TBR News May 4, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. May 4 2016:” Donald Trump’s victory in the last primary has resulted in a mixed media bag of screaming rage and the kissing of the backside. Trump is feared by the establishment because they see him as potentially overturning their order and diminishing their power and the media, in most cases, is left wing in nature and Trump obviously is not. The Chinese are furious with him because Trump wants to force profit-loving American businesses to disengage in China and move back to the United States. The Mexican government is furious with him because for some time Mexico has been shoving her unwanted and unproductive masses over the border for Americans to take care of and very militant right wing groups in Washington are fearful that Trump will make peace with Putin and deprive certain sectors of American business of the huge sums of money they make arming the military. Here is an example of what the media considers to be a devastating satire on Trump:”
9 Ways Donald Trump Would Be Unlike Any Other Nominee
May 4, 2016
by Nick Corasaniti
New York Times
There has never been a presumptive nominee for a major party quite like Donald J. Trump. Not only is he a newcomer to the world of politics, but he would shatter the mold of party standard-bearer. Mr. Trump, who now appears all but certain to clinch his party’s presidential nomination, would be the first in a range of colorful categories.
First reality TV star to be nominee
Mr. Trump hosted 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” on NBC, drawing millions of viewers to the show and adding to his personal fortune. He claimed in a personal financial disclosure form that he earned more than $213 million over the course of the show, but NBC never confirmed that claim. Whatever the paycheck, the show gave Mr. Trump something money cannot buy: his signature catchphrase, “You’re fired.”_____
First nominee to be inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame
The candidate has his own “superstar” bio on the World Wrestling Entertainment website, which refers to him as a “captivating billionaire,” a “pop culture icon” and “outspoken alpha male.” He has clobbered Vince McMahon with a clothesline move and then forcefully shaved his opponent’s head in the ring. He has been on the receiving end of a neck-wrenching move from Stone Cold Steve Austin, and he has a relationship with the organization that goes back to Andre the Giant. In 2013, he was awarded the highest honor in professional wrestling: an induction into the prestigious Hall of Fame.
First nominee with a supporting role in a Bo Derek movie
In 1989, Mr. Trump played himself in “Ghosts Can’t Do It,” a widely panned movie summed up as an “American romantic crime fantasy comedy film.” The plot involves the main character dying and becoming a ghost, his wife trying to drown a young man so that the deceased husband can inhabit an earthly body again and engage in carnal pleasures again, and so that they can complete a business deal with Mr. Trump (or something like that). The film was a success at the Razzie awards, winning worst picture, worst actress, worst director and worst supporting actor: Mr. Trump.
First nominee to have been divorced twice
In a Republican Party whose evangelical voting base has grown to become a major, influential voice, in particular in the nominating process, Mr. Trump is the first nominee to have been divorced twice. He divorced his first wife, Ivana, a Czech-American model, in 1990, and his second wife, Marla, an actress, in 1999. He married his current wife, Melania, in 2005.
First casino magnate to become a nominee
Presidential candidates tend to be from the upper crust of American society, and often come from the financial sector, law or a career in politics. Mr. Trump’s wealth came from numerous endeavors, but never before has a casino owner with towering properties in Las Vegas, and previously Atlantic City, held the cards of a major party’s nomination.
First nominee to have his own line of steaks, hand towels, chocolates and an airline
Mr. Trump has put his name in big gold letters on commercial goods as varied as rib-eyes and chocolates, something he reminded voters of during a speech in March. He also served Trump wines and water.
First nominee to own a major modeling agency
Mr. Trump is perhaps better known for his involvement in the Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants, but he also founded a modeling agency, Trump Model Management, in 1999. A Jamaican model filed a lawsuit against the company in 2014, but it was thrown out this year.
First to inspire a character in the ‘Back to the Future’ franchise
Before he left the race, Senator Ted Cruz shared a parting thought: “If anyone has seen the movie ‘Back to the Future, Part II,’ the screenwriter says that he based the character Biff Tannen on Donald Trump — a caricature of a braggadocious, arrogant buffoon who builds giant casinos with giant pictures of him wherever he looks.” (It is, indeed, true that Mr. Trump served as inspiration for the character.)
First to inspire a ‘Sesame Street’ character
A grouch with a flamboyant hairstyle and the catchphrase “I have more trash than all of you,” Donald Grump arrived on “Sesame Street” in 2005 looking for an apprentice, or as he put it in a thicker New York accent than Mr. Trump’s, a “helpah.” He continually needles and belittles those seeking to be his “helpah,” showering them with “nyahs,” and he brags about his wealth. Nonetheless, the other characters are entranced with Mr. Grump. As Oscar the Grouch glows, “His name is on every piece of trash in town.”
Conversations with the Crow
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever
After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.
Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversations with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped and later transcribed them.
These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt:
Conversation No. 111
Date: Saturday, November 22, 1997
Commenced: 1:55 PM CST
Concluded: 2:38 PM CST
GD: Good afternoon, Robert. A fateful date today, isn’t it?
RTC: What date? One tends to lost time when one gets old.
GD: You aren’t talking to dead relatives, are you?
RTC: Not yet but maybe next week. Oh my, yes, the Kennedy business. Why who could forget that date?
GD: Not in our lifetime, Robert. What a classic example of control of public opinion and such a commentary on the secret government.
RTC: There has always been a secret government, Gregory, even in the reign of George Washington.
GD: Well, you seem to have convinced the masses that Kennedy was offed by a lone lunatic or the Mafia. The masses are made up of twits who either are too stupid to grasp anything or who are obsessed with their own self-important observations. Yes, the lone nut did it or the Mafia…don’t forget the Jew Meyer Lansky either…let’s hear it for the anti-Semites while we’re at it. And all along, Robert, I have been talking to the CIA’s main man.
RTC: There were others, Gregory, a number of others. Well, there was the DSI for one. And Lyndon Johnson, for another, although he only knew what he needed to know. And Hoover and some his sweethearts. Who else? Well, the Pentagon people, or at least some of them. And Naval Intelligence, the NSG people, Colonel Cass, a few of our inner circle. All of these to be certain and many, many more in the game guessed but didn’t actually know.
GD: But if so many knew, why haven’t any of them blabbed? Maybe to a wife, a friend, a shrink, a priest or someone else?
RTC: If they did, they would join the long list of those who died as a result of either knowing too much and possibly talking or making the wrong guesses. It goes back to the invasion of Cuba we planned back just before Kennedy got into office. Eisenhower approved this and a few other nasty pieces of business. You see, the Army was planning to do an operation in which their people mocked attacks on the United States, allegedly from Cuban sources, thus giving Ike a casus belli. But this never came to pass and we all thought Kennedy was the sex-obsessed son of a rich bootlegger who was put into office with his father’s money and mob connections.
GD: You mean the Bay of Pigs? I always thought that was when a congregation of fat women went swimming off Monterey. Raised the sea levels in the neighborhood and got a pod of male whales sexually aroused.
RTC: (Laughter) Unkind. Yes, that plan. A handful of our Cuban refugee trainees invaded, established a beach head and then called for eagerly waiting U.S. airstrikes and a naval blockade in aid of the heroic rebels. It would have worked but Kennedy deliberately wrecked it. He was told and we did not know he did not approve. The usual practice was just to slip these actions into the PDBs and slide right over them. Other Presidents just nodded and paid no attention to any of it. There is an art to such presentations, believe me. Fast talk, papers shown, charts displayed, more smooth talk and the befuddled President nods and tries to look serious. You see, we have wonderful connections with the mob, who wanted Castro out because he had tossed them out, away from the huge money they made in the crooked casinos in Havana. That was their main gripe. And they got Kennedy elected, don’t forget, and they expected pay back for giving him Chicago where the dead voted early and often as my father used to say. That was the Mafia. And when Ike talked about the military/industrial complex, we can think about Alcoa whose Cuban plant was shut down by Castro and the military, mostly the Army I must say, who was on a growth program and loved the thought of a close and safe little war. More troops, more bases, more money from Congress, more power. Yes, the military, business interests and the mob. Our people knew them all and we were all friendly with them. We all had common interests.
GD: The FBI?
RTC: Hoover was a self-important little dictator, given his proclivities, a real bitch in men’s clothes. He was also over the line…
GD: Pardon?
RTC: The color line. Hoover was part black. Onward here. Many very powerful groups were not happy with Kennedy. We felt he could be manipulated by shoving a few pretty cunts in his face and leave the governing to us. After all, we had been running the country since Franklin the First bought the farm. But Kennedy turned out to be a lot tougher than we reckoned on. He backed off on the Pigs plan and they were either killed by Castro or put in nasty jails. Very angry people. And the Cubans in this country were the worst of all so we took note of their fury and used them.
GD: And the military?
RTC: Well, in ’61, they wanted to send troops to Laos and eventually to French Indo China. The frogs wanted us to protect their interest there, mostly the rubber plantations and the possibility of rich offshore oil deposits. We agreed to assist and then they became great friends with us in Europe. No, Kennedy refused to go along with this, at least in the beginning, and nixed sending troops to Laos. He was convinced to send some token forces to Viet Nam but later balked at increasing their number as the locals rebelled. We stood to lose a good deal in that country. Both money and face. We put the Diems into power and they were making trouble at one end and Kennedy, by his stupid idealism, was making trouble on the other. I was in charge of most of the ‘Nam business at work and I came to the unspoken conclusion that we could not win a guerrilla war there, especially when the Russians were arming the Cong. It was obvious that even ten million troops could not keep the lid on there for long but who was going to bell that cat? Not Johnson who might have been a great power broker with Congress but who was useless as tits on a boar pig when it came to military ventures. Those of us who could see into the future, based on the present, knew it was an unwinnable situation but no one dared to make a move towards disengagement.
GD: Not to change the subject but your people put Castro in, didn’t you?
RTC: How clever, Gregory. Of course this happened. You see, the Company is so heavily compartmented that the right hand never knows what the left hand doeth. Yes, one of our sub-groups put him in, thinking he would clean up the really bad corruption…drugs and so on…and we could control that situation. Bad judgment there, Gregory but we close ranks and silence is golden. But the unforgivable sin as far as Kennedy was concerned was his going around us and establishing a personal contact with Nikita Khrushchev. Not done. All Presidents had to use us as firewalls or contacts. Presidents had to rely on us for their information and what would come of it if they dealt directly with some hostile head of state? This would erode our power and essentially relegate the CIA to being mere messengers. The power? As keepers of the flame, others had to bow to our power but if we lost that power, all of us would be back on the chicken farm. That was the final straw, believe me. And before that, don’t forget, Kennedy was not going to do the Army’s bidding and escalate the local anti-guerrilla campaign in Vietnam. The Army was planning on a massive expansion. There would be contracts with the private sectors that would enrich the men with stars on their shoulders and more jobs for their friends and more bases and so on. No, they wanted a controlled war there, way away from the continental United States. They, through us, could control the incoming news and so on but by not performing as he was expected, Kennedy drew the black spot. Either death or some other kind of removal. And I can recall that when Hoover learned of our house cleaning project, he jumped on board with the caveat that we also get rid of Bobby. John hated Bobby…
GD: John?
RTC: Yes, Colonel John Edgar. Franklin made him a Colonel but Hoover was pissed off that he wasn’t made a general at least so he never used the title but it was there. Anyway, we had no problem with Hoover because Bobby was telling his staff that Hoover was a fairy and John Edgar didn’t like that and when Bobby dig into Hoover’s past and discovered relatives as black as the ace of spades, he got livid with rage. The Kennedy family were living in a dream world their father had convinced them was real. Power can come from money, Gregory, but power has to include working with others who also have power. Dictators cannot function with powerful barons too close. Either kill them or replace them with ciphers. No other choice. So in a sense, Kennedy was going from bad to worse and plots were being hatched all over the place during the last year of his reign. We were certainly determined to stop him from breaking the CIA up and the Army was determined to have its profitable war and then there were the business people and the Mafia in the wings. Killing a sitting President is never easy and one has to move with great care in such matters. Too much talking at the wrong time and in the wrong place can wreck even the most ambitious plans. We knew what had to be done and the opening gambits were to secure the agreement of other power brokers. We got Johnson on board through the good offices of Abe Fortis who would have sold the rotting corpse of his dead mother to the dog food people if they paid him enough. LBJ was a pill in the box in that he had some knowledge and lusted for the Oval Office. And again, Bobby was an irritant by calling him ‘Uncle Cornpone’ all over the Beltway. Johnson was used to power and did not like being ignored and marginalized so he smiled and kept quiet. And we certainly had Hoover and some of the top people in the Pentagon, the full support of the mob and a few other necessary organizations. The Mafia could get their gambling hells back again and a promise of a dead Bobby who was having his fun persecuting the very people who put his brother in the Oval Office.
GD: Ungrateful.
RTC: Yes, indeed, very. We all need friends, Gregory, and deliberately harassing the Mafia in Chicago was very, very unwise. I point out that Jack Ruby was one of their enforcers there. Dare I say more?
GD: No, I don’t think so at this point.
RTC: Not at any point. And then having such wonderful people as the goat-loving Dr. Gottleib on the staff made it easy to give Ruby fatal cancer. Injecting active cancer cells during a routine jailhouse medical examination is the best way. A natural and unsuspicious death. Of course we could have easily given Jack a heart attack but cancer is more believable, especially in the hothouse atmosphere of post-assassination madness.
GD: How many of the loonies were yours?
RTC: God, without number. The Farrell woman is our best. She controls the library and she belongs totally to us. Oh yes, we started all kinds of confusing and idiotic stories and kept most people away. You read ‘Case Closed’ didn’t you. My, Herr Posner just loved and really believed the Warren Report, didn’t he? And the New York Times couldn’t wait to praise the hell out of that piece of crap and make Gerald rich. That’s how it’s done in a nutshell, Gregory, in a nutshell. I talked with the Times people myself and they were panting and eager to praise this to the skies. Just an example of how we work but we have gone over most of this before.
GD: If I felt pity for anyone in all of this, it was for Oswald.
RTC: In a larger sense, yes. A loyal intelligence operator set up as patsy and then iced before he could tell what he knew. And then we got rid of Ruby and that was that. Howard Hunt was involved in some of this and we had to kill his wife to keep him from shooting off his mouth when he got in trouble. An endless circle of betrayal and death, Gregory, but that’s how the game goes.
(Concluded at 2:38 PM CST)
Donald Trump’s path to Republican nomination clear as Ted Cruz quits
Texas senator quits presidential race after losing to Donald Trump in Indiana, while Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton
Bernie Sanders pulls off shock victory in Indiana Democratic primary
May 4, 2016
by Ben Jacobs in Indianapolis, Dan Roberts in Washington and Ed Pilkington in New York
The Guardian
Ted Cruz suspended his US presidential campaign on Tuesday after a crushing defeat in Indiana’s primary, leaving the way clear for Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee.
The Texas senator was the last remaining competitor to Trump with a clear shot at the nomination. However, after staking his campaign on a win in Indiana, Cruz suffered an overwhelming loss in the Hoosier State.
In an inclusive victory speech in which he tried to heal some of the open wounds of the past year and begin the long and very difficult process of unifying the party, Trump had kind words for his vanquished rival.
“I don’t know if he likes me or doesn’t like me,” Trump said. “But he is one hell of a competitor. He has an amazing future.”
In the Democratic race, Bernie Sanders pulled off a shock victory, beating Hillary Clinton by 52.5% to 47.5%, with 97.9% reporting.
“The Clinton campaign thinks this campaign is over,” he said. “They’re wrong.”
Cruz leaves the Republican race having won 565 delegates and 11 states, including the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses in January. Despite successfully building a strong base among evangelicals and social conservatives, he was unable to expand his following and to pivot to the unpredictable Trump, who repeatedly bashed him as “Lyin’ Ted”.
In an emotional address, Cruz told a room of supporters in Indianapolis: “From the beginning I’ve said I will continue on as long as there is a viable path to victory – tonight I am sorry to say it appears that math has been foreclosed.”
As the crowd shouted “no, no,” Cruz told attendees: “Together we left it out on the field. We gave it everything we got. But the voters chose another path, and so with a heavy heart but with boundless optimism for the long-term future of our nation we are suspending our campaign.”
Cruz repeatedly referenced his idol Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful attempt to wrest the Republican nomination from Gerald Ford in 1976, ending by promising: “There is no substitute for the America we will restore as the shining city on the hill for generations to come,” a reference to Reagan’s farewell address.
The Republican party elite, which has battled over the prospect of a Trump nomination, began to rally round him. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, declared that Trump was the “presumptive nominee” and called on supporters to unite against Hillary Clinton.
Cruz’s exit leaves John Kasich the only remaining candidate in the race against Trump. In a statement, the Ohio governor’s chief strategist, John Weaver, told the Guardian: “The senator ran on strong conservative principles and his views are part of the broad Republican party. Donald Trump’s mad hatter ramblings are outside the conservative reform movement and we will continue onward to deny him the nomination.”
Kasich did not compete in Indiana as a result of a pact with Cruz and has so far only won his home state of Ohio. In a memo sent out earlier Tuesday night, Kasich vowed to stay in “unless a candidate reaches 1,237 bound delegates before the convention”.
Victory speech
Trump celebrated victory at his looming Fifth Avenue tower in New York, marking the seminal moment in which he was transformed from a maverick and implausible candidate into presumptive Republican nominee.
He delivered his victory speech from a podium poignantly positioned just in front of the escalator in his midtown Manhattan skyscraper where he had launched his unlikely bid for the White House 10 months ago.
Trump effectively takes the nomination with a personal rating among voters stuck in the doldrums, with 67% of Americans thinking of him unfavorably. That makes him the least well-regarded presidential nominee of either main party since at least 1984 – and the hostility shown towards him by leaders of the Republican party is unprecedented.
But none of those hard facts appeared to take any shine off Trump’s moment of victory. “We want to bring unity to the Republican party. We have to bring unity,” he said.
Trump glossed over his terrible poll ratings among female voters by saying: “Women. I love winning with women.” He similarly shrugged off similar evidence of the major problem he faces with Hispanic voters and African Americans.
“We are going to win, we are going to win in November. And we are going to win big,” he said.
Recognizing the shift in gear that faces the Trump campaign, he put a marker in the sand. “Now we are going after Hillary Clinton,” Trump said. “She will not be a great president, she will not be a good president, she will be a poor president.”
He indicated that he intended to go after Clinton on the issue of trade and the loss of American jobs to foreign countries. “She doesn’t understand trade and her husband signed perhaps in the history of the world the single worst trade deal, Nafta.”
He also highlighted Clinton’s comments on the coal industry and the need to restrict it in the fight against climate change. “Hillary Clinton talked about the miners as though they were just numbers, and she said she wanted the mines closed and she would never let them work again. Let me tell you, the mines are going to start to work again.”
The Sanders campaign hopes his victory in Indiana will mark one last turning point in a Democratic race characterised by a series of surprise comebacks that have prolonged Clinton’s otherwise relentless path toward the nomination.
He is well placed to pull off similar wins in West Virginia on 10 May and Oregon on 17 May, before a final showdown next month in California, whose 546 delegates present the biggest prize of the contest.
But even though Sanders has pledged to keep competing until the party convention in Philadelphia this July, he has acknowledged that catching up with Clinton is an “uphill struggle”.
Before Indiana, the former secretary of state was nearly 300 pledged delegates ahead of her Vermont rival and within 200 delegates of crossing the finish line including the controversial superdelegates – party figures who are able to vote independently of election results and overwhelmingly back Clinton.
Nonetheless, the Sanders team will view the Indiana result as an important vindication of their decision to keep pressuring superdelegates to change their minds.
‘Abyss’
Trump’s victory in Indiana ended the best hope of blocking a presidential nomination Cruz had claimed will plunge America into the political “abyss”.
The Texas senator’s decision to drop out had been the subject of debate with the campaign but some Cruz aides urging that he still had a better chance of being the nominee after his loss in Indiana than he did when he declared in March.
Then Cruz was considered a conservative gadfly who would have to claw and fight rivals to be the favorite among even his Tea Party base but Cruz fended off rival after rival to win the Iowa caucuses and become the conservative standard-bearer in the field.
Despite a day of dire warnings from Cruz, Trump was declared victor by the Associated Press within seconds of polls closing.
Cruz, whose campaign had built a formidable grassroots operation, with volunteers knocking on 70,000 doors in Indiana in the three days before the primary and making 100,000 calls on the day before the election, but it was all for naught. As one top aide said of the campaign as a whole: “Sometimes you can make all the right moves and still lose.”
With 97.9% reporting, Trump had won 53.3% of the vote in Indiana, with Cruz getting 36.6% and Kasich 7.6%. Trump now has 1,047 pledged delegates as well, of the 1,237 he needs to be the party’s nominee.
Trump now looks almost certain to inherit a party he has left bitterly divided through a brand of politics defined by innuendo, race-baiting and outright demagoguery.
His latest sally came in a telephone interview with Fox News on Tuesday, in which the Republican frontrunner alleged that Cruz’s father, Rafael, had met with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination of John F Kennedy and implied that Rafael Cruz was somehow involved.
Cruz attacks Trump for linking his father to JFK assassination
Trump had previously threatened to “spill the beans” about Cruz’s wife and has spread a variety of clearly false stories, starting from his June announcement speech that Mexico was deliberately sending rapists into the US and including the repeated claim that American general John Pershing committed war crimes in the Philippines. The latter story appears to have originated via an internet hoax spread by email.
Cruz’s campaign-ending loss in Indiana came after a significant investment of resources by anti-Trump forces in the state. Cruz and anti-Trump Super Pacs spent $6m in the state on television advertising while Trump spent less than a million.
Further, in a vain attempt for a boost in the Hoosier State, Cruz unveiled former rival Carly Fiorina as his running mate if he receives the nomination and was able to cajole the state’s sitting governor, Mike Pence, into an endorsement. In contrast, Trump was endorsed in the state by a number of prominent former college basketball coaches, led by legendary Indiana University coach Bobby Knight.
With his loss on Tuesday night, Cruz had not won a primary election for over a month since his 5 April win in Wisconsin. Despite Cruz doing well in delegate selection contests in Colorado and Wyoming, Trump won seven consecutive primaries and over 200 delegates over the last two weeks.
Earlier, Trump had called for Cruz to drop out of the race in a tweet: “Lyin’ Ted Cruz consistently said that he will, and must, win Indiana. If he doesn’t he should drop out of the race-stop wasting time & money.”
Cruz took his advice.
Nationalists on course for another Scottish victory
The Scottish Nationalist Party is on course to secure an unprecedented third term in Thursday’s polls. As Peter Geoghegan reports from Glasgow, that makes a second independence referendum very likely
May 4, 2016
DW
Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde – better known as Faslane – is one of Britain’s most unexpected sights. Two miles of double razor-wire fences, sentry posts, and watchtowers framed by rolling green Scottish fields and azure Highland sea lochs. Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, is less than an hour’s drive away.
Faslane is home to the biggest political football in Scotland: the Trident nuclear submarines. The renewal of the UK’s nuclear deterrent is expected to be rubberstamped by the Commons in London later this year, but many Scots are opposed.
And, as Scotland goes to the polls in Thursday’s elections to the devolved parliament in Edinburgh, Trident is once again on the political agenda.
The ruling Scottish National Party, who are widely expected to win a majority of the seats in the Scottish Parliament, is firmly against Trident. “I am opposed to nuclear weapons,” says Gail Robertson, SNP candidate in Dumbarton, the constituency that takes in the navel base. “I don’t see the economic benefit that some see there is from Trident.”
That Robertson is on course to take the seat speaks volumes for the changes in Scottish politics since the 2014 independence referendum. The area around the Faslane navel base was firmly against leaving the United Kingdom, in large part due to fears for the future of the estimated 6,500 workers at the navel base. Now the constituency is set to return a Scottish nationalist for the very first time.
“More and more people are starting to recognize that the area does not benefit from Trident as much as people think,” Robertson tells DW when we meet in her office in a former cheque cashing shop. A photograph above the door features the beaming candidate beside the SNP’s popular leader Nicola Sturgeon.
SNP on a roll
Sturgeon’s party is currently polling around 50 percent, more than enough to secure a majority and an unprecedented third consecutive term in government at the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh. Such has been the nationalists’ dominance that the campaign has been a muted affair, with more debate about whether Labour or the Conservatives will finish second than the overall outcome.
The main reason for the SNP’s supremacy is the independence referendum that radically re-shaped Scottish politics, says commentator Iain MacWhirter. “Most Scots now believe the country is destined to be independent – it has become the ‘new normal’ – even if they can’t quite see the mechanism through which this will happen.”
Meanwhile, the SNP is firmly ensconced as the party of government. “For most Scots a vote for the SNP is now almost above politics; it’s a vote for being Scottish. Nicola Sturgeon seems to embody this renewed Scottish identity: smart, presentable, leftish, unapologetic, Scottish without-making-a-thing-of-it,” MacWhirter tells DW.
Labour woes
Labour, long the dominant party in Scottish politics, is struggling to adapt. Recently elected leader Kezia Dugdale has pledged to increase taxes to fund public services – a move seen by many as an attempt to erode the SNP’s left-wing support – but is struggling to gain much traction in the polls.
When it comes to Faslane, Scottish Labour has reversed its former support for the renewal of Trident. But the local Labour member of the Scottish Parliament remains committed to the nuclear weapons system and has said she will vote against her party.
The Conservatives, however, are unapologetically pro-union, and pro-Faslane. “The naval base brings prosperity to the town,” says Tory-supporter Roddy MacKenzie. “Virtually everyone in the town benefits from the base. The nationalists have their blinkers on if they think it would be fine if it went.”
While backing for Trident remains strong around the naval base, the independence referendum changed how local people view a nuclear weapons, says Veronika Tudhope, a Scottish Greens list candidate for the West of Scotland. “Awareness of the base really increased during the referendum,” she told DW. “People now talk about it far more openly, even if they support Trident.”
The only realistic prospect for removing Trident from Scotland is the break-up of the UK. Despite the SNP’s strength in the polls, a majority of Scots remain supporters of the three-centuries-old union with England.
Referendum rears its head – again
Nevertheless, the question of a second independence referendum has featured heavily in the latter stages of the election campaign. For the first time, the SNP manifesto does not include an explicit commitment to hold a referendum on leaving the UK, instead stating that the Scottish Parliament should have “the right” to hold another vote if there is “clear and sustained evidence” of a majority in favor of independence.
Asked by a Sunday newspaper last weekend whether she thought there would be a second referendum during her time in office, Nicola Sturgeon replied. “If you’re asking me, do I think its more likely than not? Yes.”
But another vote on leaving the UK is highly unlikely in the course of the next Scottish Parliament, says David Torrance, author of a biography of Nicola Sturgeon.
“Sturgeon doesn’t seem terribly keen on having one, and it’s up to her at the end of the day. The key moment seems to be 2020/21 with the 2021 Holyrood [Scottish parliament – the ed.] election providing a clear mandate for a second referendum, although that of course is risky,” he told DW.
What Is the US Military Doing in the Baltics?
Get out – before we start World War III
May 4, 2016
by Justin Raimondo
AntiWar
Get ready for the new cold war, which will no doubt turn hot if Hillary Clinton gets into the White House: NATO has just announced it is “considering” the addition of 4,000 more troops to be stationed in Poland and the Baltic states, i.e. right on Russia’s western border. The Washington Post helpfully informs us that this is being done “to deter future Russian aggression” – as if there’s any real possibility that Putin will order the Russian army to take Warsaw or march on Estonia.
What this is is another NATO provocation aimed at showing Putin who’s really in charge in the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. They’re hoping the Russian leader will respond in kind. But he’s too smart for that: instead, Putin will retaliate in a different theater, perhaps in Syria or Armenia, where the fight with Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh is in full swing.
This latest move will bring the number of NATO troops staring at the Russkies across their western border to nearly 10,000, if we take into account the “Very High Readiness Joint Task Force” previously mobilized and the US troops already in Ukraine.
Imagine the outcry if 10,000 Russian soldiers suddenly arrived on the Rio Grande! Or in Cuba – we’d be witnessing a replay of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The US and Russia are coming dangerously close to an outright conflict: there have been two recent incidents. One where a Russian plane buzzed an American warship patrolling Baltic waters, and the other where a Russian jet intercepted a US reconnaissance plane headed at high speed for Russian airspace.
The buzzing of the warship was a foolish move on the part of the Russians, but even more foolish was the warning from John Kerry, who intoned: “Under the rules of engagement, that could have been a shoot-down, so people need to understand that this is serious business.” That’s nonsense: is any US commander going to issue orders to shoot down a Russian plane that is clearly not attacking? Of course not – unless that commander happens to be Gen. Wesley Clark, who has thankfully retired.
NATO is launching “Operation Atlantic Resolve,” which pours US arms into Europe: aircraft, tanks, and artillery are flowing into the region. Can the Russians be expected to stand idly by while the NATO alliance prepares for war?
Asked how the US should respond to Russian fly-bys, GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, in his usual contradictory and semi-coherent way, underscored both the stupidity of US policy and his own incoherence:
“Normally, an Obama, let’s say a president, because you want to make at least a call or two, but normally Obama would call up Putin and say, ‘Listen, do us a favor, don’t do that, get that maniac, just stop it.’ But we don’t have that kind of a president. He’s gonna be out playing golf or something.
“But I don’t know, at a certain point, you can’t take it. I mean, at a certain point, you have to do something that, you just can’t take that. That is not right. It’s against all, you know, when you talk about Geneva convention, there’s gotta be things that are against it. You can’t do that. That’s called taunting. But it should certainly start with diplomacy and it should start quickly with a phone call to Putin, wouldn’t you think?
“And if that doesn’t work out, I don’t know, you know, at a certain point, when that sucker comes by you, you gotta shoot. You gotta shoot. I mean, you gotta shoot. And it’s a shame. It’s a shame. It’s a total lack of respect for our country and it’s a total lack of respect for Obama. Which as you know, they don’t respect.”
So – which is it? Diplomacy, or “you gotta shoot”? With Trump, there’s no real way to know.
And that’s the whole problem with this nationalist impulse – it’s an impulse, insofar as Trump is concerned, and not a coherent ideology – it could go either way. Because on the other hand, Trump has repeatedly said he would make a real effort to “get along” with Putin: he has consistently stated his opposition to starting a new cold war with Russia. In Syria, Trump wants to let the Russians have a go at ISIS, which he sees as preferable to having us send in our own ground forces. And if we take his goal of détente with the Russians seriously, then under a Trump administration why would US warships and planes be in the Baltics anyway? In order to support NATO, which Trump says is “very obsolete”?
US relations with Russia are at an all-time post-cold war low. And there really is no reason why that should be so. We have vital strategic interests that are complementary to Russia’s – Washington and Moscow are fighting a worldwide Islamist insurgency that has visited terrorism on both countries. It is only our Bush era neoconservative foreign policy that has made Moscow out to be an enemy, and Trumpism is supposed to be breaking with all that.
And yet it will be hard, even if Trump does make it to the White House, to completely ditch the old GOP foreign policy orthodoxy, which will continually reassert itself in spite of everything: there’s too much money and prestige at stake, not to mention sheer force of habit.
America’s face-off with Russia is the most dangerous emerging conflict of them all: it augurs not only a new cold war, but a potentially very hot one in which nuclear weapons are the ultimate card. The US is now engaged in a very dangerous arms race with the Kremlin, in which the Obama administration is undertaking to “modernize” our nuclear weapons stockpile. It is dangerous because, a) nukes are inherently dangerous, and b) because “modernization” means miniaturization, a development that makes actually using nukes “thinkable” for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We don’t want to go down that road.
The very existence of the NATO alliance means that we have set up any number of tripwires that could end in a nuclear exchange. Not only on Russia’s eastern frontier, but on it’s southern flank, where our NATO ally Turkey has already shot down one Russian plane and is likely gunning for more. Recep Erdogan is an irrational despot who is seeking to stifle trouble at home – and no doubt looks forward to a conflict with Russia as a way to provoke a nationalist upsurge that would shore up his increasingly authoritarian regime.
Do we really want to risk war with Russia for Erdogan’s sake?
And then there’s Ukraine, where US “soft power” gave a hard kick and deposed the elected President: they’ve been a basket case ever since. Not only that, but they’ve been an obstreperous basket case, stubbornly refusing to rein in either their corrupt economic arrangements or their inclination to simply stamp out internal opposition. The West is in a lather because the authorities just banned the most popular television journalist in the country, but we didn’t hear a peep out of these guys when the Kiev regime first began cracking down on journalists like Ruslan Kotsaba, who is still in jail for making a video opposing Ukraine’s conscription law.
As I warned a year ago, Ukraine’s government has fallen into the hands of extreme nationalists who are out to turn the country into a dictatorship. The presence of neo-Nazis in the Kiev government signaled the rise of the Ukrainian ultra-right as a force to be reckoned with, and my prediction is coming all too true: the ascension of Andriy Parubiy, founder of the “Social Nationalist” Party of Ukraine – renamed Svoboda (“Freedom”) – to the post of Speaker of Parliament, and the resignation of the “moderate” Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, shows what direction the country is headed.
That US troops are currently in Ukraine training and advising the army of a proto-fascist government – including the explicitly neo-Nazi Azov Brigade and others like it – is a moral obscenity. Yet this is where the launching of a new cold war against Russia has led us.
What is needed is a new US policy in the region, one that extends the hand of friendship to Russia, cuts off our free-riding European “allies” who refuse to pay their fair share of NATO’s costs, and puts American interests first. Turkey must be reined in, and given an ultimatum: stop supporting terrorism in Syria, lay off the Russians, and give up dreams of a “Greater Turkey” that endanger the peace and do nothing to help ordinary Turks live a decent life.
NATO is an alliance that has long since outlived whatever usefulness it may once have had. It is time to pull up this tripwire and tell the nations of Europe: you’re on your own! Trump says NATO is “obsolete,” but it’s far worse than that: it’s a danger to the peace of the world. The US should leave forthwith.
The last thing on earth we need is another cold war with the Russians: we’re $21 trillion in debt, and beset by enemies who want to destroy us right here on our home turf: the last time we won a decisive victory in war was when Eisenhower reached the Elbe.
It’s time for America to come home – to repair our decaying infrastructure, take care of our pressing social problems, and rebuild a nation deteriorating in every possible way.
Russia to form 3 new divisions to counter NATO buildup
May 4, 2016
RT
Russia is to deploy two new divisions in the west and one in the south to counterbalance NATO’s increased military presence near Russian borders, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced.
“The Defense Ministry is taking a number of measures to respond to the NATO military buildup at the Russian border,” Shoigu said on Wednesday. “Before the year’s end two new divisions will be formed in the Western Military District and one in the Southern Military District.”
Earlier there were reports in the Russian media that three new divisions with 10,000 troops each may be deployed in Rostov-on-Don, the Smolensk Region and the Voronezh Region.
NATO has been sending additional forces to Poland, the Baltic States and elsewhere near Russian borders since 2014. It claimed that the deployments were necessary to build confidence of Eastern European members in the face of “Russian aggression.”
The perceived aggression was exemplified by the example of Crimea, which seceded from Ukraine after a coup in Kiev. The former Ukrainian region voted in a referendum to join Russia, which was described as an illegal annexation through military force by the new government in Kiev and its foreign allies.
Moscow rejected the reasoning and said that the alliance was using the political crisis in Ukraine to justify its existence by playing the old Russia scaremongering card.
During a top-level meeting at the ministry, Shoigu also said that Russia has rapped-up military training and production of advanced military hardware in response to the NATO threat.
Russia warns of retaliation if NATO makes more deployments in Eastern Europe
May 4, 2016
by Dmitry Solovyov and Lidia Kelly
Reuters
MOSCOW-Russia will take retaliatory measures if NATO deploys four extra battalions in Poland and the Baltic states and it will reinforce its western and southern flanks with three new divisions by the year-end anyway, officials said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said on Monday that NATO was weighing up rotating four battalions of troops through eastern member states amid rising tension in the Baltic.
Russia has scrambled jets to intercept U.S. reconnaissance planes in recent weeks and made simulated attack passes near a U.S. warship in the Baltic Sea.
Andrei Kelin, a department head at Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said on Wednesday that the proposed NATO deployment spoken of by Carter was a source of concern for Moscow.
“This would be a very dangerous build-up of armed forces pretty close to our borders,” Kelin told the Interfax news agency.
“I am afraid this would require certain retaliatory measures, which the Russian Defence Ministry is already talking about.”
Russia announced in January it would create three new military divisions and bring five new strategic nuclear missile regiments into service.
On Wednesday, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the new divisions would be formed by the end of this year and were being created to counter what Moscow saw as NATO’s growing strength.
Russian media, citing unnamed military sources, said the new divisions would most likely be motorized rifle ones and number around 10,000 soldiers each.
“The Ministry of Defence has adopted a series of measures to counter the growing capacity of NATO forces in close proximity to the Russian borders,” Shoigu said in televised comments.
The new divisions are likely to be deployed in military districts close to Russia’s borders with Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and Finland as well as Georgia and Azerbaijan.
Russia has reacted angrily to NATO’s increased military presence in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and to military exercises close to its borders.
But its own actions, particularly its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, have sparked anxiety in the region and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania asked the alliance to expand its presence on their soil as a deterrent.
The Kremlin strongly denies having any intention to attack the Baltic countries, but has often said it feels they have become an aggressive “russophobic kernel” pushing NATO toward a consistently anti-Russian course.
(Additional reporting by Jack Stubbs; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
China’s military appeals to younger generation with ‘kill, kill, kill’ video
Three-minute recruitment film features aircraft carriers, tanks and fighter jets, set to a soundtrack warning that ‘war can break out at any time’
May 4, 2016
The Guardian
China’s military is appealing to the younger generation with a slick new recruitment video featuring aircraft carriers, rocket launchers, tanks and fighter jets, all set to a rousing rap-rock soundtrack.
With lyrics such as “just waiting for the order to kill, kill, kill”, the video appears aimed at millennials brought up on first-person shooter video games such as Call of Duty. While no potential opponents are identified in the clip, it cautions that “war can break out at any time” and asks “are you ready?”
At one point in the three-minute film, a man brandishing an AK-47 is shot in the head.The video, available on Wednesday via a link on the defence ministry’s official website, appears as the 2.3 million-member People’s Liberation Army is downsizing in an effort to boost its war-fighting capabilities. Chief among those steps is a cut of 300,000 personnel, while the navy, missile corps and air force are receiving more attention and funding.
The video presents an image of the PLA as a hi-tech and high-powered force. While catering to traditional patriotic sentiments, it heavily emphasises the advances made by the world’s largest standing military as it takes on missions further afield.
China’s sole aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, is featured prominently, as are latest generation tanks, warplanes, attack helicopters and ballistic missiles that were showcased in a massive military parade through the heart of Beijing in September.
“Ambassadors of peace, we are the guardians of China. Ambassadors of power, we are the tiger’s teeth,” said some of the lyrics.
It ends with a shot of a soldier passionately planting a Chinese flag into a patch of presumably foreign soil.
Traditionally focused on land-based threats and China’s threat to invade Taiwan, the PLA has taken on increasingly complex tasks, including long-range aerial patrols in the East China Sea, an anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden and defending Beijing’s maritime claims in the South China Sea.
Associated Press contributed to this report
Beyond Schadenfreude, the Spectacular Pundit Failure on Trump is Worth Remembering
May 4 2016
by Glenn Greenwald, Zaid Jilani
The Intercept
Trying to predict the future can be fun, which is why – from office sports pools to stock market speculation – many do it. Generally, though, people make such predictions with at least some humility: with the knowledge that they do not actually know what the future holds.
But not America’s beloved political pundits. When they pronounce what the future has in store for us, it comes in the form of definitive decrees, shaped with the tone of authoritative certainty. With a few exceptions, those who purported to see the future of the 2016 GOP nomination process spent many months categorically assuring everyone that, polls notwithstanding, Donald Trump simply could not, would not, become the GOP nominee; one could spend all day posting humiliating examples, so a representative sampling will have to suffice:
By itself, the intense schadenfreude makes it genuinely hard to get oneself to stop posting these (there were at least a dozen others gathered by Twitter commentators such as @blippoblappo – excellent all – that we forced ourselves to omit). But if one can tear oneself away from the sheer joy of wallowing in this festival of fantastic failure, there are several substantive points worth making:
First, ponder the vast amount of journalistic energies and resources devoted to trying to predict election outcomes. What value does that serve anyone? The elections are going to be held and the outcome will be known once the votes are counted. Why would journalists decide that it’s important for the public to hear their guesses about who will win and lose? One can, I suppose, recognize the value of having a couple of outlets with actual statistical experts offering empirical-based analysis of polling data (although Nate Silver’s 538 fared no better when it came to Trump, putting his chances in August of winning the nomination at between 2% and -10%), but why do so many political pundits feel a need to spend so much time pronouncing which candidates will or won’t win?
I asked that question this morning and Matt Yglesias of Vox – which offered lots of definitive pronouncements about the 2016 campaign, many hideously wrong – replied: “(a) it’s fun to try (b) people like to read it.” Both of those claims are probably true (I’d add: election predictions are incredibly easy to spout). But that only answers the question of why so many journalists do it, not what the journalistic value is.
There seems to be none, accompanied by at least two significant harms: (1) these predictions create narratives about winners and losers, thus covertly trying to dictate election outcomes under the guise of “predicting” them; and (2) there’s an opportunity cost to all journalistic choices: flooding the zone with horserace chatter means less time, energy and resources for substantive coverage.
Second, any pundit who issued such definitive, hubristic certainties – that turned out to be totally, fundamentally wrong – owes some self-accounting and a serious self-analysis about how and why they went so wrong. To their credit, some – such as Silver and Brooks – have started to do that, but many of them have done little beyond cursory acknowledgements of error, if that. If they really believe that there’s some sort of value in issuing these prognostications, then there must be even more value in exploring what they failed to comprehend – especially since they would undoubtedly expect credit as visionaries and oracles if they had been right.
Third, there are – and I’m far from the first one to note this – some serious problems in political journalism reflected by this insistent, pervasive belief that Trump could not possibly win (the belief that Clinton would waltz to the nomination without any serious challenge reflects a similar problem). Influential journalists live much different lives from the mass of voters on whose behalf they think they can speak – or, at least, whose thoughts and actions they believe they can anticipate. They also often have different interests, including an inclination to prefer status quo preservation (and to see the status quo more favorably) than those who have been less rewarded by the status quo. The media class, by and large, is not furious with the political class or with prevailing conditions, and they thus failed to detect the sentiments of anger and anxiety that drove the Trump campaign (and, in some similar ways, the Sanders campaign).
Let’s acknowledge all the valid caveats: there’s nothing inherently wrong with making predictions, and everyone who tries it is going to be wrong sometimes. Moreover, though there were some exceptions, very few pundits predicted Trump’s success (though there’s a huge difference between (a) refraining from predicting or doing so with a tone of uncertainty and (b) hubristically and condescendingly “explaining” The Truth to the world about what will happen). Many factors, such as Trump’s celebrity status, made these circumstances unusual. And everyone makes mistakes in every realm.
Nonetheless, it becomes a much different type of error when one invokes one’s own claimed authority and expertise when issuing such embarrassingly wrong pronouncements, and, worse still, when the tone used is one of certainty and hubris as though the decrees are being passed down from Mount Sinai. At the very least, when a profession that touts its expertise, collectively, is this wildly wrong about something so significant, more needs to be done than a cursory, superficial acknowledgment of error – or casting blame on others – before quickly moving on, in the hope that it’s all forgotten. Some collective, introspective soul-searching is in order.
US election: How Trump defied all predictions
May 4, 2016
by Katty Kay
BBC News
America tonight stands on the doorstep of greatness, or the precipice of doom.
Under a candidate this divisive, there’s not much room for feeling anything in between, as the realisation dawns that Donald Trump now has a plausible shot at being America’s next president.
There has never been a candidate for the White House quite like this. He came into the race something of a joke, he conducted his campaign in ways that sometimes seemed like a joke (remember the steaks) but he won the nomination with totally serious conviction, demolishing his large field of competitors.
One by one, the primary wins stacked up and the other candidates fell. It was extraordinary to watch. The man almost no-one in the American political world took seriously defied all the predictions.
How did he do it?
Trump tapped into something we all should have seen, but failed to. For years, working class Americans have suffered from low employment and stagnant wages. They’ve watched the spread of globalisation, immigration and free trade and they felt left behind.
The US economy appeared to boom, but their lives didn’t reflect that triumph. They had got a bad deal. Add to that an America that seemed to have faltered on the global stage and a president congenitally averse to nationalistic chest-thumping and Donald Trump was a gift.
From the billionaire’s New York penthouse, he somehow understood the concerns of less educated Americans, particularly less educated American men.
He appeared to have an intuitive understanding of their loves and hates. He even said at one point in this absurdly long campaign that he loved the poorly educated. He knew they felt shackled by political correctness, and he gave them freedom to rail against it.
He knew they were afraid that their country was changing around them, increasingly populated by people whose first language was Spanish not English. When he suggested that Mexico was sending rapists across the border, he vindicated those fears. When he proposed to ban all Muslims from America, he gave voice to the anti-Islamic sentiment that’s simmered in the US since 9/11.
It has been a remarkable display of political instinct from a man who’s never been in politics. His supporters are so devoted to him that he could do no wrong. When he said Vietnam torture victim and war vet Senator John McCain wasn’t a war hero, his approval ratings went up.
When he suggested a female reporter posed a tough question because she was menstruating, his numbers improved again.
Mexico, Muslims, Lyin’ Ted… they all just fuelled the Trump train. And they love him most because he doesn’t sound like all the politicians who have promised much and delivered little.
And yet, at the risk of being churlish on the night Mr Trump celebrates a stunning victory, it is worth noting how he has also alienated millions of Americans in a way we have not seen here in modern history.
Never has a candidate for the presidency been this reviled and rejected by some members of their own party. There is a long list (literally, you can find it on the website of The Hill newspaper) of Republican politicians and strategists who have said they will never vote for Trump.
In private there are many more who have said they will vote for Hillary rather than Donald.
These are the people – and I have spoken to many of them – who say their party’s candidate is a “bigot”, “racist”, “misogynist”. They call him “crass”, “rude”, “a bully”.
Some of these people may now fall in line with the party leadership, hold their nose and tick the Trump box, but they don’t like him.
If you broaden the surveys out to all Americans, Trump breaks records with his unfavourability ratings.
Which is why two groups are cheering tonight, team Trump and team Clinton.
The Clinton campaign remains convinced that this is the perfect race for them. They see Trump’s negatives and they believe he is the best candidate they could have hoped for as their Republican opponent.
Moreover, the demographics of America would suggest that whoever is the Democratic nominee stands an odds-on chance of winning the White House – there are just more Democratic than Republican voters in the country.
But this is a curious year, the political rule book has been shredded and Donald Trump hates losing almost more than he loves winning.
The Clinton camp would be wrong to get too confident too soon. If we have learned one thing in this crazy campaign, it is that predictions are foolish.
Call me a fool, but I’m prepared to make just one more – the Clinton-Trump match-up is going to be brutal.
You thought the last 24 hours was ugly. You haven’t seen anything yet.
Researchers: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States
May 3, 2016
by Ariana Eunjung Cha
The Washington Post
Nightmare stories of nurses giving potent drugs meant for one patient to another and surgeons removing the wrong body parts have dominated recent headlines about medical care. Lest you assume those cases are the exceptions, a new study by patient safety researchers provides some context.
Their analysis, published in the BMJ on Tuesday, shows that “medical errors” in hospitals and other health care facilities are incredibly common and may now be the third leading cause of death in the United States — claiming 251,000 lives every year, more than respiratory disease, accidents, stroke and Alzheimer’s.
Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who led the research, said in an interview that the category includes everything from bad doctors to more systemic issues such as communication breakdowns when patients are handed off from one department to another.
“It boils down to people dying from the care that they receive rather than the disease for which they are seeking care,” Makary said.
The issue of patient safety has been a hot topic in recent years, but it wasn’t always that way. In 1999, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report calling preventable medical errors an “epidemic” shocked the medical establishment and led to significant debate about what could be done.
The IOM, based on one study, estimated deaths because of medical errors as high as 98,000 a year. Makary’s research involves a more comprehensive analysis of four large studies, including ones by the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of the Inspector General and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that took place between 2000 to 2008. His calculation of 251,000 deaths equates to nearly 700 deaths a day — about 9.5 percent of all deaths annually in the United States.
Makary said he and co-author Michael Daniel, also from Johns Hopkins, conducted the analysis to shed more light on a problem that many hospitals and health care facilities try to avoid talking about.
Though all providers extol patient safety and highlight the various safety committees and protocols they have in place, few provide the public with specifics on actual cases of harm due to mistakes. Moreover, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t require reporting of errors in the data it collects about deaths through billing codes, making it hard to see what’s going on at the national level
The CDC should update its vital statistics reporting requirements so that physicians must report whether there was any error that led to a preventable death, Makary said.
“We all know how common it is,” he said. “We also know how infrequently it’s openly discussed.”
Kenneth Sands, who directs health care quality at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, said that the surprising thing about medical errors is the limited change that has taken place since the IOM report came out. Only hospital-acquired infections have shown improvement. “The overall numbers haven’t changed, and that’s discouraging and alarming,” he said.
Sands, who was not involved in the study published in the BMJ, the former British Medical Journal, said that one of the main barriers is the tremendous diversity and complexity in the way health care is delivered.
“There has just been a higher degree of tolerance for variability in practice than you would see in other industries,” he explained. When passengers get on a plane, there’s a standard way attendants move around, talk to them and prepare them for flight, Sands said, yet such standardization isn’t seen at hospitals. That makes it tricky to figure out where errors are occurring and how to fix them. The government should work with institutions to try to find ways improve on this situation, he said.
Makary also used an airplane analogy in describing how he thinks hospitals should approach errors, referencing what the Federal Aviation Administration does in its accident investigations.
“Measuring the problem is the absolute first step,” he said. “Hospitals are currently investigating deaths where medical error could have been a cause, but they are under-resourced. What we need to do is study patterns nationally.”
He said that in the aviation community every pilot in the world learns from investigations and that the results are disseminated widely.
“When a plane crashes, we don’t say this is confidential proprietary information the airline company owns. We consider this part of public safety. Hospitals should be held to the same standards,” Makary said.
Frederick van Pelt, a doctor who works for The Chartis Group, a health care consultancy, said another element of harm that is often overlooked is the number of severe patient injuries resulting from medical error.
“Some estimates would put this number at 40 times the death rate,” van Pelt said. “Again this gets buried in the daily exposure that care providers have around patients who are suffering or in pain that is to be expected following procedures.”