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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 months ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 6, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 06, 2024

Yesterday, November 5, 2024, Americans reelected former president Donald Trump, a Republican, to the presidency over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. As of Wednesday night, Trump is projected to get at least 295 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, with two Republican-leaning states still not called. The popular vote count is still underway.

Republicans also retook control of the Senate, where Democrats were defending far more seats than Republicans. Control of the House is not yet clear.

These results were a surprise to everyone. Trump is a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in a number of jurisdictions. He refused to leave office peacefully when voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020, instead launching an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, and said during his campaign that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.

Pollsters thought the race would be very close but showed increasing momentum for Harris, and Harris’s team expressed confidence during the day. By posting on social media—with no evidence—that the voting in Pennsylvania was rigged, Trump himself suggested he expected he would lose the popular vote, at least, as he did in 2016 and 2020.

But in 2024, it appears a majority of American voters chose to put Trump back into office.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, offered a message of unity, the expansion of the economic policies that have made the U.S. economy the strongest in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and the creation of an “opportunity economy” that echoed many of the policies Republicans used to embrace. Trump vowed to take revenge on his enemies and to return the country to the neoliberal policies President Joe Biden had rejected in favor of investing in the middle class.

When he took office, Biden acknowledged that democracy was in danger around the globe, as authoritarians like Russian president Vladimir Putin and China’s president Xi Jinping maintained that democracy was obsolete and must be replaced by autocracies. Russia set out to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that enforced the rules-based international order that stood against Russian expansion.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who overturned democracy in his own country, explained that the historical liberal democracy of the United States weakens a nation because the equality it champions means treating immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women as equal to men, thus ending traditionally patriarchal society.

In place of democracy, Orbán champions “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.

In order to strengthen democracy at home and abroad, Biden worked to show that it delivered for ordinary Americans. He and the Democrats passed groundbreaking legislation to invest in rebuilding roads and bridges and build new factories to usher in green energy. They defended unions and used the Federal Trade Commission to break up monopolies and return more economic power to consumers.

Their system worked. It created record low unemployment rates, lifted wages for the bottom 80% of Americans, and built the strongest economy in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, setting multiple stock market records. But that success turned out not to be enough to protect democracy.

In contrast, Trump promised he would return to the ideology of the era before 2021, when leaders believed in relying on markets to order the economy with the idea that wealthy individuals would invest more efficiently than if the government regulated business or skewed markets with targeted investment (in green energy, for example). Trump vowed to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations and to make up lost revenue through tariffs, which he incorrectly insists are paid by foreign countries; tariffs are paid by U.S. consumers.

For policies, Trump’s campaign embraced the Project 2025 agenda led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to Orbán. That plan calls for getting rid of the nonpartisan civil service the U.S. has had since 1883 and for making both the Department of Justice and the military partisan instruments of a strong president, much as Orbán did in Hungary. It also calls for instituting religious rule, including an end to abortion rights, across the U.S. Part of the idea of “purifying” the country is the deportation of undocumented immigrants: Trump promised to deport 20 million people at an estimated cost of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.

That is what voters chose.

Pundits today have spent time dissecting the election results, many trying to find the one tweak that would have changed the outcome, and suggesting sweeping solutions to the Democrats’ obvious inability to attract voters. There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world.

There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat.

But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.”

X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.

Many voters who were using their vote to make an economic statement are likely going to be surprised to discover what they have actually voted for. In his victory speech, Trump said the American people had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”

White nationalist Nick Fuentes posted, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” and gloated that men will now legally control women’s bodies. His post got at least 22,000 “likes.” Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, previously funded by Russia, posted: “It is my honor to inform you that Project 2025 was real the whole time.”

Today, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would launch the “largest mass deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants, and the stock in private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic jumped 41% and 29%, respectively. Those jumps were part of a bigger overall jump: the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved up 1,508 points in what Washington Post economic columnist Heather Long said was the largest post-election jump in more than 100 years.

As for the lower prices Trump voters wanted, Kate Gibson of CBS today noted that on Monday, the National Retail Federation said that Trump’s proposed tariffs will cost American consumers between $46 billion and $78 billion a year as clothing, toys, furniture, appliances, and footwear all become more expensive. A $50 pair of running shoes, Gibson said, would retail for $59 to $64 under the new tariffs.

U.S. retailers are already preparing to raise prices of items from foreign suppliers, passing to consumers the cost of any future tariffs.

Trump’s election will also mean he will no longer have to answer to the law for his federal indictments: special counsel Jack Smith is winding them down ahead of Trump’s inauguration. So he will not be tried for retaining classified documents or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government when he lost in 2020.

This evening, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!”

This afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at her alma mater, Howard University, to concede the election to Trump.

She thanked her supporters, her family, the Bidens, the Walz family, and her campaign staff and volunteers. She reiterated that she believes Americans have far more in common than separating us.

In what appeared to be a message to Trump, she noted: “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle as much as any other distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it. At the same time in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God.

“My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say, while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up.”

Harris urged people “to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.” She told those feeling as if the world is dark indeed these days, to “fill the sky with the light of a billion brilliant stars, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service,” and to let “that work guide us, even in the face of setbacks, toward the extraordinary promise of the United States of America.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather cox Richardson #election 2024 #TFG #the flood of disinformation #political technology #right wing media

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tomorrowusa · 10 months ago

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Four years ago today (March 13th), then President Donald Trump got around to declaring a national state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic. The administration had been downplaying the danger to the United States for 51 days since the first US infection was confirmed on January 22nd.

From an ABC News article dated 25 February 2020...

CDC warns Americans of 'significant disruption' from coronavirus

Until now, health officials said they'd hoped to prevent community spread in the United States. But following community transmissions in Italy, Iran and South Korea, health officials believe the virus may not be able to be contained at the border and that Americans should prepare for a "significant disruption." This comes in contrast to statements from the Trump administration. Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said Tuesday the threat to the United States from coronavirus "remains low," despite the White House seeking $1.25 billion in emergency funding to combat the virus. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC’s Kelly Evans on “The Exchange” Tuesday evening, "We have contained the virus very well here in the U.S." [ ... ] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the request "long overdue and completely inadequate to the scale of this emergency." She also accused President Trump of leaving "critical positions in charge of managing pandemics at the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security vacant." "The president's most recent budget called for slashing funding for the Centers for Disease Control, which is on the front lines of this emergency. And now, he is compounding our vulnerabilities by seeking to ransack funds still needed to keep Ebola in check," Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday morning. "Our state and local governments need serious funding to be ready to respond effectively to any outbreak in the United States. The president should not be raiding money that Congress has appropriated for other life-or-death public health priorities." She added that lawmakers in the House of Representatives "will swiftly advance a strong, strategic funding package that fully addresses the scale and seriousness of this public health crisis." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also called the Trump administration's request "too little too late." "That President Trump is trying to steal funds dedicated to fight Ebola -- which is still considered an epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- is indicative of his towering incompetence and further proof that he and his administration aren't taking the coronavirus crisis as seriously as they need to be," Schumer said in a statement.

A reminder that Trump had been leaving many positions vacant – part of a Republican strategy to undermine the federal government.

Here's a picture from that ABC piece from a nearly empty restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. The screen displays a Trump tweet still downplaying COVID-19 with him seeming more concerned about the effect of the Dow Jones on his re-election bid.

People were not buying Trump's claims but they were buying PPE.

I took this picture at CVS on February 26th that year.

The stock market which Trump in his February tweet claimed looked "very good" was tanking on March 12th – the day before his state of emergency declaration.

Trump succeeded in sending the US economy into recession much faster than George W. Bush did at the end of his term – quite a feat!. (As an aside, every recession in the US since 1981 has been triggered by Republican presidents.)

Of course Trump never stopped trying to downplay the pandemic nor did he ever take responsibility for it. The US ended up with the highest per capita death rate of any technologically advanced country.

Precious time was lost while Trump dawdled. Orange on this map indicates COVID infections while red indicates COVID deaths. At the time Trump declared a state of emergency, the virus had already spread to 49 states.

The United States could have done far better and it certainly had the tools to do so.

The Obama administration had limited the number of US cases of Ebola to under one dozen during that pandemic in the 2010s. Based on their success, they compiled a guide on how the federal government could limit future pandemics.

Obama team left pandemic playbook for Trump administration, officials confirm

Of course Trump ignored it.

Unlike those boxes of nuclear secrets in Trump's bathroom, the Obama pandemic limitation document is not classified. Anybody can read it – even if Trump didn't. This copy comes from the Stanford University Libraries.

TOWARDS EPIDEMIC PREDICTION: FEDERAL EFFORTS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN OUTBREAK MODELING

Feel free to share this post with anybody who still feels nostalgic about the Trump White House years!

#covid-19 #coronavirus #pandemic #public health #donald trump #trump's incompetent response to the pandemic #covid state of emergency #2020 #trump recession #51 days of trump pandemic dawdling #obama pandemic playbook #2010s ebola outbreak #nostalgia for trump administration #republicans #election 2024 #vote blue no matter who

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justinspoliticalcorner · 14 days ago

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Ed Pilkington at The Guardian:

Joe Biden has carried out the largest act of presidential clemency on a single day in modern US history, commuting the sentences of almost 1,500 people and pardoning 39 Americans convicted of non-violent crimes. In a statement issued on Thursday, the White House said that Biden’s sweeping act of clemency was designed to “help reunite families, strengthen communities, and reintegrate individuals back into society”. The almost 1,500 commutations ordered by the president all relate to people who were released from prisons and placed in home confinement during the Covid pandemic. Thousands of prisoners were released to their homes as an emergency measure under the Cares Act to prevent the rapid spread of coronavirus through federal prisons. Each individual included in the new commutations had been serving their sentences at home for at least a year and had shown they were reunited with their families and were committed to rehabilitation, the White House said. “These commutation recipients have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities and have shown that they deserve a second chance,” they continued. The commutations come at a time when Republicans in Congress have been pressing to send thousands of federal prisoners on home release back behind bars. Criminal justice reformers have protested that the home release program has been highly successful, with a rate of new offending at a mere fraction of the overall recidivism rate in federal prisons. Under the commutations, the almost 1,500 Americans will retain their convictions but have their sentences reduced. The 39 people pardoned by Biden have had their guilty verdicts wholly erased.

The White House said the 39 were all individuals convicted of non-violent crimes, including drug offenses. Among them were a woman who led emergency response teams during natural disasters; a church deacon who had worked as an addiction and youth counsellor; a doctoral student in molecular biosciences; and a decorated military veteran.

President Joe Biden (D) issues around 1,500 sentence commutations and 39 pardons of non-violent crimes in the largest single-acts of clemency.

#Joe Biden #Clemency #Pardons #Commutations #Biden Administration

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acquariusgb · 1 month ago

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When Covid was raging in New York, Hillary and I were at home, with Chelsea, Marc, and our three grandkids next door in our guesthouse. Our Clinton Foundation staff all worked from home, keeping our projects going, including helping the faith leaders involved in our opioid alliance encourage their members to follow safe practices through worship and in daily life. [...] In spite of Covid’s terrible toll, it was a blessing for Hillary and me in some ways. I loved having our family so close. It was such a kick to have then six-year-old Charlotte and four-year-old Aidan barge into the house and insist that Hillary and I stop whatever we were doing and play their favorite games, read books, or be characters in the plays they created. Seven-month-old Jasper happily observed the chaos. I spent time exploring the internet—the magnificent music, the comedy routines, the humorous video clips, memes, and photos. (Did you see the guy singing “Don’t Be Cruel” to two white cockatoos perched on a couch and rocking along to the music? Or the man out west who gives a ride in the backseat of his old convertible to a buffalo?) Hillary and I finally got into the streaming craze,spending Valentine’s Day 2021 binge-watching Bridgerton all night long. We later binged Ted Lasso in smaller bites. [...] In ways I still don’t fully understand, the coronavirus and its stay-at-home imperative and the uprising changed me, and I suspect, you, too, especially in where and how we work and how much time we spend with family and friends. I laughed at the internet, then cried as I called friends who lost a spouse, a brother, parents. I worried with the people I work with and other friends, praying their infected family members would recover. Yet I became more hopeful that—in our shared grief and worry, in our shared cheering for the bravery and devotion of those on the front lines who often don’t ook like us, in our shared laughter that makes the awful bearable, in our collective efforts to survive in a crippled economy, and in the outpouring of support for Floyd’s family and for others whose loved ones were killed while being stopped, chased, or arrested, and for the idea that Black lives do matter—we might be recovering a sense of our common humanity, humility, and gratitude. The jury’s still out on that. It could have the reverse effect, making too many of us even more determined to withdraw from each other and the rest of the world.

Citizen- My Life after the White House - Bill Clinton

#the clintons #hillary clinton #bill clinton #billary #bill and hillary #book quotes #husband and wife

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covid-safer-hotties · 5 months ago

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How covid conspiracy theories led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism - Published Aug 7, 2024

Widespread distrust of our public health system is reviving long-debunked ideas on HIV and AIDS—and energizing a broad movement that questions the foundations of disease prevention.

Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that “party drugs” were an “important factor in AIDS.” His guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the former evolutionary biology professor turned contrarian podcaster Bret Weinstein, agreed with him: The “evidence” that AIDS is not caused by HIV is, he said, “surprisingly compelling.”

During the show, Rogan also asserted that AZT, the earliest drug used in the treatment of AIDS, killed people “quicker” than the disease itself—another claim that’s been widely repeated even though it is just as untrue.

Speaking to the biggest podcast audience in the world, the two men were promoting dangerous and false ideas—ideas that were in fact debunked and thoroughly disproved decades ago.

But it wasn’t just them. A few months later, the New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, four-time winner of the NFL’s MVP award, alleged that Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, had orchestrated the government's response to the AIDS crisis for personal gain and to promote AZT, which Rodgers also depicted as “killing people.” Though he was speaking to a much smaller audience, on a podcast hosted by a jujitsu fighter turned conspiracy theorist, a clip of the interview was re-shared on X, where it’s been viewed more than 13 million times.

Rodgers was repeating claims that appear in The Real Anthony Fauci, a 2021 book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a work that has renewed relevance as the anti-vaccine activist makes a long-shot but far-from-inconsequential run for the White House. The book, which depicts the elderly immunologist as a Machiavellian figure who used both the AIDS and covid pandemics for his own ends, has reportedly sold 1.3 million copies across all formats.

“When I hear [misinformation] like that, I just hope it doesn’t get traction,” says Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy.

But it already has. These comments and others like them add up to a small but unmistakable resurgence in AIDS denialism—a false collection of theories arguing either that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS or that there’s no such thing as HIV at all.

The ideas here were initially promoted by a cadre of scientists from unrelated fields, as well as many science-adjacent figures and self-proclaimed investigative journalists, back in the 1980s and ’90s. But as more and more evidence stacked up against them, and as more people with HIV and AIDS started living longer lives thanks to effective new treatments, their claims largely fell out of favor.

At least until the coronavirus arrived.

Read the full article at either link! (the covidsafehotties archive is always free of annoying in-line ads, jsky!)

#covid #mask up #pandemic #covid 19 #wear a mask #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #still coviding #public health #wear a respirator #AIDS #HIV #conspiracy theories

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ridenwithbiden · 13 days ago

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic and is pardoning 39 Americans convicted of nonviolent crimes. It’s the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.

The commutations announced Thursday are for people who have served out home confinement sentences for at least one year after they were released. Prisons were uniquely bad for spreading the virus and some inmates were released in part to stop the spread. At one point, 1 in 5 prisoners had COVID-19, according to a tally kept by The Associated Press.

Biden said he would be taking more steps in the weeks ahead and would continue to review clemency petitions. The second largest single-day act of clemency was by Barack Obama, with 330, shortly before leaving office in 2017.

“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a statement. “As president, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”

The clemency follows a broad pardon for his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes. Biden is under pressure from advocacy groups to pardon broad swaths of people, including those on federal death row, before the Trump administration takes over in January. He’s also weighing whether to issue preemptive pardons to those who investigated Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and are facing possible retribution when he takes office.

Clemency is the term for the power the president has to pardon, in which a person is relieved of guilt and punishment, or to commute a sentence, which reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing. It’s customary for a president to grant mercy at the end of his term, using the power of the office to wipe away records or end prison terms.

Those pardoned Thursday range in age from 36 to 75. About half are men and half are women, and they had been convicted of nonviolent crimes such as drug offenses, fraud or theft and turned their lives around, White House lawyers said. They include a woman who led emergency response teams during natural disasters; a church deacon who has worked as an addiction counselor and youth counselor; a doctoral student in molecular biosciences; and a decorated military veteran.

Louisiana resident Trynitha Fulton, 46, was one of the pardons; she pleaded guilty to participating in a payroll fraud scheme while serving as a New Orleans middle school teacher in the early 2000s. She was sentenced to three years of probation in 2008.

“The pardon gives me a sense of freedom,” Fulton said in a written statement to the AP. “The conviction has served as a mental barrier for me, limiting my ability to live a full life.”

“The pardon gives me inspiration to make more impactful decisions personally and professionally,” she added.

After her conviction, Fulton went on to earn a master’s degree. She helps lead the nonprofit Skyliners-Youth Outreach, which supports New Orleans youth by providing hot meals, clothing, shelter and mental health referrals.

The president had previously issued 122 commutations and 21 other pardons. He’s also broadly pardoned those convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia, and pardoned former U.S. service members convicted of violating a now-repealed military ban on consensual gay sex.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., and 34 other lawmakers are urging the president to pardon environmental and human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who was imprisoned or under house arrest for three years because of a contempt of court charge related to his work representing Indigenous farmers in a lawsuit against Chevron.

Others are advocating for Biden to commute the sentences of federal death row prisoners. His attorney general, Merrick Garland, paused federal executions. Biden had said on the campaign trail in 2020 that he wanted to end the death penalty but he never did, and now, with Trump coming back into office, it’s likely executions will resume. During his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented number of federal executions, carried out during the height of the pandemic.

More clemency grants are coming before Biden leaves office on Jan. 20, but it’s not clear whether he’ll take action to guard against possible prosecution by Trump, an untested use of the power. The president has been taking the idea seriously and has been thinking about it for as much as six months — before the presidential election — but has been concerned about the precedent it would set, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions.

But those who received the pardons would have to accept them. New California Sen. Adam Schiff, who was a part of the House committee that investigated the violent Jan. 6 insurrection, said such a pardon from Biden would be “unnecessary,” and that the president shouldn’t be spending his waning days in office worrying about this.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., another target of Trump’s threats, said in a statement this week that his suggestion that she and others be jailed for the investigations “is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”

Before pardoning his son, Biden had repeatedly pledged not to do so. He said in a statement explaining his reversal that the prosecution had been poisoned by politics. The decision prompted criminal justice advocates and lawmakers to put additional public pressure on the administration to use that same power for everyday Americans. It wasn’t a very popular move; only about 2 in 10 Americans approved of his decision, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

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defensenow · 20 days ago

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orangerosebush · 6 months ago

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[Link to the Reuters article. From June 14th, 2024]

"At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so.

Spokespeople for Trump and Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the clandestine program.

A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China’s vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S. military “uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.” She also noted that China had started a “disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”

In an email, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it has long maintained the U.S. government manipulates social media and spreads misinformation.

Manila’s embassy in Washington did not respond to Reuters inquiries, including whether it had been aware of the Pentagon operation. A spokesperson for the Philippines Department of Health, however, said the “findings by Reuters deserve to be investigated and heard by the appropriate authorities of the involved countries.” Some aid workers in the Philippines, when told of the U.S. military propaganda effort by Reuters, expressed outrage.

Briefed on the Pentagon’s secret anti-vax campaign by Reuters, some American public health experts also condemned the program, saying it put civilians in jeopardy for potential geopolitical gain. An operation meant to win hearts and minds endangered lives, they said.

“I don’t think it’s defensible,” said Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. “I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that,” said Lucey, a former military physician who assisted in the response to the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The effort to stoke fear about Chinese inoculations risked undermining overall public trust in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines that became available later, Lucey and others said. Although the Chinese vaccines were found to be less effective than the American-led shots by Pfizer and Moderna, all were approved by the World Health Organization. Sinovac did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Academic research published recently has shown that, when individuals develop skepticism toward a single vaccine, those doubts often lead to uncertainty about other inoculations. Lucey and other health experts say they saw such a scenario play out in Pakistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency used a fake hepatitis vaccination program in Abbottabad as cover to hunt for Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Discovery of the ruse led to a backlash against an unrelated polio vaccination campaign, including attacks on healthcare workers, contributing to the reemergence of the deadly disease in the country.

“It should have been in our interest to get as much vaccine in people’s arms as possible,” said Greg Treverton, former chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, which coordinates the analysis and strategy of Washington’s many spy agencies. What the Pentagon did, Treverton said, “crosses a line.”

Together, the phony accounts used by the military had tens of thousands of followers during the program. Reuters could not determine how widely the anti-vax material and other Pentagon-planted disinformation was viewed, or to what extent the posts may have caused COVID deaths by dissuading people from getting vaccinated.

In the wake of the U.S. propaganda efforts, however, then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte had grown so dismayed by how few Filipinos were willing to be inoculated that he threatened to arrest people who refused vaccinations.

“You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in a televised address in June 2021. “There is a crisis in this country … I’m just exasperated by Filipinos not heeding the government.”

When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.

A spokesperson for Duterte did not make the former president available for an interview.

Some Filipino healthcare professionals and former officials contacted by Reuters were shocked by the U.S. anti-vax effort, which they say exploited an already vulnerable citizenry. Public concerns about a Dengue fever vaccine, rolled out in the Philippines in 2016, had led to broad skepticism toward inoculations overall, said Lulu Bravo, executive director of the Philippine Foundation for Vaccination. The Pentagon campaign preyed on those fears.

“Why did you do it when people were dying? We were desperate,” said Dr. Nina Castillo-Carandang, a former adviser to the World Health Organization and Philippines government during the pandemic. “We don’t have our own vaccine capacity,” she noted, and the U.S. propaganda effort “contributed even more salt into the wound.”

The campaign also reinforced what one former health secretary called a longstanding suspicion of China, most recently because of aggressive behavior by Beijing in disputed areas of the South China Sea. Filipinos were unwilling to trust China’s Sinovac, which first became available in the country in March 2021, said Esperanza Cabral, who served as health secretary under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Cabral said she had been unaware of the U.S. military’s secret operation.

“I’m sure that there are lots of people who died from COVID who did not need to die from COVID,” she said.

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

In uncovering the secret U.S. military operation, Reuters interviewed more than two dozen current and former U.S officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers. Reporters also reviewed Facebook, X and Instagram posts, technical data and documents about a set of fake social media accounts used by the U.S. military. Some were active for more than five years.

Clandestine psychological operations are among the government’s most highly sensitive programs. Knowledge of their existence is limited to a small group of people within U.S. intelligence and military agencies. Such programs are treated with special caution because their exposure could damage foreign alliances or escalate conflict with rivals.

Over the last decade, some U.S. national security officials have pushed for a return to the kind of aggressive clandestine propaganda operations against rivals that the United States’ wielded during the Cold War. Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which Russia used a combination of hacks and leaks to influence voters, the calls to fight back grew louder inside Washington.

In 2019, Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, Reuters reported in March. As part of that effort, a small group of operatives used bogus online identities to spread disparaging narratives about Xi Jinping’s government.

COVID-19 galvanized the drive to wage psychological operations against China. One former senior Pentagon leader described the pandemic as a “bolt of energy” that finally ignited the long delayed counteroffensive against China’s influence war.

The Pentagon’s anti-vax propaganda came in response to China’s own efforts to spread false information about the origins of COVID. The virus first emerged in China in late 2019. But in March 2020, Chinese government officials claimed without evidence that the virus may have been first brought to China by an American service member who participated in an international military sports competition in Wuhan the previous year. Chinese officials also suggested that the virus may have originated in a U.S. Army research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. There’s no evidence for that assertion.

Mirroring Beijing’s public statements, Chinese intelligence operatives set up networks of fake social media accounts to promote the Fort Detrick conspiracy, according to a U.S. Justice Department complaint.

China’s messaging got Washington’s attention. Trump subsequently coined the term “China virus” as a response to Beijing’s accusation that the U.S. military exported COVID to Wuhan.

“That was false. And rather than having an argument, I said, ‘I have to call it where it came from,’” Trump said in a March 2020 news conference. “It did come from China.”

China’s Foreign Ministry said in an email that it opposed “actions to politicize the origins question and stigmatize China.” The ministry had no comment about the Justice Department’s complaint.

Beijing didn’t limit its global influence efforts to propaganda. It announced an ambitious COVID assistance program, which included sending masks, ventilators and its own vaccines – still being tested at the time – to struggling countries. In May 2020, Xi announced that the vaccine China was developing would be made available as a “global public good,” and would ensure “vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.” Sinovac was the primary vaccine available in the Philippines for about a year until U.S.-made vaccines became more widely available there in early 2022.

Washington’s plan, called Operation Warp Speed, was different. It favored inoculating Americans first, and it placed no restrictions on what pharmaceutical companies could charge developing countries for the remaining vaccines not used by the United States. The deal allowed the companies to “play hardball” with developing countries, forcing them to accept high prices, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University who has worked with the World Health Organization.

The deal “sucked most of the supply out of the global market,” Gostin said. “The United States took a very determined America First approach.”

To Washington’s alarm, China’s offers of assistance were tilting the geopolitical playing field across the developing world, including in the Philippines, where the government faced upwards of 100,000 infections in the early months of the pandemic.

The U.S. relationship with Manila had grown tense after the 2016 election of the bombastic Duterte. A staunch critic of the United States, he had threatened to cancel a key pact that allows the U.S. military to maintain legal jurisdiction over American troops stationed in the country.

Duterte said in a July 2020 speech he had made “a plea” to Xi that the Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines. He vowed in the same speech that the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing’s aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security understanding Manila had long held with Washington.

“China is claiming it. We are claiming it. China has the arms, we do not have it.” Duterte said. “So, it is simple as that.”

Days later, China’s foreign minister announced Beijing would grant Duterte’s plea for priority access to the vaccine, as part of a “new highlight in bilateral relations.”

China’s growing influence fueled efforts by U.S. military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.

“We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners,” a senior U.S. military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia told Reuters. “So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”

U.S. military leaders feared that China’s COVID diplomacy and propaganda could draw other Southeast Asian countries, such as Cambodia and Malaysia, closer to Beijing, furthering its regional ambitions.

A senior U.S. military commander responsible for Southeast Asia, Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga, pressed his bosses in Washington to fight back in the so-called information space, according to three former Pentagon officials.

The commander initially wanted to punch back at Beijing in Southeast Asia. The goal: to ensure the region understood the origin of COVID while promoting skepticism toward what were then still-untested vaccines offered by a country that they said had lied continually since the start of the pandemic.

A spokesperson for Special Operations Command declined to comment.

At least six senior State Department officials responsible for the region objected to this approach. A health crisis was the wrong time to instill fear or anger through a psychological operation, or psyop, they argued during Zoom calls with the Pentagon.

“We’re stooping lower than the Chinese and we should not be doing that,” said a former senior State Department official for the region who fought against the military operation.

While the Pentagon saw Washington’s rapidly diminishing influence in the Philippines as a call to action, the withering partnership led American diplomats to plead for caution.

“The relationship is hanging from a thread,” another former senior U.S. diplomat recounted. “Is this the moment you want to do a psyop in the Philippines? Is it worth the risk?”

In the past, such opposition from the State Department might have proved fatal to the program. Previously in peacetime, the Pentagon needed approval of embassy officials before conducting psychological operations in a country, often hamstringing commanders seeking to quickly respond to Beijing’s messaging, three former Pentagon officials told Reuters.

But in 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.

In spring 2020, special-ops commander Braga turned to a cadre of psychological-warfare soldiers and contractors in Tampa to counter Beijing’s COVID efforts. Colleagues say Braga was a longtime advocate of increasing the use of propaganda operations in global competition. In trailers and squat buildings at a facility on Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base, U.S. military personnel and contractors would use anonymous accounts on X, Facebook and other social media to spread what became an anti-vax message. The facility remains the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda factory.

Psychological warfare has played a role in U.S. military operations for more than a hundred years, although it has changed in style and substance over time. So-called psyopers were best known following World War II for their supporting role in combat missions across Vietnam, Korea and Kuwait, often dropping leaflets to confuse the enemy or encourage their surrender.

After the al Qaeda attacks of 2001, the United States was fighting a borderless, shadowy enemy, and the Pentagon began to wage a more ambitious kind of psychological combat previously associated only with the CIA. The Pentagon set up front news outlets, paid off prominent local figures, and sometimes funded television soap operas in order to turn local populations against militant groups or Iranian-backed militias, former national security officials told Reuters.

Unlike earlier psyop missions, which sought specific tactical advantage on the battlefield, the post-9/11 operations hoped to create broader change in public opinion across entire regions.

By 2010, the military began using social media tools, leveraging phony accounts to spread messages of sympathetic local voices – themselves often secretly paid by the United States government. As time passed, a growing web of military and intelligence contractors built online news websites to pump U.S.-approved narratives into foreign countries. Today, the military employs a sprawling ecosystem of social media influencers, front groups and covertly placed digital advertisements to influence overseas audiences, according to current and former military officials.

China’s efforts to gain geopolitical clout from the pandemic gave Braga justification to launch the propaganda campaign that Reuters uncovered, sources said.

By summer 2020, the military’s propaganda campaign moved into new territory and darker messaging, ultimately drawing the attention of social media executives.

In regions beyond Southeast Asia, senior officers in the U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, launched their own version of the COVID psyop, three former military officials told Reuters.

Although the Chinese vaccines were still months from release, controversy roiled the Muslim world over whether the vaccines contained pork gelatin and could be considered “haram,” or forbidden under Islamic law. Sinovac has said that the vaccine was “manufactured free of porcine materials.” Many Islamic religious authorities maintained that even if the vaccines did contain pork gelatin, they were still permissible since the treatments were being used to save human life.

The Pentagon campaign sought to intensify fears about injecting a pig derivative. As part of an internal investigation at X, the social media company used IP addresses and browser data to identify more than 150 phony accounts that were operated from Tampa by U.S. Central Command and its contractors, according to an internal X document reviewed by Reuters.

“Can you trust China, which tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many people consider such a drug haram?” read an April 2021 tweet sent from a military-controlled account identified by X.

The Pentagon also covertly spread its messages on Facebook and Instagram, alarming executives at parent company Meta who had long been tracking the military accounts, according to former military officials.

One military-created meme targeting Central Asia showed a pig made out of syringes, according to two people who viewed the image. Reuters found similar posts that traced back to U.S. Central Command. One shows a Chinese flag as a curtain separating Muslim women in hijabs and pigs stuck with vaccine syringes. In the center is a man with syringes; on his back is the word “China.” It targeted Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, a country that distributed tens of millions of doses of China’s vaccines and participated in human trials. Translated into English, the X post reads: “China distributes a vaccine made of pork gelatin.”

Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the military’s phony accounts, according to three former U.S. officials and another person familiar with the matter. The government, Facebook argued, was violating Facebook’s policies by operating the bogus accounts and by spreading COVID misinformation.

The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content, according to two people familiar with the exchange. The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading COVID-related propaganda, and some of the accounts continued to remain active on Facebook.

Nonetheless, the anti-vax campaign continued into 2021 as Biden took office.

Angered that military officials had ignored their warning, Facebook officials arranged a Zoom meeting with Biden’s new National Security Council shortly after the inauguration, Reuters learned. The discussion quickly became tense.

“It was terrible,” said a senior administration official describing the reaction after learning of the campaign’s pig-related posts. “I was shocked. The administration was pro-vaccine and our concern was this could affect vaccine hesitancy, especially in developing countries.”

By spring 2021, the National Security Council ordered the military to stop all anti-vaccine messaging. “We were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro all vaccines,” said a former senior military officer who helped oversee the program. Even so, Reuters found some anti-vax posts that continued through April and other deceptive COVID-related messaging that extended into that summer. Reuters could not determine why the campaign didn’t end immediately with the NSC’s order. In response to questions from Reuters, the NSC declined to comment.

The senior Defense Department official said that those complaints led to an internal review in late 2021, which uncovered the anti-vaccine operation. The probe also turned up other social and political messaging that was “many, many leagues away” from any acceptable military objective. The official would not elaborate.

The review intensified the following year, the official said, after a group of academic researchers at Stanford University flagged some of the same accounts as pro-Western bots in a public report. The high-level Pentagon review was first reported by the Washington Post. which also reported that the military used fake social media accounts to counter China’s message that COVID came from the United States. But the Post report did not reveal that the program evolved into the anti-vax propaganda campaign uncovered by Reuters.

The senior defense official said the Pentagon has rescinded parts of Esper’s 2019 order that allowed military commanders to bypass the approval of U.S. ambassadors when waging psychological operations. The rules now mandate that military commanders work closely with U.S. diplomats in the country where they seek to have an impact. The policy also restricts psychological operations aimed at “broad population messaging,” such as those used to promote vaccine hesitancy during COVID.

The Pentagon’s audit concluded that the military’s primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review. The review also found that military leaders didn’t maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.

A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”

And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military."

#philippines #us politics #sinophobia #covid 19 #long post #continued below the cut

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vote-democrat-president-congress · 3 months ago

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Trump secretly sent covid tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, new book says

“War,” by Bob Woodward, traces how Trump and Biden responded to international crisis and concludes that Trump is worse than Nixon, the president exiled by the Watergate scandal.

By Isaac Stanley-Becker October 8, 2024 at 8:56 a.m. EDT As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.

Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter. Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.

Putin, according to the book, told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”

Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.

The book does not describe what the two men purportedly discussed, and it quotes a Trump campaign official casting doubt on the supposed contact. But the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.

These interactions between Trump and the authoritarian leader of a country at war with an American ally form the basis of Woodward’s conclusion that Trump is worse than Richard M. Nixon, whose presidency was undone by the Watergate scandal exposed a half-century ago by Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein.

“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward writes in the book, “War,” which is set to be released Oct. 15.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

With publication on the eve of the presidential election, Woodward, who has chronicled the successes and failures of U.S. presidents for 50 years, concludes that Trump is unfit for office while President Joe Biden and his team, mistakes notwithstanding, exhibited “steady and purposeful leadership.” Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, makes several appearances in the narrative, with Woodward presenting her as a shrewd and loyal No. 2 to Biden but not an influential voice in his administration’s foreign policy.

The book is Woodward’s fourth since Trump’s upset victory in 2016. It focuses principally on the twin wars consuming Biden’s national security team — Russia’s all-out war in Ukraine, which began in February 2022, and Israel’s campaign against Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxies since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.

The book also examines the long shadow cast by Trump over the foreign conflicts of the past four years, and over the bitter U.S. political environment in which they have unfolded. And it includes candid assessments by Biden of his own missteps, including his decision to make Merrick Garland attorney general. Reacting to the prosecution of his son Hunter — by a special prosecutor named by Garland amid partisan recriminations over the Justice Department’s prosecution of Trump — the president told an associate, “Should never have picked Garland.”

Woodward reveals how Biden weighed his fate before exiting the presidential race in July, including over lunch earlier that month with Antony Blinken, his secretary of state. Blinken, reports Woodward, warned Biden in the private dining room off the Oval Office that everyone’s legacy is reduced to a single sentence — and that, if he continued to campaign and lost to Trump, that would be his legacy.

Still, Blinken believed at the end of the meal that the president was leaning toward staying in the race, underscoring how unpredictable Biden’s decision-making remained until the final moment.

“War” illuminates the frantic, and often failed, effort by Biden’s team to prevent escalation of fighting in the Middle East — fighting that the president came to see as inseparable from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political fortunes, and from political dynamics in the United States, too.

According to Woodward, one of Trump’s national security advisers, Keith Kellogg, secretly met with Netanyahu during a trip to Israel earlier this year. Upon his return, Kellogg publicly circulated a memo effectively blaming Biden for the Hamas-led attack on Israel, writing, “This visit reinforced that the Biden Administration’s erosion of U.S. deterrence globally and its failed policies vis-à-vis Iran have opened America up to a regional war in the Middle East with devastating consequences for our ally Israel.”

At the time, Biden advisers were pushing Israel’s leaders to agree to a cease-fire deal as part of an effort to head off an invasion of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. Their entreaties were futile; the Rafah offensive began in May. No one felt the limits of the administration’s ability to restrain Israel more acutely than Blinken. “It was obvious Blinken had no influence,” Woodward writes.

On Ukraine, too, Trump’s influence was pronounced, even from his home at Mar-a-Lago. The former president’s resistance to funding Kyiv’s war effort created a blockade on GOP support in the House. This past spring, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was able to persuade Trump to soften his stance, according to Woodward, not by showing him that Ukraine’s cause was just, but by convincing him that the aid package would help the Republican conference’s electoral chances and thus benefit him personally in the run-up to the November election.

“War” offers several snapshots of Harris, always in a supporting role to Biden and hardly determining foreign policy herself.

The book recounts how Harris sought to spur French President Emmanuel Macron into action in the fall of 2021, in preparation for what the U.S. intelligence community indicated would be a significant Russian military action against Ukraine. So, too, the vice president made her case to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference in February 2022, going so far as to press him to develop a succession plan ensuring stability “if you’re captured or killed,” as she put it. And the book reveals how her forceful public tone following a meeting in July with Netanyahu — pledging that she would “not be silent” about Palestinian suffering — contrasted with her more amicable approach in private. The difference, according to Woodward, infuriated Netanyahu, who was taken aback by her public remarks.

From the Israeli viewpoint, however, Harris had little responsibility for the administration’s approach to the conflict.

“Until now, I didn’t feel that Vice President Harris had any impact on our issues,” Michael Herzog, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, is quoted as saying about the period before Harris replaced Biden on the ticket. “She was in the room, but she never had an impact.”

As for Trump’s own decision-making process on foreign affairs when he was commander in chief, the book shows how he took in a wide range of viewpoints, including from people without relevant expertise. During a high-level meeting about Afghanistan held at one point in the Situation Room, Trump went around the table to ask everyone’s opinion.

“Mr. President, I’m the notetaker,” one person deflected.

“Oh, no,” Trump replied, “if you’re in this room, you’re talking.” The notetaker briefly shared her views.

“War” presents the withdrawal from Afghanistan, in the summer of 2021, as a wound for the Biden administration that would shape its response to other international flash points. The debacle, in which U.S. intelligence failed to foresee how quickly the Taliban would seize power, elicited sympathy from the architect of the initial 2001 invasion, George W. Bush, who told Biden, according to the book: “Oh boy, I can understand what you’re going through. I got [expletive] by my intel people, too.”

Woodward contrasts the intelligence failure in Afghanistan to the remarkable insight gained by American spies into Russian plans ahead of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. U.S. capabilities, Woodward reports, included a human source inside the Kremlin.

The book shows how Biden’s early decisions, which were sometimes in conflict with the judgments of his closest advisers, shaped the course of the war. Foremost was his public vow that Washington would not commit troops to the conflict, which took a key bargaining chip off the table but laid down a marker for the American public wary of new foreign entanglements. Biden, according to Woodward, felt past Russian aggression had been badly mismanaged by his predecessors, including the one he had served, Barack Obama.

“Barack never took Putin seriously,” Biden told a close friend.

Biden’s own blunders were costly, the book reveals. In January 2022, he seemed to undercut American resolve by raising the possibility that Russia might seek only a “minor incursion.” His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, had to do damage control with counterparts in nine NATO countries, in addition to Japan, Woodward reveals.

Woodward writes that Biden’s most delicate diplomacy, however, involved seeking to foreclose Russia’s nuclear option. In the fall of 2022, that option seemed like a live one, as U.S. intelligence agencies reported that Putin was seriously weighing use of a tactical nuclear weapon — at one point assessing the likelihood at 50 percent. An especially frantic quest to bring Moscow back from the brink came in October of that year, when Russia appeared to be laying the groundwork for escalation by accusing Ukraine of preparing to detonate a dirty bomb.

Biden’s team confronted similar hair-raising moments with the Israelis, Woodward reports, foreshadowing Netanyahu’s recent campaign against Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group and Iranian proxy, in an explicit rejection of U.S. calls for a cease-fire. In a parallel of unsubstantiated Russian claims of Ukraine’s intention to use a dirty bomb, the Israelis seemed poised, in the days after Oct. 7, 2023, to launch a preemptive strike against Hezbollah based on what American experts deemed “phantom” warnings of Hezbollah mobilization along Israel’s northern border.

“The Israelis always do this,” was the reaction of Brett McGurk, Biden’s Middle East coordinator, according to the book. “They claim ‘We got the intel! You’ll see it. You’ll see it.’ But like 50 percent of the time the so-called intel doesn’t actually show up.” Apparent drones reported by the Israelis turned out to be birds.

Yet the book also shows how the Biden administration did little to alter its policy toward Israel even as senior U.S. officials abandoned their belief that the government in Jerusalem was operating in good faith. Already in the days after Oct. 7, Blinken’s impression of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s approach was: “It doesn’t matter how many people die. I have a mission to eradicate Hamas and it doesn’t matter how many Palestinians die. It doesn’t matter how many Israelis die.”

Biden, according to Woodward, was cautious about setting limits on Israel’s conduct lest Netanyahu blow past them. In a one-on-one call in April, Netanyahu promised Biden that the Rafah offensive would take only three weeks, a vow the American president never took seriously. “It’ll take months,” Biden replied.

To associates, Biden complained that Netanyahu was a liar only interested in his political survival. And he concluded the same of the prime minister’s associates, saying that 18 out of 19 people who work for Netanyahu are “liars.”

At the same time, support for the Biden administration’s Middle East policy came from unexpected places, the book reveals. Before the Oct. 7 attacks, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a loyal Trump lieutenant and shape-shifter who went from an outspoken critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to a trusted interlocutor, had relayed information to Biden about prospects for the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Graham believed normalization was best completed under Biden, arguing that congressional Democrats would be reluctant to lend support to a Trump-sponsored initiative. Graham promised he could deliver the Republican votes.

After Oct. 7, Graham continued to engage with the crown prince. During a March visit by the senator to Riyadh, which is recounted by Woodward, Graham proposed a phone call with Trump, so the crown prince pulled out a burner phone labeled “TRUMP 45.” In earlier meetings, the crown prince had brandished other such devices, including one labeled “JAKE SULLIVAN” for Biden’s national security adviser.

During the March call with Trump, conducted by the crown prince over speakerphone while Graham was present, the former president teased the senator for once calling for the Saudi royal’s ouster over the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which the CIA concluded Mohammed had ordered. Graham brushed it off, professing to have been wrong about the autocrat.

The royal court in Riyadh, however, is not the comparison Graham uses when describing visits to Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. According to Woodward, the senator invokes an even more brutal form of authoritarianism.

“Going to Mar-a-Lago is a little bit like going to North Korea,” the book quotes Graham as saying. “Everybody stands up and claps every time Trump comes in.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/08/bob-woodward-new-book-war-trump-putin-biden/

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yourreddancer · 2 months ago

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Heather Cox Richardson 11.6.24

Republicans also retook control of the Senate, where Democrats were defending far more seats than Republicans. Control of the House is not yet clear.

But in 2024, it appears a majority of American voters chose to put Trump back into office.

That is what voters chose.

There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat.

X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.

U.S. retailers are already preparing to raise prices of items from foreign suppliers, passing to consumers the cost of any future tariffs.

This evening, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!”

This afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at her alma mater, Howard University, to concede the election to Trump.

She thanked her supporters, her family, the Bidens, the Walz family, and her campaign staff and volunteers. She reiterated that she believes Americans have far more in common than separating us.

—

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mariacallous · 1 year ago

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Today’s newsletter is about a recent report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

But it’s also about a major policy initiative that helped lots of Americans even though almost nobody seems to have noticed — and how that lack of attention has made it more difficult to renew the program now that it has expired.

The subject of the report is child care. As you may know firsthand ― or if you’ve read HuffPost’s coverage of the issue ― finding quality, affordable child care providers in the U.S. is difficult. A big reason is that it costs a lot of money to run a high-performing child care center, and the fees to sustain that kind of operation are more than many families can afford.

These problems have existed for years but got even worse during the coronavirus pandemic, when public health closures and illness-related absences reduced revenue for providers, putting some into debt while forcing others to reduce capacity or close. Those that survived struggled to hire (or rehire) workers once demand returned, in part because they were increasingly competing with retail and hospitality industries that could raise wages more easily.

The federal government stepped in by providing $24 billion in emergency assistance as part of the American Rescue Plan, which Democrats in Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed in early 2021. The money went directly to state governments, which, in turn, gave it to providers. Some used it for workers, while others used it to maintain equipment or acquire equipment. Others paid off debts.

All of this made a big difference, according to that new Council of Economic Advisers report I mentioned.

In particular, the council’s economists determined, emergency child care money:

“Saved families with young children who rely on paid child care,”

“Helped hundreds of thousands of women with young children enter or reenter the workforce more quickly,” and

“Boosted the child care workforce and helped raise the real wages of child care workers.”

These conclusions make intuitive sense. And although the council is part of the White House, its staff is composed of well-credentialed economists who have a legal mandate to provide objective analysis ― and these conclusions make intuitive sense. In other words, there’s good reason to think this Biden-Democratic initiative propped up child care at a moment of crisis, preserving access for a significant number of families.

That’s a big deal. Just ask any working parent — or any employer, for that matter. But few Americans even realize Biden and the Democrats in Congress took this action, let alone that it had such an impact.

So what happened? And what does that tell us about how politics works nowadays? I have a few ideas about that...

Why Nobody Noticed The Child Care Money

For one thing, the child care assistance was part of a larger bill that never generated much of a substantive debate, except when it came to its overall size. And it went through Congress at a time when other news stories, such as the distribution of (still new) COVID vaccines, were getting a lot more attention.

What’s more, the assistance wasn’t in the form of checks with Biden’s name on them that went to families. It was money that went through states directly to providers.

Then there’s the fact that the program’s effects consisted primarily of things that didn’t happen rather than things that did. Child care costs didn’t rise as fast as they would otherwise. Providers that would have closed stayed open. Workers who might have left child care for positions in retail or hospitality didn’t. Working parents, especially women, didn’t cut back hours or leave the workforce.

You’re not going to recognize this kind of effect unless you contemplate the counterfactual ― in other words, what might have happened without the assistance in place. And that’s just not how most people think.

What’s Happening To Child Care Now

As it happens, a version of that counterfactual may be starting to play out now, because the temporary assistance program has expired. On Oct. 1, the federal government stopped writing new assistance checks.

That might not seem significant, given that the pandemic emergency is effectively over. But the system’s pre-existing problems are still there ― and now appear to be compounded by other, newer factors, like those tight labor markets that make it even harder for providers to hire and retain qualified workers.

It takes a while for money to work its way through government bureaucracies, so it’s going to take time to see just how big a deal the end of federal emergency funds will be. Many experts (including several quoted in this October Vox article) have raised questions about the most dire predictions, which suggest 3 million child care slots could vanish nationwide.

But it’s hard to imagine there won’t be some fallout. Already there are reports of sporadic closures around the country. That includes in rural communities of western North Carolina, where a nonprofit agency called the Southwestern Child Development Commission announced in late October that seven centers were shutting down.

Sheila Hoyle, the commission’s executive director, confirmed to me by phone that the end of federal emergency funds was the catalyst that led to the closings, which in turn reduced available slots for children by more than 300. And while many of the kids ended up with other providers, Hoyle said, the new arrangements for families — at least, the ones that were able to find them — are generally less well-suited to parent working hours, came with higher expenses for parents, or both.

“We’re asking our parents to patch together programs that weren’t designed to fulfill the needs of working parents, and we need to ask what happens to that child,” Hoyle said. “There’s Grandma or Grandpa on Tuesday, and Daddy gets off early on Fridays, and Mama tries to do Monday and Wednesday, and then you take them to a relative’s house or a next-door neighbor’s house.”

“It’s all just getting by,” Hoyle added, “and just getting by is not what we intend for young children who need a good solid early childhood learning experience while their families work, so that they can succeed in school and eventually become successful young adults.”

How ‘Invisible’ Policy Creates Political Problems

The Biden administration and Democratic leaders in Congress want to do something about that, by restoring at least some of the funding, starting with $16 billion for the coming year. The hope is to attach something to a must-pass spending bill whenever an opportunity presents itself.

But it will take political pressure to round up the votes, especially given Republican skepticism of federal spending and conservative doubts about the structure of federal child care assistance. And it’s hard to generate pressure to restore a program most Americans never knew existed.

Of course, this is not exactly a new problem for Biden, or for Democrats more generally.

Programs nowadays frequently operate invisibly through indirect grants to states or via the tax code, in what political scientist Susan Mettler has called “the submerged state.” Other initiatives are more visible but, like the pandemic child care finding, have primarily prevented bad outcomes rather than creating good ones.

Those problems help explain why, for example, Democrats weren’t able to extend another pandemic measure, a tax credit for children, even though its existence had caused child poverty to plummet. It expired at the end of 2021. Now child poverty is back up, and virtually nobody seems to recognize what it accomplished or Biden’s role in initially reducing it ― making it even harder to get such a program going again. It’s even possible that the expiration of these programs is contributing to voter frustration with Biden, saddling him with blame for the end of assistance that he’s been trying to save.

Politics is like that sometimes, with credit or blame for policy falling in ways that align poorly with what elected officials have actually done. But if Biden and the Democrats lose next November, the chances of meaningful new investments in child care — and plenty of other, similar needs — will be even lower than they are now.

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