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Javier E

Trump Helsinki Summit: His Servility to Vladimir Putin Is Unbecoming of a President - 0 views

www.weeklystandard.com/...n-is-unbecoming-of-a-president

helsinki trump summit history presidency

shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • In a sign of the poverty of our historical imagination, Trump’s performance is frequently compared to Neville Chamberlain. But this is unfair to Chamberlain, who, although deeply wrongheaded, was in fact a serious and patriotic man. Trump’s performance in Helsinki was something else altogether, a performance so servile that we struggle to place it in context, because there are no parallels in the history of the American presidency.
  • So what are we to make of our president, who relishes insulting and humiliating the leaders of western democracies, but truckles to dictators? We simply do not know (and it remains dangerous to speculate) whether the Russians have “kompromat” on Trump. Perhaps the reality is worse; maybe Trump really believes all of this and genuinely admires what Putin represents.
  • Monday in Helsinki reminded us that as valuable as the court may be, it’s not worth it; not worth the mendacity, the pusillanimous appeasement, the debasement of the presidency, the castration of the Congress, the mockery of decency, the assault on truth, the air of thuggery and corruption in Trumpian politics, and the diminishment of our role in the world.
Javier E

The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki - Lexington - 0 views

www.economist.com/...trump-putin-summit-in-helsinki

summit trump foreign policy legitimacy election

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • The most cautionary precursor to Helsinki, a report issued this week by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee that confirms the agencies’ view on Russian election-meddling, has been mocked or ignored in conservative media. This is new terrain for America. It means that whatever reset Mr Trump may have in mind for Russia will be far less credible, far more divisive and tarnished by partisanship than the corresponding efforts of his two immediate predecessors in the White House.
  • In great-power terms, the Helsinki summit, by contrast, is scarcely about Russia at all. It is more a test of whether American foreign policy can navigate the fissures in America’s democracy that the summit’s participants, separately if not in tandem, have widened.
  • Despite occasional blazing rows, foreign policy was until recently fairly bipartisan. But that consensus had been softening in both parties. Mr Trump has obliterated it. He has shown contempt for the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment and used foreign policy as a means for partisan point-scoring, including by dismantling whatever Barack Obama built. He also treats foreign policy as an instrument of his personal whims and interests. This is what the transactional edge he has inserted into American diplomacy boils down to
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  • This has made foreign policy unprecedentedly politicised: how Americans feel about it is almost entirely determined by how they feel about the president. How they feel about Russia illustrates this especially starkly—because the implications of thinking that Mr Trump is wrong and Mr Clapper right, as many Democrats do, is that the president may be illegitimate.
  • Other reasons for Trump supporters’ willing suspension of disbelief on Russia’s malign intent are unique to Republicans. The most important is the fervour of their support for Mr Trump’s blood-and-soil nativist policies. This is the main explanation for his hold on the right and the reason he can flip opinion on arcane foreign or economic policies so easily. American politics will remain fiercely antagonistic, polarising the country on foreign and domestic policy, so long as it is defined in such visceral terms.
  • The Russian campaign was based on a simple appreciation of that fact. Many of its propaganda tools merely aped the sorts of chauvinist and ethno-nationalist sentiment that Mr Trump and other right-wing politicians have long used to charge up their base
  • Another reason Republicans might choose to deny the existence of such propaganda is because to do otherwise would be to admit that they have been had, and not only by Moscow.
  • relations with Russia have become a mirror to America’s big weakness, the political threat from within. That is why Mr Putin has been able to sow such chaos so cheaply; why he is getting away with it so easily; and why his meddling will surely continue
Javier E

The borrowers: why Finland's cities are havens for library lovers | Cities | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-library-lovers-oodi-helsinki

library reading culture finland

shared by Javier E on 15 May 18 - No Cached
  • “Finland is a country of readers,” declared the country’s UK ambassador Päivi Luostarinen recently, and it’s hard to argue with her. In 2016 the UN named Finland the world’s most literate nation, and Finns are among the world’s most enthusiastic users of public libraries – the country’s 5.5m million people borrow close to 68m books a year.
  • the UK spends just £14.40 per head on libraries. By contrast, Finland spends £50.50 per inhabitant. While more than 478 libraries have closed in cities and towns across England, Wales and Scotland since 2010, Helsinki is spending €98m creating an enormous new one
  • 84% of the country’s population is urban, and given the often harsh climate, libraries are not simply places to study, read or borrow books – they are vital places for socialising
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  • one of Oodi’s architects, has described the new library as “an indoor town square” – a far cry from the stereotypical view of libraries as stale and silent spaces. “[Oodi] has been designed to give citizens and visitors a free space to actively do what they want to do – not just be a consumer or a flâneur,”
  • Oodi – Ode in English – is more than a sober monument to civic pride. Commissioned as part of Finland’s celebration of a century of independence, the library is no mere book repository. “I think Finland could not have given a better gift to the people. It symbolises the significance of learning and education, which have been fundamental factors for Finland’s development and success,”
  • “There’s strong belief in education for all,” says Hanna Harris, director of Archinfo Finland and Mind-building’s commissioner. “There is an appreciation of active citizenship – the idea that it is something that everyone is entitled to. Libraries embody that strongly,” she adds.
  • Those feelings of pride in the equality of opportunity offered by the city’s new library are echoed by the site chosen for Oodi: directly opposite parliament. “I think there is no other actor that could stand in front of the grounds of democracy like the public library does,
  • “We want people to find and use the spaces and start to change them,” says Nousjoki. “Our aim was to make [Oodi] attractive so that everybody will use it – and play a role in making sure it is maintained.”
  • Perhaps a clue to the Finnish enthusiasm for libraries comes from the fact that they offer far more than books. While many libraries worldwide provide internet access and other services, libraries in cities and towns across Finland have expanded their brief to include lending e-publications, sports equipment, power tools and other “items of occasional use”. One library in Vantaa even offers karaoke.
  • These spaces are not designed to be dusty temples to literacy. They are vibrant, well-thought-out spaces actively trying to engage the urban communities who use them. The library in Maunula, a northern Helsinki suburb, has a doorway that leads directly to a supermarket – a striking and functional decision which, along with its adult education centre and youth services section, was partly down to the fact that it was designed with input from locals.
  • Oodi, however, will go even further: in addition to its core function as a library, it will boast a cafe, restaurant, public balcony, cinema, audiovisual recording studios and a makerspace with 3D printers
  • “Libraries must reach out to the new generations. The world is changing – so libraries are changing too. People need places to meet, to work, to develop their digital skills.”
  • “Töölö library is one of my favourites,” says Harris. “It’s set in a park and has a rooftop balcony. Recently my colleagues and I went down there and there was a queue outside the doors – on a regular weekday morning, there was a queue at 9am to get in.”
  • the most impressive thing about it is the lack of public opposition to such a costly project. “People are looking forward to Oodi. It’s not been contentious: people are excited about it across the board,” says Archinfo director Harris. “It will be important to daily life here in Helsinki.”
lenaurick

How some European countries are tightening their refugee policies - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

international crisis refugee politics

shared by lenaurick on 24 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • At least 12,472 refugees and migrants have arrived on Europe's shores since the beginning of 2017, according to the UN refugee agency -- only slightly less than the 12,587 Syrian refugees admitted by the US in all of last year.
  • The UK government recently announced it was halting a program to resettle lone refugee children, after 350 had been brought to Britain. Campaigners had hoped that 3,000 children would benefit from the scheme, introduced last year.
  • In November 2016, the Home Office issued new guidance barring unaccompanied refugees from Afghanistan, Yemen and Eritrea older than 12, who were living in the now-demolished "Jungle" camp at Calais in northern France, from entering the UK if they have no family there.
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  • More than 250,000 people were given refugee status in Germany in 2016, many of whom had arrived the previous year when Chancellor Angela Merkel threw the country's doors open to refugees, but there are signs that attitudes are hardening.
  • This month, Germany also deported a second tranche of asylum seekers to Afghanistan, despite the UNHCR's insistence that "the entire state ... is affected by an armed conflict." The European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) argues that "by carrying out these deportations, the Federal Ministry of the Interior is completely ignoring the security situation in Afghanistan."
  • A recent report by Amnesty International highlighted the "dire conditions" in Greek camps, citing "overcrowding, freezing temperatures, lack of hot water and heating, poor hygiene, bad nutrition, inadequate medical care, violence and hate-motivated attacks."
  • If Europe cannot reliably protect its external borders, De Maiziere said in a speech, Germany will implement "appropriate national border controls against illegal immigration."
  • from March, Germany will begin returning asylum seekers to Greece, if that was the first safe country in which they arrived, a spokeswoman for the German Ministry for the Interior told CNN. This process was halted in 2011 due to "systemic deficiencies in the Greek asylum system."
  • Italy's chief of police, Franco Gabrielli, has called for the detention and deportation of migrants, who he blames for "instability and threats" in the country. Gabrielli's comments, published in a circular on December 30, 2016, align closely with the government's position.
  • Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has adopted a zero-tolerance approach to immigrants who are unwilling to sign up to the country's way of life, telling those who "refuse to adapt and criticize our values" to "behave normally or go away."
  • The party pledges to invest in caring for refugees in the Middle East in order to reduce the number traveling to Europe.
  • The Hungarian parliament introduced a bill on February 14 that requires the police to deport any person who is in Hungary illegally, without allowing any access to an asylum procedure, according to a written statement by the NGO The Hungarian Helsinki Committee.The bill also requires all asylum applications to be automatically held in detention until their claim is processed, according to the NGO.The NGO describes the proposed changes as "extreme and flagrant violations of European Union asylum law.
Javier E

Why people like Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-bcd5-9d911c784c38_story.html

gop support fascism resentment whitelash

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • The results of the Helsinki summit are in. President Trump couldn’t handle statecraft or, for that matter, double negatives, but he came out of the meeting undefeated and invincible.
  • The post-summit poll numbers are instructive. While 50 percent of Americans disapproved of the way Trump handled Vladimir Putin, his Republican base stayed both loyal and comatose. In a Post-ABC News poll, 66 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s performance. An earlier Axios-SurveyMonkey poll put the GOP figure at 79 percent, not only more impressive but also downright eerie.
  • As far as the evangelical community is concerned, nothing has changed. Trump has been accused of adultery and of buying the silence of his alleged paramours. He has referred to impoverished nations as “shithole countries” and — unforgivably — belittled the wartime torture of Sen. John McCain. None of this shook his base. On the contrary, his support within the Republican Party has risen and solidified. It now stands at around 90 percent, which is what tin-pot dictators get in rigged elections.
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  • The upshot is that we now have two political parties — one pro-Trump and one anti-. Some celebrated Republicans — George F. Will, for instance — have already declared their apostasy. Will is now “unaffiliated,” but no one runs for president as that. In this country, if you’re anti-Trump, realism says you’ve got to vote Democratic.
  • it’s clear that something beyond economics — and certainly not foreign policy — motivates Trump’s people. My guess is that it’s a low-boil rage against a vague and threatening liberalism — urbane, educated, affluent, secular, diverse and sexually tolerant. It is, in other words, some of the same sentiment that once fueled European fascism.
  • Those of us who write newspaper columns know that sheer brilliance, should it happen, gets a silent nod of the head, but affirmation — saying what readers already think — gets loud hurrahs. This is Trump’s appeal as well. He validates the thinking — some of it ugly — of many Americans. To them, Helsinki doesn’t matter and even Putin doesn’t matter. Only Trump does. To them, he hates the right people.
Javier E

If this is not treason, then what is it? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...is-not-treason-then-what-is-it

treason trump gop

shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Based on the actions of the Trump administration this week, reasonable people can disagree over whether treason is being committed. Let me repeat that: Reasonable people can disagree over whether treason is being committed by this White House.
  • Much as I may have disagreed with previous administrations in my lifetime, I never doubted that the people in those administrations were trying to advance the national interest the best way they thought possible. After this past week, can that case be made with Trump and his national security team?
  • At some point, Trump will no longer be president. It will be tempting for whomever succeeds him to turn the page on history, declare bygones and move forward. Not me. The behavior of the Trump administration this week has been suspect. It demands a reckoning. A former CIA chief of Russian operations tweeted, “From a counterintelligence perspective, something is going on behind the scenes. Before Helsinki I was less sure; post Helsinki, I feel sick.” I feel sick typing these words. But the words and actions of this president, his administration, and his loyalists sickens me even more.
brickol

I.O.C. and Japan Agree to Postpone Tokyo Olympics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...summer-olympics-postponed.html

COVID-19 crisis culture economics politics

shared by brickol on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • After months of internal discussions and mounting pressure from nations and athletes across the world, the International Olympic Committee will postpone the Tokyo Games that had been scheduled to begin in late July, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan said Tuesday.
  • The Summer Games, the world’s largest sporting event, will instead take place sometime in 2021, a change that will likely wreak havoc with sports schedules but should bring great relief to the athletes, organizers and health officials who pressed for a delay and complained that the I.O.C. was not moving quickly enough to adjust to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • The decision became inevitable after the national Olympic committee in Canada announced on Sunday that it was withdrawing from the Games, and Australia’s committee told its athletes that it was not possible to train under the widespread restrictions in place to control the virus. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, after initially declining to take a stand, joined the fray Monday night, urging the I.O.C. to postpone.
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  • “I am disappointed,” Mori said. “But to be on course with a certain direction is a sigh of relief.” He added: “This could be a good pretext for us to go forward and we can prepare for an even better Olympic and Paralympic Games than what we have planned for this year.”That could include adjusting the dates to avoid the hottest weeks of the summer, a criticism Olympic organizers faced before the coronavirus threat developed into a pandemic.
  • Bach said the situation became untenable in recent days as the World Health Organization detailed the acceleration of the virus in Africa for Olympic leaders. That forced the I.O.C. to shift its focus from whether Japan could be safe at the start of the Games to what was happening immediately in various countries and continents.
  • The decision quickly gained the support of national Olympic committees from around the world. In a statement, Andy Anson, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association, said a postponement was the only decision his organization could support. “It would have been unthinkable for us to continue to prepare for an Olympic Games at a time the nation and the world no less is enduring great hardship,” Anson said.
  • At a time when Japan’s economy is already stumbling, the delay of the Olympics could deal a serious blow. In a report early this month, SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. projected that a cancellation of the Games would erase 1.4 percent of Japan’s economic output.Advertisement
  • Until now, the Olympics had not been canceled or postponed since World War II. Tokyo was supposed to host the Summer Games in 1940 but had to bow out after it went to war with China. The Games were then awarded to Helsinki, but were canceled after the outbreak of the war in Europe. Helsinki ultimately hosted the 1952 Summer Games, and Tokyo held them in 1964.
sidneybelleroche

Blinken and Russia's Lavrov meet amid tensions over Ukraine - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by sidneybelleroche on 02 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met Thursday in Stockholm, Sweden, amid growing concern among Western powers that Russia is seeking to destabilize Ukraine.
  • Speaking during the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Stockholm, Lavrov warned that NATO's expansion into the East would affect "fundamental interests" of Russian security.
  • He stressed that although Russia does "not want any conflicts" with NATO over Ukraine, it maintains the "right to choose ways to ensure its legitimate security interests."
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  • The United States, meanwhile, warned again that there would be "serious consequences" if Russia engages to "pursue confrontation" with Ukraine.
  • Despite the accusations the two officials recognized the importance of dialogue
  • calling on Russia to abide by the Minsk peace agreements hammered out in 2015 between Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany.
  • Blinken criticized Russia's adherence to the Helsinki Final Act, a multilateral agreement dating back to 1975, saying that the country "continues to violate the Helsinki principles and repeatedly obstructs the work of this organization."
  • Blinken told summit attendees that the US holds "deep concerns about Russia's plans for renewed aggression against Ukraine."
  • Blinken also held a bilateral meeting Thursday with the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dymtro Kuleba, at which the top US diplomat reiterated Washington's "unwavering commitment to Ukraine's territorial integrity, sovereignty and its independence."
  • The OSCE summit comes on the heels of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Latvia that was dominated by concerns over recent events in Belarus and Russia's intentions in Ukraine.
  • The US and NATO say Russia is increasing the number of combat troops near its border with Ukraine.
  • The Kremlin has repeatedly denied that Russia plans to invade Ukraine
  • sees NATO support for the country as a threat on Russia's western border.
  • Putin said NATO military expansion close to Russian borders and deploying missile systems in Ukraine would be crossing a "red line" for Russia.
Javier E

Cyberweapon Warning From Kaspersky, a Computer Security Expert - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-computer-security-expert.html

cybersecurity Russia danger

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • While the United States and Israel are using the weapons to slow the nuclear bomb-making abilities of Iran, they could also be used to disrupt power grids and financial systems or even wreak havoc with military defenses.
  • The wide disclosure of the details of the Flame virus by Kaspersky Lab also seems intended to promote the Russian call for a ban on cyberweapons like those that blocked poison gas or expanding bullets from the armies of major nations and other entities.
  • The United States has long objected to the Russian crusade for an online arms control ban. “There is no broad international support for a cyberweapon ban,” says James A. Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “This is a global diplomatic ploy by the Russians to take down a perceived area of U.S. military advantage.”
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  • the company has been noticeably silent on viruses perpetrated in its own backyard, where Russian-speaking criminal syndicates controlled a third of the estimated $12 billion global cybercrime market last year, according to the Russian security firm Group-IB. Some say there is good reason. “He’s got family,” said Sean Sullivan, an adviser at F-Secure, a computer security firm in Helsinki. “I wouldn’t expect them to be the most aggressive about publicizing threats in their neighborhood for fear those neighbors would retaliate.”
Javier E

What Hold Does Putin Have on Trump? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...565310

national security trump crisis

shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • America is a very legalistic society, in which public discussion often deteriorates into lawyers arguing about whether any statutes have been violated. But confronting the country in the wake of Helsinki is this question: Can it afford to wait to ascertain why Trump has subordinated himself to Putin after the president has so abjectly demonstrated that he has subordinated himself?
  • Robert Mueller is leading a legal process. The United States faces a national-security emergency.
Javier E

The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...suffocation-of-democracy

democracy authoritarian fascism illiberal history

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
  • Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
  • Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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  • Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
  • If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
  • Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
  • Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
  • In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
  • The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
  • the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
  • Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
  • Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
  • In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  • The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
  • To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
  • Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
  • In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
  • the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
  • No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
  • Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
malonema1

Finnish PM Says Government Could Break up Due to New Finns Party Leader: Report | World... - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...-new-finns-party-leader-report

Finland politics

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Finnish PM Says Government Could Break up Due to New Finns Party Leader: Report
  • HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila said that there is a risk his three-party government could break up following Saturday's leadership change in co-ruling nationalist Finns party. "Of course (there's is a risk). This is a tough spot for the government", Sipila told Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.
Javier E

Ex-KGB Agent Says Trump Was a Russian Asset. Does it Matter? - 0 views

nymag.com/...utin-kompromat-unger-book.html

trump asset russia putin

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • If something like the most sinister plausible story turned out to be true, how much would it matter? Probably not that much
  • I have merely come to think that even if we could have confirmed the worst, to the point that even Trump’s supporters could no longer deny it, it wouldn’t have changed very much. Trump wouldn’t have been forced to resign, and his Republican supporters would not have had to repudiate him. The controversy would have simply receded into the vast landscape of partisan talking points — one more thing liberals mock Trump over, and conservatives complain about the media for covering instead of Nancy Pelosi’s freezer or antifa or the latest campus outrage.
  • One reason I think that is because a great deal of incriminating information was confirmed and very little in fact changed as a result. In 2018, Buzzfeed reported, and the next year Robert Mueller confirmed, explosive details of a Russian kompromat operation. During the campaign, Russia had been dangling a Moscow building deal that stood to give hundreds of millions of dollars in profit to Trump, at no risk. Not only did he stand to gain this windfall, but he was lying in public at the time about his dealings with Russia, which gave Vladimir Putin additional leverage over him. (Russia could expose Trump’s lies at any time if he did something to displease Moscow.)
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  • The truth, I suspect, was simultaneously about as bad as I suspected, and paradoxically anticlimactic. Trump was surrounded by all sorts of odious characters who manipulated him into saying and doing things that ran against the national interest. One of those characters was Putin. In the end, their influence ran up against the limits that the character over whom they had gained influence was a weak, failed president.
  • Ultimately, whatever value Trump offered to Russia was compromised by his incompetence and limited ability to grasp firm control even of his own government’s foreign policy. It was not just the fabled “deep state” that undermined Trump. Even his own handpicked appointees constantly undermined him, especially on Russia. Whatever leverage Putin had was limited to a single individual, which meant there was nobody Trump could find to run the State Department, National Security Agency, and so on who shared his idiosyncratic Russophilia.
  • Mueller even testified that this arrangement gave Russia blackmail leverage over Trump. But by the time these facts had passed from the realm of the mysterious to the confirmed, they had become uninteresting.
  • Shvets told Unger that the KGB cultivated Trump as an American leader, and persuaded him to run his ad attacking American alliances. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations at that time,” he said, “It was a big thing — to have three major American newspapers publish KGB soundbites.”
  • To be clear, while Shvets is a credible source, his testimony isn’t dispositive. There are any number of possible motives for a former Soviet spy turned critic of Russia’s regime to manufacture an indictment of Trump
  • This is what intelligence experts mean when they describe Trump as a Russian “asset.” It’s not the same as being an agent. An asset is somebody who can be manipulated, as opposed to somebody who is consciously and secretly working on your behalf.
  • A second reason is that reporter Craig Unger got a former KGB spy to confirm on the record that Russian intelligence had been working Trump for decades. In his new book, “American Kompromat,” Unger interviewed Yuri Shvets, who told him that the KGB manipulated Trump with simple flattery. “In terms of his personality, the guy is not a complicated cookie,” he said, “his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”
  • If I had to guess today, I’d put the odds higher, perhaps over 50 percent. One reason for my higher confidence is that Trump has continued to fuel suspicion by taking anomalously pro-Russian positions. He met with Putin in Helsinki, appearing strangely submissive, and spouted Putin’s propaganda on a number of topics including the ridiculous possibility of a joint Russian-American cybersecurity unit. (Russia, of course, committed the gravest cyber-hack in American history not long ago, making Trump’s idea even more self-defeating in retrospect than it was at the time.) He seemed to go out of his way to alienate American allies and blow up cooperation every time they met during his tenure.
  • He would either refuse to admit Russian wrongdoing — Trump refused even to concede that the regime poisoned Alexei Navalny — or repeat bizarre snippets of Russian propaganda: NATO was a bad deal for America because Montenegro might launch an attack on Russia; the Soviets had to invade Afghanistan in the 1970s to defend against terrorism. These weren’t talking points he would pick up in his normal routine of watching Fox News and calling Republican sycophants.
  • there was a reasonable chance — I loosely pegged it at 10 or 20 percent — that the Soviets had planted some of these thoughts, which he had never expressed before the trip, in his head.
  • Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”
  • During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (It never happened.)
  • In 2018, I became either famous or notorious — depending on your point of view — for writing a story speculating that Russia had secret leverage over Trump
  • Here is what I wrote in that controversial section:
Javier E

Opinion | We Can End Homelessness In Our Cities - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...affordable-housing-cities.html

housing homeless crisis politics policy culture

shared by Javier E on 16 May 20 - No Cached
  • The federal government could render homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring. The cure for homelessness is housing, and, as it happens, the money is available: Congress could shift billions in annual federal subsidies from rich homeowners to people who don’t have homes.
  • Instead, Americans have taken to treating homelessness as a sad fact of life, as if it were perfectly normal that many thousands of adults and children in the wealthiest nation on earth cannot afford a place to live.
  • Government programs focus on palliative care: Annual spending on shelters has reached $12 billion a year
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Rather than provide housing for the homeless, cities offer showers, day care centers and bag checks.
  • We have decided to live with the fact that some of our fellow Americans will die on the streets.
  • “There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen,” Leilani Farha, then the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, said after a 2018 visit to Northern California.
  • “I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve done outreach on every continent,” Dame Louise Casey, who directed homeless policy for several British prime ministers, said after touring homeless encampments in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other American cities.
  • almost 40 percent of workers in households making less than $40,000 a year have lost work. Women in Need NYC, which runs shelters, warned this week that New York faces a “mass increase” in homelessness
  • Countries confronting homelessness with greater success than the United States, including Finland and Japan, begin by treating housing as a human right
  • the first law of real estate applies to homelessness, too: Location, location, location. The nation’s homeless population is concentrated in New York, the cities of coastal California and a few other islands of prosperity.
  • Well-educated, well-paid professionals have flocked to those places, driving up housing prices. And crucially, those cities and their suburbs have made it virtually impossible to build enough housing to keep up.
  • The government calculates $600 is the most a family living at the poverty line can afford to pay in monthly rent while still having enough money for food, health care and other needs. From 1990 to 2017, the number of housing units available below that price shrank by four million.
  • While there are roughly 80,000 homeless people in New York on any given night, more than 800,000 New Yorkers — more than 10 times as many people — are scraping by, spending more than half their income on rent.
  • According to one analysis, a $100 increase in the average monthly rent in a large metro area is associated with a 15 percent increase in homelessness.
  • In 2018, eight out of every 10,000 Michigan residents were homeless. In California, it was 33 per 10,000. In New York, it was 46 per 10,000.
  • in recent decades, wealth and homelessness have both increased — a stark illustration of the inequalities that pervade American life.
  • Having failed to address homelessness during the longest economic expansion in American history, the nation now faces a greater challenge under more difficult circumstances
  • Reframing the debate — asking what is necessary to end homelessness — is an important first step for New York and for other places that are failing this basic test of civic responsibility.
  • The program costs about $19 billion a year. Vouchers for all eligible households would cost another $41 billion a year
  • Where to get the money? Well, the government annually provides more than $70 billion in tax breaks to homeowners, including a deduction for mortgage interest payments and a free pass on some capital gains from home sales. Let’s end homelessness instead of subsidizing mansions.
  • Without a significant expansion in the supply of housing, adding vouchers would be like adding players to a game of musical chairs without increasing the number of chairs.
  • Market-rate construction can help: More housing would slow the upward march of housing prices. New York and San Francisco are the nation’s most tightly regulated markets for housing construction,
  • Tokyo, often cited as an international model for its permissive development policies, has expanded its supply of homes by roughly 2 percent a year in recent years, while New York’s housing supply has expanded by roughly 0.5 percent a year. Over the last two decades, housing prices in Tokyo held steady as New York prices soared.
  • In California, for example, construction of a five-story apartment building that meets minimum standards costs an average of $425,000 per unit,
  • Without public aid, the apartments would need to be rented for several times more than the $600 a month affordable to a family living at the poverty line.
  • Proposals for a big increase in affordable housing construction inevitably call to mind the troubled public housing projects of the mid-20th century. They offer one clear lesson: Avoid housing that concentrates poverty
  • there is a solution — to build subsidized housing as part of mixed-income developments and to spread the developments out, putting them not just in cities but also in the surrounding suburbs.
  • Helsinki, Finland, a city of just 600,000 people, builds about 7,000 units of mixed-income housing a year. That’s a big reason Finland is the rare European country where homelessness is in decline.
  • Extending this approach to the entire homeless population would be expensive. To take one example, King County, which encompasses Seattle, would need to increase annual spending on homelessness to roughly $410 million from $196 million to help each of the county’s 22,000 homeless families, according to a study by McKinsey. That’s about $19,000 per family.
  • Even if the cost per person were twice as high, the nation’s homeless population could be housed for $10 billion a year — less than the price of one aircraft carrier.
  • there is worse to come. Homelessness rises during recessions, the federal funding is temporary and state and local governments face huge drops in tax revenue.
  • The federal government already provides housing vouchers to help some lower-income families. The families pay 30 percent of their monthly income toward rent; the government pays the rest. But instead of giving vouchers to every needy family, the government imposes an arbitrary cap. Three in four eligible families don’t get vouchers.
  • Americans must decide whether we are willing to let elementary school students spend nights in guarded parking lots
  • We must decide whether it’s worth spending just a little of this nation’s vast wealth to ensure that no 60-year-old woman needs to sleep on the same bench in downtown Santa Monica
Javier E

Book Review: 'The Divider' Is a Sober Look at the Trump White House - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...peter-baker-susan-glasser.html

trump presidency book review politics history

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Comprehensively researched and briskly told, “The Divider” is a story of disasters averted as well as disasters realized.
  • It’s all here: the culture wars and the corruption, the demagogy and the autocrat-love, the palace intrigue and the public tweets, the pandemic and the impeachments (plural).
  • those with strong stomachs will find a lot they didn’t know, and a lot more that they once learned but maybe, amid the daily barrage of breaking-news banner headlines, managed to forget.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • they draw on an impressively broad array of materials: hundreds of original interviews, reams of contemporary daily journalism, and an already-fat library of memoirs and journalistic accounts of the Trump years,
  • the authors are persuasive in arguing that in this White House, “impulse and instinct ruled.” Given the sheer number of crises and conflicts that erupted on Trump’s watch, herding them all into a narrative isn’t easy.
  • the authors center each chapter on its own topic or story line — Trump’s rocky relationship with foreign allies, for example, or the 2018 budget battle over the Mexico wall. Other chapters focus on key supporting players, who are rendered with deft portraits, such as Jared Kushner, Trump’s widely reviled but fireproof son-in-law, or the president’s antagonist-turned-sycophant, Senator Lindsey Graham
  • Some of the weightiest chapters take up Trump’s relationship with Russia.
  • Yet Baker and Glasser seem to endorse the view of the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who, during the first impeachment, warned Republicans, “You will not change him, you cannot constrain him.”
  • The chapters on the 2019 Ukraine scandal, when Trump linked aid to its government to delivery of dirt on Joe Biden, re-establish the gravity of the first impeachment
  • If “The Divider” has a dominant theme, it may be the struggle within the “almost cartoonishly chaotic White House” by people more reasonable and ethical than Trump to rein in his most dangerous instincts
  • Time and again, staffers debate whether to stay put in hopes of mitigating Trump’s basest impulses or to run screaming from the room. Even more stunning is the number of onetime loyalists who, after their tours of duty, emerged as among the president’s most strident critics.
  • Many Trump aides — even some, like National Security Adviser John Bolton or Attorney General William P. Barr, who might deserve harsh criticism on other grounds — did intervene valiantly at times to keep Trump in check. Without their small acts of resistance, things could have gone even worse
  • “The Divider” soberly and carefully reconstructs events to reveal anew Trump’s shocking deference to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin — notably at the 2018 Helsinki summit, where, the authors pointedly write, “Trump acknowledged that he would accept the word of Putin over that of his own intelligence agencies.”
  • They write: “So many had told themselves that they could manage the unmanageable president, that they could keep him from going too far, that they could steer him in the direction of responsible governance. … They had justified their service to him or their alliances with him or their deference to him on the grounds that they could ultimately control him. And what Schiff was saying is that three years had shown that was not possible.”
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