| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? 09:28 - Jul 9 with 17875 views | Shaky |
This story about Trump's war on healthcare is going to take some beating:
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U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials
By Andrew Jacobs
The New York Times. July 8, 2018
A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.
Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.
Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.
American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.
When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.
The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.
The showdown over the issue was recounted by more than a dozen participants from several countries, many of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation from the United States.
Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.
“We were astonished, appalled and also saddened,” said Patti Rundall, the policy director of the British advocacy group Baby Milk Action, who has attended meetings of the assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, since the late 1980s.
“What happened was tantamount to blackmail, with the U.S. holding the world hostage and trying to overturn nearly 40 years of consensus on best way to protect infant and young child health,” she said.
In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure – and the Americans did not threaten them.
The State Department declined to respond to questions, saying it could not discuss private diplomatic conversations. The Department of Health and Human Services, the lead agency in the effort to modify the resolution, explained the decision to contest the resolution’s wording but said H.H.S. was not involved in threatening Ecuador.
“The resolution as originally drafted placed unnecessary hurdles for mothers seeking to provide nutrition to their children,” an H.H.S. spokesman said in an email. “We recognize not all women are able to breast-feed for a variety of reasons. These women should have the choice and access to alternatives for the health of their babies, and not be stigmatized for the ways in which they are able to do so.” The spokesman asked to remain anonymous in order to speak more freely.
Although lobbyists from the baby food industry attended the meetings in Geneva, health advocates said they saw no direct evidence that they played a role in Washington’s strong-arm tactics. The $70 billion industry, which is dominated by a handful of American and European companies, has seen sales flatten in wealthy countries in recent years, as more women embrace breast-feeding. Overall, global sales are expected to rise by 4 percent in 2018, according to Euromonitor, with most of that growth occurring in developing nations.
The intensity of the administration’s opposition to the breast-feeding resolution stunned public health officials and foreign diplomats, who described it as a marked contrast to the Obama administration, which largely supported W.H.O.’s longstanding policy of encouraging breast-feeding.
During the deliberations, some American delegates even suggested the United States might cut its contribution the W.H.O., several negotiators said. Washington is the single largest contributor to the health organization, providing $845 million, or roughly 15 percent of its budget, last year.
The confrontation was the latest example of the Trump administration siding with corporate interests on numerous public health and environmental issues.
In talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Americans have been pushing for language that would limit the ability of Canada, Mexico and the United States to put warning labels on junk food and sugary beverages, according to a draft of the proposal reviewed by The New York Times.
During the same Geneva meeting where the breast-feeding resolution was debated, the United States succeeded in removing statements supporting soda taxes from a document that advises countries grappling with soaring rates of obesity.
The Americans also sought, unsuccessfully, to thwart a W.H.O. effort aimed at helping poor countries obtain access to lifesaving medicines. Washington, supporting the pharmaceutical industry, has long resisted calls to modify patent laws as a way of increasing drug availability in the developing world, but health advocates say the Trump administration has ratcheted up its opposition to such efforts.
The delegation’s actions in Geneva are in keeping with the tactics of an administration that has been upending alliances and long-established practices across a range of multilateral organizations, from the Paris climate accord to the Iran nuclear deal to Nafta.
Ilona Kickbusch, director of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, said there was a growing fear that the Trump administration could cause lasting damage to international health institutions like the W.H.O. that have been vital in containing epidemics like Ebola and the rising death toll from diabetes and cardiovascular disease in the developing world.
“It’s making everyone very nervous, because if you can’t agree on health multilateralism, what kind of multilateralism can you agree on?” Ms. Kickbusch asked.
A Russian delegate said the decision to introduce the breast-feeding resolution was a matter of principle.
“We’re not trying to be a hero here, but we feel that it is wrong when a big country tries to push around some very small countries, especially on an issue that is really important for the rest of the world,” said the delegate, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
He said the United States did not directly pressure Moscow to back away from the measure. Nevertheless, the American delegation sought to wear down the other participants through procedural maneuvers in a series of meetings that stretched on for two days, an unexpectedly long period.
In the end, the United States was largely unsuccessful. The final resolution preserved most of the original wording, though American negotiators did get language removed that called on the W.H.O. to provide technical support to member states seeking to halt “inappropriate promotion of foods for infants and young children.”
The United States also insisted that the words “evidence-based” accompany references to long-established initiatives that promote breast-feeding, which critics described as a ploy that could be used to undermine programs that provide parents with feeding advice and support.
Elisabeth Sterken, director of the Infant Feeding Action Coalition in Canada, said four decades of research have established the importance of breast milk, which provides essential nutrients as well as hormones and antibodies that protect newborns against infectious disease.
A 2016 Lancet study found that universal breast-feeding would prevent 800,000 child deaths a year across the globe and yield $300 billion in savings from reduced health care costs and improved economic outcomes for those reared on breast milk.
Scientists are loath to carry out double-blind studies that would provide one group with breast milk and another with breast milk substitutes. “This kind of ‘evidence-based’ research would be ethically and morally unacceptable,” Ms. Sterken said.
Abbott Laboratories, the Chicago-based company that is one of the biggest players in the $70 billion baby food market, declined to comment.
Nestlé, the Switzerland-based food giant with significant operations in the United States, sought to distance itself from the threats against Ecuador and said the company would continue to support the international code on the marketing of breast milk substitutes, which calls on governments to regulate the inappropriate promotion of such products and to encourage breast-feeding.
In addition to the trade threats, Todd C. Chapman, the United States ambassador to Ecuador, suggested in meetings with officials in Quito, the Ecuadorean capital, that the Trump administration might also retaliate by withdrawing the military assistance it has been providing in northern Ecuador, a region wracked by violence spilling across the border from Colombia, according to an Ecuadorean government official who took part in the meeting.
The United States embassy in Quito declined to make Mr. Chapman available for an interview.
“We were shocked because we didn’t understand how such a small matter like breast-feeding could provoke such a dramatic response,” said the Ecuadorean official, who asked not to be identified because she was afraid of losing her job.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/health/world-health-breastfeeding-ecuador- |  |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 12:07 - Jul 14 with 3367 views | Lord_Bony |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 18:24 - Jul 12 by Shaky |
Wow.
Juncker clearly decided getting merry was preferable to listening to Trump's electoral college victory story again. . .
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That is not a good look for the EU.
The president of the EU commission pissed as a fart...in the middle of a NATO conference ffs.
These people don’t take their responsibilities seriously imo. |  |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 10:44 - Jul 15 with 3262 views | Shaky |
Evil genius or crass moron?
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Theresa May: Trump told me to sue the EU
41 minutes ago
Theresa May reveals the advice President Trump gave her over Brexit
Donald Trump told Theresa May she should sue the EU rather than negotiate, she has told the BBC.
The US president said on Friday at a joint press conference that he had given her a suggestion but she had found it too "brutal".
Asked by the BBC's Andrew Marr what it was he had said, she replied: "He told me I should sue the EU - not go into negotiations."
Full story with video: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44838028 | |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 09:20 - Jul 17 with 3193 views | Shaky |
Ku Klux Klan fully behind Trump:
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 09:38 - Jul 17 with 3181 views | omarjack |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 09:20 - Jul 17 by Shaky |
Ku Klux Klan fully behind Trump:
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Hey but it's not Trump's fault that all the maniacs, psychos and pedos in society support him!!
Or is it? |  |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 11:34 - Jul 17 with 3146 views | Shaky |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 13:42 - Jul 17 with 3114 views | Mo_Wives |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 09:38 - Jul 17 by omarjack |
Hey but it's not Trump's fault that all the maniacs, psychos and pedos in society support him!!
Or is it? |
Look at the state of this f*cking idiot...
Hillary and Harvey...
Hillary's Weiner...
Hillary and long time good friend and former grand wizard of the KKK, Robert Byrd
Hillary and supporter...
Bill taking a flight on the Lolita express....
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 12:31 - Jul 23 with 3055 views | Shaky |
U.S. launches campaign to erode support for Iran's leaders
By Jonathan Landay, Arshad Mohammed, Warren Strobel, John Walcott
Reuters WORLD NEWS, JULY 21, 2018 / 10:20 PM / A DAY AGO
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration has launched an offensive of speeches and online communications meant to foment unrest and help pressure Iran to end its nuclear program and its support of militant groups, U.S. officials familiar with the matter said.
More than half a dozen current and former officials said the campaign, supported by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, is meant to work in concert with U.S. President Donald Trump’s push to economically throttle Iran by re-imposing tough sanctions. The drive has intensified since Trump withdrew on May 8 from a 2015 seven-nation deal to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
The current and former officials said the campaign paints Iranian leaders in a harsh light, at times using information that is exaggerated or contradicts other official pronouncements, including comments by previous administrations.
The White House declined comment on the campaign. The State Department also declined to comment on the campaign specifically, including on Pompeo’s role.
A senior Iranian official dismissed the campaign, saying the United States had sought in vain to undermine the government since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
“Their efforts will fail again,” the official said.
MORE CRITICAL POSTS
A review of the State Department’s Farsi-language Twitter account and its ShareAmerica website - which describes itself as a platform to spark debate on democracy and other issues - shows a number of posts critical of Tehran over the last month.
Iran is the subject of four of the top five items on the website’s “Countering Violent Extremism” section. They include headlines such as “This Iranian airline helps spread violence and terror.”
In social media posts and speeches, Pompeo himself also appeals directly to Iranians, the Iranian diaspora and a global audience.
On June 21, Pompeo tweeted out graphics headlined: “Protests in Iran are growing,” “Iranian people deserve respect for their human rights,” and “Iran’s revolutionary guard gets rich while Iranian families struggle.” The tweets were translated into Farsi and posted on the ShareAmerica website.
On Sunday, Pompeo will give a speech titled “Supporting Iranian Voices” in California and meet Iranian Americans, many of whom fled the Islamic Revolution that toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
“Let me be clear, we are not seeking regime change. We are seeking changes in the Iranian government’s behavior,” a State Department official said in response to questions from Reuters.
“We know we are driving Iran to make some hard choices. Either they can change their ways or find it increasingly difficult to engage in their malign activities,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “And we believe we are offering a very positive vision for what we could achieve and what the Iranian people could have.”
AGGRESSIVE CAMPAIGN
Some of the information the administration has disseminated is incomplete or distorted, the current and former officials said.
In a May 21 speech in Washington, Pompeo said Iranian leaders refused to spend on their people funds freed by the nuclear weapons deal, using it instead for proxy wars and corruption.
By contrast, in March testimony before a U.S. Senate committee, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency director, Robert Ashley, said social and economic expenditures remained Tehran’s near-term priority despite some spending on security forces.
Pompeo also accused “Iran-sponsored Shia militia groups and terrorists” of infiltrating Iraqi security forces and jeopardizing Iraq’s sovereignty throughout the period of the nuclear agreement.
While opponents accuse the Iran-backed Iraqi militias of human rights abuses against civilians, which the groups deny, the militias fought Islamic State extremists and helped keep them from overrunning Iraq in 2014 after Iraq’s army collapsed. They then aided the U.S.-backed offensives that liberated ISIS-held territory and some units are being incorporated into Iraqi security forces.
The State Department official acknowledged that the militias, known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, are by law part of Iraq’s security forces and played a role in countering Islamic State in 2014.
“We understand, however, that some of the undisciplined PMF are especially close to Iran, responsive to Iran’s directives, and have a history of criminal activity and terrorism,” the official said. “Those groups are as problematic for the Iraqi state as they are for us.”
Experts said the administration also is exaggerating the closeness of the relationship between Iran and Afghanistan’s Taliban militants and al Qaeda by calling them co-conspirators.
The State Department did not respond to requests for comment about the accuracy of the information it was disseminating.
It is too early to determine the impact of the administration’s communications campaign, U.S. officials said.
TWO POSSIBLE OUTCOMES
Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, said the strategy to economically strangle Iran and stoke public discontent with the leadership aimed to produce one of two outcomes.
“Outcome one is capitulation, forcing Iran to further curtail not only its nuclear program but also its regional ambitions,” Sadjadpour said. “Outcome two is the implosion of the Islamic Republic.”
But some U.S. officials and other experts cautioned that by fueling turmoil in Iran, the U.S. administration could foster greater authoritarian rule and a more aggressive foreign policy, raising the threat of a U.S.-Iran confrontation.
Washington has long called Iran the world’s leading “state sponsor of terrorism” because Tehran arms and funds proxy militant groups like Lebanese Hezbollah. Iranian leaders urge the destruction of the United States and Israel, and Iranian proxies have killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and diplomats since the Islamic Revolution.
That record provided previous administrations with ample material for waging their own public relations campaigns against Tehran, including trying to communicate directly with the Iranian people.
President George W. Bush’s administration established Radio Farda, a U.S.-funded broadcaster that beams into Iran what it says is “objective and accurate news and information to counter state censorship and ideology-based media coverage.” The Obama administration launched a Farsi Twitter account - @USAdarFarsi — in 2011.
Additional reporting by Parisa Hafezi in Ankara and John Irish in Paris; Editing by Paritosh Bansal, Daniel Wallis and James Dalgleish
© 2018 Reuters. All Rights Reserved.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran/u-s-launches-campaign-to-erode-suppo
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 12:56 - Jul 23 with 3034 views | Shaky |
A little - not so light - background reading
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Preparing the Battlefield
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
By Seymnour Hersch
New Yorker, July 7, 2008
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.
Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees–the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.
“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.
Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership–Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections–were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.
The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement.”)
Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.
A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”–the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world–“have weighed in on that issue.”
The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”
Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”
When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”
The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace–it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”
Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)
The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.
“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”–between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not–“but now it’s a shade of mush.”
“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. “This drove the military people up the wall,” he said. As far as the C.I.A. was concerned, the former senior intelligence official said, “the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support.” The Finding sent to Congress was a compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to the use of lethal force in ambiguous terms.
The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.
The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman subsequently wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that “no lethal action, period” had been authorized within Iran’s borders. As of June, he had received no answer.
Members of Congress have expressed skepticism in the past about the information provided by the White House. On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. He had changed his mind, he said, because the White House promised better coöperation. “The Executive Branch understands that we are not trying to dictate what they do,” he said in a floor speech at the time. “We are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with American values and will not get the country in trouble.”
Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with Congress. He said, “I suspect there’s something going on, but I don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran, and if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still don’t get enough information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence that they give us information on the edge.”
None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes–would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just that–notification, and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said, “As a rule, we don’t comment one way or the other on allegations of covert activities or purported findings.” The White House also declined to comment.)
A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control.” He went on, “We control the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration.” He added, “This Administration has been so secretive.”
One irony of Admiral Fallon’s departure is that he was, in many areas, in agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good working relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in regular communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was “encouraged” about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the role played by Iran’s leaders, he said, “They’ve been absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely don’t condone any of their activities. And I have yet to see anything since I’ve been in this job in the way of a public action by Iran that’s been at all helpful in this region.”
Fallon made it clear in our conversations that he considered it inappropriate to comment publicly about the President, the Vice-President, or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that people in the White House had been “struggling” with his views on Iran. “When I arrived at CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every entity inside Iraq. It was in their interest to get us out, and so they decided to kill as many Americans as they could. And why not? They didn’t know who’d come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I couldn’t resolve the situation in Iraq without the neighborhood. To get this problem in Iraq solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and Syria. I had to work the neighborhood.”
Fallon told me that his focus had been not on the Iranian nuclear issue, or on regime change there, but on “putting out the fires in Iraq.” There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option, Fallon said, he believed that “it would happen only if the Iranians did something stupid.”
Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”–area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”
The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.
“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”
Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”
The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”
In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.”
Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi–who was overthrown in 1979–was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate for the Iranians–to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s an escalation–a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great Satan.’ “ In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, may generate support for it.
Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a reason to intervene.
A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country–like France and Germany–and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”
The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers–in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.
One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.
The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.
The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts–and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”
The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States, has been operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and other groups have sought self-rule in territory that is now part of each of those countries.) In recent weeks, according to Sam Gardiner, the military strategist, there has been a marked increase in the number of PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. In early June, the news agency Fars reported that a dozen PJAK members and four Iranian border guards were killed in a clash near the Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed three Revolutionary Guards and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected Turkey, a member of NATO, to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of American support for the group have been a source of friction between the two governments.
Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced that his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the M.E.K.–a slap at the U.S.’s dealings with the group. Maliki declared that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of “Maliki’s increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the United States.” In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in the killing of American soldiers, he said, “Maliki was unwilling to play the blame-Iran game.” Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. America’s covert operations, he said, “seem to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.”
The White House’s reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans involving possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence communities. JSOC’s operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on a program that has, with some success, used surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the tribal territories of Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But the situations in Waziristan and Iran are not comparable.
In Waziristan, “the program works because it’s small and smart guys are running it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s being executed by professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the D.I.A.”–the Defense Intelligence Agency–“are right in there with the Special Forces and Pakistani intelligence, and they’re dealing with serious bad guys.” He added, “We have to be really careful in calling in the missiles. We have to hit certain houses at certain times. The people on the ground are watching through binoculars a few hundred yards away and calling specific locations, in latitude and longitude. We keep the Predator loitering until the targets go into a house, and we have to make sure our guys are far enough away so they don’t get hit.” One of the most prominent victims of the program, the former official said, was Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Al Qaeda* commander, who was killed on January 31st, reportedly in a missile strike that also killed eleven other people.
A dispatch published on March 26th by the Washington Post reported on the increasing number of successful strikes against Taliban and other insurgent units in Pakistan’s tribal areas. A follow-up article noted that, in response, the Taliban had killed “dozens of people” suspected of providing information to the United States and its allies on the whereabouts of Taliban leaders. Many of the victims were thought to be American spies, and their executions–a beheading, in one case–were videotaped and distributed by DVD as a warning to others.
It is not simple to replicate the program in Iran. “Everybody’s arguing about the high-value-target list,” the former senior intelligence official said. “The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney’s office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.”
The Pentagon consultant told me, “We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags–basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size fits all, but the legal issues surrounding extrajudicial killings in Waziristan are less of a problem because Al Qaeda and the Taliban cross the border into Afghanistan and back again, often with U.S. and NATO forces in hot pursuit. The situation is not nearly as clear in the Iranian case. All the considerations–judicial, strategic, and political–are different in Iran.”
He added, “There is huge opposition inside the intelligence community to the idea of waging a covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and Ahwazis as surrogates. The leaders of our Special Operations community all have remarkable physical courage, but they are less likely to voice their opposition to policy. Iran is not Waziristan.”
A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, found that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed thought that the United States should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent favored direct military action. Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to endorse a military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran. This mood could change quickly, however. The potential for escalation became clear in early January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed to be under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of aggressive moves toward three Navy warships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio, to “explode” the American ships. At a White House news conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to the Middle East, called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran. “TWO MINUTES FROM WAR” was the headline in one British newspaper.
The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning shots were fired, the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January 7th, via teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. “Yes, it’s more serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,” Cosgriff said. “I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.”
Admiral Cosgriff’s caution was well founded: within a week, the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long known for sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.
In June, President Bush went on a farewell tour of Europe. He had tea with Queen Elizabeth II and dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, the President and First Lady of France. The serious business was conducted out of sight, and involved a series of meetings on a new diplomatic effort to persuade the Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program. (Iran argues that its enrichment program is for civilian purposes and is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Secretary of State Rice had been involved with developing a new package of incentives. But the Administration’s essential negotiating position seemed unchanged: talks could not take place until Iran halted the program. The Iranians have repeatedly and categorically rejected that precondition, leaving the diplomatic situation in a stalemate; they have not yet formally responded to the new incentives.
The continuing impasse alarms many observers. Joschka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister, recently wrote in a syndicated column that it may not “be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before they are completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.” When I spoke to him last week, Fischer, who has extensive contacts in the diplomatic community, said that the latest European approach includes a new element: the willingness of the U.S. and the Europeans to accept something less than a complete cessation of enrichment as an intermediate step. “The proposal says that the Iranians must stop manufacturing new centrifuges and the other side will stop all further sanction activities in the U.N. Security Council,” Fischer said, although Iran would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal negotiations begin. “This could be acceptable to the Iranians–if they have good will.”
The big question, Fischer added, is in Washington. “I think the Americans are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,” he said. “Some officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have no idea where the Americans will end up on this issue.”
There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no “self-defeating” preconditions (although only after diplomatic groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized by John McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s national-security director, as stating that McCain supports the White House’s position, and that the program be suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said, “is unilateral cowboy summitry.”
Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain campaign’s most important channel of communication with the White House. He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. I have heard differing accounts of Scheunemann’s influence with McCain; though some close to the McCain campaign talk about him as a possible national-security adviser, others say he is someone who isn’t taken seriously while “telling Cheney and others what they want to hear,” as a senior McCain adviser put it.
It is not known whether McCain, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been formally briefed on the operations in Iran. At the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in June, Obama repeated his plea for “tough and principled diplomacy.” But he also said, along with McCain, that he would keep the threat of military action against Iran on the table. ♦
*Correction, August 7, 2008: Abu Laith al-Libi was a senior Al Qaeda commander, not a senior Taliban commander, as originally stated.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/07/07/preparing-the-battlefield | |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 09:26 - Jul 25 with 2987 views | Shaky |
US pledges $12bn aid for farmers hit by trade war
President tries to shore up support for tariffs on eve of EU meeting
By Shawn Donnan and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Financial Times, 24 July 2018
The Trump administration on Tuesday promised billions of dollars in aid to placate farmers and offset the economic impact of its trade wars, even as the US president hailed his growing list of tariffs as “the greatest”.
The $12bn aid plan is aimed at soyabean, pork and other farmers who have been hit by what the US insists are illegal retaliatory tariffs imposed by US trading partners such as China and the EU.
It will take the form of either direct cash payments to farmers or the purchase of products for use by food banks, and be administered via the New Deal-era Commodity Credit Corporation, which was established to help farmers in economic emergencies.
The goal, officials said, was to offer one-time help to farmers while the Trump administration uses tariffs to increase its leverage in negotiations with trading partners that have until now resisted US demands.
“President Trump has promised since day one that he has the back of every American farmer and rancher,” Sonny Perdue, the US agriculture secretary, told reporters. “This obviously is a short-term solution that will give President Trump time to work on a long-term trade policy and deal that will benefit agriculture as well as all sectors of the American economy.”
The move came on the eve of a visit to Washington by the European Commission’s Jean-Claude Juncker for talks aimed at defusing the escalating trade tensions.
Late on Tuesday, Mr Trump made what appeared to be a tongue in cheek offer to the EU. “I have an idea for them. Both the US and the EU drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be called Free Market and Fair Trade! Hope they do it, we are ready – but they won’t!” he said on Twitter.
But the aid for farmers is a sign of how the administration is bracing for a protracted fight on trade and trying to respond to the increasingly vocal domestic criticism of Mr Trump’s tariffs.
After taking to Twitter to declare that “Tariffs are the greatest!”, the president later told a veterans convention in Missouri to ignore the “fake news” about his trade policy and campaigns by critics of it.
“Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” he said.
We know that we can make money selling our beef. We also know that we cannot sustainably operate our farm if we have to look to a federal pay cheque every month. That’s not a good idea.
Casey Guernsey, Missouri cattle farmer and spokesman for Americans for Farmers and Families
The response to the farm aid programme was scathing from the growing ranks of his trade critics in the agriculture and business communities, as well as in his own Republican party.
“I appreciate that President Trump is trying to stand up for farmers. But this is just not realistic,” said Casey Guernsey, whose family has raised beef in Missouri for seven generations and acts as a spokesman for the pro-trade Americans for Farmers and Families.
“We know that we can make money selling our beef. We also know that we cannot sustainably operate our farm if we have to look to a federal pay cheque every month. That’s not a good idea.”
Ben Sasse, a Republican senator from Nebraska and persistent critic of Mr Trump’s trade policies, likened the aid initiative to spending “$12bn on gold crutches” for farmers after cutting off their legs.
“This administration’s tariffs and bailouts aren’t going to make America great again, they’re just going to make it 1929 again,” he said.
In a sign of the administration’s concerns over the mounting domestic backlash, the president is this week travelling the US to try to sell his tariffs and a broader strategy aimed at undoing decades of trade imbalances that he argues have hit the country’s manufacturing heartland.
Any weakening of support from Mr Trump in conservative farm states, which were crucial to his victory in 2016, could spell trouble for Republicans in Congress in the November midterm elections.
At the heart of Mr Trump’s sales pitch is the notion that his tariffs are part of a grand negotiating strategy. The US has imposed new import taxes on aluminium and steel from around the world and some $34bn in goods from China. The president has threatened to expand these to up to $350bn in imports of cars and parts as well as up to $500bn in trade with China.
One big test of that strategy will come on Wednesday when Mr Juncker, the European Commission president, visits Washington for talks aimed at convincing Mr Trump not to go ahead with his auto tariffs.
So far, the president has been unable to conclude any significant trade negotiations and many of his efforts have stalled in the face of resistance from trading partners.
Part of the problem is what is seen as Mr Trump’s bellicose approach to the negotiations. But some analysts said the president, as he indicated in his tweets on Tuesday, is also increasingly happy to rely on his tariffs as a tool to rewrite the US’s trading relationships.
“This is all pretty clear. Trump either wants big unilateral concessions from trading partners or he wants big tariffs,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Trump has been quite consistent about this in saying to trading partners: ‘Either you are going to offer us these big concessions or we are going to use tariffs as our rebalancing strategy.’”
https://www.ft.com/content/21051570-8f58-11e8-b639-7680cedcc421 | |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 16:53 - Oct 15 with 2777 views | Shaky |
What Is Donald Trump’s Response to the U.N.’s Dire Climate Report?
The U.N.’s scientific advisory board sounds a piercing alarm on climate change, but the President doesn’t seem to hear it.
By Elizabeth Kolbert
New Yorker, October 22, 2018 Issue
Three years ago, when world leaders met in Paris to negotiate a treaty on climate change, one of the sticking points was where to set what might be called the Doomsday Thermometer. For reasons that had to do mostly with politics, rather than with geophysics, industrialized nations wanted to define “dangerous” warming as an average global-temperature increase of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). But island states, such as the Maldives and Mauritius, along with developing countries like Ethiopia and Cambodia, were resistant. Well before the world warmed by two degrees, their countries would be devastated–some of them underwater. Why should they endorse what amounted to a death sentence?
“We will not sign off on any agreement that represents a certain extinction of our people,” a delegate to the talks from Barbados told Politico. Together with a group of nearly fifty “climate vulnerable” countries, the island nations pressed for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The compromise reached–more Monty Hall than Solomon–was to endorse both figures. The Paris agreement calls for “holding” warming below two degrees, while “pursuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees.
Last week, the United Nations’ scientific advisory board delivered its assessment of those numbers. The findings of the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were almost universally–and justifiably–described as “dire.” Even 1.5 degrees’ worth of warming, the I.P.C.C. warned, is likely to be disastrous, with consequences that include, but are not limited to, the loss of most of the world’s coral reefs, the displacement of millions of people by sea-level rise, and a decline in global crop yields. Meanwhile, at the current rate of emissions, the world will have run through the so-called carbon budget for 1.5 degrees within the next decade or so. “It’s like a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen,” Erik Solheim, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, told the Washington Post.
But, if a smoke alarm rings in the kitchen and everyone’s watching “Fox & Friends” in the den, does it make a sound? Asked about the report last week, Donald Trump said, “I want to look at who drew it–you know, which group drew it.” The answer seemed to indicate that the President had never heard of the I.P.C.C., a level of cluelessness that, while hardly a surprise, was nevertheless dismaying. The next day, as a devastating hurricane hit Florida–one made that much more destructive by the warming that’s already occurred–the President flew to Pennsylvania to campaign for Lou Barletta, a climate-change-denying Republican congressman running for the Senate.
Though the Administration often seems incapable of systematic action, it has spent the past eighteen months systematically targeting rules aimed at curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. One of these rules, which required greater fuel efficiency for cars and trucks, would have reduced CO2 emissions by an estimated six billion tons over the lifetime of the affected vehicles. In a recent filing intended to justify the rollback, the Administration predicted that, by the end of this century, global temperatures will have risen by almost four degrees Celsius (nearly seven degrees Fahrenheit). In this context, the Administration argued, why would anyone care about a mere six billion tons? Come the apocalypse, it seems, we’ll all want to be driving S.U.V.s.
The Supreme Court, for its part, appears unlikely to challenge the Administration’s baleful reasoning. Last week, it declined to hear an appeal to a lower-court ruling on hydrofluorocarbons, chemicals that are among the most potent greenhouse gases known. The lower court had struck down an Obama-era rule phasing out HFCs, which are used mostly as refrigerants. The author of the lower-court decision was, by the dystopian logic of our times, Brett Kavanaugh.
Even as the I.P.C.C. warned that 1.5 degrees of warming would be calamitous, it also indicated that, for all intents and purposes, such warming has become unavoidable. “There is no documented historical precedent” for the changes needed to prevent it, the group wrote. In addition to transforming the way that electricity is generated and distributed around the world, fundamental changes would be needed in transportation, agriculture, housing, and infrastructure. And much of this would have to be accomplished by the time today’s toddlers hit high school. To have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, the I.P.C.C. said, global CO2 emissions, now running about forty billion tons a year, would need to be halved by 2030 and reduced more or less to zero by 2050. And this would still not be enough. All the scenarios that the I.P.C.C. could come up with to limit warming to 1.5 degrees rely on some kind of “carbon-dioxide removal”: essentially, technologies to suck CO2 out of the air. Such technologies exist, but so far only in the sense that flying cars exist–as expensive-to-produce prototypes. A leaked draft of the report noted that there was a “very high risk” of exceeding 1.5 degrees; although that phrase was removed from the final report, the message is clear.
Thus, it is tempting, following the Trump Administration’s lead, to simply give up. But, as Edgar puts it in “King Lear,” the “worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’ ” Perhaps the most important takeaway from the report is that every extra half a degree is world-altering. According to the I.P.C.C., between 1.5 degrees and two degrees of warming, the rate of crop loss doubles. So does the decline in marine fisheries, while exposure to extreme heat waves almost triples. As always, it’s the poor who are apt to suffer most. Friederike Otto, the acting director of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, recently told the Web site Carbon Brief that “half a degree of additional warming makes a huge difference. For people who are already marginalised, this can be an existential difference.”
Meanwhile, two and a half degrees, three degrees, or even, per the Trump Administration, four degrees of warming are all realistic possibilities. Indeed, based on recent trends, the last figure seems the most likely. Globally, emissions rose last year, and they’re expected to rise still further this year. This disaster is going to be as bad–as very, very bad–as we make it. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the October 22, 2018, issue, with the headline “Global Warning.”
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”Read more »
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/what-is-donald-trumps-response-to- | |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 17:22 - Oct 15 with 2756 views | jackrmee |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 13:42 - Jul 10 by peenemunde |
I couldn’t careless if you know.
Anti England is ok in your book, but anything else and you cry like a little baby.
Hypocrite. |
I am very reticent to slag anyone off on here, but this guy is one of the most ignorant and uneducated excuses for a human I've ever encountered. Absolute joke of a bloke. |  |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 17:28 - Oct 15 with 2748 views | jackrmee |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 17:51 - Jul 10 by peenemunde |
Well you don’t know many then.
I have been in the states 3 in the last year and he is popular from the people I’ve spoken too.
One lady I spoke to at the hotel told me Trump had a big mouth, and I wish he’d keep it shut a bit more, but he’s doing a good job, better than that other one.
I’m going to the USA again next Monday for a month and will be going to Trump tower on 5th Avenue- to pay homage to the great man. |
"pay homage to the great man" 
You sicken me | |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 14:30 - Oct 17 with 2661 views | Catullus |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 17:02 - Jul 9 by peenemunde |
Trump is a great man.
Wind of change is coming. |
I accidentally up arrowed this, sorry but I was in hysterics at the time. Trump is great...he's a steaming "GREAT" turd.
As it goes my wife couldn't breastfeed because of medication she takes. However, when corporate greed comes before health then those responsible need (as my father would say) stuffing with a ragman's trumpet, blunt end first. |  |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 15:48 - Oct 17 with 2631 views | sotonswan |
You can tell who's winning by who is using the foul language, and who is starting riots.
5-4
Not long now. |  |
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WWG1WGA |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 16:11 - Oct 17 with 2620 views | Ace_Jack |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 15:48 - Oct 17 by sotonswan |
You can tell who's winning by who is using the foul language, and who is starting riots.
5-4
Not long now. |
pretty cryptic and creepy no? |  | | |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 16:51 - Oct 17 with 2610 views | jackrmee |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 14:40 - Oct 17 by omarjack |
The less you meddle with Mr.Penis the better. He's hopeless and far too gone to be saved.
He's the kind of guy who boasts ultra-nationalism while sucking off Donnie's Yankee c*ck while daydreaming about shagging the English Queen Lizzie all at the same time.
Doesn't know his anus from his bellybutton let alone f*ck all about politics or human decency. [Post edited 17 Oct 2018 14:41]
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I am wondering if he is just one of them trolls who just says things to get a bite? If his comments are real, he definitely needs help. | |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 18:59 - Oct 17 with 2590 views | longlostjack |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 16:51 - Oct 17 by jackrmee |
I am wondering if he is just one of them trolls who just says things to get a bite? If his comments are real, he definitely needs help. |
I can’t work out if Peens puts America first, England first or the U.K first. He does seem a bit confused. |  |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 20:19 - Oct 17 with 2566 views | jackrmee |
| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 18:59 - Oct 17 by longlostjack |
I can’t work out if Peens puts America first, England first or the U.K first. He does seem a bit confused. |
...and a bit of a bellend | |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 17:02 - Dec 6 with 2360 views | Shaky |
Trump on Coming Debt Crisis: ‘I Won’t Be Here’ When It Blows Up
By Asawin Suebsaeng,Lachlan Markay
Daily Beast, 12.05.18 10:32 AM ET
Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s aides and advisers have tried to convince him of the importance of tackling the national debt.
Sources close to the president say he has repeatedly shrugged it off, implying that he doesn’t have to worry about the money owed to America’s creditors–currently about $21 trillion–because he won’t be around to shoulder the blame when it becomes even more untenable.
The friction came to a head in early 2017 when senior officials offered Trump charts and graphics laying out the numbers and showing a “hockey stick” spike in the national debt in the not-too-distant future. In response, Trump noted that the data suggested the debt would reach a critical mass only after his possible second term in office.
“Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt.
“I never once heard him talk about the debt.”
– Former Senior White House official
The episode illustrates the extent of the president’s ambivalence toward tackling an issue that has previously animated the Republican Party from the days of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of Barack Obama.
But for those who have worked with Trump, it was par for the course. Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested.
Marc Short, who until recently worked for Trump as his legislative affairs director, said he believed the president recognized “the threat that debt poses” and he pointed to Trump’s concern “about rising interest rates” as evidence of his concern for the matter.
“But there’s no doubt this administration and this Congress need to address spending because we have out-of-control entitlement programs,” Short said, adding, “it’s fair to say that... the president would be skeptical of anyone who claims that they would know exactly when a [debt] crisis really comes home to roost.”
Recent reports have suggested that Trump is determined, at least rhetorically, to address the issue. Hogan Gidley, a spokesman for the president, noted that the president and his team have proposed policies to achieve some deficit reduction, “including in his first budget that actually would’ve balanced in 10 years, a historic, common-sense rescissions proposal.”
But Gidley also passed the buck to the legislative branch. “While the president has and will continue to do everything in his power to rein in Washington’s out-of-control spending,” he said, “the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse and it’s time for them to work with this president to reduce the debt.”
FUZZY MATH
The “Tax the Rich” Delusion of the Democratic LeftBrian Riedl
Those close to Trump say that one reason the issue of debt reduction has never been an animating one for him is because he is convinced that it can be solved through means other than tax hikes or sharp spending reductions.
Stephen Moore, a conservative economist at the Heritage Foundation and an economic adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, recalled making visual presentations to Trump in mid-2016 that showed him the severity of the debt problem. But Moore told The Daily Beast that he personally assured candidate Trump that it could be dealt with by focusing on economic growth.
“That was why, when he was confronted with these nightmare scenarios on the debt, I think he rejected them, because if you grow the economy… you don’t have a debt problem,” Moore continued. “I know a few times when people would bring up the enormous debt, he would say, ‘We’re gonna grow our way out of it.’”
Moore has since championed this approach to tackling the debt as a key part of “Trumponomics,” and has co-authored a book supporting it.
As Moore recalled, a belief that robust economic growth would solve all problems was the way Trump–starting in 2016–justified the cost of his ambitious proposals to slash taxes, pursue big infrastructure projects, and simply avoid massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Since then, the president has continued to show indifference over the national debt, to the consternation of more traditionally conservative associates.
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Remember, as a senator, Obama did not vote for increasing the debt ceiling http://bit.ly/f7yQrU I guess things change when President?!
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7:55 PM - Jan 14, 2013
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Obama: Not Always a Fan of Upping Debt Ceiling
While President Obama’s economic advisor Austin Goolsbee argued Sunday that a refusal by the Senate to increase the government’s debt ceiling (currently $14.3 trillion) would be “catastrophic” and …
nationalreview.com
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One current senior Trump administration official vented that Trump “doesn’t really care” about actually attacking the debt “crisis,” and prefers simply “jobs and growth, whatever that means.”
For the most part, the Republican Party has gone along. Over the first two years of the Trump administration, congressional Republicans have slashed taxes dramatically while increasing defense and discretionary spending, all without giving much indication that they’re going to take a stab at dramatically gutting certain popular entitlements.
The results have not been what Trump and Moore have promised; at least not yet. Economic growth increased over the past year–including a robust 4.1 percent in the second quarter of 2018–but the federal deficit has ballooned as well, in part because the government has taken in less revenue because of the tax cuts. Current forecasts are not too rosy about the future economy.
Recently, both Trump and some Republican lawmakers have hinted at regret over their approach. Earlier this year, Trump conveyed his disappointment with signing a large spending bill, particularly after he saw typically friendly allies on Fox News tear into him for supporting legislation that they viewed as funding Democratic priorities, exacerbating the national debt, and ditching his pledge to build a gigantic border wall, according to a report at the time in Axios.
Sources close to the president tell The Daily Beast that Trump was genuinely taken aback by the severity of this mini-revolt from MAGA loyalists.
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Funny to hear the Democrats talking about the National Debt when President Obama doubled it in only 8 years!
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2:23 AM - Nov 30, 2017
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However, right-leaning reformers shouldn’t be holding their breath.
The Washington Post recently reported that Trump had instructed his Cabinet to devise plans to trim their budgets in an effort to reduce the federal deficit. But Trump also set strict limits on what sorts of programs could be cut–and quickly proceeded to propose increased spending in other areas of the federal government.
“He understands the messaging of it,” the former senior White House official told The Daily Beast. “But he isn’t a doctrinaire conservative who deeply cares about the national debt, especially not on his watch… It’s not actually a top priority for him… He understands the political nature of the debt but it’s clearly not, frankly, something he sees as crucial to his legacy.”
The former Trump official adding, “It’s not like it’s going to haunt him.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-on-coming-debt-crisis-i-wont-be-here-when-it | |
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| Trump Evilometer: How Low Can He Go? on 09:25 - Dec 13 with 2247 views | Shaky |
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