandfather didn’t have work at the time, and they were forcing them to leave. There was no gun put to his to head, but [they said he] wouldn’t be eligible to receive assistance—and he would starve.”

    “Many people didn’t believe they had a choice,” Herrada explained, “so they didn’t resist. My family didn’t believe they had a choice.”

    Herrada’s father and uncle would spend two years in Mexico before his parents were able to bring him back to the United States—after her grandfather, a veteran of the U.S. Army, returned to the country and once again found work.

    If American deportees made it back to America, according to Dunn, it was often because a friend or family member back in the States managed to obtain a copy of their birth certificate, proof of citizenship. And if they weren’t U.S. citizens, by the onset of World War II and the departure of much of the able-bodied workforce to the front, Mexican labor was back in demand: bodies were needed for low-paying agricultural work, and the xenophobia subsided under the auspices of the Bracero Program (a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Mexico, the program brought Mexican workers to the states for short-term labor).

    But some never made it back to America. “We are who we are because of what people did in that moment,” said Herrada.

    Each state handled the raids differently—sometimes federal agents were involved, sometimes it was social workers and local law enforcement who targeted people for removal. Hoover’s precise role in directing the deportation efforts is unclear, but, according to Professor Kevin Johnson, Dean of the UC Davis School of Law, and a specialist in public interest law and Chicano studies, “There was a lot of correspondence between the different levels of government, and there was logistical support.” This support included reimbursing states for the chartering of busses and trains to transport people to Mexico.

    Deportations took place across the country: Los Angeles had the largest concentration of Mexicans and Mexican-born Americans, but communities in Detroit were also targeted in large number. “America’s most industrial city was in many ways the promise of the age in terms of economic prosperity,” according to Balderrama, and because of this, its Mexicans and citizens of Mexicans-descent were not exempt from deportation. “The archival evidence points to a full map, across the nation,” said Balderrama. There were deportations in states as far flung as Alaska, Alabama and Mississippi.

    And yet, confirming the precise number of people who were deported during this era is difficult, said Balderrama. “Both governments”—Mexico and the United States—“weren’t very interested in keeping records about what happened. It was a problem and they wanted to get rid of it. That’s why the numbers are very difficult.”

    Dunn, however, spent nearly three years doing archival research, enlisting his state senate staff to comb through federal, state and local records in a bid to reconcile California’s tortured legacy. He feels confident in his citation of 1.8 million people deported. “That number came out of several documents we got from the federal government,” he told me.

    Beyond the travesty inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens, the Mexican deportations of the 1920s and 1930s are also shocking—and at this moment, particularly enlightening—for the illegalities visited upon non-citizens. Trump is unlikely to willfully deport American citizens, but he appears perilously close to replicating many of the mistakes Hoover did as it concerned the undocumented. And given the number of mixed-status families in the U.S.—as of 2015, 16.6 million Americans lived in residences with at least one undocumented immigrant—these deportations will affect citizens and non-citizens alike.

    Johnson said that in hindsight, it is clear Hoover’s deportations were a violation of “several constitutional rights,” including the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause and the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure.

    “Now it’s very clear that some of those provisions apply to immigrants in the U.S. The Supreme Court has made very clear that as long as you’re in the U.S., you have a right to due process and hearing. That doesn’t mean you can’t be removed,” said Johnson. “But you have the ability to retain counsel.”

    Johnson said that many immigrants—especially those who have been here for any extended amount of time, may have “deep community ties—to citizens, churches, employers.” The longer someone is in the U.S., he explained, “the more of those ties you have, and the deeper your rights are.”

    He pointed out that this legal reality, “is an issue right now because the White House is making efforts to expedite and expand deportations. But it means no hearing, no judicial review; it could be ready as a summary deportation.”

    Further, the expedited deportations can now occur beyond one hundred miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, and can target people who have been here for as many as two years. “Imagine what can happen in two years,” said Johnson. “All kinds of relief you might be eligible for, but you might not even have a hearing. The reason you have hearings is to try and avoid mistakes: If you don’t … you are probably going to have some mistakes tolerated and accepted.”

    Perhaps more than anything, the humanitarian cost of the Hoover-era deportations are the specter that looms largest over Trump’s immigration policy of today. Given the burden mass deportations would have placed on the federal bureaucracy, Hoover’s administration outsourced the raids, targeting and deportation to local and state officials—persons not particularly well versed in constitutional law, nor the sensitivities surrounding deportation.

    Trump appears ready to do the same: while the administration has directed the hiring of 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to oversee the dramatic increase in deportations, the administration has also revived the controversial 287(g) program, which recruits local law enforcement and sheriff’s deputies to assist in deportations.

    “It’s frightening and terrifying,” said Johnson. “We have a recent history—one not limited to the 1930s—of law enforcement engaging in excess in the name of law enforcement.”

    “I may be suspicious of ICE officials and how they apply the law,” he added, “but I do think they are trained to enforce the laws. And it’s the job of state and local police to enforce criminal laws—they don’t have the training, expertise or sensitivity to enforce accurate immigration decisions.”

    And yet it’s unclear if federal agents are the ones who intend on showing any particular restraint, given the new guidelines. According to the New York Times, ICE agents have already been targeting church shelters, airports and other areas where immigrants are known to convene.

    Two officials in Washington said that the shift [in policy]— and the new enthusiasm that has come with it — seems to have encouraged pro-Trump political comments and banter that struck the officials as brazen or gung-ho, like remarks about their jobs becoming “fun.” Those who take less of a hard line on unauthorized immigrants feel silenced, the officials said.

    Brazen behavior by those tasked with deportations, Johnson said, “is opening the door to the kinds of excesses that happened ... across the nation during the Depression—when state and local law enforcement made mistakes and rounded up brown people as their way of general relief reduction. I understand why immigrant communities are very frightened about what could happen.”

    In the meantime, only a limited number of Americans seem to even be aware of the gross mistakes their country made in the name of security. While still a state senator, Dunn successfully sponsored the Apology Act, an official mea culpa from the state of California to its Mexican residents—it passed in 2006. He also led efforts to have a memorial erected in La Placita park, the site of the first raids on L.A.’s Mexican community, where it now stands in memoriam.

    And yet, when Dunn took his apology proposal to members of the U.S. Congress, no one was interested. “They would say, ‘Immigration is really volatile right now. We’re gonna look like we’re only fighting for Latinos.’ We couldn’t convince anyone to pick it up.”

    As for all the records and material unearthed during his research? Dunn said, “Those documents are still sitting in my garage. Nobody really wanted them.”

    Those whose families were affected by the deportations—in some cases forever changed—appear no more eager to delve into the sins of the past. “They never talked about it,” said Herrada, “there was a lot of shame associated with it … They didn’t know why they got deported. They didn’t know what they did to bring that on. The only thing they knew was that they were Mexicans—and this only happened to Mexicans.”

    She added, “My grandfather still didn’t want to say he was deported. And my father, on his deathbed, said to me, You know, I never liked that word. He was really angry that I had used it.”

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/americas-brutal-forgotten-history-of-illegal-deportations/517971
    #histoire #USA #Etats-Unis #renvois #expulsions #migrations #Mexican_repatriation #Mexique

    signalé par @isskein via la mailing-list de Migreurop

  • USA : L’ambassadeur français sortant compare Trump à Louis XIV. « Israël va devenir un Etat d’apartheid » – Site de la chaîne AlManar-Liban
    http://french.almanar.com.lb/1332157

    Les propos du désormais ex-ambassadeur de France comparant Trump à Louis XIV ont été très repris. Ses commentaires sur le deal du siècle pour "résoudre" la question palestinienne beaucoup moins. Et c’est dommage !

    L’ambassadeur français sortant a également déclaré qu’il croyait que le deal du siècle (plan de paix américain bafouant les droits des Palestiniens) était voué à l’échec.

    « Je suis proche de Jared Kushner… Partout dans l’histoire de l’humanité, lorsqu’il y a une négociation entre deux parties, le [parti] le plus puissant impose des conditions à la partie la plus faible », a-t-il expliqué.

    « C’est la base du plan de paix de Jared Kushner – c’est une proposition très proche de ce que veulent les Israéliens. Est-il voué à l’échec ? Je devrais dire oui à 99%, mais (il reste) 1%, il ne faut jamais oublier le 1%. Trump est particulièrement capable de pousser les Israéliens, car il est très populaire en Israël », a encore dit l’ambassadeur.

    #palestine #deal_du_siècle

    • A Conversation With Outgoing French Ambassador Gérard Araud
      Yara Bayoumy - Apr 19, 2019 - The Atlantic
      https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/conversation-outgoing-french-ambassador-gerard-araud/587458

      (...) Yara Bayoumy: Your career started out in the Middle East. Where do you see the situation there now, especially with the peace process?

      Gérard Araud: I’m close to Jared Kushner … Everywhere in the history of mankind, when there is a negotiation between two sides, the more powerful [party] is imposing terms on the weaker party. That’s the basis of Jared Kushner’s [peace plan]—it will be a proposal very close to what the Israelis want. Is it doomed to fail? I should say 99 percent yes, but 1 percent, you never forget the 1 percent. Trump is uniquely able to push the Israelis, because he is so popular in Israel.

      Bayoumy: But Trump hasn’t pushed the Israelis so far.

      Araud: Exactly, but if need be, he may do it. Once Trump told Macron, “I have given everything to the Israelis; the Israelis will have to give me something.” He is totally transactional. He is more popular than [Benjamin] Netanyahu in Israel, so the Israelis trust him. That’s the first bet, Kushner told me. The second is that the Palestinians may consider, it’s their last chance to get limited sovereignty. And the third element is Kushner is going to pour money on the Palestinians. Don’t forget, the Arabs are behind the Americans. The plan is 50 pages, we were told, very precise; we don’t know what is in the plan. But we’ll see.

      The problem is that the disproportion of power is such between the two sides that the strongest may conclude that they have no interest to make concessions. And also the fact that the status quo is extremely comfortable for Israel. Because they [can] have the cake and eat it. They have the West Bank, but at the same time they don’t have to make the painful decision about the Palestinians, really making them really, totally stateless or making them citizens of Israel. They won’t make them citizens of Israel. So they will have to make it official, which is we know the situation, which is an apartheid. There will be officially an apartheid state. They are in fact already.

      Bayoumy: How do you feel Kushner approached the peace plan?

      Araud: He is totally in real-estate mode. He is totally dry. He’s extremely smart, but he has no guts. He doesn’t know the history. And in a sense, it’s good—we are not here to say who is right, who is wrong; we are trying to find a way. So in a sense, I like it, but at the same time he is so rational, and he is so pro-Israeli also, that he may neglect the point that if you offer the Palestinians the choice between surrendering and committing suicide, they may decide the latter. Somebody like Kushner doesn’t understand that. (...)

  • Who Is Paying for the War in Yemen? - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/pentagon-refueling-controversy-saudi-led-war-yemen/577666

    The Pentagon says that “#errors_in_accounting ” mean Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have not been properly charged for refueling.

    President Donald Trump, who repeatedly complains that the United States is paying too much for the defense of its allies, has praised Saudi Arabia for ostensibly taking on Iran in the Yemen war. It turns out, however, that U.S. taxpayers have been footing the bill for a major part of the Saudi-led campaign, possibly to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

    The revelation—detailed in a Defense Department letter obtained by The Atlantic—is likely to raise further ire among senators who have grown ever-more critical of Saudi conduct in the war, which has resulted in a growing number of civilian casualties, and U.S. support for it.

    Since the start of the Saudi-led intervention, in March 2015, and up until last month, the United States provided mid-air refueling for Saudi-led coalition aircraft that then flew missions related to the Yemen campaign. Getting heavy U.S. tankers into the air and carrying out this job is enormously expensive. The recipient country is required by law to pay the costs, but that isn’t what happened here. In a mea culpa of sorts, the Pentagon’s November 27 letter states that while the Defense Department “believed” Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates “had been charged for the fuel and refueling services, they in fact had not been charged adequately.” How inadequately, the Pentagon will not yet say; it is “currently calculating the correct charges,” the letter states.

    #erreur_comptable !

  • James A. Winnefeld Speaks Out on the Opioid Crisis - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/james-winnefeld-speaks-out-opioid-crisis/572128

    When speaking to Andersen, Winnefeld described how Jonathan was a quiet, kind, and clever kid, who suffered from anxiety and depression. After a false diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, Jonathan began drinking to come down from the Adderall he had been prescribed, and later moved on to harder substances such as opioids. Winnefeld and his wife tried to get Jonathan into intensive outpatient treatment, but no centers had space. During his senior year of high school, Jonathan began to spiral downward. He tried, unsuccessfully, to take his own life.

    “We realized, at that point, that we could not keep our son safe,” Winnefeld said.

    After about five days of searching, Winnefeld found a treatment center to take Jonathan. And after 15 months of treatment, Jonathan began to return to whom he once was. “It takes that long for the brain to recover from the physiological, psychological changes that have taken place,” Winnefeld said. “We saw his ambition come back. We saw his zest for life.”

    During his treatment, Jonathan received his emergency-medical-technician qualifications. In an admissions essay to the University of Denver, Jonathan wrote about a time when he had to administer CPR to someone undergoing a heroin overdose in a McDonald’s bathroom. Winnefeld shared how Jonathan wrote that “at that moment, he had decided he would dedicate his life to helping people who could not help themselves.”

    Yet addiction is a powerful thing, Winnefeld explained. Three weeks later, Jonathan passed away, relapsing on heroin that had been laced with fentanyl.

    So the Winnefelds started SAFE, which Andersen described as “amazingly comprehensive in its approach to the opioid epidemic.” SAFE combats the opioid crisis from six different angles. It works on public awareness and trying to lower the stigma of addiction. It also focuses on prevention in vulnerable populations such as high schools, and seeks to have doctors moderate their prescription of opioids.

    The nonprofit also emphasizes law enforcement’s response to opioid addiction, trying to assure that addiction isn’t criminalized. SAFE considers medical response critical to fighting the crisis, and works to make sure every first responder is equipped with the lifesaving drug naloxone, which can reverse the symptoms of an overdose.

    #Opioides #USA

  • Trumpism, Realized
    To preserve the political and cultural preeminence of white Americans against a tide of demographic change, the administration has settled on a policy of systemic child abuse.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/child-separation/563252

    The policy’s cruelty is its purpose: By inflicting irreparable trauma on children and their families, the administration intends to persuade those looking to America for a better life to stay home. The barbarism of deliberately inflicting suffering on children as coercion, though, has forced the Trump administration and its allies in the conservative press to offer three contradictory defenses.

    First, there’s the denial that the policy exists: Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen declared, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”

    Not so, the administration’s defenders in the media have insisted. The policy is both real and delightful. The conservative radio host Laura Ingraham called the uproar “hilarious,” adding sarcastically that “the U​.​S​.​ is so inhumane to provide entertainment, sports, tutoring, medical, dental, four meals a day, and clean, decent housing for children whose parents irresponsibly tried to bring them across the border illegally.” She also described the facilities as “essentially summer camps.” On Fox News, the Breitbart editor Joel Pollak argued that the detention facilities offer children both basic necessities and the chance to receive an education. “This is a place where they really have the welfare of the kids at heart,” he said.

    • Why The Face Of Family Separation Is A Whi

      te Woman.
      https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-daniels-kirstjen-neilsen-family-separation_us_5b2a5774e4b05d

      Nielsen is leaning into enforcing the “zero tolerance” policy of separating children from their families at the border.

      Family separation has been portrayed as a “women’s issue” in the media, with all four living former first ladies opposing it. The administration has deployed Nielson, along with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to defend it. Both women appeared at a press briefing on Monday and performed that job with gusto.

      Tempting though it is to assume that Nielsen and Sanders must, on some level, oppose this cruel policy, there’s no reason to believe they have more empathy by virtue of being women. In fact, it’s these kinds of assumptions about white women’s innocence and outsized empathy that have made them some of white supremacy’s most effective agents. To be sure, it is men like Trump, former DHS chief John Kelly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House adviser Stephen Miller who are the architects of this policy ― but it has been left to Nielsen to implement their inhumane plan and to defend it to the public.

      White women like Nielsen (and Sanders) have always been part of making white supremacy seem more palatable and less like the brutal, repressive ideology it is. Historical examples abound, from white women who worked alongside male colonizers to the wives of slaveholders who punished the people their husbands owned, to the white women who packed the picnic lunches for and took the photos at the lynchings committed purportedly in their defense. White women have played active roles in advancing and protecting white supremacy.

  • “The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal”

    “A majority of white voters backed a candidate who assured them that they will never have to share this country with people of color as equals. That is the reality that all Americans will have to deal with”

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-nationalists-delusion/546356 #Trump #racisme #USA

  • The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-secret-correspondence-between-donald-trump-jr-and-wikileaks/545738

    The transparency organization asked the president’s son for his cooperation—in sharing its work, in contesting the results of the election, and in arranging for Julian Assange to be Australia’s ambassador to the United States.

    Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year’s presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee’s oldest son and campaign surrogate. “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks wrote. “The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?”

    The next morning, about 12 hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. “Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around,” he wrote on September 21, 2016. “Thanks.”

    The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between WikiLeaks and the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation. WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump’s tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States.

  • Rape in the American Prison
    In 2003, Congress passed legislation to eliminate sexual assaults against inmates. One young man’s story shows how elusive that goal remains.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/rape-in-the-american-prison/385550

    The rituals of intake were familiar. Standing in a line with several dozen other men, John stripped off his navy blue scrubs, squatted, and coughed to prove he wasn’t hiding anything. Once inside, he could try grimacing to look tough, as he had in his early mugshots, but he couldn’t hide his skinny frame or his high-pitched voice.

    Over the next few days, while bringing trays of food around the blocks for his new kitchen job, John would learn that he had been placed in one of the nicer units (another he saw “looked like a basement, with the lights busted out”). But he also noticed that he was one of the youngest prisoners on the block. The other prisoners noticed too. He was what they called a “fish.”

  • What the ’Crack Baby’Panic Tells us About the Opioid Epidemic - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/what-the-crack-baby-panic-reveals-about-the-opioid-epidemic/533763

    [...] a recent article in the New York Times by Catherine Saint Louis that chronicles approaches for caring for newborns born to mothers who are addicted to opioids [...] is remarkable in its command and explanation of the medical and policy issues at play in the ongoing epidemic, but its success derives from something more than that. Saint Louis expertly captures the human stories at the intersection of the wonder of childbirth and the grip of drug dependency in a Kentucky hospital, all while keeping the epidemic in view.

    [...]

    The article is an exemplar in a field of public-health-oriented writing about the opioid crisis—the most deadly and pervasive drug epidemic in American history—that has shaped popular and policy attitudes about the crisis. But the wisdom of that field has not been applied equally in recent history. The story of Jamie Clay and Jay’la Cy’anne stood out to me because it is so incongruous with the stories of “crack babies” and their mothers that I’d grown up reading and watching.

    The term itself still stings. “Crack baby” brings to mind hopeless, damaged children with birth defects and intellectual disabilities who would inevitably grow into criminals. It connotes inner-city blackness, and also brings to mind careless, unthinking black mothers who’d knowingly exposed their children to the ravages of cocaine. Although the science that gave the world the term was based on a weak proto-study of only 23 children and has been thoroughly debunked since, the panic about “crack babies” stuck. The term made brutes out of people of color who were living through wave after waves of what were then the deadliest drug epidemics in history.

    #deux_poids_deux_mesures #Etats_Unis #racisme #opiacés