TBR News April 1, 2018

The Voice of the White House 

Washington, D.C. April 1, 2018:” In a world where wishful thinking and over-ripe imaginations are far in excess of accuracy and truthfulness, historical incidents are almost always the victim of the wishful thinker or the creative liar.

This is by no means a modern phenomenon as witness the strange and contradictory passages in the New Testament or in later histories that discussed the reality of dragons being seen in the sky, or in the water, and angels floating above battlefields.

The desperation of some people who suffer from futile lives and chronic disappointments to have some special information with which to gain self-importance presents a rich soil in which to grow fantasies and delusional material.

I recently had a long, very unhappy, email from a gentleman who took great offense at my making fun of his loud assumptions that the aircraft that struck the WTC were not commercial airlines but Russian-made rockets purchased by the Skull and Bones society.

He claimed that he had a degree in aeronautical engineering and had worked for many years at Boeing in Seattle.

I asked a friend, who is qualified, to check this man out. He very quickly discovered that the writer was indeed employed by Boeing during the 1960s but not as an aeronautical engineer but rather as a janitor. (‘Senior Sanitary Engineer’)

He had, my contact advised me, no degree whatsoever.

When I published this, he vanished quietly into the blessed night of oblivion.

His fierce contention was that ex-Soviet missiles struck the building and “proved” it with very fuzzy and obviously doctored TV stills.

Sic transit gloria mundi!

There were no little green men involved here, only someone who was nothing and wanted to be recognized as someone.

No doubt he liked to impress his fellow sufferers at the Mental Health Outpatient Clinic in Buffalo Breath, Montana.

He indeed had a following but then, so did Charles Manson, and I firmly believe there are still others who will admit to voting for George W. Bush. Under torture.”

Table of Contents

• No Gaza inquiry, Israeli defense minister says
• Erdogan calls Netanyahu ‘terrorist’ as insults fly after Gaza deaths
• The Great Majority of Jews Today Have No Historical or Ethnic Relationship to Palestine
• The main differences between Catholics and Protestants
• Congress, Not Trump, Has the Authority Over War
• A Guaranteed Jobs-for-All Program Is Gaining Traction Among 2020 Democratic Hopefuls
• Tired of the wait game’: White House stabilizers gone, Trump calling his own shots
• ‘Humanitarian Crisis in Hollywood’: Chronic homelessness vs. the American Dream

 

No Gaza inquiry, Israeli defense minister says

April 1, 2018

by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Jeffrey Heller

Reuters

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s defense minister rejected on Sunday calls for an inquiry into the killing of 15 Palestinians by the military during a Palestinian demonstration that turned violent on Friday at the Gaza-Israel border.

Hamas, the dominant Palestinian group in Gaza, said five of the dead were members of its armed wing. Israel said eight of the 15 belonged to Hamas, designated a terrorist group by Israel and the West, and two others came from other militant factions.

A tense calm descended on Sunday on the border area, where hundreds of Palestinians, a fraction of the tens of thousands who initially turned out, remained in tent encampments along the fenced 65-km (40-mile) border.

Organizers expect many to come back on Friday, when schools and businesses are closed for the Muslim sabbath, and rejoin the planned six-week protest pressing for right of return for refugees and their descendents to what is now Israel.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, have called for an independent investigation into Friday’s bloodshed.

Pope Francis, in an apparent reference to the events in Gaza in his Easter address, called for “reconciliation for the Holy Land, also experiencing in these days the wounds of ongoing conflict that do not spare the defenseless.”

Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli defense minister, rejected criticism of Israel’s actions, saying soldiers along the Gaza frontier “deserve a medal” and did what was necessary to protect the border.

“As for a commission of inquiry – there won’t be one,” he told Israeli Army Radio.

The United States blocked a Kuwait-drafted U.N. Security Council statement on Saturday, diplomats said, that would have called for an independent investigation and urged restraint by all sides.

WOUNDED

In a Gaza hospital on Sunday, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy hit by Israeli gunfire on Friday said that when he approached the border fence with others in the crowd, he thought he would be safe as long as he did not touch the barrier or throw stones.

Hundreds had ignored calls by protest organizers and by the Israeli military to stay away from the frontier. The military said some of those who were shot had fired at soldiers, rolled burning tires and hurled rocks and fire bombs toward the border.

“I was just standing there when I felt something hit my leg and it pushed me to the ground,” the boy, Bashar Wahdan, told Reuters, estimating his distance from the fence at 30 meters (yards). The bullet cut through blood vessels and broke a bone.

At his bedside, Bashar’s father said he had no idea his son had gone to the protest.

The Israeli military accused Hamas of “cynically exploiting women and children” by sending them to the fence. A Hamas spokesman called the allegations “lies aimed at justifying the massacres”.

On Saturday, Israeli troops using live ammunition and rubber bullets shot and wounded about 70 Palestinians among demonstrators at the border, Palestinian officials said. Witnesses said stones were thrown at the soldiers.

Doctors at Gaza’s crowded Shifa hospital said they were running out of medicine and other supplies.

The protest is scheduled to culminate on May 15, when Palestinians mark the “Nakba” or “Catastrophe” when hundreds of thousands fled or were driven out of their homes in 1948, when the state of Israel was created. Israel has long ruled out any right of return, fearing it would lose its Jewish majority.

Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Maayan Lubell and Mark Potter

 

Erdogan calls Netanyahu ‘terrorist’ as insults fly after Gaza deaths

April 1, 2018

Reuters

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan called his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu a “terrorist” on Sunday, escalating an exchange of insults that started after he criticized Israel’s lethal military response to a demonstration on the Gazan border.

Israel has defended the killing of 15 Palestinians during Friday’s demonstration and Netanyahu tweeted that the Israeli army “will not be lectured by those who have indiscriminately bombed civilian populations for years”, referring to Turkey.

Erdogan told supporters on Sunday: “We don’t have the shame of invading on us, Netanyahu. You are an invader and right now are present in those lands as an invader. At the same time, you are a terrorist.”

In another speech he said: “You are a terrorist state. It is known what you have done in Gaza and what you have done in Jerusalem. You have no one that likes you in the world.”

Israel’s defense minister has rejected calls for an inquiry into Friday’s events.

Hamas, the dominant Palestinian group in Gaza, said five of the dead were members of its armed wing. Israel said eight of the 15 belonged to Hamas, designated a terrorist group by Israel and the West, and two others came from other militant factions.

Reporting by Ali Kucukgocmen and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Editing by Robin Pomeroy

 

The Great Majority of Jews Today Have No Historical or Ethnic Relationship to Palestine

by Issa Nakhleh  LL.B

The Jews of today are composed of the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi Jews. The Sephardi Jews are the Oriental Jews wo are descendants of the Jews who left Palestine during the Christian era and migrated to neighboring Arab countries., North Africa and Spain. Some of the Oriental Jews were also converts to Judaism, such as some Berbers of North Africa who were converted to Judaism. The Tunisian Jews, Albert Memmi, a Professor of Sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris, has expressed doubt as “to whether his own ancestors in the Saraha had any historic connection to Palestine. Perhaps, he suggested, they were just Berbers converted to Judaism, since according to his information, “most North African Jews are simply Berber nomads who have accepted Judaism.”

Arthur Koestler maintains that there were many Jewish converts outside of Palestine with no biblical family roots:

‘Witness to the proselytizing zeal of the Jews of earlier times are the black-skinned Falasha of Abyssinia, the Chinese Jews of Kai-Feng who look like Chinese, the Yemenite Jews with the dark olive complexion, the Jewish Berber tribes of the Sahara who look like Tauregs, and so on, down to our prime example, the Khazars.’

The Ashkenazi Jews who lived in Russian and Central Eastern Europe and later on migrated to Western and Southern Europe, are of Khazar origin and were converted to Judaism in the 9th century A.S. The Khazar Jews have no ethnic or historical connection with Palestine. The Ahakenazi Jews who migrated to Palestine during the British mandate and who committed the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people are descendants of the Khazars. The Jewish Encyclopedia refers to the Khazars and their conversion to Judaism:

“A people of Turkish origin whose life and history are interwoven with the very beginnings of the history of the Jews of Russia. The kingdom of the Khazars was firmly established in most of South Russia long before the foundation of the Russian monarchy by the Varangians(855)…Driven onward by the nomadic tribes of the steppes and by their own desire for plunder and revenge, they made frequent invasions into Armenia…

In the second half of the sixth century the Khazar move westward. They established themselves in the territory bounded by the Sea of Azov, the Don and the lower Volga, the Caspian Sea, and the northern Caucasus…In 679 the Khazars subjugated the Bulgars and extended their sway further west between the Don and the Dnieper, as far as the the head-waters of Donetsk….It was probably about that time that the Khaghan (Bulan) of the Khazars and his grandees, together with a large number of his heathen people, embraced the Jewish religion…

It was one of the successors of Bulan, named Obadiah, who regenerated the kingdom and strengthened the Jewish religion. He invited Jewish scholars to settle in his dominions, and founded synagogues and schools, The people were instructed in the Bible, Mishnah, and Talmud…

From the work Kitab al-Buldan written about the ninth century, it appears as if all the Khazars were Jews and that they had been converted to Judaism only a short time before that book was written….It may be assumed that in the ninth century many Khazar heathens became Jews, owing to the religious zeal of King Obadia,. “Such a conversion in great masses says Chwolson (Izvyestia o  Khazaraka, p 58), ” may have been the reason for the embassy of the Christians from the land of the Khazars to the Byzantine emperor Michael…

The Jewish population in the entire domain of the Khazars, in the period between the seenth and tenth centuries, must have been considerable…

The Russians invaded the trans-Caucasian country in 944…This seems to have been the beginning of the downfall of the Khazar kingdom…The Russian prince Sviatoslav made war upon the Khazars (c.974) the Russians conquered all the Khazarian territory east of the Sea of Azov. Only the Crimean territory of the Khazars remained in their possession until 1016, when they were dispossessed by a joint expedition of Russians and Byzanatines…Many were sent as prisoners of was to Kiev, where a Khazar community had long existed…Some went to Hungary, but the great mass of the people remained in their native country. Many members of the Khazrian royal family emigrated to Spain…

Professor Graetz describes the Khazar kingdom as follows:

“The heathen king of a barbarian people, living in the north,m together with all his court, adopted the Jewish religion…Their kings, who bore the title of Khakhan or Khaghan, had led these warlike sons of the steppe from victory to victory…

It is possible that the circumstances under which the Khazars embraced Judaism have been embellished by legend, but the fact itself is too definitely proved on all sides to allow any doubt as to its reality. Besides Bulan, the nobles of his kingdom, numbering nearly four thousand,m adopted the Jewish religion. Little by little it made its way among the people, so that most of the inhabitants of the towns of the H=Khazar kingdom were Jews…At first the Judaism of the Khazars must have been rather superficial, and could have had but a little influence on their mind and manners…

A successor of Bulan, who bore the Hebrew name of Obadiah, was the first to make serious efforts to further the Jewish religion. He invited Jewish sages to settle in his dominions, rewarded them royally, founded synagogues and schools, caused instruction to be given to himself and his people in the Bible and the Talmud, and introduced a divine service modeled on that of the ancient communities…After Obadiah came a along series of Jewish Khaghans, for according to a fundamental law of the state only Jewish rulers were permitted to ascent the throne…”

According to Dr. A.A. Poliak, Professor of Medieval Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, the descendants of the Khazars-“those who stayed where they were, those who emigrated to the United States and to other countries, and those who went ti Israel– constitute now the large majority of world Jewry.”

The physiological differences between the Ashkenazim, who are mainly of Turkic Khazar origin, the the Sephardim, who are mainly of Semitic Palestinian origin, has been confirmed by scientific evidence:

“By, and large, the Sephardim are dolichocephalic (long-headed), the Ashkenazim brachycephalic (broad-headed)…The statistics relating to other physical features also speak against racial unity…The hardest evidence to date come from classification by blood groups.”The thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler pps. 232-233

Thus both historical and physiological evidence negate any historical claims to being of Palestinian origin to the European Jews in Israel and to the majority of Jews in the world.

 

The main differences between Catholics and Protestants

They worship the same God, but the principles of their faith are different. Five hundred years after the Reformation, there are still painful divisions between Protestants and Catholics.

October 30, 2018

Klaus Krämer (eg)

DW

In Germany, the country of the Reformation, a deep animosity divided Catholic and Protestant Christians up until a few decades ago. This division had deepened over the centuries through religious conflicts and wars.

It all started when Reformation took place, 500 years ago, as Martin Luther (1483-1546) tried to reform the Catholic Church. His attempt to do so instead led to a schism in the church.

On October 31, 1517, the publication of his Ninety-Five Theses, which outlined different abusive practices of the church, is considered the founding event that led to this division in Germany and the creation of the Evangelical Church.

Reconciliation instead of hero worshiping

Right from the beginning, on October 21, 2016, this year of commemoration of the Reformation was characterized by an ecumenical approach. In the past, Protestant churches celebrated major Reformation anniversaries by worshiping Martin Luther as a hero — but this time it’s different.

The Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) wishes to turn the celebrations of “500 Years of Reformation” into a common celebration of Christ with the Catholic Church.

Through various events, both sides will pay tribute to Martin Luther while emphasizing their will to overcome divisions. On Saturday, March 11, a central reconciliation service will be held in Hildesheim.

‘Reconciled diversity’

The goal is to reach better understanding and find common ground between the two churches. A new united church is, however, far from being realized – and it is doubtful that it ever will.

To describe their relationship, the expression “reconciled diversity” is used by both sides. Many of the aspects that were reformed by Luther at the time still divide both groups to this day.

Here are the eight main differences:

1. Understanding of the Bible

Catholicism and Protestantism have distinct views on the meaning and the authority of the Bible. For Protestant Christians, Luther made clear that the Bible is the “Sola Skriptura,” God’s only book, in which He provided His revelations to the people and which allows them to enter in communion with Him.

Catholics, on the other hand, do not base their beliefs on the Bible alone. Along with the Holy Scripture, they are additionally bound by the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church.

2. Understanding the Church

Catholics and Protestants have a different view on the nature of the church. The word “catholic” means “all-embracing,” and the Catholic Church sees itself as the only true church worldwide, under the leadership of the pope.

In contrast, the Protestant Churches which have emerged from Reformation, also called “Evangelical,” which means “according to the Gospel,” do not make up one united Church. There are rather several tens of thousands of different denominations around the world. Officially, all of these many churches are considered equal.

3. The pope

Protestants are not open at all to papal primacy. According to the Evangelical view, this dogma contradicts statements in the Bible.

Catholics see in the pope the successor of the Apostle Peter, the first head of their Church, who was appointed by Jesus. The papal office is justified by an allegedly unbroken chain of consecrations, ranging from the first century to the present.

4. Understanding of the office

This continuous chain, known as the apostolic succession, is overall significant for different spiritual offices in the Catholic Church. With the Sacrament of Holy Orders, bishops, priests and deacons receive a lifelong seal of God giving them sacramental authority over Catholic laypeople. This consecration can only be given to men.

Protestants do not consecrate specific persons into office, but rather accept the principle that priesthood can be transferred to every believer – even to women.

5. Eucharist or Lord’s Supper

The Catholics’ views on the spiritual office are reflected in the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, a rite commemorating the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples before his crucifixion. Once consecrated by a priest in the name of Jesus, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Non-Catholics may not participate in Communion.In the Protest Church, every baptized person is invited to share and is allowed to lead the Lord’s Supper. This approach is not accepted by Catholics.

Additionally, Eucharist has a different meaning for Catholics and Protestants. The bread, known as the Host, embodies Jesus and can therefore be prayed to. For Protestants, the ritual only serves to commemorate Jesus’ death and resurrection.

6. Sacraments

In the Roman Catholic Church, there are seven solemn rites, called sacraments: baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, matrimony, penance, holy orders and extreme unction. The church believes these sacraments were instituted by Jesus and that they confer God’s grace.

Most Protestant churches only practice two of these sacraments: baptism and the Eucharist (called Lord’s Supper). They are perceived as symbolic rituals through which God delivers the Gospel. They are accepted through faith.

7. Marian dogmas and the worship of Saints

The Roman Catholic Church reveres Mary, the mother of Jesus, as “Queen of Heaven.” However, there are few biblical references to support the Catholic Marian dogmas – which include the Immaculate Conception, her perpetual virginity and her Assumption into heaven. This is why they are rejected by Protestants.

The Catholic Church also practices the veneration of saints. Dead models of faith, recognized as “saint” by the church through canonization, can be prayed to for help in maintaining faith in God. There are over 4,000 saints. Their remains are considered holy relics which are venerated.

This veneration is also categorically by the Protestant Church as unbiblical. According to Reformation views, every person may and should pray directly to God.

8. Celibacy

All main world religions integrate in some way the concept of celibacy, the vow of abstaining from marriage and sexual relations, and the Catholic and Protestant churches are no exception. In the Catholic Church, celibacy is obligatory for priests. It is seen as a symbol of the undivided succession of Christ.

The Protestant Church rejects this obligation for priests. Martin Luther already demanded its abolition as early as 1520. He made a decisive personal contribution to this end in 1525: The former monk married the former nun Katharina von Bora. Initially unsure of whether he should marry, Luther finally determined that “his marriage would please his father, rile the pope, cause the angels to laugh, and the devils to weep.”

 

 

Congress, Not Trump, Has the Authority Over War

America’s representatives can, and should, end the country’s participation in the horrific onslaught on Yemen.

March 29, 2018

by  Bernie Sanders

foreignpolicy.com

On March 20, by a vote of 55-44, the U.S. Senate tabled a resolution that I introduced along with two of my colleagues, Republican Mike Lee of Utah and Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut, calling on the president to withdraw U.S. participation in the war in Yemen.

We offered this resolution for two reasons. First, the Saudi-led war in Yemen has led to one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern history. Second, the time is long overdue for Congress to reassert its constitutional authority in matters of war. Article I of the U.S. Constitution states clearly that the people’s representatives in Congress, not a single person residing in the White House, shall have the power to declare war.

Though a majority of our Senate colleagues voted to table our resolution — that is, they chose to avoid taking a vote on the issues it raised — I am more convinced than ever of the need to go forward aggressively on this matter. We must never forget that the two most significant foreign-policy disasters in the modern history of the United States, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam, occurred when Congress sat back and allowed two administrations, one Republican and one Democrat, to lie to the American people as they led us into conflicts with horrific consequences. We must never allow that to happen again.

On March 20, 2003, the war in Iraq, which I strongly opposed, began and the bombs started falling on Baghdad. Today, it is widely acknowledged that the war in Iraq was a blunder of enormous magnitude, and that our entry into that war was based on a series of falsehoods. Despite what the Bush administration said, Iraq had no role in the 9/11 attacks, and it did not possess weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States.

As we now know, that war created a cascade of instability around the region that we are dealing with today in Syria and elsewhere, and will be for many years to come. Indeed, had it not been for the Iraq War, the Islamic State would almost certainly not exist.

The war deepened hostilities between Sunni and Shiite communities in Iraq and elsewhere. It exacerbated a regional struggle for power between Saudi Arabia and Iran and their proxies in places like Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, and it undermined American diplomatic efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That war was created by a Republican administration. Now, let me tell you about a Democratic administration, and an earlier conflict that began on similarly false pretenses. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson cited an attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin as a pretext for escalating the U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

We now know from declassified recordings that Johnson himself doubted that the USS Maddox had come under fire on Aug. 4, 1964, but still used that alleged attack to push for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing him to escalate United States military involvement in Vietnam.

Johnson’s administration misled both Congress and the American people into that war, just as the Bush administration misled us into the war in Iraq. Repeatedly, disasters occur when presidents refuse to tell their people the truth, and when Congress abdicates its constitutional responsibility to get that truth.

The truth about Yemen is that, by providing intelligence and the aerial refueling of Saudi combat planes, U.S. forces are engaged in hostilities unauthorized by Congress. This war has resulted in a massive humanitarian crisis where some 10,000 civilians have been killed, 40,000 more have been wounded, and more than 3 million have been displaced. In November of last year, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator said that Yemen was on the brink of “the largest famine the world has seen for many decades.” Fifteen million people lack access to clean water and sanitation because water treatment plants have been destroyed. More than 20 million people in Yemen, over two thirds of the population, need some kind of humanitarian support, with nearly 10 million in acute need of assistance. More than 1 million suspected cholera cases have been reported, representing potentially the worst cholera outbreak in world history.

The Yemen war has also undermined U.S. efforts to stop terrorism. In 2016, Reuters reported that the war “has helped al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)” — one of al Qaeda’s most dangerous branches — “to become stronger than at any time since it first emerged almost 20 years ago.” A 2016 U.S. State Department report likewise found that the conflict had helped both al Qaeda and the Islamic State to “deepen their inroads across much of the country.”

 

A Guaranteed Jobs-for-All Program Is Gaining Traction Among 2020 Democratic Hopefuls

April 1 2018

by Kate Aronoff

The Intercept

The conservative approach to social programs has evolved in sophistication over the decades. With frontal assaults on Social Security and Medicaid having been badly beaten back, the GOP has repackaged its attempt to roll back these programs by putting recipients to work.

Work requirements were the cornerstone of the 1996 welfare reform, and each subsequent assault on public benefits has used them to kick in the door. Want food stamps? Work. Want Medicaid? Work. Want disability? Work.

After all, if a person is physically able to, why shouldn’t they work just like everybody else?

But an approach catching fire among activists and even some high-level elected Democrats answers the question by turning it on its head, drawing on an idea with a storied history in American politics. If working is so important, then why shouldn’t the government provide a job directly to somebody who can’t find one?

For years considered the province of renegade economists, the idea that everyone should have a job if they want or need one — and it’s the government’s job to make that possible — has begun once again to creep into mainstream conversation.

In the last week alone, rumored 2020 hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told The Nation that “guaranteed jobs programs, creating floors for wages and benefits, and expanding the right to collectively bargain are exactly the type of roles that government must take to shift power back to workers and our communities.”

And Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., another presumed 2020 aspirant, has begun looking closely at this issue, a source close to her told The Intercept. Senate aides have begun interoffice meetings to grapple with how to draft a workable bill, aides in two separate offices told The Intercept.

Another politician who many suspect has his eyes on another presidential run, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., hasn’t endorsed guaranteed jobs, but recently invited one of the best known scholars on the subject, economist Darrick Hamilton, to speak alongside Warren and filmmaker Michael Moore at a livestreamed town hall that has drawn at least 3 million viewers.

Sanders’s former senior economist on the Senate Budget Committee, Stephanie Kelton, who went on to advise his 2016 presidential bid, has been a longtime proponent of the idea. The Sanders Institute — where Kelton is now a fellow — released a filmed conversation between her and Jane Sanders dedicated to discussing the idea after Kelton completed a paper on the policy. Kelton, in her interview with Jane Sanders, said a job guarantee was something she had brought up with Bernie Sanders in her initial job interview years ago.

A federal job guarantee is exactly what it sounds like. “The private sector,” Hamilton tells me, “does not absorb stigmatized workers — those that are formerly incarcerated, black, disabled — at the same rate that it does nonstigmatized workers. A job guarantee would enable workers, particularly at the lower end of the labor market, but throughout the labor market too. It would remove the threat of unemployment and of being destitute.”

By making living-wage work available to anyone who wants it, the program would also establish a de facto wage floor, forcing private sector employers to match the kinds of wages, working conditions, and benefits available to workers through the public sector. “It gets rid of involuntary unemployment altogether,” Hamilton said.

Once a fixture of Democratic Party platforms, the idea’s resurgence is evidence that a growing number of Democrats see their political fortunes tied to their embrace of the kind of big, expensive programs that used to be the party’s bread and butter. Perhaps still more significant than this bald-faced embrace of progressive and even left ideas, though, is the broader shift it might signal in how today’s Democrats think about budgets, spending, and deficits. As the 2020 primaries near, there’s a real chance that the party’s hopefuls could begin falling over each other to embrace different versions of a federal job guarantee, along with proposals like “Medicare for All.” In the process, they might just make deficit spending great again.

As savvy politicians are starting to realize, embracing big spending could be an electoral boon. Accompanying Gillibrand’s quote to The Nation was new polling on the job guarantee from Data for Progress and Civis Analytics, which found that 52 percent of those surveyed support the idea of promising “a job to every American adult, with the government providing jobs for people who can’t find employment in the private sector,” paid for “by a 5 percent income tax increase on those making over $200,000 per year.” Almost 7 in 10 Hillary Clinton voters support a job guarantee, which has 62 and 55 percent support among black and Latino voters, respectively. The idea enjoys overwhelming support across state lines and has comparable backing among rural and urban voters.

It shouldn’t be all that surprising: Given the fact that jobs and the economy reliably top voters’ priorities on both sides of the aisle — and big, universal programs like Social Security and Medicaid remain overwhelmingly popular — the notion of the U.S. government employing people directly seems in some ways like a natural extension of the benefits that the state already provides. The sheer scale of such a program also flies in the face of how policy gets made in Washington.

Since the passage of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act in 1974 and the ensuing creation of the Congressional Budget Office, any given piece of legislation’s financial viability has been assessed mainly by one question: How much money will it add to the federal deficit? Nominally, the CBO provides an independent analysis of proposed legislation’s impact on federal spending and revenues. In effect, CBO analyses — or “scores” — can damn legislation to purgatory before it ever comes to a vote. Yet the sticker price of a policy is just one of many factors that contribute to its overall effect on the economy and society more broadly: Does it, for instance, meet a pressing public need? Will it increase or decrease inequality?

“If we had had CBO in 1935, we wouldn’t have Social Security. If we had it in 1964, we wouldn’t have Medicare,” Kelton tells me. “It has become in many ways the key impediment to the progressive agenda and just good economic policy generally.” To get that, she argues, progressives will need to be willing to disregard their proposals’ CBO scores or work to reform the way that they’re calculated. She proposed a rebranding: “Change the word ‘deficit’ to ‘non-government surplus.’” (A government deficit, in accounting terms, necessarily means that the economy is experiencing a private sector surplus. People like surpluses and dislike deficits, so Kelton’s approach would simply redirect attention to the part of the equation that people like.)

A common response among progressives, instead, has been to present their policies as a two-step process: Tax the bad — corporate profits, financial sector speculation, offshore earnings, etc. — to pay for the good, be it health care, free education, or renewable energy.

As Kelton asks, “Why not decouple those fights? Go after the rich — fight to return the estate tax to some reasonable level, for instance. But don’t hold the nation’s infrastructure, the poor, and the sick hostage to increasing tax revenue.”

There are signs that decoupling may be starting to catch on. Discussing his ambitious plan for debt-free higher education, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, recently refused to answer the question of how he has intended to “pay for” the measure. “I don’t play the pay-for game. I reject the pay-for game,” he explained to Vox, an outlet whose devotion to policy wonkery can sometimes get it bogged down in CBO speak. “After the Republicans did the $1.5 trillion in unpaid-for tax cuts, and as we’re doing a bipartisan appropriations bill — which I support — which is also an increase in federal spending [that’s] unpaid for, I just reject the idea that only progressive ideas have to be paid for. We can work on that as we go through the process, but I think it’s a trap.”

As Schatz alluded to, deficit spending has always been great for the GOP — so long as they’re the ones doing the spending or cutting the taxes. But once Democrats come back to power, Republicans’ seemingly religious opposition to deficits returns, and Democrats dutifully put out calls to “tighten our belts.”

“The No. 1 most important myth in American economic debates,” campaigner Ady Barkan said, “is that deficits matter, and that we have to raise taxes to pay for spending. … Bill Clinton cut deficits by cutting welfare. Then George W. Bush blew up the deficit for his wars and his tax cuts. Barack Obama tied himself in knots trying to be the responsible deficit cutter. First as tragedy, then as farce, now as Donald Trump.”

When it comes to federal spending, Barkan argues, “people don’t have deeply held beliefs. It’s not like guns or abortions or something like that. People don’t give a shit about deficits. You tell them that they can have free health care and child care and infrastructure, and they’ll accept that.”

A longtime organizer, Barkan — who has Lou Gehrig’s disease — gained national recognition after his viral confrontation of Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., over his support for the Republican tax plan and the cuts to Medicare that it would impose. When he was diagnosed with ALS in late 2016, Barkan was working with the Center for Popular Democracy on a campaign to reform the Federal Reserve and American monetary policymaking with it. Following Trump’s election, he has continued to fight for that and against a range of Republican policies.

“If I had five years of health ahead of me now,” he told me, “I would want to launch a campaign to guarantee everyone a good job and say, ‘If you’re unemployed, we’re not going to give you unemployment benefits; we’re going to give you a living wage job taking care of kids, taking care of old people, cleaning the streets, installing solar panels, building public housing, writing plays, singing songs.’ There’s no end of productive work we can put people to work doing.”

The kind of truly full employment Barkan is calling for isn’t a new idea.

The first tenet of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1944 Economic Bill of Rights is the “right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.” In a dissenting Supreme Court opinion in 1972 — in a case on alleged discrimination in the firing of a Wisconsin State University-Oshkosh professor — Justice Thurgood Marshall contended that the right to a job was guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. “Every citizen who applies for a government job,” he wrote, “is entitled to it unless the government can establish some reason for denying the employment. This is the ‘property’ right that I believe is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and that cannot be denied ‘without due process of law.’ And it is also liberty — liberty to work — which is the ‘very essence of the personal freedom and opportunity’ secured by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

As late as 1980, the Democratic Party’s platform stated that “we must require work or necessary training leading to work of every capable person, except for the elderly and those responsible for the care of small children. However, we cannot make this requirement effective unless we can assure employment first through the private sector and, if that is insufficient, through public employment. We must provide an income floor both for the working poor and the poor not in the labor market” (my emphasis).

Some of the people who first pushed the job guarantee onto the national stage, though, didn’t always enjoy a cozy relationship with the Democratic Party. David Stein, a UCLA historian working on a book about the legacy of the job guarantee in the United States, traces it back well over 100 years, to radical Reconstruction after the Civil War and the fight for what W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy.” Heavily influenced by Du Bois and his writing on Reconstruction, labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph went on to become one of the century’s most dogged advocates for a job guarantee.

“For Du Bois and Randolph,” Stein tells me, “abolition democracy is about abolishing the violence of slavery, of a society that could allow slavery and all the institutions that are attached to it, and creating new institutions. Those new institutions express themselves in different forms, depending on their historical moment. That form, starting in the 1940s and on, becomes job guarantees.”

Randolph was one of the key organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at one point slated to be called the “Emancipation March for Jobs.” That iconic demonstration was a response, in part, to the little-remembered recession of 1958, which like most economic downturns hit black workers the hardest. Among the demands of that march was a “massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.” Yet despite the size and historic nature of the March on Washington, Randolph and fellow organizer Bayard Rustin didn’t see the momentum they generated translate into influence over lawmakers. Added to this was a frustration that the gains of the civil rights movement on issues like desegregation and voting rights had not, by and large, translated into improved economic conditions for African-Americans more broadly.

The closest thing to a job guarantee that the U.S. has had in recent memory is the U.S. military, which provides a decent standard of living, debt-free higher education, health care, and decent benefits — provided you’re willing to risk your life for it. That wasn’t so different than in the post-war era, when so-called military Keynesianism provided GIs with the kinds of amenities usually associated with social democracies. As Stein points out, though, Dixiecrat politicians worked assiduously to ensure that the welfare state of that era — robust compared to what we have now — never fully extended to communities of color.

Reflecting on the state of the civil rights movement in 1965, Rustin wrote, “I fail to see how the movement can be victorious in the absence of radical programs for full employment, abolition of slums, the reconstruction of our educational system, new definitions of work and leisure. Adding up the cost of such programs, we can only conclude that we are talking about a refashioning of our political economy.”

From there, civil rights leaders, economists, and unions worked to create the Freedom Budget, released in 1967 by the A. Philip Randolph Institute, where Randolph served as president and Rustin as executive director. The budget sketches out an ambitious economic program for everything from education to monetary policymaking. “For the first time,” its authors stated, “everyone in America who is fit and able to work will have a job. For the first time, everyone who can’t work, or shouldn’t be working, will have an income adequate to live in comfort and dignity. And that is freedom. For freedom from want is the basic freedom from which all others flow.”

In the foreword to the Freedom Budget, Martin Luther King Jr. urged that policies be universal, rather than either means-tested or directed solely at vulnerable populations. As he wrote, “We shall eliminate unemployment for Negroes when we demand full and fair employment for all,” he committed his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to pushing for it. “We must dedicate ourselves to the legislative task to see that it is immediately and fully achieved. I pledge myself to this task and will urge all others to do likewise.”

A close collaborator with Rustin and Randolph, Coretta Scott King first got interested in a job guarantee during her involvement with the Progressive Party in the 1940s, and she continued to carry the torch of that demand long after her husband’s assassination in 1968. Stein and other historians have credited her sustained activism on this front with helping to pull King further to the left over the course of his life and engage more deeply with economic issues. In Memphis, just days after her husband’s death, Scott King marched in support of the striking sanitation workers her husband had died fighting alongside. “Every man,” she said at the time, “deserves a right to a job or an income.” In 1974, she founded the National Committee for Full Employment/Full Employment Action Council to fight for legislation that guaranteed jobs to all Americans. As Stein’s research has highlighted, the organization was instrumental in pushing forward the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which put teeth behind the Fed’s nominal, but at that point, often ignored mandate to “promote full employment and production, increased real income, balanced growth, … adequate productivity growth, proper attention to national priorities, achievement of an improved trade balance, … and reasonable price stability.”

While hardly a radical proposal in the scope of American history, the demand for a job guarantee does offer a radically different idea of what constitutes “full employment.” Even with the Humphrey-Hawkins Act in place, the Fed has tended to define the term loosely along the lines of something called the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment, or NAIRU, usually set at somewhere around 5.5 percent. The theory posits that unemployment below a certain level — a so-called natural rate of unemployment — will trigger accelerating inflation, potentially putting the economy on a path toward the dark days of double-digit inflation in the late 1970s. But for the millions of people embedded in that 5.5 percent, it doesn’t feel like full employment.

Since the mid-1980s, empirical evidence has suggested that the theoretical link between unemployment and inflation is overblown. Unemployment has continued to tick downward, while the Fed has been consistently unable to meet its 2 percent inflation targets over the last several years. The Federal Open Market Committee, the policymaking body of the Fed, has had to keep revising its NAIRU estimates downward. “NAIRU isn’t just a useless concept, it’s a counterproductive one that encourages policymakers to focus on the jobless rate as a means to an end (price stability) even though there is zero connection between the two variables,” Matthew Klein writes in the Financial Times. And despite the fact that the Fed moved to raise interest rates last week, it isn’t really sure why. When he announced the decision, Fed Chair Jerome Powell was forced to admit that “there’s no sense in the data that we’re on the cusp of an acceleration of inflation.”

If enacted, a federal job guarantee — driving unemployment to its lowest levels yet — might just hammer a final nail into the coffin of NAIRU and the more archaic parts of the FOMC’s inflation playbook. As Hamilton told me, “The notion of the ‘natural rate’ of unemployment would go away with a federal job guarantee.”

A forthcoming paper from Stephanie Kelton and other researchers with the Levy Institute of Bard College uses a macroeconomic model developed by Yale economist Ray Fair to run the numbers on a program for full employment, looking at the impact it would have on a range of economic indicators: state, local, and federal budgets, inflation, the federal deficit, and more. Unsurprisingly, a federal job guarantee — federally funded and locally administered, with wages set at $15 and hour — would increase the federal deficit. It would also cause a slight, short-term rise in inflation. Something else happens too: “What you see is the government deficit increasing, but state and local budgets moving in the reverse direction,” Kelton said, as millions of people enter the job market and spend and pay taxes accordingly.

To administer the job guarantee, the Levy researchers suggest a Public Service Employment program that utilizes the expansive, already-existing American Job Center Network to match jobseekers with meaningful, living-wage work in their communities. Standards for such jobs would likely be set by the Department of Labor “to serve the public purpose and not compete with private employment. The focus should be on delivering public goods, aimed broadly at three areas: caring for people, caring for the planet, and caring for communities,” Kelton said.

With a ballooning elderly population, and households with two working parents as the norm, there’s no shortage of care work to be done. “Projects bubble up from the bottom. They’re not passed down. Jobs are coming from the local communities who know best what those communities’ needs are,” said Kelton.

A similar proposal from Darrick Hamilton and economists William Darity and Mark Paul at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls for the creation of a National Investment Employment Corps, administered by the Labor Department and overseen by the secretary of labor, who would allocate grants for state, county, and local governments, along with Native American nations. They also envision that the department will work with other federal agencies to identify key investment opportunities in, for example, infrastructure, care work, and job training. “We need to reverse the narrative that government does not do useful things. Governments have done useful things. They currently do useful things,” Hamilton said.

So what would a campaign for a job guarantee look like? As was the case half a century ago, it’s unlikely that even progressive policymakers will come to fully embrace the idea en masse without some kind of outside pressure pushing them to do so — no matter how friendly the polling looks. At the Progressive Congress Strategy Summit recently, Ady Barkan, who was being honored there, sketched out what he thought a campaign for full employment might look like. “We would start asking people what would you do with a trillion dollars. We don’t have to go immediately to the notion that deficits are meaningless, and we just print our way to utopia,” he said.

“We have meetings with people all across the country where they write up their own wish list,” Barkan continued, mapping out a series of public visioning sessions. “They send letters to their members of Congress. They write public manifestos. They hold town halls. And then we would need to start organizing the elected officials to sign on letters saying, ‘I support this wish list.’ We hold conventions. We get local elected officials and celebrities to endorse it. We work toward the Democratic Party platform in the summer of 2020.”

Having grassroots energy behind the job guarantee demand could also help hold politicians accountable to ensuring that their proposals for a federal job guarantee actually live up to the name. Hamilton and Kelton both predicted that — with the revived popularity of the job guarantee idea — some imposters will enter the fray, substituting the idea of a public option for employment with public-private partnerships and subsidies to companies to create more jobs.

Of course, even the most ambitious version of a job guarantee is no panacea for what ails the American economy. As Hamilton points out, such a policy would do little to address gaping wealth inequality, which is particularly harsh along racial lines. He and Darity have done extensive research on other policies that could — including reparations, debt-free higher education, and baby bonds — and he sees them as working in tandem with one another.

Still, a federal job guarantee in the United States wouldn’t exist in a vacuum. The government providing every person with a job marks a stark break from the kind of neoliberal politics that have defined the last half-century, reimagining the role of the state in the economy and the kinds of spending deemed politically and financially viable. By setting a nationwide standard for what good jobs look like, it would also give workers a lot more bargaining power over their bosses. After all, what incentive would you have to put up with a shitty boss if you can go down the street and get a better job from the government?

And in addition to bolstering local and state budgets, a job guarantee could pry open the Overton window for other kinds of ambitious and desperately needed federal investment — and be an unexpected boon to climate campaigners. “You’re not going to get a permission slip from CBO to do something big on climate,” Kelton explained. “Why? Because it won’t pay for itself. That’s dangerous. How are we going to deal with this imminent threat if we have to wait around for the CBO to figure out a model to address climate change so that it doesn’t add to the deficit?”

A little-remembered group called Environmentalists for Full Employment — active in the late 1970s — saw it as a means of opening up new economic opportunities for workers in the extractive industry, especially those living in places where refining and mining jobs were some of the only ones around.

It’s for reasons like this that Barkan and other job guarantee proponents see it as a political gift that keeps on giving. “There’s something for everyone,” he said. “Everybody’s wish list could go into this: You want child care, arts, infrastructure, a green energy revolution? Everything can fit under the notion that the government has the resources, and the American people can provide the labor to rebuild the country. It transforms our political discourse away from a vision of scarcity and precarity and toward one of abundance and dignity, and communal thriving. I’m excited.”

 

Tired of the wait game’: White House stabilizers gone, Trump calling his own shots

March 31, 2018

by Philip Rucker and Robert Costa

The Washington Post

PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump began the past workweek cutting into steaks at the White House residence on Monday night with his political soldiers, including former advisers Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, strategist Brad Parscale, and son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.

He ended it dining on the gilded patio of his Mar-a-Lago estate with eccentric boxing promoter Don King, who said he vented to the president about the Stormy Daniels saga. “It’s just utterly ridiculous,” King said he told a nodding Trump on Thursday evening as the president began his holiday weekend in Palm Beach.

Nowhere to be seen was John F. Kelly, the beleaguered White House chief of staff and overall disciplinarian — nor were the handful of advisers regarded as moderating forces eager to restrain the president from acting impulsively, who have resigned or been fired.

The gatherings neatly illustrated an inflection point for the Trump presidency. Fourteen months into the job, Trump is increasingly defiant and singularly directing his administration with the same rapid and brutal style he honed leading his real estate and branding empire.

Trump is making hasty decisions that jolt markets and shock leaders and experts — including those on his own staff. Some confidants are concerned about the situation, while others, unworried, characterize him as unleashed.

The president is replacing aides who have tended toward caution and consensus with figures far more likely to encourage his rash instincts and act upon them, and he is frequently soliciting advice from loyalists outside the government. As he shakes up his administration, Trump is prioritizing personal chemistry above all else, as evidenced by his controversial selection of Navy Rear Adm. Ronny L. Jackson, the White House physician, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“The president is in an action mood and doesn’t want to slow-roll things, from trade to the border to staffing changes,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “He wants to make things that he’s been discussing for a while happen. He’s tired of the wait game.”

This dynamic — detailed in interviews with 23 senior White House officials and outside advisers, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments — is evident in multiple realms.

Trump is domineering his strategy regarding the expanding investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, in effect acting as his own lawyer. He is clamoring to reject the counsel of his attorneys and sit for an interview with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whom he has maligned by name.

On policy, Trump is making sudden decisions without much staff consultation, wagering that they will pay dividends — accepting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s invitation for a face-to-face meeting and threatening to veto before ultimately signing the most recent government spending bill.

On the stump, Trump is an improvisational showman. He swooped into the working-class Ohio town of Richfield on Thursday to pitch his infrastructure plan but diverged from his script to deliver surprise commentary on a medley of issues. He threatened to delay a newly renegotiated trade deal with South Korea and announced that the United States may soon withdraw troops from Syria.

The president’s unbridled eruptions continued Saturday in a pair of tweets hammering Amazon.com and falsely stating that “the Fake Washington Post” was acting as a lobbyist for the retail behemoth. The Washington Post operates independently of Amazon, though the newspaper is owned by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon.

All the while, Trump is trying to keep in touch with the cultural zeitgeist. Trump called Roseanne Barr to congratulate her on the success of ABC’s “Roseanne” revival. “Look at Roseanne!” Trump bellowed in Ohio. “Look at her ratings!”

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York mayor and longtime Trump friend, said the president is entering a new phase: “It took time for the president to discover how far he could move things and find the pieces that fit. Now, he sees he has an open field.”

To many beyond the White House, the Trump White House appears dangerously dysfunctional. Theodore B. Olson, a Republican former solicitor general, declined to join Trump’s legal team in the Russia matter.

“I think everybody would agree this is turmoil, it’s chaos, it’s confusion, it’s not good for anything,” Olson recently told anchor Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. “We always believe that there should be an orderly process, and of course government is not clean or orderly — ever. But this seems to be beyond normal.”

But people close to the president offer a different view.

“I don’t see anything under siege; I see it as the Big Red Machine,” incoming National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow said, referring to the championship Cincinnati Reds baseball teams from the 1970s. “The only people under siege are reporters who don’t like President Trump — and those guys need some significant therapy. I could recommend some awful good people in New York.”

A quartet of senior West Wing aides who spent several hours a day with the president and were considered stabilizing forces are gone. Hope Hicks’s last day as communications director was Thursday. Gary Cohn was replaced as chief economic adviser by Kudlow. H.R. McMaster was dismissed as national security adviser. And Rob Porter departed as staff secretary amid allegations of spousal abuse.

Outside the West Wing Rex Tillerson often challenged Trump as secretary of state, but the president fired him and nominated as his successor CIA Director Mike Pompeo. He is known for agreeing with Trump, as is John Bolton, the incoming national security adviser.

“This is now a president a little bit alone, isolated and without any moderating influences — and, if anything, a president who is being encouraged and goaded on by people around him,” one Trump confidant said. “It really is a president unhinged.”

Other than Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the lone remaining enforcer is Kelly. But his power as chief of staff has been diminished. Officials said the days of Kelly hovering in the Oval Office morning to night and screening the president’s calls are over. Trump is largely circumventing Kelly’s strict protocols.

The president recently reached out to some people Kelly had sought to excommunicate, calling former communications director Anthony Scaramucci to banter about politics and inviting Lewandowski and Bossie to dinner in the residence.

“He’s rotating back to the people who actually like him and is more willing to take advice from those people,” Scaramucci said. “They’re more honest with him, and he’s more comfortable with them.”

Allies said Trump is reverting to the way he led the Trump Organization from his 26th-floor office suite at Trump Tower in Manhattan. There, staffers were functionaries or lawyers, and many of his advisers were outside the company — rival business leaders, media figures and bankers. Back then, Trump controlled his orbit himself from behind his cluttered desk, relying on assistant Rhona Graff to field calls.

Trump has welcomed friends to the White House recently, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who visited Tuesday and met with Bolton, among others. And the president has turned to outside surrogates to carry his messages. After consulting with Trump, Newsmax chief executive Christopher Ruddy went on ABC’s “This Week” on March 25 and revealed that Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin was expected to be removed. Trump fired him three days later.

“It was the direction [Trump] was always bound to take,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official. “The phone book at the White House was filled by complete strangers. . . . But now he knows how the White House operates, and he’ll operate it himself.”

Ascendant in the West Wing are advisers who play to Trump’s gut: Kudlow on tax cuts and deregulation, Bolton on a muscular approach to foreign affairs, Peter Navarro on protectionist trade policies, Stephen Miller on crackdowns on undocumented immigrants and Kellyanne Conway on an open press strategy and tangling with reporters.

Like Conway, Bolton and Kudlow are seasoned cable news commentators who share Trump’s hard-charging instincts and have no illusions about his governing style. Officials said they are expected to cater to the president’s wishes and seek to avoid the internal knife fights that have befallen many a Trump aide.

Kudlow has told Cohn’s top deputies that he would like them to stay on in their posts, a gesture that West Wing aides described as a reflection of Kudlow’s respect for Cohn’s operation as well as his understanding of the difficulties he would probably encounter if he attempted an overhaul.

Kudlow, 70, is a generational peer of Trump and a staple of the New York business elite to which Trump has long aspired. Kudlow has privately told associates that the president has asked him to be an energetic salesman on television — by acting as a principal, with speeches and road trips — for the Republican-authored tax law ahead of the midterm elections, as opposed to functioning as a behind-the-scenes manager, according to people who have spoken with him.

“He’s squaring up his economic policy with the right adviser for him,” Giuliani said. “Gary was really good, but I don’t know if Gary ever embraced the Trump economic ideas. He was more of a traditional Democrat or moderate Republican. Kudlow is a real cheerleader for the tax cuts in a way Gary never was, although he helped get them passed.”

Bolton, meanwhile, has told allies that he may make major changes on the National Security Council staff but has been careful not to reveal his plans until he formally takes over later this month. He has been working to appear as a team player — touting his bond with Pompeo and lunching Tuesday with McMaster — despite his reputation as a sharp-elbowed bureaucratic brawler, officials said.

Trump has been frustrated by news stories of White House tumult and has ordered aides to contest the notion that there is chaos. He also has vented frequently about the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill, griping that Congress did not fully fund his promised U.S.-Mexico border wall and labeling Republican congressional leaders “weak negotiators.”

Meeting with advisers Monday in the Oval Office, Trump was alerted to a new CNN poll that showed his approval rating at 42 percent nationally, up 7 percentage points since February. Trump joked that CNN, which he generally views as hostile to him, paid for a survey that pleased him, according to officials briefed on the conversation.

Another issue that has drawn Trump’s ire — although he has not engaged publicly — is Daniels, the adult-film actress who alleged having a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 and was paid $130,000 to sign a nondisclosure agreement shortly before the 2016 election. She and her attorney have not kept their silence, however, and the president has been bothered by the headlines they have generated.

The Daniels saga came up as Trump ate dinner Thursday night at Mar-a-Lago with his wife, Melania, and other family members. King — who is so controversial because of his 1967 manslaughter conviction (he was later pardoned) that he was barred from speaking at the 2016 Republican National Convention — joined the president and griped about the media.

“The top story, number one, is Stormy Daniels,” King said he told Trump. “I told him it’s utterly ridiculous. I just came back from Hamburg, Germany, and they were just laughing at us.”

King said that Trump nodded in approval and told him, “It’s meaningless.”

“If he denies it happened, that’s what it is,” King said. “Who cares what he does with some lady?”

“The president,” King added, “is a guy who we call in the vernacular of the ghetto, S.K.D., something kinda different.”

Costa reported from Washington.

 

‘Humanitarian Crisis in Hollywood’: Chronic homelessness vs. the American Dream

April 1, 2018

RT

Thousands of people in one of America’s richest cities live on sidewalks infested with flesh-eating bacteria and tuberculosis. A Redfish Media report looks at the chronic homelessness crisis in Los Angeles.

Homelessness in Los Angeles has increased 43 percent in just four years. Skid Row, the epicenter of homelessness in the City of Angels, is home to approximately 2,500 people who live on the streets in a 49 square block area. It is the biggest concentration of homeless people in the United States. Overall, a staggering 60,000 people live without shelter in LA county.

Reverend Andy Bales is the CEO of the Union Rescue mission, which provides shelter to 1,000 people on any given night. He told Redfish Media  about the appalling conditions in Skid Row, which, according to the most recent Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council action letter, is 80 restrooms shy of satisfying the minimum standards of a long-term refugee camp. It has nine permanent restrooms for 1,777 people, or one for every 197 homeless people, compared to the UN refugee camp standards of 20 per person.

Bales outlined just how dangerous this extreme lack of basic sanitation is. “I actually contracted three flesh-eating diseases E. coli, staph and strep from the sidewalks when I had a wound boot on and, after two years in a wheelchair I ended up losing my lower right leg. That is the condition of the health on Skid Row because of the shortage of restrooms. It really is a crisis.” Bales added that a certain strain of tuberculosis, which is not found anywhere else in the world, also thrives in the area.

The chronic conditions in Los Angeles and in other cities around America prompted the government to invite the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, to carry out inspections last year.

In his damning report, Alston said: “The United States is alone among developed countries in insisting that while human rights are of fundamental importance, they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable healthcare, or growing up in a context of total deprivation.”

Alston concluded that the “the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.” On Skid Row, the poverty and deprivation make it very hard for anyone to even believe in the illusion any more.