#association for the study of the cuban economy

[governmentjobsworld]

தேர்வே இல்லாமல் - தேசிய விசாரணை நிறுவனத்தில் வேலை வாய்ப்பு..!

NIA Recruitment 2022 – Apply Offline For 49 DSP & ASP Posts #NIA #Centralgovtjobs #govtjobs #jobrascals

தேசிய விசாரணை ஆணையத்தில் (ASP & DSP) பணியிடம் நிரப்புவதற்கான அறிவிப்பு வெளியாகியுள்ளன. மத்திய அரசு இந்த அதிகாரப்பூர்வ அறிவிப்பினை  வெளியிட்டுள்ளது. தேசிய விசாரணை ஆணையத்தின் பணிக்கு விண்ணப்பிக்க ஆர்வமுள்ளவர்கள் 14/11/2022 முதல் 14/01/2023க்குல் அஞ்சல் மூலமாக விண்ணப்பிக்கவும். இப்பணிக்கு விண்ணப்பிக்கும் நபர்கள் விண்ணப்பிக்கும் முன்பு கீழே கொடுக்கப்பட்டுள்ள பணிக்கான கல்வித் தகுதி , வ��து விவரம் , …

[newstfionline]

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Canadian survey on religion reveals a nation of no-gos (Politico) How often have you attended a religious service in the past three months? If your answer is “never” you’re in the majority, according to a new survey of Canadians from EKOS Research Associates. In fact, only 19 percent of survey respondents said they’d joined a service more than once during that time frame. The survey was inspired by new census data from Statistics Canada showing that 68 percent of Canadians claimed a religious affiliation in 2021, down from 90 percent in 1985. EKOS asked respondents about their attachment to religion and found 40 percent consider it “very important” or “somewhat important”—a number that ranges from 38 percent in British Columbia to 50 percent in Alberta. In Quebec, it was 27 percent. The EKOS survey adds to a myriad of statistical studies that show religion occupies little space in the lives of Canadians. In a study of 148 countries by the Global Business Policy Institute in 2020 on the importance of religion, Canada ranked 121st, second last in the Americas. According to that study, Canadians are closer to Cubans than to Americans on matters of faith.

US recession a growing fear as Fed plans to keep rates high (AP) After scaling 40-year highs, inflation in the United States has been slowly easing since summer. Yet the Federal Reserve seems decidedly unimpressed—and unconvinced that its fight against accelerating prices is anywhere near over. On Thursday, stock markets buckled on the growing realization that the Fed may be willing to let the economy slide into recession if it decides that’s what’s needed to drive inflation back down to its 2% annual target. The message the Fed was sending, said Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, was blunt: “We’re going to break something. We’re going to break inflation or we’re going to break the economy.”

So long, California: Major county votes to study secession (AP) The November elections saw Californians continue to embrace progressive leadership, but voters in one of the state’s most populous counties are so frustrated with this political direction that they voted to consider seceding and forming their own state. An advisory ballot proposal approved in San Bernardino County—home to 2.2 million people—directs local officials to study the possibility of secession. The razor-thin margin of victory is the latest sign of political unrest and economic distress in California. This attempt to create a new state—which would be the first since Hawaii in 1959—is a longshot proposition for the county just east of Los Angeles that has suffered from sharp increases in cost of living. It would hinge on approval by the California Legislature and Congress, both of which are highly unlikely. Still, it’s significant that the vote came from a racially and ethnically diverse county that is politically mixed, as well as the fifth-most populous in the state and the largest in the nation by area. San Bernardino’s 20,000 square miles (51,800 square kilometers) is composed of more land than nine states.

US court rejects maintaining COVID-19 asylum restrictions (AP) Restrictions that have prevented hundreds of thousands of migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. in recent years remained on track to expire in a matter of days after an appeals court ruling Friday, as thousands more migrants packed shelters on Mexico’s border with the U.S. Migrants have been denied rights to seek asylum under U.S. and international law 2.5 million times since March 2020 on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The public-health has left some migrants biding time in Mexico. Advocates for immigrants had argued that the U.S. was abandoning its longstanding history and commitments to offer refuge to people around the world fleeing persecution, and sued to end the use of Title 42. They’ve also argued the restrictions were a pretext by Trump for restricting migration, and in any case, vaccines and other treatments make that argument outdated.

El Salvador’s prolonged state of emergency (Foreign Policy) El Salvador has extended its state of emergency for the ninth time, allowing the government to crack down on gang violence and make sweeping arrests at the expense of certain civil liberties. Since the decree was imposed in March, around 60,000 people with alleged gang ties have been jailed, fueling concerns of human rights violations. But homicide rates have reportedly fallen in the Central American country, and the president is enjoying an 86% approval rating.

Chile Tries Again (Foreign Policy) Three months after Chileans voted down a progressive draft constitution in a nationwide referendum, national lawmakers from across the political spectrum have agreed on guidelines to give the process another go. Politicians from 14 parties reached a deal Monday that outlines a January to December 2023 drafting and approval process. For it to kick off, the proposal still must pass a formal congressional vote. The suggested design of the second rewrite process aims to address factors seen as responsible for the first’s failure. The new framework appears designed to produce a less transformational charter. President Gabriel Boric said political leaders learned that “you cannot go faster than your people.”

The city with U.K.’s highest cost of living (Washington Post) “Want a brew?” asked the pastor in dark sunglasses, offering a cup of tea. That’s the only question he puts to the people wandering into his church in Northern England. But many tell him their stories anyway, conveying in vivid detail what Britain’s “cost-of-living crisis” actually means for people living through the worst of it. “A lady the other day, she put her arms around me, crying, because we put some heating on for her,” said the pastor, Mick Fleming, who runs the church and the associated Church on the Street charity from a space that used to be a gym. He has heard about people stocking up on candles and blankets, refusing to turn on their heat or skipping meals. Fleming, 56, has a fascinating story of his own. He is a former drug dealer who became a priest. He has been working to help lift people out of poverty for more than a decade. He says the need has suddenly become much more acute. Fleming is based in the hardscrabble city of Burnley, which, in the context of historic inflation, has earned the notorious distinction of having the highest cost of living among cities and towns in Britain. Nationally, inflation is at 10.7 percent, near a 40-year-high. In Burnley—with a population of 90,000 and about an hour’s drive north of Manchester—inflation is estimated to be 12.4 percent, according to the Center for Cities think tank.

EU unity over Russia sanctions falters as Europe’s economy wilts (Reuters) European Union unity over sanctions on Russia has started to falter as jitters about the impact on Europe’s own stumbling economy weakens resolve to punish Moscow for war in Ukraine. EU leaders agreed on Thursday to a ninth package of sanctions but talks were acrimonious, with Poland and the Baltic states that neighbour Russia campaigning for tougher measures, while states further west, such as Germany, were more hesitant. Some, such as Belgium and Greece, as well as Hungary which still relies heavily on Russian energy imports, pushed back against further sweeping measures, EU diplomats told Reuters. “It is becoming increasingly difficult to impose sanctions that hit Russia hard enough, without excessive collateral damage to the EU,” a spokesperson for Belgium’s government said ahead of the deal at the EU leaders’ summit.

In Subfreezing Cold, Waves of Russian Missiles Batter Ukraine (NYT) In subfreezing weather, Russia launched dozens of missiles and drones at Ukrainian energy systems on Friday, pitching millions of civilians into the cold and dark in its deadly campaign to batter—and freeze—the populace into submission. In the central city of Kremenchuk, Mayor Vitalii Maletsky said that heat was out for more than 200,000 customers as temperatures hovered around 14 degrees Fahrenheit, and implored people to “close all windows and take all possible measures to preserve heat.” In Kyiv, the capital and largest city, even after hours of emergency repairs, two-thirds of the residents had no heat and water, and 60 percent had no electricity, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said in the evening. In the ninth large-scale wave of attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure this fall, and the second this week, explosions shook cities and towns across a country where millions of people have already been bombed or frozen out of their homes. The barrage came as Ukrainian military and political leaders warned in a series of interviews and news conferences that Russia was preparing for a new ground offensive this winter, and would likely make another attempt to seize Kyiv.

Pacifist Japan unveils biggest military build-up since World War Two (Reuters) Japan on Friday unveiled its biggest military build-up since World War Two with a $320 billion plan that will buy missiles capable of striking China and ready it for sustained conflict, as regional tensions and Russia’s Ukraine invasion stoke war fears. The sweeping, five-year plan, once unthinkable in pacifist Japan, will make the country the world’s third-biggest military spender after the United States and China, based on current budgets. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who described Japan and its people as being at a “turning point in history”, said the ramp-up was “my answer to the various security challenges that we face”. His government worries that Russia has set a precedent that will encourage China to attack Taiwan, threatening nearby Japanese islands, disrupting supplies of advanced semiconductors and putting a potential stranglehold on sea lanes that supply Middle East oil.

Landslide at Malaysia campground kills 21, leaves 12 missing (AP) A thunderous crush of soil and debris killed 21 people at a campground in Malaysia on Friday, and rescuers dug through the mud in the night for another 12 who were feared buried in the landslide. More than 90 people were sleeping on an organic farm when the dirt tumbled from a road about 30 meters (100 feet) above the site and covered about 1 hectare (3 acres). Two of the dead were found locked in an embrace, according to the state fire department chief. Authorities told local media that the landowners did not have a license to run a campground. At least seven people were hospitalized and dozens more were rescued unharmed.

[sleepysera]

Jul 12 Headlines

WORLD NEWS

South Africa: 6 dead in riots over jailing of ex-leader Zuma (AP)

"Six people have been killed and 219 arrested amid escalating violence during rioting that broke out following the imprisonment of South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma, police said Monday. Army soldiers will be deployed to help police quell the violence, the South African National Defense Force said."

Cuba: Thousands rally against government as economy struggles (BBC)

"Thousands of Cubans have joined the biggest protests for decades against the island's Communist government. They marched in cities including the capital Havana, shouting, 'Down with the dictatorship!'. The protesters were demanding a faster coronavirus vaccination programme after Cuba reported a record of nearly 7,000 daily infections and 47 deaths on Sunday."

India: Lightning strike kills 16 taking selfies in Jaipur (BBC)

"The victims were taking selfies in the rain on top of a watch tower at the city's 12th Century Amer Fort, a popular tourist attraction. Lightning strikes kill some 2,000 Indians on average every year, according to official data. The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has said that deaths by lightning strikes have doubled in the country since the 1960s - one of the reasons they cited was the climate crisis."

US NEWS

Covid: Pfizer to discuss vaccine booster with US officials (AP)

"The company said it was scheduled to have the meeting with the Food and Drug Administration and other officials Monday, days after Pfizer asserted that booster shots would be needed within 12 months. Pfizer’s Dr. Mikael Dolsten told The Associated Press last week that early data from the company’s booster study suggests people’s antibody levels jump five- to 10-fold after a third dose, compared to their second dose months earlier — evidence it believes supports the need for a booster."

US Heat Wave: Wildfires rage as US west grapples with heat wave, drought (AP)

"Firefighters were working in extreme temperatures across the U.S. West and struggling to contain wildfires, the largest burning in California and Oregon, as another heat wave baked the region, straining power grids. The blazes come as the West is in the midst of a second extreme heat wave within just a few weeks and as the entire region is suffering from one of the worst droughts in recent history."

Environment: Florida breaks manatee death record in first 6 months of 2021 (BBC)

"A record number of manatees have died this year in the US state of Florida, primarily from starvation, wildlife authorities say. At least 841 of the marine mammals died in waters near the eastern state between 1 January and 2 July. That breaks the previous record set in 2013, when 830 manatees died after exposure to harmful algae. This year biologists say seagrass beds manatees rely on for food are dying out because of rising water pollution."

[penzanews]

Cuba can overcome internal problems without external intervention

PenzaNews. The Cuban government allowed the inhabitants of the island to open small and medium-sized private business with up to 100 employees. This happened in the wake of the massive protests which took place in July in Havana and a number of major cities due to the deterioration of living conditions, including in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The State Council has approved a decree-law on micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, which facilitates their coherent insertion in the legal system as an actor that affects the productive transformation of the country,” says a note on the website of the National Assembly of People’s Power of Cuba.

Meanwhile, President President Miguel Diaz-Canel said Cuba was taking firm steps to update its economic model.

Earlier, travellers were allowed arriving in the country to bring in food, medicine and other essentials without paying import duties.

According to official information, many government supporters who took to the streets during the days of the protests to prevent provocations were injured in clashes with protesters. The Cuban authorities blamed the United States for organizing the riots.

Analyzing the situation in the country, David Jessop, the director and founder of the Cuba Initiative, Non-Executive Director of the Caribbean Council and Cuba Briefing Editor, said the protests were largely spontaneous.

“The unrest, news of which was widely spread on social media within Cuba, was a response to growing concerns about food shortages, severe power outages, the growing incidence of COVID 19, and the deteriorating ability of Cuba’s health care system to cope with rising infection rates in some provinces, all of which to a significant extent have been exacerbated by the tightening of the US embargo. These then morphed in some locations to protests against the government,” the expert reminded.

In his opinion, the Government response was initially confrontational possibly because some in the Communist Party feared that a US soft war that the leadership says it has been facing was becoming among some a US inspired direct challenge to its power.

“Cuba’s President subsequently sought to lower the tension by recognising the legitimacy of many of the concerns expressed including by ‘revolutionary people’. Since then he has moved to indicate to others in the leadership that it will be necessary to increase the space for debate in Cuban society, and to address issues with a wider group of participants,” David Jessop said.

From his point of view, this reflects in part the danger the early confrontations on the street posed to the Cuban military concept of a ‘war of all the people’ as this doctrine is felt to be the only way to repulse the US attempt at an invasion if it happens.

“Government has been undergoing generational change and implementing major economic reforms that decentralise and theoretically de-bureaucratise state decision making and encourage non-state economic development. There are divisions between conservatives and liberal reformers about the pace of and nature of such change. In my view the current tension s surrounding economic delivery and future growth and the concerns of many Cubans could be overcome if it were to liberalise and create a social market economy that emulated many of the reforms undertaken in Vietnam,” the expert said.

At the same time, according to him, only the Cuban people can decide on their own future.

“It is not up to The US, the EU Russia or anyone else to determine. The US Embargo has failed but has become a function of US domestic politics, making it harder to unravel and in the process harming the ability of the Cuban people to have a better life,” David Jessop added.

Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, believes that the unrest in Cuba was “spontaneous, and a non-violent expression of social despair.”

“But there is also a broader setting. The ‘revolutionary regime’ leadership is trying to pass power to a next generation, but this rising cohort lacks the self-confidence and prestige of the founders. Hopes for a more inclusive future were stirred by Barack Obama, and by the spread of the internet, and some mild economic relaxations, then dashed by Donald Trump, COVID-19, and the collapse of tourism. The long overdue currency unification was launched under duress on Jan 1st – the worst possible timing – and has only produced inflation and empty shelves so far. Fundamentally the regime failed to promote food self-security and now lacks the means to import basic food supplies either,” Laurence Whitehead noted.

In his opinion, the US sanctions and international solidarity, including from Russia, help governmental cohesion.

“The immediate crisis seems to have passed without spinning out of control, and to my mind the authorities have exercised suitable restraint - but this is controversial with the western press screaming ‘repression.’ […] On the issue of economic scarcity it is bending to some obvious and easy but necessary and overdue concessions. But that does not restore the prestige of the regime, or compensate for the damage done. Major further reforms are essential, but extremely difficult without splitting the elite. So the danger persists of renewed and perhaps more confrontational outbursts. It remains to be seen how Havana is processing all this,” the expert said.

Commenting on inadmissibility of the intervention of external forces in solving problems in Cuba, he stressed that the question of how it is governed must be decided by the islanders.

“[…] The question at issue in Cuba is whether the US government has the right to asymmetrical intervention that it has repeatedly exercised since the invasion of 1898. The UN votes every year by about 191 to 2 (US and Israel) that such ‘plattism’ is not permissible. […] Biden knows it is not, and that there is no prospect of containing the damage if they invade again like in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.,” Laurence Whitehead explained.

“The question of how Cuba is governed must be decided basically by the islanders. My observation in 2019 is that the referendum on the current constitution did have substantial (if grudging) support. It would have to be the basis for further political innovations that are going to be essential in coming years. The protesters want ‘Patria y Vida’ rather than ‘Patria o Muerte.’ That is a powerful, but essentially reformist and national platform. Fulminating against supposed ‘totalitarianism’ is no help to the Cuban people. They need international solidarity to guide the country out of its current impasse,” he added.

In turn, Mark Jones, Professor of Political Science at Rice University, expert in Latin American Studies, shared the opinion that the situation in Cuba is increasingly problematic for the Cuban government.

“The economic downturn associated with the COVID-19 pandemic combined with the reduction in low-cost/free oil shipments from Venezuela have added almost unbearable stress to an economic system that was already broken and in dire straits,” the expert said.

“Cuban citizens have finally reacted to the Communist government’s myriad failures: a moribund economy that cannot provide for Cubans’ basic needs, a health care system that cannot protect them from COVID-19, and a repressive police state that denies Cubans even the most basic civil liberties,” he said.

Meanwhile, in his opinion, the Cuban government should be able to effectively repress these protests.

“First, as an island, it is easier for the government to prevent both access to the broader world. Second, the Cuban security apparatus is formidable and also realizes quite clearly, that if the current government falls, they and their families will lose all of their economic and social privileges and quite possibly be jailed for human rights violations,” Mark Jones explained.

Analyzing the likelihood of outside interference, he suggested that the Joe Biden administration will not go the next step of trying to overthrow the Cuban government, beyond the punitive measures such as the embargo that are already in effect.

“There are multiple reasons for this. First, intervention into another country’s internal affairs is opposed by most Democrats and many Republicans. Second, within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party there are many Democratic elites who are historic supporters of the Cuban Revolution and Cuban government, and any intervention would alienate them. Third, the last thing the Biden Administration wants is a breakdown of the current Cuban Government and the country descending into anarchy, which would possibly result in a million or more Cuban refugees arriving in Florida,” Mark Jones said.

Emily Morris, Research Fellow at University College London’s Institute of the Americas (UCLIA), drew attention to the fact that even before COVID-19 the country was suffering from the tightening of US sanctions during the presidency of Donald Trump.

“When the pandemic began, multilateral official financing institutions, led by the IMF, moved quickly to provide emergency financing facilities for countries that needed foreign exchange and fiscal support to enable them to respond to the health emergency. They knew that if they did not, there would be huge suffering and likely political upheaval. But because of US sanctions, Cuba […] has had no access to official international emergency financing. Moreover, just before leaving office in January 2021, the Trump administration introduced their most devastating measure in terms of its effect on the Cuban economy: by re-listing Cuba on the US Treasury department’s list of ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ without any plausible justification. […] This makes it extremely difficult for any Cuban entities to simply process payments for international trade, as well as finance. So Cuba not only had no access to official external financial support, but faced the pandemic amidst a sharp reduction in access to any form of international finance. No other country has experienced this,” the expert said.

“On top of all this, the Cuban government introduced a major economic reform in January 2021: currency unification. This is an important and necessary reform, but it was inevitably going to cause some economic disruption – with businesses earning foreign exchange becoming more profitable, while those with high import components becoming uneconomic – and inflation. In the context of shortages resulting from COVID-19 and US sanctions, inflation has been stronger than it would otherwise has been, creating considerable alarm among Cubans,” Emily Morris added.

According to her, the protests were certainly encouraged by the efforts of US-based organisations to stir unrest, but they also reflected real frustrations of the citizens.

“The government’s attempts to cap prices and ration distribution of increasingly scarce basic goods stimulated growing black markets and queues. With foreign exchange limited, many goods disappeared from shelves […] and were only available in hard currency stores. So politically, there was a general atmosphere of rising frustration,” the expert noted.

In her opinion, the current Cuban government is committed to economic reform, and has been moving towards greater openness and inclusion.

“It has also been remarkably competent in terms of ensuring that basic health and nutrition needs of the most vulnerable are met during this severe economic crisis, and very willing to respond to complaints and difficulties. But the reforms have been a slow process, and the messaging has been clumsy, especially in terms of reaching the young and unengaged population. President Diaz-Canel’s insistence on ‘continuity’ works for the older generation and loyal followers, and indeed may be necessary for ensuring that planned reforms have their consent, but is unattractive to this new generation. AS well as being frustrated by the loss of opportunities and dismal economic situation, they are bored with hearing the government blame problems on the ‘US blockade’ – even though US sanctions are more to blame than before – and fed up with the bureaucracy and controls,” Emily Morris said.

From her point of view, intervention, directly or indirectly, can only make the situation worse.

“The situation should be resolved in Cuba and by its people only. Indirect intervention, whether the radio or TV broadcasts, propaganda disseminated through internet, or covert support for dissidents, is entirely counter-productive in terms of its effect on the internal debate. There is a vibrant exchange of opinions within Cuba, which has the capacity to bring new thinking and concrete reforms, and a process of reform towards a more open society and economy is under way. In the short period of the Obama opening, discussion opened up; but in the context of growing US hostility, the Cuban authorities, as always – and as any government would, in the face of a perceived external threat – reacted against outside intervention by closing ranks,” the expert stressed.

“Direct intervention would be a disaster, with the resultant chaos and destruction causing suffering in Cuba and difficulties for the US. Whether or not it succeeded in its stated intention of ‘regime change’, it would be resisted by a large proportion of Cubans, and the resultant conflict would be costly in human terms,” Emily Morris concluded.

Source: https://penzanews.ru/en/analysis/67212-2021

[popscenery]

Passion Pit, »Take a Walk«

by Jessica Doyle

In the summer of 2010, when I took a leave of absence from my PhD program, my dissertation was a helpless non-thing without a subject. In December 2018, I officially got my PhD, because my dissertation was done: written, revised, defended, revised again, approved, copied, formatted, distributed, carefully archived, accepted as an actual work of scholarship. It is arguably my most important professional accomplishment of the decade, and also arguably entirely inconsequential. The claim that 90 percent of academic papers go uncited is mostly untrue, but it is true for my dissertation, and I have the gaping void of a Google Scholar search return to prove it.

Trust me: as bitter and self-deprecating post-graduate students might be about their research (see previous paragraph), none of us start out planning to write something inconsequential. Certainly the subject of my dissertation was not inconsequential at all. “Take a Walk” is not my favorite song of the past decade, but it is the song that kept reminding me that the topic was worth writing about.

My dissertation examined what makes starting and maintaining a business easier or harder for Latino entrepreneurs in different American cities. Take Miami as an example, where 47% of all businesses are Latino-owned. That’s much higher than the national average (12 percent) and higher than the percentage in other cities with large Latino populations: New York, Los Angeles, Houston. So what’s so special about Miami? Is it because the Cuban population that arrived in the 1960s were often landowners or merchants fleeing Castro, and made wealth-building a priority in their new city? Is it the geographic proximity to Latin America and the Caribbean? Is starting a business in Miami easier than elsewhere? Is it something about Miami’s economy in general, or Florida’s? Finally (and more to the point), if policy-makers in another city wanted to put in policies that would help local Latino entrepreneurs flourish, what would Miami’s example offer as guidance?

To make a 295-page story short: it is much easier to turn immigrants into successful business owners if they come to the country with business experience and/or capital already at hand; and if the local immigrant population doesn’t start with those advantages, then policy-makers should focus on providing business education and access to financing, especially the latter. Latino immigrants in the United States who want to start businesses are more likely than native-born white entrepreneurs to use their own cash (which takes a while to accumulate), credit cards (which charge higher interest rates than do bank loans), or loans from family or friends (which means that loved ones, rather than banks with larger cushions, bear the risks). I’d say read the whole dissertation, but in all frankness you’d be better off checking out the research being published by the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, including this report. (It’s more concise and their data is more robust than mine was.)

This all assumes, of course, that you want to encourage Latinos, or other immigrants, or anyone at all, to start their own business. A lot of us--including me; including Michael Angelakos, the artist behind Passion Pit--have immigrant entrepreneurs in our family lineage. In interviews to promote the album Gossamer, Angelakos described “Take a Walk,” the lead single, as about different members of his family. The first verse’s portrait is a classic rags-to-riches, grateful-to-be-in-America immigrant story: I love this country dearly / I can feel the ladder clearly. But in the second verse, the story shifts to a new narrator, and so does the tone: I watch my little children / Play some board game in the kitchen / And I sit and pray they never feel my strife. The final narrator is eventually undone...

I think I borrowed just too much We had taxes, we had bills We had a lifestyle to front

...yet still insists on his participation in the American dream:

Tomorrow you'll cook dinner For the neighbors and their kids We can rip apart those socialists And all their damn taxes You see, I am no criminal I'm down on both bad knees I'm just too much a coward To admit when I'm in need

Apparently at one point a Fox News reporter failed to hear the irony, and asked Angelakos if the song was anti-socialist. But Angelakos told MTV News, “It's about very specific family members, the male hierarchy, and how the men in my family have always dealt with money.... All these men were very conservative; socially very liberal but for some reason, they all came here for capitalism, and they all ended up kind of being prey to capitalism.” He told a different interviewer, “These are all true stories; this is my grandfather and so on.”

Angelakos’s ambivalence is understandable. (Several of the pieces that greeted “Take a Walk” identified it as a direct reponse to the 2008 financial crisis, an interpretation he rejected.) The idea that anyone can come to the United States, start a business, and work their way to financial security and political freedom is an old one--the history of immigrants employing at higher rates than native-born Americans goes as far back as the Census Bureau has been keeping track of such things. But even for the successful it has its costs. The narrators of “Take a Walk” are estranged from their families, anxious about their ability to keep wealth. The theme of risk runs through the song. No one worries about getting fired; they have market investments, business partners, endless complaints about taxes (as one might if one has to pay both ends of the Social Security and Medicare taxes single-handedly.) The risk allows the narrators to make comfortable lives for themselves and their family, and yet Angelakos isn’t convinced, looking back, that they were better off.

Historically, if you were running for any sort of higher political office in the United States and were from a major party, you made sure to say nice things about small businesses and entrepreneurship, especially the immigrant kind. To some degree this is still true: Elizabeth Warren’s campaign platform includes a Small Business Equity Fund that would give grants to minority entrepreneurs. That said, I’m not sure the current dominant political energy on either the American left or right favors small businesses, who tend to hate tariffs. If you read the Green New Deal resolution, though it calls for a more equitable distribution of available financing to such smaller-scale lenders as community banks and credit unions, a lot of what it wants it can only get at a certain scale. It’s easier for a larger company to retool its supply chains to lower environmental costs than it is for ten small businesses to do the same. It’s easier for a firm with a thousand employees to absorb the cost of any one employee needing a higher wage to make rent, or a longer maternity leave, or extended absences due to illness, than it is for a firm with five.

And Music Tumblr in particular can be forgiven for not thinking highly of entrepreneurship. Most creative people--artists, musicians, writers--end up as entrepreneurs simply because decent-paying employment in those fields has never been easy to find. (In 2017, Angelakos spoke of dealing with venture capitalists and deciding to run his mental-health-focused initiative, Wishart, as a combination of for-profit and non-profit.) But no loan officer with a nickel’s worth of sense would approve a loan to enter a market so saturated that marginal revenue is typically zero or close enough, or where thousands if not millions of people seem thoroughly committed to proving themselves, in Samuel Johnson’s eyes, blockheads. Upon hearing, “You can do what you love, but the market won’t reward you,” a lot of people will reply, “To hell with markets, then.”

It all comes down to how you feel about risk. For a long time the dominant American thinking was that higher risk was the price entrepreneurs paid to have the chance to succeed on their own terms. (There’s an ongoing debate in the immigrant-entrepreneurship academic literature about whether any one particular group of entrepreneurs is “pushed” into entrepreneurship--as in, they only start businesses as the best of a bad set of money-making options--or “pulled,” starting businesses because they want to.) More recently has emerged the critique that not all experiences of risk are created equal, and that in championing immigrant or minority entrepreneurship we offload risk onto those people with smaller financial or even emotional cushions. The heightened experience of risk, and its attendant anxiety and feeling of constant scarcity, may be what Angelakos meant when he described his relatives as “kind of being prey to capitalism.”

I personally agree with that critique, and would throw in that the general perception of Latino immigrants as not-entrepreneurial denies them a road to acceptance (or bourgeois respectability, if you prefer) that their Swedish, German, Jewish, Italian, and more recently Korean predecessors have been able to walk. That was why I wanted to write about Latino entrepreneurship in the first place, and why I ended up writing about North Carolina’s Latino Community Credit Union and associated initiatives as a promising case study. But I would caution against crossing the line from wanting to reduce risk for vulnerable minorities to regarding asking them to bear any kind of risk as imperialist and offensive. Risk can’t be eliminated altogether, and there are costs to scaling risk to higher levels of human activity and trying to diffuse it. A small business committed to a bad idea does a lot less damage than a government policy committed to a bad idea, even if the latter is more equitable in the range and number of people it effects.

Writing a dissertation is a humbling process. I’ve never written and recorded a song, but I imagine that process humbles too. (When “Take a Walk” came out Angelakos was not shy about disliking it, though he seems to have grown fonder of it as time goes on: “I like that it’s so uncharacteristic of me,” he said in 2017.) You work and work and work, all the while knowing you have no control over how your audience will hear your message, or if there will even be an audience. You can never be sure that you read enough, or chose the right method of analysis, or treated your subjects with sufficient respect. You’ll never know if you’re actually on the side of the angels. If the “angels” are metaphorical--if you don’t actually believe in a god, or God, whose love is greater than your human tendency to error and self-deception and treachery--then the risk is even higher. And yet, without that risk, how would you ever be able to say anything worth saying?

[arcticdementor]

The emergence of liberal democracies is associated with ideals of liberty and equality that may seem self-evident and irreversible. But these ideals are far more fragile than we believe. Their success in the 20th century depended on unique technological conditions that may prove ephemeral.

In the second decade of the 21st century, liberalism has begun to lose credibility. Questions about the ability of liberal democracy to provide for the middle class have grown louder; politics have grown more tribal; and in more and more countries, leaders are showing a penchant for demagoguery and autocracy. The causes of this political shift are complex, but they appear to be intertwined with current technological developments. The technology that favored democracy is changing, and as artificial intelligence develops, it might change further.

…

In the 20th century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump may therefore demonstrate a trajectory opposite to that of traditional socialist revolutions. The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but feared they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the 21st century, populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore. This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

…

All of this leads to one very important conclusion: The automation revolution will not consist of a single watershed event, after which the job market will settle into some new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions. Old jobs will disappear and new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs will also rapidly change and vanish. People will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once, but many times.

Just as in the 20th century governments established massive education systems for young people, in the 21st century they will need to establish massive reeducation systems for adults. But will that be enough? Change is always stressful, and the hectic world of the early 21st century has produced a global epidemic of stress. As job volatility increases, will people be able to cope? By 2050, a useless class might emerge, the result not only of a shortage of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also of insufficient mental stamina to continue learning new skills.

…

Imagine, for instance, that the current regime in North Korea gained a more advanced version of this sort of technology in the future. North Koreans might be required to wear a biometric bracelet that monitors everything they do and say, as well as their blood pressure and brain activity. Using the growing understanding of the human brain and drawing on the immense powers of machine learning, the North Korean government might eventually be able to gauge what each and every citizen is thinking at each and every moment. If a North Korean looked at a picture of Kim Jong Un and the biometric sensors picked up telltale signs of anger (higher blood pressure, increased activity in the amygdala), that person could be in the gulag the next day.

And yet such hard-edged tactics may not prove necessary, at least much of the time. A facade of free choice and free voting may remain in place in some countries, even as the public exerts less and less actual control. To be sure, attempts to manipulate voters’ feelings are not new. But once somebody (whether in San Francisco or Beijing or Moscow) gains the technological ability to manipulate the human heart—reliably, cheaply, and at scale—democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.

…

However, artificial intelligence may soon swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. In fact, it might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse systems, because machine learning works better when the machine has more information to analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, you’ll wind up with much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. An authoritarian government that orders all its citizens to have their DNA sequenced and to share their medical data with some central authority would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data are strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.

New technologies will continue to emerge, of course, and some of them may encourage the distribution rather than the concentration of information and power. Blockchain technology, and the use of cryptocurrencies enabled by it, is currently touted as a possible counterweight to centralized power. But blockchain technology is still in the embryonic stage, and we don’t yet know whether it will indeed counterbalance the centralizing tendencies of AI. Remember that the Internet, too, was hyped in its early days as a libertarian panacea that would free people from all centralized systems—but is now poised to make centralized authority more powerful than ever.

…

Humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision making. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism see the individual as an autonomous agent constantly making choices about the world. Works of art—be they Shakespeare plays, Jane Austen novels, or cheesy Hollywood comedies—usually revolve around the hero having to make some crucial decision. To be or not to be? To listen to my wife and kill King Duncan, or listen to my conscience and spare him? To marry Mr. Collins or Mr. Darcy? Christian and Muslim theology similarly focus on the drama of decision making, arguing that everlasting salvation depends on making the right choice.

What will happen to this view of life as we rely on AI to make ever more decisions for us? Even now we trust Netflix to recommend movies and Spotify to pick music we’ll like. But why should AI’s helpfulness stop there?

Every year millions of college students need to decide what to study. This is a very important and difficult decision, made under pressure from parents, friends, and professors who have varying interests and opinions. It is also influenced by students’ own individual fears and fantasies, which are themselves shaped by movies, novels, and advertising campaigns. Complicating matters, a given student does not really know what it takes to succeed in a given profession, and doesn’t necessarily have a realistic sense of his or her own strengths and weaknesses.

It’s not so hard to see how AI could one day make better decisions than we do about careers, and perhaps even about relationships. But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and whom to date or even marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision making, and our conception of life will need to change. Democratic elections and free markets might cease to make sense. So might most religions and works of art. Imagine Anna Karenina taking out her smartphone and asking Siri whether she should stay married to Karenin or elope with the dashing Count Vronsky. Or imagine your favorite Shakespeare play with all the crucial decisions made by a Google algorithm. Hamlet and Macbeth would have much more comfortable lives, but what kind of lives would those be? Do we have models for making sense of such lives?

…

Nationalization of data by governments could offer one solution; it would certainly curb the power of big corporations. But history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of overmighty governments. So we had better call upon our scientists, our philosophers, our lawyers, and even our poets to turn their attention to this big question: How do you regulate the ownership of data?

Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans who produce enormous amounts of data and function as efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but they hardly maximize their human potential. If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.

[omgstupendousbouquetbasement]

In Florida Visit, Trump Melds Venezuela Policy, Campaign Strategy

Amid a surge in coronavirus cases, President Donald Trump flew to Florida on Friday on a visit that melded his administration’s policy toward Venezuela and Cuba and his reelection bid in one of the nation’s biggest swing states.

Trump hosted a round-table discussion in Doral, in Miami-Dade County, home to one of the largest Venezuelan communities in the United States. Flanked by Venezuelan and Cuban dissidents, Trump reiterated his administration’s support for the people of Venezuela and Cuba.

“We are standing with the righteous leader of Venezuela, Juan Guaido,” Trump said, adding that he had ended the “Obama-Biden sellout to the Castro regime.”

Trump laid out a similar message at an earlier event Friday as he met with leaders of the U.S. Southern Command to review the counternarcotics operation in the Caribbean, an effort his administration has described partly as an attempt to intercept funds going to the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

“We’re going to fight for Venezuela and we're going to be fighting for our friends from Cuba,” Trump said.

FILE - Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido talks to a journalist during an interview with The Associated Press in Brussels, Jan. 22, 2020.

Last year, Guaido, who was then Venezuelan National Assembly president, took over the role of interim president, replacing Maduro. Washington’s early support for Guaido helped him gain diplomatic recognition from about 60 countries. But a series of sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba and a proposal for a peaceful transition presented by the U.S. State Department have failed to persuade Maduro to leave office.

In June, Trump was criticized for saying he was open to meeting with Maduro. Trump later clarified he would do so only to discuss the Venezuelan president’s exit.

Shifting Venezuela policy

Presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden reminded voters of what he described as Trump’s shifting Venezuela foreign policy in a statement Friday.

“Just like his response to this pandemic, the president has been unreliable and self-centered in his approach to the issues closest to the Venezuelan people,” Biden said.

He renewed his pledge to grant Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans to allow them to live and work in the United States and said he would lead a coordinated international effort to help Venezuela’s failing economy. He called Trump’s Florida visit a “photo-op and a distraction from his failures.”

FILE - Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks during an event with the youth of Venezuela's United Socialist Party in Caracas, Venezuela, June 22, 2020.

At the round-table event in Florida, Trump hit back at his Democratic opponent. As attendees shared their experiences of fleeing from socialist countries, Trump described Biden as a puppet of progressive Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the militant left.”

Despite sanctions and diplomatic pressure by the Trump administration, the issue of Venezuela remains unresolved.

“The power struggle between Juan Guaido and Nicolas Maduro endures with no end in sight,” wrote Moises Rendon, director of The Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This underscores the limitations of sanctions as a foreign policy tool and calls into question their role within the U.S. maximum pressure campaign on the Maduro regime.”

Swing state

Florida has 29 electoral votes and is considered an important swing state that could decide the November presidential election. Trump narrowly won the state in 2016 over then-Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by 1.2 percentage points. According to a Fox News poll, Biden is currently ahead of Trump in Florida by 9 percentage points.

There is waning confidence in Trump from the Venezuelan American community in Florida, Luisana Perez Fernandez, deputy communications director of the state’s Democratic Party, told VOA.

This visit was for Trump to “continue lip service,” said Perez Fernandez, who came to the U.S. from Venezuela in 2011.

“It's been more than a year of him talking and talking about Venezuela, but Maduro is still in power and Venezuelans are still being deported,” she said.

But Republicans describe elevated energy on the ground to reelect the president.

"Miami is filled with immigrants fleeing socialist tyranny,” Maricel Cobitz, vice president of the Florida Federation of Republican Women, told VOA. “They lived these lies. The enthusiasm for President Trump and capitalism is overwhelming and real."

Trump’s visit to Florida appeared to be part of an outreach to Hispanic voters ahead of the November election. Almost a quarter of state residents consider themselves Hispanic.

On Thursday at the White House, the president signed an executive order “to improve Hispanic American access to educational and economic opportunities.”

FILE - A health care worker takes a swab sample from a driver at a drive-through COVID-19 testing site outside Hard Rock Stadium, July 8, 2020, in Miami Gardens, Fla. Florida is one of the nation's hot spots for coronavirus.

Overshadowed by pandemic

Florida reported nearly 11,500 more cases of COVID-19 on Friday, bringing the total number of cases to nearly 245,000 across the state. The state’s health department reported nearly 440 more hospitalizations Friday, the largest single-day increase the state has seen thus far.

Trump allies Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez are both facing criticism for their handling of the pandemic. DeSantis downplayed the outbreak early on but has since been forced to pause the state’s reopening amid a resurgence of the virus.

Despite the surge of cases, Republicans still plan to hold their national convention next month in Jacksonville, Florida.

The Trump campaign has been criticized for holding rallies and other large gatherings amid the pandemic. On Friday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump was postponing a rally in New Hampshire set for  Saturday, citing a tropical storm forecast to hit in the area.

Trump ended his Florida trip with a private fundraiser at Hillsboro Beach before returning to the White House.

Maritime counternarcotics

Since the Trump administration increased its maritime counternarcotics focus April 1, the U.S. has added 75% more surveillance aircraft and 65% more ships to support drug interdictions, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Friday during the U.S. Southern Command meeting with Trump.

President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on counternarcotics operations at U.S. Southern Command, July 10, 2020, in Doral, Fla.

The enhanced operations have allowed the U.S. and its allies to ramp up targeting of known maritime smugglers by 60%, Esper added, disrupting more than 122 metric tons of drugs and denying $2 billion in drug profits since late March.

That means that in the last three months alone, the U.S. and allies interdicted nearly half the amount of drugs that they interdicted in all of last year. According to SOUTHCOM data provided to VOA, the U.S. and its allies interdicted 273 metric tons of drugs in 2018 and 280 metric tons of drugs in 2019.

Still, these counternarcotics operations are making just a small dent in the illegal-drug profits of transnational criminal organizations, estimated at $90 billion a year according to SOUTHCOM.

In written testimony before the asset increase took effect, SOUTHCOM commander Admiral Craig Faller said the U.S. “only enabled the successful interdiction of about 9 percent of known drug movement” recently in Latin America and the Caribbean.

VOA Pentagon Correspondent Carla Babb contributed to this report.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/32iofl1 via IFTTT

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/united-states-of-america/trump-administration-announces-new-restrictions-on-dealing-with-cuba/

Trump Administration Announces New Restrictions on Dealing With Cuba

The Trump administration on Wednesday imposed new restrictions on dealing with Cuba amid a broader toughening of its Latin American policy, limiting nonfamily travel to the island and how much money Cuban-Americans can send to relatives there, and allowing exiles to sue for property seized by the Castro government.

“In our most fervent dreams, we could not have conceived that a U.S. administration would do this,” Nicolás J. Gutiérrez, president of the National Association of Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba and whose family lost property there, said in praising the decision to allow the lawsuits. “No administration has ever done this. Forget Reagan. Forget Bush.”

By allowing the lawsuits — a departure from nearly a quarter-century of policy — the administration dismissed passionate opposition from officials in Europe and Canada who had lobbied in recent weeks against the move, which could unleash a torrent of proceedings against companies and people accused of “trafficking” in the confiscated property.

The decision, announced by Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, was part of a broader set of policies that also targeted Venezuela and Nicaragua and were outlined in a speech in Miami by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser.

“The ‘troika of tyranny’ — Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua — is beginning to crumble,” Mr. Bolton said in the speech, which marked the 58th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the failed 1961 attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, Cuba’s communist leader. “The United States looks forward to watching each corner of this sordid triangle of terror fall.”

In the speech, Mr. Bolton announced new sanctions on the Central Bank of Venezuela and Nicaragua’s Bancorp, which he described as a “slush fund” for that nation’s president, Daniel Ortega. Earlier this month, the Trump administration imposed sanctions against Venezuela aimed at oil shipments between that country and Cuba.

Mr. Bolton also announced sanctions on Laureano Ortega, one of Mr. Ortega’s sons, who Mr. Bolton said had been groomed as a successor.

The bulk of the speech, however, was focused on the restrictions on dealings with Cuba, reversing the Obama administration’s embrace of the country.

The Trump administration will further restrict nonfamily travel to Cuba, which Mr. Bolton described as “veiled tourism.” It will also limit money sent to the country to $1,000 per person, per quarter.

Emilio Morales, who studies the Cuban economy closely for his firm, the Havana Consulting Group, said the cutback in remittances to Cuba would have virtually no effect, because the average monthly remittance to Cuba is $200 to $220.

Limiting nonfamily travel, however, will seriously hurt the tourism sector on the island, he said.

“The Obama era is over,” he said. “It’s all over.”

Still, the details of the travel restriction were not clear. There are up to a dozen categories of such travel, and the administration did not say whether they would be prohibited.

“I have spent the day on the telephone with current and former State and executive branch officials and industry and policy experts, and nobody knows what the actual restrictions are,” said Collin Laverty, president of Cuba Educational Travel, which organizes cultural and university trips to Cuba.

Cuban-Americans with property claims on the island hailed the decision to allow them to sue over their lost holdings.

Conchita Beltrán, 76, remembers well the day that the Cuban government confiscated more than 1,500 acres of her family’s sugar cane fields. Her grandmother, who had been meticulously managing the lands that had been in the family since the 1800s with the expectation of leaving it to her eight grandchildren, saw the announcement on television.

“Castro used to give the bad news around 9 at night,” Ms. Beltrán said. “She was watching the news at night, her head went down and she said: ‘I cannot believe it; my grandchildren are penniless. I have nothing to give them.’”

Her beloved grandmother had a heart attack and died that same night in 1960. Ms. Beltrán, who was a teenager then, has always dreamed of recovering the land.

The Helms-Burton Act, passed by Congress in 1996, gave Ms. Beltrán and others like her hope that they could someday get compensated. But administration after administration waived the provision that would allow them to sue.

“We have written to every president, and everybody ignored us,” Ms. Beltrán said. “We are very grateful to Trump. He is doing something nobody else had the courage to do.”

For weeks, though, foreign officials have lobbied Washington against allowing the lawsuits, arguing that it would harm their businesses and the Cuban people.

“The E.U. will consider all options at its disposal to protect its legitimate interests,” the European Commission said in a statement. Canada’s foreign minister said that the country was “deeply disappointed” by the announcement.

Collecting any judgment by suing the Cuban government is a long shot. Cuba does not recognize United States courts or defend itself against such lawsuits. In the past, courts have seized Cuban assets in the United States, but there are none left to confiscate.

Anyone who sues Cuba would be doing so for symbolic reasons, said Mr. Gutiérrez, of the National Association of Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba.

Suing foreign companies could also be difficult. People must prove they are the rightful owner and be able to show that the foreign company currently using it has assets in the United States, which could be an obstacle.

[newstfionline]

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Biden’s Afghanistan plan a plus to some vets (AP) Patrick Proctor Brown says the war in Afghanistan was lost within a year of its start. The suburban Milwaukee lawyer, who was an infantry captain in Iraq, said the trillions of dollars spent and the thousands of lives lost, including a lieutenant he trained with, make it “a tragedy.” “And the Taliban will be back in power in a year,” said Brown, 35, who also studied diplomacy at Norwich, a military university in Vermont. “It’s insane.” Brown supports President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, and by voting for the Democrat, he represents a subtle but potent shift in the voting behavior of some in the military. Voters who served in the military have long leaned toward Republicans. But there are signs that Biden may have cut into that advantage. “This president has got to end these wars,” said Jon Soltz, a former Army tank captain who formed the Democratic-leaning VoteVets.org in 2006. “He’s got to fulfill some of these promises. There’s a war-weariness in the military.”

Riot declared after windows smashed in Portland protests (AP) Police in Portland, Oregon, declared a riot Friday night after authorities said protesters smashed windows and burglarized businesses during demonstrations that started earlier in the day after police fatally shot a man while responding to reports of a person with a gun. The vandalism downtown came after the Friday morning police shooting but also was part of vigils and demonstrations already planned for the night in the name of people killed in other police shootings nationwide. They include 13-year-old Adam Toledo of Chicago and Daunte Wright, a Black man in a Minneapolis suburb. Deputy Police Chief Chris Davis told reporters earlier in the day that a white man in his 30s was shot and killed by police, who opened fire with a gun and weapons that fire non-lethal projectiles. A witness who spoke to reporters at the scene said the man, who had removed his shirt and was blocking an intersection, appeared to be in a mental health crisis.

Castro era in Cuba to end as Raul confirms he’s retiring (Reuters) Raul Castro confirmed he was handing over the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party to a younger generation at its congress that kicked off on Friday, ending six decades of rule by himself and older brother Fidel. In a speech opening the four-day event, Castro, 89, said the new leadership would be party loyalists with decades of experience working their way up the ranks and were “full of passion and anti-imperialist spirit.” The new generation of leaders, which did not forge itself through rebellion, has no easy task. The transition comes as Cuba faces the worst economic crisis since the collapse of former benefactor the Soviet Union, while there are signs of growing frustration, especially among younger Cubans. A tightening of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo and the coronavirus pandemic have exacerbated a liquidity crisis in Cuba’s ailing centrally planned economy. Shortages of even basic goods mean Cubans spend hours lining up to buy groceries.

Argentina closes schools, imposes curfew in Buenos Aires as COVID-19 cases spike (Reuters) Argentina’s government will tighten pandemic restrictions in and around the capital Buenos Aires to rein in a sharp spike in COVID-19 cases, including shutting schools and imposing a curfew from 8pm to limit social activity. President Alberto Fernández, 62, given his all-clear earlier in the day after he was infected with the virus, said the South American country needed to “gain time” in the fight against COVID-19 after daily cases hit a record this week. The measures will see schools closed in Greater Buenos Aires from Monday, and the suspension of indoor sports, recreational, religious and cultural activities until April 30.

The queen says goodbye to Philip, continues her reign alone (AP) Sitting by herself at the funeral of Prince Philip on Saturday, Queen Elizabeth cut a regal, but solitary figure: still the monarch, but now alone. The queen sat apart from family members at the simple but somber ceremony in accordance with strict social distancing rules during the coronavirus pandemic. But if the ceremony had been for anyone else, at her side would have been her husband of 73 years, who gave a lifetime of service to the crown. The monarch’s four children and eight grandchildren sat in small groups nearby, during a stripped-back service at Windsor Castle that made their loss somehow more personal for people who often live their lives in public. The service was quiet and without excessive pageantry. Philip was deeply involved in planning the ceremony. At his request, there was no sermon. There were also no eulogies or readings, in keeping with royal tradition. Former Bishop of London Richard Chartres, who knew Philip well, said the 50-minute service reflected the preferences of the prince, who was a man of faith but liked things to be succinct. “He was at home with broad church, high church and low church, but what he really liked was short church,” Chartres told the BBC.

Philip’s legacy lives in chef who traded prison for kitchen LONDON (AP)—Jon Watts was 18 years old when he woke up in a prison cell and decided he had to change. He enrolled in every course he could find, from mathematics to business. But he says it was a program founded by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, that gave him a “passion for food” and a career as a chef when he got out of prison 3 1/2 years later. “I was a young boy in prison,” Watts, now 32, told The Associated Press. “It helped mold me to be what I like to think is a good person, and it set me up to believe in myself, to believe that I can achieve things.” After Philip’s death last week at age 99, politicians and world leaders rushed to eulogize his lifetime of service to his wife, Queen Elizabeth II, and to the British nation. For many people across the country, though, his greatest contribution was the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, a program which seeks to give young people the skills and confidence they need to succeed. Participants in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award must complete volunteer work, improve their physical fitness, learn new skills, and go on expeditions to earn each of three progressively more difficult levels of achievement—bronze, silver and gold. More than 6.7 million people between the ages of 14 and 24 have taken part in the U.K., and the program has expanded to 130 countries since Philip founded it in 1956.

A Bitter Family Feud Dominates the Race to Replace Merkel (NYT) With less than six months to go before Germans cast their ballots for a new chancellor, the political vacuum Angela Merkel leaves behind after 16 years of consensus-oriented leadership is coming more sharply into focus. A rare and rancorous power struggle has gripped Germany’s conservatives this week as two rivals vie to replace her, threatening to further hobble her Christian Democratic Union, which is already sliding in the polls. Normally, Armin Laschet, 60, who was elected in January to lead the party, would almost assuredly be the heir apparent to Ms. Merkel. Instead, he finds himself unexpectedly pitted against his biggest rival, Markus Söder, the more popular head of a smaller, Bavaria-only party, the Christian Social Union, in a kind of conservative family feud. Experts and party members alike are calling for the dispute to be resolved within the coming days, as it risks damaging the reputation of the two conservative parties, jointly referred to as the Union. Because the two parties operate as one on the national stage, they must choose one candidate for chancellor.

Russia to expel 10 US diplomats in response to Biden actions (AP) On Thursday, the Biden administration announced sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2020 U.S. presidential election and involvement in the SolarWind hack of federal agencies—activities Moscow has denied. The U.S. ordered 10 Russian diplomats expelled, targeted dozens of companies and people, and imposed new curbs on Russia’s ability to borrow money. Russia responded by saying it would expel 10 U.S. diplomats and take other retaliatory moves in a tense showdown with Washington. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also said Moscow will move to shut down those U.S. nongovernment organizations that remain in Russia to end what he described as their meddling in Russia’s politics. The top Russian diplomat said the Kremlin suggested that U.S. Ambassador John Sullivan follow the example of his Russian counterpart and head home for consultations. Russia will also deny the U.S. Embassy the possibility of hiring personnel from Russia and third countries as support staff, limit visits by U.S. diplomats serving short-term stints at the embassy, and tighten requirements for U.S. diplomats’ travel in the country.

Russia’s surveillance state (Washington Post) Russian authorities are ramping up the use of facial recognition technology to track opposition protesters to their homes and arrest them—a powerful new Kremlin tool to crush opposition. But when state security agents are suspected of murders or attacks on journalists and opposition activists, surveillance cameras have at times been switched off or “malfunction.” And the system is so leaky that surveillance data on individuals can be bought for a small sum on Russia’s notorious black market in data, along with all kinds of other personal information. There is even a name for the clandestine cyber-bazaar: probiv. China leads the world in rolling out a vast network of facial recognition technology, including a system to track and repress its Uyghur minority. But Putin’s Russia is racing to catch up. Russian firms such as NtechLab produce some of the world’s most sophisticated facial recognition software as authorities grapple with counterpunches by the opposition, including using social media to expose Russia’s kleptocracy such as extravagances by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s political allies. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the facial recognition system—rolled out in Moscow en masse in January 2020 and expanded to at least 10 other Russian cities—is now used in 70 percent of crime investigations. Moscow has more than 189,000 cameras with facial recognition capabilities, as well as more than 12,300 on subway cars in Moscow’s Metro.

Health care: The medical cost crisis will outlast COVID (The Week) Few would disagree that “much-reviled Big Pharma pulled off one of the great achievements in medical history,” said Geoff Colvin at Fortune—quickly developing multiple effective COVID-19 vaccines. Hospital workers, too, “have been heroes in the truest sense” in the fight against the pandemic. These are not groups America “wants to punish” right now. But something has to give. A system of “perverse incentives,” from drug distribution to insurance rebates, has made health-care costs “maddeningly untamable.” In the six years since the Affordable Care Act was passed, health-care spending per capita has increased faster than it did in the six years prior. Three-quarters of Americans say that the quality of the health care they get isn’t worth what they are paying for it. Big Hospitals and Big Pharma are “at each other’s throats” over who is to blame, but the trend in costs “isn’t about to reverse.” Poorer hospitals have “limped through the year,” straining under the costs of COVID, said Jordan Rau and Christine Spolar at Kaiser Health News, but many wealthier ones have done just fine. The U.S. has budgeted $178 billion in aid for health-care providers, and even profitable hospitals have gotten help. After receiving $454 million in federal aid, Baylor, the biggest nonprofit hospital system in Texas, “accumulated an $815 million surplus, $20 million more than it had in 2019.” Despite this, hospitals have devised ways to pass on costs, said Sarah Kliff at The New York Times. Lenox Hill, one of the oldest and best-known hospitals in New York City, has “repeatedly billed patients more than $3,000 for the routine nasal swab test” for COVID, “about 30 times the test’s typical cost.” The hospital “advertised its COVID-19 testing on a large blue-and-white banner,” then charged each visit as an emergency room procedure. Federal legislation mandated that coronavirus testing be free for patients. “But eventually, American patients bear the costs in the form of higher insurance premiums.”

[troger]

How Trump Grew His Support Among Latinos

He understood what motivated his voters, and he made sure they knew he did.

Geraldo L. Cadava

History professor at Northwestern University

Latinos are not a uniform voting bloc. We are spread across the country and have wildly different backgrounds. Over the years, Latinos ourselves have struggled to articulate what unites and divides us. The first question I ask in my Latino History course at Northwestern University is “Who, or what, is a ‘Latino’ anyway?” The class never resolves the question, but the students go back to it over and over as they study the evolving conceptions of Latinos.

We are so diverse that we often say the “Latino vote” doesn’t really exist. Yet certain trends emerge when you look closely at the voting preferences of our motley demographic. According to my calculations based on early exit polls, almost 60 percent of eligible Latinos voted this year—more than 19 million voters—compared with about 50 percent in prior elections. That turnout means that a huge number voted for Joe Biden, but also that a large number voted for Donald Trump. Trump earned 28 percent of Latino votes in 2016 and approximately 32 percent in 2020. He was able to expand his support not only in southern Florida, where many typically conservative Cuban Americans live, but also among Latinos of different stripes across the country—in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Read: What liberals don’t understand about pro-Trump Latinos

How did a president who has continually maligned immigrants grow his portion of Latino voters? Hispanic Republicans and Latino Trump supporters are not “self-hating,” as the actor John Leguizamo and many others have argued. I’ve studied Republicans’ relationship with Latinos over the decades and have conducted many interviews with voters and political operatives during this election. The political beliefs of these voters are deeply held and sincere. Trump understood what motivated his Latino supporters—economic individualism, religious liberty, and law and order—and he made sure they knew he did.     

In almost every election since Richard Nixon’s in 1972, the Republican presidential candidate has won from a quarter to a third of the Latino vote, even as the GOP tacked right on immigration and border enforcement. In 2004, Latinos, drawn to George W. Bush’s moderation and compassion on a range of issues, including immigration and bilingual education, gave him about 40 percent of their votes. Trump was a very different candidate and president from Bush, but a sizable percentage of Latinos had come to identify as loyal Republicans, and they wouldn’t switch sides easily.

Trump’s administration built on existing Republican support by relentlessly courting Latinos since 2017, focusing on his economic policies and support for religious freedom. Even as Trump made family separation and the border wall central parts of his platform, the White House engaged Latino business owners early and often. Trump lowered taxes, slashed financial regulations, and named a Latina Small Business Administration administrator, Jovita Carranza, who helped Latino business owners. He also claimed credit in speeches for low unemployment numbers, rising rates of homeownership, and growing family incomes for Latinos, trends that started during the Barack Obama years.

While Democrats focused on Trump’s slanders, they missed a bigger picture. Take, for example, the week in early July when Goya CEO Robert Unanue’s praise of Trump resulted in calls to boycott Goya products. That week as a whole was about Trump’s relentless recruitment of Latino voters—the visit by Mexico’s president to celebrate the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement; the announcement of the Hispanic Prosperity Initiative, which promised more support for Latino business owners, charter schools, and Hispanic-serving institutions; and the meeting with Southcom, a joint military command based in Florida that’s responsible for operations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, during which the president promised to halt the flow of drugs from Latin America.

Trump also successfully exploited the economic frustrations of many Latinos, young and old. He clearly stated that he had answers to their problems, would help them find jobs, and would grow the economy. This rhetoric resonated with those in South Texas, a heavily Mexican American, traditionally Democratic area of the state with high rates of poverty, poor educational outcomes, and health disparities, including a particularly high rate of COVID-19 infection and mortality.

Read: The neglect of Latino voters

Republican boosters in the region talked about improved quality of life, business opportunities, and educational access to institutions such as the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Trump amplified this narrative of regional progress and gave many in the area hope. Monica De La Cruz–Hernandez, a Republican who narrowly lost her race for a congressional seat in the Rio Grande Valley, told me that Trump had helped Mexican Americans “find their voice.” Now they’re “walk-away Democrats” who shifted their support to Trump more dramatically than Latinos in other parts of the country.

Trump aggressively talked about law and order in a way that appealed particularly to Latino men in the Border Patrol, military, and police departments. In the days before the election, Latino leaders of the National Border Patrol Council expressed support for Trump’s immigration and border policies. Art Del Cueto, the council’s vice president, said, “We must continue to support the rule of the law and continue to support President Trump.” Trump also received the endorsement of the National Latino Peace Officers Association Advocacy.

The Trump administration focused on Latino churchgoers, deputizing Vice President Mike Pence to visit gatherings with Latino evangelicals and tell them that Trump was the defender of their religious liberties. Members of this religious group have deeply ingrained anti-abortion-rights beliefs, and they also responded to the administration’s support for religious charter schools and its general desire to blur the lines between religion and public life. Latino evangelicals aren’t all Republicans. One of their leaders, Gabriel Salguero, has called them classic swing voters whose political allegiance is divided. But they do support Republicans at greater rates—46 percent—than the general Latino population does.

Finally, the idea, spread through scaremongering campaigns, that most Democrats are socialists worried Latinos whose families had fled leftist-controlled governments in Latin America. Socialism was also shorthand for a range of ideas related to government overreach in healthcare, the economy, and education.  

Latinos certainly contributed to Biden’s margin of victory. The former vice president’s campaign and its pollster Latino Decisions point to the dramatic rise in Latino participation. However, the campaign has been criticized for not beginning its outreach earlier. It didn’t really start until the days before the Democratic National Convention and focused on us during Hispanic Heritage Month in the fall, despite the fact that Latino political strategists have long argued that a candidate can’t expect our support if he shows up only in the final months or weeks of a campaign.

But to believe that earlier outreach would have led to a dramatically different result is to ignore the political agency of Latino Republicans and Trump supporters. Republicans in 2024 will look to replicate Trump’s relative success among Latinos, perhaps without the racism. Democrats, meanwhile, should grapple with the reality that a growing number of Latinos voted for the Republican Party’s policies. They should engage Latinos across the country, beginning today, to understand how to better represent their preferences on issues including healthcare, education, the economy, and immigration. If Democrats hope to reverse the gains Republicans made this year, they should also pay attention to what about Trump drew Latinos in.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Geraldo Cadava, a history professor at Northwestern University, is the author of The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump.

[mikemortgage]

Cubans fly around the world hunting shopping bargains

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Most people don’t think of Haiti as a shopping destination. Unless they’re Cuban.

Every afternoon, hundreds of Cubans swarm a rutted crossroads in the capital of the hemisphere’s poorest nation, hunting clothes, light bulbs, perfume and other goods that are in short supply back home.

Haitian vendors blast Cuban reggaeton music to draw in shoppers. In a year-old cafe painted with Cuban flags, Havana-born Angelina Luis Dominguez and her niece Yeleny Terry Luis serve black beans, rice and roast pork to compatriots on lunch breaks.

“There are thousands, thousands of Cubans,” Luis Dominquez said. “There used to be four or five; now they’ve taken root. It feels like all of Cuba is here.”

The “Cuban market” in Port-au-Prince is part of a global trade, estimated to top $2 billion, fed by the confluence of Cubans’ increased freedom to travel with the communist state’s continued domination of the economy back home.

Clothing, housewares, hardware, personal-care products and other goods at state-run stores in Cuba cost two or three times what they do elsewhere. And that’s when they are on sale at all in an economy hampered by incessant shortage. What’s more, Cuba’s state monopoly on imports and exports excludes the small but vibrant private sector, which employs more than a half million people who often earn three or four times a state worker’s salary.

Since Cuba did away with a hated exit permit five years ago, Cubans are packing flights to destinations with easy entry requirements. In Port-au-Prince, Panama City, Cancun, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, even Moscow, Cubans are packing suitcases with goods for personal use and resale back home.

In Panama, the Colon Free Trade Zone has a “Little Havana” where Cubans spent $308 million last year, and are on track to spend perhaps 8 per cent more in 2018, said Luis Carlos Saenz, the zone’s general assistant manager.

“We now have an important Cuban clientele who came to make purchases and are making a significant contribution to business in the zone,” Saenz said.

Panama is so eager for Cuban business that its embassy in Havana has started giving Cubans with private business licenses on-the-spot “tourist cards” that eliminate the need for a lengthy visa application process.

“More Cubans are coming now because of the tourist cards,” said Jose Hernandez, who was shopping in the free zone with a group of relatives last week. “Taking back an air conditioner, an electric motorcycle is a big deal for us. In Cuba, that’s gold.”

That sort of business tourism has diversified a trade long centred on South Florida, where Cubans with family ties in the U.S. relied on relatives to shuttle in personal or business goods. Driving the trade away from Miami has been the Trump administration’s decision to pull most staff from its Havana embassy last year, ending visa processing there and forcing Cubans to travel to third countries to apply for permission to visit the U.S.

The Miami-based Havana Consulting Group estimated in an August study that Cubans spent more than $2 billion in 2017 on bringing goods back to the island.

That spending may equal anywhere from 2 per cent to 5 per cent of Cuba’s gross domestic product, depending on which of the wildly varying estimates of GDP is used in absence of reliable economic statistics on the island’s economy.

Cuba maintains tight restrictions on the quantities that individuals can import, and working as a “mule” — bringing goods back for others — is technically prohibited, according to some official statements, but it is rarely prosecuted.

Haiti, which is struggling with increasing violence and a devaluing currency, appears to be grabbing an increasing slice of the Cuban shopping pie.

In the neighbourhood surrounding the market, dozens of Cubans run bed-and-breakfasts for travelling shoppers in homes rented from Haitian owners. Dozens of Haitian “guides” help Cubans hunt down specialized goods like electronics and hardware.

“I have visas for Panama and Mexico but I like Haiti,” said Eduardo Leiva, who runs a small hardware business in Cuba. “There’s great variety of merchandise, a level of product that you don’t find in other countries.”

Tiny Sunrise Airways runs 12 direct flights weekly from the Cuban cities of Havana, Camaguey and Santiago to Port-au-Prince. Cubans interviewed in the market said they spend about $700 on airfare, food and lodging and another $700 on merchandise, which they resell at a markup high enough to make several hundred dollars profit per trip.

Most of those interviewed said they made near-monthly trips, generating more than $2,000 in extra income a month in a country where annual state salaries are less than $400.

“The Cubans are very good for us. They come, they take merchandise back home, we get to make a little profit,” said Terese Rencher, who buys Peruvian-made T-shirts with designer logos in the Dominican Republic and sells them at the “Cuban market.”

“This is how I sent my kid to school, to university,” said Rencher, who said her 23-year-old daughter is studying at a hotel school in Port-au-Prince.

Some Cubans said they had been robbed by young men aware that Cubans can be carrying large sums of cash, but they still preferred the quick trip to the neighbouring island over the odysseys many Cubans undertake to feed their country’s informal retail market.

“Compared with Russia, Haiti is closer, it isn’t cold, and the merchandise is practically the same,” said taxi driver Braulio Hernandez, who was hunting tools and parts for his home car-repair workshop.

——

Associated Press journalists Evens Sanon in Port-au-Prince and Juan Zamorano in Colon, Panama, contributed to this report.

——

Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mweissenstein

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[alamante]

Given Spain’s historical links to Latin America, many Venezuelans have used their family ancestry to claim a Spanish passport. Several have relatives who fled Spain in 1939, after Gen. Francisco Franco won the civil war, while others have tapped into a citizenship program for descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from the country in 1492.

Venezuelans are also among the main applicants to Spain’s “golden visa” scheme, which grants residency to foreigners buying a property worth €500,000 or more, a measure instituted in 2013 to help revive the crisis-hit economy.

“Madrid is becoming for Venezuelans what Miami once was for us — and remains for Cubans,” said Mr. Seijas of SNB Capital, who also heads an investment association and estimates that about 280,000 Venezuelans now live in Spain, of whom about 120,000 have acquired Spanish citizenship.

Tomás Páez, a professor who studies immigration at the Central University of Venezuela, said Venezuelans now formed the fastest-growing foreign community in Spain, more than doubling their presence in the past two years.

Javier Cremades, a Spanish lawyer and chairman of Cremades Calvo y Sotelo, said his Madrid-based firm was representing about 40 Venezuelans applying for a golden visa. Mr. Cremades has also been at the forefront of Spanish efforts to help Mr. Maduro’s political opponents, like Antonio Ledezma, the former mayor of Caracas, who fled to Spain last November.

In July, Mr. Ledezma was among an association representing Venezuelan residents in Madrid that called on Spain’s new Socialist government to grant a special asylum status to those fleeing Mr. Maduro’s regime.

On the other hand, members of the Venezuelan opposition have used social media to keep track in Spain of the “bolochicos,” a derogatory nickname given to the younger heirs of the Bolivarian republic of Venezuela started by Mr. Chávez, who became president in 1999.

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[omgstupendousbouquetbasement]

In Florida Visit, Trump Melds Venezuela Policy, Campaign Strategy

Amid a surge in coronavirus cases, President Donald Trump flew to Florida on Friday on a visit that melded his administration’s policy toward Venezuela and Cuba and his reelection bid in one of the nation’s biggest swing states.

Trump hosted a round-table discussion in Doral, in Miami-Dade County, home to one of the largest Venezuelan communities in the United States. Flanked by Venezuelan and Cuban dissidents, Trump reiterated his administration’s support for the people of Venezuela and Cuba.

“We are standing with the righteous leader of Venezuela, Juan Guaido,” Trump said, adding that he had ended the “Obama-Biden sellout to the Castro regime.”

Trump laid out a similar message at an earlier event Friday as he met with leaders of the U.S. Southern Command to review the counternarcotics operation in the Caribbean, an effort his administration has described partly as an attempt to intercept funds going to the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

“We’re going to fight for Venezuela and we're going to be fighting for our friends from Cuba,” Trump said.

FILE - Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido talks to a journalist during an interview with The Associated Press in Brussels, Jan. 22, 2020.

Last year, Guaido, who was then Venezuelan National Assembly president, took over the role of interim president, replacing Maduro. Washington’s early support for Guaido helped him gain diplomatic recognition from about 60 countries. But a series of sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba and a proposal for a peaceful transition presented by the U.S. State Department have failed to persuade Maduro to leave office.

In June, Trump was criticized for saying he was open to meeting with Maduro. Trump later clarified he would do so only to discuss the Venezuelan president’s exit.

Shifting Venezuela policy

Presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden reminded voters of what he described as Trump’s shifting Venezuela foreign policy in a statement Friday.

“Just like his response to this pandemic, the president has been unreliable and self-centered in his approach to the issues closest to the Venezuelan people,” Biden said.

He renewed his pledge to grant Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans to allow them to live and work in the United States and said he would lead a coordinated international effort to help Venezuela’s failing economy. He called Trump’s Florida visit a “photo-op and a distraction from his failures.”

FILE - Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks during an event with the youth of Venezuela's United Socialist Party in Caracas, Venezuela, June 22, 2020.

At the round-table event in Florida, Trump hit back at his Democratic opponent. As attendees shared their experiences of fleeing from socialist countries, Trump described Biden as a puppet of progressive Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the militant left.”

Despite sanctions and diplomatic pressure by the Trump administration, the issue of Venezuela remains unresolved.

“The power struggle between Juan Guaido and Nicolas Maduro endures with no end in sight,” wrote Moises Rendon, director of The Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This underscores the limitations of sanctions as a foreign policy tool and calls into question their role within the U.S. maximum pressure campaign on the Maduro regime.”

Swing state

Florida has 29 electoral votes and is considered an important swing state that could decide the November presidential election. Trump narrowly won the state in 2016 over then-Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by 1.2 percentage points. According to a Fox News poll, Biden is currently ahead of Trump in Florida by 9 percentage points.

There is waning confidence in Trump from the Venezuelan American community in Florida, Luisana Perez Fernandez, deputy communications director of the state’s Democratic Party, told VOA.

This visit was for Trump to “continue lip service,” said Perez Fernandez, who came to the U.S. from Venezuela in 2011.

“It's been more than a year of him talking and talking about Venezuela, but Maduro is still in power and Venezuelans are still being deported,” she said.

But Republicans describe elevated energy on the ground to reelect the president.

"Miami is filled with immigrants fleeing socialist tyranny,” Maricel Cobitz, vice president of the Florida Federation of Republican Women, told VOA. “They lived these lies. The enthusiasm for President Trump and capitalism is overwhelming and real."

Trump’s visit to Florida appeared to be part of an outreach to Hispanic voters ahead of the November election. Almost a quarter of state residents consider themselves Hispanic.

On Thursday at the White House, the president signed an executive order “to improve Hispanic American access to educational and economic opportunities.”

FILE - A health care worker takes a swab sample from a driver at a drive-through COVID-19 testing site outside Hard Rock Stadium, July 8, 2020, in Miami Gardens, Fla. Florida is one of the nation's hot spots for coronavirus.

Overshadowed by pandemic

Florida reported nearly 11,500 more cases of COVID-19 on Friday, bringing the total number of cases to nearly 245,000 across the state. The state’s health department reported nearly 440 more hospitalizations Friday, the largest single-day increase the state has seen thus far.

Trump allies Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez are both facing criticism for their handling of the pandemic. DeSantis downplayed the outbreak early on but has since been forced to pause the state’s reopening amid a resurgence of the virus.

Despite the surge of cases, Republicans still plan to hold their national convention next month in Jacksonville, Florida.

The Trump campaign has been criticized for holding rallies and other large gatherings amid the pandemic. On Friday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump was postponing a rally in New Hampshire set for  Saturday, citing a tropical storm forecast to hit in the area.

Trump ended his Florida trip with a private fundraiser at Hillsboro Beach before returning to the White House.

Maritime counternarcotics

Since the Trump administration increased its maritime counternarcotics focus April 1, the U.S. has added 75% more surveillance aircraft and 65% more ships to support drug interdictions, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Friday during the U.S. Southern Command meeting with Trump.

President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on counternarcotics operations at U.S. Southern Command, July 10, 2020, in Doral, Fla.

The enhanced operations have allowed the U.S. and its allies to ramp up targeting of known maritime smugglers by 60%, Esper added, disrupting more than 122 metric tons of drugs and denying $2 billion in drug profits since late March.

That means that in the last three months alone, the U.S. and allies interdicted nearly half the amount of drugs that they interdicted in all of last year. According to SOUTHCOM data provided to VOA, the U.S. and its allies interdicted 273 metric tons of drugs in 2018 and 280 metric tons of drugs in 2019.

Still, these counternarcotics operations are making just a small dent in the illegal-drug profits of transnational criminal organizations, estimated at $90 billion a year according to SOUTHCOM.

In written testimony before the asset increase took effect, SOUTHCOM commander Admiral Craig Faller said the U.S. “only enabled the successful interdiction of about 9 percent of known drug movement” recently in Latin America and the Caribbean.

VOA Pentagon Correspondent Carla Babb contributed to this report.

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[newsvomit-blog]

U.S. decision to permanently reduce Cuba embassy staff draws swift reaction

The State Department announced Friday it will permanently maintain a skeletal staff at the U.S.embassy in Cuba citing the “health attacks” on its personnel that have baffled experts to this day.The decision to maintain the staff at 60 per cent will have a sweeping impact across U.S.intelligence, small business owners, Cuban migration, and human rights advocates.

The reaction by many who support engagement with Cuba has been swift.James Williams, President of Engage Cuba, a group that advocates for engagement with the island, laments the decision, particularly because Cuba will soon go through one of the biggest political transitions in recent history when Raul Castro steps down on April 19.“While Cuba is going through the most historic transition in almost 60 years, the United States is going to be blind on the island,” Williams said.The decision is “not going to help with human rights, political reform, economic reform, not to mention Cuban families being connected as a result,” he said.Last October, the State Department ordered non-essential embassy personnel and the families of all staff to leave Havana, arguing the U.S.could not protect them from unexplained illnesses that have harmed at least 24 Americans.But by law, the department can only order diplomats to leave for six months before either sending them back or making the reductions permanent.The six months expire Sunday.

So the department said it was setting in place a new, permanent staffing plan that maintains a lower level of roughly two-dozen people — “the minimum personnel necessary to perform core diplomatic and consular functions.” The department also said that the embassy in Havana would operate as an “unaccompanied post,” meaning diplomats posted there will not be allowed to have spouses or children live with them in the country.Camilo Condis, an entrepreneur in Havana, says he is concerned about the impact this will have on those in the private sector.It comes at a crucial time, when many are anticipating an announcement by the Cuban government to curtail private businesses.Condis, who rents an apartment to locals and is a senior manager at Artecorte, a non-profit that holds community activities, said “many of us will lose the opportunity to visit our families in the U.S.” Because of the scarcity of supplies on the island “many entrepreneurs buy many or most of the items they need for their businesses in the U.S.”Martha Honey, the executive director of the Center for Responsible Travel, a non-profit focused on sustainable tourism, said how this will affect U.S.travel to Cuba is still a question mark, though she is cautiously optimistic.She said the State Department’s position has been that when there is a draw down of diplomats at an embassy, they have to simultaneously issue a travel warning and caution the public that the embassy has been downsized.“It sets a new normal.

And the new normal is that the current size of the embassy staff will remain.My reading is that this could change the status of the travel warning against Cuba from a level three to a level two,” Honey said.When the U.S.ordered its personnel out of Cuba, it had issued a warning advising Americans not to travel to the country.

In January, when the State Department changed its travel alert system, it changed the warning to a level 3 and recommended Americans “reconsider” traveling to Cuba.The downsizing of the embassy staff along with a travel warning have had significant effects on Cuba’s economy and for its citizens.With fewer employees on hand, the U.S.Embassy in Havana halted visa processing, forcing Cubans who wish to visit the United States to seek visas through U.S.

embassies in other countries.The U.S.is also expected to fall far short of granting the 20,000 immigrant visas to Cubans that have been allotted annually for decades.Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed off on the permanent plan for reduced staffing out of concern for “the health, safety and well-being of U.S.

government personnel and family members,” the department said in a statement.”We still do not have definitive answers on the source or cause of the attacks, and an investigation into the attacks is ongoing,” the department said.Cuba has repeatedly denied either involvement in or knowledge of any attacks, and has said its own investigation into the illnesses has turned up no evidence of deliberate action.The United States has not accused Cuba of such action but has said Havana holds responsibility nonetheless, arguing that such incidents could not have occurred on the small, communist-run island without the knowledge of Cuban officials.The mysterious case has sent U.S.-Cuba relations plummeting from what had been a high point when the two countries, estranged for a half-century, restored full diplomatic ties under President Barack Obama in 2015.In late 2016, U.S.Embassy personnel began seeking medical care for hearing loss and ear-ringing that they linked to weird noises or vibrations — initially leading investigators to suspect “sonic attacks.”An interim FBI report disclosed by The Associated Press in early January said the investigation has uncovered no evidence that sound waves could have damaged the Americans’ health.

But Tillerson has said he’s still convinced the diplomats were hit by deliberate, specific attacks targeting their health.Doctors treating the patients said in a study published last month that the sounds heard by diplomats might have been a byproduct of something else that might help explain the full symptom list: memory problems, impaired concentration, irritability, balance problems and dizziness.The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association said doctors still have no clear diagnosis of just what happened to trigger the mysterious health problems.The Associated Press contributed to this report.FOLLOW LATINO ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM Source: NBC News.

U.S. decision to permanently reduce Cuba embassy staff draws swift reaction was originally published on NewsVomit

[newstfionline]

Saturday, July 24, 2021

Virus’s impact (AP) The eruption of COVID-19 last year caused the proportion of people working from home in the U.S. to nearly double. The share of employed people working from home shot up from just 22% in 2019 to 42% in 2020, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was among the striking findings of an annual government survey that documents the far-reaching impact the viral pandemic has had on Americans’ everyday lives since it struck in March of last year. Because of the pandemic and the widespread social distancing it required, people on average spent more time last year sleeping, watching TV, playing games, using a computer and relaxing and thinking—and less time socializing and communicating in person—than in 2019. Adults also spent more hours, on average, caring for children in their household. The survey also lends support to concerns that the pandemic worsened isolation for millions of Americans. With people working from home or attending school online, the time they spent alone increased. Among Americans ages 15 and over, time spent alone each day increased by an average of an hour. For those ages 15 to 19, it rose 1.7 hours per day.

Medical debt (NYT) A new study put the amount of unpaid medical bills held by collection agencies at $140 billion last year, up from $81 billion according to a similar analysis carried out in 2016. The analysis looked at 10 percent of all TransUnion credit reports and found that about 18 percent of Americans have medical debt that has been sent to collections. Over the period from 2009 to 2020, the largest source of debt owed to collection agencies became medical debt. The $140 billion, to be clear, is not an estimate of medical debt; that figure is far higher, as the $140 billion is merely the debt that has been passed along to the vultures.

Crews make progress on huge Oregon blaze (AP) The nation’s largest wildfire raged through southern Oregon on Friday but crews were scaling back some night operations as hard work and weaker winds helped reduce the spread of flames even as wildfires continued to threaten homes in neighboring California. The Bootleg Fire, which has destroyed an area half the size of Rhode Island, was 40% surrounded after burning some 70 homes, mainly cabins, fire officials said. The fire, which was sparked by lightning, had been expanding by up to 4 miles (6 kilometers) a day, pushed by strong winds and critically dry weather.

Thousands of bullets have been fired in this D.C. neighborhood (Washington Post) Markeith Muskelly, a barber who has spent half his 52 years cutting hair in Southeast Washington, has seen people get shot on the street outside the shop where he works. Last fall, he saw a man die there. The shop is tucked into a corner of the Benco Shopping Center, a mainstay in the Marshall Heights neighborhood for six decades. Its plate-glass window has long offered a view of one of the most dangerous streets in the District. In the neighborhood where Muskelly works, gun violence has affected generations, bringing a sad realization that, for some, that the danger may never end. A Washington Post analysis shows that in a recent period of a little more than three years, crime scene technicians found 2,759 bullet casings—byproducts of shootings involving rifles, pistols and shotguns—in about a one-square-mile area that includes Benning Road in Marshall Heights, with Benco between them. Bullets have struck people, pockmarked parked cars, embedded in walls of homes and shattered windows of businesses filled with patrons. Patrol officers carry “quick clot gauze” used by troops in war.

Volunteers hunting for Mexico’s ‘disappeared’ become targets (AP) The mainly female volunteers who fan out across Mexico to hunt for the bodies of murdered relatives are themselves increasingly being killed, putting to the test the government’s promise to help them in their quest for a final shred of justice: a chance to mourn. Those who carry on the effort tell tales of long getting threats and being watched—presumably by the same people who murdered their sons, brothers and husbands. But now threats have given way to bullets in the heads of searchers who have proved far better than the authorities at ferreting out the clandestine burial and burning pits that number in the thousands. Two searchers have been slain the past two months. Fear has always accompanied the searchers. They go to wild, remote, abandoned places where terrible crimes have been committed. But up to now, they mostly shrugged it off.

Cuba’s communist authorities have long feared change. Street protests show the risk of resisting it. (Washington Post) On a farm not far from the town where Cuba’s protests first erupted this month, police investigators last summer carried out a major sting operation. Their target was not a dissident activist, but a dairyman nicknamed El Rey del Queso: The King of Cheese. His offense? Operating a clandestine factory that produced tire-sized hunks of cheese for private sale in Havana. Authorities arrested the King, confiscated hundreds of pounds of yellow queso and produced a news report about the bust on Cuban state television depicting him as a villain. Cuba’s communist authorities have for decades treated private entrepreneurs as a threat to be contained, not encouraged. Long after China and Vietnam embraced market reforms, using material prosperity to buttress authoritarian rule, Cuba has clung to an economic model based on centralized planning and state control. The July 11 protests that shook Cuba’s rulers showed that model might be their biggest vulnerability, as its weak foundation is further eroded by the decades-long U.S. embargo, additional Trump-era sanctions and now the coronavirus pandemic. The country’s economy contracted 11 percent last year, according to government data. Cubans are spending hours in lines to buy basic goods they can barely afford. Hospitals have been overwhelmed by covid patients, and medicine is scarce. Power outages are turning stifling summer heat into an explosive fuse. “Unless the government makes profound changes, I think people will take to the streets again,” said Camilo Condis, a Cuban entrepreneur and business advocate.

Haiti leader’s slaying exposes role of ex-Colombian soldiers (AP) As the coronavirus pandemic squeezed Colombia, the Romero family was in need of money to pay the mortgage. Mauricio Romero Medina’s $790 a month pension as a retired soldier wasn’t going far. Then came a call offering a solution. When Romero answered the phone on June 2, another veteran, Duberney Capador, offered what he said was a legal, long-term job requiring only a passport. But Romero had to make a decision fast. “Talk about it with your family and if you are interested, see you tomorrow in Bogota, because the flight is the day after tomorrow,” Romero’s wife, Giovanna, told The Associated Press, recalling the conversation. A month later, Romero and Capador were dead and 18 Colombians were reportedly in custody, accused of taking part in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. It’s a case that dramatizes Colombia’s role as a recruiting ground for the global security industry—and its murkier, mercenary corners. Colombia’s Defense Ministry says about 10,600 soldiers retire each year, many highly trained warriors forged in a decades-long battle against leftist rebels and drug trafficking cartels. Many—including a number of those involved in Haiti—have been trained by the U.S. military. Those soldiers make up a pool of recruits for companies seeking a wide range of services—as consultants or bodyguards, in teams guarding Middle Eastern oil pipelines or as part of military-like private security in places like the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. The UAE paid Colombian veterans to join in the battle against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Italy makes health pass mandatory for many leisure activities, in bid to pressure the unvaccinated (Washington Post) Italy on Thursday significantly ramped up pressure on its unvaccinated population, announcing that a digital or printed health pass would be necessary for accessing a range of everyday leisure activities, from theaters to indoor dining. The decision puts Italy in a rare category along with France among Western nations that have been willing to leverage certain freedoms and equalities now that vaccines have become widely available. Italy is essentially betting that it can revive its slowing vaccination campaign—and avoid future, onerous restrictions—by creating heavy incentives for inoculation, in the kind of step that would be politically unthinkable in the United States. Italy is looking for ways to avoid a new round of closures and curfews. For now, every Italian region is “white”—meaning that life proceeds almost as normal, and people can stay out as late as they want. That has made for a joyful Italian summer.

‘Messy’ fight (Washington Post) KUNDUZ, Afghanistan—Around 3 a.m., a small team of elite special forces were halfway through an operation to retake a sliver of territory along the city’s northern edge when a police unit assisting them refused to advance. Hours later, the police fled, ceding the territory back to the Taliban. For weeks, the Afghan military has struggled to hold provincial capitals such as Kunduz after a surge of Taliban attacks that came as U.S. forces withdrew and U.S. air support dropped. Afghan ground forces are increasingly used to fill the void. Their capabilities are uneven, however, resulting in government advances that often rapidly evaporate. Experienced and motivated elite units are leading the battle to retake territory. But the troops called up to secure those gains—army, police and irregular fighters—often have little training and are less inclined to fight. First Lt. Abdullah Ansari, 30, led the elite unit retaking territory house by house in Kunduz earlier this month. He said the debacle on Kunduz’s northern edge made him miss working with U.S. troops. “Now everything is just messy,” he said.

Death rates soar in Southeast Asia as virus wave spreads (AP) Indonesia has converted nearly its entire oxygen production to medical use just to meet the demand from COVID-19 patients struggling to breathe. Overflowing hospitals in Malaysia had to resort to treating patients on the floor. And in Myanmar’s largest city, graveyard workers have been laboring day and night to keep up with the grim demand for new cremations and burials. Images of bodies burning in open-air pyres during the peak of the pandemic in India horrified the world in May, but in the last two weeks the three Southeast Asian nations have now all surpassed India’s peak per capita death rate as a new coronavirus wave, fueled by the virulent delta variant, tightens its grip on the region. The deaths have followed record numbers of new cases being reported in countries across the region which have left health care systems struggling to cope and governments scrambling to implement new restrictions to try to slow the spread.

Typhoon to bring heavy rains to Taiwan, China over weekend (AP) A typhoon is forecast to bring heavy rains to Taiwan and coastal China over the weekend, days after the worst flooding on record in a central Chinese province caused at least 51 deaths. Forecasters say Typhoon In-fa is moving toward China and expected to make landfall in Zhejiang province either Sunday afternoon or early Monday morning. Zhejiang’s bureau of emergency management said on its microblog Friday that it is raising its risk warning to the second-highest level and calling on all localities to take preventative measures. Those usually include recalling fishing boats to port and relocating people living in vulnerable coastal communities. Fujian province to the south has issued similar orders. On its current track, the eye of the typhoon is expected to pass north of Taiwan while still bringing considerable rain to the island.

[uniteordie-usa]

Americans Are Only Now Beginning to Learn that We Live in a Dictatorship

http://uniteordie-usa.com/americans-are-only-now-beginning-to-learn-that-we-live-in-a-dictatorship/ http://uniteordie-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/North-Woods.jpg Americans Are Only Now Beginning to Learn that We Live in a Dictatorship By Eric Zuesse December 22, 2017 The first time when it became clear to me that I live in a dictatorship was in 2014 when reading, prior to its publication, the landmark (and still the only) scientific empirical study to address the question as to whether or not the United States federal Governm...

By Eric Zuesse December 22, 2017

The first time when it became clear to me that I live in a dictatorship was in 2014 when reading, prior to its publication, the landmark (and still the only) scientific empirical study to address the question as to whether or not the United States federal Government is, authentically, a democracy — or, whether, alternatively, it’s instead more of a dictatorship, than a democracy. This study documented conclusively that America’s Government is the latter.

So, on 14 April 2014, I headlined “US Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy, Says Scientific Study”. Subsequently, my editor linked it to the published article at the Journal where the study was published, Perspectives on Politics, from the American Political Science Association, and the full study can be read there.

On 30 April 2014, was posted at youtube the video that remains, to this day, the best and clearest ordinary-language summary of what that badly-written academic study proved. See its explanation here:

That summary’s title is also better than the title of my article was; this excellent video headlines “Corruption is Legal in America”, which is another accurate conclusion from that study. Every American citizen should know what this 6-minute video says and shows from the academic study, because it explains how the super-rich, as a class, steal from everyone else (everyone who isn’t super-rich): They do it through corruption.

Then, that same person who created the video did another presentation of it, but this time with text accompanying the video, and this article was titled “One graph shows how the rich control American politics”, and it indeed showed how. The super-rich carry out their control via corruption, which is legal in America and which can be done vastly more by rich people than by poor people — poor people simply can’t buy the Government, and any who would even attempt to do so would be using only the illegal means, which the US Supreme Court says constitutes the only illegal means, and that’s blatant bribery, which is lower-class corruption, not the far more lucrative type of corruption that super-wealthy individuals have access to. Only the forms of corruption which are available only to the super-rich are legal in America. That’s the reason why the super-rich keep getting still-richer, while the rest of the population are lucky if they don’t become poorer.

On 28 July 2015, former US President Jimmy Carter was frank about this situation; as a caller at a progressive radio show, he said this about America’s soaring top-level corruption:

“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and US Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. … At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.”

Three days later, Huffington Post published my article about that statement, which was headlined “Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the US Is No Longer a Democracy,” and it had over 60,000 likes on Facebook (here the article is shown a bit earlier, when it had 56,000) but HuffPo reduced that number down to its currently shown number, 18,000; and this article turned out to have been the last submission of the 100+ that they accepted from me. They’ve rejected all of my submissions after it. No explanation was ever given, and I never heard anything from them again.

The scientific article about America’s Government had reviewed 1,779 pieces of proposed legislation during the period from 1981 to 2002, and it found that only what the super-rich wanted to become law did become law: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” they said. That’s certainly not a democracy.

There has been speculation as to how far back historically America’s government-by-the-aristocracy (or, simply, America’s being an aristocracy — a rule over the public by the few super-rich, an “oligarchy”) has been in effect. Prior to Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, going back to the time when FDR died in office in 1945 as the President, the distribution of income and of wealth was much more equal in America than it started to become as soon as Reagan entered the White House and began the subsequent dominance of supply-side economics, which is based upon the supply-push belief that wealth trickles down from the few rich, instead of (as FDR believed) in a demand-pull way, that it percolates up from the many poor. FDR believed that what drives an economy is needs, not the products and services to fill needs. Reagan believed in the opposite, Say’s law, which says that whatever is produced will fill needs (or at least desires) — that production is what drives an economy, and that needs (and desires) just take care of themselves. So, FDR focused on “the common man” and especially the poor, but Reagan focused on “entrepreneurs” or the owners of businesses. (The middle class isn’t an issue here, but is simply the richer portion of the poor. Historically that has been the case. For example, America’s middle class has declined while the poor have mushroomed, but the top 5% are getting all of the gains; and most of that is going to the top 1% or even less. So: “poor” here includes the middle-class; and, to refer to “middle-class America” is now like referring to a dying breed — but it’s a breed of poor, not of rich.)

However, the extreme corruption at the top in this country is showing up more sharply than ever in recently declassified US Government documents about the JFK assassination — showing up as having begun much earlier than had generally been suspected, begun at least by the time when President Kennedy came into office on 20 January 1961. Kennedy found himself surrounded by the military-industrial complex that his predecessor, Eisenhower, had cultivated while he was in the White House and that “Ike” hypocritically warned the American public against, on his way out of office, only on 17 January 1961 — three days before Kennedy’s inauguration. Some of these corrupt people were ones whom Kennedy himself had brought in. Not all of them were Ike’s holdovers. But Kennedy was apparently shocked, nonetheless.

The beginnings of this profound corruption might be traced still farther back to moles in the Government (such as the Dulles brothers, Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush) who had built their careers after World War I by means of plying and mastering the revolving door between the Government’s foreign-policy Establishment and Wall Street. Starting at the very end of WW II, in 1945, agents of these moles ended FDR’s Office of Strategic Services and started Truman’s CIA. Right from the get-go, the CIA was deeply corrupt, as the following 2.5-hour BBC documentary from 1992 makes clear:

Operation Gladio – Full 1992 documentary BBC

It documents from testimony of former CIA operatives in Europe, that the CIA had been hiring European aristocrats and committed fascists and even ‘former’ Nazis, to set up terrorist incidents in Europe rigged so as to be blamed by the public against communists and against any entities that were favorable in any way toward the Soviet Union. Numberless Europeans were injured and killed in terrorist incidents that were set up by the CIA to be, basically, anti-communist propaganda. This CIA operation was called “Gladio,” and it continues to this day, even though communism itself is gone.

Subsequently, a video was done that’s far briefer, 50 minutes, and which starts with interviews of some of the survivors of these CIA-NATO operations, so that it’s far more from the victims’ perspective than was the BBC’s lengthier documentary:

NATO’s Secret Armies (2009)

When Kennedy became President, he found himself surrounded by advisors who were urging him such as, on 22 March 1962, John Kennedy’s own brother and US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy did, when RFK held a meeting to discuss “the possibility of US manufacture or acquisition of Soviet aircraft” because:

“There is a possibility that such aircraft could be used in a deception operation designed to confuse enemy planes in the air, to launch a surprise attack against enemy installations or in a provocation operation in which Soviet aircraft would appear to attack US or friendly installations in order to provide an excuse for US intervention. If the planes were to be used in such covert operations, it would seem preferable to manufacture them in the United States.”

And, also like this (on 12 April 1962, from a Major General and CIA officer — see it on page 16):

“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of a Cuban agent and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.”

Even JFK’s own brother RFK, and Secretary of ‘Defense’ Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk — plus lots of holdovers from the Eisenhower Administration — thought that this sort of thing would be worth the President of the United States considering. Fortunately, JFK didn’t.

Michael Ellison had gotten to see a bit of the 12 April 1962 document decades earlier and he reported it on 2 May 2001 in Britain’s Guardian under the headline “Memos disclose US cold-war plot to frame Castro”. Ellison wrote that “The idea was an element in a wider scheme that ‘may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the US government’, asserts James Bamford.” Since Bamford is perhaps the world’s leading journalist and historian who has written about the NSA (books such as his 1983 The Puzzle Palace), for even him to have expressed surprise in 2001 that the US Government, at its top level, was predominantly staffed by people who were racking their brains to figure out ways to fake Soviet terrorism and attacks so as for the US and NATO to have a pretext to invade the Soviet Union, indicates how much more cynical we all have become after George W. Bush’s lies about ‘Saddam’s WMD’ as pretexts for the US and its collaborators to invade and destroy Iraq in 2003. Not only was John Kennedy surprised to discover it in 1962, but James Bamford was surprised to discover it even as late as 2001. Bamford in 2001 might not have said what he said there if he had seen that 1992 BBC documentary, which showed that the top level of the CIA had been like this from the time when the CIA started in 1947. But with so much history behind us now and which had still been classified information, and thus non-public, until 2001 when Bamford said that the 12 April 1962 document described “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the US Government,” we today are hardly surprised at all to discover it. The corruption at the top of the US Government has long since overflowed its banks, out into the public’s consciousness. Not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put the myth of US Government decency together again.

Read More: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/12/22/americans-only-now-beginning-learn-that-we-live-dictatorship.html