TBR News July 3, 2018

Jul 03 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8

Washington, D.C. July 3, 2018:”The growing polarization of the American public is approaching a level where outbreaks of violence between Trump supporters and anti-Trump groups will most certainly escalate.

And Trump’s growing racism may appeal to many but it anathema to far more.

If, as has been rumored, Trump was bought by Putin and is working for him, Putin must be smiling to himself as he reads the American press.

It is regretful that the United States cannot find a leader who would be as competent and as beneficial to his country’s welfare as Putin is for Russias.”

 

 

The Table of Contents

  • Exclusive: China presses Europe for anti-U.S. alliance on trade
  • A Year Later, the Fascists of Charlottesville Are Back for More — This Time Outside the White House
  • Organized Trump right-wing supporters
  • Trump’s “Infrastructure” Plan: Pump Up the Pentagon
  • Will Michael Cohen flip on Trump? The key questions answered
  • Trump reportedly demands NATO allies increase defense spending in harshly worded letters
  • This new study suggests Trump’s racism might actually hurt him
  • Gmail messages ‘read by human third parties’
  • Russia completes testing extended-range interceptor missile for S-400 system – reports
  • Pew, pew! China develops AK-47-sized low lethality ‘laser rifle’

 

Exclusive: China presses Europe for anti-U.S. alliance on trade

July 3, 2018

by Robin Emmott and Noah Barkin

Reuters

BRUSSELS/BERLIN (Reuters) – China is putting pressure on the European Union to issue a strong joint statement against President Donald Trump’s trade policies at a summit later this month but is facing resistance, European officials said. In meetings in Brussels, Berlin and Beijing, senior Chinese officials, including Vice Premier Liu He and the Chinese government’s top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, have proposed an alliance between the two economic powers and offered to open more of the Chinese market in a gesture of goodwill.

One proposal has been for China and the European Union to launch joint action against the United States at the World Trade Organisation.

But the European Union, the world’s largest trading bloc, has rejected the idea of allying with Beijing against Washington, five EU officials and diplomats told Reuters, ahead of a Sino-European summit in Beijing on July 16-17.

Instead, the summit is expected to produce a modest communique, which affirms the commitment of both sides to the multilateral trading system and promises to set up a working group on modernizing the WTO, EU officials said.

Vice Premier Liu He has said privately that China is ready to set out for the first time what sectors it can open to European investment at the annual summit, expected to be attended by President Xi Jinping, China’s Premier Li Keqiang and top EU officials.

Chinese state media has promoted the message that the European Union is on China’s side, officials said, putting the bloc in a delicate position. The past two summits, in 2016 and 2017, ended without a statement due to disagreements over the South China Sea and trade.

“China wants the European Union to stand with Beijing against Washington, to take sides,” said one European diplomat. “We won’t do it and we have told them that.”

China’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Beijing’s summit aims.

CHINA’S MOMENT?

Despite Trump’s tariffs on European metals exports and threats to hit the EU’s automobile industry, Brussels shares Washington’s concern about China’s closed markets and what Western governments say is Beijing’s manipulation of trade to dominate global markets.

“We agree with almost all the complaints the U.S. has against China, it’s just we don’t agree with how the United States is handling it,” another diplomat said.

Still, China’s stance is striking given Washington’s deep economic and security ties with European nations. It shows the depth of Chinese concern about a trade war with Washington, as Trump is set to impose tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Chinese imports on July 6.

It also underscores China’s new boldness in trying to seize leadership amid divisions between the United States and its European, Canadian and Japanese allies over issues including free trade, climate change and foreign policy.

“Trump has split the West, and China is seeking to capitalize on that. It was never comfortable with the West being one bloc,” said a European official involved in EU-China diplomacy.

“China now feels it can try to split off the European Union in so many areas, on trade, on human rights,” the official said.

Another official described the dispute between Trump and Western allies at the Group of Seven summit last month as a gift to Beijing because it showed European leaders losing a long-time ally, at least in trade policy.

European envoys say they already sensed a greater urgency from China in 2017 to find like-minded countries willing to stand up against Trump’s “America First” policies.

NO “SYSTEMIC CHANGE”

A report by New York-based Rhodium Group, a research consultancy, in April showed that Chinese restrictions on foreign investment are higher in every single sector save real estate, compared to the European Union, while many of the big Chinese takeovers in the bloc would not have been possible for EU companies in China.

China has promised to open up. But EU officials expect any moves to be more symbolic than substantive.

They say China’s decision in May to lower tariffs on imported cars will make little difference because imports make up such a small part of the market. China’s plans to move rapidly to electric vehicles mean that any new benefits it offers traditional European carmakers will be fleeting.

“Whenever the train has left the station we are allowed to enter the platform,” a Beijing-based European executive said.

However, China’s offer at the upcoming summit to open up reflects Beijing’s concern that it is set to face tighter EU controls, and regulators are also blocking Chinese takeover attempts in the United States.

The European Union is seeking to pass legislation to allow greater scrutiny of foreign investments.

“We don’t know if this offer to open up is genuine yet,” a third EU diplomat said. “It’s unlikely to mark a systemic change.”

Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by Giles Elgood

 

A Year Later, the Fascists of Charlottesville Are Back for More — This Time Outside the White House

July 2, 2018

by Natasha Lennard

The Intercept

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year ripped away the last shred of plausible deniability about the white supremacist fascism of the so-called alt-right. A neo-Nazi plowed his Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-fascist counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring others. A young black man was beaten bloody by racists with metal poles in a parking lot near a police station. White supremacists marched Klan-like, with burning torches and Nazi salutes, around a Confederate statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee while chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” It was a gruesome pastiche of 19th-century American and 20th-century European race hate, newly emboldened under Donald Trump. The president later declared that there were some “very fine people on both sides” — a remark that winked at the side with swastikas and “Sieg Heils.”The tragic events of that day make it all the more vile that the white nationalist organizer of “Unite the Right,” Jason Kessler, is planning an event to mark the deadly demonstration. The approval for the “anniversary” rally outside the White House was granted by the National Park Service. The application offered plans for an estimated 400 demonstrators in Washington’s Lafayette Park who would be “protesting civil rights abuse in Charlottesville, Va / white civil rights.” Kessler initially applied to hold “Unite the Right 2” in Charlottesville, and is now suing the city because it denied him a permit due to safety concerns. The lawsuit seeks to allow the demonstration to go ahead in Charlottesville, as well as in Washington, D.C., on August 12 — exactly a year after Heyer’s brutal death. The false victimhood of Kessler’s aims were on full display as news of approval for him to both assemble and speak in Washington came in: He told a local CBS affiliate, “We’re not able to peacefully assemble. We’re not able to speak.”

Even if “Unite the Right 2″ attendees do no more than chant and hold posters, their rally will still be a violent act; there’s an inherent violence to the genocidal ideology of white supremacy. The ideology’s emboldening under Trump has already provoked violent consequences: More than 60 people were killed or injured in “alt-right” violence last year alone, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center; white supremacists and other far-right extremists were responsible for 59 percent of all extremist-related fatalities in the United States in 2017. To allow “Unite the Right” to march under the banner of “civil rights” and “free speech” would be an unconscionable sanctioning of racist violence. However, the answer — from a practical as well as ideological standpoint — will not come from appealing to the National Park Service, the city, or any governmental body to have the demonstration banned.

It’s tempting to want to push for authorities to side with Charlottesville and also deny Kessler a permit out of safety concerns. (The Washington rally has been approved, but a formal permit has yet to be issued.) The deadly violence of last year’s event — which Kessler brazenly blamed on left-wing counterprotesters, of which Heyer was one — gives strong grounds to worry any local authorities. But Washington, unlike Charlottesville, is not an open-carry jurisdiction, and the notion that the D.C. police department could not control a crowd of 400 is implausible. While any large gathering of white supremacists is an existential threat to the lives of black and brown people, the bureaucracies of protest permits don’t barter with existential safety concerns. An appeal to safety will not see “Unite the Right” pre-emptively shut down. Nor will any appeal to governmental authority.

Kessler and his fellow white supremacists have a constitutional right to publicly spew hate. In a 1969 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Ku Klux Klan member’s right to call publicly for “revengeance” (sic) against Jews and black people. In 1977, the court sided with a neo-Nazi group in its attempt to march through the heavily Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois. A conservative court led by John Roberts in the Trump era is not about to overturn decades of American free speech for fascist absolutism. The government has upheld the speech rights of white nationalists with ardor. And yet for others, freedom of speech and association is increasingly under threat. Black Lives Matter activists are labeled “Black Identity Extremists” and tracked. The government swept up anti-fascist J20 protesters and threw the book at them. Palestinian rights activists could be labeled anti-Semitic for criticizing Israel under a newly proposed law.

A common misconception about the anti-fascist “no-platforming” position is that it amounts to a desire for First Amendment-violating censorship — a misconception that plays into current far-right myths of threatened rights for whites. But most “no-platformers,” myself included, know better than to call upon the government or the courts, especially under this white supremacist administration, to ban white supremacist events. Anti-fascist activists have no interest in bolstering the state’s censorial oversight, and even less faith that any such censorship would ever be applied to white supremacists.

And the criminalization of certain hate speech can do little to hold back the tides of rising nationalism. In statutes that make speech in Germany no less free than ours, for example, the display or reproduction of Hitler-era symbols, like the swastika or the Nazi salute, is banned. The legal concept of “Volksverhetzung” — “incitement of the masses” — criminalizes Holocaust denial and an array of hate speech. But the racist thugs of Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West; the far-right nationalists of Alternative for Germany (who hold seats in parliament); and even explicit neo-Nazis all hold rallies and make speeches regularly and legally, replacing verboten imagery and content with veiled symbolism.

Yet just because white supremacist rallies cannot and will not be banned by the state does not mean they should proceed without opposition. A white supremacist rally outside the White House on the anniversary of a deadly neo-Nazi demonstration deserves vigorous counterprotest and disruption. The anniversary event is unlikely to be large, given the deadly associations with the “Unite the Right” label and ongoing infighting between far-right cohorts. But even a small gathering is grounds for a significant counterprotest to descend on Washington, least of all because a large demonstration of anti-fascist, anti-racist sentiment outside the white supremacist White House would not go amiss in this political moment.

Kim Kelly, a writer and anarchist organizer in New York (and a personal friend) was present at the Charlottesville rally alongside a number of other anti-fascist activists from the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council. “Had I not instinctively leaped out of the way when that Dodge Charger came barreling toward — and then through — the crowd of anti-fascist protesters on August 12, 2017, I would not be here today,” she told me. “As it stands now, I can still hear the screams. I can still see the flying bodies when I close my eyes, and the mangled limbs, and Heather Heyer’s turquoise blouse.” Kelly, who plans to return to Charlottesville this year “on a mission of remembrance, solidarity, and healing” told me, “I’m still amazed at the fact that these weak-willed, mealy-mouthed troglodytes are being given the opportunity to celebrate their direct role in the death of Heather Heyer and the injury of dozens of others.”

The suggestion that white nationalists should either be ignored or civilly debated misunderstands that white supremacist fascism is not a reasoned, developed political position, but a perverted desire for dominance. It simply can’t be reasoned away. The role of a successful anti-fascist counterprotest is to create stakes for the fascists: They will be exposed publicly, heckled, and confronted. But in the lead up to “Unite the Right 2,” we will no doubt see calls for respectful counterprotest, a demand for that old canard of “civility,” and renewed hysteria over the threat of antifa. On his application to the National Park Service, Kessler — who in a deleted tweet last year called Heyer a “fat, disgusting Communist” and called her death “payback time” — wrote that “members of Antifa affiliated groups will try to disrupt.”

While many in the mainstream press pronounce disgust with Trump, they parrot his “both sides” attitude. According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, in the month that followed the events in Charlottesville, America’s top six broadsheet newspapers altogether ran 28 opinion pieces condemning anti-fascist action, but only 27 condemning neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Trump’s failure to disavow them. These are the commentators who would sooner decry anti-fascists than the fascists they oppose, who would no doubt also prefer to see Sarah Huckabee Sanders served with “civility” in a restaurant after defending the caging of immigrant babies in camps. They are who Martin Luther King Jr. called the “white moderate” in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” And it is precisely in the name of justice, without which there can be no peace, that calls for civility and order in the face of white supremacist terror must be ignored.

To allow neo-Nazis to rally en masse without vigorous counterprotest and intervention would not only be an affront to Heyer’s memory, but an abrogation in the struggle for justice. “It is easy to criticize militant action when you never leave the house or think that ‘resistance’ means sending a tweet or donating to a Democrat,” said Kelly, the organizer. “We were there. They weren’t.”

 

Organized Trump right-wing supporters

by Christian Jürs

Who are these groups? Here is a listing of only some of them:

  • ACT for America
  • Alliance Defending Freedom
  • America’s Promise Ministries
  • American Border Patrol/American Patrol
  • American Family Association
  • American Freedom Party
  • American Renaissance
  • Aryan Brotherhood
  • Aryan Brotherhood of Texas
  • Aryan Nations
  • Blood & Honor
  • Brotherhood of Klans
  • Center for Security Policy
  • Church of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
  • The Creativity Movement
  • The Sovereign Citizen Movement of the US and Canada
  • The Dominonist Movement of America
  • National Alliance
  • National Coalition for Immigration Reform
  • National Socialist Movement
  • National Vanguard
  • Oath Keepers
  • Stormfront
  • The Aryan Terror Brigade.
  • The neo-Confederate League of the South.
  • Traditionalist Worker Party
  • White Revolution

 

 

Trump’s “Infrastructure” Plan: Pump Up the Pentagon

by William D. Hartung

TomDispatch

Other than shouting about building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, one of Donald Trump’s most frequently proclaimed promises on the 2016 campaign trail was the launching of a half-trillion-dollar plan to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure (employing large numbers of workers in the process). Eighteen months into his administration, no credible proposal for anything near that scale has been made. To the extent that the Trump administration has a plan at all for public investment, it involves pumping up Pentagon spending, not investing in roads, bridges, transportation, better Internet access, or other pressing needs of the civilian economy.

Not that President Trump hasn’t talked about investing in infrastructure. Last February, he even proposed a scheme that, he claimed, would boost the country’s infrastructure with $1.5 trillion in spending over the next decade. With a typical dose of hyperbole, he described it as “the biggest and boldest infrastructure investment in American history.”

Analysts from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania — Trump’s alma mater — beg to differ. They note that the plan actually involves only $200 billion in direct federal investment, less than one-seventh of the total promised. According to Wharton’s experts, much of the extra spending, supposedly leveraged from the private sector as well as state and local governments, will never materialize. In addition, were such a plan launched, it would, they suggest, fall short of its goal by a cool trillion dollars. In the end, the spending levels Trump is proposing would have “little to no impact” on the nation’s gross domestic product. To add insult to injury, the president has exerted next to no effort to get even this anemic proposal through Congress, where it’s now dead in the water.

There is, however, one area of federal investment on which Trump and the Congress have worked overtime with remarkable unanimity to increase spending: the Pentagon, which is slated to receive more than $6 trillion over the next decade. This year alone increases will bring total spending on the Pentagon and related agencies (like the Department of Energy where work on nuclear warheads takes place) to $716 billion. That $6-trillion, 10-year figure represents more than 30 times as much direct spending as the president’s $200 billion infrastructure plan.

In reality, Pentagon spending is the Trump administration’s substitute for a true infrastructure program and it’s guaranteed to deliver public investments, but neglect just about every area of greatest civilian need from roads to water treatment facilities.

The Pentagon’s Covert Industrial Policy

One reason the Trump administration has chosen to pump money into the Pentagon is that it’s the path of least political resistance in Washington. A combination of fear, ideology, and influence peddling radically skews “debate” there in favor of military outlays above all else. Fear — whether of terrorism, Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea — provides one pillar of support for the habitual overfunding of the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state (which in these years has had a combined trillion-dollar annual budget). In addition, it’s generally accepted in Washington that being tagged “soft on defense” is the equivalent of political suicide, particularly for Democrats. Add to that the millions of dollars spent by the weapons industry on lobbying and campaign contributions, its routine practice of hiring former Pentagon and military officials, and the way it strategically places defense-related jobs in key states and districts, and it’s easy to see how the president and Congress might turn to arms spending as the basis for a covert industrial policy.

The Trump plan builds on the Pentagon’s already prominent role in the economy. By now, it’s the largest landowner in the country, the biggest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, the most significant source of funds for advanced government research and development, and a major investor in the manufacturing sector. As it happens, though, expanding the Pentagon’s economic role is the least efficient way to boost jobs, innovation, and economic growth.

Unfortunately, there is no organized lobby or accepted bipartisan rationale for domestic funding that can come close to matching the levers of influence that the Pentagon and the arms industry have at their command. This only increases the difficulty Congress has when it comes to investing in infrastructure, clean energy, education, or other direct paths toward increasing employment and economic growth.

Former congressman Barney Frank once labeled the penchant for using the Pentagon as the government’s main economic tool “weaponized Keynesianism” after economist John Maynard Keynes’s theory that government spending should pick up the slack in investment when private-sector spending is insufficient to support full employment. Currently, of course, the official unemployment rate is low by historical standards. However, key localities and constituencies, including the industrial Midwest, rural areas, and urban ones with significant numbers of black and Hispanic workers, have largely been left behind. In addition, millions of “discouraged workers” who want a job but have given up actively looking for one aren’t even counted in the official unemployment figures, wage growth has been stagnant for years, and the inequality gap between the 1% and the rest of America is already in Gilded Age territory.

Such economic distress was crucial to Donald Trump’s rise to power. In campaign 2016, of course, he endlessly denounced unfair trade agreements, immigrants, and corporate flight as key factors in the plight of what became a significant part of his political base: downwardly mobile and displaced industrial workers (or those who feared that this might be their future fate).

The Trump Difference

Although insufficient, increases in defense manufacturing and construction can help areas where employment in civilian manufacturing has been lagging. Even as it’s expanded, however, defense spending has come to play an ever-smaller role in the U.S. economy, falling from 8%-10% of the gross domestic product in the 1950s and 1960s to under 4% today. Still, it remains crucial to the economic base in defense-dependent locales like southern California, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington state. Such places, in turn, play an outsized political role in Washington because their congressional representatives tend to cluster on the armed services, defense appropriations, and other key committees, and because of their significance on the electoral map.

A long-awaited Trump administration “defense industrial base” study should be considered a tip-off that the president and his key officials see Pentagon spending as the way to economincally prime the pump. Note, as a start, that the study was overseen not by a defense official but by the president’s economics and trade czar, Peter Navarro, whose formal title is White House director of trade and industrial policy. A main aim of the study is to find a way to bolster smaller defense firms that subcontract to giants like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin.

Although Trump touted the study as a way to “rebuild” the U.S. military when he ordered it in May 2017, economic motives were clearly a crucial factor. Navarro typically cited the importance of a “healthy, growing economy and a resilient industrial base,” identifying weapons spending as a key element in achieving such goals. The CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, one of the defense lobby’s most powerful trade groups, underscored Navarro’s point when, in July 2017, he insisted that “our industry’s contributions to U.S. national security and economic well-being can’t be taken for granted.” (He failed to explain how an industry that absorbs more than $300 billion per year in Pentagon contracts could ever be “taken for granted.”)

Trump’s defense-industrial-base policy tracks closely with proposals put forward by Daniel Goure of the military-contractor-funded Lexington Institute in a December 2016 article titled “How Trump Can Invest in Infrastructure and Make America Great Again.” Goure’s main point: that Trump should make military investments — like building naval shipyards and ammunition plants — part and parcel of his infrastructure plan. In doing so, he caught the essence of the arms industry’s case regarding the salutary effects of defense spending on the economy:

“Every major military activity, whether production of a new weapons system, sustainment of an existing one or support for the troops, is imbedded in a web of economic activities and supports an array of businesses. These include not only major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, but a host of middle-tier and even mom-and-pop businesses. Money spent at the top ripples through the economy. Most of it is spent not on unique defense items, but on products and services that have commercial markets too.”

What Goure’s analysis neglects, however, is not just that every government investment stimulates multiple sectors of the economy, but that virtually any other kind would have a greater ripple effect on employment and economic growth than military spending does. Underwritten by the defense industry, his analysis is yet another example of how the arms lobby has distorted economic policy and debate in this country.

These days, it seems as if there’s nothing the military won’t get involved in. Take another recent set of “security” expenditures in what has already become a billion-dollar-plus business: building and maintaining detention centers for children, mainly unaccompanied minors from Central America, caught up in the Trump administration’s brutal security crackdown on the U.S.-Mexico border. One company, Southwest Key, has already received a $955 million government contract to work on such facilities. Among the other beneficiaries is the major defense contractor General Dynamics, normally known for making tanks, ballistic-missile-firing submarines, and the like, not ordinarily ideal qualifications for taking care of children.

Last but not least, President Trump has worked overtime to tout his promotion of U.S. arms sales as a jobs program. In a May 2018 meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House (with reporters in attendance), he typically brandished a map that laid out just where U.S. jobs from Saudi arms sales would be located. Not coincidentally, many of them would be in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida that had provided him with his margin of victory in the 2016 elections. Trump had already crowed about such Saudi deals as a source of “jobs, jobs, jobs” during his May 2017 visit to Riyadh, that country’s capital. And he claimed on one occasion — against all evidence — that his deals with the Saudi regime for arms and other equipment could create “millions of jobs.”

The Trump administration’s decision to blatantly put jobs and economic benefits for U.S. corporations above human rights considerations and strategic concerns is likely to have disastrous consequences. Its continued sales of bombs and other weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, for example, allows them to go on prosecuting a brutal war in Yemen that has already killed thousands of civilians and put millions more at risk of death from famine and disease. In addition to being morally reprehensible, such an approach could turn untold numbers of Yemenis and others across the Middle East into U.S. enemies — a high price to pay for a few thousand jobs in the arms sector.

Pentagon Spending Versus a Real Infrastructure Plan

While the Trump administration’s Pentagon spending will infuse new money into the economy, it’s certainly a misguided way to spur economic growth. As University of Massachusetts economist Heidi Garrett-Peltier has demonstrated, when it comes to creating jobs, military spending lags far behind investment in civilian infrastructure, clean energy, health care, or education. Nonetheless, the administration is moving full speed ahead with its military-driven planning.

In addition, Trump’s approach will prove hopeless when it comes to addressing the fast-multiplying problems of the country’s ailing infrastructure. The $683 billion extra that the administration proposes putting into Pentagon spending over the next 10 years pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars the American Society of Civil Engineers claims are needed to modernize U.S. infrastructure. Nor will all of that Pentagon increase even be directed toward construction or manufacturing activities (not to speak of basic infrastructural needs like roads and bridges). A significant chunk of it will, for instance, be dedicated to paying the salaries of the military’s massive cadre of civilian and military personnel or health care and other benefits.

In their study, the civil engineers suggest that failing to engage in a major infrastructure program could cost the economy $4 trillion and 2.5 million jobs by 2025, something no Pentagon pump-priming could begin to offset. In other words, using the Pentagon as America’s main conduit for public investment will prove a woeful approach when it comes to the health of the larger society.

One era in which government spending did directly stimulate increased growth, infrastructural development, and the creation of well-paying jobs was the 1950s, a period for which Donald Trump is visibly nostalgic. For him, those years were evidently the last in which America was truly “great.” Many things were deeply wrong with the country in the fifties — from rampant racism, sexism, and the denial of basic human rights to McCarthyite witch hunts — but on the economic front the government did indeed play a positive role.

In those years, public investment went far beyond Pentagon spending, which President Dwight Eisenhower (of “military-industrial complex” fame) actually tried to rein in. It was civilian investments — from the G.I. Bill to increased incentives for housing construction to the building of an interstate highway system — that contributed in crucial ways to the economic boom of that era. Whatever its failures and drawbacks, including the ways in which African-Americans and other minorities were grossly under-represented when it came to sharing the benefits, the Eisenhower investment strategy did boost the overall economy in a fashion the Trump plan never will.

The notion that the Pentagon can play a primary role in boosting employment to any significant degree is largely a myth that serves the needs of the military-industrial complex, not American workers or Donald Trump’s base. Until the political gridlock in Washington that prevents large-scale new civilian investments of just about any sort is broken, however, the Pentagon will continue to seem like the only game in town. And we will all pay a price for those skewed priorities, in both blood and treasure.

 

Will Michael Cohen flip on Trump? The key questions answered

Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer has told an interviewer that his first loyalty is to his family. Is he about to change tack?

July 2, 2018

by Tom McCarthy

The Guardian

After months of silence, Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer to Donald Trump who is the target of a multifaceted federal criminal investigation, sat for an interview with ABC News that was published on Monday morning.

Cohen revealed that his loyalty to Trump is perhaps not as absolute as it has previously seemed.

Cohen has said he would “take a bullet” for Trump and “grab” anyone who attacked Trump “by the neck”.

But in fact, he told interviewer George Stephanopoulos: “My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will. I put family and country first.”

What does Cohen’s apparent change of heart mean, for him and for Trump? Here are the key questions:

Is Cohen ‘flipping’?

Potential witnesses are said to “flip” when they go from being targets of a criminal investigation to entering some kind of deal with prosecutors in which they agree to cooperate in exchange for a reduction in charges or sentencing.

There are signs Cohen is actively seeking such a deal, significantly including his recent hire of a new lawyer, Guy Petrillo, formerly a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), the office currently prosecuting Cohen. Petrillo’s relationships with SDNY prosecutors could hasten a deal.

“Once I understand what charges might be filed against me, if any at all, I will defer to my new counsel, Guy Petrillo, for guidance,” Cohen told ABC.

How bad would that be for Trump?

If Cohen reaches a deal with prosecutors, the consequences could be serious for Trump and his family on multiple fronts. As a vice-president in the Trump Organization who worked closely with Trump for a decade, Cohen was entrusted with delicate tasks including promoting real estate deals in Russia and coordinating payoffs for women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. The president denies all wrongdoing and has denied multiple affairs.

Trump and three of his children – Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric – have also been accused by the New York state attorney general of violating charity laws in the operation of the Trump Foundation. Cohen is likely to know a lot about how the foundation worked. Trump has denied wrongdoing and called the case a Democratic hit job.

But the prosecutor for whom Cohen may be most valuable is the special counsel, Robert Mueller, who is investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Cohen has close personal ties to Ukrainian and Russian immigrants and managed communications between the Trump Organization and Russian entities. Mueller might expect Cohen to be able to testify, for example, about whether anyone in the Trump campaign ever encouraged foreign nationals linked to Russian hackers to publicize emails stolen from Hillary Clinton – conduct that could be criminal.

Trump has denied all knowledge of wrongdoing by his campaign and calls the Russia investigation a “witch-hunt”.

Cohen told Stephanopoulos: “I don’t like the term witch-hunt. As an American, I repudiate Russia’s or any other foreign government’s attempt to interfere or meddle in our democratic process, and I would call on all Americans to do the same.”

Is Cohen making a play for a pardon?

Trump’s habit of making seemingly spontaneous, high-profile pardons has led to speculation Cohen may be seeking the same. Among those whom Trump has pardoned so far are the rightwing fireband Dinesh D’Souza; discriminatory Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio; and former Dick Cheney aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

There is, however, good reason to believe Cohen is not looking for a pardon. Legal analysts say gambling on a pardon would be a wild strategy for a lawyer of Petrillo’s caliber and standing. And Cohen could face criminal charges brought by the state of New York or another state that Trump would be powerless to pardon, as the constitution states the president may only pardon federal crimes. So a pardon might not keep Cohen out of prison.

Remind me why Cohen is in trouble?

Cohen has not been charged with a crime but his residences, offices and electronic devices were raided on 9 April by FBI agents looking for evidence of suspected crimes including bank fraud, wire fraud, tax fraud, campaign finance violations and possibly more.

One lead prosecutors are pursuing grew out of multiple suspicious activity reports filed by a bank that flagged large money flows into and out of a limited liability corporation (LLC) Cohen set up just before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen used the company, Essential Consultants, to send $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who alleges an affair with Trump, among other payments.

The account was also used to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporations seeking to improve access to the president. The potential charges carry maximum possible sentences of decades in prison. That is a price Cohen does not sound prepared to pay on behalf of his former employer.

“I will not be a punching bag as part of anyone’s defense strategy,” Cohen told Stephanopoulos. “I am not a villain of this story, and I will not allow others to try to depict me that way.”

 

Trump reportedly demands NATO allies increase defense spending in harshly worded letters

July 2, 2018

by Victor Morton

The Washington Times

President Trump has reportedly sent letters to at least four NATO allies, criticizing their low defense spending and implying that he and the American people will not tolerate this for much longer.

The letters were sent last month, The New York Times reported Monday afternoon ahead of a NATO summit meeting last week, and were received by at least the heads of government of Germany, Belgium, Norway and Canada.

“As we discussed during your visit in April, there is growing frustration in the United States that some allies have not stepped up as promised,” Mr. Trump wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, The Times reported. “Continued German underspending on defense undermines the security of the alliance and provides validation for other allies that also do not plan to meet their military spending commitments, because others see you as a role model.”

The Times cited “someone who saw [the letter to Mrs. Merkel] and shared excerpts” with its reporters.

Mr. Trump said in at least three of the letters that while “domestic political pressure” might account for the nations’ breaking the 2014 agreement that all NATO countries should spend 2 percent of their Gross Domestic Product on their militaries, he noted that he had spent “considerable political capital to increase our own military spending” and said he couldn’t guarantee that he’d be able to do it forever if other NATO countries weren’t doing a better job.

“It will, however, become increasingly difficult to justify to American citizens why some countries do not share NATO’s collective security burden while American soldiers continue to sacrifice their lives overseas or come home gravely wounded,” he wrote to Mrs. Merkel, similar to the wording in letters to Prime Ministers Justin Trudeau of Canada and Erna Solberg of Norway.

The existence of, and some details about, some of the notes had been reported by foreign news outlets before Monday.

The U.S. has always spent a bigger share of its economic output on its military than other NATO members, even during the height of the Cold War, and American politicians have long complained about it.

But Mr. Trump has been unusually sharp and pointed in his rhetoric, and has frosty relations with many of the first-world’s leaders, culminating in a breakdown at the annual Group of 7 meeting last month in Quebec, Canada. NATO heads of government gather next week in Brussels.

“The president wants a strong NATO,” National Security Adviser John R. Bolton said Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “If you think Russia’s a threat, ask yourself this question: Why is Germany spending less than 1.2 percent of its G.N.P.? When people talk about undermining the NATO alliance, you should look at those who are carrying out steps that make NATO less effective militarily.”

President Trump has reportedly sent letters to at least four NATO allies, criticizing their low defense spending and implying that he and the American people will not tolerate this for much longer.

The letters were sent last month, The New York Times reported Monday afternoon ahead of a NATO summit meeting last week, and were received by at least the heads of government of Germany, Belgium, Norway and Canada.

“As we discussed during your visit in April, there is growing frustration in the United States that some allies have not stepped up as promised,” Mr. Trump wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, The Times reported. “Continued German underspending on defense undermines the security of the alliance and provides validation for other allies that also do not plan to meet their military spending commitments, because others see you as a role model.”

The Times cited “someone who saw [the letter to Mrs. Merkel] and shared excerpts” with its reporters.

Mr. Trump said in at least three of the letters that while “domestic political pressure” might account for the nations’ breaking the 2014 agreement that all NATO countries should spend 2 percent of their Gross Domestic Product on their militaries, he noted that he had spent “considerable political capital to increase our own military spending” and said he couldn’t guarantee that he’d be able to do it forever if other NATO countries weren’t doing a better job.

“It will, however, become increasingly difficult to justify to American citizens why some countries do not share NATO’s collective security burden while American soldiers continue to sacrifice their lives overseas or come home gravely wounded,” he wrote to Mrs. Merkel, similar to the wording in letters to Prime Ministers Justin Trudeau of Canada and Erna Solberg of Norway.

The existence of, and some details about, some of the notes had been reported by foreign news outlets before Monday.

The U.S. has always spent a bigger share of its economic output on its military than other NATO members, even during the height of the Cold War, and American politicians have long complained about it.

But Mr. Trump has been unusually sharp and pointed in his rhetoric, and has frosty relations with many of the first-world’s leaders, culminating in a breakdown at the annual Group of 7 meeting last month in Quebec, Canada. NATO heads of government gather next week in Brussels.

“The president wants a strong NATO,” National Security Adviser John R. Bolton said Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “If you think Russia’s a threat, ask yourself this question: Why is Germany spending less than 1.2 percent of its G.N.P.? When people talk about undermining the NATO alliance, you should look at those who are carrying out steps that make NATO less effective militarily.”

 

This new study suggests Trump’s racism might actually hurt him

July 3, 2018

by Greg Sargent

Washington Post

One of the worst mental habits we see among pundits these days is to overexaggerate the role that Donald Trump’s harsh anti-immigration agenda played in his 2016 victory. This isn’t just about the past; it also confuses analysis of the present, leading analysts to baselessly presume in advance that President Trump’s immigration attacks will prove fearsomely potent in November’s midterms.

A new analysis by two political scientists offers important new data that sheds light on this debate. It suggests Trump’s immigration agenda might have been of negligible importance in his 2016 win, and that Hillary Clinton may have benefited more from the immigration debate than Trump did (that is, despite her electoral-college loss, it actually expanded her popular-vote total).

With Trump tweeting another round of attacks on Democrats over immigration this morning, this new data suggests — as the two political scientists conclude — that the Trumpified immigration debate might actually hurt the president and Republicans more than it does Democrats right now.

The new analysis by Howard Lavine and Wendy Rahn of the University of Minnesota looked at 2016 national polling data from the American National Election Studies. They broke down white Americans into three groups: 44 percent of whites are “anti-immigration” and want lower immigration levels; 40 percent of whites are immigration moderates who want to keep levels the same; and 16 percent of whites are “pro-immigration” and want immigration increased.

That means a minority of whites want reduced immigration (as Trump does), while a 56 percent majority of whites are not anti-immigration, with most wanting to keep current levels. The key finding here is that Trump only marginally improved over previous Republican presidential candidates among anti-immigration whites, gaining eight percentage points among them over Mitt Romney. By contrast, Clinton improved over Barack Obama’s performance by seven points among moderates but also by a huge margin among pro-immigration whites. Together, those last two blocks of whites are larger than the anti-immigration block

Trump, of course, routed Clinton among white voters. But Lavine and Rahn conclude that his anti-immigration agenda in particular might not have played a big role in making that happen, because the backlash among moderate and pro-immigration whites more than canceled out any gain Trump made among anti-immigration whites. And turnout was not higher among anti-immigration whites.

One can surmise that maybe Trump’s small gain among anti-immigration whites helped produce tiny Trump margins in a few states while Clinton’s gain among other whites mostly piled up in liberal strongholds. But that gets bound up in a debate over the many other causes that might have shifted those tiny margins, which will probably forever remain inconclusive.

The backlash to Trumpism is large

That aside, what’s really important about this analysis is what it says about the current debate. Lavine and Rahn conclude that, because “xenophobic whites” are already reliably Republican and that “less intolerant whites” waver (and shifted to Clinton in response to Trump), this may mean “politicizing xenophobia and racism in American elections” is “instigating a liberal counterreaction” that may be giving Democrats “more to gain than Republicans” from “political conflict over immigration.”

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we’ve already seen this in other elections this cycle, especially the Virginia gubernatorial race and the Alabama Senate race. In those elections, Republicans ran on Trumpist race-baiting immigration appeals (as they also did in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District) and lost, in part due to what appeared to be a large backlash to Trump among nonwhite voters, yes, but also among younger white voters and college-educated whites — especially suburbanites and women.

Trump’s immigration agenda and attacks on Democrats on the issue, of course, are heavily bound up with his racism, as three years of his public and private statements have confirmed. And Trump wants to make the midterms about his immigration agenda, in the belief that it will juice turnout among the Trump base (i.e., rural, exurban, blue collar, evangelical, and aging whites). The question is whether the backlash that that is fueling on the other side of the cultural divide will remain large enough to help Dems make big gains in the House. If that happens, it would suggest this study was on to something — Trump’s racism and xenophobia hurt more than they help.

One last point: This study found that only a minority of whites favor reduced immigration levels. More broadly, a recent Quinnipiac survey found the same, but also that only small minorities of whites favor Trump’s wall and oppose citizenship for the “dreamers” and for the broader category of undocumented immigrants. And so, if Trump’s agenda is inspiring a backlash, it is worth noting that the reason for this is that not only are trans-racial majorities rejecting Trumpism — majorities of whites are broadly rejecting Trumpism as well.

* TRUMP IS CUTTING LEGAL IMMIGRATION: The Post reports that Trump is making inroads towards one of his key goals:

The number of people receiving visas to move permanently to the United States is on pace to drop 12 percent in President Trump’s first two years in office, according to a Washington Post analysis of State Department data.

Among the most affected are the Muslim-majority countries on the president’s travel ban list — Yemen, Syria, Iran, Libya and Somalia — where the number of new arrivals to the United States is heading toward an 81 percent drop by Sept. 30, the end of the second fiscal year under Trump. . . .

Legal immigration from all Muslim-majority countries is on track to fall by nearly a third.

Remember how we were supposed to actually believe that Trump banned travel from those particular countries for national-security reasons?

* TRUMP MELTDOWN AT NATO COULD HELP PUTIN: The New York Times reports that Trump wrote “sharply worded letters” blasting NATO leaders for spending too little on their own defense in advance of his upcoming meeting with them:

Mr. Trump’s criticism raised the prospect of another confrontation [with] American allies after a blowup by Mr. Trump at the Group of 7 . . . and increased concerns that far from projecting solidarity in the face of threats from Russia, the meeting will highlight divisions within the alliance. Such a result could play into the hands of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia . . . whose primary goal is sowing divisions within the alliance.

Feature, not bug.

* TRUMP KEEPS LYING ABOUT HIS WALL: Trump has been telling his gullible rally crowds that construction of the wall is underway. NBC News sets the record straight, noting that only a bit of fencing has been built:

While some new fencing has been built along the U.S.-Mexico border in the past year, it’s not the concrete barrier Trump vowed because of the strings Congress put on the cash. . . . A spokesman for Customs and Border Protection said that more than seven miles of border fencing had been replaced in the past year. (The president has said the U.S. needs 700 miles of new barrier on the border, and has sought $25 billion for his wall.)

As NBC points out, Trump had repeatedly and emphatically said that a “fence” will not count as a “wall.” Apparently that’s no longer operative, since losing on this is unthinkable.

* JUDGE BLOCKS TRUMP AGAIN: A federal judge in Washington has ordered the Trump administration to release or grant individual hearings to more than 1,000 asylum seekers it had detained, in response to an ACLU lawsuit:

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued in March after finding detention rates at the offices surged to 96 percent in the first eight months after President Trump took office in 2017, up from less than 10 percent in 2013. . . . The ACLU says the mass imprisonment of people seeking refuge while awaiting immigration court hearings stems from policies . . . that amount to a deterrent to using the asylum provision.

As always, the Trump administration will do whatever it takes to dissuade people from seeking asylum here, desperate refugees included.

* REPUBLICANS WORRY ABOUT TRUMP’S TRADE WAR: Politico reports that Republicans have had enough, dammit:

The mounting frustration with the Republican president is a warning sign for the party amid what’s been a surprisingly favorable stretch. . . . But Republican senators say they can’t get the president to comprehend that his tariffs offensive could upend all of that progress in short order. Commodity prices in the heartland are sagging, U.S. allies are retaliating with tariffs of their own — and GOP leaders are fretting that the booming economy is about to go into a pre-midterms nosedive.

But it’s all good, because . . .

* TRUMP THINKS HIS BASE LOVES TRADE WAR: Politico also reports that Trump is now at war with business leaders over his trade war, but he thinks he’s got enough support where it counts:

[Trump is] betting that his populist approach to trade will thrill his working-class base and blow away any short-term economic fallout . . . His message to corporate America so far: I don’t care what you say, my base is with me. On the other side, corporate titans and market analysts fear Trump is on the cusp of damaging the American economy — and that he will not recognize the failure of his approach until it’s too late.

It will certainly be interesting to see how much of his base stays with him if we do start seeing serious economic damage, because it will likely bite hard in Trump country.

* AND TRUMP MAKES ‘POLICY BY TEMPER TANTRUM’: Paul Krugman takes stock of all the rising opposition in many quarters to Trump’s tariffs, and concludes:

Another administration might look at foreign retaliation, industry protests and stories about jobs lost due to its tariffs and consider the possibility that it’s on the wrong path. This administration? Never. I don’t think most businesses, or most investors in financial markets, are taking the threat of trade war seriously enough. They’re acting . . . as if the grown-ups will step in . . . But there are no grown-ups in this administration, which basically makes policy by temper tantrum. A full-blown trade war looks all too possible; in fact, it may already have begun.

As Krugman notes, a full-blown trade war “would cause huge worker displacement.” But we’re told Trump’s base thrills to this type of “temper tantrum,” seeing it as sticking it to the “elites.”

 

 

Gmail messages ‘read by human third parties’

July 3, 2018

BBC News

Google has confirmed that private emails sent and received by Gmail users can sometimes be read by third-party app developers.

People who have connected third-party apps to their accounts may have unwittingly given external developers permission to read their messages.

One company told the Wall Street Journal that the practice was “common” and a “dirty secret”.

Google indicated that the practice was not against its policies.

One security expert said it was “surprising” that Google allowed it.

Gmail is the world’s most popular email service with 1.4 billion users.

Google lets people connect their account to third-party email management tools, or services such as travel planning and price comparisons.

When linking an account to an external service, people are asked to grant certain permissions – which often include the ability to “read, send, delete and manage your email”.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this permission sometimes allows employees of third-party apps to read users’ emails.

‘Not asked permission’

While messages are typically processed by computer algorithms, the newspaper spoke to several companies where employees had read “thousands” of email messages.

Edison Software told the newspaper it had reviewed the emails of hundreds of users to build a new software feature.

Another firm – eDataSource Inc – said engineers had previously reviewed emails to improve its algorithms.

The companies said they had not asked users for specific permission to read their Gmail messages, because the practice was covered by their user agreements.

“You can spend weeks of your life reading terms and conditions,” said Prof Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey.

“It might well be mentioned in there, but it’s not what you would think of as reasonable, for a human being in a third-party company to be able to read your emails.”

Google said only companies that had been vetted could access messages, and only if users had “explicitly granted permission to access email”.

It pointed the BBC to its developer policies, which state: “There should be no surprises for Google users: hidden features, services, or actions that are inconsistent with the marketed purpose of your application may lead Google to suspend your ability to access Google API Services.”

It said Gmail users could visit the Security Check-up page to see which apps they had linked to their account, and revoke any they no longer wanted to share data with.

 

Russia completes testing extended-range interceptor missile for S-400 system – reports

July 3, 2018

RT

The Russian military has reportedly accepted that a new extended-range interceptor missile, for the acclaimed S-400 air defense system, is ready for service and could be in operational service by the end of August.

The update on the trials of the missile comes from a source in the defense industry cited by TASS news agency. Almaz-Antey, the producer of the S-400 system, declined to comment on the news. The 40N6E is an extended range surface-to-air missile that the S-400 can fire. The projectile can take down targets up to 400 km far, according to open source data

There are conflicting reports about whether the missile is capable of engaging high-altitude targets, with some sources claiming it may have maximum altitude of 185km while others saying it is designed with a conservative ceiling of 30km.

The first successful test of the 40N6E was reported in 2015. The S-400 is currently the backbone of Russia’s long-range air defense architecture. The Russian military has been in the process of replacing older S-300 variant with the newer system since 2007. The older missiles that the S-400 can fire has a range of up to 250 km.

 

Pew, pew! China develops AK-47-sized low lethality ‘laser rifle

July 2, 2018

RT

Chinese Armed Police units may soon have a new weapon, a portable laser beam that can reach targets from a kilometer away and is powerful enough to set flammable things on fire.

Although classified as “non-lethal,” the infrared laser projector can “burn through clothes in a split second … If the fabric is flammable, the whole person will be set on fire,” according to a South China Post report. The device is called ZKZM-500 and has been prototyped by the Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shaanxi province.

It weighs about 3kg, has an effective range of 800 meters and is powered by a lithium battery pack. It fires in bursts of no more than two seconds and lasts for over 1,000 ‘shots’ before requiring recharge.

The inventors see their “laser rifle” as a means to disable hostiles, for instance during a hostage situation. It can be also used for sabotage, for example, buy causing gas tanks of enemy vehicles explode with no apparent cause. There is a potential use as a crowd control tool, although a beam that can burn through clothes is probably overkill for such a task.

SCMP says the developer is now seeking a partner with a license to produce weapons to put the ZKZM-500 into series. It estimates that it will cost about $15,000 per unit when mass-produced. Basic documentation about the weapon was released last month at a government-run website for military-civilian collaboration.

Lasers have been used in military applications for decades for things like range detection or projectile guidance. But their use as directed energy weapons was not feasible until recently due to energy requirements and other drawbacks of the technology. Powerful lasers tend to produce plasma in its path, which causes the beam to defocus, and are cheaply countered by smoke screens.

The US is currently in the latest stages of introducing large laser devices on Navy ships, which are to be used against high-speed targets like incoming missiles or speedboats. There were also tests of a vehicle-borne laser meant to destroy mines from a distance.

A number of projects for portable low-lethality laser weapons were announced over the years, most of them in the US, but none of them reached maturity.

 

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