Friday, March 30, 2018

Editorial: Expect the Worst

Nothing good can come of the appointment of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and John Bolton as President Trump’s national security adviser. Outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster didn’t accomplish much in those roles, but they kept Trump from starting a new war, so that first year might count as the golden era of the Trump Reign.

Now, in Pompeo and Bolton, Trump has foreign policy soulmates who have been pushing for the US to flex its military might to advance national interests. They are a lot less likely to try to talk Trump out of attacking Iran or North Korea. Bolton is a big proponent of pre-emptive war, not excluding nuclear war. In 2009, he said “unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.” In February he wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal arguing that it was “perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.”

We had no confidence in Trump when he announced in early March that he will meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to discuss denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. Ordinarily, we would say engagement of an adversary in face-to-face talks is a good thing, especially when the alternative is escalating name-calling that might lead to a nuclear exchange. But, we ask ourselves, what could go wrong? With Trump, plenty. And Pompeo and Bolton replacing Tillerson and McMaster only makes the prospects worse.

South Korea President Moon Jae-in made overtures toward more normal relations with the North — and to cool off the rhetoric between Kim and Trump. A South Korean emissary, who had met with Kim in North Korea, relayed Kim’s proposal to suspend nuclear and missile testing while talks are ongoing, and Trump surprised his advisers by accepting.

Tillerson was apparently blindsided. “We’re a long way from negotiations. We just need to be very clear-eyed and realistic about it,” he said March 8, just a few hours before the news broke. It wasn’t Tillerson’s last surprise.

Trump is supposed to meet with Kim in May, but the State Department is understaffed and Trump appears to be in no hurray to fill the glaring vacancies. He doesn’t have an ambassador to South Korea, and the State Department’s point person on North Korean issues just retired and hasn’t been replaced. But Trump does not appear inclined to listen to advice when it is offered anyway.

Trump fancies himself a dealmaker, but Kim comes from a family that has been conning Americans since 1994, when his grandfather agreed to stop nuclear weaponization in exchange for energy assistance. Kim is unlikely to give up his nuclear program — he saw what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi after they gave up their nuclear programs — nor is he likely to submit to international inspectors.

Robert Kuttner wrote, “The best we might hope for would be a series of ‘trust-building’ baby steps: a moratorium on the name-calling; a suspension of tests; and more moves toward rapprochement between South and North, with Washington’s blessing. This might give both Trump and Kim some favorable publicity, but if it did nothing to slow the development of stronger bombs and longer-range missiles, the advantage would be Kim’s.”

I don’t see much trust building under Trump with Bolton at his ear and Pompeo representing our diplomatic efforts. Is Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis our last, best hope for a peacemaker?

Adding to the complications, Trump apparently does not value China’s cooperation in dealing with North Korea, as he has chosen to initiate a trade war with China a few weeks before the engagement with North Korea.

Perhaps the best case for Trump is if he can convince Kim to authorize a Trump hotel in Pyongyang. Maybe that will divert the war Trump intended to bring up his approval rates at home.

But if Trump is spoiling for a military adventure, the more likely target is Iran. Unlike North Korea, Iran has neither a nuclear weapon nor a US ally within easy range of Iranian artillery. And Iran has done nothing to provoke an attack from the US. Instead, UN nuclear inspectors have certified Iran is compliant with the deal it reached with six world powers, including the US, in 2015 to scale back its uranium enrichment with its promise not to pursue nuclear weapons. In return, international sanctions were lifted, allowing Iran to sell its oil and gas worldwide, which has contributed to lower fuel prices. Trump persists in saying, “This is the worst deal. We got nothing.” He may have been referring to American oil companies.

Pompeo has said Trump was right in calling the deal a “disaster.”

Shortly before Trump’s election, Bolton spoke to a right-wing group in California about the spread of “radical Islam” and its threat to the West, and called the 2015 nuclear deal “the worst act of appeasement in American history,” Ted Regencia reported at Al Jazeera.

“The government in Tehran is left with an essentially unimpeded path towards nuclear weapons,” Bolton said, ignoring multiple findings by UN nuclear inspectors that contradict his claim.

Without offering evidence, Bolton told the crowd that Iranian nuclear weapons could be delivered through ballistic missiles, or smuggled by “terrorists” into the US, and detonated “at a time most suitable to them.”

On Jan. 12, Trump announced he was waiving US sanctions for the “last time,” and said if his demands are not met within 120 days, the US will withdraw from the deal. The deadline is May 12.

Iranian officials insist that Tehran will never pursue nuclear weapons despite the expiration of some provisions of the pact, but Iran also rejects Trump’s demands for more inspections of its military sites and an end to its ballistic missile program.

At the CIA, Pompeo backed Trump’s decision to decertify the deal, and has tried to link Iran to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), failing to mention that Iran-backed forces fought against ISIL in Iraq and Syria, Regencia noted.

In 2017, Bolton, who had been blamed for pushing defective intelligence that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, renewed his call for “regime change” in Iran, a country of 80 million people, by 2019. On March 25, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported that he tried to convince Israel to bomb Iran when he was US ambassador to the UN during George W Bush’s administration.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) has questioned if Bolton can obtain a full security clearance after Bolton’s “contacts with foreign governments,” notably in Russia, pointing to a 2013 video for a Russian gun rights group in which Bolton appeared. Bolton also might be questioned about work on behalf of Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group that was on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations for having killed American citizens before Bolton and others successfully lobbied to have the designation removed in 2012, Jason Rezalan reported in the Washington Post March 24.

Rezalan, who was the Post’s Tehran correspondent from 2012 to 2016, including 544 days imprisoned by Iranian authorities, concluded, “The MEK is the type of fringe group that sets up camp across the street from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and hands out fliers filled with unsubstantiated claims. This is America — we let crazy people talk. That’s their right, and I would never suggest that they be prohibited from doing that. But giving the MEK a voice in the White House is a terrible idea.

“In John Bolton they have someone who will do it for them.”

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2018

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Selections from the April 15, 2018 issue

COVER/Robert Borosage
Opening a new way for Democrats to run and win


EDITORIAL
Expect the worst from Pompeo and Bolton


LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
A conservative’s guide to the real Pope Francis


RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen  
With pesticides, if you catch your neighbor’s drift, you’re in trouble

DISPATCHES
New report shows midterms rigged for Republicans;
Fair Elections issue on Ohio ballot;
NRA mocks gun violence survivors;
What’s in the spending bill?
Spending bill saves border wildlife refuge;
Congress funds EPA, clean energy programs Trump planned to slash;
Puerto Rico passes six months without full power;
Trump has trouble finding and keeping lawyers;

MSNBC silent in run-up to vote to end Yemen war ...

ART CULLEN
Kander wants to talk to rural Iowa


JILL RICHARDSON
To believe in science, you have to understand how it’s done


JOHN YOUNG
This week on: ‘(US) House Makeover’


BOB BURNETT
Forecasting midterm elections in Midwest


LEO GERARD
Labor organizes a congressional win


STEPHANIE SAVELL 
15 years after the Iraq invasion, what are the costs? 


WENONAH HAUTER
Bottled water, brought to you by fracking


ROGER BYBEE
The unhinged and ignorant vs. clueless and complacent on tariffs

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas 
A better target: The NRA


SAM URETSKY
US health declines toward third-world status


WAYNE O’LEARY
The banksters are back


JOHN BUELL
Sexual exploitation and corporate power


KENT PATERSON
Will an ‘inconvenient’ Lopez Obrador be Mexico’s next president?


GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet 
Drug war tougher than smart


ROB PATTERSON
Dylan’s Christian excursion revisited in ‘Bootleg Series’


BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky 
Resisting oppression


MOVIES/Ed Rampell
Tim Robbins tackles the refugee crisis, racism, and modern life


SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson 
We’re lucky to have him


and more ...

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Trump’s policies all feed the fear that many white Americans have of anyone or anything different from their lifestyle and beliefs


By Marc Jampole

Something quite wonderful happened to my wife and me the other day during our annual public humiliation, which is how we refer to our one trip a year to buy sweet kosher wine—always for our Seder. We entered the neighborhood liquor store near Hunter College and sheepishly asked a group of employees gathered in front, “Where’s the sweet kosher wine?” I added, as if telling a joke, “You know, once a year…” to which the store manager answered with a lilting empathy that seemed to come from years of experience, “I know, once a year!” We were sharing a moment.
Except the manager was most certainly a sub-continental or Persian, and thus probably Muslim or Hindu and not Jewish.
In all, six ethnic groups were involved in this public ritual that always proceeds our private religious-cultural celebration: A secular Syrian Jew and his Quaker wife of German-Dutch-English descent are served first by a South or Central Asian who asks his Latino employee to show us where to look—he said, “Jose, show them.” The cashier is a very friendly African-American woman.
Syrian Jew, WASP, Asian, Latino, Black—that’s five cultures. Six, when you count the man to whom the store manager was talking the entire time we were in the store—a jovial heavyset, tow-haired guy with an Eastern European accent.
Diversity and respect for everyone. It’s what I love about New York City, and what I love about America.
And it’s what Trump supporters fear.
Core Trump supporters fear the other—other cultures, other skin colors, other religions, other sexual predilections, other nationalities. They fear being invaded or physically harmed. They fear losing their traditions. They harbor a completely irrational fear of being displaced, after centuries of enjoying preferential treatment.
Virtually all the Trump positions that appeal to his white, mostly rural or working class, base begin with a fear of the other: The policy to build a wall, shut down immigration and deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible. The policies to get tough on crime and gut poverty programs, which appeal to the many white Americans who mistakenly believe that the majority of both criminals and the poor are people of color. The defense of Christmas, which isn’t so much a defense against encroachments on religious celebration as an attempt to assert the prerogatives of one religion as dominant and therefore normal. The anti-LGBTQ policies such as Trump’s several attempts to kick transgendered people out of the armed forces. The gun policies, as surveys show that those hoarding guns and spewing out NRA rhetoric tend to be whites who are afraid of African-Americans. Even Trump’s “America first” foreign policy reflects a fear of the other.
If it’s different from the normal defined by Walt Disney in the 1950’s, then Trump’s America hates it.
But it’s differences that I love in my America, an America I share with more than half the population, congregating primarily in big cities and their immediate suburbs along the coasts and major rivers and transit points.
In our America, we don’t fear the other, we embrace all others, as we’re likely an “other” ourselves. We enjoy our freedom to express our culture in our homes, our community centers and yes, sometimes in the streets. We love to see others express their cultures. We love to dabble sometimes in the culture of others—Native American, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, Ethiopian, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Persian, Indonesian and a myriad of other cuisines, parades, neighborhoods, music festivals and exhibits. We are not threatened by diversity. Diversity makes our surroundings more interesting and provocative. Being part of a big-tent America also protects us—or is supposed to protect us—from discrimination.
Those who fear the other have always been around to impede what Martin Luther King called the long arc of our history towards justice for all. Fear of the other has a long tradition in American culture and politics. It served as a justification for both slavery and how we treated freed African-American slaves. Fear of the other animated the nativist political movements of the 19th centuries and our restrictive immigration policies between the World Wars. It guided our housing, mass transit, urban renewal and land development policies and fueled the flight to the suburbs after World War II.
Over the past twenty years, the country seems to be polarizing around these two visions of American more than ever before. With the Republican and Democratic Parties taking turns as the dominant political force, our national politics must appear bipolar to the outside world, as we violently shift between policies that stultify diversity with those that encourage it.
Sadly, the GOP even before Trump has for years exploited the irrational fear of the other to gain support for an economic agenda that has inflicted severe harm on the very constituency most susceptible to their fear-mongering—less educated, rural and working class whites.
The ironic thing about this never-ending Kulturkampf is that Trump’s Americans—the evangelicals, the cultural conservatives, the gun lovers and even the white supremacists can live their lives as exactly as they want in the privacy of their own homes, community centers and hunting lodges in an America based on diversity, as long as they don’t insist on foisting their beliefs, cultural artifacts and definitions of normalcy on others. You do your thing and let me do mine. And we’ll keep public places and institutions secular and open to all.
I’m reminded of a heated discussion about what constitutes America that I had with my much younger step brother when he was in his angry white guy phase decades ago. He was blasting away against anti-American values and the threat of Blacks and foreigners, all the while eating a taco from a fast food emporium. When I pointed out that he was eating Mexican food, my then callow step brother insisted with some vehemence, “No, I’m not. Tacos are American.”
You’ll get no argument here.

Monday, March 26, 2018

Students marching for stiffer gun control should get “woke” to the fact that their struggle is related to #MeToo, BlackLivesMatter & the pro-immigration movement


By Marc Jampole

The students of America haven’t been so united since the protests against the War in Viet Nam that followed the killing of students at Kent State University and Jackson State College (now University) in 1970.
Like most sane Americans and surely all of the almost 70% of us who want to ban all private ownership of assault weapons, I applaud the many high school and college students who marched across the country over the weekend, and especially the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School students who cast aside their shock and sorrow to get the ball rolling.
But in the exuberance of the moment, I can’t help but notice one interesting and perhaps troubling similarity about the Viet Nam War protests in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In both cases, large waves of students, most of whom have never engaged in protests on other issues, were united to protect themselves from getting senselessly killed.
No war since Viet Nam has directly threatened the lives of large numbers of American youths simply because in no post-1960’s war has the U.S. military forced people to serve. The ending of the draft in January of 1973 effectively ended all mass student protest against the Viet Nam War—and any sustained large-scale sustained movement to oppose any subsequent war. While there were some major marches before the First Iraq War, for example, as soon as the troops landed virtually all opposition disintegrated. Certainly in no antiwar protest or movement since Viet Nam has the Youth of America (to borrow Casey Stengel’s phrasing) played a predominant role.
Contemporary high school and college students literally have more to fear from on-campus gun violence than dying in war. It makes sense they would rise up to oppose our irresponsible and anti-social current gun laws.
But again, like the Viet Nam War, the primary motivation to protest is self-interest and not commitment to a political, social or economic ideal or policy.
I’m not chiding the kids. I love them. They’re smart, educated and articulate. In their leadership and organizational efforts, they seem to take American diversity and equality as givens. But all they’ve proven so far is that they can mobilize when their own lives are in danger, which ends up being the only thing that the Baby Boom generation ended up proving, too.
While expressing my enthusiastic support of the marchers, I also want to issue a challenge: Don’t limit yourself to this one issue which deeply involves you and your continued existence.
Students should keep in mind that gun control is connected in many ways to the #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, LBGTQ and pro-immigration movements, and to the much smaller and less well-known movements to shrink the military and ban nuclear weapons. One big connection is that these movements all have the same opponents, the Trump base of misogynists, racists and nativists, encouraged by the big-money ultra-right wing. Surveys show that those who hoard guns are primarily whites afraid of blacks. To a large extent, the gun culture, the white supremacy culture and the hetero-white-men-are-superior cultures overlap in their adherents.
But there are also subtler relationships between the sudden wave of anti-gun activity and existing grass roots movement that lean left: virtually all American mass shooters displayed racist or sexist behavior in their past, and all fed on the same pool of hate and fear that animates racists, nativists and misogynists. Moreover, the companies selling weapons and funding the National Rifle Association are often subsidiaries of the companies selling American weapons to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and dozens of other countries. The United States sells almost as many military arms to other countries as the rest of the world combined. The current administration is loosening regulations to make it easier for U.S. companies to sell arms abroad. The weapons industry is one of the most dominant forces in both state and federal government and one of the most insidious forces in mass culture.
When I started my anti-War activity at the age of 16, I was pretty dubious of the declarations of some of the more radical, and usually highly educated, among us that the War in Viet Nam was intimately connected with the abuses that the Civil Rights movement was battling. Soon enough I became “woke” to the relationship between racial injustice, cultural imperialism and unregulated free markets abroad and on the home front.
It’s time for the marchers in favor of stricter gun control laws to get “woke.”