Pour alimenter la riche collection #toilettes & #genre sur seenthis :
Vu sur twitter, le 17.04.2018. Les images viennent apparemment de #New_Orleans :
▻https://twitter.com/matthewblongo/status/985963185374203904
GOP Vermont governor signs gender-neutral bathroom law
Vermont’s Republican governor has signed into law a gender-neutral bathroom measure that lawmakers are touting as a major victory for LGBTQ rights.
Trump’s sending troops to the border to take on 200 kids and parents
According to President Donald Trump, the mightiest, richest country in the world is under a threat so huge and scary that it will require the deployment of military forces — as many as 2,000 to 4.000, Trump said Thursday — along its 2,000-mile southern border. The danger consists of a ragtag caravan formed by several hundred impoverished people, many of them children from tiny Central American nations. Yes, the time has come to protect America from marauding youngsters and their parents.
▻https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/05/opinions/trump-has-no-shame-on-immigration-fernandez-kelly-opinion/index.html?sr=twCNN040518trump-has-no-shame-on-immigration-fernandez-ke
#Trump #frontières #armée #militarisation_des_frontières #USA #Etats-Unis
The cost of 2 National Guard border arrests would help a homeless vet for a year
President Donald Trump’s decision to send #National_Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border has drawn a mixed response. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey welcomed the move, while California Gov. Jerry Brown’s National Guard said it would “review” the request.
Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., had a specific complaint: He said it was a poor use of tax dollars.
“Using the National Guard to do border security is very expensive,” Gallego tweeted April 3. “For what it would cost the Guard to make just TWO arrests at the border, we could give a homeless veteran permanent housing for an entire year.”
Guard border deployment creates issues for Pentagon
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) have now sent two requests for assistance to the Pentagon’s new Border Security Support Cell, which was hastily established to help coordination between the Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Homeland Security.
It’s estimated that it will cost $182 million to keep 2,093 guardsmen at the border through the end of September, which represents just more than half of the personnel approved.
The amount covers $151 million in pay and allowances for the 2,093 personnel, as well as $31 million for 12,000 flying hours for 26 UH-72 Lakota helicopters, according to a defense memo on the amount.
▻http://thehill.com/policy/defense/386617-guard-border-deployment-creates-issues-for-pentagon
The Cal. National Guard Is Working At the Mexican Border, But Mostly Behind The Scenes
In California - a state with strong differences with the White House on immigration policy - about 400 troops are on border duty. But they’re keeping a low profile.
Signalé par Reece Jones sur twitter, avec ce commentaire:
What are US National Guard troops doing at the border? Analyze intelligence, work as dispatchers, and monitor cameras “but not cameras that look across the border into Mexico”
L’armée américaine mobilisée pour défendre la frontière
En campagne pour les élections américaines de mi-mandat, le président Trump a focalisé son discours sur la caravane de migrants d’Amérique centrale qui fait route à travers le Mexique. Il a promis de tout faire pour empêcher ces demandeurs d’asile de pénétrer sur le territoire américain (“Personne n’entrera”), y compris de déployer “entre 10 000 et 15 000 soldats” en plus de la police aux frontières et de la police de l’immigration.
L’armée estime que seuls 20 % des migrants, soit 1 400 selon les estimations les plus hautes, iront jusqu’à la frontière qui se trouve encore à quelque 1 300 kilomètres et plusieurs semaines de marche, rapporte le Los Angeles Times. Le chiffre de 15 000 hommes correspond à peu près au nombre de soldats déployés en Afghanistan, observe le même quotidien. Les militaires envoyés à la frontière peuvent se poser des questions sur le sens de cette mission, comme l’illustre ici le dessinateur Chappatte.
U.S. Troops’ First Order at the Border: Laying Razor Wire
Soldiers fill local hotels, joke about finding ways to keep busy.
On Monday morning in this border town, about a dozen U.S. Army soldiers unfurled reams of razor wire on top of a wrought-iron fence alongside a bridge to Mexico.
The soldiers from the 36th Engineer Brigade at Fort Riley, Kan., who wore helmets but didn’t appear to be armed, are among thousands of troops deployed in recent days to the southwest U.S. border as part of Operation Faithful Patriot.
Around border crossings throughout Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, military personnel have filled up hotels and delivered trucks packed with coils of razor wire as they begin to support U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers.
The personnel were sent in advance of the anticipated arrival of thousands of Central Americans, including children, traveling in caravans currently several hundred miles south of the nearest U.S. border crossing.
At the DoubleTree Suites Hotel in McAllen, Texas, the bar did brisk business Sunday night as soldiers who had changed into civilian clothes chatted over drinks. Some joked about needing to find ways to keep soldiers busy during their deployment.
The Anzalduas International Bridge, where the Kansas-based troops were working, is used only for vehicle traffic to and from the Mexican city of Reynosa. The wire was placed on top of fences at least 15 feet high along each side of the bridge that sat several dozen feet above an embankment.
Outside the port of entry where vehicles from Mexico are stopped after crossing the bridge, shiny razor wire recently placed around the facility glistened in the afternoon sun.
Migrants seeking asylum who cross the border illegally generally don’t come to the port, but swim or wade across the Rio Grande and turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents.
Near another bridge connecting Hidalgo, Texas, to Reynosa, a concertina wire fence was recently erected along the river edge, a placement more likely to impede illegal migrants who arrive on foot.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have determined where the military placed razor wire, Army Col. Rob Manning, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters Monday during a briefing.
It is part of an effort previously announced by Air Force Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy, commander of the U.S. Northern Command, to “harden the points of entry and address key gaps.”
Near the Donna-Rio Bravo International Bridge about 22 miles southeast of McAllen, troops on Monday were working on what looked to be a staging area to prepare for coming work. Two armed military police officers stood guard, opening and closing a gate as flatbed trailers carrying heavy military trucks and transports with troops inside arrived. At least one tent apparently intended to house troops was in place Monday.
President Trump ordered the deployment last month after the first caravan made its way into Mexico. He had described the impending caravan’s arrival as an “invasion.”
The Pentagon said Monday that more than 5,000 troops are at or would be on their way to the U.S.-Mexico border by the end of the day, with about 2,700 in Texas, 1,200 in Arizona and 1,100 in California. Eventually, nearly 8,000 will be deployed, according to a U.S. official. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security have said the troops won’t be used to enforce immigration laws but will provide backup for Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection officers.
At the Vaquero Hangout, an open-air bar within eyesight of the Anzalduas bridge, a flag declaring support for the U.S. military hung from the rafters. It was business as usual on Sunday evening. Some patrons watched the Houston Texans’ NFL game, while others were focused on a live band, George and the Texas Outlaws.
A few folks briefly took notice of flashing lights from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicle parked on the bridge as the soldiers lay down razor wire, an effort they would continue the next day.
▻https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-troops-first-order-at-the-border-laying-razor-wire-1541509201
#fil_barbelé #barbelé
Pentagon to begin drawdown of troops at border: report
The Pentagon is planning to begin a drawdown of troops at the southern border as soon as this week, the Army commander overseeing the mission told Politico on Monday.
Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan told the news outlet that the 5,800 active-duty troops sent to assist Customs and Border Protection at the U.S.-Mexico border should be home by Christmas.
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“Our end date right now is 15 December, and I’ve got no indications from anybody that we’ll go beyond that,” said Buchanan, who is overseeing the mission from Texas.
Buchanan said engineer and logistics troops, which make up the largest parts of the deployment, will begin returning home soon.
According to Politico’s report, some troops will begin leaving the area before the so-called migrant caravan arrives at the border.
The news of the troops’ return comes as critics call President Trump’s request to send thousands of troops to the border a “political stunt.”
Trump before Election Day stoked fears over an approaching group of Central American migrants heading towards the southern border, which he referred to as an “invasion.” He requested the deployment of thousands of troops to the border in a support mission just before Nov. 6.
Some lawmakers have accused Trump of wasting resources and manpower on the mission, as reports have emerged that the troops are restless and underutilized.
Thousands of participants in the caravan over the weekend reached Tijuana, Mexico, where they were met with vast protests. Some of the protesters are echoing Trump’s language, calling the group a danger and an invasion, The Associated Press reported.
Most of the members of the caravan are reportedly escaping rampant poverty and violence in their home countries.
▻https://thehill.com/policy/defense/417503-pentagon-to-begin-drawdown-of-troops-at-border-report
–-> commentaire sur twitter:
Just 3 weeks after deployment, Trump’s Pentagon is sending the military home from the border. They’ve served their purpose as the GOP’s 11th hour campaign force. Now we’re stuck with a hundred miles of trashy concertina wire and a $200 million bill.
▻https://twitter.com/LaikenJordahl/status/1064644464726048768
Troops at U.S.-Mexican border to start coming home
All the troops should be home by Christmas, as originally expected, Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan said in an interview Monday.
The 5,800 troops who were rushed to the southwest border amid President Donald Trump’s pre-election warnings about a refugee caravan will start coming home as early as this week — just as some of those migrants are beginning to arrive.
Democrats and Republicans have criticized the deployment as a ploy by the president to use active-duty military forces as a prop to try to stem Republican losses in this month’s midterm elections.
The general overseeing the deployment told POLITICO on Monday that the first troops will start heading home in the coming days as some are already unneeded, having completed the missions for which they were sent. The returning service members include engineering and logistics units whose jobs included placing concertina wire and other barriers to limit access to ports of entry at the U.S.-Mexico border.
All the troops should be home by Christmas, as originally expected, Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan said in an interview Monday.
“Our end date right now is 15 December, and I’ve got no indications from anybody that we’ll go beyond that,” said Buchanan, who leads the land forces of U.S. Northern Command.
The decision to begin pulling back comes just weeks after Trump ordered the highly unusual deployment.
In previous cases in which the military deployed to beef up security at the border, the forces consisted of part-time National Guard troops under the command of state governors who backed up U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other law enforcement agencies.
But the newly deployed troops, most of them unarmed and from support units, come from the active-duty military, a concession the Pentagon made after Trump insisted that the deployment include “not just the National Guard.”
Buchanan confirmed previous reports that the military had rejected a request from the Department of Homeland Security for an armed force to back up Border Patrol agents in the event of a violent confrontation.
“That is a law enforcement task, and the secretary of Defense does not have the authority to approve that inside the homeland,” Buchanan said.
The closure earlier Monday of one entry point along the California border near Tijuana, Mexico, was only partial and did not require more drastic measures, Buchanan said.
“About half of the lanes were closed this morning, but that’s it,” he reported. “No complete closures.”
Other ports might be closed fully in the future, he said, but he did not anticipate any need to take more drastic measures.
“If CBP have reliable information that one of their ports is about to get rushed with a mob, or something like that that could put their agents at risk, they could ask us to completely close the port,” Buchanan said. “You understand the importance of commerce at these ports. Nobody in CBP wants to close a port unless they’re actually driven to do so.”
The troop deployment should start trailing off as engineer and other logistics troops wind down their mission of building base camps and fortifying ports of entry for the Border Patrol.
Army and Marine engineers have now emplaced about 75 percent of the obstacles they planned to, including concertina wire, shipping containers, and concrete barriers at ports of entry. “Once we get the rest of the obstacles built, we don’t need to keep all those engineers here. As soon as I’m done with a capability, what I intend to do is redeploy it,” Buchanan said. “I don’t want to keep these guys on just to keep them on.”
Logistics troops, too, will be among the first to head home. “I will probably ask to start redeploying some of our logistic capability,” Buchanan predicted. “Now that things are set down here, we don’t need as many troops to actually build base camps and things like that, because the base camps are built."
Among the troops who will remain after construction engineers and logisticians start departing are helicopter pilots, planners, medical personnel, and smaller “quick response” teams of engineers who can help Border Patrol personnel shut down traffic at their ports of entry.
In contrast to the speed of the deployment in early November and the fanfare surrounding it, the withdrawal promises to be slower and quieter — but Buchanan expects it to be done before Christmas.
“That doesn’t mean it’s impossible,” he added. “But right now, this is a temporary mission, and we’re tasked to do it until the 15th of December.”
▻https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/19/troops-us-mexico-border-come-home-1005510
Trump’s Border Stunt Is a Profound Betrayal of Our Military
The president used America’s military not against any real threat but as toy soldiers, with the intent of manipulating a domestic midterm election.
A week before the midterm elections, the president of the United States announced he would deploy up to 15,000 active duty military troops to the United States-Mexico border to confront a menacing caravan of refugees and asylum seekers. The soldiers would use force, if necessary, to prevent such an “invasion” of the United States.
Mr. Trump’s announcement and the deployment that followed (of roughly 5,900) were probably perfectly legal. But we are a bipartisan threesome with decades of experience in and with the Pentagon, and to us, this act creates a dangerous precedent. We fear this was lost in the public hand-wringing over the decision, so let us be clear: The president used America’s military forces not against any real threat but as toy soldiers, with the intent of manipulating a domestic midterm election outcome, an unprecedented use of the military by a sitting president.
The public debate focused on secondary issues. Is there truly a threat to American security from an unarmed group of tired refugees and asylum seekers on foot and a thousand miles from the border? Even the Army’s internal assessment did not find this a very credible threat.
Can the president deny in advance what could be legitimate claims for asylum, without scrutiny? Most likely, this violates treaty commitments the United States made as part of its agreement to refugee conventions in 1967, which it has followed for decades.
The deployment is not, in the context of the defense budget, an albatross. We are already paying the troops, wherever they’re deployed, and the actual incremental costs of sending them to the border might be $100 million to $200 million, a tiny fraction of the $716 billion defense budget.
Still, we can think of many ways to put the funds to better use, like improving readiness.
It’s also not unusual for a president to ask the troops to deploy to the border in support of border security operations. Presidents of both parties have sent troops to the border, to provide support functions like engineering, logistics, transportation and surveillance.
But those deployments have been generally in smaller numbers, usually the National Guard, and never to stop a caravan of refugees and asylum seekers.
So, generously, some aspects of the deployment are at least defensible. But one is not, and that aspect is the domestic political use — or rather, misuse — of the military.
James Mattis, the secretary of defense, asserted that the Defense Department does not “do stunts.” But this was a blatant political stunt. The president crossed a line — the military is supposed to stay out of domestic politics. As many senior military retirees have argued, the forces are not and should not be a political instrument. They are not toy soldiers to be moved around by political leaders but a neutral institution, politically speaking.
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Oh, some might say, presidents use troops politically all the time. And so they do, generally in the context of foreign policy decisions that have political implications. Think Lyndon Johnson sending more troops to Vietnam, fearing he would be attacked for “cutting and running” from that conflict. Or George W. Bush crowing about “mission accomplished” when Saddam Hussein was toppled. Those are not the same thing as using troops at home for electoral advantage.
Electoral gain, not security, is this president’s goal. Two of us served in the military for many years; while all troops must obey the legal and ethical orders of civilian leaders, they need to have faith that those civilian leaders are using them for legitimate national security purposes. But the border deployment put the military right in the middle of the midterm elections, creating a nonexistent crisis to stimulate votes for one party.
When partisan actions like this occur, they violate civil-military traditions and erode that faith, with potentially long-term damage to the morale of the force and our democratic practice — all for electoral gain.
The deployment is a stunt, a dangerous one, and in our view, a misuse of the military that should have led Mr. Mattis to consider resigning, instead of acceding to this blatant politicization of America’s military.
The Military Is ’Securing’ a 1,900-Mile Border with 22 Miles of Razor Wire
“#Operation_Faithful_Patriot” is nothing more than a very expensive, politically motivated P.R. campaign.
Skim through the Pentagon’s media site for Operation Faithful Patriot—the fittingly ridiculous name for the deployment of some 7,000 American troops to various spots along the Mexican border—and you’ll see lots of razor wire.
There are photos of American troops laying razor wire (technically known as concertina wire) along the California-Mexico border. Of wire being affixed to the top of fences and to the sides of buildings. Everywhere you look on the Pentagon’s site, you find wire, wire, and more wire. Photos of soldiers carrying rolls of unused wire, snapshots of forklifts bringing more of the stuff to the border, and even videos of wire being unrolled and deployed. It’s thrilling stuff, truly.
The message is not subtle. President Donald Trump might not have convinced Congress to blow billions for a fully operational border wall, but good luck to any immigrant caravan that happens to stumble into the thorny might of the American military’s sharpest deterrents.
The focus on concertina wire isn’t just in the Pentagon’s internal media. The Wall Street Journal dedicated an entire Election Day story to how troops in Granjeno, Texas, had “unfurled reams of razor wire on top of a wrought-iron fence alongside a bridge to Mexico.” Troops stringing wire also appeared in The New York Post, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.
There is so much concertina wire deployed to the southern border that if it were all stretched out from end to end, it would reach all the way from Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf Coast to....well, whatever is 22 miles west of Brownsville, Texas.
Yes. Despite the deluge of photos and videos of American troops are securing the southern border with reams of razor wire, Buzzfeed’s Vera Bergengruen reports that “troops have deployed with 22 miles of the wire so far, with 150 more available.”
The U.S.–Mexico border is roughly 1,950 miles long.
The wire doesn’t seem to be getting strung with any sort of strategic purpose, either. That WSJ story about the troops in Texas hanging wire from a bridge says that the “wire was placed on top of fences at least 15 feet high along each side of the bridge that sat several dozen feet above an embankment” while the bridge itself remains open to vehicle traffic from Mexico. If there is a goal, it would seem to be making the border look more prickly and dystopian while not actually creating any sort of barrier.
It’s no wonder, then, that the troops deployed to the border are confused about why they are there. On Wednesday, when Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited some of the troops stationed near McAllen, Texas, he was met with lots of questions and provided few answers.
“Sir, I have a question. The wire obstacles that we’ve implanted along the border....Are we going to be taking those out when we leave?” one of the soldiers asked Mattis, according to Bergengruen. Another asked Mattis to explain the “short- and long-term plans of this operation.”
“Short-term right now, you get the obstacles in so the border patrolmen can do what they gotta do,” Mattis responded. “Longer term, it’s somewhat to be determined.”
Even at a time when most American military engagements seem to be conducted with a “TBD” rationale, this feels especially egregious. Mattis did his best on Wednesday to make the effort seem like a meaningful attempt to secure the border, while simultaneously admitting that he does not expect the deployed troops to actually come into contact with any immigrant caravans. Lately he’s been talking about how the deployment is supposedly good training for unconventional circumstances.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Operation Faithful Patriot—a name so silly that the Pentagon has decided to stop using it—is nothing more than a very expensive, politically motivated P.R. campaign. Of the 39 units deployed, five of them are public affairs units. There seems to be no clear mission, no long-term objective, and no indication that the troops will add meaningful enforcement to existing border patrols.
As for all that wire? It doesn’t really seem to be working either.
▻https://reason.com/blog/2018/11/19/the-military-is-securing-a-1900-mile-bor
#Faithful_Patriot #barbelé
v. aussi :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/748944
Janvier 2019... l’histoire se répète...
Adelson refuses to back Netanyahu as PM faces possible police call for indictment - Israel News - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/adelson-refuses-to-back-netanyahu-ahead-of-pm-s-possible-indictment-1.58101
The once-warm relationship between U.S. billionaire Sheldon Adelson and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have frosted over completely. In an Israeli radio interview broadcast on Monday, the GOP megadonor declined to say – not once, but twice – he wishes the Israeli leader won’t be indicted over graft suspicions.[…]
In the investigation the police call #Case_2000, it is alleged that Netanyahu tried to strike a deal with the publisher of Israel’s biggest paid newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, which would give him better coverage in exchange for weakening its rival, the free daily Israel Hayom. The latter is a staunchly pro-Netanyahu newspaper, published by Adelson, which quickly surpassed Yedioth’s circulation.
Netanyahu was taped telling Yedioth publisher Arnon Mozes that if his daily were to ease its hard stance on him, the prime minister would talk to Adelson about Israel Hayom refraining from publishing its weekend edition.
Last June, Adelson and his wife Miriam were questioned about the affair by police in Israel. They reportedly told investigators they were disappointed and angry when they found out about the alleged negotiations and Netanyahu’s taped commitments to weaken their paper.
United states: Pro-Israel Democrats are in denial of Pew poll showing favorability tanking
▻http://mondoweiss.net/2018/02/democrats-showing-favorability
Last week Pew released a bombshell survey showing that the progressive base of the Democratic Party is now far more sympathetic to Palestine than Israel. “[N]early twice as many liberal Democrats say they sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israel (35% vs. 19%).”
That finding is now getting pushback from Democrats who support the strong Israel-U.S. relationship. They worry that the issue is becoming politicized: that the Republican Party is becoming the address for Israel support, so before long Democratic candidates for office will distance themselves from Israel. And Israel will be under real pressure to change its Jim Crow foundations.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America said the poll is faulty.
Finally, a poll released by Pew did a faulty job of measuring American support for Israel, especially within the Democratic Party. While Democrats and Republicans generally disagree on certain Israeli policies, such as Israel’s settlement movement and the Kotel agreement, overall support for Israel remains strong. Just as Americans can question and criticize the Trump administration while still loving their country and remaining patriots, so too can Americans criticize Israeli policies and its leaders.
This is not very convincing: The Council links a study done 14 months ago by Shibley Telhami showing that 60 percent of Democrats support imposing sanctions on Israel over settlements, and 55 percent of Democrats regard Israel as a burden on U.S. foreign policy. It’s only gotten worse since.
Writing “How Not to Measure Americans’ Support for Israel” at the Atlantic, establishment Israel advocates Tamara Cofman Wittes and Daniel Shapiro can only offer a semantical argument against the poll: Pew misframed the question so that the surveyed conflate “Israel” with the “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” And nobody likes the conflict– so Israel suffers.
Short-termism led the Democratic Party to let unions die, and now they’ve lost their base / Boing Boing
▻https://boingboing.net/2018/01/27/solidarity-forever.html
For decades, Democrats in power and in opposition have traded away labor laws and rules that protected unions in order to gain short-term advantages in political horse-trades, and now, with union membership down from 26 to 10.7% since the Reagan years, districts that formed Democrats’ “blue wall” have been poverty-struck and have flipped for Trump.
A new NBER study quantifies the effect that union membership has on Democratic support, comparing counties that cross state lines, with one half in a ’right-to-work’ state and the other in a state that protects unions, finding that the difference that unionization makes in Democratic support would have been enough to deliver the presidency to Democrats in 2016.
As New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz points out, Republicans know this, even if Democrats don’t (his aphorism: “The GOP understands how important labor unions are to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, historically, has not”).
This could have been a golden age for American liberalism. The Democratic Party — and the progressive forces within it — have so much going for them. The GOP’s economic vision has never been less popular with ordinary Americans, or more irrelevant to their material needs. The U.S. electorate is becoming less white, less racist, and less conservative with each passing year. Social conservatism has never had less appeal for American voters than it does today. The garish spectacle of the Trump-era Republican Party is turning the American suburbs — once a core part of the GOP coalition — purple and blue.
If the Democratic Party wasn’t bleeding support from white working-class voters in its old labor strongholds, it would dominate our national politics. Understandably, Democratic partisans often blame their powerlessness on such voters — and the regressive racial views that led them out of Team Blue’s tent. But as unions have declined across the Midwest, Democrats haven’t just been losing white, working-class voters to revanchist Republicans — they’ve also been losing them to quiet evenings at home. The NBER study cited by McElwee found that right-to-work laws reduce voter turnout in presidential elections by 2 to 3 percent.
From the Bargaining Table to the Ballot Box: Political Effects of Right to Work Laws [James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Vanessa Williamson/National Bureau of Economic Research] ▻https://jamesfeigenbaum.github.io/research/pdf/fhw_rtw_jan2018.pdf
Democrats Paid a Huge Price for Letting Unions Die [Eric Levitz/New York Magazine] ▻http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/democrats-paid-a-huge-price-for-letting-unions-die.html
Kentucky Senate Passes GOP Bill Allowing Discrimination Against Interracial Couples
▻http://oppositionreport.com/kentucky-senate-passes-gop-bill-allowing-discrimination-against-in
With Bannon banished from Trump World, pro-Israel hard-liners pin their hopes on Pence
Far-right U.S. Jewish Republicans believed the one-time Breitbart supremo had their back, but his fall from grace shifts their focus to the vice president and a very unlikely blast from the recent past
Allison Kaplan Sommer Jan 16, 2018
Few American Jews shed tears at the downfall of Steve Bannon, whose humiliation was made complete Tuesday when he stepped down from Breitbart News following his ugly estrangement from President Donald Trump – confirmed by the insulting new nickname of Sloppy Steve.
skip - Donald Trump tweet
The catalyst for his fate were his uncensored remarks in Michael Wolffs White House tell-all book, Fire and Fury, alienating Trump and then, fatally, the Mercers (Bannons arch-conservative financial backers who bankrolled both Breitbart and his endeavors to become a renegade Republican kingmaker.)
The vast majority of Americas overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic Jews viewed Bannon as either an anti-Semite or an anti-Semite enabler whose conspiratorial references to demonic global financiers awakened and emboldened white supremacists. His oft-quoted description of Breitbart as the platform for the alt-right white nationalist movement confirmed such views.
But for the minority of staunchly hard-line, pro-Israel Jews (and evangelical Christians) who support Israels settlement enterprise, oppose a Palestinian state and any form of territorial compromise, Bannon was an important force in the White House.
For this group, his out-of-the-box positions on Israel far outweighed any threats the views of the Trump-voting, alt-right fan base from which he drew his influence might pose.
Notably, it was Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America – who invited Bannon to address his organizations annual gala last November – who was the sole loyalist quoted as willing to speak up for Bannon in a lengthy Politico piece on Sunday. Klein said: If there is anyone, like Bannon, who is a strong supporter of Israel and a strong fighter against anti-Semitism and that person ends up having less influence on the administration, that is something that would sadden me.
In Fire and Fury, the extent to which Bannons position on Israel matched hard-liners like Klein was described in detail. The book not only revealed that Trumps then-strategic adviser planned to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Day One after entering the White House, but, moreover, had an extreme and highly unorthodox approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza, says Bannon in the book. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying.
He then claimed that both GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were all in on his plans.
Taken as a whole, it is a depiction of an extreme right-wing cabal, one that could find its place on the right fringes of Likud, that has been guiding if not running [President Donald] Trumps Middle East policies, Haaretzs Chemi Shalev wrote. Shalev described it as an axis that dominated Trumps Middle East policies during his first year in office. It is an alliance that Netanyahu appears to have cultivated, with the assistance, or at the direction, of his Las Vegas benefactor, Adelson. All three operate under the premise ascribed to Bannon that the further right you were, the more correct you were on Israel.
This hard-line trio of influence presumably acted as a counterweight against the more pragmatic former military men in the White House – most prominently National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, but also former Secretary of Homeland Security and current Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis – whom, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the far right privately scorn as Arabists who are soft on Israel. It was also a bulwark against Trumps fantasies of making the ultimate deal, which they believed were being cultivated by Bannons nemesis – Trumps son-in-law and aide, Jared Kushner.
Bannons banishment from the White House, and now his political self-immolation and disappearance from Trumps circle of influence, comes as a deep disappointment to those who embraced and celebrated his outlook and that of satellite foreign policy Bannonites like Sebastian Gorka.
Sad, tragic and disappointing, one pro-Trump Republican on the Jewish far right told me, asking not to be identified by name. Israels lost a really important voice.
With that sadness comes concern over the increased influence of the generals, as well as Javanka (Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump), on Middle East policy. The Jewish Trump supporter said he believes the presidents son-in-law has got his head in a very dark place when it comes to this peace thing. I think Jared is really wrong on this whole peace plan and can only do damage, he noted.
But the hard-liners are still hopeful, attributing their optimism that the Trump administration will avoid any Kushner-fueled peace attempts to three factors.
First, and most prominently, their hopes are pinned on Vice President Mike Pence – who will visit Israel on January 22-23 – and the evangelical Christian base he represents. Rejecting the portrayal of a sidelined Pence in Wolffs book, they call him a powerful player, particularly on Israel.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, January 9, 2018. JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS
Clear evidence for this, they argue, lies in the fact that last months declaration of recognizing Jerusalem as Israels capital and the plan for an embassy move came after Bannon left the White House. It was Pence and the evangelicals – not Adelson, Netanyahu and Bannon – who ultimately got something done, and they are the ones who will have Israels back in the post-Bannon era.
Secondly, there are the Palestinians themselves, who called the Jerusalem declaration a kiss of death to the two-state solution.
Third, there is Trump himself. Much as the president is portrayed as an utterly transactional empty vessel, his Jewish supporters dont believe his views were artificially foisted on him by Bannon, but instead come from his own core beliefs. It was the president himself who wanted to move the embassy at the very beginning of his administration, they say, and it was Netanyahu himself who told Trump it would be better to wait.
skip - Conor Powell tweet
Return of the Mooch?
If there is now a vacuum in the conduit between the far-right Klein/Adelson crowd and the Trump White House, one figure is clearly eager to fill it. Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci is not only different from Bannon – as slick and public as Bannon is unkempt and secretive – but he is also Bannons nemesis.
In this July 2017 file photo, Anthony Scaramucci blows a kiss after answering questions during the press briefing.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
Call it a coincidence, but on the same day Bannon departed from Breitbart, it was also announced that Scaramucci – who spent the day dancing on his grave – would be a keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas. The RJC confab is set for early February at Adelsons Venetian hotel and casino. In the past, ZOAs Klein has described Scaramucci as being supportive of Israel in the ZOA way, not in the mainstream Jewish way.
Scaramucci has made a point of cozying up to the Adelson-backed Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. It was at a Boteach Hanukkah party that Scaramucci reportedly took a verbal detour from recounting his trip to Israel to insult Bannon, allegedly calling the former Trump aide messianic and a loser, warning that Hell be a stalwart defender of Israel until hes not. Thats how this guy operates. Ive seen this guy operate. He was a stalwart defender of me until it became better for him not to be.
In the end, it was not his failure to defend Israel that proved to be Bannons undoing. It was his failure to defend Donald Trump.
Allison Kaplan Sommer
Haaretz Correspondent
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Jackson Lears · What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking : #Russiagate · LRB 4 January 2018
►https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-russian-hacking
La pensée unique aux États Unis de plus en plus sectaire et pesante
Jackson Lears
American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton’s defeat. Then everything changed.
A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.
The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind.
Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free ‘assessment’ produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this crucial admission: ‘Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.’ Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, or at least for those ‘hand-picked’ analysts.
It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of disinformation (a.k.a. ‘fake news’) as a tactic for advancing one administration or another’s political agenda. Once again, the established press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had ‘wittingly’ spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. In May 2017, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump’s campaign because they are ‘almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique’. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians – above all Putin – as uniquely, ‘almost genetically’ diabolical.
It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump’s election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It’s true that Trump’s menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage done by Bush and Cheney – who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with impeccable interventionist credentials.
Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors’ lavish funding of the already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albright’s ‘indispensable nation’. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it’s the greatest country in the world, Albright because it’s an exceptional force for global good. Nor is there anything unprecedented about Trump’s desire for détente with Russia, which until at least 2012 was the official position of the Democratic Party. What is unprecedented about Trump is his offensive style: contemptuous, bullying, inarticulate, and yet perfectly pitched to appeal to the anger and anxiety of his target audience. His excess has licensed overt racism and proud misogyny among some of his supporters. This is cause for denunciation, but I am less persuaded that it justifies the anti-Russian mania.
Besides Trump’s supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies. The second provides the emotional charge for the first. Both seem to me problematic. With respect to the first, the hacking charges are unproved and may well remain so. Edward Snowden and others familiar with the NSA say that if long-distance hacking had taken place the agency would have monitored it and could detail its existence without compromising their secret sources and methods. In September, Snowden told Der Spiegel that the NSA ‘probably knows quite well who the invaders were’. And yet ‘it has not presented any evidence, although I suspect it exists. The question is: why not? … I suspect it discovered other attackers in the systems, maybe there were six or seven groups at work.’ He also said in July 2016 that ‘even if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, #XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops.’ The NSA’s capacity to follow hacking to its source is a matter of public record. When the agency investigated pervasive and successful Chinese hacking into US military and defence industry installations, it was able to trace the hacks to the building where they originated, a People’s Liberation Army facility in Shanghai. That information was published in the New York Times, but, this time, the NSA’s failure to provide evidence has gone curiously unremarked. When The Intercept published a story about the NSA’s alleged discovery that Russian military intelligence had attempted to hack into US state and local election systems, the agency’s undocumented assertions about the Russian origins of the hack were allowed to stand as unchallenged fact and quickly became treated as such in the mainstream media.
Meanwhile, there has been a blizzard of ancillary accusations, including much broader and vaguer charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It remains possible that Robert Mueller, a former FBI director who has been appointed to investigate these allegations, may turn up some compelling evidence of contacts between Trump’s people and various Russians. It would be surprising if an experienced prosecutor empowered to cast a dragnet came up empty-handed, and the arrests have already begun. But what is striking about them is that the charges have nothing to do with Russian interference in the election. There has been much talk about the possibility that the accused may provide damaging evidence against Trump in exchange for lighter sentences, but this is merely speculation. Paul Manafort, at one point Trump’s campaign manager, has pleaded not guilty to charges of failing to register his public relations firm as a foreign agent for the Ukrainian government and concealing his millions of dollars in fees. But all this occurred before the 2016 campaign. George Papadopolous, a foreign policy adviser, has pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his bungling efforts to arrange a meeting between Trump’s people and the Russian government – an opportunity the Trump campaign declined. Mueller’s most recent arrestee, Michael Flynn, the unhinged Islamophobe who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser, has pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about meeting the Russian ambassador in December – weeks after the election. This is the sort of backchannel diplomacy that routinely occurs during the interim between one administration and the next. It is not a sign of collusion.
So far, after months of ‘bombshells’ that turn out to be duds, there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking Colin Powell’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN. (There are members of VIPS who dissent from the VIPS report’s conclusions, but their arguments are in turn contested by the authors of the report.) The VIPS findings received no attention in major media outlets, except Fox News – which from the centre-left perspective is worse than no attention at all. Mainstream media have dismissed the VIPS report as a conspiracy theory (apparently the Russian hacking story does not count as one). The crucial issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of people with professional credentials and a solid track record.
Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian hackers called Fancy Bear – also known among the technically inclined as APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the theft of their emails. Alperovitch is also a fellow at the Atlantic Council, an anti-Russian Washington think tank. In its report Crowdstrike puts forward close to zero evidence for its claim that those responsible were Russian, let alone for its assertion that they were affiliated with Russian military intelligence. And yet, from this point on, the assumption that this was a Russian cyber operation was unquestioned. When the FBI arrived on the scene, the Bureau either did not request or was refused access to the DNC servers; instead it depended entirely on the Crowdstrike analysis. Crowdstrike, meanwhile, was being forced to retract another claim, that the Russians had successfully hacked the guidance systems of the Ukrainian artillery. The Ukrainian military and the British International Institute for Strategic Studies both contradicted this claim, and Crowdstrike backed down. But its DNC analysis was allowed to stand and even become the basis for the January Intelligence Community Assessment.
The chatter surrounding the hack would never have acquired such urgency were it not for the accompanying assumption: Russia is a uniquely dangerous adversary, with which we should avoid all contact. Without that belief, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s meetings with Russians in September 2016 would become routine discussions between a senator and foreign officials. Flynn’s post-election conversations with the Russian ambassador would appear unremarkable. Trump’s cronies’ attempts to do business in Russia would become merely sleazy. Donald Trump Jr’s meeting at Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya would be transformed from a melodrama of shady intrigue to a comedy of errors – with the candidate’s son expecting to receive information to use against Clinton but discovering Veselnitskaya only wanted to talk about repealing sanctions and restarting the flow of Russian orphans to the United States. And Putin himself would become just another autocrat, with whom democracies could engage without endorsing.
Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. The claim that the Russians hacked local and state voting systems in the US was refuted by California and Wisconsin election officials, but their comments generated a mere whisper compared with the uproar created by the original story. The rush to publish without sufficient attention to accuracy has become the new normal in journalism. Retraction or correction is almost beside the point: the false accusation has done its work.
The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. To say this is to risk dismissal as the ultimate wing-nut in the lexicon of contemporary Washington: the conspiracy theorist. Still, the fact remains: sometimes powerful people arrange to promote ideas that benefit their common interests. Whether we call this hegemony, conspiracy or merely special privilege hardly matters. What does matter is the power to create what Gramsci called the ‘common sense’ of an entire society. Even if much of that society is indifferent to or suspicious of the official common sense, it still becomes embedded among the tacit assumptions that set the boundaries of ‘responsible opinion’. So the Democratic establishment (along with a few Republicans) and the major media outlets have made ‘Russian meddling’ the common sense of the current moment. What kind of cultural work does this common sense do? What are the consequences of the spectacle the media call (with characteristic originality) ‘Russiagate’?
The most immediate consequence is that, by finding foreign demons who can be blamed for Trump’s ascendancy, the Democratic leadership have shifted the blame for their defeat away from their own policies without questioning any of their core assumptions. Amid the general recoil from Trump, they can even style themselves dissenters – ‘#the resistance’ was the label Clintonites appropriated within a few days of the election. Mainstream Democrats have begun to use the word ‘progressive’ to apply to a platform that amounts to little more than preserving Obamacare, gesturing towards greater income equality and protecting minorities. This agenda is timid. It has nothing to say about challenging the influence of concentrated capital on policy, reducing the inflated defence budget or withdrawing from overextended foreign commitments; yet without those initiatives, even the mildest egalitarian policies face insuperable obstacles. More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders’s supporters.
For the DNC, the great value of the Russian hack story is that it focuses attention away from what was actually in their emails. The documents revealed a deeply corrupt organisation, whose pose of impartiality was a sham. Even the reliably pro-Clinton Washington Post has admitted that ‘many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.’ Further evidence of collusion between the Clinton machine and the DNC surfaced recently in a memoir by Donna Brazile, who became interim chair of the DNC after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of the email revelations. Brazile describes discovering an agreement dated 26 August 2015, which specified (she writes)
that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.
Before the primaries had even begun, the supposedly neutral DNC – which had been close to insolvency – had been bought by the Clinton campaign.
Another recent revelation of DNC tactics concerns the origins of the inquiry into Trump’s supposed links to Putin. The story began in April 2016, when the DNC hired a Washington research firm called Fusion GPS to unearth any connections between Trump and Russia. The assignment involved the payment of ‘cash for trash’, as the Clinton campaign liked to say. Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin’s interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. The Clinton campaign tried to persuade established media outlets to publicise the Steele dossier, but with uncharacteristic circumspection, they declined to promote what was plainly political trash rather than reliable reporting. Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration, James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After Comey’s briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington establishment.
The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence, disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the intelligence community: the ‘tree of smoke’ that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. I inhaled that smoke myself in 1969-70, when I was a cryptographer with a Top Secret clearance on a US navy ship that carried missiles armed with nuclear warheads – the existence of which the navy denied. I was stripped of my clearance and later honourably discharged when I refused to join the Sealed Authenticator System, which would have authorised the launch of those allegedly non-existent nuclear weapons. The tree of smoke has only grown more complex and elusive since then. Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted John Birch Society.
I thought of these ironies when I visited the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which featured the work of black American artists from the 1960s and 1970s, when intelligence agencies (and agents provocateurs) were spearheading a government crackdown on black militants, draft resisters, deserters and antiwar activists. Amid the paintings, collages and assemblages there was a single Confederate flag, accompanied by grim reminders of the Jim Crow past – a Klansman in full regalia, a black body dangling from a tree. There were also at least half a dozen US flags, juxtaposed in whole or in part with images of contemporary racial oppression that could have occurred anywhere in America: dead black men carted off on stretchers by skeletons in police uniform; a black prisoner tied to a chair, awaiting torture. The point was to contrast the pretensions of ‘the land of the free’ with the practices of the national security state and local police forces. The black artists of that era knew their enemy: black people were not being killed and imprisoned by some nebulous foreign adversary, but by the FBI, the CIA and the police.
The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless.
Having come of age during the Vietnam War, a calamitous consequence of that inflated definition of national interest, I have always been attracted to the realist critique of globalism. Realism is a label forever besmirched by association with Henry Kissinger, who used it as a rationale for intervening covertly and overtly in other nations’ affairs. Yet there is a more humane realist tradition, the tradition of George Kennan and William Fulbright, which emphasises the limits of military might, counselling that great power requires great restraint. This tradition challenges the doctrine of regime change under the guise of democracy promotion, which – despite its abysmal failures in Iraq and Libya – retains a baffling legitimacy in official Washington. Russiagate has extended its shelf life.
We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking. For a start, they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in the election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of disenfranchising minority voters. Nor are they talking about the trillion dollar defence budget that pre-empts the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other urgently needed social programmes; nor about the modernisation of the American nuclear arsenal which Obama began and Trump plans to accelerate, and which raises the risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear war – a threat made more serious than it has been in decades by America’s combative stance towards Russia. The prospect of impeaching Trump and removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats, allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of many politicians far more skilful in Washington’s ways than their president will ever be.
It is not the Democratic Party that is leading the search for alternatives to the wreckage created by Republican policies: a tax plan that will soak the poor and middle class to benefit the rich; a heedless pursuit of fossil fuels that is already resulting in the contamination of the water supply of the Dakota people; and continued support for police policies of militarisation and mass incarceration. It is local populations that are threatened by oil spills and police beatings, and that is where humane populism survives. A multitude of insurgent groups have begun to use the outrage against Trump as a lever to move the party in egalitarian directions: Justice Democrats, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a host of local and regional organisations. They recognise that there are far more urgent – and genuine – reasons to oppose Trump than vague allegations of collusion with Russia. They are posing an overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic arrogance that led to Clinton’s defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are seeking funding from outside the DNC. This is the real resistance, as opposed to ‘#theresistance’.
On certain important issues – such as broadening support for single-payer healthcare, promoting a higher minimum wage or protecting undocumented immigrants from the most flagrant forms of exploitation – these insurgents are winning wide support. Candidates like Paula Jean Swearengin, a coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia who is running in the Democratic primary for nomination to the US Senate, are challenging establishment Democrats who stand cheek by jowl with Republicans in their service to concentrated capital. Swearengin’s opponent is Joe Manchin, whom the Los Angeles Times has compared to Doug Jones, another ‘very conservative’ Democrat who recently won election to the US Senate in Alabama, narrowly defeating a Republican disgraced by accusations of sexual misconduct with 14-year-old girls. I can feel relieved at that result without joining in the collective Democratic ecstasy, which reveals the party’s persistent commitment to politics as usual. Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar formulas. Jess King – a Mennonite woman, Bard College MBA and founder of a local non-profit who is running for Congress as a Justice Democrat in Lancaster, Pennsylvania – put it this way: ‘We see a changing political landscape right now that isn’t measured by traditional left to right politics anymore, but bottom to top. In Pennsylvania and many other places around the country we see a grassroots economic populism on the rise, pushing against the political establishment and status quo that have failed so many in our country.’
Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire.
This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. ‘The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,’ Autopsy announces. But what sets this apart from most progressive critiques is the cogent connection it makes between domestic class politics and foreign policy. For those in the Rust Belt, military service has often seemed the only escape from the shambles created by neoliberal policies; yet the price of escape has been high. As Autopsy notes, ‘the wisdom of continual war’ – what Clinton calls ‘global leadership’ –
was far clearer to the party’s standard bearer [in 2016] than it was to people in the US communities bearing the brunt of combat deaths, injuries and psychological traumas. After a decade and a half of non-stop warfare, research data from voting patterns suggest that the Clinton campaign’s hawkish stance was a political detriment in working-class communities hard-hit by American casualties from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Francis Shen of the University of Minnesota and Douglas Kriner of Boston University analysed election results in three key states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – and found that ‘even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.’ Clinton’s record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. Kriner and Shen conclude that Democrats may want to ‘re-examine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase Trump’s electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by 15 years of war’. If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It’s a long shot, but there is something happening out there.
Google : Eric Schmidt, le président de la Catalogne, vante une résultat que personne ne peut discuter, Puigdemont quitte ses fonctions à la maison mère d’Alphabet
Il y a un bot sur mastodon qui fait que ça : ►https://botsin.space/@twoheadlines
Il y en a des pas mal.
@koantig J’écris comme un bot. Là mon ego en prend un coup sévère. Et en plus ce que le bot en question est infiniment meilleur que ce que je fais moi, en tatonnant tous les matins en prenant soin de ne pas être bien réveillé.
Est-ce que tu sais si c’est du bot pur ou s’il y a une selection humaine à l’intérieur d’une production automatique ?
En attendant je me demande si je ne vais pas garder par devers moi mes petits efforts de dyslexie créative.
Et sinon merci pour la lecture il y en a des effectivement redoutables.
Republican Party sailors vanished into a fog during WWI. A century later, we found out where they went.
Autant que je sache, c’est complètement automatisé ; c’est pas toujours top grammaticalement.
Mais continue !
Dalit Panthers: A Radical Resistance | Feminism In India
▻https://feminisminindia.com/2017/12/13/dalit-panthers-radical-resistance
With defining “All those who are exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion” as Dalits, the radical social organisation Dalit Panthers rose in the struggle against Hindu feudalism which is still flourishing in modern India, even after independence. Dalit Panthers was formed on the lines of the famous revolutionary African American revolutionary organisation The Black Panthers, whose aim was to destroy American Imperialism.
While the Dalit Panthers resolved their politics against Hindu feudalism in the name of modern democracy where the structures of its functioning remained the same, but for its form of existence. After Indian independence celebrated its 25th anniversary, Dalit Panthers questioned the very idea of independence and stood up for real independence.
This is the time when the Republican Party of India, after Ambedkar’s death in 1956, came to a downfall, owing to its submissive character in front of the Indian National Congress. Some of the leaders within the party sensed betrayal to the struggle and had to meet up in a classroom to find the alternative and rescue the movement.
The alternative was the formation of Dalit Panthers in April 1972. The founders were Namdeo Dhasal, Raja Dhale, Arun Kamble and a few others. Agglomerating all scheduled caste/tribes, proletariats, women irrespective of caste and religious minorities, this social movement rendered tremendous vibes and stood as one of the greatest movements against oppression in India.
Trump’s Jerusalem declaration gives Abbas a chance to shake things up
Unfortunately, however, change is something that the Palestinian leadership has forgotten how to accomplish
Amira Hass Dec 09, 2017 10:08 AM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-1.827682
The American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is an opportunity for the Palestinian leadership to cast off old and fossilized modes of thinking and action that have rendered these leaders incapable of change.
Will this opportunity be used to undertake an internal process of democratization, first of all to restore relations between an unelected Palestinian elite that has been in power for several decades and the public (not only in the West Bank and in Gaza but in the Palestinian diaspora as well)? The hope is that it will be used to effect change. The concern is that it won’t happen.
When the Palestinian leadership recovers from the shock delivered by the symbolic change in American policy — symbolic, but with explosive potential — it will say that this is a pan-Muslim, a pan-Arab or perhaps a European problem. The leadership would be correct in saying so, of course. The leaders will say that Palestinians are the weakest link in the chain and that they can’t deal with the pyromaniac in the White House on their own.
It might also put another way. The change in the American position enables Palestinian leaders, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, to effect change that will show their people that they haven’t embraced the diplomatic course that depends on economic and security coordination with Israel only to further their own immediate personal and financial interests — and those of entourages close to Fatah and Palestine Liberation Organization leadership.
“Personal advancement” has been one of the prevalent explanations for the fact that Abbas has stubbornly evaded the holding of elections, and that, within his Fatah faction, elections have been fixed and dictated from above to an extent that is not openly discussed. For the same reason it is argued that Abbas has been avoiding making changes to his cabinet that would allow it to represent the spectrum of political organizations and not just his own.
After recovering from the shock, Abbas and his people will say, and rightly so, that the change in the American position does not necessarily reflect a failure of the Palestinian diplomatic course but rather the incompetence of reasonable factions within the Republican Party in the United States.
After all, President Trump lashed out at all Muslims, including those in countries whose governments are considered U.S. allies, in addition to assailing the Vatican and Europe. Palestinian leaders will be able to say that Trump’s daring, in breaking with international convention, is not confined to one field.
Just recently, he and the economic and Evangelistic right-wing that he serves and represents chalked up two major victories: an increase in benefits to big business through corporate tax cuts and a Supreme Court ruling that allowed the immediate enforcement of a ban on the entry of citizens from six Muslim countries. As a result, Abbas and his associates will say, there is no connection between the internal Palestinian situation and the international community’s attempts to deal with Trump’s policies.
The diplomatic course — involving symbolic international recognition of a Palestinian state — was paved slowly, and included several encouraging achievements such as acceptance into international institutions and the signing of international conventions. But then it was blocked in its tracks by the United States. The diplomatic course angered Israel, but it is exhausted by now, without having changed the reality on the ground: limited autonomy for the Palestinian Authority, split among disconnected enclaves, while absolving Israel of responsibility despite its being the occupying power. Western countries still confer their seal of approval to an unelected and unloved Palestinian leadership as a result of its commitment to restrain the public and maintain quiet vis-à-vis Israel, and for its willingness to pretend that there is still an ongoing “process” leading to a state. The risks that Trump’s move entail will only buttress Europe’s demand that Abbas and his security forces continue to restrain the Palestinian public in exchange for their continued acceptance as the legitimate leadership.
The United States, a very generous donor to the UN Relief and Works Agency and to the Palestinian security forces, accepted the reality of enclaves long before Trump’s arrival. That was the message behind its financing the upgrading of rural roads, as a substitute to wide and fast highways, but in the process, Israel has blocked access from Palestinian towns and villages for the convenience of West Bank Jewish settlers.
European countries are not absolved, however, from their own responsibility for abetting the reality of the enclaves, through their donations that somewhat moderate the chronic financial crisis caused by Israeli restrictions. But these countries have tried and are trying to help Palestinians remain on their land, taking steps that have not been completed to boycott products from the settlements while declaring that Area C (which is under full Israeli control) is part of the Palestinian state. They are at least aware of their negative role in subsidizing the occupation.
They certainly won’t stop subsidizing it now — through humanitarian assistance to Palestinians — amid a growing sense of an impending explosion. This too will enhance the logic of maintaining the Abbas government as it is now.
The call by Abbas’ Fatah party for three days of rage over the Jerusalem issue with no internal systemic changes is a risky gamble. It endangers the lives and health of hundreds of Palestinian young people, exposing them to mass arrest, and all for nothing. Mainly, however, it might demonstrate that the Palestinian public doesn’t heed calls issued by Fatah and the Palestinian Authority since it doesn’t trust them. The public will instead act at a time and in an manner that suits it.
Instead of hounding anyone who criticizes him on Facebook and silencing critics through an internet law, Abbas and people around him could now take several initial steps to refresh the political system that they have built under the auspices of the Oslo accords. It’s hard to imagine how such a process would look like, as a result of the prolonged ossification of PLO and Palestinian Authority institutions. In any event, it requires the inclusion and active involvement of wide sectors of the population in the thinking and doing phases, something that Fatah and PLO leaders have long forgotten how to do.
Is the GOP tax plan an unprecedented windfall for the wealthy? We look at 50 years of data to find out.
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/04/is-the-gop-tax-plan-an-unprecedented-windfall-for-the-wealthy-we-look-at-50-years-of-data-to-find-out/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_taxregressive-1245pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
Christian nationalism can no longer be ignored. Roy Moore’s win proves it.
▻https://thinkprogress.org/christian-nationalism-helped-roy-moore-win-c90a50e5d86f
▻https://i0.wp.com/thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ap_17270108649325.jpg?resize=1280%2C720px&ssl=1
Moore’s fusion of faith and politics doesn’t fit neatly into any of the well-worn political narratives used by pundits to characterize his path to the Senate. Some framed his primary win as a blow to Donald Trump, who endorsed Moore’s opponent Luther Strange, and a cheeky win for former senior White House adviser Steve Bannon, who backed Moore. Others read it as a sign the GOP establishment that rushed to defend Strange is drowning beneath an unrelenting tide of raw populism exemplified by Moore.
“We have to return the knowledge of God and the Constitution of the United States to the United States Congress.”
Ultimately, more polling and study is needed to determine exactly where Moore’s support came from. But his faith-fueled speech may offer a telling signal about his ability to inspire conservative voters. Moore’s candidacy points to something political analysts should keep an eye on: Christian nationalism.
La santé mentale de Trump est l’objet de toutes les spéculations
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/251017/la-sante-mentale-de-trump-est-l-objet-de-toutes-les-speculations
Donald Trump, à la Maison Blanche, le 19 octobre © Reuters #Donald_Trump est-il fou ? Faut-il le démettre ? Un an après l’élection, une partie des États-Unis reste tétanisée par son accession au pouvoir. Télés et réseaux sociaux amplifient à l’infini ses faits et gestes. Résultat : malgré ses échecs politiques, il continue de concentrer toute l’attention. C’est justement ce qu’il cherche.
#International #Etats-Unis #folie #GOP #Présidence #Républicains
Republican Tactic Aims to Open Eastern Gulf, Arctic to Oil Rigs - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-18/republicans-may-use-budget-to-open-arctic-atlantic-to-oil-rigs
Congressional Republicans have found a way to use the federal budget to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling — and they don’t plan on stopping there.
GOP leaders in the House and Senate are exploring ways to also expand drilling in the Gulf of Mexico as well as the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans through congressional budget rules that allow them to pass major policy changes on a simple majority vote.
“There are other opportunities for us,” Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in an interview. “There is a significant way that we can help with the budget process.”
Money from selling drilling rights and royalties from oil and gas production would be a revenue-raiser that could help offset some of the tax cuts Republicans are proposing. The House has instructed its Natural Resources Committee to find ways to generate $5 billion in revenue over the next decade. And the Senate is set to vote as soon as this week on a budget plan imposing a $1 billion target on Murkowski’s natural resources committee.
Peter W. Smith, opérateur du GOP qui a cherché les courriels de Clinton contre les pirates russes, s’est suicidé - RipouxBlique des CumulardsVentrusGrosQ
▻http://slisel.over-blog.com/2017/08/peter-w.smith-operateur-du-gop-qui-a-cherche-les-courriels-de-clin
Un donateur républicain et opérateur de la Côte-Nord de Chicago qui a déclaré qu’il avait essayé d’obtenir les courriels manquants de Hillary Clinton de pirates russes s’est suicidé dans une chambre d’hôtel du Minnesota, après avoir parlé à The Wall Street Journal de ses efforts, montrent les records publics.
À la mi-mai, dans une pièce d’un hôtel de Rochester utilisé presque exclusivement par des patients et des parents de Mayo Clinic , Peter W. Smith, 81, a laissé un dossier de documents soigneusement préparé, y compris une déclaration que la police appelle une note de suicide dans laquelle il a dit qu’il était en mauvaise santé et une police d’assurance-vie expirait.
Au centre de la guerre politique secrète…exécuté par un bras vengeur !
Au centre de la guerre politique secrète…exécuté par un bras vengeur !
Des jours plus tôt, le financier de la forêt de lac suburbain a donné une interview au Journal au sujet de sa quête, et il a commencé à publier des histoires sur ses efforts à la fin de juin. Le Journal a également signalé qu’il avait vu des courriels écrits par Smith montrer à son équipe considérée le lieutenant-général général Michael Flynn , alors un conseiller principal de la campagne du républicain Donald Trump , un allié. Flynn a brièvement été le conseiller de sécurité nationale du président Trump et a démissionné après avoir déterminé qu’il n’avait pas divulgué les contacts avec la Russie.
À l’époque, le journal a signalé que la mort de Smith le 14 mai avait eu lieu environ 10 jours après avoir accordé l’entrevue. Le mystère enveloppa comment et où il était mort, mais le journaliste principal sur les histoires disait sur un podcast qu’il n’avait aucune raison de croire que la mort était le résultat d’un jeu malin et que Smith était probablement mort de causes naturelles.
Cependant, le Chicago Tribune a obtenu un record de mort d’état du Minnesota déposé dans le comté d’Olmsted, affirmant que Smith s’est suicidé dans un hôtel près de la clinique Mayo à 13h17 le dimanche 14 mai. Il a été trouvé avec un sac sur la tête avec une source de hélium attaché. Le rapport d’un médecin légiste donne le même compte, sans préciser l’heure, et un rapport de la police de Rochester détaille son suicide.
Dans la note récupérée par la police, Smith s’est excusé auprès des autorités et a déclaré que « NO FOUL PLAY WHATSEERVER » était impliqué dans sa mort. Il a écrit qu’il prenait sa propre vie à cause d’un « RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH DEPUIS JANVIER 2017 » et chronométré « À L’ASSURANCE-VIE D’EXPIRATION DE 5 MILLIONS DE DOLLARS ».
Il avait séjourné à l’hôtel pendant plusieurs jours et avait prolongé son séjour au moins une fois, mais il était prévu de vérifier le jour où son corps a été retrouvé. « Demain c’est mon dernier jour », a déclaré Smith à un travailleur d’hôtel le 13 mai, alors qu’il travaillait sur un ordinateur dans le centre d’affaires, imprimant des documents, selon les rapports de la police.
L’un des anciens employés de Smith a déclaré à la Tribune qu’il pensait que l’homme âgé était allé à la clinique célèbre pour être traité pour une maladie cardiaque. La porte-parole de Mayo, Ginger Plumbo, a déclaré jeudi qu’elle ne pouvait confirmer que Smith avait été un patient, en citant les lois sur la protection de la vie privée médicale.
Peter W. Smith
Les journaux ont déclaré que le week-end de la fête du travail, l’année dernière, Smith avait rassemblé une équipe pour acquérir des courriels dont le détenteur certifiait qu’ils auraient pu être volée du serveur privé que Clinton avait utilisé pendant sa période de secrétaire d’État. L’intérêt de Smith portait sur plus de 30 000 courriels. Clinton avait dit qu’elle les avait supprimé parce qu’ils se rapportaient à des questions personnelles. Une énorme cache d’autres courriels Clinton avait été rendu publique,à ce moment-là.
Smith a déclaré au Journal qu’il croyait que les courriels manquants auraient pu être obtenus par des pirates russes. Il a également déclaré qu’il pensait que la correspondance concernait les devoirs officiels de Clinton. Il a déclaré au Journal qu’il travaillait de façon indépendante et ne faisait pas partie de la campagne Trump. Il a également déclaré au Journal que lui et son équipe ont trouvé cinq groupes de pirates informatiques – deux d’entre eux des groupes russes – qui prétendaient avoir les emails manquants de Clinton.
Smith a eu une histoire de faire des recherches de l’opposition, le terme formel pour l’information peu flatteuse que les agents politiques dévoilent sur les candidats rivaux.
Pendant des années, l’ancien président démocrate Bill Clinton était l’objectif de Smith. L’homme d’affaires riche avait pour rôle d’exposer les allégations de « Troopergate » au sujet de la vie sexuelle de Bill Clinton. Et il a discuté du financement d’une enquête sur un voyage de 1969 que Bill Clinton a pris au collège en Union soviétique, selon le magazine Salon.
Les enquêtes sur les liens possibles entre le gouvernement russe et les personnes associées à la campagne présidentielle de Trump sont en cours au Congrès et par l’ancien chef du FBI, Robert Mueller . Il agit comme conseiller spécial du ministère de la Justice. Le porte-parole de Mueller, Peter Carr, a refusé de commenter les histoires du journal sur Smith ou sa mort. L’avocat de Washington, Robert Kelner, qui représente Flynn, n’a eu aucun commentaire jeudi.
Le décès de Smith a eu lieu à Aspen Suites à Rochester, spectacle des records. Ils énumèrent la cause de la mort comme « asphyxie due au déplacement d’oxygène dans un espace confiné à l’hélium ».
Le chef de la police de Rochester, Roger Peterson, a déclaré mercredi le mode de mort de Smith « inhabituel », mais un travailleur funéraire a déclaré qu’il l’avait déjà vu.
Un employé de Rochester Cremation Services, la maison funéraire qui a répondu à l’hôtel, a déclaré qu’il a aidé à retirer le corps de Smith de sa chambre et a rappelé avoir vu un réservoir.
L’employé, qui a parlé à condition qu’il ne soit pas identifié en raison de la nature délicate de la mort de Smith, a décrit le réservoir comme étant de taille similaire à un réservoir de propane sur un gril à gaz. Il ne se souvenait pas d’avoir vu un sac que Smith aurait placé sur sa tête. Il a dit que le coroner et la police étaient là et qu’il « n’a pas fait beaucoup de réflexion autour ».
« Quand je suis arrivé là-bas et j’ai vu le réservoir, j’ai pensé : » J’ai déjà vu ça « , et j’ai pu mettre deux ou deux ensemble », a déclaré l’employé.
Une autopsie a été menée, selon le dossier de décès. Le Bureau de l’examinateur médical régional de Southern Minnesota a refusé une demande de Tribune pour le rapport d’autopsie et a publié des informations limitées sur le décès de Smith. Un porte-parole d’AXA Equitable Life Insurance Co., classé dans des documents récupérés par la police en tant que transporteur d’assurance de Smith, n’a pas de commentaires immédiats.
The Final Exit Network, une organisation à but non lucratif basée en Floride, fournit de l’information et du soutien aux personnes qui souffrent d’une maladie terminale et veulent se suicider. Fran Schindler, bénévole du groupe, a noté que le livre best-seller « Final Exit », écrit par Derek Humphry en 1991 et révisé plusieurs fois depuis, explique en détail la méthode du gaz à l’hélium.
« Beaucoup de gens obtiennent cette information de son livre », a déclaré Schindler. « C’est une méthode qui existe depuis de nombreuses années et est connue ».
Selon les chiffres du bureau du médecin légiste de County Cook, 172 personnes se sont suicidées par étouffement à partir de janvier 2007 à ce jour. Parmi les décès dus à l’asphyxie, 15 impliquaient l’utilisation d’un sac en plastique sur la tête.
On ne pouvait pas déterminer combien impliquaient l’utilisation d’hélium, d’un gaz inodore et sans goût non toxique.
« L’hélium n’a pas d’effet direct. Un sac sur la tête de quelqu’un épuise l’oxygène de la personne et cause la mort », a déclaré Becky Schlikerman, porte-parole du bureau du médecin légiste du comté de Cook. »L’ajout d’hélium peut déplacer l’oxygène plus rapidement mais n’a pas d’effet direct sur une personne ».
La police a trouvé un reçu d’un timbre local Walmart daté de la veille, le 13 mai à 12h53. Le reçu était pour l’achat de « Helium Jumbo » et d’autres articles. La police a également noté que les deux réservoirs d’hélium dans la pièce étaient drapés avec de la cheville à exercices ou des poignets couvert de vinyle. Le rapport n’a pas expliqué les poids. La police a déclaré que, parce qu’ils ne soupçonnaient pas un jeu malin, ils n’avaient vu aucune vidéo de sécurité du magasin Walmart pour confirmer que Smith a acheté les citernes lui-même.
Les restes de Smith ont été incinérés au Minnesota, selon les documents. Il était marié à Janet L. Smith et avait trois enfants et trois petits-enfants, selon sa nécrologie. Les appels de Tribune aux membres de la famille n’ont pas été retournés.
Sa note nécrologique a déclaré que Smith a été impliqué dans des affaires publiques depuis plus de 60 ans et il l’a annoncé comme « un champion de l’énergie tranquillement généreux pour assurer un monde économiquement et politiquement plus sécurisé ». Smith a mené des sociétés de capital-investissement dans des acquisitions de sociétés et des investissements de capitalisation depuis plus de 40 ans. Plus tôt, il a travaillé avec DigaComm LLC de 1997 à 2014 et en tant que président de Peter W. Smith & Co. de 1975 à 1997. Avant cela, il était officier supérieur de Field Enterprises Inc., une société qui possédait alors le Chicago Sun -Times et a été détenu par la famille Marshall Field , indique sa nécrologie.
Un mémorial de famille privé a été planifié, a déclaré l’avis nécrologique. Les amis ont affiché des hommages en ligne à Smith après sa mort. L’un était de son ancien employé, Jonathan Safron, 26 ans, qui habite dans la boucle de Chicago et a travaillé pour Smith pendant environ deux ans.
Safron, dans une interview, a déclaré qu’il travaillait pour un cabinet de tutorat lorsque Smith est devenu son client. Son travail impliquait d’enseigner à Smith comment utiliser un MacBook, a déclaré Safron. Au moment où Smith vivait dans une copropriété au sommet du Four Seasons Hotel Chicago. Safron a déclaré que Smith l’a ensuite employé à Corporate Venture Alliances, un cabinet d’investissement privé que Smith a couru, d’abord hors du même condo et plus tard d’un bureau dans le bâtiment Hancock.
Safron, qui a déclaré qu’il avait un travail de bas niveau avec le Parti républicain de l’Illinois en 2014, a déclaré qu’il n’avait aucune connaissance de l’offre de Smith pour trouver des pirates informatiques qui pourraient localiser des messages manquants dans le service de Clinton en tant que secrétaire d’État.Dans son hommage en ligne à son ancien employeur, il a appelé Smith le « meilleur patron que je pourrais jamais demander … un mentor, un ami et un être humain modèle ».
Safron a déclaré qu’il travaillait à temps partiel pour Smith, mettant environ 15 heures par semaine, mais les deux se sont approchés, souvent déjeunés ensemble dans un endroit préféré de Smith : Oak Tree Restaurant & Bakery Chicago sur North Michigan Avenue. Il a appelé Smith un homme sérieux qui était « optimiste », « cosmopolite » et « plus grand que la vie ». Il savait que Smith était en train de diminuer la santé, disant que l’homme plus âgé avait parfois de la difficulté à respirer et a déclaré aux collègues du travail qu’il avait des problèmes cardiaques. Des semaines avant de prendre sa vie, il était fatigué de marcher vers le bas sur quatre ou cinq marches d’escalier pendant une épreuve d’incendie de Hancock Building et plus tard envoyé par courrier électronique à Safron en disant qu’il était « étourdi », at-il déclaré.
La dernière volonté et le testament de Smith, signés le 21 février dernier, ont une durée de sept pages et sont consignés dans la Cour des successions dans le comté de Lake. La volonté donne à sa femme son intérêt pour leur propriété résidentielle et ses biens personnels corporels et dit que les actifs restants devraient être placés dans deux fiducies.
Il est né le 23 février 1936 à Portland, dans le Maine, selon le dossier de décès.
Son défunt père, Waldo Sterling Smith, était un représentant du fabricant pour les entreprises féminines de vêtements, les représentant dans les grands magasins du Maine, du New Hampshire et du Vermont, selon la nécrologie du père de 2002. L’ancien Smith est mort à 92 ans à Saint-Augustin, en Floride, et son obit a noté qu’il avait été actif dans le comté de St. Johns, en Floride, dans les affaires républicaines et dans une église méthodiste locale.
Peter Smith a écrit deux articles sur son blog, datés de la veille de sa mort. L’un des responsables des services de renseignement américains a contesté que la Russie a interféré avec les élections de 2016. Un autre article a prédit : « À mesure que l’attention se tourne vers les affaires internationales, comme il le fera bientôt, l’histoire de l’ingérence russe va mourir de son propre poids ».
Sources :
Katherine Skiba a rapporté l’événement de Washington, David Heinzmann de Rochester et Todd Lighty de Chicago.Lauren Rosenblatt du Tribune Washington Bureau et Jim Newton du Lake County News-Sun et Gregory Pratt ont contribué à cette histoire.
kskiba@chicagotribune.com
dheinzmann@chicagotribune.com
tlighty@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @Katherine Skiba
Twitter @DavidHeinzmann
Twitter @TLighty
Aux Etats-Unis, les ravages de l’ouragan Harvey sont attribués au changement climatique
▻https://reporterre.net/Aux-Etats-Unis-les-ravages-de-l-ouragan-Harvey-sont-attribues-au-changem
Au Texas, le passage dévastateur et toujours en cours de Harvey, l’ouragan rétrogradé en tempête tropicale, ramène dans le débat la question du rôle du climat. Pour le célèbre climatologue Michael Mann, « le changement climatique a aggravé les conséquences de l’ouragan. »
▻https://alencontre.org/ameriques/americnord/usa/etats-unis-quelques-harvey-et-le-franchissement-de-seuils-vers-le-bascul
Mais un simple fait doit retenir l’attention : le Texas est le cœur de l’industrie pétrolière des Etats-Unis. Les patrons de cette industrie sont ultra-conservateurs et soutiennent les positions climato-sceptiques de Trump. Le gouverneur républicain du Texas, Greg Abbott, en place depuis 2015, a affirmé à plusieurs reprises que l’industrie pétrolière ainsi que l’activité humaine n’avaient pas d’impact significatif sur « le réchauffement climatique ». Il n’y a donc pas de chance que l’administration Trump change de position sur ce thème. Par contre, la protection – dite sécurisation – des industries pétrolières, plus ou moins proches du littoral, sera à coup sûr mise en avant et financée. Et tout cela aura pour fonction de stabiliser, dans cette vaste région, le réseau socio-élecoral et économique du Trump tweeteur et de sa fraction de milliardaires qui noient sous les dollars les divers lobbies – comme le puissant Forum pour la liberté et la croissance des frères pétroliers Koch – chargés d’assurer une refonte du Parti républicain, quitte à se trouver, plus d’une fois, à la marge droite et dans une position semi-indépendante par rapport au GOP. (C.A. Udry)
Hero of Israel
Gideon Levy | Jul 27, 2017
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.803684
The new hero of Israel wears torn jeans, lives in a religious cooperative community in the south, has a girlfriend and he kills Arabs. Heroes of Israel have always killed Arabs, but sometimes they did so bravely; today they do so with rather pathetic cowardice. They’re scared of a teen with a screwdriver.
The hero of Israel kills Arabs indiscriminately, including ones who are innocent or who did not deserve to die. The Israeli hero is a young man of principles, principles he absorbed while serving in the occupied territories. He learned dehumanization in the Givati Brigade and how to kill civilians in Operation Protective Edge. He learned that the first action to take against an Arab is always to shoot to kill; the alternatives can be considered later.
He learned that it’s perfectly fine, even heroic, to kill an Arab, no matter why. He trained in the territories and put it to use in Jordan — what difference does it make, all Arabs are the same, whether on the east or the west bank of the Jordan River. His friends say he’s a “man’s man,” that this wasn’t his first time in a tough situation, like that teen with a screwdriver, and that he’s calm and considered. Imagine what might have happened if he weren’t. He might have killed five people, maybe 10.
The hero of Israel killed civilians: a physician, for no reason, and a teenager who was assembling furniture and who threatened him with that doomsday weapon, the screwdriver, in the heat of some argument, not even an attack. The hero of Israel didn’t blink. A hero of Israel never counts to 10. He draws and fires. Two dead, two more kill notches.
Our newest hero’s name is Ziv, but we can’t show his face. His blurred visage as he is embraced by the prime minister only adds to his aura. He replaces his predecessor, the more exalted Elor Azaria. The former killed a dying man, the latter killed two civilians. Don’t accuse him. That’s what he was taught to do in “tough situations” in the territories — to shoot and to kill. That’s what he was trained to be, a blind machine gun.
He is considered a hero. No one would dream of seriously questioning him as a suspect, beyond the formality promised to Jordan, and it’s already been said it would lead to nothing. Perhaps he committed murder, or perhaps negligent manslaughter? Perhaps he violated the rules of engagement? How would we know? We won’t know. We don’t want to know. Instead of that, we got the prime minister’s unsurprising phone call to him. “Did you make a date with your girlfriend yet?” asked Benjamin Netanyahu in that fatherly manner reserved for heroes. After that came the brave embrace in his office. Look, Jordan, look, these are the heroes of Israel, your sister in peace, the killers of your citizens. And the Palestinians are accused of exalting terrorists.
When a Jordanian soldier killed seven Israeli schoolgirls in Naharayim in 2007, Jordan’s King Hussein cut short his trip to Spain and hurried to Beit Shemesh to kneel before the grieving families and beg forgiveness. He also visited the wounded and his kingdom paid compensation. But when an Israeli government security guard kills two Jordanians, at least one of them completely innocent, the Israeli prime minister won’t even consider apologizing. Condemnations we demand only from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. We can only fantasize about a condolence call or the payment of compensation. Why, who died, as the saying goes? Two Arabs, nothing more.
King Hussein of jordan consoling an Israeli family whose daughter was killed by a Jordanian soldier during a class trip to Naharayim, 2007.Avi Ohayon / GOPTwo dead Arabs, and a hero of Israel who returned home safely, overcoming his injuries. Ziv the hero will recite his version of events, and perhaps even return to service. Tens of thousands of young Israelis dream of being Ziv. They dream of serving in the territories in the occupation army, of abusing and killing Arabs, of traveling to India and to Guatemala before becoming embassy security guards. If they’re lucky, they might even get to kill some teenager with a screwdriver and a doctor who happened to be there, as in the good old days in Qalandiyah.
Salute the heroes of Israel. They are the finest of our youth.
Republican Data-Mining Firm Exposed Personal Information for Virtually Every American Voter
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/06/19/republican-data-mining-firm-exposed-personal-information-for-virtually
The GOP’s 2016 presidential upset wasn’t surprising just because it put Donald Trump in the White House ; it also proved the party had vastly improved its ability to exploit data, including precision ad targeting campaigns on Facebook. Now comes the fallout of all that information hoarding : A California-based security researcher says Republican-linked election databases were inadvertently exposed to the entire internet, sans password, potentially violating the privacy of almost every single (...)
#électeurs #données #UpGuard #DeepRootAnalytics #data-mining #profiling
Perverse Law in 9 States Enriches Donors to Private Schools: Trump Could Be on the Verge of Taking It National | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/education/perverse-law-9-states-enriches-donors-private-schools-trump-could-be-verge
Education
Perverse Law in 9 States Enriches Donors to Private Schools: Trump Could Be on the Verge of Taking It National
A GOP-sponsored bill finds more ways to starve traditional public schools.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet
June 5, 2017, 1:39 PM GMT
The Trump administration’s push to privatize public education not only seeks to deprive traditional K-12 schools of billions in federal aid, but may greatly expand existing tax loopholes that already allow wealthy people and firms to make money on donating to private schools.
The proposed Education Opportunities Act would “put two new federal voucher tax shelters within reach for many more Americans and lead to an explosion in funding for private schools,” a joint release from the School Superintendents Association (ASSA) and Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) said. “It would also keep in place an existing federal loophole that permits savvy taxpayers to benefit from certain ‘double-dipping’ practices, where they receive a federal deduction and state tax credit on the same donation to a private school.”
Ambassador Slammed Donald Trump Amid UAE Campaign To Isolate Qatar | HuffPost
▻http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/yousef-al-otaiba-emails-trump_us_59358e71e4b013c48169d5dc?section=us
WASHINGTON ― Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the U.S. and a confidant of White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, repeatedly criticized President Donald Trump in private correspondence last year ― including with officials loyal to President Barack Obama ― emails obtained by HuffPost show.
Otaiba, one of the most powerful diplomats in Washington, figures in an unfolding regional crisis centered on U.S. partner nation Qatar, which hosts America’s largest military base in the region. The UAE and three other U.S.-aligned Middle East governments ratcheted up a simmering dispute with Qatar on Sunday night when they cut diplomatic and transportation ties to the Gulf nation over its support of the transnational Muslim Brotherhood and alleged assistance to Iran-backed militants around the region.
The Trump administration has not taken a formal position on the issue. Many in Trump’s orbit agree with the UAE on the need to combat forces that Qatar supports in the region, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood movement. The UAE has designated the group a terrorist organization and pushed for the U.S. to do the same, a step counterterrorism researchers say would be controversial and risky.
The leaked emails, which show Otaiba’s comments during a yearlong campaign to discredit Qatar in the U.S., threaten the UAE’s hope to win official American blessing for its pressure campaign against the Qataris. Trump is notoriously thin-skinned: He has banned people who publicly criticized him from his team (including GOP consigliere Elliott Abrams, a fellow Qatar skeptic who is friends with Otaiba) and seems unable to get over slights even years after they occur. And his administration already seems disinclined to pick a side. Top officials like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis have emphasized the importance of resolving the dispute.
The Republican Party Is Ready to Sell Off Your Internet Privacy at a Level That Boggles the Mind | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/republican-party-ready-sell-your-internet-privacy-level-boggles-mind
Trump’s new Chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, recently co-authored what is either an intentionally or naively deceptive op-ed in The Washington Post.
Pai suggested that when Republicans in the House and Senate – without a single Democratic vote in either body – voted to legalize your Internet Service Provider – your ISP – to sell your personal (and you-thought-private) browsing information and the content of your emails and video-viewing to anybody they choose, they were actually working to “protect” your privacy. He knew this, he wrote, because critics of the GOP policy “don’t understand how advertising works.”
Pai’s argument is basically that if Google can sell or use your information, then Comcast, AT&T, Time-Warner, etc., should be able to, too.
But there’s a fundamental difference. If you don’t want Google to sell or use your information, you can use a search engine (like www.duckduckgo.com) or an online store that promises not to.
But your internet service provider sees everything you do on the internet, right down to the keystroke level. They can monitor every VOIP conversation, make note of every search or purchase, and transcribe every email or IM. Just like your phone company, before Title II, could listen in on every one of your phone calls.
A Billionaire-Backed Super PAC Attacks a Homegrown Congressional Candidate
▻https://psmag.com/a-billionaire-backed-super-pac-attacks-a-homegrown-congressional-candidate-7e
As he traverses the state talking health care, conservation, and Main Street economics, as he shakes hands and holds town halls in anticipation of Montana’s May 25th special election, Quist’s campaign appears to be making the Republican Party afraid. GOP operatives are already hard at work and spending heavily to smear their Democratic opponent as out of touch and out of place in the state that bore and bred him. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, a group called the Congressional Leadership Fund, or CLF, has committed at least $1 million to combat Quist. Much of that spending will go toward attack ads meant to sully the country singer’s reputation.
Et derrière, bien sûr les Koch Brothers...
#politique_USA #argent
Bad News for Obama : Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal | Mother Jones
►http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/09/methane-fracking-obama-climate-change-bill-mckibben
His accession to office coincided (coincidentally) with the widespread adoption of hydraulic fracking to drill for natural gas, resulting in a sudden boom in supplies and a rapid drop in price, to the point where gas began to supplant coal as the fuel of choice for American power plants. As a result (and as a result of the recession Obama also inherited), the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions began to fall modestly.
For a political leader, it was the very definition of a lucky break: Without having to do much heavy lifting against the power of the fossil fuel industry, the administration was able to produce results. In fact, it gave Obama cover from the right, as he in essence turned the GOP chant of “Drill Baby Drill” into “Frack Baby Frack.” Not only that, the cheap gas was a boost to sputtering American manufacturing, making it profitable once again to make chemicals and other goods close to home. As Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union address, as his reelection campaign geared up, “We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly a hundred years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy.”
(...)
But CO2 is not the only molecule that plays this trick. Methane—CH4—is a rarer gas, but it’s even more effective at trapping heat. And methane is another word for natural gas. So: When you frack, some of that gas leaks out into the atmosphere. If enough of it leaks out before you can get it to a power plant and burn it, then it’s no better, in climate terms, than burning coal. If enough of it leaks, America’s substitution of gas for coal is in fact not slowing global warming.
(...)
In April, Howarth published a review of all the data sets so far, and they showed that his original numbers were pretty likely correct: Up to 5 percent of the methane probably leaks out before the gas is finally burned.
(...)
1. Given what we know about methane leakage, it makes absolutely no sense to convert vehicle fleets to natural gas. That’s because, as you go from the well to the car, there are even more places for leaks than when you send the gas to a power plant. An EDF study found that converting even big diesel trucks to natural gas would result “in nearly 300 years of climate damage before any benefits were achieved.” Since we already use gas for lots of things like home heating and cooking, there should be a huge priority on plugging the leaks in the ancient pipes that deliver it to our cities, and in converting home gas furnaces to more modern technology like heat pumps.
(...)
Twenty years ago, when scientists first started calculating how much to worry about methane, they said that molecule for molecule, it trapped 25 times as much solar radiation as CO2. But now, over a more appropriate 20-year time frame, that ratio is reckoned to be about 86 times as much. At that rate, more than a third of the greenhouse gas that America produces is methane (not all of it from gas wells—a fair amount comes from cattle). And that means that while the Obama administration boasts about cutting carbon, it’s poised to leave behind a huge burst of methane as its greatest climate legacy.
Juste pour rappeler combien la façon dont on nous bassine avec les décisions de l’administration Trump est déconnectée de toute vision d’ensemble. Les méchants américains vont continuer de brûler un charbon qu’ils n’ont jamais cessé de brûler, du fait que les législations voulues par Obama n’ont jamais vraiment été appliquées, tout comme les législations de 2015 qui visaient à réguler un petit peu l’extraction des gaz de schistes...
Bref, le charbon, c’est mal, surtout pour la santé publique... mais le gaz de schistes, c’est carrément catastrophique... pour le réchauffement climatique. Et les extracteurs jusqu’alors parviennent à empêcher toute législation qui les forcerait à mieux contrôler des fuites qui ne sont de toute façon que très difficiles à maîtriser de bout en bout de la chaine de l’extracteur au consommateur.
Cet article de Mother Jones fait assez bien le point sur la question.
Senate Republicans Vote to Allow ISPs to Sell Your Private Data - Motherboard
▻https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/senate-republicans-vote-to-allow-isps-to-sell-your-private-data
Republican lawmakers in the US Senate approved a measure on Thursday designed to kill federal broadband privacy protections and allow internet service providers like AT&T and Verizon to sell your sensitive private information to the highest bidder.
The vote represents the culmination of a year-long campaign by the nation’s largest internet service providers (ISPs) and their GOP allies to torpedo Federal Communications Commission rules that require broadband providers to obtain “opt-in” consent before using, sharing, or selling private consumer data.
Consumer advocates and privacy watchdogs responded with outrage, and accused Republican lawmakers of putting the financial interests of a handful of wildly profitable corporate giants ahead of the privacy interests of the American people.