Yet another study shows the negative effect that charter schools have on public schools and the communities they serve

By Marc Jampole

Here’s another example of ideology being such a strong factor in perception that it overcomes facts. Two academic researchers Helen Ladd of Duke University and Josh Singleton of the University of Rochester conduct a fine study that shows another way that charter schools are bad for students and society, but their conclusion is not to end charter schools but to make it easier to open more!

What the esteemed professors Ladd and Singleton find is that shifting monies from public schools to charter schools leave the public schools with less money to spend per pupil, something like $500 per kid in the areas they studied, which is a lot of money when you start thinking about supplies, books and enrichment tools. Ladd and Singleton did their analysis on the Durham, North Carolina school system and follows similar research that found that Albany had $900 less to spend per public school pupil and Buffalo had $700 less to spend because of charter schools. Ladd and Singleton figure that the impact is greater on the North Carolina children because that state spends less per child on public education. Reversing the math, Ladd and Singleton compute that each charter school enrollee in Durham means there is $3,500 less to spend on the students who remain in public schools.

The biggest reason Ladd and Singleton find for the charter school drain on public schools is that fixed costs such as for buildings, vehicles, administrators and compliance remain the same but there is a smaller base of students to pay for these expenses.

Before considering how Ladd and Singleton propose to address the issue of charter schools draining public schools, let’s review what we already know about charters. Time and again, studies have shown that more than 70% of all charter schools perform either at a worse level or at the same level as the public school with which they compete. Thus in most cases, charter schools are not working and were not worth the effort and disruption.

What’s more, whenever researchers and journalists dig into any of the 29% of charter schools whose students seem to do better than the kids in the competing public school, they find a telling pattern: In every reported case I’ve seen, the charter school always starts with more kids in their early grades but as the years progress, gradually whittle down the class size. In other words, many of the limited number of successful charter schools weed out underperforming students so that their results look better.

For example, a charter run by the for-profit BASIS Charter Schools that U.S. News & World Report once named as one of the top 10 schools in the country, started with 125 students in sixth grade but had a mere 21 in the graduating class. The administration presumably weeded out low performers, who then returned to their traditional public school.

We must assume that Ladd and Singleton have reviewed this research. In fact, if they were doing work on charter schools, we would be highly surprised and suspicious if they were not aware of the growing body of research demonstrating that charter schools have failed to deliver on their promise to improve school performance.

So let me pose a common sense question. If you knew charter schools almost always do not do better than public schools and many of the small number of cases in which they do improve student performance the schools cooked the books, and then you found out that charter schools also hurt the kids who remain in the public school system, what would you recommend?

Remember, the results: Doesn’t work for the kids it teaches and makes things worse for other kids.

Let’s simplify some more: Doesn’t help users, hurts others.

Admit it. When learning that something usually doesn’t help the people it’s supposed to and hurts everyone else, wouldn’t you say, get rid of it!? Wouldn’t you take that prescription drug off the market, or not approve it in the first place?

But that’s not what Ladd and Singleton want. They don’t call for an end to charter schools. They don’t propose a process for reintegrating charter school students into the public school population. They don’t advocate for a public affairs program to explain to school boards, politicians and civic leaders why charter schools suck. They don’t even propose that charter schools pony up more money to public schools (which in this case means taking less funds or returning some of the money) to make up the difference.

No, what Ladd and Singleton advocate is that state governments provide local public schools with more funding to make up the difference when charter schools drain their student base.

We can only speculate idly about why two apparently well-respected academics would not only fail to recommend reigning in charter schools, but actually propose a way to make it easier to form more. We have seen this kind of thinking before, usually from right-wing ideologues who place the free market system above all else, but also from Democrats who try to accommodate the free market such as the Clintons and Obama. Take the large number of policy wonks who continue to believe that making a market for pollution will lower pollution because the market will encourage more innovation than simply regulating emissions, despite the fact that all pollution markets have failed miserably. As we know, many of the most radical free-marketers are in the pay of the billionaire funders of the charter school movement, whose real goal all along has been to destroy teachers’ unions.

We have no way of knowing the real reason why Ladd and Singleton don’t condemn charter schools. All we can do is scratch our heads and wonder.

How else to understand the negative reaction to Michelle Wolf’s jokes at White House Correspondents’ dinner if not sexism & a double standard for women comedians?

By Marc Jampole

I thought The Emperor’s New Clothes was a children’s story, not the plot to the latest media distraction: the wide condemnation by the Trumpverse and many in the mainstream media of Michelle Wolf’s performance at the recent Whitehouse Correspondents’ Association dinner. Everything Wolf said hit a truth about the current administration and many of its players, but in the Trumpverse the media, our civic leaders and the general public ignore and even deny the many lies, inanities and cruelties of Trump and his crew.

Meanwhile, Mika Brzezinski, Andrea Mitchell, Maggie Haberman and other mainstream media continue to look for any way possible to normalize as much of the behavior of the current White House staff as possible, and creating out of the blue the imaginary rule that you don’t make jokes about the White House press secretary is a cheap way to do it. After all, Miss Sarah is just a hard-working professional in a tough situation. True enough, but the way out of Sarah’s difficulties is not to lie, which means either quit or answer questions truthfully. Once you lie again and again and again over months, you become part of the corruption and an open target for the satirists of the world such as Michelle Wolf.

Word to the literally dozens of conservatives who use “it’s not the appropriate time, place and/or words” to condemn all manner of performances, demonstrations, speeches, community actions and other expressions of free speech:

There is no such thing as an inappropriate time and place to speak the truth.

There is no such thing as an inappropriate time and place for a comedian hired to perform to make fun of a person who is front of the news media almost daily.

Unless we’re talking about a death, a horrible accident, the victims of a tsunami or a similar personal tragedy. Or children.

But Sarah Huckabee Sanders is not a child and has not suffered any personal tragedy that she did not bring on herself through her own career choices. She is the public spokesperson for the White House, a public figure subject to comment, parody and joking. Moreover, she has chosen to be part of a corrupt political machine that seems to share more similarities to a crime family than to a political movement, an autocratic kleptocracy based on lies and unproven assumptions that knowingly lies to the public on a daily if not hourly basis.

Then there’s Kelly Anne, one of the longest running of the Trump crew of mean-spirited, racist liars. How is she not fair game for a political comedian?

No one has to think that Wolf was funny. I only liked about half her jokes. But to say it was a mistake to tell them, that the jokes were in poor taste because of the setting, is to assault the first amendment. You don’t have to agree with her or think she’s funny to recognize that Wolf exercised her First Amendment rights in the service of her profession. Whether it’s Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Chris Rock, Lewis Black or Stephen Colbert, comedians who talk about serious subjects often have punchlines that are unfunny, or funny but sad or sickening at the same time, but still a necessary part of the truth they are conveying. Anger lurked or lurks behind the humor of all these comedians. Those they shock are often angry at the joke because it cuts too close to home or it puts the lie to a myth they believe.

I don’t see the difference between what these comedians were doing and what Michelle Wolf did at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

But my wife saw a difference.

They were men and she’s a woman.

It’s hard to deny the reality of the facts on the ground. Starting with Colbert, male comedian after male comedian has gone after administration figures at these annual dinners, and the butts of the joke politely grin and bear it, while the comedian collects his kudos. A woman does it and she’s widely (but not universally) condemned. For an extended period of time by media standards, she becomes some cross between a cause celèbre and a political football.

 Plus, there’s the painfully obvious sexism of the administration, which starts with a lack of female appointees, but includes a high tolerance of sexual harassment in the workplace and elsewhere, a dismantling of regulations that protect women, and a war against birth control and abortion.

I wish I could come up with another explanation for why so much of the mainstream news media, including the White House Correspondents’ Association itself, swallowed the authoritarian and anti-American Trump Kool-aid on Michelle Wolf. But institutional sexism—a reluctance to give women the same rights and privileges as men—is the only rationale that makes sense, the only one consistent with the facts.

Not the finest moment for Mika, Andrea or Maggie.

Editorial: Banana Republicans

A week after James Comey exploded in the media with his book, telling his side of the story about his conflicts with President Donald Trump, Republicans mounted an all-hands-on-deck effort to discredit the former FBI director and seek to jail him and other Justice Department officials who were involved in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russian officials who allegedly interfered in the 2016 elections.

Republican leaders, who aborted congressional investigations of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, now have trained their sights on Comey, the longtime Republican who had testified at length before Congress and wrote the book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership, about his tumultuous experiences as FBI director. Republican congressional leaders demanded that the Justice Department produce the “Comey memos,” which Comey had written to document his meetings with Trump and other members of the White House staff during the first few months of the Trump administration, before he was fired.

As part of the right’s counterattack against the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, on April 18, 11 Republican members of Congress wrote a letter to Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions and other Justice Department officials demanding that the agency start criminal investigations of Comey for claimed leaks of classified information, Hillary Clinton of claims that she concealed campaign payments to an opposition research firm and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch on claims that she threatened an informant with “reprisal” if he came forward with anti-Clinton information in 2016.

The Republicans also accused top FBI officials who signed off on a surveillance warrant for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Those officials, they say, include former acting attorney general Sally Yates, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and former acting deputy attorney general Dana Boente, as well as FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

Republican congressmen who signed the letter include Reps. Ron DeSantis (Fla.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Dave Brat (Va.), Jeff Duncan (S.C.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Andy Harris (Md.), Jody Hice (Ga.), Todd Rokita (Ind.), Claudia Tenney (N.Y.) and Ted Yoho (Fla.).

It wasn’t the first attempt by Republicans to criminalize investigators who were threatening Trump. In January, Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Christopher Steele, the former British spy who originally wrote the dossier on Trump’s ties to Russia for Republican opponents of Trump, lied to federal authorities about his contacts with reporters regarding information in the dossier. The decision by Grassley and Graham to single out the former intelligence officer infuriated Democrats and raised the stakes in the growing partisan battle over the investigations into Trump, his campaign team and Russia.

The day after the Republican congressmen requested the prosecutions of Comey, Clinton, Lynch et al., the Department of Justice released the long-sought Comey memos, which were leaked in less than an hour. Apparently, Trump’s allies hoped to find conflicts between Comey’s contemporaneous notes and his later statements to Congress and in his book and publicity interviews. Instead, the memos confirmed what Comey has been saying all along.

Comey, who was then director of the FBI, made a horrible decision 12 days before the 2016 election when he sent word to members of Congress that the FBI was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s use of personal emails after new copies of emails were found. The move violated the policies of the Justice Department, which does not reveal investigations when the disclosure might influence an election. But Comey, who several months earlier had declared the case closed after a yearlong investigation, felt he was obligated to tell Congress of the change. Within a few minutes of the disclosure, Republicans leaked the information, and Clinton’s comfortable lead in the polls disappeared, and she was unable to regain the momentum, even after Comey announced on Nov. 6, two days before the election, that they still hadn’t found anything to justify charges against Clinton.

Comey did not disclose that the FBI was also investigating the campaign of Donald Trump, even though just weeks earlier, he had declined to answer a question from Congress about whether there was such an investigation. In that case, he played it by the book.

Comey’s bad judgement then is distinguished from the mendacity of Lyin’ Donnie, a sociopath who has been recorded making false or misleading claims more than 2,400 times in the first 14 months as president, according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. That works out to six lies per day and is way beyond a reckless disregard for the truth. And this is the grifter Republican congressional leaders are willing to tear down the FBI and the Justice Department to protect.

Trump’s vilification campaign made some headway when his Justice Department referred McCabe to the US Attorney for D.C. for possible criminal charges, based on the FBI inspector general’s report finding that McCabe had shown a “lack of candor” about an unauthorized leak to the Wall Street Journal confirming that the FBI was investigating the Clinton Foundation. The investigation of the Clinton Foundation also came to nothing, but McCabe ended up being fired abruptly, in a highly unorthodox fashion, just a few hours before he planned to retire, and weeks before the report was released in full.

The allegation that McCabe was involved in an unauthorized leak was unusual because Comey told Rachel Maddow on April 19 that there were two people in the FBI who had authorization to provide such information to the media at the time: himself and McCabe.

Trump has been unable to shut up about Comey, but after Trump once again called on him to be sent to prison, Comey told NPR, “The president of the United States just said that a private citizen should be jailed. And I think the reaction of most of us was, ‘Meh, that’s another one of those things.’ This is not normal. This is not OK. There’s a danger that we will become numb to it, and we will stop noticing the threats to our norms.”

The Democratic National Committee prudently filed a lawsuit against the Trump campaign, the Russian government and Wikileaks, not only to recover damages from the hacking of its computer system but also to preserve a course of action in civil court if Trump is successful in shutting down the criminal investigation.

The suit, filed in US district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found there.

DNC Chairman Tom Perez noted there is a precedent, as the DNC in 1972 sued President Richard Nixon’s re-election committee for $1 million for the break-in at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building. Democrats got a $750,000 settlement from the Nixon campaign on the day in 1974 Tricky Dick stepped down as president. There were still responsible Republicans then.

The current lawsuit would give the Democrats a chance to seek internal documents and testimony from the Trump campaign to help them learn more about interactions with Russia during the race.

Trump Campaign Manager Brad Parscale noted that the Trump campaign, too, would be allowed to probe management decisions at the DNC, as well as the party’s involvement with commissioning the Trump dossier. Democrats apparently think they have nothing to fear from such a search but plenty to gain. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2018

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Selections from the May 15, 2018 issue

COVER/Stephen Talbot
Revisiting the supply-side tax cut disaster: How does Kansas feel about Brownback’s ‘experiment’?

EDITORIAL
Banana Republicans

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
Lead or get out of the way

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Look for bad bills at every level of government

DISPATCHES
Net neutrality eliminated;
Renewable energy milestones reached;
Trump’s big idea for health insurance excludes maternity care and barely covers addition treatment;
Trumpism takes deregulation to new depths;
Farm bill attacks
Romneyfinishes second in Senate nomination battle;
Large number of Amazon workers rely on food stamps;
Global warming threatens coastal property bubble ...

ART CULLEN
At least I got the ex-journalist, and the Irish, vote

JILL RICHARDSON
Another counterproductive assault on food stamps

JOHN YOUNG
And the Democrats say, ‘thank you’

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Pushing back against the occupation

MARK ANDERSON
Right wants to keep US the World’s Cop

SETH SANDRONSKY
Poor people’s campaign grows

BOB BURNETT
Another look at Trump supporters

ROGER BYBEE
Ryan exit heightens chances of flipping key district

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The land of unintended consequences

SAM URETSKY
Trouble in Trumpland

WAYNE O’LEARY
Cruisin’ for a bruisin’

JOHN BUELL
Students as debt slaves

FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
Blind religious motivation vs. religious idealism

BARRY FRIEDMAN
I’m tired of sitting in the middle

ROB PATTERSON
Try detectives across the ocean

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Special ‘K’

MUSIC REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Odes to joy and oy: From the 9th to 9/11, Beethoven meets Adams in the wild west

and more ...

Trade War Casualties

The trade war started gloriously on March 2 with Donald Trump talking about putting tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum to protect American jobs. Trump tweeted that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”

Trump, for good reasons, later backed off tariffs on steel from Canada, Mexico and Europe to focus on low-cost competitors in Asia and South America. China on April 2 retaliated with tariffs on about $3 billion worth of 128 US imports, ranging from pork, meat and fruit to steel pipes. Trump raised the stakes April 3 with threats to place 25% tariffs on 1,300 Chinese products, worth $50 billion, including flat-screen televisions, medical devices, aircraft parts and batteries in a sweeping trade measure aimed at penalizing China for its trade practices. China replied April 4 with proposed tariffs on $50 billion worth of American soybeans, corn, cotton, beef, pork, orange juice, tobacco, whiskey and other goods, much of which comes from Republican-dominated states that voted for Trump.

Midwestern farmers who voted for Trump should worry that he will sell them out as he has sold out “partners” throughout his business career, as he pursues a trade war with China with little regard for the damage it may do to the rural economy.

White House officials held out the possibility that the tariffs might never go into effect. “There’s no trade war here,” Larry Kudlow, Trump’s new top economic adviser, said April 4. He described the threat of tariffs as “just the first proposal” in a process that would involve negotiations and back-channel talks. “I understand the stock market’s anxiety,” he said. “But on the other hand, don’t overreact.”

However, pork prices already have dropped about a third since January, John Fischer, a farmer from Neola, Iowa, told ABC News April 8, and farmers are preparing to plant corn and soybeans, whose value would be heavily impacted by changes in Chinese buying patterns.

The American Soybean Association noted that the price of soybean futures dropped 40 cents a bushel, or $1.72 billion in value for a projected crop of 4.3 billion bushels in 2018, the morning after Chinese authorities announced the retaliatory tariffs. The soybean group urged Trump to scrap the tariffs and instead negotiate with Beijing to end the trade dispute.

Corn was bringing $3.50 a bushel, half of what farmers were getting in 2012-2013, and politicians from the Corn Belt were feeling the pressure, particularly after the White House threatened April 5 to impose tariffs on another $100 billion worth of Chinese goods. “If he’s even half-serious, this is nuts,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) told the New York Times. “Let’s absolutely take on Chinese bad behavior, but with a plan that punishes them instead of us. This is the dumbest possible way to do this.”

Trump acknowledged in a radio interview April 6 that the tariffs may be tough on some people and businesses, but said it’d be better for the country in the long run.

“I’m not saying there won’t be a little pain, but the market has gone up 40 percent, 42 percent so we might lose a little bit of it,” he said on WABC Radio’s Bernie & Sid morning show in New York City. ”But we’re going to have a much stronger country when we’re finished. So we may take a hit and, you know, what? Ultimately, we’re going to much stronger for it.”

Trump also has threatened to dismantle the North American Free Trade Agreement and he has repeatedly slammed Mexico, which has become a major importer of American corn, pork and poultry. No matter what you think of NAFTA, over the past 18 years the competition from US agribusinesses has destroyed the campesino culture in Mexico and many of those former Mexican farm workers have moved north to find jobs in maquiladora factories that assemble products formerly made in the US, or they migrate into the US, to states such as Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin, to work on farms or in meat processing plants slaughtering pork, beef or poultry.

As these undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America are being collected and deported by Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE), farmers who voted for Trump will find it difficult to find US citizens willing to work as hard for as little pay.

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox said Mexico is looking at Argentina and Brazil to find a more certain marketplace in the wake of Trump’s comments on trade with Mexico.

Trump suggested in an April 4 tweet that he saw no reason to back down, since the US was already on the losing end of trade with China.

“We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the US,” he wrote. “Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue!”

He added in another tweet, “When you’re already $500 Billion DOWN, you can’t lose!” (Actually, the trade deficit with China was $336 billion in 2017. And you certainly can lose — the market for your product long enough to put you out of business!)

Trump’s inattention to details like these may be one of the reasons his companies were forced six times to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Corn Belt Republicans who are leery of free-market solutions to international trade disputes should work with Democrats to fashion a farm bill that will protect family farmers and ranchers from the collateral damage that occurs in the trade war.

The Bully’s Pulpit

We’re sorry to keep returning to Trump’s record as a liar, but honest Americans cannot ignore the president’s reckless disregard for the truth, which has accelerated since he was appointed president.
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has been tracking Trump’s lies, and has documented more than 2,400 misstatements since he was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2017. On March 2, the Post reported that in the 406 days since he had taken the oath of office, Trump has made 2,436 false or misleading claims — an average of six false claims a day. That was up from an average of 4.9 false claims a day during the first 100 days.

Lying Donnie went the extra step in disgracing his office April 3, when he tweeted, “Thank you to Rasmussen for the honest polling. Just hit 50%, which is higher than Cheatin’ Obama at the same time in his Administration.”

Trump does not explain why he called Obama a cheater, but it fits his practice of acting like a middle-school bully. Rasmussen is a right-leaning polling firm that consistently ranks Trump’s approval higher than other polling firms; still, April 3 was the first time Trump’s approval rating was higher than Obama’s 46% on April 3, 2010. But most reputable pollsters still have Trump’s approval in the high 30s or low 40s. The Gallup poll showed Trump with a 39% approval rating on April 2, compared with Obama’s 49% approval in a comparable period in 2010, Gallup noted.

A popular Facebook meme by The Other 98% notes that “Trump – who has cheated on all three of his wives, dodged the draft, had to pay out a $25 million settlement for his scam university, refuses to release his taxes and is under federal investigation for cheating in the 2016 election — just referred to his predecessor as ‘Cheatin’ Obama.’”

If Trump were a drinking man, we could hope he’d get sober. But he claims to be a teetotaler. Until Republicans become embarrassed at the unhinged Tweeter in Chief, he’ll continue to embarrass — and possibly endanger — the rest of us. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2018

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Selections from the May 1, 2018 issue

COVER/Igor Bobic and Daniel Marans
Trade war could cost the GOP at the ballot box

EDITORIAL
Trade war casualties; The bully’s pulpit

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
How Trump gets to yes

DISPATCHES
Steel tariff talk causes Korea to yield;
Trump’s store ducks sales taxes;
Impeachment is the latest GOP bogeyman;
Rs mull spending cuts to nibble deficit caused by billionaire tax cuts;
Govs balk at sending Guard to border;
FBI raid targets Trump's lawyer;
Rick Scott wants to take his bad ideas to Washington;
Scott Pruitt hasn't saved taxpayers anything;
Iowans gain right to buy worthless health insurance;

ART CULLEN
The real soy worry

BOB BURNETT
Facebook, Trump and Russia

JOHN YOUNG
Second Amendment and fraudulent hucksters

GENE NICHOL
In NC’s struggling regions, many ‘feel like they’ve had the hell kicked out of them’

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Why trade deficits matter

JASON SIBERT
Cash is weaponized in public dialog

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet 
Posse Trumpitatus

WENONAH HAUTER
Martin County, Ky., facing a water crisis

SETH SANDRONSKY
‘I won’t keep calm I have a black son’

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas 
‘Promises promises’: Right to try legislation

SAM URETSKY
Administration with no concern for the truth

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Tracking the rebirth of white nationalism in America

WAYNE O’LEARY
Return of the wildcat

JOHN BUELL
Corporate trade treaties and the revenge of the deplorables

MARK ANDERSON
Conservatives see ‘liberal’ world order fraying

FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
When can one disobey the law?

ROB PATTERSON
Netflix series look at days gone by

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson 
Lost in translation

ED RAMPELL
Interview: Gloria Allred talks #MeToo and ‘Seeing Allred’

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 ...

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.

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.”

Replacing McMaster with Bolton & Tillerson with Pompeo brings us closer to both a nuclear war & an authoritarian regime at home

By Marc Jampole

Now I’m worried.

Correction: Scared out of my shoes.

A guy who is so bellicose in his pronouncements that he couldn’t get a Republican Senate’s approval to be Union Nations Ambassador, a mere spokesperson role, is going to be National Security Advisor, the person most responsible for formulating and implementing our foreign policy.

John Bolton is the kind of one-dimensional Dickensian fool who makes great confrontational TV, but dangerously ignorant policy.

Bolton has in the past expressed a desire to bomb North Korea and Iran. He fully supported the Iraq War from day one until today, even after it was revealed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction or no ties to Al Qaida. He famously has opposed the International Criminal Court and the Biological Weapons Convention. He fully buys into the idea of a worldwide cultural war between the West and Islam. But like Trump, he doesn’t really like any other country. Correction, Trump does seem to harbor a fondness for totalitarian regimes, and Russia in particular.

If Bolton gets his way, thousands of American soldiers will die fighting major wars with Iran and North Korea, and tens of thousands more will have their lives ruined by physical injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Iranians will die, be injured or have their lives uprooted, most of whom will be innocent civilians. We will waste trillions of dollars that could go to infrastructure improvement, alternative fuel development and commercialization, education and help for the poor and elderly. Even worse, if nuclear weapons are detonated, it will poison our entire biosphere, leading to cancers and birth defects all over the world for decades, if not longer. It could also perhaps trigger the use of nuclear weapons against us by allies of Iran or North Korea.

At the very least, Bolton will encourage Trump to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal, which will further isolate the United States from the rest of the world. The new tariffs on foreign goods, leaving the Paris Accord, not joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump’s desire to renegotiate NAFTA and his constant rhetoric already have compelled the rest of the world to start cutting deals that cut America out. The result of the “America First” policy will be a slow, then faster shrinking of our economy.

Bolton plays to all of Donald Trump’s worst instincts and most pernicious beliefs. Trump has expressed the idea that only a war can bring the United States together. My take on that comment is that he means that a war behind which everyone unifies is the only way to retain his current job in 2020, and perhaps the only way to avoid legislative disaster in 2018. Perhaps a war could serve as an excuse for suspending elections or declaring Martial Law, or for censoring the press or rounding up scores of innocent Muslims for a new round of detention camps run primarily by private prison companies.

Unfortunately, in weighing whether to follow Bolton’s counsel and go to war, Trump will not think about the financial costs, because he’s used to going bankrupt and leaving investors holding an empty bag.

He won’t think of the death and destruction a war will bring because he doesn’t think of other people’s suffering ever, except the suffering of adversaries, which he gleefully reveals in seeing.

He won’t consider that the likely outcome of a war against North Korea or Iran will not be a western-style democracy pliantly under America’s hegemony, but increased regional instability, decades of civil war, the creation of millions of refugees, an explosion of terrorism worldwide and the possible bombing of U.S. territories or territory. He’s far too enamored of the tough-guy persona and the us-versus-them narrative to consider the past in predicting a war’s outcome.

He certainly won’t consider how much progress has been made to address the world’s problems following the principles of multilateralism and economic sanctions because he prefers the disproven myths of his 1950’s childhood to facts and scientific analysis.

No, he will only consider one factor: Will it help him?

And in his distorted, self-centered, corrupt and mean-spirited universe, the answer could be that war will help Trumpty-Dumpty.

And it might in the short-term. The First Iraq War and our three-day farce in Grenada demonstrate that Americans like short wars that we win. The public even liked the Second Iraq War at first, despite the fact-filled arguments of those opposed to it. But the longer any war goes on, the less Americans like it. After 15 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have grown especially cynical. The public’s attention span for everything has shortened considerably—something that Trump’s speaking style takes advantage of—and is probably much shorter when it comes to suffering warfare than ever before. In other words, declaring war on Iran, North Korea, both or another imaginary bogeyman may backfire or may give Trump a very temporary lift. Unless, of course, he uses a major conflagration to grab authoritarian power.

Before now, the craven and unethical way that the GOP has tolerated Trump instead of working with Democrats to replace him has irritated but not concerned me. I—like many—have depended on the Democrats to take power in 2018 and use the results of the Mueller probe to rid us of the cancer that is Donald Trump. The current administration has already inflicted tremendous damage to our economy, our reputation around the world, our security, the environment and immigrants and other individuals, most of the harm could be quickly reversed, except for that done to individuals.

But a major war, especially one that could go nuclear or serve as an excuse to for an executive takeover, would be catastrophic. Replacing McMaster with Bolton and Tillerson with Pompeo brings us closer to both a nuclear war and an authoritarian regime at home

That’s why I’m scared. Very scared.

Which Senators will vote to confirm former torture supervisor Gina Haspel? Only those so corrupted by politics they no longer have a moral compass

By Marc Jampole

The big question in my mind since learning that former torture Chief Gina Haspel has received the nomination for next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been: what should we demand of Haspel to demonstrate that she won’t allow torture to take place under her watch?

Haspel gained notoriety when the news media revealed that she was in charge of a CIA torture facility in Thailand at which at least two suspected terrorists underwent waterboarding. Haspel later participated in an attempted cover-up of the American torture gulag by helping to destroy videotapes that showed torture at a number of secret CIA locations throughout the world. This cover-up strongly suggests that Haspel and her comrades knew that the cruel techniques that they were ordering others to use to interrogate human beings were both illegal and morally wrong.

Certainly a simple statement that she will follow all U.S. laws will not suffice to convince us Haspel’s torture days are in the past, since she could turn around at a later date and say that torture is legal or use an interrogation technique that is clearly torture but declare it isn’t, backed by the weaselly lawyering of the next generation of John Yoos and David Addingtons.

But is it enough for her to state unequivocally that the CIA will not engage in torture nor encourage the intelligence forces of our allies to do so? Doesn’t she also have to define in the most explicit terms what she means by torture and detail the horrific, inhumane acts that she won’t allow to happen under her watch? Will it help if she also cites the overwhelming evidence gathered through centuries that torture does not work?—evidence that the CIA and the Bush II administration chose to ignore.

Will laying out a full policy against all types of physical and mental torture be sufficient to convince the Senate—and the American people—that the CIA won’t revitalize the torture gulag that the Bush II administration established in the first decade of the 21st century? Does she also have to admit that what she ordered others to do was illegal and wrong and that she regrets doing it? Will anything less than a complete and abject mea culpa satisfy our need to protect the United States from ever debasing itself again through the use of torture.

No.

None of it will be enough. There is nothing that Gina Haspel could say or do that could convince any Senator to vote to confirm her as CIA chief except for those so corrupted by politics and self-interest that they no longer have any interest in the United States following its ethical compass.

That doesn’t mean that I believe that once they have served their time we should not give criminals a second chance, restore their rights and let them feely pursue careers and other interests. I believe fully and faithfully in rehabilitation and reintegration of virtually all who commit criminal acts. If you did the time, we should set aside the crime. But I don’t believe in asking the fox to guard the henhouse. We’d be foolish to make a reformed embezzler chief financial officer of a company or to have a reformed sex offender chaperone a field trip of college-aged women.

Besides, up to now Haspel has admitted to no wrong-doing and has never been punished for either the torture or the attempted cover-up. While condemning our use of torture, the United States government has done nothing to punish or even condemn those who established the torture regime and gave the orders to put dozens of people—many innocent of anything other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time—through excruciating mental and physical anguish, despite the fact that virtually all studies show torture to be ineffective in gathering information from enemy combatants. Many like David Addington, John Yoo and Gina Haspel have fallen on their feet with cushy jobs or are enjoying a posh retirement like Bush II and his vice president.

There can be no doubt that Donald Trump likes the fact that Haspel engaged in torture. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he spoke often of bringing back torture and adding prisoners to Guantanamo, which with Bagram and Abu Ghraib has come to symbolize the American torture machine. He has called for “worse than waterboarding.”

There is a cruel streak to most autocrats. The ability to inflict meaningless or excess pain on one’s enemies or even those who disobey seems to come naturally to the dictators of the world. They don’t want merely to win, they want to crush their opponent into fine particles.

Cruelty not only reassures the autocrat of his extensive power, it also serves as a warning to others who might dare to cross the ruler. That was surely the intent when Trump pressured Jeff Sessions to fire Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) the day before he was eligible for retirement. Firing McCabe for political reasons, as Trump admits happened, was the government’s misguided prerogative. But to do it just before McCabe could cash in on all his years of loyal and competent service to his country was cruel, to say the least. Living in the high-cost D.C. area with two children, how likely is it that McCabe depended heavily on his government pension for his and his wife’s retirement. Unless the plan to work for a Democratic Congressional representative works out or he has enormous success in a post-governmental career, McCabe and his family may find themselves in an economic freefall. The cruelty of the act certainly serves as a warning to others in government wanting to speak up against Trump or cooperate with the Mueller investigation.

Haspel’s best possible excuse for ordering and overseeing the torture committed by her subordinates—that she was only following orders—is what makes her particularly attractive to the autocratic Trumpty-Dumpty. The autocrat likes people who blindly follow orders, even if they are incompetent or unsuited to their jobs. For the autocrat, an order-follower who is also extremely talented and accomplished is a rare jewel indeed. And one who will do anything, who will stoop to any level, who will throw away all scruples—what an extraordinary find that is indeed. Gina Haspel is tailor-made for the Trump administration.

Which is why confirming her as CIA Director would be bad for the country. I’m urging all readers to write their Senators and tell them explicitly that if they vote to confirm Gina Haspel they will lose your vote and support.