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Trump Administration

The Empire’s Hustle: Why Anti-Trumpism Doesn’t Include Anti-War

September 22, 2017 Ajamu Baraka, www.counterpunch.org , , ,
By Ajamu Baraka for Counter Punch - Libertarian U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) declared from the Senate floor last week in anticipation of the vote on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2018: “I rise today to oppose unauthorized, undeclared and unconstitutional war…What we have today is basically unlimited war, anywhere, anytime, any place upon the globe.” With these words, Paul became one of the few voices to oppose the obscenity that is known as U.S. war policy. But only two other senators joined him: Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR). But there is a wrinkle here: Paul is not concerned with the size of the military budget. He’s pointing his finger at the continuation of the Authorization to Use Military Force Act (AUMF) of 2001, which was the “legal” basis for the U.S. global “war on terror.” He wants Congress to re-assess this legislation that has prompted endless wars abroad. After Paul’s amendment to the NDAA was defeated, the Senate went on to approve it with a vote of 89-9 Monday in what the New York Times correctly identified as a bi-partisan effort, to authorize a military budget of $696 billion—an increase in the military budget of almost $75 billion and well over the $54 billion that Pres. Donald Trump had originally proposed.

California To Sue Trump Administration Over U.S.-Mexico Border Wall

September 22, 2017 Patrick McGreevy and Jazmine Ulloa, www.latimes.com , , , ,
By Patrick McGreevy and Jazmine Ulloa for Los Angeles Times - California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra plans to announce a lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of the state that will challenge President Trump’s proposal to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, a project Becerra has called “medieval.” Becerra is scheduled to travel to Border Field State Park near San Diego to announce that a lawsuit is being filed in federal court over construction of border wall projects in San Diego and Imperial counties. The lawsuit, which includes the California Coastal Commission as a plaintiff, states its purpose is "to protect the State of California’s residents, natural resources, economic interests, procedural rights, and sovereignty from violations of the United States Constitution" and federal law. It adds that the wall would have a chilling effect on tourism to the United States from Mexico. The state's lawsuit alleges that the Trump administration has failed to comply with federal and state environmental laws and relied on federal statutes that don't authorize the proposed projects. The brief alleges the federal government violated the U.S. Constitution's separation-of-powers doctrine "by vesting in the Executive Branch the power to waive state and local laws, including state criminal law.".

Trump Administration Urges Congress To Renew FISA

September 14, 2017 Aaron Kesel, www.activistpost.com , ,
By Aaron Kesel for Activist Post - U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is urging Congress to “promptly” reauthorize section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) scheduled to expire at the end of this year. The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats also signed the letter, addressed to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Section 702 of FISA “allows the Intelligence Community, under a robust regime of oversight by all three branches of government, to collect vital information about international terrorists, cyber actors, individuals and entities engaged in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other important foreign intelligence targets located outside the United States,” Sessions and Coats wrote. They added: “Reauthorizing this critical authority is the top legislative priority of the Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community. As publicly reported by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, information collected under one particular section of FAA, Section 702, produces significant foreign intelligence that is vital to protect the nation against international terrorism and other threats.”

Trump Pandering To Racists With Repeal Of DACA

September 12, 2017 Abraham, www.blackalliance.org , , , ,
By Abraham for BAJI - NEW YORK, NY – This morning Attorney General Sessions announced that the Trump Administration will rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allowed 800,000 immigrant youth to live, work and remain in the United States without the constant fear of deportation. Established in 2012, the program has transformed the lives of young people, including thousands of Black immigrants, bringing stability, along with economic and educational opportunities to marginalized families and communities. “BAJI is appalled by Trump’s decision to rescind DACA. By canceling the program President Trump is yet again pandering to white supremacists over immigrant, Black, and poor communities, as well as millions of organizations, businesses, and allies that support DACA recipients. It is now up to Congress to come up with a long term solution to our broken immigration system that protects human rights and enables immigrant families to live and thrive in the U.S.,” says Opal Tometi, BAJI’s Executive Director and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Global Network. “BAJI stands with the millions of young undocumented immigrants whose lives are on the line, including those protected under DACA. Until dignity, justice, and human rights protections can be afforded all oppressed communities in the U.S....

Ending DACA Would Be Cruel And Senseless

September 7, 2017 Jesse Mechanic, www.huffingtonpost.com , , ,
By Jesse Mechanic for The Huffington Post - President Trump has unofficially set forth plans to dismantle the Consideration for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). According to reports, he plans to let congress hash out the details over the next six months. There is a fair amount of bipartisan support for DACA and numerous legal challenges are locked and loaded, so fully erasing the law will not be easy. This article is based solely on the intention of destroying DACA and what that intention represents. Ending the program would be heartless and myopic. There seems to be a lot of misinformation swirling about on DACA, so let’s first go over the basics: DACA was implemented through executive order by the Obama administration in 2012. The law grants deferred action (protection from deportation) for people who were brought to the United States illegally as children. Being granted deferred action does not provide legal status or future amnesty. DACA recipients (DREAMers) must apply for renewal of deferred action status every two years.

Venezuelan Left Fights Back Against Trump’s Threats And Sanctions

September 7, 2017 Emile Schepers, www.peoplesworld.org , , ,
By Emile Schepers for People's World - On Friday, August 25, President Trump announced the imposition of tough new sanctions on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, as punishment for the establishment of a new National Constituent Assembly in that country. But the Constituent Assembly is not taking Trump’s latest attacks lying down, but rather is forging ahead with a full program of reforms on the heels of military threats against the South American country. Threats against Venezuela by the United States are not new. President Obama had already declared Venezuela to be an unusual threat to U.S. security and interests, using language required to make the imposition of sanctions legal. However, the composition and politics of the Trump administration have greatly increased the anti-Venezuela mood in our executive branch. The high concentration in the U.S. political establishment, in the Trump cabinet and among Trump’s closest advisors and personal cronies — of people with axes to grind against Venezuela — has increased the danger. For example, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson used to be the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, a transnational oil giant which has had sharp disputes with the Venezuelan government over the nationalization of some of their properties in that country.

Protest Outside Of Rex Tillerson’s House Over Hurricane Harvey

September 7, 2017 Anthony Torres, www.alternet.org , , , ,
By Anthony Torres for AlterNet - Wednesday night, I joined dozens of D.C. residents for a vigil of mourning and reckoning outside the D.C. residence of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former ExxonMobil CEO. We mourned for our sisters and brothers in Texas, Bangladesh, Mumbai and Sierra Leone drowning in their homes. We leveraged our resources to raise funds for the community organizations that will sustain the organizing needed for just and equitable recoveries. As we mourned, we also condemned those responsible for these human catastrophes: the oil barons and politicians who profit off of climate disaster. We gathered just before sunset at a neighborhood park in Kalorama, one of D.C.’s most exclusive neighborhoods, home of Ivanka Trump, President Obama and Rex Tillerson. Led by local leaders from Sunrise Movement, Hip Hop Caucus, Rising Hearts Coalition, 350 DC, Interfaith Power and Light and more, we marched in song, hand in hand, toward Rex’s multimillion-dollar residence. Upon arriving, we lit our candles and raised them toward the building to shine a light through this dark hour. While we stood in prayer, nearly a dozen police stood between us and his front door...

How President Trump’s Tax Plan Would Really Affect The Middle Class

August 31, 2017 Chye-Ching Huang, www.cbpp.org , , ,
By Chye-Ching Huang for CBPP - President Trump is set to speak in Missouri today where he will reportedly continue to tout his tax plan’s benefits for the middle class even though it would actually concentrate its tax cuts at the top — and could even hurt low- and middle-income families. Over the last two years, the President has released several different tax plans that would deliver trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and corporations but do little to help working families. Yet, he’s consistently promised to help the middle class: in his inaugural address, for example, he said that “every decision” on taxes will “be made to benefit American workers and American families.” In fact, if President Trump’s proposed tax cuts are paid for through the types of spending cuts he has proposed in his budget, low- and middle-income Americans would clearly end up far worse off.

Trump’s Tough New Sanctions Will Harm The People Of Venezuela

August 29, 2017 Mark Weisbrot, www.thehill.com , , ,
By Mark Weisbrot for The Hill - The Trump administration announced new, unprecedented sanctions against Venezuela on Friday that are designed to cut off financing to Venezuela. The Trump team pretends that the sanctions are only directed at the government. But as any economist knows, this is clearly false. By starving the economy of foreign exchange, this action will harm the private sector, most Venezuelans, the poor and the vulnerable. These sanctions will deepen the severe depression that Venezuela’s economy has been in for more than three and a half years, which has already shrunk income per person by more than a third. They will worsen the shortages of food and essential medicines. They will exacerbate the country’s balance of payments crisis, and therefore feed the spiral of inflation (600 percent over the past year) and depreciation of the currency (on the black market) that has been accelerating since late 2012. And they will further polarize an already divided country. Opposition leaders who support the sanctions, or are associated with them because of their longstanding ties to the United States, will be seen as treasonous — much as Republicans in the Trump administration, including Trump himself, are portrayed by those who believe they collaborated with the Russian government to win the 2016 election.

What A Revived Poor People’s Campaign Needs To Do

August 26, 2017 Amanda Abrams, www.yesmagazine.org , ,
By Amanda Abrams for Yes! Magazine - In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies started the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement meant to improve the lives of low-income Americans. But King was assassinated a few months before its political actions officially kicked off, and the campaign never reached its full potential. Fifty years later, Rev. William Barber, head of the North Carolina NAACP, is joining other religious and activist leaders to launch a new Poor People’s Campaign, picking up where King left off. Although King is universally associated with civil rights and the struggles of African Americans, the original Poor People’s Campaign was an inclusive effort to alleviate the poverty of Americans of all races. And today’s organizers say that goal is fundamental to the new campaign as well. In this deeply polarized socio-political climate, the message is an attractive one, emphasizing not left or right, but a collective moral obligation to allow everyone a fair shot at a decent life. Barber’s inclusive language certainly succeeded in North Carolina, where the popular Moral Mondays protests he spearheaded in 2013–14 helped elect a Democratic governor last year. But for the new movement to gain national traction, it will need to appeal not only to African Americans and progressive Whites, who currently make up Barber’s base, but also draw in poor and working-class Whites, too.

The Hard Numbers On The War In Afghanistan Trump Left Out Of His Speech

August 23, 2017 Mike Ludwig, www.truth-out.org , , , ,
By Mike Ludwig for Truthout - Last night, President Trump was expected to announce that he would be sending several thousand more troops to Afghanistan, where the United States has been at war for 16 years and violence and corruption have become a way of life. Instead, he outlined a vague strategy meant to appease both a public weary of endless war and the military generals who are now among his top advisors. In his address to the nation from Fort Myer, Trump did not say how many more troops he would send to Afghanistan, or how much more money he is willing to spend on the war. He only said that restrictions on wartime spending would be lifted, and that military commanders would have the freedom to launch attacks without waiting for approval from Washington. Trump also refused to give a timetable for withdrawing American forces, saying only that the enemy would not be privy to when and where the US would attack. He said the "nation-building" effort in Afghanistan is over, and the US would no longer seek to forge democracies in foreign lands "in our own image." Trump did mention that the Taliban could have a place in a functioning Afghan democracy, a sign that the White House might now be willing to negotiate with anti-government forces after years of bloody warfare, but it's not clear what such negotiations would look like.

Trump’s Afghan War Speech: More Of The Same, With More Killing

August 23, 2017 W.J. Astore, www.bracingviews.com , , , ,
By W.J. Astore for Bracing Views - Actually, the consequences of an American withdrawal are both unpredictable and (most probably) acceptable. Sure, terrorist organizations may gain impetus from an American withdrawal. It’s also possible that a notoriously corrupt Afghan government might finally negotiate with the Taliban and other organizations, and that regional power brokers like Pakistan and Iran, who have their own interests in regional stability, might broker a settlement that Americans could live with. Trump further argued that a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 led to “hard-won gains slip[ping] back into the hands of terrorist enemies. Our soldiers watched as cities they had fought for, and bled to liberate, and won, were occupied by a terrorist group called ISIS.” The truth is far more complex. The prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq helped to create ISIS in the first place, and failed American efforts to create and train reliable Iraqi security forces contributed to easy ISIS victories after U.S. forces left in 2011.

Trump’s New FERC Commissioner Rob Powelson Accepted Gifts From Energy Industry

August 21, 2017 Itai Vardi, www.desmogblog.com , , , ,
By Itai Vardi for Desmog Blog - Robert Powelson, President Donald Trump’s newly appointed commissioner to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), received both gifts and reimbursements for travel, lodging, and hospitality from the energy and utility sectors in his previous position as a state regulator. He will now regulate those sectors at the federal level. Powelson, a Republican, began his tenure at FERC last week. Documents and emails recently uncovered by the Energy & Policy Institute, a watchdog monitoring attacks on renewable energy, indicate that he maintained a close relationship with industry groups as a member of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. In addition, earlier this year, Powelson said pipeline opponents are engaged in “jihad,” a statement which drew criticism from activists and further solidified his pro-industry image. NFL Game and Industry Conferences. DeSmog has found that according to Powelson’s financial interest disclosures at the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission, in September 2013 he accepted two tickets from NRG Energy to attend a football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and San Diego Chargers. Each ticket cost $105. Powelson attended the game with James Steffes, a senior vice president at NRG Energy, a large energy company operating numerous power generating stations throughout the U.S.

The Activists Who Helped Shut Down Trump’s CEO Councils

August 21, 2017 Sarah Anderson, www.inequality.org , , ,
By Sarah Anderson for Inequality - The CEOs who made up two White House advisory councils have fled like rats on a sinking ship. Their exodus — a dramatic rebuke of Donald Trump — came within 48 hours of the incendiary August 15 press conference where the President praised some of the participants of last week’s white supremacist rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia. But many of the CEOs on these councils had been under heavy pressure to disavow Trump’s agenda of hate and racism even before Charlottesville. That pressure came from grassroots activists. The Center for Popular Democracy, Make The Road New York, New York Communities for Change, and several other immigrant and worker advocates had led that activist campaign, targeting the leaders of nine major corporations affiliated with the Trump administration. The campaign, working through a web site called Corporate Backers of Hate, detailed the connections between the nine companies and the Trump administration and encouraged people to send emails to both the CEOs involved and members of their corporate boards. Throughout the spring and summer, the campaign also held protests against the companies, including a civil disobedience action at the JPMorgan Chase headquarters on May Day...

10 Ways Trump’s New NAFTA Threatens People And Planet

August 17, 2017 William Waren, www.medium.com , ,
By William Waren for Friends of the Earth - During his campaign for president, Donald Trump demonized the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), calling it “the worst trade deal” and making false assurances that he would rework NAFTA, and other trade deals, to protect the American people. As the process to renegotiate NAFTA begins, Trump’s rhetoric and actions strongly suggest that he plans to step up his war on the planet. Trump’s NAFTA “re-do” is highly likely to reflect many elements of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and specifically, the portions of the TPP that would undercut environmental regulations. The Administration’s statement on July 17 of its NAFTA negotiating objectives reinforces concerns that Trump plans to use a new NAFTA to hamstring effective environmental regulation across the board and accelerate global warming. When we compare the evils of Trump’s new trade deal against reality of our current economy, the American people should be extremely concerned about the future of our environment. As trade renegotiations begin in Washington, D.C., on August 16, we compiled a list of ten ways this process endangers our environment.
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