person:bill clinton

  • Pourquoi il faut signer l’arrêt de mort du néolibéralisme - Joseph E. STIGLITZ The Guardian - 30 Mai 2019
    • Joseph E. Stiglitz est lauréat du prix Nobel d’économie, professeur à l’Université Columbia et économiste en chef à l’Institut Roosevelt.

    Depuis des décennies, les États-Unis et d’autres états mènent une politique de libre échange qui a échoué de façon spectaculaire.
    Quel type de système économique apporte le plus de bien-être au genre humain ? Cette question est devenue centrale aujourd’hui, car après 40 ans de néolibéralisme aux États-Unis et dans d’autres économies avancées, nous savons ce qui ne fonctionne pas.
    L’expérience néolibérale – réduction de l’impôt des riches, déréglementation des marchés du travail et des produits, financiarisation et mondialisation – a été un échec spectaculaire. La croissance est plus faible que pendant le quart de siècle qui a suivi la seconde guerre mondiale et elle n’a favorisé le plus souvent que ceux qui sont tout en haut de l’échelle. Après des décennies de revenus stagnants, ou même en baisse pour ceux qui se trouvent en dessous d’eux, il faut signer le certificat de décès du néolibéralisme et l’enterrer.


    Au moins trois grandes propositions politiques alternatives existent actuellement : le nationalisme d’extrême droite, le réformisme de centre gauche et la gauche progressiste (le centre-droit représentant l’échec néolibéral). Mais, à l’exception de la gauche progressiste, ces alternatives continuent d’adhérer à une forme d’idéologie qui a (ou aurait dû avoir) fait long feu.

    Le centre-gauche, par exemple, représente le néolibéralisme à visage humain. Son objectif est d’adapter au XXIe siècle les politiques de l’ancien président américain Bill Clinton et de l’ancien premier ministre britannique Tony Blair, en n’apportant que de légères modifications au système de financiarisation et de mondialisation actuel. La droite nationaliste, quant à elle, rejette la mondialisation, et accuse les migrants et les étrangers de tous les problèmes. Mais, comme l’a montré la présidence de Donald Trump, elle continue – du moins dans sa version étatsunienne – à réduire, avec zèle, les impôts des riches, à déréglementer et à réduire ou supprimer les programmes sociaux.

    En revanche, le troisième camp défend ce que j’appelle le capitalisme progressiste, qui propose un programme économique radicalement différent, fondé sur quatre priorités. La première consiste à rétablir l’équilibre entre les marchés, l’État et la société civile. La lenteur de la croissance économique, les inégalités croissantes, l’instabilité financière et la dégradation de l’environnement sont des problèmes nés du marché et ne peuvent donc pas être réglés par le marché. Les gouvernements ont le devoir de limiter et d’organiser le marché par le biais de réglementations en matière d’environnement, de santé, de sécurité au travail et autres. Le gouvernement a également pour tâche de faire ce que le marché ne peut ou ne veut pas faire, par exemple investir activement dans la recherche fondamentale, la technologie, l’éducation et la santé de ses électeurs.

    La deuxième priorité est de reconnaître que la « richesse des nations » est le résultat d’une enquête scientifique – l’étude du monde qui nous entoure – et d’une organisation sociale qui permet à de vastes groupes de personnes de travailler ensemble pour le bien commun. Les marchés gardent le rôle crucial de faciliter la coopération sociale, mais ils ne peuvent le faire que si des contrôles démocratiques les contraignent à respecter les lois. Autrement, les individus s’enrichissent en exploitant les autres et en faisant fructifier leurs rentes plutôt qu’en créant de la richesse par leur ingéniosité. Beaucoup de riches d’aujourd’hui ont emprunté la voie de l’exploitation pour arriver là où ils en sont. Les politiques de Trump ont favorisé les rentiers et détruit les sources de la création de richesse. Le capitalisme progressiste veut faire exactement le contraire.

    Cela nous amène à la troisième priorité : résoudre le problème croissant de la concentration du pouvoir du marché. En utilisant les techniques d’information, en achetant des concurrents potentiels et en créant des droits de douane à l’entrée, les entreprises dominantes peuvent maximiser leurs rentes au détriment des populations. L’augmentation du pouvoir des entreprises sur le marché, conjuguée au déclin du pouvoir de négociation des travailleurs, explique en grande partie la hausse des inégalités et la baisse de la croissance. À moins que le gouvernement ne joue un rôle plus actif que ne le préconise le néolibéralisme, ces problèmes vont probablement s’aggraver à cause des progrès de la robotisation et de l’intelligence artificielle.

    Le quatrième point clé du programme progressiste consiste à rompre le lien entre les pouvoirs économique et politique. Les pouvoirs économique et politique se renforcent mutuellement et se cooptent réciproquement, en particulier là où, comme aux États-Unis, des individus et des sociétés fortunés peuvent financer sans limites les élections. Dans le système étatsunien de plus en plus antidémocratique de « un dollar, une voix », il n’y a plus assez de ces freins et contre-pouvoirs si nécessaires à la démocratie : rien ne peut limiter le pouvoir des riches. Le problème n’est pas seulement moral et politique : les économies plus égalitaires sont en réalité plus performantes. Les capitalistes progressistes doivent donc commencer par réduire l’influence de l’argent en politique et par réduire les inégalités.

    On ne peut pas réparer les dégâts causés par des décennies de néolibéralisme d’un coup de baguette magique. Mais on peut y arriver en suivant le programme que je viens d’ébaucher. Il faudra que les réformateurs soient au moins aussi déterminés à lutter contre le pouvoir excessif du marché et les inégalités, que le secteur privé l’a été pour les générer.

    L’éducation, la recherche et les autres véritables sources de richesse doivent être au cœur des réformes. Il faudra protéger de l’environnement et lutter contre le changement climatique avec la même vigilance que les Green New Dealers aux États-Unis et Extinction Rebellion au Royaume-Uni. Et il faudra mettre en place des mesures sociales permettant à tous de mener une vie décente. Cela veut dire bénéficier de la sécurité économique, d’un travail et d’un salaire décent, de soins de santé et d’un logement convenable, d’une retraite garantie et d’une éducation de qualité pour ses enfants.

    Ce programme d’action n’a rien d’irréaliste ; ce qui serait irréaliste serait de ne pas le mettre en œuvre. Les alternatives proposées par les nationalistes et les néolibéraux engendreraient davantage de stagnation, d’inégalités, de dégradation de l’environnement et de colère, et pourraient avoir des conséquences que nous ne pouvons même pas imaginer.

    Le capitalisme progressiste n’est pas un oxymore. C’est au contraire l’alternative la plus viable et la plus dynamique à une idéologie qui a clairement échoué. Il constitue notre meilleure chance de sortir du marasme économique et politique actuel.

    Joseph E. STIGLITZ

    #néolibéralisme #capitalisme #financiarisation #mondialisation #nationalisme #réformisme #progressisme #pouvoirs #marchés #inégalités #Joseph_Stiglitz

    Sources : https://www.legrandsoir.info/pourquoi-il-faut-signer-l-arret-de-mort-du-neoliberalisme-the-guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/30/neoliberalism-must-be-pronouced-dead-and-buried-where-next

  • États-Unis : décès de la femme qui manifestait depuis 35 ans devant la Maison-Blanche
    Par Journaliste Figaro Yohan Blavignat Publié le 27/01/2016 à 18:57
    http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2016/01/27/01003-20160127ARTFIG00370-etats-unis-deces-de-la-femme-qui-manifestait-depu

    Concepcion Picciotto avait installé sa tente en face de la résidence présidentielle dans les années 1980. Elle a vu se succéder Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton et Barack Obama. Elle est morte à l’âge de 80 ans au terme de la manifestation la « plus longue de l’histoire américaine ».

    Elle était sans aucun doute la manifestante la plus obstinée de l’histoire des États-Unis. Concepcion Picciotto, plus connue sous le nom de « Connie » ou « Conchita », manifestait depuis près de 35 ans tous les jours devant la Maison-Blanche contre la prolifération nucléaire et les guerres successives engagées par Washington. Cette femme de conviction née en Espagne est morte lundi dans un centre venant en aide aux femmes sans abri, rapporte le Washington Post qui fait de son portrait la une de son édition de mardi. Elle avait 80 ans. (...)

    #ténacité

  • #CBP terminates controversial $297 million #Accenture contract amid continued staffing struggles

    #Customs_and_Border_Protection on Thursday ended its controversial $297 million hiring contract with Accenture, according to two senior DHS officials and an Accenture representative.
    As of December, when CBP terminated part of its contract, the company had only completed processing 58 applicants and only 22 had made it onto the payroll about a year after the company was hired.
    At the time, the 3,500 applicants that remained in the Accenture hiring pipeline were transferred to CBP’s own hiring center to complete the process.

    CBP cut ties with Accenture on processing applicants a few months ago, it retained some services, including marketing, advertising and applicant support.
    This week, the entire contract was terminated for “convenience,” government speak for agreeing to part ways without placing blame on Accenture.
    While government hiring is “slow and onerous, it’s also part of being in the government” and that’s “something we have to accept and deal with as we go forward,” said one of the officials.
    For its efforts, CBP paid Accenture around $19 million in start-up costs, and around $2 million for 58 people who got job offers, according to the officials.
    Over the last couple of months, CBP explored how to modify the contract, but ultimately decided to completely stop work and return any remaining funds to taxpayers.
    But it’s unclear how much money, if any, that will be.

    In addition, to the funds already paid to Accenture, CBP has around $39 million left to “settle and close the books” with the company, an amount which has yet to be determined.
    In November 2017, CBP awarded Accenture the contract to help meet the hiring demands of an executive order on border security that President Donald Trump signed during his first week in office. The administration directed CBP to hire an additional 7,500 agents and officers on top of its current hiring goals.
    “We were in a situation where we needed to try something new” and “break the cycle of going backwards,” said a DHS official about why the agency started the contract.

    Meanwhile, hiring remains difficult for the agency amid a surge of migrants at the southern border that is stretching CBP resources thin.
    It “continues to be a very challenging environment,” said one official about hiring efforts this year.

    In fact, one of the reasons that CBP didn’t need Accenture to process applicants, is because the agency didn’t receive as many applications as it initially planned for.
    The agency has been focused on beating attrition and has been able to recently “beat it by a modest amount,” said the official. “Ultimately we would like to beat it by a heck of a lot, but we’re not there yet.”

    https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/05/politics/cbp-terminate-hiring-contract-accenture/index.html
    #frontières #contrôles_frontaliers #USA #Ests-Unis #complexe_militaro-industriel #business

    • Border Profiteers

      On a recent sunny spring afternoon in Texas, a couple hundred Border Patrol agents, Homeland Security officials, and salespeople from a wide array of defense and security contractors gathered at the Bandera Gun Club about an hour northwest of San Antonio to eat barbecue and shoot each other’s guns. The techies wore flip-flops; the veterans wore combat boots. Everyone had a good time. They were letting loose, having spent the last forty-eight hours cooped up in suits and ties back at San Antonio’s Henry B. Gonzalez convention center, mingling and schmoozing, hawking their wares, and listening to immigration officials rail about how those serving in enforcement agencies are not, under any circumstances, Nazis.

      These profiteers and bureaucrats of the immigration-industrial complex were fresh from the 2019 #Border_Security_Expo —essentially a trade show for state violence, where law enforcement officers and weapons manufacturers gather, per the Expo’s marketing materials, to “identify and address new and emerging border challenges and opportunities through technology, partnership, and innovation.” The previous two days of panels, speeches, and presentations had been informative, a major in the Argentine Special Forces told me at the gun range, but boring. He was glad to be outside, where handguns popped and automatic rifles spat around us. I emptied a pistol into a target while a man in a Three Percenter militia baseball hat told me that I was a “natural-born killer.” A drone buzzed overhead until, in a demonstration of a company’s new anti-drone technology, a device that looked like a rocket launcher and fired a sort of exploding net took it down. “This is music to me,” the Argentine major said.

      Perhaps it’s not surprising the Border Security Expo attendees were so eager to blow off steam. This year’s event found many of them in a defensive posture, given the waves of bad press they’d endured since President Trump’s inauguration, and especially since the disastrous implementation of his family separation policy, officially announced by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April of 2018, before being rescinded by Trump two-and-a-half months later. Throughout the Expo, in public events and in background roundtable conversations with reporters, officials from the various component parts of the Department of Homeland Security rolled out a series of carefully rehearsed talking points: Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) need more money, personnel, and technology; taking migrants to hospitals distracts CBP officers from their real mission; and the 1997 Flores court settlement, which prohibits immigration enforcement agencies from detaining migrant families with children for more than twenty days, is undermining the very sovereignty of the United States. “We want a secure border, we want an immigration system that has integrity,” Ronald Vitiello, then–acting head of ICE, said in a keynote address to the hundreds of people gathered in San Antonio. “We have a generous immigration system in this country, but it has to have integrity in order for us to continue to be so generous.”

      More of a technocrat than his thuggish predecessor Thomas Homan, Vitiello also spoke at length about using the “dark web” to take down smugglers and the importance of having the most up-to-date data-management technology. But he spoke most adamantly about needing “a fix” for the Flores settlement. “If you prosecute crimes and you give people consequences, you get less of it,” he said. “With Flores, there’s no consequence, and everybody knows that,” a senior ICE official echoed to reporters during a background conversation immediately following Vitiello’s keynote remarks. “That’s why you’re seeing so many family units. We cannot apply a consequence to a family unit, because we have to release them.”

      Meanwhile, around 550 miles to the west, in El Paso, hundreds of migrants, including children and families, were being held by CBP under a bridge, reportedly forced to sleep on the ground, with inadequate medical attention. “They treated us like we are animals,” one Honduran man told Texas Monthly. “I felt what they were trying to do was to hurt us psychologically, so we would understand that this is a lesson we were being taught, that we shouldn’t have crossed.” Less than a week after the holding pen beneath the bridge closed, Vitiello’s nomination to run ICE would be pulled amid a spate of firings across DHS; President Trump wanted to go “in a tougher direction.”

      Family Values

      On the second day of the Border Security Expo, in a speech over catered lunch, Scott Luck, deputy chief of Customs and Border Protection and a career Border Patrol agent, lamented that the influx of children and families at the border meant that resources were being diverted from traditional enforcement practices. “Every day, about 150 agents spend their shifts at hospitals and medical facilities with illegal aliens receiving treatment,” he said. “The annual salary cost for agents on hospital watch is more than $11.5 million. Budget analysts estimate that 13 percent of our operational budget—the budget that we use to buy equipment, to buy vehicles for our men and women—is now used for transportation, medical expenses, diapers, food, and other necessities to care for illegal aliens in Border Patrol custody.”

      As far as Luck was concerned, every dollar spent on food and diapers is one not spent on drones and weapons, and every hour an agent spends guarding a migrant in a hospital is an hour they don’t spend on the border. “It’s not what they signed up for. The mission they signed up for is to protect the United States border, to protect the communities in which they live and serve,” he told reporters after his speech. “The influx, the volume, the clutter that this creates is frustrating.” Vitiello applied an Orwellian inversion: “We’re not helping them as fast as we want to,” he said of migrant families apprehended at the border.

      Even when discussing the intimate needs of detained migrant families, the language border officials used to describe their remit throughout the Expo was explicitly militaristic: achieving “operational control,” Luck said, requires “impedance and denial” and “situational awareness.” He referred to technology as a “vital force multiplier.” He at least stopped short of endorsing the president’s framing that what is happening on the border constitutes an invasion, instead describing it as a “deluge.”

      According to the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, the U.S. immigrant population has continued to grow—although at a slower rate than it did before the 2007 recession, and undocumented people appear to make up a smaller proportion of the overall population. Regardless, in fiscal year 2018, both ICE and CBP stepped up their enforcement activities, arresting, apprehending, and deporting people at significantly higher rates than the previous year. More than three times as many family members were apprehended at the border last year than in 2017, the Pew Research Center reports, and in the first six months of FY 2019 alone there were 189,584 apprehensions of “family units”: more than half of all apprehensions at the border during that time, and more than the full-year total of apprehended families for any other year on record. While the overall numbers have not yet begun to approach those of the 1980s and 1990s, when apprehensions regularly exceeded one million per year, the demographics of who is arriving at the United States southern border are changing: fewer single men from Mexico and more children and families from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—in other words, an ever-wider range of desperate victims of drug gangs and American policies that have long supported corrupt regimes.

      This change has presented people like Luck with problems they insist are merely logistical: aging Border Patrol stations, he told us at the Expo, “are not luxurious in any way, and they were never intended to handle families and children.” The solution, according to Vitiello, is “continued capital investment” in those facilities, as well as the cars and trucks necessary to patrol the border region and transport those apprehended from CBP custody to ICE detention centers, the IT necessary to sift through vast amounts of data accumulated through untold surveillance methods, and all of “the systems by which we do our work.”

      Neither Vitiello nor Luck would consider whether those systems—wherein thousands of children, ostensibly under the federal government’s care, have been sexually abused and five, from December through May of this year, have died—ought to be questioned. Both laughed off calls from migrant justice organizers, activists, and politicians to abolish ICE. “The concept of the Department of Homeland Security—and ICE as an agency within it—was designed for us to learn the lessons from 9/11,” Vitiello said. “Those needs still exist in this society. We’re gonna do our part.” DHS officials have even considered holding migrant children at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to the New York Times, where a new $23 million “contingency mass migration complex” is being built. The complex, which is to be completed by the end of the year, will have a capacity of thirteen thousand.

      Violence is the Point

      The existence of ICE may be a consequence of 9/11, but the first sections of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border—originally to contain livestock—went up in 1909 through 1911. In 1945, in response to a shift in border crossings from Texas to California, the U.S. Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service recycled fencing wire and posts from internment camps in Crystal City, Texas, where more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans had been imprisoned during World War II. “Although the INS could not erect a continuous line of fence along the border, they hoped that strategic placement of the fence would ‘compel persons seeking to enter the United States illegally to attempt to go around the ends of the fence,’” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, quoting from government documents, writes in Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. “What lay at the end of the fences and canals were desert lands and mountains extremely dangerous to cross without guidance or sufficient water. The fences, therefore, discouraged illegal immigration by exposing undocumented border crossers to the dangers of daytime dehydration and nighttime hypothermia.”

      Apprehension and deportation tactics continued to escalate in the years following World War II—including Operation Wetback, the infamous (and heavily propagandized) mass-deportation campaign of 1954—but the modern, militarized border era was greatly boosted by Bill Clinton. It was during Clinton’s first administration that Border Patrol released its “Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond,” which introduced the idea of “prevention through deterrence,” a theory of border policing that built on the logic of the original wall and hinges upon increasing the “cost” of migration “to the point that many will consider it futile to continue to attempt illegal entry.” With the Strategic Plan, the agency was requesting more money, officers, and equipment in order to “enhance national security and safeguard our immigration heritage.”

      The plan also noted that “a strong interior enforcement posture works well for border control,” and in 1996, amid a flurry of legislation targeting people of color and the poor, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which empowered the federal government to deport more people more quickly and made it nearly impossible for undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status. “Before 1996, internal enforcement activities had not played a very significant role in immigration enforcement,” the sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen A. Pren wrote in 2012. “Afterward these activities rose to levels not seen since the deportation campaigns of the Great Depression.” With the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2002, immigration was further securitized and criminalized, paving the way for an explosion in border policing technology that has further aligned the state with the defense and security industry. And at least one of Border Patrol’s “key assumptions,” explicitly stated in the 1994 strategy document, has borne out: “Violence will increase as effects of strategy are felt.”

      What this phrasing obscures, however, is that violence is the border strategy. In practice, what “prevention through deterrence” has meant is forcing migrants to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the desert, putting already vulnerable people at even greater risk. Closing urban points of entry, for example, or making asylum-seekers wait indefinitely in Mexico while their claims are processed, pushes migrants into remote areas where there is a higher likelihood they will suffer injury and death, as in the case of seven-year-old Jakil Caal Maquin, who died of dehydration and shock after being taken into CBP custody in December. (A spokesperson for CBP, in an email response, deflected questions about whether the agency considers children dying in its custody a deterrent.) Maquin is one of many thousands who have died attempting to cross into the United States: the most conservative estimate comes from CBP itself, which has recovered the remains of 7,505 people from its southwest border sectors between 1998 and 2018. This figure accounts for neither those who die on the Mexican side of the border, nor those whose bodies remain lost to the desert.

      Draconian immigration policing causes migrants to resort to smugglers and traffickers, creating the conditions for their exploitation by cartels and other violent actors and increasing the likelihood that they will be kidnapped, coerced, or extorted. As a result, some migrants have sought the safety of collective action in the form of the “caravan” or “exodus,” which has then led the U.S. media and immigration enforcement agencies to justify further militarization of the border. Indeed, in his keynote address at the Expo, Luck described “the emerging prevalence of large groups of one hundred people or more” as “troubling and especially dangerous.” Later, a sales representative for the gun manufacturer Glock very confidently explained to me that this was because agents of al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, were embedded with the caravans.

      Branding the Border

      Unsurprisingly, caravans came up frequently at the Border Security Expo. (An ICE spokesperson would later decline to explain what specific threat they pose to national security, instead citing general statistics about the terrorist watchlist, “special interest aliens,” and “suspicious travel patterns.”) During his own keynote speech, Vitiello described how ICE, and specifically its subcomponent Homeland Security Investigations, had deployed surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques to monitor the progress of caravans toward the border. “When these caravans have come, we’ve had trained, vetted individuals on the ground in those countries reporting in real time what they were seeing: who the organizers were, how they were being funded,” he said, before going on an astonishing tangent:

      That’s the kind of capability that also does amazing things to protecting brands, property rights, economic security. Think about it. If you start a company, introduce a product that’s innovative, there are people in the world who can take that, deconstruct it, and create their own version of it and sell it as yours. All the sweat that went into whatever that product was, to build your brand, they’ll take it away and slap it on some substandard product. It’s not good for consumers, it’s not good for public safety, and it’s certainly an economic drain on the country. That’s part of the mission.

      That the then–acting director of ICE, the germ-cell of fascism in the bourgeois American state, would admit that an important part of his agency’s mission is the protection of private property is a testament to the Trump administration’s commitment to saying the quiet part out loud.

      In fact, brands and private industry had pride of place at the Border Security Expo. A memorial ceremony for men and women of Border Patrol who have been killed in the line of duty was sponsored by Sava Solutions, an IT firm that has been awarded at least $482 million in federal contracts since 2008. Sava, whose president spent twenty-four years with the DEA and whose director of business development spent twenty with the FBI, was just one of the scores of firms in attendance at the Expo, each hoping to persuade the bureaucrats in charge of acquiring new gear for border security agencies that their drones, their facial recognition technology, their “smart” fences were the best of the bunch. Corporate sponsors included familiar names like Verizon and Motorola, and other less well-known ones, like Elbit Systems of America, a subsidiary of Israel’s largest private defense contractor, as well as a handful of IT firms with aggressive slogans like “Ever Vigilant” (CACI), “Securing the Future” (ManTech), and “Securing Your Tomorrow” (Unisys).

      The presence of these firms—and indeed the very existence of the Expo—underscores an important truth that anyone attempting to understand immigration politics must reckon with: border security is big business. The “homeland security and emergency management market,” driven by “increasing terrorist threats and biohazard attacks and occurrence of unpredictable natural disasters,” is projected to grow to more than $742 billion by 2023 from $557 billion in 2018, one financial analysis has found. In the coming decades, as more people are displaced by climate catastrophe and economic crises—estimates vary between 150 million and 1 billion by 2050—the industry dedicated to policing the vulnerable stands to profit enormously. By 2013, the United States was already spending more on federal immigration enforcement than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, including the FBI and DEA; ICE’s budget has doubled since its inception in 2003, while CBP’s has nearly tripled. Between 1993 and 2018, the number of Border Patrol agents grew from 4,139 to 19,555. And year after year, Democrats and Republicans alike have been happy to fuel an ever more high-tech deportation machine. “Congress has given us a lot of money in technology,” Luck told reporters after his keynote speech. “They’ve given us over what we’ve asked for in technology!”

      “As all of this rhetoric around security has increased, so has the impetus to give them more weapons and more tools and more gadgets,” Jacinta Gonzalez, a senior campaign organizer with Mijente, a national network of migrant justice activists, told me. “That’s also where the profiteering comes in.” She continued: “Industries understand what’s good for business and adapt themselves to what they see is happening. If they see an administration coming into power that is pro-militarization, anti-immigrant, pro-police, anti-communities of color, then that’s going to shape where they put their money.”

      By way of example, Gonzalez pointed to Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who spent $1.25 million supporting Trump’s 2016 election campaign and followed that up last year by donating $1 million to the Club for Growth—a far-right libertarian organization founded by Heritage Foundation fellow and one-time Federal Reserve Board prospect Stephen Moore—as well as about $350,000 to the Republican National Committee and other GOP groups. ICE has awarded Palantir, the $20 billion surveillance firm founded by Thiel, several contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to manage its data streams—a partnership the agency considers “mission critical,” according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. Palantir, in turn, runs on Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing service provided by the world’s most valuable public company, which is itself a key contractor in managing the Department of Homeland Security’s $6.8 billion IT portfolio.

      Meanwhile, former DHS secretary John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff when the administration enacted its “zero-tolerance” border policy, has joined the board of Caliburn International—parent organization of the only for-profit company operating shelters for migrant children. “Border enforcement and immigration policy,” Caliburn reported in an SEC filing last year, “is driving significant growth.” As Harsha Walia writes in Undoing Border Imperialism, “the state and capitalism are again in mutual alliance.”

      Triumph of the Techno-Nativists

      At one point during the Expo, between speeches, I stopped by a booth for Network Integrity Systems, a security firm that had set up a demonstration of its Sentinel™ Perimeter Intrusion Detection System. A sales representative stuck out his hand and introduced himself, eager to explain how his employer’s fiber optic motion sensors could be used at the border, or—he paused to correct himself—“any kind of perimeter.” He invited me to step inside the space that his coworkers had built, starting to say “cage” but then correcting himself, again, to say “small enclosure.” (It was literally a cage.) If I could get out, climbing over the fencing, without triggering the alarm, I would win a $500 Amazon gift card. I did not succeed.

      Overwhelmingly, the vendors in attendance at the Expo were there to promote this kind of technology: not concrete and steel, but motion sensors, high-powered cameras, and drones. Customs and Border Patrol’s chief operating officer John Sanders—whose biography on the CBP website describes him as a “seasoned entrepreneur and innovator” who has “served on the Board of Directors for several leading providers of contraband detection, geospatial intelligence, and data analytics solutions”—concluded his address by bestowing on CBP the highest compliment he could muster: declaring the agency comparable “to any start-up.” Rhetoric like Sanders’s, ubiquitous at the Expo, renders the border both bureaucratic and boring: a problem to be solved with some algorithmic mixture of brutality and Big Data. The future of border security, as shaped by the material interests that benefit from border securitization, is not a wall of the sort imagined by President Trump, but a “smart” wall.

      High-ranking Democrats—leaders in the second party of capital—and Republicans from the border region have championed this compromise. During the 2018-2019 government shutdown, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson told reporters that Democrats would appropriate $5.7 billion for “border security,” so long as that did not include a wall of Trump’s description. “Walls are primitive. What we need to do is have border security,” House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said in January. He later expanded to CNN: “I’ve said that we ought to have a smart wall. I defined that as a wall using drones to make it too high to get over, using x-ray equipment to make it too wide to get around, and using scanners to go deep enough not to be able to tunnel under it. To me, that would be a smart thing to do.”

      Even the social democratic vision of Senator Bernie Sanders stops short at the border. “If you open the borders, my God, there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people from all over the world,” he told Iowa voters in early April, “and I don’t think that’s something that we can do at this point.” Over a week later, during a Fox News town hall with Pennsylvania voters, he recommitted: “We need border security. Of course we do. Who argues with that? That goes without saying.”

      To the extent that Trump’s rhetoric, his administration’s immigration policies, and the enforcement agencies’ practices have made the “border crisis” more visible than ever before, they’ve done so on terms that most Democrats and liberals fundamentally agree with: immigration must be controlled and policed; the border must be enforced. One need look no further than the high priest of sensible centrism, Thomas Friedman, whose major complaint about Trump’s immigration politics is that he is “wasting” the crisis—an allusion to Rahm Emanuel’s now-clichéd remark that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” (Frequently stripped of context, it is worth remembering that Emanuel made this comment in the throes of the 2008 financial meltdown, at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, shortly following President Obama’s election.) “Regarding the border, the right place for Democrats to be is for a high wall with a big gate,” Friedman wrote in November of 2018. A few months later, a tour led by Border Patrol agents of the San Ysidro port of entry in San Diego left Friedman “more certain than ever that we have a real immigration crisis and that the solution is a high wall with a big gate—but a smart gate.”

      As reasonable as this might sound to anxious New York Times readers looking for what passes as humanitarian thinking in James Bennet’s opinion pages, the horror of Friedman’s logic eventually reveals itself when he considers who might pass through the big, smart gate in the high, high wall: “those who deserve asylum” and “a steady flow of legal, high-energy, and high-I.Q. immigrants.” Friedman’s tortured hypothetical shows us who he considers to be acceptable subjects of deportation and deprivation: the poor, the lazy, and the stupid. This is corporate-sponsored, state-sanctioned eugenics: the nativism of technocrats.

      The vision of a hermetically sealed border being sold, in different ways, by Trump and his allies, by Democrats, and by the Border Security Expo is in reality a selectively permeable one that strictly regulates the movement of migrant labor while allowing for the unimpeded flow of capital. Immigrants in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are caught between two factions of the capitalist class, each of which seek their immiseration: the citrus farmers, construction firms, and meat packing plants that benefit from an underclass of unorganized and impoverished workers, and the defense and security firms that keep them in a state of constant criminality and deportability.

      You could even argue that nobody in a position of power really wants a literal wall. Even before taking office, Trump himself knew he could only go so far. “We’re going to do a wall,” he said on the campaign trail in 2015. However: “We’re going to have a big, fat beautiful door on the wall.” In January 2019, speaking to the American Farm Bureau Association, Trump acknowledged the necessity of a mechanism allowing seasonal farmworkers from Mexico to cross the border, actually promising to loosen regulations on employers who rely on temporary migrant labor. “It’s going to be easier for them to get in than what they have to go through now,” he said, “I know a lot about the farming world.”

      At bottom, there is little material difference between this and what Friedman imagines to be the smarter, more humane approach. While establishment liberals would no doubt prefer that immigration enforcement be undertaken quietly, quickly, and efficiently, they have no categorical objection to the idea that noncitizens should enjoy fewer rights than citizens or be subject to different standards of due process (standards that are already applied in deeply inequitable fashion).

      As the smorgasbord of technologies and services so garishly on display at the Border Security Expo attests, maintaining the contradiction between citizens and noncitizens (or between the imperial core and the colonized periphery) requires an ever-expanding security apparatus, which itself becomes a source of ever-expanding profit. The border, shaped by centuries of bourgeois interests and the genocidal machinations of the settler-colonial nation-state, constantly generates fresh crises on which the immigration-industrial complex feeds. In other words, there is not a crisis at the border; the border is the crisis.

      CBP has recently allowed Anduril, a start-up founded by one of Peter Thiel’s mentees, Palmer Luckey, to begin testing its artificial intelligence-powered surveillance towers and drones in Texas and California. Sam Ecker, an Anduril engineer, expounded on the benefits of such technology at the Expo. “A tower doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t care about being in the middle of the desert or a river around the clock,” he told me. “We just let the computers do what they do best.”

      https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/border-profiteers-oconnor

  • Une diplomatie des excuses ? Le #Saint-Siège et le #Rwanda

    Le 25 mars 1998, le président Bill Clinton se rendait à l’aéroport de Kigali et, sans en sortir, présentait ses excuses pour l’inaction des États-Unis au cours du génocide. Deux années plus tard, le Premier ministre Guy Verhofstadt présentait à son tour les excuses officielles de la Belgique lors de la commémoration officielle du génocide au site de Gisozi. Il réitérait ses propos en 2004 à l’occasion de la dixième #commémoration du #génocide au stade Amahoro. D’autres pays, en premier lieu la France, ont toujours refusé de participer à cette « diplomatie des #excuses 1 » (à ce sujet, voir Rosoux ; Gibney & Howard-Hassmann).

    Depuis 1994, des associations de rescapés ainsi que les autorités rwandaises réclamaient des excuses officielles de l’#Église_catholique rwandaise et du #Vatican pour leurs rôles dans le #génocide des #Tutsi. Vingt-trois années après ces premières demandes, et après bien des controverses, le pape François a officiellement imploré en mars 2017 « le pardon de Dieu » pour les échecs de l’Église au Rwanda.

    Afin de comprendre ce geste politique, il est nécessaire de revenir sur les débats relatifs à la responsabilité de l’Église catholique au Rwanda avant et pendant le génocide ainsi que sur les étapes ayant conduit aux excuses officielles.

    https://www.memoires-en-jeu.com/inprogress/une-diplomatie-des-excuses-le-saint-siege-et-le-rwanda
    #mémoire #Eglise

  • USA : du Panoptique à la barbarie
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/usa-du-panoptique-a-la-barbarie

    USA : du Panoptique à la barbarie

    On voit ci-dessous, dans un texte de WSWS.org dont on comprend bien qu’il n’est en rien dans ses intentions d’atténuer les horreurs infernales de la situation américaniste, l’état actuel de l’“enfer carcéral” que constitue l’“univers carcéral” des USA, à partir d’un rapport sur cette situation dans l’État de l’Alabama (État dont Bill Clinton fut le gouverneur). Le texte se passe de tout commentaire, sinon l’emploi de l’expression “sauvagerie barbare” pour désigner la situation actuelle de la chose.

    Il nous a paru intéressant de mettre en regard certaines observations et réflexions faites par trois philosophes-commentateurs à propos du premier voyage de Tocqueville (avec Beaumont) aux USA en 1831, avec pour mission officielle d’étudier le système carcéral aux USA, et de faire une (...)

  • #Trump et le coup d’État des #multinationales

    Comment Donald Trump a-t-il conquis la Maison-Blanche ? Au travers d’analyses d’observateurs et de paroles d’électeurs, Fred Peabody dessine le saisissant portrait d’une démocratie confisquée.

    Et si le 45e président des États-Unis n’était pas le symbole d’une ère nouvelle, mais au contraire l’aboutissement d’un processus entamé depuis de longues années ? Alors que la journaliste canadienne Naomi Klein a récemment comparé l’administration Trump à un « coup d’État des grandes entreprises », son compatriote philosophe John Saul (Mort de la globalisation, éd. Payot) estime, lui, que la confiscation de la démocratie et des biens publics par les intérêts privés a débuté dès la fin des années 1970, la première élection de Ronald Reagan en 1981 la rendant effective. Sa théorie du « coup d’État au ralenti » a notamment inspiré le journaliste Chris Hedges dans son analyse de l’état de l’Amérique. Pour lui, et certains de ses pairs, également interviewés ici, l’élection de Donald Trump ne constitue que le dernier rebondissement, le plus visible sans doute, d’une dérive à laquelle ses prédécesseurs démocrates, Bill Clinton et Barack Obama, ont activement prêté la main. Des pans entiers de la population américaine, notamment dans les anciennes régions ouvrières, ont ainsi été délibérément sacrifiés par les élites au nom de la libéralisation du marché, et la crise de 2008 a contribué à accélérer cet abandon.

    Outsiders
    En écho à ces réquisitoires très argumentés, le réalisateur Fred Peabody (Tous les gouvernements mentent) explore ainsi les villes dévastées de Camden (New Jersey) et de Youngstown (Ohio), anciens bastions industriels livrés au chômage et à la misère, où des sans-abri, citoyens jadis prospères, campent à deux pas de rangées de maisons murées. Et c’est l’aspect le plus passionnant, et le plus novateur, de son film, que de donner la parole à des électeurs de Trump qui, ni haineux, ni racistes, ni religieux fanatiques, expliquent pourquoi ils n’ont pu se résoudre, une fois de plus, à voter pour un parti qui les a rayés de la carte sans sourciller. Sans illusion sur Trump, ils lui reconnaissent une seule vertu : celle de l’outsider, méprisé comme eux par les politiciens professionnels et les médias. De Washington à la Rust Belt, la « ceinture de rouille », cette balade dans une Amérique oubliée fait puissamment écho à l’actualité française.


    https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/084760-000-A/trump-et-le-coup-d-etat-des-multinationales
    #coup_d'Etat #USA #Etats-Unis #corporation #coup_d'Etat_permanent #impôts #fiscalité #élite #pouvoir_économique #démocratie #groupes_d'intérêt #intérêt_personnel #Mussolini #fascisme #corporatisme #propagande #médias #presse #lobby #Camden (New Jersey) #pauvreté #SDF #sans-abris #sans-abrisme #villes-fantôme #capitalisme #ghost-city #pillage #Youngstown (Ohio) #sidérurgie #industrie_sidérurgique #acierie #désindustrialisation #Rusting_belt #délocalisation #chômage #drogue #Manifeste_Powell #inégalités #richesse #pauvreté #ALENA #traité_de_libre-échange #accords_de_libre-échange #syndicats #prisons #privatisation_des_prisons #emprisonnement #divisions #diviser_pour_régner #racisme #sexisme #patriarcat #film #documentaire #film_documentaire

  • Pan Am Flight 103 : Robert Mueller’s 30-Year Search for Justice | WIRED
    https://www.wired.com/story/robert-muellers-search-for-justice-for-pan-am-103

    Cet article décrit le rôle de Robert Mueller dans l’enquête historique qui a permis de dissimuler ou de justifier la plupart des batailles de la guerre non déclarée des États Unis contre l’OLP et les pays arabes qui soutenaient la lutte pour un état palestinien.

    Aux États-Unis, en Allemagne et en France le grand public ignore les actes de guerre commis par les États Unis dans cette guerre. Vu dans ce contexte on ne peut que classer le récit de cet article dans la catégorie idéologie et propagande même si les intentions et faits qu’on y apprend sont bien documentés et plausibles.

    Cette perspective transforme le contenu de cet article d’une variation sur un thème connu dans un reportage sur l’état d’âme des dirigeants étatsuniens moins fanatiques que l’équipe du président actuel.

    THIRTY YEARS AGO last Friday, on the darkest day of the year, 31,000 feet above one of the most remote parts of Europe, America suffered its first major terror attack.

    TEN YEARS AGO last Friday, then FBI director Robert Mueller bundled himself in his tan trench coat against the cold December air in Washington, his scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. Sitting on a small stage at Arlington National Cemetery, he scanned the faces arrayed before him—the victims he’d come to know over years, relatives and friends of husbands and wives who would never grow old, college students who would never graduate, business travelers and flight attendants who would never come home.

    Burned into Mueller’s memory were the small items those victims had left behind, items that he’d seen on the shelves of a small wooden warehouse outside Lockerbie, Scotland, a visit he would never forget: A teenager’s single white sneaker, an unworn Syracuse University sweatshirt, the wrapped Christmas gifts that would never be opened, a lonely teddy bear.

    A decade before the attacks of 9/11—attacks that came during Mueller’s second week as FBI director, and that awoke the rest of America to the threats of terrorism—the bombing of Pan Am 103 had impressed upon Mueller a new global threat.

    It had taught him the complexity of responding to international terror attacks, how unprepared the government was to respond to the needs of victims’ families, and how on the global stage justice would always be intertwined with geopolitics. In the intervening years, he had never lost sight of the Lockerbie bombing—known to the FBI by the codename Scotbom—and he had watched the orphaned children from the bombing grow up over the years.

    Nearby in the cemetery stood a memorial cairn made of pink sandstone—a single brick representing each of the victims, the stone mined from a Scottish quarry that the doomed flight passed over just seconds before the bomb ripped its baggage hold apart. The crowd that day had gathered near the cairn in the cold to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing.

    For a man with an affinity for speaking in prose, not poetry, a man whose staff was accustomed to orders given in crisp sentences as if they were Marines on the battlefield or under cross-examination from a prosecutor in a courtroom, Mueller’s remarks that day soared in a way unlike almost any other speech he’d deliver.

    “There are those who say that time heals all wounds. But you know that not to be true. At its best, time may dull the deepest wounds; it cannot make them disappear,” Mueller told the assembled mourners. “Yet out of the darkness of this day comes a ray of light. The light of unity, of friendship, and of comfort from those who once were strangers and who are now bonded together by a terrible moment in time. The light of shared memories that bring smiles instead of sadness. And the light of hope for better days to come.”

    He talked of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and of inspiration drawn from Lockerbie’s town crest, with its simple motto, “Forward.” He spoke of what was then a two-decade-long quest for justice, of how on windswept Scottish mores and frigid lochs a generation of FBI agents, investigators, and prosecutors had redoubled their dedication to fighting terrorism.

    Mueller closed with a promise: “Today, as we stand here together on this, the darkest of days, we renew that bond. We remember the light these individuals brought to each of you here today. We renew our efforts to bring justice down on those who seek to harm us. We renew our efforts to keep our people safe, and to rid the world of terrorism. We will continue to move forward. But we will never forget.”

    Hand bells tolled for each of the victims as their names were read aloud, 270 names, 270 sets of bells.

    The investigation, though, was not yet closed. Mueller, although he didn’t know it then, wasn’t done with Pan Am 103. Just months after that speech, the case would test his innate sense of justice and morality in a way that few other cases in his career ever have.

    ROBERT S. MUELLER III had returned from a combat tour in Vietnam in the late 1960s and eventually headed to law school at the University of Virginia, part of a path that he hoped would lead him to being an FBI agent. Unable after graduation to get a job in government, he entered private practice in San Francisco, where he found he loved being a lawyer—just not a defense attorney.

    Then—as his wife Ann, a teacher, recounted to me years ago—one morning at their small home, while the two of them made the bed, Mueller complained, “Don’t I deserve to be doing something that makes me happy?” He finally landed a job as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco and stood, for the first time, in court and announced, “Good morning your Honor, I am Robert Mueller appearing on behalf of the United States of America.” It is a moment that young prosecutors often practice beforehand, and for Mueller those words carried enormous weight. He had found the thing that made him happy.

    His family remembers that time in San Francisco as some of their happiest years; the Muellers’ two daughters were young, they loved the Bay Area—and have returned there on annual vacations almost every year since relocating to the East Coast—and Mueller found himself at home as a prosecutor.

    On Friday nights, their routine was that Ann and the two girls would pick Mueller up at Harrington’s Bar & Grill, the city’s oldest Irish pub, not far from the Ferry Building in the Financial District, where he hung out each week with a group of prosecutors, defense attorneys, cops, and agents. (One Christmas, his daughter Cynthia gave him a model of the bar made out of Popsicle sticks.) He balanced that family time against weekends and trainings with the Marines Corps Reserves, where he served for more than a decade, until 1980, eventually rising to be a captain.

    Over the next 15 years, he rose through the ranks of the San Francisco US attorney’s office—an office he would return to lead during the Clinton administration—and then decamped to Massachusetts to work for US attorney William Weld in the 1980s. There, too, he shined and eventually became acting US attorney when Weld departed at the end of the Reagan administration. “You cannot get the words straight arrow out of your head,” Weld told me, speaking of Mueller a decade ago. “The agencies loved him because he knew his stuff. He didn’t try to be elegant or fancy, he just put the cards on the table.”

    In 1989, an old high school classmate, Robert Ross, who was chief of staff to then attorney general Richard Thornburgh, asked Mueller to come down to Washington to help advise Thornburgh. The offer intrigued Mueller. Ann protested the move—their younger daughter Melissa wanted to finish high school in Massachusetts. Ann told her husband, “We can’t possibly do this.” He replied, his eyes twinkling, “You’re right, it’s a terrible time. Well, why don’t we just go down and look at a few houses?” As she told me, “When he wants to do something, he just revisits it again and again.”

    For his first two years at so-called Main Justice in Washington, working under President George H.W. Bush, the family commuted back and forth from Boston to Washington, alternating weekends in each city, to allow Melissa to finish school.

    Washington gave Mueller his first exposure to national politics and cases with geopolitical implications; in September 1990, President Bush nominated him to be assistant attorney general, overseeing the Justice Department’s entire criminal division, which at that time handled all the nation’s terrorism cases as well. Mueller would oversee the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, mob boss John Gotti, and the controversial investigation into a vast money laundering scheme run through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals

    None of his cases in Washington, though, would affect him as much as the bombing of Pan Am 103.

    THE TIME ON the clocks in Lockerbie, Scotland, read 7:04 pm, on December 21, 1988, when the first emergency call came into the local fire brigade, reporting what sounded like a massive boiler explosion. It was technically early evening, but it had been dark for hours already; that far north, on the shortest day of the year, daylight barely stretched to eight hours.

    Soon it became clear something much worse than a boiler explosion had unfolded: Fiery debris pounded the landscape, plunging from the sky and killing 11 Lockerbie residents. As Mike Carnahan told a local TV reporter, “The whole sky was lit up with flames. It was actually raining, liquid fire. You could see several houses on the skyline with the roofs totally off and all you could see was flaming timbers.”

    At 8:45 pm, a farmer found in his field the cockpit of Pan Am 103, a Boeing 747 known as Clipper Maid of the Seas, lying on its side, 15 of its crew dead inside, just some of the 259 passengers and crew killed when a bomb had exploded inside the plane’s cargo hold. The scheduled London to New York flight never even made it out of the UK.

    It had taken just three seconds for the plane to disintegrate in the air, though the wreckage took three long minutes to fall the five miles from the sky to the earth; court testimony later would examine how passengers had still been alive as they fell. Nearly 200 of the passengers were American, including 35 students from Syracuse University returning home from a semester abroad. The attack horrified America, which until then had seen terror touch its shores only occasionally as a hijacking went awry; while the US had weathered the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, attacks almost never targeted civilians.

    The Pan Am 103 bombing seemed squarely aimed at the US, hitting one of its most iconic brands. Pan Am then represented America’s global reach in a way few companies did; the world’s most powerful airline shuttled 19 million passengers a year to more than 160 countries and had ferried the Beatles to their US tour and James Bond around the globe on his cinematic missions. In a moment of hubris a generation before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the airline had even opened a “waiting list” for the first tourists to travel to outer space. Its New York headquarters, the Pan Am building, was the world’s largest commercial building and its terminal at JFK Airport the biggest in the world.

    The investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103 began immediately, as police and investigators streamed north from London by the hundreds; chief constable John Boyd, the head of the local police, arrived at the Lockerbie police station by 8:15 pm, and within an hour the first victim had been brought in: A farmer arrived in town with the body of a baby girl who had fallen from the sky. He’d carefully placed her in the front seat of his pickup truck.

    An FBI agent posted in London had raced north too, with the US ambassador, aboard a special US Air Force flight, and at 2 am, when Boyd convened his first senior leadership meeting, he announced, “The FBI is here, and they are fully operational.” By that point, FBI explosives experts were already en route to Scotland aboard an FAA plane; agents would install special secure communications equipment in Lockerbie and remain on site for months.

    Although it quickly became clear that a bomb had targeted Pan Am 103—wreckage showed signs of an explosion and tested positive for PETN and RDX, two key ingredients of the explosive Semtex—the investigation proceeded with frustrating slowness. Pan Am’s records were incomplete, and it took days to even determine the full list of passengers. At the same time, it was the largest crime scene ever investigated—a fact that remains true today.

    Investigators walked 845 square miles, an area 12 times the size of Washington, DC, and searched so thoroughly that they recovered more than 70 packages of airline crackers and ultimately could reconstruct about 85 percent of the fuselage. (Today, the wreckage remains in an English scrapyard.) Constable Boyd, at his first press conference, told the media, “This is a mammoth inquiry.”

    On Christmas Eve, a searcher found a piece of a luggage pallet with signs of obvious scorching, which would indicate the bomb had been in the luggage compartment below the passenger cabin. The evidence was rushed to a special British military lab—one originally created to investigate the Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and kill King James I in 1605.

    When the explosive tests came back a day later, the British government called the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for combating terrorism, L. Paul Bremer III (who would go on to be President George W. Bush’s viceroy in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion of Iraq), and officially delivered the news that everyone had anticipated: Pan Am 103 had been downed by a bomb.

    Meanwhile, FBI agents fanned out across the country. In New York, special agent Neil Herman—who would later lead the FBI’s counterterrorism office in New York in the run up to 9/11—was tasked with interviewing some of the victims’ families; many of the Syracuse students on board had been from the New York region. One of the mothers he interviewed hadn’t heard from the government in the 10 days since the attack. “It really struck me how ill-equipped we were to deal with this,” Herman told me, years later. “Multiply her by 270 victims and families.” The bombing underscored that the FBI and the US government had a lot to learn in responding and aiding victims in a terror attack.

    INVESTIGATORS MOVED TOWARD piecing together how a bomb could have been placed on board; years before the 9/11 attack, they discounted the idea of a suicide bomber aboard—there had never been a suicide attack on civil aviation at that point—and so focused on one of two theories: The possibility of a “mule,” an innocent passenger duped into carrying a bomb aboard, or an “inside man,” a trusted airport or airline employee who had smuggled the fatal cargo aboard. The initial suspect list stretched to 1,200 names.

    Yet even reconstructing what was on board took an eternity: Evidence pointed to a Japanese manufactured Toshiba cassette recorder as the likely delivery device for the bomb, and then, by the end of January, investigators located pieces of the suitcase that had held the bomb. After determining that it was a Samsonite bag, police and the FBI flew to the company’s headquarters in the United States and narrowed the search further: The bag, they found, was a System 4 Silhouette 4000 model, color “antique-copper,” a case and color made for only three years, 1985 to 1988, and sold only in the Middle East. There were a total of 3,500 such suitcases in circulation.

    By late spring, investigators had identified 14 pieces of luggage inside the target cargo container, known as AVE4041; each bore tell-tale signs of the explosion. Through careful retracing of how luggage moved through the London airport, investigators determined that the bags on the container’s bottom row came from passengers transferring in London. The bags on the second and third row of AVE4041 had been the last bags loaded onto the leg of the flight that began in Frankfurt, before the plane took off for London. None of the baggage had been X-rayed or matched with passengers on board.

    The British lab traced clothing fragments from the wreckage that bore signs of the explosion and thus likely originated in the bomb-carrying suitcase. It was an odd mix: Two herring-bone skirts, men’s pajamas, tartan trousers, and so on. The most promising fragment was a blue infant’s onesie that, after fiber analysis, was conclusively determined to have been inside the explosive case, and had a label saying “Malta Trading Company.” In March, two detectives took off for Malta, where the manufacturer told them that 500 such articles of clothing had been made and most sent to Ireland, while the rest went locally to Maltese outlets and others to continental Europe.

    As they dug deeper, they focused on bag B8849, which appeared to have come off Air Malta Flight 180—Malta to Frankfurt—on December 21, even though there was no record of one of that flight’s 47 passengers transferring to Pan Am 103.

    Investigators located the store in Malta where the suspect clothing had been sold; the British inspector later recorded in his statement, “[Store owner] Anthony Gauci interjected and stated that he could recall selling a pair of the checked trousers, size 34, and three pairs of the pajamas to a male person.” The investigators snapped to attention—after nine months did they finally have a suspect in their sights? “[Gauci] informed me that the man had also purchased the following items: one imitation Harris Tweed jacket; one woolen cardigan; one black umbrella; one blue colored ‘Baby Gro’ with a motif described by the witness as a ‘sheep’s face’ on the front; and one pair of gents’ brown herring-bone material trousers, size 36.”

    Game, set, match. Gauci had perfectly described the clothing fragments found by RARDE technicians to contain traces of explosive. The purchase, Gauci went on to explain, stood out in his mind because the customer—whom Gauci tellingly identified as speaking the “Libyan language”—had entered the store on November 23, 1988, and gathered items without seeming to care about the size, gender, or color of any of it.

    As the investigation painstakingly proceeded into 1989 and 1990, Robert Mueller arrived at Main Justice; the final objects of the Lockerbie search wouldn’t be found until the spring of 1990, just months before Mueller took over as assistant attorney general of the criminal division in September.

    The Justice Department that year was undergoing a series of leadership changes; the deputy attorney general, William Barr, became acting attorney general midyear as Richard Thornburgh stepped down to run for Senate back in his native Pennsylvania. President Bush then nominated Barr to take over as attorney general officially. (Earlier this month Barr was nominated by President Trump to become attorney general once again.)

    The bombing soon became one of the top cases on Mueller’s desk. He met regularly with Richard Marquise, the FBI special agent heading Scotbom. For Mueller, the case became personal; he met with victims’ families and toured the Lockerbie crash site and the investigation’s headquarters. He traveled repeatedly to the United Kingdom for meetings and walked the fields of Lockerbie himself. “The Scots just did a phenomenal job with the crime scene,” he told me, years ago.

    Mueller pushed the investigators forward constantly, getting involved in the investigation at a level that a high-ranking Justice Department official almost never does. Marquise turned to him in one meeting, after yet another set of directions, and sighed, “Geez, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you want to be FBI director.”

    The investigation gradually, carefully, zeroed in on Libya. Agents traced a circuit board used in the bomb to a similar device seized in Africa a couple of years earlier used by Libyan intelligence. An FBI-created database of Maltese immigration records even showed that a man using the same alias as one of those Libyan intelligence officers had departed from Malta on October 19, 1988—just two months before the bombing.

    The circuit board also helped makes sense of an important aspect of the bombing: It controlled a timer, meaning that the bomb was not set off by a barometric trigger that registers altitude. This, in turn, explained why the explosive baggage had lain peacefully in the jet’s hold as it took off and landed repeatedly.

    Tiny letters on the suspect timer said “MEBO.” What was MEBO? In the days before Google, searching for something called “Mebo” required going country to country, company to company. There were no shortcuts. The FBI, MI5, and CIA were, after months of work, able to trace MEBO back to a Swiss company, Meister et Bollier, adding a fifth country to the ever-expanding investigative circle.

    From Meister et Bollier, they learned that the company had provided 20 prototype timers to the Libyan government and the company helped ID their contact as a Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who looked like the sketch of the Maltese clothing shopper. Then, when the FBI looked at its database of Maltese immigration records, they found that Al Megrahi had been present in Malta the day the clothing was purchased.

    Marquise sat down with Robert Mueller and the rest of the prosecutorial team and laid out the latest evidence. Mueller’s orders were clear—he wanted specific suspects and he wanted to bring charges. As he said, “Proceed toward indictment.” Let’s get this case moving.

    IN NOVEMBER 1990, Marquise was placed in charge of all aspects of the investigation and assigned on special duty to the Washington Field Office and moved to a new Scotbom task force. The field offce was located far from the Hoover building, in a run-down neighborhood known by the thoroughly unromantic moniker of Buzzard Point.

    The Scotbom task force had been allotted three tiny windowless rooms with dark wood paneling, which were soon covered floor-to-ceiling with 747 diagrams, crime scene photographs, maps, and other clues. By the door of the office, the team kept two photographs to remind themselves of the stakes: One, a tiny baby shoe recovered from the fields of Lockerbie; the other, a picture of the American flag on the tail of Pan Am 103. This was the first major attack on the US and its civilians. Whoever was responsible couldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

    With representatives from a half-dozen countries—the US, Britain, Scotland, Sweden, Germany, France, and Malta—now sitting around the table, putting together a case that met everyone’s evidentiary standards was difficult. “We talked through everything, and everything was always done to the higher standard,” Marquise says. In the US, for instance, the legal standard for a photo array was six photos; in Scotland, though, it was 12. So every photo array in the investigation had 12 photos to ensure that the IDs could be used in a British court.

    The trail of evidence so far was pretty clear, and it all pointed toward Libya. Yet there was still much work to do prior to an indictment. A solid hunch was one thing. Having evidence that would stand up in court and under cross-examination was something else entirely.

    As the case neared an indictment, the international investigators and prosecutors found themselves focusing at their gatherings on the fine print of their respective legal code and engaging in deep, philosophical-seeming debates: “What does murder mean in your statute? Huh? I know what murder means: I kill you. Well, then you start going through the details and the standards are just a little different. It may entail five factors in one country, three in another. Was Megrahi guilty of murder? Depends on the country.”

    At every meeting, the international team danced around the question of where a prosecution would ultimately take place. “Jurisdiction was an eggshell problem,” Marquise says. “It was always there, but no one wanted to talk about it. It was always the elephant in the room.”

    Mueller tried to deflect the debate for as long as possible, arguing there was more investigation to do first. Eventually, though, he argued forcefully that the case should be tried in the US. “I recognize that Scotland has significant equities which support trial of the case in your country,” he said in one meeting. “However, the primary target of this act of terrorism was the United States. The majority of the victims were Americans, and the Pan American aircraft was targeted precisely because it was of United States registry.”

    After one meeting, where the Scots and Americans debated jurisdiction for more than two hours, the group migrated over to the Peasant, a restaurant near the Justice Department, where, in an attempt to foster good spirits, it paid for the visiting Scots. Mueller and the other American officials each had to pay for their own meals.

    Mueller was getting ready to move forward; the federal grand jury would begin work in early September. Prosecutors and other investigators were already preparing background, readying evidence, and piecing together information like the names and nationalities of all the Lockerbie victims so that they could be included in the forthcoming indictment.

    There had never been any doubt in the US that the Pan Am 103 bombing would be handled as a criminal matter, but the case was still closely monitored by the White House and the National Security Council.

    The Reagan administration had been surprised in February 1988 by the indictment on drug charges of its close ally Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, and a rule of thumb had been developed: Give the White House a heads up anytime you’re going to indict a foreign agent. “If you tag Libya with Pan Am 103, that’s fair to say it’s going to disrupt our relationship with Libya,” Mueller deadpans. So Mueller would head up to the Cabinet Room at the White House, charts and pictures in hand, to explain to President Bush and his team what Justice had in mind.

    To Mueller, the investigation underscored why such complex investigations needed a law enforcement eye. A few months after the attack, he sat through a CIA briefing pointing toward Syria as the culprit behind the attack. “That’s always struck with me as a lesson in the difference between intelligence and evidence. I always try to remember that,” he told me, back when he was FBI director. “It’s a very good object lesson about hasty action based on intelligence. What if we had gone and attacked Syria based on that initial intelligence? Then, after the attack, it came out that Libya had been behind it? What could we have done?”

    Marquise was the last witness for the federal grand jury on Friday, November 8, 1991. Only in the days leading up to that testimony had prosecutors zeroed in on Megrahi and another Libyan officer, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah; as late as the week of the testimony, they had hoped to pursue additional indictments, yet the evidence wasn’t there to get to a conviction.

    Mueller traveled to London to meet with the Peter Fraser, the lord advocate—Scotland’s top prosecutor—and they agreed to announce indictments simultaneously on November 15, 1991. Who got their hands on the suspects first, well, that was a question for later. The joint indictment, Mueller believed, would benefit both countries. “It adds credibility to both our investigations,” he says.

    That coordinated joint, multi-nation statement and indictment would become a model that the US would deploy more regularly in the years to come, as the US and other western nations have tried to coordinate cyber investigations and indictments against hackers from countries like North Korea, Russia, and Iran.

    To make the stunning announcement against Libya, Mueller joined FBI director William Sessions, DC US attorney Jay Stephens, and attorney general William Barr.

    “We charge that two Libyan officials, acting as operatives of the Libyan intelligence agency, along with other co-conspirators, planted and detonated the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103,” Barr said. “I have just telephoned some of the families of those murdered on Pan Am 103 to inform them and the organizations of the survivors that this indictment has been returned. Their loss has been ever present in our minds.”

    At the same time, in Scotland, investigators there were announcing the same indictments.

    At the press conference, Barr listed a long set of names to thank—the first one he singled out was Mueller’s. Then, he continued, “This investigation is by no means over. It continues unabated. We will not rest until all those responsible are brought to justice. We have no higher priority.”

    From there, the case would drag on for years. ABC News interviewed the two suspects in Libya later that month; both denied any responsibility for the bombing. Marquise was reassigned within six months; the other investigators moved along too.

    Mueller himself left the administration when Bill Clinton became president, spending an unhappy year in private practice before rejoining the Justice Department to work as a junior homicide prosecutor in DC under then US attorney Eric Holder; Mueller, who had led the nation’s entire criminal division was now working side by side with prosecutors just a few years out of law school, the equivalent of a three-star military general retiring and reenlisting as a second lieutenant. Clinton eventually named Mueller the US attorney in San Francisco, the office where he’d worked as a young attorney in the 1970s.

    THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY of the bombing came and went without any justice. Then, in April 1999, prolonged international negotiations led to Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi turning over the two suspects; the international economic sanctions imposed on Libya in the wake of the bombing were taking a toll on his country, and the leader wanted to put the incident behind him.

    The final negotiated agreement said that the two men would be tried by a Scottish court, under Scottish law, in The Hague in the Netherlands. Distinct from the international court there, the three-judge Scottish court would ensure that the men faced justice under the laws of the country where their accused crime had been committed.

    Allowing the Scots to move forward meant some concessions by the US. The big one was taking the death penalty, prohibited in Scotland, off the table. Mueller badly wanted the death penalty. Mueller, like many prosecutors and law enforcement officials, is a strong proponent of capital punishment, but he believes it should be reserved for only egregious crimes. “It has to be especially heinous, and you have to be 100 percent sure he’s guilty,” he says. This case met that criteria. “There’s never closure. If there can’t be closure, there should be justice—both for the victims as well as the society at large,” he says.

    An old US military facility, Kamp Van Zeist, was converted to an elaborate jail and courtroom in The Hague, and the Dutch formally surrendered the two Libyans to Scottish police. The trial began in May 2000. For nine months, the court heard testimony from around the world. In what many observers saw as a political verdict, Al Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was found not guilty.

    With barely 24 hours notice, Marquise and victim family members raced from the United States to be in the courtroom to hear the verdict. The morning of the verdict in 2001, Mueller was just days into his tenure as acting deputy US attorney general—filling in for the start of the George W. Bush administration in the department’s No. 2 role as attorney general John Ashcroft got himself situated.

    That day, Mueller awoke early and joined with victims’ families and other officials in Washington, who watched the verdict announcement via a satellite hookup. To him, it was a chance for some closure—but the investigation would go on. As he told the media, “The United States remains vigilant in its pursuit to bring to justice any other individuals who may have been involved in the conspiracy to bring down Pan Am Flight 103.”

    The Scotbom case would leave a deep imprint on Mueller; one of his first actions as FBI director was to recruit Kathryn Turman, who had served as the liaison to the Pan Am 103 victim families during the trial, to head the FBI’s Victim Services Division, helping to elevate the role and responsibility of the FBI in dealing with crime victims.

    JUST MONTHS AFTER that 20th anniversary ceremony with Mueller at Arlington National Cemetery, in the summer of 2009, Scotland released a terminally ill Megrahi from prison after a lengthy appeals process, and sent him back to Libya. The decision was made, the Scottish minister of justice reported, on “compassionate grounds.” Few involved on the US side believed the terrorist deserved compassion. Megrahi was greeted as a hero on the tarmac in Libya—rose petals, cheering crowds. The US consensus remained that he should rot in prison.

    The idea that Megrahi could walk out of prison on “compassionate” ground made a mockery of everything that Mueller had dedicated his life to fighting and doing. Amid a series of tepid official condemnations—President Obama labeled it “highly objectionable”—Mueller fired off a letter to Scottish minister Kenny MacAskill that stood out for its raw pain, anger, and deep sorrow.

    “Over the years I have been a prosecutor, and recently as the Director of the FBI, I have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other prosecutors, since only the prosecutor handling the case has all the facts and the law before him in reaching the appropriate decision,” Mueller began. “Your decision to release Megrahi causes me to abandon that practice in this case. I do so because I am familiar with the facts, and the law, having been the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991. And I do so because I am outraged at your decision, blithely defended on the grounds of ‘compassion.’”

    That nine months after the 20th anniversary of the bombing, the only person behind bars for the bombing would walk back onto Libyan soil a free man and be greeted with rose petals left Mueller seething.

    “Your action in releasing Megrahi is as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice. Indeed your action makes a mockery of the rule of law. Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world,” Mueller wrote. “You could not have spent much time with the families, certainly not as much time as others involved in the investigation and prosecution. You could not have visited the small wooden warehouse where the personal items of those who perished were gathered for identification—the single sneaker belonging to a teenager; the Syracuse sweatshirt never again to be worn by a college student returning home for the holidays; the toys in a suitcase of a businessman looking forward to spending Christmas with his wife and children.”

    For Mueller, walking the fields of Lockerbie had been walking on hallowed ground. The Scottish decision pained him especially deeply, because of the mission and dedication he and his Scottish counterparts had shared 20 years before. “If all civilized nations join together to apply the rules of law to international terrorists, certainly we will be successful in ridding the world of the scourge of terrorism,” he had written in a perhaps too hopeful private note to the Scottish Lord Advocate in 1990.

    Some 20 years later, in an era when counterterrorism would be a massive, multibillion dollar industry and a buzzword for politicians everywhere, Mueller—betrayed—concluded his letter with a decidedly un-Mueller-like plea, shouted plaintively and hopelessly across the Atlantic: “Where, I ask, is the justice?”

    #USA #Libye #impérialisme #terrorisme #histoire #CIA #idéologie #propagande

  • Here’s why this media scholar changed her mind and now thinks there’s a ’very strong’ case Russia won the 2016 election for Trump | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-media-scholar-changed-her-mind-and-now-thinks-theres-very-strong

    I originally thought that the idea that the Russians could have used social media to create a substantial impact on the election was absurd. I started to change my mind when I saw the first release of Russian social media and troll campaign ads and messaging during the U.S. Senate hearings in October and November of last year. These ads were a coherent plan and understanding of the presidential election which was consistent with Donald Trump’s political needs.

    If acted on systematically, these ads would have produced a communication effect that on the margins could have affected enough votes to change the outcome of the election in his favor. If the Russians didn’t have a coherent theory of what it took for Donald Trump to win — or what it would take to make it more likely that Hillary Clinton would lose — then all their machinations would not have mattered. But the Russians knew who to mobilize.

    The Russians were trying to mobilize evangelicals and white conservative Catholics. The Russians also knew that they needed to mobilize veterans and military households. The Russians knew they had to demobilize Bernie Sanders supporters and liberals, especially young people. The Russians were also attempting to shift the voters they could not demobilize over to Jill Stein.

    You add that together with demobilizing African-American voters with messaging that Hillary Clinton is bad for the black community, and then Clinton’s whole messaging strategy is at risk. If Hillary Clinton can’t mobilize the black vote at levels near Barack Obama’s, although not the same level, then she is in trouble.

    I then started to examine where the Russians and their trolls spent their time and attention. They were spending more of it on trying to demobilize African-American voters by emphasizing things that group may not like about Hillary Clinton. When a person casts a vote they are not thinking about every detail or issue relative to a candidate. Voters make decisions based on what is most important in that moment of time, what is on the top of their mind.

    So if you remind voters who are African-American that at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency there was a very high level of increased incarceration of African-Americans on drug charges then an African-American voter may say, “Maybe I should think about Hillary Clinton differently.”

    If you remember her “superpredator” comment and take it to be about black people in general and not about gangs specifically, then you as an African-American voter may be less likely to support her.

    By featuring these types of messages, the Russians were increasing the likelihood that while you may not be likely to cast a vote for Donald Trump, you are more likely to stay home and not vote for Hillary Clinton.

    I then started to wonder whether maybe there was enough troll activity that was addressed to the right constituencies to have impacted the margins of the vote. The question then becomes, did the Russians and their trolls target the right voters in the right places? We still don’t know that.

    The social media platforms know the answer, but they have not released the information. The trolls alone could have swung the electorate. But in my judgment the WikiLeaks hacks against the DNC is a much stronger case. There we see a clear effect on the news media agenda. We know from decades of communication scholarship that if you change the media agenda you then change the criteria that people vote on. The shift in the media agenda from October forward was decisively against Hillary Clinton. And the questions in the presidential debates which were based on information stolen by WikiLeaks and the Russians disadvantaged Clinton and, looking at the polling data, predicted the vote.

    President Trump is better at commanding the agenda than he is at any other single thing that he as a communicator does. The press has been an accomplice in the process of ceding agenda control to him by virtue of his tweeting — and having the press respond immediately, as if every tweet is presumed to be newsworthy. Donald Trump has the capacity to get whatever he wants the public to focus on by directing the cable news agenda. We really should ask: Aren’t there other things we ought to be paying more attention to? How often are we being distracted from something that Trump does not want us to pay attention to? Being distracted by his effective use of tweets to set an alternative agenda.

    Fox News is de facto Trump’s state-sponsored media. How does this impact American political culture?

    We are increasingly going into ideological enclaves to get our news. To the extent that people find the news compatible with what they already believe, that means they are not being exposed to alternative interpretations of reality and alternative points of view. What is unprecedented about the relationship between Fox News and the president of the United States is the extent to which what is said and shown on Fox News appears to influence what is said and featured by the president of the United States. The traditional model of agenda-setting is that the president sets the agenda and the news media follows. This reversal with Donald Trump and Fox News is something new.

    #Politique #Médias_sociaux #USA #Trump

  • Joseph Stiglitz : « La politique économique de Trump est conçue pour les ultra-riches »

    https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2018/09/08/joseph-stiglitz-trump-met-en-place-une-politique-economique-concue-pour-les-

    Pour le prix Nobel et ancien conseiller de Bill Clinton, la politique menée par le locataire de la Maison Blanche est désastreuse pour l’Américain ordinaire.

    Professeur d’économie à l’université Columbia, Joseph Stiglitz a dirigé les conseillers économiques du président Clinton (1995-1997), avant d’être chef économiste de la Banque mondiale (1997-2000). En 2001, il a reçu le prix Nobel d’économie pour ses travaux sur l’asymétrie d’information sur les marchés imparfaits. Il a publié de nombreux ouvrages dont La Grande Désillusion (Fayard, 2002) ou plus récemment, L’Euro : comment la monnaie unique menace l’avenir de l’Europe (éd. Les Liens qui libèrent, 2016).

    Depuis l’élection de Donald Trump, le S&P 500, indice basé sur les 500 plus grandes sociétés cotées aux Etats-Unis a augmenté de 33 % pour atteindre son plus haut niveau historique, le taux de chômage est bas, et celui de la croissance, annualisée, atteint plus de 4 %. Finalement, Trump, ça marche ?

    La bonne santé de l’économie américaine n’est pas à mettre au crédit de Donald Trump. Premièrement, il bénéficie de la reprise économique qui a débuté sous Barack Obama. Deuxièmement, il a fait exploser le déficit budgétaire en augmentant la dépense publique et en baissant les impôts, ce qui, naturellement, crée de la croissance à court terme. En France, un choc fiscal de cette ampleur, qui a vu le déficit public américain passer de 3 % à presque 6 % du produit intérieur brut (PIB), n’aurait même pas été autorisé par les traités européens.

    Troisièmement, si les cours de la Bourse ont tant augmenté, c’est surtout parce que les impôts sur les sociétés ont beaucoup baissé, ce qui a augmenté les valeurs des entreprises. Enfin, si on compare la situation aux Etats-Unis depuis l’élection de Trump avec celle des autres pays de la région, on se rend compte qu’elle n’a rien d’exceptionnel. Par exemple, entre 2016 et 2017, la croissance a davantage augmenté au Canada qu’aux Etats-Unis.

    En faisant exploser le déficit public, Trump déplace le fardeau de la charge fiscale sur les générations futures. Sa politique n’est pas viable à long terme. Je m’attends à un vrai ralentissement de la croissance vers la fin 2019, début 2020, car ses réformes ne favorisent pas l’investissement. La Réserve fédérale [la banque centrale des Etats-Unis] va devoir augmenter les taux d’intérêt plus que s’il n’y avait pas eu de baisse massive des impôts.

    De plus, Trump a réduit certains programmes publics, et on peut s’attendre à moins d’investissements productifs dans ce secteur. Au total, sa politique économique aura donc des effets très néfastes.

    Vous mettez aussi en cause le caractère inégalitaire de sa politique économique…

    Alors que, les Etats-Unis sont déjà le pays le plus inégalitaire des pays développés, Trump met en place une politique économique conçue pour les ultra-riches mais désastreuse pour l’Américain ordinaire. Il finance une baisse d’impôts pour les très riches par une hausse pour les classes moyennes.

    Sur le plan éducatif, il fait ouvrir des « charter schools » [écoles privées à financements publics] qui par le passé ont pourtant contribué à faire beaucoup augmenter les inégalités. Par ailleurs, il a fait passer une réforme qui va faire perdre à treize millions d’Américains leur couverture santé, alors que dans ce pays le problème du manque d’accès aux soins est tel que l’espérance de vie est aujourd’hui en déclin.

    Les mesures favorables aux entreprises ne vont-elles pas, cependant, susciter une croissance bénéfique à tous ?

    Les revenus des 1 % les plus riches n’ont cessé d’augmenter ces quarante dernières années, tandis que ceux des 90 % les plus pauvres ont stagné. Les faits le prouvent : l’enrichissement des plus riches ne bénéficie qu’aux plus riches.

    Par ailleurs, l’argent que Trump a rendu aux riches et aux entreprises n’a pas été réinvesti, ni utilisé pour augmenter les salaires, mais a servi à financer des programmes de rachat d’actions, ce qui a mis de l’argent dans les poches d’Américains déjà très riches.

    Parlons justement des inégalités, que vous voyez comme l’un des défis majeurs du XXIe siècle. Pourquoi ont-elles explosé au sein de nos sociétés ces quarante dernières années ?

    Certaines tendances majeures, comme les évolutions technologiques, la mondialisation ou la libéralisation des échanges, sont les mêmes dans tous les pays. Pourtant, les inégalités n’ont pas augmenté de la même manière partout, ce qui prouve que les choix politiques en sont en partie responsables.

    Les Etats-Unis ont, par exemple, rendu la vie des syndicats très compliquée et ont réduit les droits des salariés, ce qui a nui à leur pouvoir de négociation avec les patrons. Conséquence : les salaires les plus bas sont au même niveau qu’il y a soixante ans. Dans la plupart des pays ce serait inadmissible. Plus généralement, ceux qui ont fait les mêmes choix économiques que les Etats-Unis ont de hauts niveaux d’inégalités, tandis que ceux qui ont suivi d’autres chemins en ont moins. La France, par exemple, a fait plus pour protéger les salariés.

    Les réformes qui seraient nécessaires pour réduire les inégalités ne nuiraient-elles pas à l’efficacité économique ?

    Non, cette vieille idée a été totalement discréditée ces dix dernières années. L’inégalité est coûteuse pour la société. Je l’ai expliqué dans un livre appelé Le Prix de l’inégalité (éd. Les liens qui libèrent, 2012). D’ailleurs, les travaux économétriques et statistiques réalisés par le Fonds monétaire international (FMI) ou par l’Organisation pour la coopération et le développement économiques (OCDE) ont toujours soutenu que les économies les plus égalitaires étaient les plus efficaces.

    Il y a au moins deux raisons à cela. D’abord, les pays les plus égalitaires sont généralement ceux où les riches ne peuvent pas se limiter à exploiter leurs rentes, ce qui induit une utilisation plus efficace des ressources. Ensuite, dans les pays très inégalitaires, il n’existe souvent pas d’égalité des chances. Du coup, des jeunes talentueux mais défavorisés n’obtiennent pas le niveau d’éducation qui leur permettrait d’exploiter leur potentiel et de contribuer pleinement à l’économie du pays.

    Donald Trump a augmenté les tarifs douaniers pour les exportations chinoises de 16 milliards de dollars (14 milliards d’euros). Certains commentateurs pensent que cette guerre commerciale sera plus douloureuse pour la Chine que pour les Etats-Unis, et qu’elle devra donc céder aux exigences américaines…

    Ce point de vue ne prend pas en compte le fait que la Chine a des moyens non économiques de faire souffrir les Etats-Unis. Elle peut le faire par le biais diplomatique avec, par exemple, son droit de veto au Conseil de sécurité des Nations unies (ONU) ou par le biais politique, comme à travers ses choix vis-à-vis de la Corée du Nord.

    Le jeu auquel joue Trump est donc dangereux, et à terme pourrait nuire aux intérêts des Etats-Unis. De plus, même en ne regardant que l’aspect purement économique, il n’est pas donné que la Chine soit forcément perdante dans cette guerre commerciale.

    « EN CHINE, (...) IL PARAÎT INCONCEVABLE DE SE LAISSER HUMILIER UNE NOUVELLE FOIS, SURTOUT PAR TRUMP, VU COMME UN RACISTE INCOMPÉTENT. »

    Le gouvernement chinois aimerait que l’économie du pays soit plus autosuffisante, qu’elle repose davantage sur sa demande intérieure plutôt que sur ses exportations, et que ses entreprises puissent développer leurs produits sans avoir recours à la technologie étrangère.

    La guerre commerciale peut se révéler, pour la Chine, une forte incitation à atteindre plus rapidement ces objectifs. Et il est intéressant de se rappeler qu’au XIXe siècle, l’Occident a mené contre ce pays deux guerres pour lui imposer d’ouvrir ses frontières au commerce d’opium. En Chine, où ces défaites sont encore dans les mémoires, il paraît inconcevable de se laisser humilier une nouvelle fois, surtout par Trump, vu comme un raciste incompétent. Néanmoins, Pékin ne serait pas forcément contre un accord raisonnable, mais je doute que Trump soit capable d’accepter les concessions nécessaires.

    Pourquoi les mesures protectionnistes de Donald Trump sont-elles plébiscitées par ses supporteurs ?

    Les économistes sont d’accord sur le fait qu’à l’échelle macroéconomique, le libre-échange, bien géré, est bénéfique. En revanche, à l’échelle des individus il fait, au moins à court terme, des victimes, le plus souvent des travailleurs peu qualifiés. Or, ces dernières décennies, au lieu d’aider les travailleurs des régions frappées par la désindustrialisation, nous leur avons dit : « Ne vous inquiétez pas, vous bénéficierez du libre-échange plus tard. » Certains, qui n’en bénéficient toujours pas, sont logiquement en colère.

    Cela étant, un retour au protectionnisme ne les aiderait pas non plus. La mondialisation a été très disruptive, mais la « démondialisation » le serait plus encore et, paradoxalement, ferait beaucoup de mal à une tranche de la population qui a déjà fortement souffert de la mondialisation.

    Le populisme s’épanouit aux Etats-Unis, mais aussi en Europe. Comment expliquez-vous le rejet des partis traditionnels et des experts ?

    Aux Etats-Unis comme en Europe, un gouffre énorme s’est creusé entre ce qui a été promis par les élites et les résultats obtenus. La mondialisation, censée être bénéfique à tous, a été néfaste à nombre de gens. La libéralisation des marchés financiers, censée créer de la croissance, a abouti à la plus grande crise financière depuis 1929.

    L’euro, censé apporter la prospérité à toute l’Europe, a enrichi l’Allemagne et affecté les pays européens les plus pauvres. Les électeurs se tournent donc vers des partis qui n’ont jamais été au pouvoir. Mais les promesses des formations populistes ne seront pas davantage tenues.

    Je ne vois guère, alors, que deux possibilités : soit de nouvelles forces, véritablement progressistes, émergeront, et mettront en œuvre les mesures nécessaires, soit les gens se tourneront vers des partis de plus en plus fascistes.

    Vous avez écrit que l’euro était « un système conçu pour échouer ». Pourquoi ?

    Les pays qui sont passés à l’euro ont perdu plusieurs leviers d’ajustement, notamment une politique monétaire indépendante qui leur aurait permis de choisir leurs propres taux d’intérêt ou de dévaluer pour rendre leurs exportations plus compétitives.

    Or, au moment du passage à l’euro, il manquait en Europe toutes les institutions nécessaires au bon fonctionnement d’une monnaie unique : il n’y avait pas de garantie commune des dépôts bancaires, pas d’union bancaire, pas de système commun d’assurance-chômage…

    Aux Etats-Unis, nous avons le dollar, mais aussi toutes les institutions qui vont avec. Même s’il y a des progrès, je suis peu confiant dans la capacité des Européens à faire face à une nouvelle crise, car au sein de l’Union européenne, les processus décisionnels sont compliqués et requièrent parfois l’unanimité des pays membres, difficile à obtenir en présence d’intérêts souvent divergents.

  • Aux Etats-Unis, Enrique Morones, le « Bad Hombre » au secours des migrants

    https://abonnes.lemonde.fr/m-actu/article/2018/06/29/aux-etats-unis-enrique-morones-le-bad-hombre-au-secours-des-migrants

    Fondateur de l’ONG Border Angels, le Californien d’origine mexicaine vient en aide aux Latino-Américains qui tentent de passer la frontière.

    Quand Fox News, la chaîne préférée de Donald Trump, veut inviter un Latino défenseur des immigrants, c’est à lui qu’elle fait appel. Avec son côté baroudeur et sa stature athlétique, Enrique Morones, 53 ans, n’a pas peur d’affronter ceux qui agitent des thèses xénophobes. Quand un intervenant, à l’écran, répète que les Mexicains doivent faire la queue comme tout le monde s’ils veulent entrer aux Etats-Unis, au lieu de court-circuiter les processus d’immigration légale, Enrique interrompt sèchement : « C’est un mythe. Il n’y a pas de file d’attente. » Car les visas, ajoute-t-il, sont généralement rejetés, même pour les visites familiales de courte durée. L’homme est charismatique, pressé.

    Lorsque les nativistes, anti-immigration, assènent que les candidats à l’asile, comme les quelque 150 migrants d’Amérique centrale arrivés fin avril à Tijuana, doivent être interdits d’entrée, il s’étrangle. En vertu du droit international, les Etats-Unis « n’ont pas le choix », rappelle-t-il : c’est d’ailleurs la position qu’ont adoptée les services de l’immigration de San Diego, dans le sud de la Californie, où a été créée son ONG, Border Angels (« les anges de la frontière »).

    « J’AI HONTE. AUCUN PAYS AU MONDE NE SÉPARE LES ENFANTS DE LEURS PARENTS. DONALD TRUMP REPRÉSENTE LE PIRE DE L’ESPRIT AMÉRICAIN. » ENRIQUE MORONES, BORDER ANGELS

    Mais il arrive aussi à Enrique de rester sans voix. Comme le 19 juin, quand la chaîne MSNBC lui demande ce qu’il pense des propos de Laura Ingraham, l’égérie des ultraconservateurs qui officie sur Fox News. L’animatrice ironisait sur le tollé provoqué par la nouvelle politique de séparation des familles annoncée un peu plus tôt par l’administration Trump. Pratique qui a conduit à ce que plus de 2 300 enfants soient enlevés à leurs parents et placés dans des centres grillagés. « Des camps de vacances », selon elle. Enrique a eu l’air abattu. « J’ai honte, a-t-il confié. Aucun pays au monde ne sépare les enfants de leurs parents. Donald Trump représente le pire de l’esprit américain. » Le lendemain, le président battait en retraite et annonçait que priorité serait donnée au « maintien de l’unité des familles ».

    Mais, pour Enrique, la lutte continue. Border Angels prépare la manifestation nationale contre la politique de Trump et en soutien aux immigrants, le 30 juin. Devenu le porte-voix des sans-papiers, Enrique Morones ne compte pas que des amis. Il y a quelques semaines, il a exposé au FBI les menaces qu’il reçoit par téléphone. Dans le sud de la Californie, le climat est tendu. Les nationalistes n’apprécient pas sa manière de répéter qu’il se sent avant tout mexicain alors qu’il est né aux Etats-Unis. Ce qu’il fait par provocation, vêtu de son tee-shirt « Bad Hombre », l’insulte proférée par Donald Trump pendant la campagne électorale de 2016, comme si tous les Latinos étaient des narcos en puissance.


    L’ONG Border Angels, fondée par Enrico Morones en 1986, distribue des colis de vivres aux familles.

    Enrique Morones a grandi à San Diego, où son père était employé au service mexicain des pêches, puis directeur de l’agence locale de la compagnie aérienne Aeroméxico. Toute sa famille est retournée au Mexique, où son grand-père était un dirigeant syndical national. Après avoir étudié le commerce, le français et le karaté à l’université, Enrique Morones a officié à la tête du marketing pour le public latino chez les Padres, l’équipe de base-ball de San Diego. Emu par le sort des migrants, entassés dans les canyons une fois la frontière franchie, il a fondé Border Angels en 1986 pour distribuer des colis de vivres aux familles.

    Gardien de la mémoire des migrants

    Après l’opération « Gatekeepers », lancée par Bill Clinton en 1994, quand les premières barrières ont été érigées, et que le nombre de migrants a commencé à grimper, Enrique a étendu la mission de l’association. Les « anges » ont commencé à déposer des bidons d’eau dans le désert à destination des marcheurs pour prévenir la déshydratation. Ils le font toujours, chaque troisième samedi du mois. Avant l’arrivée de Trump à la Maison Blanche, l’association comptait une trentaine de bénévoles en moyenne pour les distributions. Depuis son élection, leur nombre a décuplé, indique-t-il, alors que les tentatives de traversée illégale de la frontière sont au plus bas depuis quarante-six ans quoi que prétende le président.


    L’ONG dépose chaque mois des bidons d’eau dans le désert pour les clandestins.

    Enrique Morones est aussi le gardien de la mémoire des migrants. Quand il arpente le désert, pour inspecter les éventuels progrès du « mur » de Donald Trump, il est muni d’un sac. Il ramasse les morceaux de tapis dont les clandestins se servent pour effacer leurs traces. Des objets exposés dans les locaux de Border Angels, à San Diego. A ses yeux, les histoires individuelles ne doivent pas être oubliées. Lui-même en connaît des dizaines, qu’il récite, de mémoire, jusqu’aux noms des victimes retrouvées sans vie, et dont il fait une liste partielle en annexe de son livre (Border Angels. The Power of One, San Diego University Press, 2015, non traduit). Il n’a jamais oublié Francisco, le migrant effondré au milieu des épineux. L’homme, pourtant à moitié mort de déshydratation, portait un autre voyageur sur son dos. « Il ne le connaissait pas, mais il l’avait pris sur ses épaules pour le sauver », admire Enrique Morones.

    Les histoires ont été collectées dans un texte, écrit par l’acteur Dave Rivas et présenté dans les écoles de San Diego : Letters from the Wall. Les « lettres du mur » commencent toutes par « Cher Enrique » : elles racontent un miracle ou, le plus souvent, un drame sous la plume d’un migrant. La pièce est jouée en anglais et en espagnol par les écoliers : enfants de la frontière en quête de justice pour leurs parents les migrants.

  • Opinion | Democrats Appealing to the Heart? Yes, Please - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/opinion/democratic-party-advertisements.html

    It is a longstanding stereotype that, when it comes to political combat, Democrats aim for the electorate’s head while Republicans aim for its gut. The emotional route tends to be discussed in largely negative terms, with Republicans accused of fearmongering on issues ranging from gay marriage to crime to immigration. There is maybe no more glaring case study of this than the 2016 matchup between Hillary Clinton, with her reputation as an overachieving wonk incapable of connecting with voters, and Donald Trump, with his know-nothing, visceral demagogy. Candidate Trump had few policy ideas and may have known less about how government works than any nominee in the history of the Republic. But he was, and is, a master at connecting — albeit on a dark, primordial level.

    But this trend goes beyond any specific contest. Reams have been written about how Democrats more often operate with an eye toward wooing voters with more rational, data-driven appeals. As Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of the 2005 book “The Political Brain,” has noted, “Democrats typically bombard voters with laundry lists of issues, facts, figures and policy positions, while Republicans offer them emotionally compelling appeals, whether to their values, principles or prejudices.” In that sense, there’s truth to the Republican attack line that Democrats are a bunch of know-it-all elitists who think they are so much smarter than “regular” Americans: Democratic politicians all too often convey the impression that, if only they could make the electorate understand the superiority of their policies, victory would follow.

    Except that most voters don’t vote on policy specifics. Despite fancying themselves rational creatures, people are often more influenced by tribal identification or the personal appeal of a candidate.

    Of course, this political stereotype, like all stereotypes, is an oversimplification — and one with notable exceptions. (Two words: Bill Clinton.) But it does suggest that Democrats could work a bit harder on their emotional savvy.

    #Politique_USA #Communication #Publicité_politique

  • Service national universel : mesdames prenez votre plaisir en main
    Pénétration vaginale : des organisations de jeunesse fustigent un projet « démagogique »

    Bénévole auprès de migrants : mesdames prenez votre plaisir en main
    Pénétration vaginale : une expérience « intense » qui peut devenir dévorante

    Pour Bill Clinton : mesdames prenez votre plaisir en main
    Pénétration vaginale : Vladimir sème la « discorde dans les eendroits qu’il veut affaiblir »

    Procès en Irak de Mélina Boughedir : mesdames prenez votre plaisir en main
    Pénétration vaginale : ses avocats accusent Jean-Yves Le Drian d’"ingérance"

    Président Trump, an II : mesdames prenez votre plaisir en main
    Pénétration vaginale : le pouvoir du pardon

    #de_la_dyslexie_creative

  • THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION’S SHAMEFUL ROLE IN THE VICTORY OF FIDESZ
    http://hungarianspectrum.org/2018/04/16/the-european-commissions-shameful-role-in-the-victory-of-fidesz

    In his blog, Viktor Zsiday, an economist, one of the richest persons in Hungary, portfolio manager of Concorde Asset Management and chairman of PLOTINUS Asset Management, provides yet another explanation for the election victory of Fidesz. He cites the 1992 saying of Bill Clinton: “It’s the economy, stupid!” meaning that people are mostly interested in the state of the economy: whether the economy will grow, they will have a job, their wages will increase, or not. Analyzing the statistical figures for the years 1994-2018, Zsiday clearly demonstrates a positive correlation between the growth of wages and the results of the national elections: in every case, in comparison with the previous elections, the number of votes for the ruling party always increased if the wages grew in the period before the elections, and the number of votes decreased if the wages fell. As a substantial increase of the wages occurred in Hungary in the last few years, the voters favoured Fidesz.

    The Hungarian economy depends to a high extent on EU funds. A study on the topic ordered by the Hungarian government and still accessible on the government’s website states: “International comparisons show that in relation to GDP, it is in Hungary that EU funds had the biggest effect on the economy. At the same time, between 2006 and 2015 GDP increased only by 4.6 percent. From this it can be concluded that the growth perspectives of the Hungarian economy are not reassuring, its growth depends too much on EU funds.”

  • Facebook Turned Our Economy Into a Spying Operation | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/our-economy-based-spying

    George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton sold us on the idea that we no longer needed a manufacturing economy in the U.S. because the internet was coming and it would provide entirely new business models.

    Now we’ve seen what that new economy looks like: spying for sale.

    Facebook takes all the information you give them, which they then use to create profiles to sell advertising to people who want your money or your vote.

    Your internet service provider, with former Verizon lawyer and now head of the FCC Ajit Pai having destroyed net neutrality, will soon begin (if they haven’t already started) tracking every single mouse click, reading every email, and checking out every one of your online purchases to get information they can sell for a profit.

    Your “smart" TV is tracking every show you watch, when and for how long and selling that information to marketers and networks.

    And even your credit card company is now selling your information—what have you bought that you’d rather not have the world know?

    To paraphrase Dwight Eisenhower’s Cross of Iron speech, this is not a real economy at all, in any true sense. It’s a parody of an economy, with a small number of winners and all the rest of us as losers/suckers/“product.”

    While it’s true that Facebook’s malignant business model may well provide a huge opportunity for a competitor to offer a “$3 a month and we don’t track you, spy on you, or sell your data” plan (or even for Facebook to shift to that), it still fails to address the importance of privacy in the context of society and law/rule-making.

    We cannot trust corporations in America with our personal information, as long as that information can make them more and more money. Even your doctor or hospital will now require you sign a form allowing them to sell your information to third parties.

    It’s been decades since we’ve had a conversation in America about privacy. What does the word mean? How should it be applied?

    Just this simple transparency requirement would solve a lot of these problems.

    Business, of course, will scream that they can’t afford compliance with such an onerous requirement. Every time they sell the fact that you love dogs but have a cat allergy and buy anti-allergy medications, they’ll only make a few cents per sale, but it’ll cost them more than that to let you know what part of you and your collective body of information they sold to the allergy medicine manufacturers.

    And that may well be true. It will decrease the profitability of companies like Facebook whose primary business model is spy-and-sell, and will incrementally reduce the revenue to medical groups, credit card companies, and websites/ISPs who make money on the side doing spy-and-sell.

    #Facebook #Médias_sociaux #Vie_privée #Economie_influence

  • American #Carnage
    https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/16/american-carnage

    Americans have a remarkable tolerance for child slaughter, especially the mass murders of the children of others. This emotional indifference manifested itself vividly after the disclosure of the #My_Lai #Massacre, when dozens of Vietnamese infants and children were killed by the men of Charlie Company, their tiny, butchered corpses stacked in ditches. After the trial of Lt. William Calley, more than 70 percent of Americans believed his sentence was too severe. Most objected to any trial at all. In the end, Calley served less than 4 years under house arrest for his role in the execution of more than 500 Vietnamese villagers.

    Twenty-five years later, American attitudes toward child deaths had coarsened even harder. When it was revealed that US sanctions on Iraq had caused the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, icily argued that the deaths were “worth it” to advance US policy in the Middle East. Few Americans remonstrated against this official savagery done in their name.

    Now the guns are being turned on America’s own children and the rivers of blood streaming out of US schools cause barely a ripple in our politics. If the Columbine shooting (1999) was a tragedy, what word do you use to describe the 436th school shooting since then?

    #enfants #etats-unis

  • Aux avant-postes du «  mur  » trumpien

    http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2018/02/10/aux-avant-postes-du-mur-trumpien_5254797_3234.html

    Le président républicain entend bâtir une «  barrière physique  » à la frontière avec le Mexique. Pour l’heure, celle-ci se résume à huit monolithes, symboles de la division entre pro- et anti-immigration.


    Les huit prototypes du « mur » voulu par le président Donald Trump à la frontière entre les Etats-Unis et le Mexique, en octobre 2017.

    Le « grand et beau mur » promis par Donald Trump à ses concitoyens tient pour l’instant en huit panneaux géants installés à la frontière entre les Etats-Unis et le Mexique, au sud de San Diego, en Californie. Huit monolithes de neuf mètres de haut et autant de large, postes avancés de la forteresse America First prônée par le président républicain.

    Du côté américain, il est impossible d’approcher. Les prototypes sont situés sur un terrain appartenant au gouvernement. La Border Police (police des frontières) a suspendu ses visites guidées, dans l’attente de celle de Donald Trump. Le président a promis de se déplacer pour inspecter lui-même les éléments précurseurs de « l’imposante barrière physique » qu’il espère laisser au pays. Mais sa venue, plusieurs fois annoncée, n’est toujours pas confirmée.

    Du côté mexicain, il faut franchir la frontière au poste d’Otay Mesa, à 20 km à l’est de Tijuana, puis prendre le boulevard Garita et la calle 12. On traverse les maquiladoras, ces vastes ateliers d’assemblage menacés par la renégociation de l’Accord de libre-échange nord-américain (Alena) entré en vigueur en 1994. Près de 700 multinationales, dont Sony, Samsung et General Motors, y sont installées. Les pièces arrivent d’Asie, débarquent au port de Los Angeles, traversent la frontière en duty free (sans taxe) et sont montées à Tijuana. Les produits finis sont réexportés vers les Etats-Unis.

    Des projets pilotes

    Depuis vingt ans, les soutiers de la mondialisation viennent s’entasser pour des salaires de misère (deux dollars par heure, soit cinq fois moins qu’aux Etats-Unis) dans ce faubourg poussiéreux de Las Torres, traversé par les semi-remorques rutilants, les poules et les chiens errants. Beaucoup ont fait le mur, et les narcotrafiquants ont construit des tunnels à la faveur de la prolifération des maquiladoras. Depuis 2006, une quinzaine de ces tunnels ont été mis au jour à Tijuana, certains longs de plus de 500 mètres.

    Les huit prototypes dépassent de six mètres la barrière de tôle couleur rouille héritée de Bill Clinton, qui sert de ligne de démarcation. La police des frontières leur a attribué des numéros. A la suite d’un appel d’offres lancé par le département de la sécurité intérieure, six compagnies ont été retenues pour construire des projets pilotes.

    W.G. Yates & Sons, du Mississippi, a érigé un mur de métal de couleur sable pour 458 000 dollars (payés par le contribuable américain), soit environ 375 000 euros ; Fisher Sand & Gravel, de l’Arizona, un pan de béton minimaliste (365 000 dollars). KWR, également de l’Arizona, a ajouté un tube métallique au sommet afin d’empêcher les échelles de s’accrocher. Le numéro 3 se distingue par sa couleur bleue : c’est le projet de l’ELTA, un sous-traitant des forces armées israéliennes.

    Prouesses de l’armée américaine

    De la fenêtre sans vitre de son abri, à l’ombre d’un demi-palmier, Alexis Franco Santana, 22 ans, a vue sur le prototype numéro 6, celui est surmonté d’un grillage de barbelés. Devant la masure s’empilent les déchets de plastique livrés par les camionnettes de recyclage. Le jeune homme est chargé du triage, moyennant 50 dollars par semaine. Casquette retournée, short extra-large de basketteur, il a tout d’un jeune Américain, jusqu’à l’accent, mais il se plaint de son peu de vocabulaire.

    Les prototypes n’ont pas eu raison de sa bonne humeur. « C’est comme un jeu, s’esclaffe-t-il. On dirait que Trump est allé à Toys’R’Us et qu’il s’est acheté des Lego. » Pour cinq dollars, le jeune homme loue aux touristes une échelle que lui a laissée un visiteur de passage. Au cas où Donald Trump confirmerait son arrivée, une télévision américaine a pris une option sur le gruyère de planches qui lui sert de toit.

    Le jeune Mexicain a assisté tout le mois de janvier aux prouesses de l’armée américaine. Pendant trois semaines, des éléments des forces spéciales venus de Floride et les unités paramilitaires de la police des frontières ont pris d’assaut les prototypes hauts de trois étages, à coups de « pioche », de « marteau-piqueur », de « burin », de « cric de voiture » et de « chalumeau », selon la liste dressée par la Border Police. Un seul des militaires est parvenu à se hisser au sommet. Fin janvier, les Américains ont été informés que les prototypes avaient passé avec succès le test de résistance aux envahisseurs. Alexis hausse les épaules. « Il faut qu’on traverse de toute façon. Que ça soit avec des cordes ou des tunnels. Pour nous, c’est une nécessité. »

    Craintes de manifestations et d’incidents

    Un mirador a dû être construit pour surveiller les prototypes. Coût pour le comté de San Diego : près d’un million de dollars, ce qui fait grimacer jusqu’aux républicains. Les autorités locales craignaient les manifestations et les incidents. Du côté de l’extrême droite, un groupe se réclamant de « l’identité européenne » est venu faire des selfies. Et le cercle des bordertown patriots y a relancé son bon vieux slogan de campagne : « Build the wall ! » (« construisez le mur ! »). « C’est dissuasif, explique Tom, un militant de ce groupe anti-immigration, qui préfère conserver l’anonymat. On sait bien que ça ne va pas totalement arrêter les clandestins. » Il garde toute confiance en Trump. « En un an, il a déjà réussi à construire les prototypes. Il suffit que chaque foyer paie 200 dollars et, en huit ans, le mur pourra être fini. » Sinon, prévoit-il, « les Etats-Unis ne seront plus les Etats-Unis ».

    Les défenseurs des immigrants, eux, ne se sont pas dérangés. « Pour Trump, c’est un outil de propagande. Nous n’avons pas de temps à perdre à aller crier devant ces prototypes », déclare Christian Ramirez, de l’ONG Alliance San Diego. Ce militant a été arrêté le 11 décembre à Washington, au cours d’un sit-in au Congrès. « Notre combat, ce n’est pas le mur, souligne-t-il. C’est la régularisation des “Dreamers” » (les jeunes amenés aux Etats-Unis par leurs parents avant l’âge de 16 ans). Donald Trump a mis leur sort dans la balance dans son épreuve de force avec les démocrates : 800 000 « Dreamers » – il a même poussé jusqu’à 1,6 million de bénéficiaires –, contre 25 milliards de dollars pour le mur. Les responsables latinos sont opposés à un tel marchandage. Pas question que les « Dreamers » soient « utilisés comme monnaie d’échange pour faire adopter des mesures anti-immigrants », s’insurge Christian Ramirez.

    Le « mur » a une longue histoire mais, jusqu’ici, il n’a pas survécu aux aléas politiques. En 2006, grâce à la loi votée au Congrès – y compris par Barack Obama et Hillary Clinton –, George W. Bush a lancé les travaux. Quand Barack Obama a été élu à la Maison Blanche, ils ont été suspendus, « hormis quelques routes et travaux de consolidation ici ou là », précise M. Ramirez. Janet Napolitano, ex-secrétaire à la sécurité intérieure et ancienne gouverneure de l’Arizona, a remplacé le projet de béton par un « mur électronique » : des capteurs, des drones et des patrouilles renforcées. Aujourd’hui, après plus de deux milliards d’investissement, 560 km de parois empêchent le passage des piétons et 480 km d’obstacles antivéhicule, celui des voitures. Soit 1 040 km de frontière marqués par une barrière, sur un parcours total de 3 218 km entre les deux pays.

    « Plus aucun recours légal »

    Jusqu’à présent, les ONG ont réussi à retarder la construction du mur, en exploitant les dispositions réglementaires : l’obligation de procéder à des études d’impact sur l’environnement et les espèces menacées, par exemple, mais aussi la consultation des tribus indiennes ou celle des ranchers qui, au Texas, ont porté plainte contre le gouvernement qui les a expropriés, en l’accusant de minorer leurs indemnités. Cette fois, elles redoutent que Trump ne passe outre, comme une loi de 2005 – validée par la Cour suprême – l’y autorise si la sécurité nationale est en jeu.

    Ses prédécesseurs n’avaient pas abusé des dérogations (cinq tout de même pour l’administration Bush). Mais le 45e président des Etats-Unis n’a pas l’intention de s’embarrasser de délicatesses. Fin janvier, les premières dérogations ont été publiées. Elles concernent un tronçon de 20 km près de Santa Teresa, dans le désert de Chihuahua, au Nouveau-Mexique. Les bulldozers ne sont pas loin. « Nous n’avons plus aucun recours légal. Nous sommes à la merci de l’administration Trump », déplore Christian Ramirez, qui est spécialiste des droits humains dans les communautés frontalières.

    Une fois les projets sélectionnés, les entreprises devront soumettre un nouvel appel d’offres. Lequel devra être suivi d’une période de commentaires publics. Les prototypes n’ont pas fini d’attirer la curiosité et la créativité. Les artistes de la Light Brigade de San Diego sont venus projeter une échelle lumineuse sur les monolithes, comme pour souligner l’illusion du mur tant que les déséquilibres économiques n’auront pas été corrigés. A l’instigation du plasticien helvéto-islandais Christoph Büchel, un collectif a aussi lancé une pétition pour faire des huit prototypes un « monument national ». Une « sorte de Stonehenge [site mégalithique de Grande-Bretagne] », avance Michael Diers, historien de l’art versé dans l’iconographie politique et porte-parole de l’initiative. Un monument qui témoignerait pour la postérité de la tentation de repli de l’Amérique au temps de Donald Trump.

  • Whoa, Oprah in 2020 ? | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/oprahs-golden-globes-speech-stokes-talk-presidential-bid-0

    Un autre point de vue (plutôt positif) sur la candidature d’Oprah Winfrey... si elle s’accorde avec Bernie Sanders et Elizabeth Warren. Le spectacle commence... encore trois ans !

    Winfrey’s challenge is to prove she can be an effective candidate, as opposed to an effortless talk show host. That means clearly articulating progressive public policy goals in the way that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both excelled at. (The fact that Clinton and Obama did not always govern as progressives should be a reminder that Winfrey, if elected, might not be a progressive president either.)

    Perfecting her personal appeal is not the challenge for Winfrey. Honing her political message is. What she needs to do, if she wants to be taken seriously as a would-be president, is to clarify her policy agenda.

    The most common objection I heard from Twitter is that Winfrey is a billionaire. Liberal voters will want to know if she pledges allegiance to the billionaires’ party known as Wall Street. Independent voters are going to want to know if she is serious. Men who didn’t go to college will want to know if she cares about their paychecks. And activists are going to want to know if she’s tough enough to withstand the coming attacks from Breitbart and Fox News.

    Why is she running? What does she want to accomplish? These are the basics of What It Takes to run for president. And American political history is littered with seemingly strong candidates—Ted Kennedy in 1980, Mitt Romney in 2012—who fizzled because they lacked credible answers to those questions.

    If Winfrey can answer those two questions to the satisfaction of the average Bernie Sanders voter, she’ll be the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

    #Politique #USA #Spectacle

  • Jerusalem A poisoned gift - Haaretz Editorial -

    Violating the status quo in Jerusalem, like expanding the settlement enterprise, is moving Israel further from the only possible solution, the two-state solution

    Haaretz Editorial Dec 08, 2017
    read more: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/1.827619

    U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital could have been joyful news for Israel. But it’s no coincidence that Israel is the only country in the world whose capital hasn’t been recognized by the international community. Jerusalem’s status remains a core issue in the negotiations for a final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
    In this sense, disrupting the status quo in the world’s most explosive city is a poisoned gift to the Israeli and Arab peace camp. It’s hard to understand how such a move fits with Trump’s declarations about his desire to bring about peace in the region, a feat his predecessors in the White House failed to achieve.
    Trump boasted that he didn’t follow in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who did not change U.S. policy toward Jerusalem. But previous administrations’ refusal to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital did not stem from hostility to Israel or excessive sympathy for the Muslims. These administrations heeded the advice of the National Security Council and Israeli defense officials, who warned that a policy change regarding Jerusalem would sabotage the peace process.
    The decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital plays into the hands of radical Arab groups, which don’t miss an opportunity to portray the two-state solution as deception, and portray the leaders of Egypt and Jordan, the only Arab states that recognize Israel, as collaborators with the enemies of Islam.

  • La fête au marais | Le Vilain Petit Canard
    https://levilainpetitcanard.be/articles/ailleurs/la-fete-au-marais_1809684270

    Ce que l’Amérique pourrait vouloir savoir maintenant est : comment se fait-il que Hillary Clinton n’ait aucun problème juridique ? Pourquoi les enquêteurs du DOJ n’examinent-ils pas les dossiers financiers de la Fondation Clinton ? Vous penseriez que quelqu’un voudrait savoir comment plus de 120 millions de dollars de « dons de charité » russes ont atterri sur ses registres au moment où la secrétaire d’État a approuvé l’affaire Uranium One, sans compter le paiement de 500 000 dollars à Bill Clinton pour avoir tenu un discours à la même époque, ce qui ressemble furieusement à un pot de vin.

  • 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

    https://michelduchaine.com

  • Every US President Makes Unilateral Nuclear Threats. It’s an American Tradition | Black Agenda Report
    https://www.blackagendareport.com/every-us-president-makes-unilateral-nuclear-threats-its-american-

    In 1946 and 1948 President Harry Truman threatened the Soviets over Iran and Berlin, respectively, and the Chinese in 1950 and 51.

    President Eisenhower also threatened the Chinese over Korea in 1953, and again in 1956 over Quemoy and Matsu. He offered the French nukes to use against the Vietnamese at Dienbienphu in 1954.

    President Kennedy threatened a nuclear strike at the Soviets over Berlin, and sent nuclear armed missiles to Turkey on the Russian border in 1961. Though these were later wisely withdrawn after the nuclear standoff of the Cuban missile crisis, the US has consistently based its nukes on its fleets and bases in the Pacific, in Europe and Asia, and for decades in South Korea.

    Presidents Johnson and Nixon menaced North Korea, Vietnam and the Soviet Union with air and seaborne nukes, and President Gerald Ford ordered nuclear armed bombers from Guam to loiter for an extended time off the coast of North Korea. Jimmy Carter issued the Carter Doctrine, reaffirmed by Ronald Reagan which committed the US to a nuclear response if its vital interests in the Middle East were every threatened. Ronald Reagan terrified the world, though he did briefly consider a lasting arms treaty with the USSR.

    Bush 1, Bush 2 and Bill Clinton all menaced North Korea and Iraq, and Obama declared “all options on the table” against Iran.

    The AFSC list does not include vital US assistance in developing nuclear weapons technology given to apartheid South Africa which later relinquished its nukes, and apartheid Israel, which currently has missiles aimed at every Arab capital within a thousand miles, and at Iran.

    So while Donald Trump’s “fire and destruction” bombast IS criminal and detestable, it’s not new. It’s merely the latest installment in a long running crime wave by the planet’s number one nuclear armed felon, the United States of America.

    #Etats-Unis #traditions

  • Emmanuel Macron Is Not Your Friend
    https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/emmanuel-macron-france-unions-workers-economics-le-pen

    The latest recruit to this line-up of supposedly woke real-world Superfriends is French leader Emmanuel Macron, who in May beat Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right (though, she will insist, no longer antisemitic) National Front, in the presidential election. Since then, Macron has been the object of liberal admiration the world over, with pundits and observers swooning at his courage for standing up to Trump and Vladimir Putin, as well rejecting Le Pen–style xenophobia.

    Like Trudeau and Obama, Macron is young, handsome, and charismatic. And, as with Clinton (and particularly Trudeau), he has embraced symbolic shows of social liberalism while explicitly positioning himself as a roadblock against the far right. All of this has helped obscure the more disconcerting elements of his beliefs, particularly his staunch support for economic reforms that would shift France toward a more free-market model.

    In this sense, we can think of Macron as an updated, French version of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, with a dollop of the newer generation of triangulators. He’s consciously cast himself as the outsider who will break from politics as usual in defense of decency and democracy — and he’s done it all in the service of implementing a right-wing economic agenda.

    #Bam

    • À force de répéter à longueur de colonnes que tout est nouveau dans notre paysage politique, les commentateurs avaient fini par le croire. Ils en avaient perdu de vue l’essentiel. C’est-à-dire, précisément, ce qui n’a pas changé. Car, Macron ou pas Macron, la politique est toujours affaire de répartition des richesses et de conflictualité sociale. On ne peut pas raconter longtemps des histoires aux gens que l’on appauvrit. Une habile communication avait fait tourner la tête de beaucoup d’habitués des plateaux de télévision. Le magicien de l’Élysée avait réussi, nous disait-on, à dépasser le clivage gauche-droite. Il devait beaucoup, il est vrai, au ralliement ventre à terre des « réputés » de gauche, issus de l’ancienne majorité.

      Mais, il n’aura pas fallu trois mois pour que l’illusion se dissipe. Et voilà : Emmanuel Macron est banalement de droite. La belle découverte ! L’affaire de la diminution des aides au logement a dégrisé les esprits. Notre président « ni de droite ni de gauche » est allé prendre dans la poche de nos concitoyens qui vivent sous le seuil de pauvreté, tandis qu’il exonère de l’impôt sur la fortune les actionnaires et les rentiers de la finance. Aucun de ses prédécesseurs ne s’était à ce point caricaturé. D’autant que, quelques jours auparavant, il avait annoncé le gel du point d’indice des fonctionnaires et la hausse de la CSG. Résultat : une chute dans les sondages plus rapide que pour son prédécesseur dans le même laps de temps. Cette « hollandisation » précoce est un mauvais présage. D’autant qu’il a devant lui la réforme du code du travail, grande affaire de la rentrée (...)

      https://www.politis.fr/articles/2017/07/fin-dune-illusion-37419

  • George Brandis’s salvo in cryptowars could blow a hole in architecture of the internet
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/12/george-brandiss-salvo-in-cryptowars-could-blow-a-hole-in-architecture-o

    Attorney general isn’t just proposing a backdoor into encrypted communications – it’s a giant sinkhole your backdoor fell into In 1993 the US president Bill Clinton’s administration introduced the “Clipper chip” into America’s digital and consumer electronics. It was one of the earliest attempts to enforce a backdoor into digital products, and the first in what is known as the cryptowars, when the US government fought to control and regulate strong encryption. The Clipper chip was a catastrophic (...)

    #backdoor #malware #surveillance #Five_Eyes #web #cryptage

  • Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington | Why the Trump Administration Should Reconsider Oman

    http://www.agsiw.org/why-the-trump-administration-should-reconsider-oman

    by Sigurd Neubauer and Yoel Guzansky
    Following his historic address to the U.S.-Arab-Islamic Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, U.S. President Donald J. Trump held bilateral talks with every Gulf Cooperation Council leader except for Oman’s deputy prime minister, Sayyid Fahd al-Said, who had his meeting cancelled at the last minute with no public explanation. Oman’s unique foreign policy record – which ranges from facilitating the early U.S.-Iranian contact that eventually led to the nuclear agreement, to its active contribution to the Middle East peace process, to more recently supporting the United Nations-sponsored Yemen peace negotiations – was also ignored altogether during the president’s speech, even though he thanked each of the other GCC countries for their respective commitments to fighting extremism and regional terrorist groups.

    In fact, it may be that the very nature of Oman’s engagement in efforts to defuse regional conflicts has prompted the Trump administration to view it warily, given Washington’s efforts to restore close relations with Saudi Arabia. In this context, Oman’s established links to both Tehran and the political leadership of Yemen’s Houthi insurgents – clearly valued by the administration of former President Barack Obama – may be seen now as reasons to keep Oman at arm’s length. Further evidence that the U.S.-Omani relationship may be heading toward uncertainty came as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson cancelled his meeting in Riyadh with his Omani counterpart, Yusuf bin Alawi. This, coupled with the Trump administration’s Budget Blueprint for fiscal year 2018 – which suggests a 35 percent cut in annual military/security assistance to Oman, down from $5.4 million to $3.5 million – further suggests that Washington is revising its approach toward Muscat.

    The Sultanate of Oman has been a U.S. strategic ally for nearly two centuries, and was the second Arab country, after Morocco, to establish diplomatic relations with Washington, in 1841. Moreover, Oman is only one of two GCC countries to enjoy a free trade agreement with the United States.

    Building on these historic ties, Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman, the Arab world’s longest-serving monarch, has skillfully managed throughout his 44-year tenure to serve as a regional intermediary to help defuse tensions between Washington and Tehran, and has at the same time actively contributed to Israeli-Arab dialogue by hosting the Middle East Desalination Research Center (MEDRC), a Muscat-based organization dedicated to sharing Israeli expertise on desalination technologies and clean fresh water supply.

    Given that Trump has pledged to reset U.S.-GCC relations and accelerate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as part of an apparent strategic effort to counter Tehran’s “malign” regional influence, it is also surprising that Qaboos is the only GCC leader that Trump has yet to call, especially considering Oman is the only GCC country to enjoy pragmatic relationships with Iran and Israel.

    In recent years, Oman used its channels to Tehran – and to the Houthis in Yemen – to gain the release of a half dozen U.S. citizens who had been detained, efforts that earned Oman public expressions of thanks from Obama.

    In addition, “Oman recognizes that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an irritant between the U.S. and the Arab world, but – consistent with Qaboos’ philosophy of peaceful coexistence and conflict resolution – he wanted to play a constructive role,” said Richard Schmierer, former U.S. ambassador to Oman, adding that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not a top issue on the U.S.-Omani bilateral agenda during his tenure in Muscat.

    Nonetheless, in 2010 U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton hailed MEDRC as “a model for Middle East peace making.” A year later, it was revealed that Obama personally called Qaboos to ask him to lead Arab goodwill gestures toward Israel in exchange for a settlement freeze moratorium.

    A Long History of Support for Mideast Peace

    Following the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Oman was the only GCC member to consistently engage with Israel through a number of informal diplomatic initiatives. Oman was also one of only three Arab League members not to boycott Egypt after its peace treaty with Israel while actively supporting Jordanian-Israeli peace talks in the ensuing years.

    Qaboos demonstrated his commitment to reaching a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace treaty by inviting Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to visit him in Muscat in 1994. Rabin’s visit came only months after Israel and Jordan signed a comprehensive peace treaty. Although Rabin’s landmark visit was initially conducted in secrecy, it was announced publicly upon his return to Israel.

    Though falling short of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic Knesset address in 1977 and the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty of 1994, Qaboos granted Rabin and the Israeli leadership what it had strived for since the inception of the Jewish state in 1948: recognition and legitimacy. Moreover, Qaboos’ invitation arguably signaled publicly to Rabin, the Israeli public, and the Arab world at large a willingness to distance Oman from the Saudi position by granting Israel de facto recognition.

    Following the assassination of Rabin, Qaboos once again displayed his commitment to the peace process by dispatching Oman’s foreign minister to attend Rabin’s funeral. In a subsequent interview with Israeli media, Alawi said, while being hosted by acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres, “Oman will soon have diplomatic relations with Israel, Oman was never in a state of war with Israel so there is no need for a peace agreement.”

    The brief relationship between Qaboos, Rabin, and Peres has had concrete and positive outcomes: Oman has maintained a diplomatic channel with Israel since 1996 by hosting MEDRC. MEDRC is the only surviving organization of five regional initiatives included in the Oslo Accords as part of an effort to accelerate the peace process. Through it, participants from Gaza, Jordan, and the West Bank have attended, with Israeli counterparts, a number of courses on desalination and wastewater management in Tel Aviv.

    On the surface, Oman’s quiet diplomatic style of doing business appears to be by design: By maintaining a policy of neutrality and noninterference, Oman seeks to preserve its independence and stability by closely aligning with Britain and the United States while balancing relations with its powerful neighbors, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Israeli-Palestinian angle, however, does not fit into Oman’s immediate strategic concerns; unlike Iran, with whom it shares the Strait of Hormuz, Israel is a distant power.

    Given Trump’s quest to forge a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement, Oman could potentially again play a pivotal role through its MEDRC networks. A White House invitation to Oman’s newly-appointed deputy prime minister for international cooperation, Sayyid Assad bin Tariq al-Said, might provide an opportunity to explore this potential with the man who appears to be in line to become Qaboos’ eventual successor. And, unlikely as it would seem at the moment given Trump’s strident anti-Iran rhetoric, Oman could also reprise its role as a conduit for quiet messaging between Tehran and Washington on regional security issues as part of an effort to mitigate the risk of conflict.

    While the last U.S. president to visit Oman was Bill Clinton in 2000, the administration of George W. Bush dispatched vice president Dick Cheney to Muscat in 2002, 2005, and 2006 to discuss Iran and other regional issues. More recently, the Obama administration and its secretary of state, John Kerry, in particular, came to rely on Muscat on a host of regional initiatives ranging from Iran, Syria, and Yemen. In fact, Kerry grew so appreciative of Oman’s effective diplomacy that he attended Oman’s national day celebration in 2016, a most unusual public gesture for a secretary of state. Whether Oman regains this coveted position in the eyes of the current administration remains to be seen, although its unique contributions in support of efforts to resolve some of the Middle East’s most intractable problems would at the very least argue for open channels of communication.

    Sigurd Neubauer is a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. Yoel Guzansky is a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, a National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a 2016–17 Israel Institute postdoctoral fellow.