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nicklloydnow · 24 days ago

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“Although it spanned decades and influenced the course of two superpowers, the rivalry between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, America’s great cold war strategists, merits equivalent hyphenation. Brzezinski-Kissinger was to US geopolitics what great pairing is to sport. Their core difference was over whether to sustain cold war détente — easing the strains — with America’s mortal rival or to resume ideological struggle with the USSR.

Kissinger won the battle of celebrityhood. In my view Brzezinski won their cold war dispute on points. Kissinger was wrong to presume the Soviets would be a permanent feature of the landscape. Brzezinski correctly saw the USSR’s dormant nations, including Ukraine, as its Achilles heel. Either way, their clash over how to manage the cold war mattered as much as today’s schism between those in Donald Trump’s world who laud his wish for détente with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and those who see both imposing a Munich-style disaster on Ukraine.

On the fate of Ukraine rests the future of war and peace. A key distinction from the Kissinger-Brzezinski era is that no one today can match either’s intellectual creativity, public reputation and diplomatic weight. America’s missing strategy, in other words, owes something to the absence of grand strategists.

What did they have that eludes their lesser-known heirs in today’s America? The simplistic answer is that Kissinger and Brzezinski were immigrants. Newcomers often value America’s freedoms more than its native-born and are statistically far likelier to start companies, win Nobel Prizes and indeed launch schools of thought.

(…)

A richer pointer can be found in the tales of their emigration. It was no accident that a 15-year-old Heinz Kissinger arrived in America a month before Neville Chamberlain’s infamous 1938 betrayal of Czechoslovakia in Munich. A few weeks later, a 10-year-old Brzezinski caught his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty having left Europe’s shores two days after Hitler completed his occupation of the Sudetenland.

Each had been raised in the “bloodlands” of interbellum Europe. One was a Jewish-German refugee whose extended family would be wiped out in the Holocaust; the other was the son of a Polish diplomat whose country would be razed less than a year later when the Soviets and Nazis spliced Poland in history’s ugliest vivisection.

They were marked in different ways by the harrowing fate of those they left behind. Given a choice between order and justice, Kissinger said he would always choose order. His people were liquidated amid history’s most brutal disorder. Brzezinski would have chosen justice. Wounded Polishness — a sense of amputated history — was the launch pad of his ambition.

Crucially, though, they shared a burning sense of the tragic. “As immigrants, we knew about the fragility of societies and we had an instinct for the transitoriness of human perceptions,” Kissinger told me in 2021, four years after Brzezinski died aged 89 in Virginia and two and a half years before Kissinger himself passed away in Connecticut having recently turned 100.

Kissinger was among the sources for my full biography of Brzezinski, which comes out next month. The difference between the two, in Kissinger’s view, was that Kissinger came from Germany but had not been defined by it, while Brzezinski had been defined by Poland, although it had “not set limits on what he became”.

But Kissinger wanted to stress what they had in common. Together, though with Kissinger as the pioneer, they supplanted the old Anglo-American elite. Figures such as Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson and John McCloy conducted diplomacy as a second career or part-time obligation. Kissinger and Brzezinski, on the other hand, were brash professionals who lacked the social ties of the Georgetown wise men. In Acheson’s words, the former were “present at the creation” of the US-made postwar order. Kissinger and Brzezinski grappled varyingly with the existential threat to that order.

More important, however, was their exposure to societal breakdown and the eternity of geopolitics — an experience that no Wasp could emulate. “The question is whether Americans can ever understand that we are living in a continuous experience that has no end, and that you can never segment life into different problems,” Kissinger said. “[As Europeans] we knew that we were living in a continuous history. It never comes to an end.” He might also have quoted the great American novelist William Faulkner, who said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The worldliness of these two modern-day viziers was also manifested in very different ways. Kissinger was seductive, a master of flattery and a maestro of the press conference. Brzezinski was better at making media enemies. His theory of the case — that the USSR was a gerontocracy in terminal decline — barely wavered. Kissinger, on the other hand, was strategically amorphous. He perfected the art of illusory action — “motion without movement”, as he called it. But he always gravitated back to his 1815 Congress of Vienna lodestar; a world in which great powers strove to be in balance. Brzezinski’s worldview was filtered through the smaller players — not just his native Poland but the myriad national groups within the USSR whose separatist inclinations he sought to awake.

(…)

Kissinger was a juggler; Brzezinski a boxer. When the latter accused Kissinger of “acrobatics” during the Nixon years, they nearly fell out. In spite of their often irascible disputes, the Republican and Democratic sparring partners never stinted on dinners at Sans Souci, a French restaurant (since closed) near the White House. You went there to be seen. “One always learns more from ‘friendly critics’ than from uncritical friends,” Kissinger wrote to Brzezinski after one such meal in the early 1970s. It is hard to imagine such a garrulous frenemyship in today’s Washington.

The subject of tariffs never arose. Theirs was a time when the US was opening markets and laying the foundations of globalisation. On that, the two strategists absent-mindedly agreed — economics was not either’s strong suit. Today, Trump is bludgeoning that project into reverse.

Opening to China was a central feature of both Kissinger and Brzezinski’s careers. Does Trump yet have a China strategy? Notions of Trump pulling off a “reverse Kissinger” — bringing the Russians into America’s orbit, much as Kissinger exploited the Sino-Soviet split in the other direction — are fanciful. Steve Witkoff, the New York property developer, now Trump’s all-purpose envoy, has recently proved no match for Putin. A reverse Brzezinski — cutting ties with China and recognising Taiwan — is thankfully hard to foresee even with Trump’s unpredictability.

(…)

Having all but gutted Kissinger’s détente, Brzezinski became known in China’s media as the “polar bear tamer” — the bear being Deng’s nickname for the USSR. Kissinger had wanted to keep an “equilateral” distance between the US, USSR and China. Under Carter, they became de facto partners.

Either way, it is hard to imagine Trump plunging into countless hours of tactical back-and-forth with China’s President Xi Jinping or Putin. Nor would Trump be likely to give his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, or secretary of state, Marco Rubio, anything close to Kissinger-Brzezinski latitude.

(…)

How would each handle today’s Russian war on Ukraine? In spite of their differences, it is a good bet that neither Brzezinski nor Kissinger would have advised Trump to offer concessions to Russia ahead of peace talks. Sweeteners are meant to be dangled not gift-wrapped in advance.

Both would have been mortified by Trump and his vice-president JD Vance’s Oval Office humiliation in February of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. As a seducer, Kissinger caught most of his flies with honey. Razor sharp and occasionally prickly, Brzezinski was closer to a Venus flytrap. Neither would have seen Zelenskyy as prey, still less in front of the cameras.

It is impossible to imagine either speaking about Putin in the manner Witkoff recently did to the Maga broadcaster Tucker Carlson. Witkoff disclosed that Putin had said he had prayed for Trump in church after last summer’s assassination attempt. The Russian leader also presented Witkoff with a flattering portrait of Trump. Putin was “enormously gracious”, said Witkoff. “It takes balls to say that,” Carlson replied. Whatever becomes of Trump’s Russia-Ukraine peacemaking ambition, Putin seems to have a better read of Trump than Trump of Putin.

Late in life, Kissinger and Brzezinski nearly swapped their Russia positions. In a 2014 op-ed for the FT, Brzezinski argued for the “Finlandisation” of Ukraine, which would make it an unallied, though pro-western, buffer state between Russia and Nato. Even more startlingly, Kissinger endorsed Ukraine’s Nato membership following Russia’s 2022 invasion. Kissinger’s U-turn can probably be attributed to his habit of keeping within the bounds of consensus, one linked to the needs of Kissinger Associates, his thriving business. Access to the White House and other chancelleries was vital to his consultancy.

(…)

Critics of Kissinger and Brzezinski have plenty of material to play with. “Henry Kissinger, war criminal, beloved by America’s ruling class, finally dies,” was Rolling Stone’s obituary headline. Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, his backing of Pakistan’s bloody suppression of the uprising in what was to become Bangladesh, the US-backed coup in Chile and wiretapping his own staff dogged Kissinger for the rest of his life. Yet he also negotiated the first nuclear arms control agreement and came close to clinching a second. Détente was no chimera. The older he got, the more Kissinger was treated as an oracle.

Brzezinski’s time in government left no blood on his hands. Carter was the only postwar president never to order soldiers into combat, although eight servicemen died in the aborted Iran hostage rescue attempt. Brzezinski did help lure the Soviets into Afghanistan in 1979, although it was obviously Leonid Brezhnev’s decision to invade. “They’ve taken the bait!” Brzezinski allegedly told an aide on hearing the news. The origins of global jihadism can partly be dated to then. But claims that Brzezinski played “godfather of al-Qaeda” are an absurd leap. The terrorist group was formed seven years after Carter left office.

Some argue that today’s conditions make it far harder for a Kissinger or a Brzezinski to emerge. In the digital age, geostrategic manoeuvring is so much more difficult to execute. Their by no means overlapping detractors say it is a good thing they lack contemporary equivalents. Yet, to paraphrase what one of Trump’s favourite movie characters, Hannibal Lecter, said of his interrogator, the world was more interesting with Kissinger and Brzezinski in it. And to edit-quote someone else, competing strategies beat no strategy.

When Brzezinski died, Kissinger was surprised how bereft he felt. The two had first met in Harvard 67 years earlier. “How central Zbig’s presence had been to my image of a world worth living in and defending hit home with an unexpected force,” Kissinger wrote to Brzezinski’s family on learning of his death. “I felt as if a sustaining pillar of the structure of the world I cared about had disappeared . . . We shared, I like to think, a cause, if not always our ambitions.”

In death, more than life, these two naturalised Americans seem to get along. As their era recedes, and as America repudiates the world it made, both figures deserve study.”

“America may have been temporarily chastened by failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, as it was after Vietnam. But there’s no reason that fresh, exuberant ill-judgements on the scale pushed by Rice and Bundy won’t again be made, and soon. After all, those deadly fiascos were just the worst blunders in decades of U.S. foreign policy miscalculation.

Why do such bad ideas get injected into the making of U.S. foreign policy, particularly with an ease rarely found in other advanced democracies?

Much is due to the political appointments system which the country uses to staff its government, including the national security apparatus. The White House has the responsibility to fill roughly 4,000 senior jobs throughout the federal departments and agencies. When it comes to roles concerning foreign policy and defense, such appointees from outside the executive branch often have more experience in academia, law firms or in business than on the front lines of world affairs. (The same method is applied to staffing at other departments, like Commerce and HUD — except bad ideas at Commerce or Labor are unlikely to cause international catastrophe.)

This freewheeling approach imposes inexperience, compels urgency, courts risk and foments illusions of being able to manage the ethnic, ideological and political concerns of other nations.

“I didn’t think it would be this tough,” Rice concluded on Iraq, echoing Bundy who came to admit of Vietnam that “this damn war is much tougher” than he had anticipated. The system — in which Rice and Bundy, among so many others, have flourished — creates all the wrong incentives when devising foreign policy even as it raises the risk of being gamed by rivals overseas. Of course, not all appointees have such flaws, just like not all career officials have real foresight. But it’s difficult to see why the outcomes of jousting with China, waging proxy war against Russia and courting a showdown with Iran would be any better than the results of past turmoil.

Furthermore, the problem with the system of political patronage goes deep: The influence of cabinet members and nearly all ambassadors can be secondary to that of their subordinates who structure and execute decisions day-to-day at State, the Pentagon and on the NSC staff. Unlike in any other serious country, these hands-on operating roles of government are all open to political patronage, including key positions affecting war and peace: undersecretary of defense for policy, counselor at the State Department, assistant secretary of defense for international security, ones at State for political-military affairs. Also in the mix are assistant and deputy assistant secretaries in both departments for all regions of the globe. Various office directors and senior staff add their weight.

Some slots require Senate confirmation; most not. Appointees from outside federal departments and agencies may be fewer in one administration, more so in another. But the result is always a kaleidoscope of new arrivals and random talents. Meanwhile, embers are drifting down on powder kegs.

America wasn’t always so reckless in the world. It took Kennedy’s thousand days in office to make incaution systemic.

(…)

Why the sudden shift? During the Kennedy presidency, every form of U.S. military power was multiplied. Appointee positions expanded geometrically, and vigorous men of all backgrounds quickly filled them. Professors, previously for the most part advisers to the departments dealing with national defense, suddenly became line practitioners. Kennedy moved his national security adviser — Bundy, who appointed people of his own — into the West Wing and promised a “long twilight struggle year in and year out” against ruthless, godless tyranny. The youthful and energetic men who came to power in January 1961 saw few limits and acted accordingly.

Later administrations kept the illusions of what U.S. political-military clout could accomplish, along with the habit of deploying professors and think tankers in hands-on roles, with no better results. To be sure, great accomplishments have surrounded the many self-deceptions. America defeated the Soviet empire, created sound alliances and had a short, focused, effective intervention in Kosovo, as in Kuwait. Yet the record as a whole is chilling: not just the failed wars but all the befriending of murderous sheiks and shahs, an illusory détente in the 1970s that buttressed Soviet Russia, to be followed in the 80s by upholding Saddam Hussein, later capped by nation-building in places where nations barely existed. And worst of all, the country keeps repeating its follies on a colossal scale.

Today, the Office of Presidential Personnel fills about 635 jobs at State and Defense, and several hundred more at Homeland Security and elsewhere that address foreign policy. At the NSC, which has a staff over 300, roughly 20 percent of the most senior people are appointed, the rest being detailed from the military and a range of government agencies.

Stephen Hadley, who succeeded Rice in 2005 as national security adviser, defended this approach after a lecture I gave in Washington, in 2019, on foreign policy shortfalls. Much is due to the executive branch structure’s depending on one figure being in charge. Accordingly, a president most effectively exercises power by personalizing the instruments of state right down to the level of daily implementation — especially in foreign affairs where, constitutionally, the president has vast latitude.

Basically, in this view, spirited, clever and well-schooled individuals then get pulled into the system. They are people like current national security adviser Jake Sullivan, a lawyer who had entered government in 2009, becoming Vice President Joe Biden’s chief national security aide; he then spent four years teaching and policy consulting during the Trump years, until Biden became president. Or like Rice, who in 2001 returned to Washington for a second stint in government — having spent two years at the NSC during the George H. W. Bush presidency — after a decade at Stanford. And people like Bundy too, who was new to public life when coming to Washington at the start of the Kennedy administration, after a dozen years teaching at Harvard.

(…)

These representative careers are emulated by other men and women with establishment credentials, stellar political networks and ambitions to enter America’s civilian national security cohort, or to attain foreign policy roles in general. They arrive from law firms, universities, think tanks, congressional offices, business and journalism, and they include former career professionals who’ve left government, then to return with political backing. In all, the actual number of years they serve in the executive branch is low compared to Foreign Service officers and civil servants who’ve risen in the merit-based ranks.

(…)

It’s a unique approach. In Europe, Japan, Brazil, Russia and China, ministries are filled instead by permanent, though frequently rotating, career officials. Career diplomats and foreign policy professionals hold important roles sometimes effectively up to cabinet level.

Ideally, the Washington way assures a valuable tension between an administration’s more original, politically-savvy appointees — alert to the short term — and an ongoing, knowledgeable, inherited staff attuned to longer challenges. However, what ends up happening in practice is that the country’s civil service and Foreign Service are diminished: Political appointees from outside the federal departments, relatively untried on the frontlines, tend to hold the decisive, career-enhancing roles like deputy assistant secretary and above. Chances of serious misjudgment increase.

Part of the tragedy is that most anyone whose life included years of mediating between warlords in N’Djamena, or equally dismal tasks during decades of actual responsibility, could have told professors Rice or Bundy that war was going to be “tough,” and could have said so before the thousands of body bags started arriving home.

That sort of gritty, practical, career-long experience exemplifies the Foreign Service, among other parts of the federal merit-based hierarchy. It fosters an expertise that’s hard to acquire elsewhere, even if a lawyer or professor or think tank researcher has more than one or two forays into government.

Questions of relevant, practical experience among many political appointees is one of several problems with the patronage system.

During 2001, for example, the Bush administration’s new undersecretary of defense for policy — a huge job that involved managing the Defense department’s international relations — arrived from a six-man law firm. In his memoirs written after he left for a think tank in 2005, this recent enthusiast for invading Iraq and thereby transforming the Middle East derided the country’s diplomats for their inclination to “fret about the risk” of war.

Forty years earlier, it was Bundy — with no more useful experience than this undersecretary — who mocked the professionals at State for lacking “energy” when harsh decisions of escalation and regime change had to be made on Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, in the run-ups to both Iraq and Vietnam, it tended to be those experienced, long-serving professionals — men and women required to know something of history, foreign cultures and languages — who doubted that America could recast entire cultures overnight.

A second limitation arises from the relatively short stints in government among these appointees. Institutional memory becomes spotty as they come and go. Those confirmed by the Senate stay in office for an average of 17 months. Below them, others may serve slightly longer, before returning to private life. It’s a form of unplanned obsolescence.

(…)

A system which depends heavily on short-term officeholders imposes a sense of urgency on itself. And urgency is dangerous when, say, negotiating arms accords — or deciding just how to evacuate Kabul or Saigon. Appointees — often focused, clever and determined people — are able to push their priorities through bureaucracies that are less certain or obsessed. These officials may be comparative amateurs. Yet they must act right now before competing urgencies are tabled, or their administration is swept from office.

A third limitation of many appointees — shared by cabinet members — is the recurring belief that America can pretty much shape entire geostrategic environments, like the one around Beijing.

(…)

Today, after a debacle with many similarities, retired General David Petraeus — always politically attuned, and sounding like a just-appointed assistant secretary — writes of what should have been done to “manage” Afghanistan on a “sustained, generational” scale. Words like that say a lot, and they parrot a half-century of high civilian officials. This isn’t merely shorthand for a robust foreign policy. It’s a small step to assuming that Asia or the Middle East can be smoothly administered, or fine-tuned, if the right tools are applied.

Here too a difference has long existed with professional diplomats who are skilled in non-coercive persuasion. Seldom are Foreign Service Officers, who are frequently marginalized anyway from the big decisions, to be found among the “global architects” of whom novelist John le Carré writes. Those are officials at the top who are busily crafting “a secret tuck here, and a secret pull there… and a destabilized economy or two” to save democracy everywhere.

Worst of all, the appointee system is a gateway to power for a certain type of political figure. These are people whom the opportunities offered by the modern state tempt into an eternal trifling with danger and extremity. And it’s to the excitements of war and peace that they are drawn. Nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt called them “emergency men,” and the genre has abounded in Washington.

During the discussion with Hadley, he asked me what I meant by “fine-tuning.” A successor of his, John Bolton, who served 18 months under President Donald Trump, offers an example. Bolton is a true amateur, and fits Burckhardt’s description. He’s spent only 14 divvied up years of a nearly five-decade career working on these matters in government. Law firms, politicking, early domestic duties at the Justice Department and think tanks consumed his time. (Nor do TV interviews and op-eds issued from research centers compare to owning a problem while in office, however briefly.) Yet he tells of staging coups during stints of public service — pointless acts if even true, really, because there’s little chance that Washington will be able to control what comes next, whether Saigon in 1963 or Cairo in 2013, or who-knows-what tomorrow.

To boast in 2022 of staging coups recalls another national security adviser who described himself in 1972 as “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into town.” Each man was daydreaming of uncanny abilities.

Henry Kissinger held that slot at the time. President Richard Nixon, who knew much about foreign affairs, observed that Kissinger was one of those people who foment crises “to earn attention for themselves,” adding that the Harvard professor — in his first government job — would have set one off over someplace like Ecuador had Vietnam not been in play. Many crises did erupt, and worse: bungling in Cambodia and in Pakistan that abetted genocide, and so too in East Timor which he believed to be Muslim, not Catholic, and “in the middle of Indonesia,” plus bolstering a disastrous right-wing coup in Chile, just to begin. Meanwhile, Kissinger imitated Kennedy’s own NSC adviser, McGeorge Bundy. “The defect of the State Department is low energy,” he advised Nixon.

As would Kissinger, Bundy embodied emergency: Any resolute action had to be superior to restraint. An early hawk on Vietnam, he saw bloodshed during his first visit to Asia in 1965. The U.S. commander in Vietnam recalled Bundy developing a “field marshal psychosis,” and America then intervened big.

Political appointees aren’t the only ones to blame. Generals, legislators, carefully sieved Foreign Service Officers and their counterparts in the civil service, as well as at CIA, can push foolish notions too. (CIA has few appointees, and its problems instead occur from a decades-long hermetic insularity.) It’s the brass, after all, which keeps assuring politicians that the silver bullets of airpower will deliver a decisive edge: drones in the Middle East, helicopters in Vietnam and B-29s in North Korea. Yet these aren’t the men and women who are driving decisions day-to-day.

(…)

But there’s a thin line between hopes of “shaping” the world and trying to exert open, direct control over what other countries might or might not do. Watch old habits unfurl as dangers mount, whether from Russia, Iran or from China, forever “on the march.”

The language of public debate is getting loud, and it’s unoriginal. “Vacuums of power,” “emboldened opponents,” “Munich!,” of course, and “a test of US resolve,” as well as “shaping” this or that vast entity. Excitable professors join Blinken’s new Foreign Affairs Policy Board who write, actually in italics, of “ruthlessly blocking an opponent’s way forward” and explicitly urge a new Cold War. Meanwhile, civilian control of the military, which depends on a keen sense of what can and cannot be accomplished by force, hasn’t improved in any way at all.

Victory has been called the ability to face greater problems without fear. The steadiness which makes that possible can be seen in the case-hardened, enduring qualities that the U.S. Navy brings to refueling its ships in a storm: “Not easy, just routine.” These are strengths of focus, of deadly seriousness about the country’s needs, and of seasoned professionals who work with few illusions. In contrast, to keep indulging White House patronage is like playing dice at the heights of foreign policy making.

At best, the political appointee-to-career personnel ratios might change, though in fact little will be done to improve the staffing problem. Foreign and defense policy has become a trellis on which the well-connected grow careers, and too many influential figures profit from revolving doors, as do the companies where they cash in. Yet knowing of these failings might induce a healthy skepticism toward what journalists label the “national security establishment,” and also toward our country’s commitment, as stated in the latest national strategy document, to “defend democracy around the world.”

Ultimately, America’s peculiar approach to selecting talent undercuts the ability to handle strategy, let alone grand strategy, which entails unifying long-term ends with the most broad-based means. For a lifetime, with the fewest of exceptions, what passes for considered policy has instead been a twisting sequence of ad hoc decisions, hammered out under the stresses of domestic politics. How could results be otherwise?”

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thatstormygeek · 5 months ago

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So for the next couple months, we are essentially Schrödinger’s Electorate. There is no uncertainty about Trump’s ambitions....But there is real uncertainty about his capacity to execute.

We won’t know until at least January just how dark things are about to get. There is a version of Trump’s second term where he talks a lot about mass deportation, but actually deports comparatively few people. He gestures at massive tariffs, but mostly as a negotiating tactic. The most dangerous parts of Project 2025 languish because they require more attention to detail than he cares to give. (Plus they would be unpopular. And Trump likes to feel popular.) This would be a Trump II that kind of resembles Trump I, when he talked a whole lot about “building the wall,” but lacked the will and skill to actually put the plan into practice. This is not a good future, mind you. But it’s the best possible of all the bad futures. Its one where we suffer through several years of mid-level corruption and a ceaseless barrage of Trump intrigue and incompetence. It’s a future that still yields a couple hundred more Trump judges with lifetime appointments to the federal bench, ensuring that no future administration can accomplish its goals. It’s also a future that sets us back at least four years on climate commitments, all while handing the plutocrats more money and power that they will ruthlessly work to defend. It’s, y’know, still really bad. But the other version of Trump II is the one where he deputizes and mobilizes a deportation force that removes tens of millions of people from their homes. Some will be sent back to their home countries. But most will be rounded up and sent to makeshift camps. And that’s a future where he also uses Schedule F to replace all federal workers with Trump ideologues, reducing the federal government to a cutout front for the Trump organization. It’s one where he shuts down all progressive organizations under the cover of fighting “extremism,” rendering the Democratic Party network incapable of competing in future in elections. One where his political opponents go into hiding, and the military is deployed against protestors, and press critics quickly learn that their constitutional protections are not self-enforcing. This would be much, much worse.

I’ve heard a cold-comfort, rally-the-troops message in some progressive circles: “we’ve been here before. We know how to mobilize against him!” I hate to be a downer, but… no. If your strategic plan for Trump II relies on a repeat of the conditions of Trump I, that is a very bad strategic plan. When Donald Trump assumed the Presidency in 2017, we had (1) a mainstream media that was eager to play a watchdog role, (2) a Republican Party that had not been entirely cleansed of Trump critics, (3) a judicial branch with zero Trump appointees, and (4) Trump and his team lacking even the vaguest sense of how to run the executive branch. We had, in other words, a huge attack surface. ... It’s also going to be harder to tie him up in the courts than it was in the first term. Trump appointed 234 federal judges, including three Supreme Court Justices. These Trump judges have shown no deference to precedent. Many are naked partisans, with no incentive to hide it. (Hell, a Trump judge just struck down Biden’s overtime pay Executive Order yesterday.) The Supreme Court has also gotten very comfortable using its shadow docket to speed up and slow down cases to Trump’s benefit. ... Here’s a rough outline of what I think might work. The basic assignment is simple: run out the clock. There are 102 weeks until the 2026 midterm election. There are 206 weeks until the 2028 Presidential. That’s a lot of time to be playing prevent defense against an opponent who controls all the structural power levers at the federal level. This will hardly be easy. But Donald Trump is not some strategic genius, enacting a meticulously-crafted long-term plan. He has grown older, but no wiser. He is as likely to focus on deporting 20 million people as he is to get into a weeklong Twitter spat with Mark Cuban. He is a ridiculous person, and tremendously vulnerable to ridicule. His administration will be staffed by devoted ideologues, not skilled operators. Rudy Giuliani was a devoted Trump supporter. So was John Eastman. Both were comically inept, and are now disbarred as a result. The benchwarmers suiting up now that they are off the playing field have no great excess of skill.

#us politics #2024 elections #representative government my ass #dave karpf

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rjzimmerman · 6 months ago

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Environmentalists Have a Wish List for the Lame Duck Session. (Sierra Club)

Excerpt from this story from the Sierra Club:

Americans who care about public lands conservation, wildlife protection, and climate action are bracing for a grim future. President-elect Donald Trump has boasted about gutting key climate programs to appease fossil fuel interests. And right-wing lawmakers, who will control both houses of Congress, are sharpening their axes to cut funding for endangered species protections, aiming to rescind laws meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and even daydreaming about selling off public lands.

Environmental groups will be an essential check on the next administration. Leaders at groups like the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, and Earthjustice are already preparing legal strategies to combat Trump’s policies, activating their grassroots networks and seeking legislators who will advocate for environmental protections.

But there’s another antidote to the next administration’s antics—and that’s President Biden. Congress is in session for four more weeks, and the president has committed to working up until January 20. Environmental organizations have a list of suggestions that they’re urging the president to consider, and he and his team seem eager to continue at least some of their environmental work. The challenge for environmental groups and the White House now is to merge their ambitions.

More national monuments

Conservation groups' biggest public lands priority is getting the president to designate more national monuments. These areas protect some of the country's most treasured public lands, and monuments often serve as a precursor to national park designation, one of the highest forms of preservation. Outdoor coalitions have prepared a list of outstanding areas they think are ripe for monument status. Establishing them should be an easy lift for the president—these lands are already public, there’s local support, and all that’s needed is his signature.

Last month, at the United Nations biodiversity conference in Colombia, Native American tribes called on President Biden to create three national monuments in California. These areas include the Kw’tsán National Monument in Southern California, the Chuckwalla National Monument near Joshua Tree National Park, and the Sáttítla National Monument close to the Oregon border. While President Trump may threaten to downsize these areas if designated, just as he attempted with Bears Ears National Monument, it’ll likely be an uphill battle.

Fill judicial vacancies

Another significant step the president could take would be to nominate federal judges who have a strong grasp of environmental law. In recent years, federal judges have shaped American policy perhaps even more so than legislators. The most recent high-profile environmental decision ended the Chevron Doctrine, a 40-year-old legal theory that judges have cited when deferring to federal agencies to interpret ambiguous statutes.

In the wake of the 2024 election, Senate leaders and the White House have hinted at ramping up nominations. Filling the 46 open judgeships, split between the US district courts and the courts of appeals, will likely mean the difference between protecting an endangered species and letting developers run roughshod over the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.

New rules

At the administrative level, conservation groups hope two federal agencies will finalize long-overdue decisions before the next president takes office. The US Fish and Wildlife Department has been mulling over federal protections for grizzly bears for almost two years. The agency was supposed to release a decision back in the summer but punted to January at the last minute. Conservation groups want the agency to keep bears listed throughout their range, given that there are so few bears and limited connectivity between populations. Keeping the bears listed would make it harder for a future administration to delist them in the immediate future, said Bradley Williams, the deputy legislative director for the Sierra Club's Wildlife and Lands Protection campaign.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy is updating the studies it uses to assess pending and new LNG export applications. The agency announced a pause on new LNG exports in January while it conducted its analysis. Now climate advocates are hoping the administration will reject six pending requests to build new facilities, especially Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 2 facility on the Gulf Coast. If completed, it would be the region’s largest LNG facility, pumping out the annual emissions of 51 coal-fired power plants.

Action in Congress

There is still work to be done by Congress. Lawmakers have until December 20 to pass a spending bill to fund the federal government. This package could be an opportunity to squeeze in funding for land-management agencies, like the National Park Service, or pass last-minute environmental legislative packages, such as the EXPLORE Act, which expands access to the outdoors. House lawmakers passed a version of the bill in the summer. Now it only needs to get through the Senate to reach the president's desk.

Smaller lands packages, like the effort to preserve Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or the Owyhee Canyonlands in Oregon, could also be included in the yet-to-be-passed National Defense Authorization Act. That bill, which sets annual funding for the armed forces, has typically had broad support and has been reauthorized every year for the past six decades.

#Biden #Democrats #lame duck session 2024

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houseofbrat · 8 months ago

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When do you Think This war in gaza Will end? Do you believe This war can weak kamala Win The election? English is not my First language

This will be a long post.

One, I don't think the Gaza war will end this year. It's probably going to get worse given that Israel has invaded the West Bank. Netanyahu doesn't seem at all motivated to stop the war maneuvers in the near future. He's already attacked Lebanon. Now he's attacking the West Bank in addition to what is continuing to happen in Gaza.

Iran has shown a lot of restraint by not attacking back, so far. That's not going to last forever. It's hard to know when that will change, but I suspect it will. We start "eclipse season" next Tuesday, 03 September, and it'll last until 16 October. Big changes are coming in lots of different areas. Also, Mars moves into its (sidereal) debilitation sign, Cancer, on 20 October. What is most interesting about Mars' upcoming transit in Cancer is that a) it will be a long transit because Mars will go retrograde in early December and b) Mars will significantly aspect both Israel & Iran's charts.

Mars will transit Iran's 1st house and aspect its 4th house (home), 7th house (partnerships, allies, opposition), and 8th house (death, mortality, war).

Mars will transit Israel's 10th house (government, leadership, actions of the country), and aspect it's 1st house (national identity, collective personality), 4th house (home), and 5th house (national leader, education, youth/children, border disputes).

It's interesting that on 07 October 2023, Mars was transiting through (sidereal) Libra, which is Israel's 1st house, and hit the previous eclipse point when the attack by Hamas happened. I think given Mars' upcoming & long transit through Cancer that we're probably looking at more war happening in the Middle East, not less.

What is even more interesting is that Mars will retrograde out of (sidereal) Cancer and into (sidereal) Gemini on 20 January 2025, which is the inauguration of US President. I don't know if that portends a certain length to the any possible fighting between Israel & Iran, or if there's something about that particular person being inaugurated that might provoke a change. Won't know for sure until November.

It's not going to be Donald Trump or J.D. Vance being inaugurated. Neither of them have favorable charts for winning in November. They just don't. Kamala has a better chart for winning, but as I've said before, I don't think she's going to be the person being inaugurated on 20 January 2025 "because the person who does will die in office." I have not studied Kamala's chart thoroughly, but I do not have the impression that she will be dying in the next four years or less than that.

When it comes to Donald Trump, he has a ceiling of support in the polls. That is, no matter what has happened over the course of this year (including the assassination attempt on him), his level of support in the polls has never increased above a static level. The people who like him, support him, and are going to vote for him does not seem to have increased. It is his third time on the ballot in November, and all voters already have an opinion of him. He does not seem able to increase his base of support based on the events of this year, regardless of what has happened. That is a difficult position when it comes to the ballot box because the largest group of voters is not those registered to either the Democratic or Republican parties but independent voters, who generally do not have a professed preference for a political party. If Trump cannot appeal and win more independent voters, then it is literally impossible for him to win because there are not enough Republican voters to make up the difference.

Two, Kamala Harris is doing better in the polls, currently, than Joe Biden. However, she has some obvious weaknesses. She hasn't differentiated herself much from Joe Biden.

She also seems afraid of the press, given that she's only done one major interview (CNN) after becoming the nominee.

The problem with a bigger war in the Middle East (Israel & whomever else Israel is starting shit with) is that it will likely decrease enthusiasm and support for Kamala because she won't differentiate herself or her positions from Joe Biden. When a bigger war happens, and the US military is doing whatever it is that they are going to do with American tax dollars, for a boondoggle war that no one in Congress voted and approved. It's disheartening & angering for a lot of people.

One-third of the US navy is sitting in the Middle East. That's ONE-THIRD of the largest navy on earth. For a conflict that the vast majority of Americans want no part in and are not interested in seeing American servicemen (& servicewomen) being sacrificed.

So when the bullets start flying and the US military is involved in something so high profile, you bet that it will weaken Kamala as a candidate. Because what will be the future direction of US involvement in a Harris Administration? Doesn't seem like it would be that different from Joe Biden. Donald Trump isn't likely to change the US military involvement in the region, but his voters don't seem to care about that, based on what I've seen so far. Independent and Democratic voters are not interested in seeing the US participate in a wider war. When Kamala loses enthusiasm of her supporters, then her chances of winning in November will start to decrease.

Here are three videos from a tarot reader about Kamala.

This one is from 18 November 2020 on whether Kamala will ever be President.

youtube

This next one is from 09 December 2023.

youtube

And this one is from 19 November 2020.

youtube

One of my current thoughts is that the Democratic Party delegates voted/confirmed Kamala as the party's nominee virtually, as in they did it online/electronically instead of in person. The roll call vote that happened at Democratic National Convention (DNC) was purely ceremonial. If they can have one virtual vote, then another virtual vote can also happen.

Back in July, there was a lot of reporting in some news outlets about how many people privately within the Democratic Party did not think Kamala should be on the ticket. I think Gretchen Whitmer, the current governor of Michigan, was rumored to have told Kamala that she wasn't interested in being her VP. (Rumored, not publicly confirmed) Because those who aren't going to be affiliated with the Democratic ticket in 2024--if Kamala & Tim Walz lose--can have an easier time running for president in 2028 without being connected to an electoral loss.

This is the chart for the 2025 Presidential Inauguration:

There are two things I would point out of major relevance:

The Sun is conjunct Pluto within one degree and aspected by Mars.

Mars is debilitated and weak in Cancer.

The Sun is the indicator of the president. The aspect by Mars--even though it is retrograde and debilitated--indicates a likely act of violence, aggression, or some natural force against the life of the president. Given the recent failures of the Secret Service over the last ten years, this is very plausible. (Could also just be death by natural causes.) The close conjunction with Pluto--the god of death--likely confirms it. (Just my opinion at this point.) This is the only presidential chart that will have the Sun conjunct Pluto within one degree, probably ever.

The issue with Mars being debilitated is very different. It's the first time this has ever happened in a US Presidential administration chart since the inaugurations moved to January after 1932. Mars rules the 1st house in this chart, so it doesn't likely affect the administration as a whole. It's a unique feature. I'm not entirely sure what exactly it means, but what I've been thinking about lately is that this president may be seen by many as illegitimate. And if the Democrats end up switching Kamala for someone else, then, well, that may explain that debilitation of Mars in the 2025 inauguration chart and any perceived "illegitimacy."

Sounds crazy.

But it's been a crazy year.

And it's going to get even crazier sooner than later.

#ask #my gif #middle east #USA #politics #election 2024 #2024: Year of the Wood Dragon #israel #lebanon #palestine #iran #kamala harris #vedic astrology #democratic party #tarot stuff #SCOTUS #donald trump

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feministfocus · 6 months ago

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The 2024 Presidential Election: The Candidates’ Policies and Their Impact on Marginalized Groups

by Sofia Bocchino

Today, Americans know Kamala Harris as the first female Vice President of the United States, but what will we know her as after November 5th? The 2024 presidential election will be historic regardless of who wins, as Kamala Harris will be the first female candidate of color to make it this far into the election, and now the second woman running against former president Donald Trump.

Sources such as The New York Times indicate that this election is going to be close, where either candidate could win by a narrow margin. When considering who to vote for on election day, it is important for voters to educate themselves on the policies each candidate holds in order to make an informed decision to determine what the future of our country will look like. This is especially impactful for voters in swing states, who have the power to sway the state towards either candidate. Swing states also serve as a “battleground” for the competing parties, and according to NPR, where 75% or more of campaign funds are spent. It is crucial that Americans understand which candidates will protect their rights and best serve the country for the next four years.

Since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Harris has worked tirelessly to continue progressive policies and restore freedom to marginalized communities. Her policies include restoring and protecting reproductive freedom, providing affordable housing, strengthening and bringing down the cost of health care, ensuring safety against gun violence and crime, fixing the immigration system, tackling the opioid and fentanyl crisis, protecting civil rights and freedoms, and so many more liberating policies that can be found on Harris’ website. For citizens who are less privileged and experience disadvantages due to lack of resources for issues they may be affected by, Kamala Harris proves to be the better choice for rebuilding the rights that these marginalized groups have been stripped of. According to Cambridge University Press, a recent study concluded that over 40.3% of U.S. citizens are politically, socially, and economically marginalized groups.

Although the 40.3% of Americans in marginalized groups still make up a little under half the population, that will increase with racial, gender, ethnic, and religious minorities, regardless of their income and privilege. Unlike Harris, Donald Trump’s policies are more conservative and radicalized, not taking into account the large percentage of the population that could be negatively impacted by what he is calling for, essentially a new system of government. Some of Trump’s policies include carrying out “the largest deportation in American history,” protecting the right to bear arms, cutting outsourcing, strengthening the military, cutting federal funding to schools which educate students on anything related to race, sexual orientation, or politics, keepinging men out of women’s sports, and determing women’s reproductive rights by states. All of these policies can be found on Trump’s website and The Washington Post.

These policies are directly targeted towards deporting immigrants, who, according to the American Immigration Council, make up 17% of the U.S. labor workforce, denying trangender people of basic equality and rights, and radicalizing the education system, leaving students uneducated on critical socio-political issues. With these policies in mind, it is important to consider how the Democratic or Republican parties in the running could affect the future of the United States of America. Conservative policies present limitations for minorities and intersecting marginalized groups, which together make up over half the population of the U.S. according to research conducted in 2020 by Census. If you are eligible to vote this year, please take into account how both candidates’ policies will not only affect you, but your friends, family, and most importantly, the country as a whole.

Harris’ policies serve as a beacon of hope to marginalized communities, minorities, and liberal groups in preserving their rights and access to better education, healthcare, housing, jobs, safety, and civil liberties. As I mentioned in the beginning of the article, this election is predicted to be close, and it is likely either candidate will win within the margins. It is important that swing state voters, single issue voters, and those undecided vote on November 5th, as every vote counts in the race to that will either progress our government forward or radicalize it.

From my perspective, I believe Harris has the ability to make a positive change in the U.S. government, and enforce policies that will positively impact the future of the country, helping to establish a fair balance between the majority and minority. If you are not yet eligible to vote, please educate your peers on the importance of voting and the policies each candidate plans to enact if elected. The future of the country is at the hands of its people, and it is our job to ensure everyone is granted their basic freedoms and rights as a human being, so if you are 18 or older on Tuesday, November 5th, please head to the polls and exercise your civic duty as an American citizen and vote, not only for your personal benefit, but for the benefit of all individuals who deserve the same rights, freedoms, justice, and equality.

#election 2024 #kamala harris #feminism #roe v wade #election day

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mariacallous · 3 months ago

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"Never again?" The Guardian's This is Europe - 1/29/2025

As the last Auschwitz survivors gathered to mark 80 years of liberation, their ‘never again’ warning has rarely seemed so urgent

Elon Musk’s claim that Germans should stop focusing on ‘past guilt’ was a shocking reminder of what is at stake as the far-right AfD gains ground

Tova Friedman was five when she came to Auschwitz. Her “so vivid” memories include “the cries of desperate women” and the “terrible stink” of the chimneys. Friedman was one of four former inmates who on Monday spoke from inside the former Nazi death camp at a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation.

Jon Henley’s moving front page dispatch from Poland focused not on world leaders or political speeches (they had been banned by the Auschwitz museum), but rather on eyewitnesses such as Friedman: some 50 elderly survivors returned to the scene of their trauma. They stood, Jon wrote, “before princes and presidents to remind the world, perhaps for the final time, of the horrors they had suffered there during one of the darkest moments of human history.”

This was the last big commemoration of Auschwitz that camp survivors – the youngest are now in their mid-80s – could attend in any numbers (find a gallery of pictures here) – hence the emphasis on listening to their words, and only theirs.

But survivors’ poignant warnings about repeating the mistakes of the 1930s are entwined with contemporary events. Because even before time takes the Nazi era and the Holocaust out of living memory, the far right is already resurgent.

In Germany, the Alternativ fur Deutschland is polling second nationally ahead of next month’s general election. In response, the conservative CDU, favourite to form the next government, is defensively hardening its line on AfD-favoured themes, migration and domestic security. The CDU leader Friedrich Merz is now accused of wrecking the traditional “firewall” against the far right with a promised new deportations law.

The AfD now has powerful backers abroad. Delegates at a party rally in Halle last weekend cheered wildly as the US tech billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk made a surprise appearance by video link and attacked “remembrance culture” (the German policy of acknowledging Nazi crimes). He said that Germany was too focused on “past guilt”. This drew a firm rebuke from the German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who told a special gathering of the Bundestag on Wednesday that it was not possible to “draw a line” under the Nazi era. It was the “unavoidable truth … that Germans organised and committed these crimes against humanity.”

Musk, let’s recall, gave an hour of free exposure to the AfD leader Alice Weidel on X last month, and performed what looked like two Nazi salutes at an event to mark Donald Trump’s inauguration. Fascist-sounding discourse has crept into Trump’s communications, too: in recent speeches he used “vermin” to describe immigrants and said they were “poisoning” the blood of America.

Jewish groups told Ashifa Kassam they are appalled at the threat posed by Musk’s provocations. But surely, future generations could never think Nazi crimes were exaggerated?

An eight-country survey published this week suggests exactly that; it revealed alarming gaps in awareness of the death camps, particularly among younger adults. A startlingly high proportion of 18- to 29-year-olds had not heard of the Holocaust in France (46%), Romania (15%), Austria (14%) and Germany (12%). Asked if they had encountered Holocaust denial or distortion while on social media, nearly half (47%) of Polish adults said “yes”; in Austria and Hungary, this number was 38%. In Germany it was 37%.

Many survivors never, understandably, wanted to discuss their trauma with their families, after the liberation. This was the case for Ella Garai-Ebner’s grandfather, as she wrote for the Guardian. He left extraordinary written accounts, however, which she now shares. And three people, including Albrecht “Albi” Weinberg talked to the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent, Kate Connolly. Albi, 99, says he is taken back to Auschwitz every day when he washes his face and sees his tattoo in the mirror.

Lessons from history

The aftermath of the second world war gave birth to the European Union. But a growing band of countries forms an illiberal, nationalist, Eurosceptic, Russia-friendly bloc – within the EU – led by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

Romania’s presidential election had to be annulled in November, after an obscure far-right figure won the first round with alleged outside interference.

And now Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, who is accused of democratic backsliding, is pivoting to closer support for Moscow. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets of Bratislava and other towns in recent days to protest. Fico’s culture minister’s oversight of a systematic purge of the country’s arts institutions is detailed in this chilling Guardian opinion piece from the Slovakian novelist Monika Kompaníková.

A pro-democracy grassroots uprising in Belarus five years ago raised hope of an overthrow of “Europe’s last dictator”, Alexander Lukashenko. On Sunday, a sham election perpetuated his brutal rule – all vestiges of the 2020 resistance movement stamped out. This may, as our editorial pointed out, be a hollow victory. Dictatorships do eventually get toppled.

But for now, the vow to “never forget” what authoritarianism and extremism led to in 20th century Europe has rarely seemed so pressing – or so fragile.

Until next week.

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newstfionline · 7 months ago

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Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Nerves frayed in Canada and Mexico over US trade relations (BBC) As Americans prepare to vote for their next president, Canadians and Mexicans are watching on nervously. The two-way trade of goods between the US and Mexico totalled $807bn (£621bn) last year, making Mexico the US’s biggest trading partner when it comes to physical items. Meanwhile, the US’s goods trade with Canada in 2023 was in second place on $782bn. By comparison the figure for the US and China was $576bn. Mexico and Canada’s future trade with the US could be impacted if Donald Trump wins the US election. This is because he is proposing to introduce substantial import tariffs. These would be 60% for goods from China, and 20% on products from all other countries, apparently including Mexico and Canada. By contrast, Kamala Harris is widely expected to maintain the current more open trade policies of President Biden. This is despite the fact she voted against the 2020 United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) free trade deal, saying it didn’t go far enough on tackling climate change. Trump and Harris have “starkly different visions for the future of US economic relations with the world”, said one study in September.

Inside the Last-Ditch Hunt by Harris and Trump for Undecided Voters (NYT) Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are carrying out a virtual house-to-house hunt for the final few voters who are still up for grabs, guided by months of painstaking research about these elusive Americans. Inside the Delaware headquarters of Ms. Harris’s campaign, analysts have spent 18 months curating a list of which television shows and podcasts voters consume in the battleground states. Her team has assigned every voter in these states a “contactability score” from 0 to 100 to determine just how hard that person will be to reach—and who is best to deliver her closing message. The results are guiding Ms. Harris’s media and travel schedule, as well as campaign stops by brand-name supporters. For instance, the movie star Julia Roberts and the basketball great Magic Johnson earned high marks among certain voters, so they have been deployed to swing states. At Mr. Trump’s headquarters, in South Florida, his team recently refreshed its model of the battleground electorate and found that just 5 percent of voters were still undecided, half as many as in August. The Trump team calls them the “target persuadables”—younger, more racially diverse people with lower incomes who tend to use streaming services and social media. Mr. Trump has made appearance after appearance on those platforms, including on podcasts aimed at young men.

A Nationwide Blackout, Now a Hurricane. How Much Can Cuba Endure? (NYT) The lights came back on Sunday night in Lidia Núñez Gómez’s Havana neighborhood—the first time since Friday morning—so she rushed to use her electric cooker to save the frozen chicken legs and pork her son had sent her from the United States. Meat is scarce, the power was sure to go out again soon, and Ms. Núñez, 81, needed to keep food from rotting. Her daughter, Nilza Valdés Núñez, 61, fury in her voice and tears in her eyes, took stock of months of power outages, plus food and gas shortages. With a hurricane slamming the eastern coast of the country and a four-day blackout that plunged the entire country into darkness, she summed up the past few days like this: “super bad.” “The lack of electricity, of gas, and all the other problems we have here,” Ms. Valdés said, pausing to weep, “make you feel bad.” Cuba, a Communist country long accustomed to shortages of all kinds and spotty electrical service, is in the throes of a crisis so severe that experts say it threatens to explode into social unrest.

Peru’s ex-president Toledo gets more than 20 years in prison in case linked to corruption scandal (AP) Peru’s former President Alejandro Toledo on Monday was sentenced to 20 years and six months in prison in a case involving Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, which became synonymous with corruption across Latin America, where it paid millions of dollars in bribes to government officials and others. Authorities accused Toledo of accepting $35 million in bribes from Odebrecht in exchange for allowing the construction of a highway in the South American country. Odebrecht, which built some of Latin America’s most crucial infrastructure projects, admitted to U.S. authorities in 2016 to having bought government contracts throughout the region with generous bribes. The investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice spun probes in several countries, including Mexico, Guatemala and Ecuador.

Once You Try a Four-Day Workweek, It’s Hard to Go Back (Bloomberg) Germany’s brief experiment with a four-day workweek is over, but for many of the businesses that participated, there’s no going back. “I don’t want to work on Fridays anymore. I just don’t,” says Sören Fricke, co-founder of event planner Solidsense. “Friday has actually become the third day of the weekend. You only work if there is no other option.” Solidsense is one of 45 companies that participated in the six-month trial, during which employees worked fewer hours but still received their full paycheck. In the end, 73% of the participants said they’re prepared to make the change permanent or extend the experiment.

Putin Brings Together Economies He Hopes Will Eclipse the West (NYT) After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the West imposed sweeping economic sanctions, cut its access to the global banking system, and sought to isolate Russia diplomatically from the rest of the world. But President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is determined to show the West that he has important allies on his side. This week Russia is hosting the so-called BRICS group—which stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—in a gathering of emerging market countries. The meeting, which begins Tuesday, has expanded this year to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Its wonky name notwithstanding (it was coined by a Wall Street banker in 2001), BRICS now includes countries representing almost half the world’s population and more than 35 percent of global economic output, adjusted by purchasing power. The conference is intended to present a hefty showcase of economic might but also entice new countries into a coalition Russia hopes to build that would form a new world order not dominated by the West.

King Charles III ends first Australian visit by a reigning British monarch in 13 years (AP) King Charles III ends the first visit to Australia by a reigning British monarch in 13 years Tuesday as anti-monarchists hope the debate surrounding his journey is a step toward an Australian citizen becoming head of state. Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, watched dancers perform at a Sydney Indigenous community center. The couple used tongs to cook sausages at a community barbecue lunch at the central suburb of Parramatta and later shook the hands of well-wishers for the last time during their visit outside the Sydney Opera House. Their final engagement was an inspection of navy ships on Sydney Harbor in an event known as a fleet review. Charles’s trip to Australia was scaled down because he is undergoing cancer treatment. He arrives in Samoa on Wednesday.

Hug it out, but make it quick. New Zealand airport sets time limit on goodbyes (AP) Emotional farewells are a common sight at airports, but travelers leaving the New Zealand city of Dunedin will have to be quick. A new three-minute time limit on goodbye hugs in the airport’s drop-off area is intended to prevent lingering cuddles from causing traffic jams. “Max hug time three minutes,” warn signs outside the terminal, adding that those seeking “fonder farewells” should head to the airport’s parking lot instead. The cuddle cap was imposed in September to “keep things moving smoothly” in the redesigned passenger drop-off area outside the airport, CEO Dan De Bono told The Associated Press on Tuesday. It was the airport’s way of reminding people that the zone was for “quick farewells” only. But passengers need not worry unduly about enforcement. “We do not have hug police,” De Bono said. Visitors might, however, be asked to move their lingering embraces to the parking lot, where they can cuddle free of charge for up to 15 minutes.

Blinken heads to the Middle East for the 11th time since the Gaza war (AP) Secretary of State Antony Blinken is heading again to the Middle East, making his 11th trip to the region since the war in Gaza erupted last year and as Israel steps up attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The State Department said Blinken would depart Monday for a weeklong trip to Israel. His other stops are likely to include Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, officials say. Since the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the Israeli response, Blinken has traveled to the Middle East 10 other times seeking an end to the crisis. His previous trips have yielded little in the way of ending hostilities, but he has managed to increase aid deliveries to Gaza in the past.

Israel’s wars are expensive (AP) On top of the grievous toll in human life and misery, Israel’s war against the Hamas and Hezbollah militant groups has been expensive, and the painfully high financial costs are raising concerns about the long-term effect of the fighting on the country’s economy. The Israeli government is spending much more per month on the military, from $1.8 billion before Hamas started the fighting by attacking Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, to around $4.7 billion by the end of last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In the three months after Hamas attacked, Israel’s economic output shrank 5.6%, the worst performance of any of the 38 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of mostly rich nations. The war has inflicted an even heavier toll on Gaza’s already broken economy, where 90% of the population has been displaced and the vast majority of the workforce is unemployed. The West Bank economy has also been hit hard, where tens of thousands of Palestinian laborers lost their jobs in Israel after Oct. 7 and Israeli military raids and checkpoints have hindered movement. The World Bank says the West Bank economy contracted by 25% in the first quarter.

The fear, loathing and excitement surrounding AI in the workplace (AP) Artificial intelligence’s recent rise to the forefront of business has left most office workers wondering how often they should use the technology and whether a computer will eventually replace them. Those were among the highlights of a recent study conducted by the workplace communications platform Slack. After conducting in-depth interviews with 5,000 desktop workers, Slack concluded there are five types of AI personalities in the workplace: “The Maximalist” who regularly uses AI on their jobs; “The Underground” who covertly uses AI; “The Rebel,” who abhors AI; “The Superfan” who is excited about AI but still hasn’t used it; and “The Observer” who is taking a wait-and-see approach.

#headlines #news

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mightyflamethrower · 10 months ago

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One of the few people with a literal front-row seat to be able to judge how well Joe Biden is performing since his disastrous debate appearance is ABC News Anchor George Stephanopoulos. He was the person granted the first post-debate interview with Biden, where the President performed a bit better than he did during the debate, but really not all that much.

So what did Stephanopoulos personally think of the President's cognitive abilities and whether or not he should still be running for a second term? Apparently he wasn't impressed. He was caught on camera while walking in Manhattan this week when a random pedestrian asked him whether or not Biden should step down. He responded by saying that he doesn't think that Biden can serve four more years. We should note up front that he did not say this in his official capacity as an ABC News anchor. (NY Post)

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos admitted Tuesday that he does not believe President Biden can serve out a second term — days after conducting a closely watched interview with the commander-in-chief following his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump last month. Stephanopoulos, 63, was recorded by TMZ answering a question from a passer-by about Biden’s political future in midtown Manhattan. “Do you think Biden should step down?” the anonymous interrogator asked the “Good Morning America” co-host and “This Week” moderator. “You’ve talked to him more than anybody else has lately.” “I don’t think he can serve four more years,” the soft-spoken Stephanopoulos responded after a pause.

Stephanopoulos almost immediately regretted answering the question, which is understandable. He said, “Earlier today I responded to a question from a passerby. I shouldn’t have." ABC News initially didn't have any comment on the exchange, but later came out to state that the anchor had "expressed his own point of view" and that it did not reflect the position of ABC.

It would be easy enough to say that George Stephanopoulos simply screwed up by expressing such an opinion in public. After all, his professional occupation requires him to at least attempt to maintain the appearance of objectivity and a lack of bias. Also, he is a well-known television personality and he should clearly be aware that no matter where you go in public these days, somebody is going to be filming whatever is going on with their cell phones. Perhaps he was just distracted in the moment.

But at the same time, he's a thinking, breathing human being. He clearly must have opinions of his own. His previous history as an apparatchik of the Clintons suggests that he leans heavily toward the Democrats and liberals, most likely including Joe Biden. He had the chance to sit down for nearly half an hour with the President and question him directly while observing the responses he received. How would he not come away with the impression that Joe Biden is a cognitive mess who will be lucky to make it through the next four months, to say nothing of four more years beyond that? That's the impression being held by most people, including those in Biden's own party.

I tuned in to ABC News for a little while this morning to see how they are handling the situation. They don't seem to be talking about it very much. There almost seems to be a sense of resignation in the air. Most of their on-air staff would no doubt likely be cheering for Joe Biden, but he's still not capable of generating much enthusiasm among the normally loyal press pool. It appears increasingly likely that Biden will simply refuse to step aside and release his delegates. And if that's the case, the left is probably stuck with him for better or worse. And "worse" is looking more and more likely based on Donald Trump's most recent poll numbers. Here's to hoping those numbers hold all the way through to November.

#election 2024 #media bias #propaganda

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galerymod · 10 months ago

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Should an American president engage in criminal activities while in office and then attempt to cover them up by presenting them as official business, he will remain unpunished.

It is a matter of concern that the more intelligent and criminal a future American president, regardless of party, may be, the greater the likelihood of them being able to avoid prosecution.

This represents a significant challenge to the integrity of the American justice system. It also raises concerns about the future of American democracy.

The highest court of the United States of America has once again demonstrated that it is not neutral in its decisions.

Any impartial jurist will question what the next step might be for those who have been granted such a favourable outcome. This could include acquittal for white collar crimes, bribery, and other forms of criminal activity.

Such a scenario would be beneficial for those who have been accused of such offences and who are seeking to become president.

mod

Update from July 1, 4:47 p.m.: The US Supreme Court has issued a ruling on the immunity of US presidents from criminal prosecution. The President enjoys partial, but not complete immunity. It is a partial victory for Donald Trump.

On the question of whether former presidents are protected from prosecution, the court in Washington ruled that immunity applies at least for official acts. This is likely to further delay the start of a possible trial against Trump for attempted election fraud. It is considered unlikely that the trial will start before the US election in November.

"The president does not enjoy immunity for his unofficial actions, and not everything the president does is official. The President is not above the law," the decision states. This leaves open which parts of the indictment against Trump still stand in Washington. The Supreme Court did not clarify this question. It is now up to the competent lower court to find out which actions Trump's immunity applies to. This is likely to be a lengthy process.

The ruling was made by six votes to three. The majority of judges, who are considered to be arch-conservative, agreed with the decision in principle. The three judges considered to be liberal dissented.

Supreme Court decides on immunity issue: Trump hopes for absolution

Initial report: Washington, D.C. - What is Donald Trump allowed to do? This question could be answered by the highest court on July 1. This is because the Supreme Court in the USA is ending its current session. The four outstanding rulings are due to be announced on Monday. This includes a decision on Trump, who wants to run again against incumbent Joe Biden in the 2024 US election in November. The 78-year-old had requested that he be granted "absolute presidential immunity" against criminal prosecution.

Trump is claiming immunity in criminal proceedings at federal level, among other things. The trial in the capital, Washington, is about his attempts to hold on to power after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. The special prosecutor in charge of the case, Jack Smith, who brought charges against Trump in August 2023, rejects the former head of state's claim. The proceedings have been suspended until the Supreme Court has ruled on the issue of immunity.

Does Donald Trump have "absolute" immunity? Supreme Court issues ruling

According to lower court rulings, a former president does not enjoy "absolute" immunity from prosecution. US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over Trump's election fraud case, ruled that an incumbent president "cannot be given a lifelong carte blanche". A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals also later unanimously rejected Trump's claims and, according to ABC News, warned that "absolute presidential immunity" would ultimately "collapse our system of separation of powers".

At oral arguments before the Supreme Court in April, the court's conservative majority had indicated support for the notion that former presidents should enjoy some protection from prosecution in certain cases. However, the majority of the court was skeptical of Trump's demand for "absolute presidential immunity". After all, Trump's legal team had even argued that a president who orders the assassination of his political rival could also be protected from prosecution.

Supreme Court decision on Trump's "absolute" immunity: consequences for the US election

The decision on Trump's "absolute" immunity follows a potentially far-reaching ruling in favor of those who stormed the Capitol in Washington in 2021: After the attack on the parliament building, prosecutors had gone too far in some cases, the Supreme Court had ruled on Friday (June 28). The Court specifically overturned an indictment against former police officer Joseph Fischer, who had stormed the seat of Congress in Washington together with hundreds of other people.

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 years ago

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Drew Sheneman, The Star-Ledger

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 22, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Two major stories today seem to bring together both the past and the future of the country to chart a way forward.

The first involves a historic workers’ strike. A week ago, on Friday, September 15, after workers’ four-year contracts expired, the United Auto Workers union declared a limited and targeted work stoppage in which about 13,000 workers walked off the job at three Midwestern auto plants. For the first time in history, those walkouts included all three major automakers: workers left a General Motors plant in Missouri, a Stellantis (which includes Chrysler) plant in Ohio, and a Ford plant in Michigan.

Workers accepted major concessions in 2007, when it appeared that auto manufacturers would go under. They agreed to accept a two-tier pay system in which workers hired after 2007 would have lower pay and worse benefits than those hired before 2007. But then the industry recovered, and automakers’ profits skyrocketed: Ford, for example, made more than $10 billion in profits in 2022.

Automakers’ chief executive officers’ pay has soared—GM CEO Mary Barra made almost $29 million in 2022—but workers’ wages and benefits have not. Barra, for example, makes 362 times the median GM employee’s paycheck, while autoworkers’ pay has fallen behind inflation by 19%.

The new UAW president, Shawn Fain, ran on a promise to demand a rollback of the 2007 concessions in this summer’s contract negotiations. He wants a cap on temporary workers, pay increases of more than 40% to match the salary increases of the CEOs, a 32-hour workweek, cost of living adjustments, and an elimination of the tier system.

But his position is not just about autoworkers; it is about all U.S. workers. “Our fight is not just for ourselves but for every worker who is being undervalued, for every retiree who’s given their all and feels forgotten, and for every future worker who deserves a fair chance at a prosperous life,” Fain said. “[W]e are all fed up of living in a world that values profits over people. We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer while the rest of us continue to just scrape by. We’re all fed up with corporate greed. And together, we’re going to fight to change it.”

Fain has withheld an endorsement for President Biden out of concern that the transition to electric vehicles, which are easier to build than gas-powered vehicles, will hurt union jobs, and out of anger that the administration has offered incentives to non-union plants. That criticism created an opening for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to announce he would visit Detroit next week to show autoworkers that he has “always had their back,” in hopes of winning back the support of Rust Belt states.

But for all his talk of being pro-worker, Trump recently attacked Fain, saying “The autoworkers are being sold down the river by their leadership, and their leadership should endorse Trump.” Autoworkers note that Trump and the justices he put on the Supreme Court have been anti-union, and that he packed the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees labor laws and union elections, with officials who reduced the power of workers to organize. Before he left office, Trump tried to burrow ten anti-labor activists into the Federal Service Impasses Panel, the panel in charge of resolving disputes between unions and federal agencies when they cannot resolve issues in negotiations.

Fain recently said: “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.”

President Biden prides himself on his pro-union credentials, and as soon as he took office, he fired Trump’s burrowed employees, prompting the head of the union representing 700,000 federal employees to thank Biden for his attempt to “restore basic fairness for federal workers.” He said, “The outgoing panel, appointed by the previous administration and stacked with transparently biased union-busters, was notorious for ignoring the law to gut workplace rights and further an extreme political agenda.”

Today, in the absence of a deal, the UAW expanded the strike to dozens more plants, and in a Facebook live stream, Fain invited “everyone who supports our cause to join us on the picket line from our friends and families all the way up to the president of the United States.” Biden has generally expressed support for the UAW, saying that the automakers should share their record profits with their workers, but Fain rebuffed the president’s offer to send Labor Secretary Julie Su and White House senior advisor Gene Sperling to help with negotiations.

Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and John Fetterman (D-PA) have both visited Michigan to meet with UAW workers, but it was nonetheless a surprise when the White House announced that the president will travel on Tuesday to Michigan, where he will, as he posted on X, “join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create. It’s time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs."

If President Biden is showing his support for the strong unions of the past, Vice President Kamala Harris is in charge of the future. The White House today announced the establishment of a National Office of Gun Violence Prevention, to be overseen by the vice president.

Lately, Harris has been taking the lead in embracing change and appealing to younger voters. On September 9 she hosted a celebration honoring the 50th anniversary of hip hop, and she is currently in the midst of a tour of college campuses to urge young people to vote. She has been the administration’s leading voice on issues of reproductive rights and equality before the law, issues at the top of concerns of young Americans. Now adding gun safety to that list, she is picking up yet another issue crucially important to young people.

When 26-year-old Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) introduced the president today, he said that he got involved in politics because he "didn't want to get shot in school."

If the president and the vice president today seemed to represent the past and the future to carry the country forward, the present was also in the news today, and that story was about corruption and the parties’ different approaches to it.

ProPublica has published yet another piece about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s connections to wealthy donors. Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski reported that Thomas attended at least two donor summits hosted by the Koch family, acting as a fundraising draw for the Koch network, but did not disclose the flights he accepted, which should have been considered gifts, or the hospitality associated with the trips. His appearances were coordinated with the help of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who has been behind the court’s rightward swing.

The Koch family network funds a wide range of right-wing political causes. It has had interests in a number of cases before the Supreme Court during Thomas’s term, including an upcoming challenge to the government’s ability to regulate businesses—a principle the Koch enterprises oppose.

Republicans have been defending Thomas’s behavior since these stories began to surface.

Also in the corruption file today is Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who, along with his wife, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York on three counts of conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, and conspiracy to commit extortion in connection with using his influence to advance the interests of Egypt.

This is Menendez’s second legal go-round: in 2015 he was indicted on unrelated charges of bribery, trading political help for expensive plane flights and luxury vacations. Ten of the twelve members of the jury did not agree with the other two that he was guilty and after the hung jury meant a mistrial, the Department of Justice declined to retry the case.

That the DOJ has indicted Menendez again on new charges undercuts Republicans’ insistence that the department has been weaponized to operate against them alone. And while Menendez insists he will fight the charges, he has lost his position at the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under the rules of the Democratic Conference, and New Jersey Democratic leaders have already called on him to resign.

“So a Democratic Senator is indicted on serious charges, and no Democrats attacking the Justice Department, no Democrats attacking the prosecutors, no Democrats calling for an investigation of the prosecution, and no Democrats calling to defund the Justice Department,” wrote former Republican representative from Illinois and now anti-Trump activist Joe Walsh.

“Weird, huh?”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#CEO pay #income inequality #Letters From an American #Heather Cox Richardson #corruption #Drew Sheneman #UAW #history

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