The terrible consequences of the largely symbolic move of U.S. embassy: At least 61 dead & 2,700 injured, plus U.S. credibility in international circles sinks lower

By Marc Jampole

The demonstrations and killings in the wake of the United States moving its Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem reminds us again of the power of symbolism: People are willing to put themselves in harm’s way and other people are willing to kill them for a symbol, in this case the symbolism of recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The move encourages extreme Zionists, enrages Palestinians and rankles most other countries.

But the embassy move doesn’t change a thing in the Middle East.

It doesn’t alter the situation on the ground and it shouldn’t disturb the dynamics of any negotiations. Why should Jerusalem be off the table now in discussions of a peaceful settlement, be it a two-state solution or something else? It was so easy to move the U.S. embassy. All it took was money. Why can’t a future deal require the United States to move its embassy back to Tel Aviv, or elsewhere? It’s even possible that one day this new U.S. facility could be the U.S. embassy in a democratic Palestinian state that is allied with its neighbor, Israel? A peacenik can always dream…

Trump’s lunacy does have both immediate and long-term consequences. Short-term, it increases tensions and violence in Israeli and the occupied territory. Trumpty-Dumpty and his advisors must have known that the opening ceremonies would kindle demonstrations. But did they know that Israel would react with such brutality? Only among American evangelicals and hardliners in both Israel and the United States will the Israeli reaction to the demonstrations not seem blood-thirsty. Sixty-one dead and about 2,700 injured by a superior force that as of this writing reports no injuries or deaths is what the Latins used to say was res ipsa loquitur, a thing that proves itself. What it demonstrates is that the Israelis could have figured out a way to deal with the protesters and rioters without killing anyone, inflicting minimum injury. Fire hoses. Loud acoustics. Reinforcement of the fence. There are lots of ways to deal with protesters short of firing bullets and teargas.

The long-term implication of moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem is that it provides further proof that the other nations of the world can no longer trust the United States to abide by treaties and that the United States has little interest in collective decision-making on issues of global import. Trump has already walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Accord and the Iran nuclear agreement, and raised tariffs that threaten to start a trade war. Now he has ignored the United Nations agreement not to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel until a peace agreement is reached. U.S. credibility is at an all-time low among our allies.

And for what? A symbolic move about a symbol.

As a secular Jew in diaspora, I am befuddled by the big deal that Jews make about the symbolic import of the city of Jerusalem. I’ve never been there, but I have seen ancient Neolithic, Greek, Roman, Carthaginian and Islamic ruins and experienced the expansive swell of religious joy and connection with past civilizations and peoples, the oneness with humanity, or a portion of it, that comes from knowing that values, ideas and artifacts persist in time. And yes, I did feel a special, Jewish tug when viewing the old synagogues of Prague and Spain. I get it.

But let’s consider the real symbolism of Jerusalem. It is called King David’s city, the city that King David conquered and made his capital, the city that King Solomon grew, the city of the temple of the Kings.

Kings. Royalty. The idea that certain people have a divine right that is passed down by birth, a right to command others, to mess with the lives of others by forming armies, fighting wars, deciding who should pay what taxes, and building monuments, often to their own glory. Royalty is the most autocratic and least democratic system of government. Royalty is the ultimate expression of racism: my blood is so much better than your blood that I’m always in charge. One could make a case that the kings weakened ancient Israel to the point that the Babylonians could take over the country. Why would Jews want to have anything to do with royalty? Most Jews everywhere in the world today believe in representational democracy and reject the very concept of kingship and royalty, yet worship Jerusalem, forgetting that the city is not just a symbol of Judaism, but of Jewish royalism.

True enough, both holy temples were located in Jerusalem, but the first was fruit of the evil seed of royalty. Remember, too, that the temple was the place of animal sacrifice, a practice that Jews gave up centuries ago. There are remarkable and religiously uplifting antiquities all over the state of Israel.

Giving up the obsolete is something Jews are used to doing. We replaced animal sacrifice with prayer centuries ago. Most branches of the Jewish religion have gradually ended or are in the process of ending the many sexist elements in ancient and medieval Jewish religion and custom. We’ve made changes to the liturgy—prayers and melodies. Isn’t it about time that we turn our back on the concept of royalty and thereby de-mythify Jerusalem? If I were involved in the negotiations, I would be willing to trade political control of Jerusalem in return for a real lasting peace that included economic cooperation with a Palestinian state, as long as Jews were allowed to visit and live in Jerusalem. Hell, yes.

The equations sometimes produced by symbolic actions like moving an embassy are as macabre as they are tragic. Ask yourself, if it were your children, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces, friends and neighbors, how many dead would be worth the symbolism? It shouldn’t be difficult to understand that Palestinians feel the same way. Of course, to believers in royalty, some people are worth more than others. The essence of royalty—as conceived of and practiced throughout recorded history—is that the better people can sacrifice or kill the lower orders. That military representatives of “the chosen people” should kill and maim so many as an almost necessary aftermath to Trump’s Jerusalem symbolism is the ultimate expression of the obscenity that is the concept of kingship.

Now for the latest installment of the mainstream media’s favorite game: Blame the Democrats!

By Marc Jampole

It wouldn’t be a Sunday New York Times opinion section without a couple of articles blaming liberals for their supposed inability to capture the hearts and minds of mainstream America. It’s always the liberals fault for putting up the wrong candidate, being self-righteous, being too smart or wonky, focusing too much on identity politics, not articulating the message in bold terms, or not understanding the soul of middle America. In going through this list of Democratic “failures,” note how many descriptions could be coded language for “not being racist enough.” Then there are the special criticisms leveled at Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Nancy Pelosi’s political liabilities, which have always struck me as patently misogynistic.

This week’s edition of “Beat the Liberal” featured a piece by Gerald Alexander, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia whose research suggests a right-wing bent. In “Liberals, You’re Not As Smart as You Think” the not-so-good professor claims that liberals “may be more effective at causing resentment than in getting people to come their way.” Alexander never proves his point. He doesn’t even bother to offer up one study or survey to demonstrate that when liberals talk, they turn off large numbers of people. Interestingly enough, his article is a mild revision of a piece he wrote for theWashington Post eight years ago. Bashing liberals is never out of style!

And what does Alexander think liberals do that piss people off so much? They publicly call racist behavior racist. What’s more, they do so self-righteously, with an “I’m better than you are” tone. Earth to Alexander: People who call out racism are better than the racists. That is, assuming you buy into Alexander’s shoddy premise that Democrats are self-righteous about their morality. Now maybe it’s my self-righteousness coming through, but as parent, I found that shame works wonders in getting people to do the right thing.

Frank Bruni joined in the “Beat the Liberal” game, too, this week, with another of a long line of columns by mainstream media pundits advocating that the Democratic Party can win if they become more like Republicans. The headline says it all: “Renounce Pelosi, Ignore Trump—and Win?” Bruni advocates for Democratic candidates who are less strident and project a less partisan image. In particular, Bruni touts the Democratic nominee for the seat in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District, white male Dan McCready, who claims to have center-right political views. Of course he never gives examples of Democratic candidates who are too strident or too partisan, leaving us to guess who they are. I sincerely hope Bruni means something other than the coded message I receive from his article—that he wants more white males and fewer women and minority candidates. It would help if one of the candidates he lauds in his article was not all white male.

Bruni’s article quotes Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, as saying “If we actually want to be a majority party, then we better embrace more Americans.”

What is he talking about? Democrats won way more votes than Republicans in 2012, 2014 and 2016. Clinton wiped out Trump in the popular voting. Survey after survey on education, healthcare, aid to dependent children, criminal justice reform, environmental policy, abortion and yes, even gun control, show that majorities of American—and sometimes overwhelming majorities—support the views of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and other liberal Democrats.

The game of blaming Democrats for their failure to take the reins of government conceals the real reasons Republicans today control the presidency, both Houses of Congress and most state governments:

1. The current shape of Congressional districts, gerrymandered to structurally favor Republicans after the 2010 census.
2. The raft of voter suppression laws that have swept the country, also since 2010.
3. The natural electoral bias in states and nationally in favor of rural areas, built into our system by the Electoral College and geographic representation.
4. The influx of money to support right-wing candidates and think tanks, especially since the Citizens United
5. The constant anti-Democrat slant of the mainstream and rightwing media, which includes covering Republican primaries more closely than Democratic ones, using Republican premises when formulating coverage, conflating real scandals of Republicans with Democratic non-scandals and issuing a constant stream of these silly articles about Democrats shooting themselves in the foot.

Of these five factors, only one can be remotely blamed on the Democrats: the gerrymandering of Congress. Democrats assumed they were going to lose seats in 2010, since a new president usually sees his majority eroded in midterm elections. They therefore did not aggressively spend money on 2010 mid-term elections, while the Koch brothers and their billionaire buddies saw the historic opportunity created by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that freed corporate spending on elections and ramped up their support of not just Republican, but ultra-right candidates. The news media helped out the Republicans in 2010 to be sure by ignoring Democratic primaries, focusing most political coverage on the new “Tea Party” movement, ignoring the progressive alternatives to the Tea Party, and providing inaccurate and misleading coverage of the key issue of the day, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. There was certainly a lot going against the Democrats in 2010, but by not aggressively contesting the election, they did a pretty good imitation of a pro basketball team tanking the season to get a high draft pick.

We can find no fault with the Democrats in the development of the other four factors leading to Republican control of an ostensibly democratic country in which a majority of citizens support the views of the party out of power. The voter suppression laws have come in states controlled by Republicans. The rich white men who founded the country established the rural bias in the Constitution more than 200 years ago to placate the many slave owners among them.

In one way or another, Ronald Reagan is responsible for the other two factors. Reagan started the movement to allow single companies to own many media outlets in the same town and nationally and ended the Fairness Doctrine, which made all broadcast stations air the views of the other side when they gave an editorial. These moves more than anything else enabled the fringe right-wing media like mega-giants FOX, Clear Channel and Sinclair Broadcasting to emerge as powerful voices in the marketplace of ideas. And it was Reagan who nominated two of the five justices who voted that the constitution prohibited Congress from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations in Citizens United; he also gave important career promotions to the other three voting to unleash the Koch money machine on the political system.

But pundits will continue to blame Democrats for their current status in state and federal governments. It’s easier than doing real analysis and telling the truth: our country has been taken over by a small but very well-heeled minority who have used their money to manipulate our political system to their own end and to pursue their own interests, even to the detriment of overwhelming numbers of their fellow citizens.

Editorial: Check the Lying King

Americans must guard against the normalization of lying under the administration of Donald Trump.

Trump passed the milestone of 3,000 false or misleading claims as president, uttering his 3,001st on May 1, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported. That works out to nearly 6.5 false claims per day since Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2017. And his pace of lying has picked up. In his first 100 days in the White House, he averaged 4.9 false claims a day. After 406 days in office, as of March 1, he had raised his mendacity average to six false claims a day. In the following two months, he told an average of nine false claims a day, raising his overall mendacity average to 6.5 lies per day.

Lying Donnie tells lies at such a pace that it is difficult for fact checkers to keep up with him. In effect, he runs over the truth and dares the media to try to make him tell the truth.

His record of mendacity is bloated by his tendency to repeat, over and over, many of his false statements, even after being corrected. He apparently is following the fascist playbook, which advises that a Big Lie repeated enough times will be believed by the masses. The Post has counted at least 113 different false claims Trump has repeated three or more times — and some with breathtaking frequency, such as the 72 times he has claimed he passed the biggest tax cut in history, when in fact it ranks in eighth place. At least 53 times the president has made some variant of the claim that the Russia probe is a “phony, made-up witchhunt,” with the repeated refrain that there is “no collusion,” despite the indictment of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Manafort’s business partner, Rick Gates, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopolous, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and 13 Russian citizens and three Russian entities.

Trump has continued to downplay the investigation of his campaign’s ties with Russia, despite the fact that special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe so far has produced guilty pleas from Papadopolous, for making false statements to FBI agents about contacts he had with Russian agents while working for the Trump campaign in 2016. Gates reportedly is cooperating with investigators. Gates has pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the US and making a false statement to federal gents. Flynn also pleaded guilty to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI, and later announced he is cooperating with Mueller’s investigation and “working to set things right.” Mueller also has gained guilty pleas from Richard Pinedo, a Southern California computer science major who set up bank accounts for shadowy entities that turned out to include a Russian operation that used social media platforms to sow political discord around the 2016 presidential election, and Dutch attorney Alex van der Zwaan, a son-in-law of a Russian oligarch, who admitted he lied to federal investigators about his contacts with a Trump campaign officials.

Then there is the notorious Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, with Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort and at least five other people, including Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was represented as a “Russian government attorney” with official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton. Veselnitskaya later stated that she was not a government official, though she was known to have ties to the Russian government and she later described herself as an “informant” to the office of the Russian prosecutor general.

As Jonathan Chait noted at New York Magazine, “You have a Russian agent dangling Russian assistance in the election (‘part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump’), and the offer of help being accepted (‘if it’s what you say I love it’). It doesn’t even matter to what degree or even whether the offer was actually followed through. If you take a meeting to plan a crime, and the crime later happens and you benefit, you are an accessory to the crime whether or not you participated after the meeting.” Kushner later failed to report the meeting with Veselnitskaya, or other meetings with the Russian ambassador to the US and the head of a Russian bank that was subject to US sanctions, in his initial request for a security clearance as a special adviser to the president.

(Remember that Republicans in Congress spent four years trying to blame Hillary Clinton for the deaths of four people at the US consulate in Benghazi and they spent two years investigating Clinton’s use of private emails, which succeeded in bringing down her approval ratings, as Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy noted. No charges resulted from either case, but Trump still wants to jail Clinton.)

Trump has offered variations of the false claim that Democrats don’t really care about the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump is terminating to clear the way to deport the children of undocumented immigrants, Fact Checkers Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly wrote in the Post May 1. The president has wrongly asserted 34 times that a border wall was needed to stop the flow of drugs across the southern border, even though the Drug Enforcement Administration says a wall would not stop the illegal trade, as much of it travels through legal border entries or through tunnels that go under existing walls.

While Trump’s defenders say other presidents have lied, too, the New York Times compared Trump’s lies with those of other presidents and reported Dec. 14, 2017, that Trump in the first 10 months of his presidency told 103 separate lies, while Obama told 18 lies during his eight years in office. That works out to about two a year for Obama and about 124 a year for Trump. But it’s worse when you consider that Obama didn’t continue to repeat things that turned out to be untrue, such as his most notorious claim, that all Americans would be able to keep their existing health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare).

“Obama rarely told demonstrable untruths as president,” David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Stuart A. Thompson noted in the Times. “And he appears to have become more careful over time. We counted six straight-up falsehoods in his first year in office. Across his entire second four-year term, we counted the same number, six, only one of which came in his final year in office.”

However, when Trump is caught lying, the Times reporters noted, “he will often try to discredit people telling the truth, be they judges, scientists, FBI or CIA officials, journalists or members of Congress. Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant. It is extremely damaging to democracy, and it’s not an accident. It’s core to his political strategy.”

As Robert Mueller appears to be winding up his investigation, his attempts to interview Trump apparently have been rebuffed as Trump’s attorneys and other advisers fear Mueller is setting up a “perjury trap.” What they mean is Trump has shown he cannot be expected to keep his facts straight and he will end up lying to Mueller.

Republicans have been unwilling to stand up to the Lying King so far, as they have called off congressional investigations into Trump’s role in the Russian interference in the 2016 election and even threatened to remove FBI and Justice Department officials (who happen to be Republicans) who are supervising the probe. Voters must decide if they will tolerate a Grand Oligarch Party that enables the president’s reckless disregard for the truth and the neutering of the rule of law. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2018

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Selections from the June 1, 2018 issue

COVER/Robert Borosage
How to build a progressive populist movement from the ground up

EDITORIAL
Check the Lying King

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Paul Ryan and the unintentional prophet

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Dairies are squeezed to the limits

DISPATCHES
NRA tries to distance itself from Russia by hiring man known for working with foreign adversaries;
Trump exploring new ways to hurt people;
Report: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran deal;
Consumers will pay for Trump sabotage of ACA;
Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, study finds
Americans spend time in ICE prison trying to prove citizenship;
Newest attack on Roe v. Wade: Abortion opponents are done being subtle;
Trump administration stops short of most restrictive Medicaid proposal;
Texas officials ignore dioxin spread in Houston waterways ...

ART CULLEN
They’ve built a sham. 

JILL RICHARDSON
‘The Art of the Deal’ was a lie

JOHN YOUNG
Your swamp water is served

BOB BURNETT
‘Christians’ go astray

SETH SANDRONSKY
Worker safety is not assured in US

GREG BAILEY
Trumpian chaos plays out with Missouri’s embattled governor

GENE NICHOL
Pence and taxes

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The greatest health scourge: Religious persecution

SAM URETSKY
Antibiotic resistance: The bugs are gaining on us

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Needed: An elected attorney general and an independent justice department

WAYNE O’LEARY
The mythology of trade

JOHN BUELL
Good jobs in a neoliberal era?

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Life in the wild fracking upper Midwest

ROB PATTERSON
Looming Tower

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Last man standing: Kevin J. from Boise, Idaho

THEATRE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Enter stage left: ARULA’s onstage revolution continues
and more ...

Walking away from Iran treaty is enormous foreign policy mistake. It only helps Saudis & Benjamin Netanyahu

By Marc Jampole

What I wrote last September about decertifying the Iran Nuclear Deal still holds, so rather than recreate the wheel, here it is again:

The sheer stupidity of “decertifying” the nuclear—or should I say “antinuclear”—treaty between the United States, five other nations and Iran beggars the imagination. That an ignorant bully with no experience and a history of failure should propose such an idea is not noteworthy, not if the ignorant bully is Donald Trump. That supposedly patriotic, educated and experienced cabinet officers and advisors are unable to squelch this move in any way possible makes me shudder for the future of this country—and the entire human population.

The decision is bad in every way. It destabilizes the entire world every time another nation gets nuclear weapons, because the entire world would suffer from any nuclear war. The more nations have weapons, the more likely one is going to slip into the hands of a nutcase who might push the big red button. Of course, that seems to have already happened.

The decision also sets back the peace process between Iran and the West, specifically the United States. Why would we want to be enemies with a country with such an educated population and unrivalled natural resources among mid-sized countries and whose thousands of years of history has been one of the major influencers of the European culture upon which America is built? Let’s also remember that Iran wields a lot of influence with insurgent movements around the world. Coming to a lasting, all-inclusive peace with Iran would ease tensions throughout the Muslim world.

Think, too, of the lost opportunity to reduce the need for armed forces. A rapprochement with Iran would enable us to dedicate money a large portion of the billions of dollars now spent on armed forces and counter-terrorism to fixing our infrastructure of mass transit, sewers, roads and bridges and investing in alternative energy.

The key moment in the history of American-Persian relations is a stupid mistake that the United States made in 1953. We were allies and big supporters of Iran in 1953 when the CIA engineered an overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was a secularist who wanted Iran to follow the model of American and European societies. Of course, he did nationalize oil industries, which was the secret reason the United States installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran. Yes, that’s right. Shah! King. Royalty. A dictator who rules by divine right. The system we fought a revolution to change. The United States of America overthrew a democracy to install a dictator not to protect our oil supply, but to protect the interests of certain oil companies. We continued to support the Shah of Iran as opposition to his rule grew and grew through the years until his overthrow in 1979 by ultra-right religious fanatics in what was a relatively bloodless revolution. It was in the immediate aftermath of the revolution that Iranian students took 52 Americans hostages and held them for 444 days.

The hostage crisis wounded America’s pride, leading to the current situation—decades of enmity between the two countries, during which we have embraced Saudi Arabia, a kingdom that oppresses its people and is the home to most of the 9/11 hijackers and the mastermind behind 9/11 and Al Qaeda. We’ve essentially taken sides in a regional religious dispute and selected a side less in tune with our values, all because the other side slapped us around a little after we had helped bludgeon it for 26 years.

The absurdity of not taking a road to pace with Iran will come into stark view if we consider that we have now had an adversarial relationship with it for 38 years, which is 10 years longer than Germany was our enemy in the middle of the 20th century. We essentially forgave Germany for all the death and misery it caused and immediate embraced it after WW II. Of course we beat their asses and they were Christians. When we deal with Iran across the peace negotiating table, we have to treat them as equals.

Usually when an Administration does something that hurts most people, the answer as to why can be found by following the money: who benefits. In this case, it’s primarily the Saudi Arabians and whichever governments, insurgent movements, terrorist groups and oil companies it is supporting. Also benefitting is the government of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Note I write the Israeli government, not the Israel people, who stand to benefit more than anyone else from peace with Iran. But Bibby needs another external enemy. We know Trump is buddy-buddy with both the Saudis and Bibby. It wouldn’t be the first time that crony capitalism has led America to make a bad foreign policy decision.

But in the case of Trump, I have to wonder. Media reports suggest that virtually all White House advisors are telling Trump not to do it and that he is digging in his heels. Why? Is he that much in the pockets of the Saudis?

Or could it be that Trump’s main motivation is to destroy everything done by that black man out of a sense of revenge for being the butt of a few jokes? For a while, I’ve heard and scoffed at the utterly Shakespearean theory that Trump’s hatred of Obama overwhelms all other thoughts and emotions when it comes to government. Trump as Iago or Lady Macbeth. An interesting and theatrical idea, but how could it be? Destabilize global politics? Throw 800,000 people with jobs or going to college out of the country? Walk away from our first real shot at addressing human-caused global warming? All because you dislike some uppity guy because he doesn’t know his place (although I imagine that instead of “black man” and “uppity guy,” Trump uses a different word when thinking about President Obama). Impossible, I thought. But maybe not.

Not that it will help, but we should all be jamming the phone lines and Internet bandwidth with pleas to Trump not to walk away from the Iranian deal and demands to our Senators and Congressional representatives that they announce they will support impeachments proceedings if Trump goes ahead with his plan to “decertify.”

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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