No Country for Old Women

No Country for Old Women

 I’m reading Marcia Poole’s essay in the Planet (6/15/18) on Ani, an 80 year old Buddhist nun who’s been homeless for the last five years. She’s sick, and in a wheel chair, and living in a tent. That is, until she got thrown to the ground so hard that it cracked her skull. Now she’s in the hospital. She begged our Mayor, Jesse Arreguin, a couple of weeks ago, in a video interview at the encampment she’s living in, to please find her a place to live. She can’t beat her illnesses living in a tent. She needs to be able to wash.

She’s been applying to everything she can find that might be a way off the street, and none of it has gotten anywhere. One might suppose that the Mayor knows that the city is more intent on just closing homeless encampments, and moving people around from place to place, from one raid after another, and so on, like they did in 2016. So he smiles as he leaves her.

Osha Neumann sent an open letter to the city about the raids on RVs in the Marina just this month. Its essential message was, “oh no, not again; why is civility so impossible to embrace?” Many of the homeless who get kicked out of their encampments are disabled, but that doesn’t seem to matter. When seizing their property, the police are seizing their survivability.

How does it feel, knowing that, in this society, it is okay that someone in a wheelchair has to live in a tent – or otherwise the sidewalk? When we get justly upset about children being torn from their parents that we write letters and make phone calls, is it because that is happening 1500 miles away? 

You know why so many Mexicans come to the US to work. Its because of corn. The US mass produces corn, and can sell it cheaper than Mexican farmers can produce the corn that they depend on for an income. NAFTA allows the US to export corn to Mexico free of tariffs. The Mexican farmers can’t compete. They lose their income, lose their land to the bank, and by growing the unemployment situation, drive the economy into recession. So they follow their money as if flees to the US hoping to get it back by working for it, so they can send it home to feed their kids. NAFTA takes parents away from their kids and ICE takes kids away from their parents.

When the police raid the homeless, and take their possessions, they are taking what the homeless need to protect themselves from the environment. Without that protection, they die. Everyday, somewhere in the US, some homeless people die on the street. To take their possessions is separate them from their survivability. It is, in effect, to kill them, slowly. It should be manslaughter, but it’s done knowingly. The police commit attempted murder whenever they raid a homeless encampment, and take the people’s possessions. Its unconstitutional, of course, but we’re speaking about civility here – you know, ethics.

How does it feel? 

How many of the children having been put in cages in Texas without their parents will have to die, perhaps by throwing themselves off a bridge in hopelessness, before we find a way to say "stop" to the government without having to wait two years for the next election. Death doesn’t wait that long.

Homelessness happens. Maybe you have no pension, or maybe your pension is too little to keep up with what the real estate speculators are doing to rent levels and real estate prices in this whole area. Nowadays, old Victorians go for a million plus. To rent an apartment, you have to be able to pay $2000 a month for a studio or one bedroom.

Ani is old, and sick. and can’t leave her tent. Except to wind up in the hospital. She cracked her skull open trying to get down to a BART platform. Her wheelchair got caught in the escalator and she fell.

The city government claims it has no money for people. They spent over a hundred thousand for police overtime incurred during 2016 for all the raids on the homeless encampments. The US reaps huge profits from dominating Mexican markets with cheap goods, and have none to take care of the elderly and disabled homeless here. 

But there is plenty of money. This is the richest country in the world. Mexico isn’t the only economy exploited by it. Yet government claims it is starved for funds so that housing programs, and educational systems, and health care, etc. all have to be cut back. However, there is plenty of money. It is in the five-sided building, that institution that simply has to wave its hand to get appropriations it didn’t even ask for. The US right now is bombing seven different countries in the world. Perhaps it can’t stop killing people in order to make its attitude toward the homeless here at "home" look benign. The military has but to cancel one contract for a new plane to provide health and education for everyone.

Ani would have been dead by now if it weren’t for the other homeless people who belong to that prophetic group called “First the Came for the Homeless.” They call themselves an “intentional community,” which means they take care of each other, know each other well, make their own rules democratically, keep their place spic and span, and make sure nobody dies of hunger or a terrible disease. Alcohol and drugs are not an option. They are banned from the encampment. If you come into the camp wearing that millstone around your neck, they will take care of you, but only on the basis of agreements. Agreements occur between equals. It is what produces belonging. First, there is agreement on some method of getting rid of the millstone. Then, "belonging" means living up to the agreements.

So Ani is still alive. But she’s doing some serious hospital time. 

You know what it makes me think of? There was a movie I saw a long time ago about a tribe in ancient Japan that would take their old people, who could no longer contribute to the well-being of the society, up into the mountains, and leave them there to starve to death, or throw them off a cliff. It was a 1958 film called “The Ballad of Narayama,” directed by Shichiro Fukuzawa. You watch the movie, and you go through the anguish of this family, torn between what the whole is doing and what the part must endure because of an age-old helplessness. (It is similar to the anguish that one sees in the woman who is the main character in the short story, “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson.)

There was a lot of controversy at the time the movie came out about whether the story was true or not. Fukuzawa took the story from a novel about the practice, and made it visible for everyone. Some said only savages would treat people like that. You can imagine what some other people were saying.

But now, we know the story in the movie was true. Except that the society that engages in this practice is the US, where homeless people who have been jettisoned sit on sidewalks waiting for the inevitable. They are stripped of belonging to society before the cops arrive, and they are deprived of survivability after they come. It is indeed savagery to simply leave the elderly to rot away on some mountain ledge or throw them off a cliff because they are no longer useful, or leave them sitting there on a sidewalk.

It is indeed savagery to let people rot away in the rain or confiscate their tent so that they become defenseless against the elements. That savagery may only be the soft subtle economic workings of markets and trade, but they form a cliff from which people are thrown to their death.

America’s Moral Angst - Evidence of Moral Degeneracy

America’s Moral Angst - Evidence of Moral Degeneracy

By Professor Lawrence Davidson

For all those who in 2016 closed their eyes, held their noses and took a leap into the unknown by voting for Donald Trump, it is time to pry open those eyelids, gaze upon what they have wrought, and smell the decay pervading the country’s public sphere. And indeed, it seems that growing numbers have, rather belatedly, noticed the signs of moral degeneracy coming from the Oval Office. What took them so long?

Actually, the time lapse is not really unusual. These Trump voters, having taken the leap sometimes for no other reason than they disliked Hillary Clinton (and her “politics as usual” ways), returned to their local lives and carried on as before. It was Mrs. Clinton’s defeat that satisfied them more than any concern with who had actually been elected. They had not paid attention to Trump’s malicious humbug.


These rather absent-minded balloters can be contrasted with another subset of voters, represented by the likes of former Klan leader David Duke, who went into their polling stations with eyes fully open. In February 2016 Duke had informed his white supremacist followers that “not voting for Trump was really treason to your heritage.” Later he would declare that “we are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.” The “we” here are those American whites who feel that social justice and civil rights for anyone but themselves would be an affront to their “heritage.” Every nation has its bigots. These are America’s.

And here is at least one big structural problem with U.S. democracy—it is a winner-take-all system. Thus, the “nose holder” helped the bigot to win. And, there was really no excuse for this result except that millions were not thinking through the consequences of their actions. Could those who were motivated more to vote against Clinton than to vote in favor of Trump have really anticipated the present consequences of their actions? I am afraid the answer is yes.

Even before 8 November 2016, Trump’s ethical shortcomings were pretty obvious. All that bullying, slander and racial innuendo at his campaign rallies was spontaneous Trump—the real Trump—and not the product of some miscreant speechwriter or sleazy campaign director. The notion that gaining power would somehow breed a sense of responsibility in such a personality, if this happened to occur to anyone, is just rubbish. We have known this to be so ever since a certain German election in July of 1932.

Nonetheless, it should be noted that a president of Donald Trump’s temperament is not new in U.S. history. He is not the first man with anger control problems and a stark disregard for the rule of law to hit the White House. However, he is certainly the most blatant. Not that history is a guide for the average voter—the majority of Americans are not historically aware. The national history they are taught often does not go beyond what is needed to uphold an unquestioning pledge of allegiance. Put that ignorance together with prevailing inattention and you have an explanation of why it took so long for many U.S. citizens to realize that their president is a moral idiot.

From his first day in office Trump has, consistently and without embarrassment, packed the higher offices of government with unqualified fanatics, incompetent ideologues, and people who had as their goal the destruction of the departments they “ran.” That is, with reflections of himself. He has also been bombarding us with moronic tweets (which are often indicators of forthcoming moronic policies), and lying like a cheap rug. Indeed, the only time the man is not lying is when he is in the grip of a temper tantrum or identifying with white supremacists, as after the Charlottesville debacle.

Yet, as noted, many Americans are only now shocked at the president’s behavior. And what has been the trigger for this belated jolt? Family values—that is, the disregard of them as applied to those seeking to enter the U.S. in an undocumented fashion.

You see, many of those described by the president as “rapists” and “dope peddlers” seeking to sneak across the nation’s southern border are accompanied by their families. Donald Trump has declared this to be an invasion of “criminals,” and as a deterrent to the “invaders,” he had allowed the nation’s border guards to kidnap their children. By the way, the real scoop is that most of these “illegal aliens” are fleeing Central American violence which, historically, Washington has abetted.

Regardless, in Trump’s eyes the aliens are less than human. They are not worthy of legal due process or any sort of human rights considerations. The snatching of their children was an expression of this attitude. And, when the First Lady recently went to inspect the resulting kiddy concentration camps, she let every one know how she, and no doubt the rest of the Trump tribe, felt about the plight of these stolen children. It was right there on her jacket: “I really don’t care.” Trump said the sentiment referred to the couple’s attitude toward “fake news,” but really that was just a fake excuse. It was stupid callousness on Melania’s part. It was one of those “how low can you go” situations.

Part II – Corroborating Evidence

The misrepresented refugees along the southern border of the United States are not the only ones for whom Trump has disdain. Connections with organizations that defend the rights and contribute to the needs of the poor and oppressed are now, seemingly, held hostage to the dictates of Israel—an ally of the U.S. that regards its indigenous Palestinians much as Trump regards the “illegal aliens” on the Mexican border. Thus, the Trump administration withdrew from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on 12 October 2017 citing alleged “anti-Israel bias.” One of the goals of UNESCO is “promoting education for peace and protecting culture under attack.” Given these ends and Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians, what Washington calls “bias” is in fact logical and necessary criticism on UNESCO’s part.

The same maneuver was repeated on 20 June 2018 when the Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The Council is the world’s premier human rights body that reviews and brings to light abuses on a country-by-country basis. Lo and behold, the Trump administration accused the UNHRC of “chronic bias” against Israel. What is a human rights organization to do when confronted by a chronic human rights abusing state? Not be biased? Nor does the appearance of the occasional abuser state on its membership list negate the council’s mission. Membership is rotating and has not prevented the council from doing its job.

Part III – Conclusion

A recent Brookings Institution analysis stated that the goals of the Trump administration are ones of regression: “Weaken institutions not to its liking, abandon them if they do not comply with its demands … go it alone with little regard of the costs to U.S. interests” and do so in a manner that “absolves the administration from pretending to lead by its own example on human rights.”

It should be noted that this approach to the world is not the product of a thought-out strategy. The present administration is not eschewing human rights because it has some detailed, if oddball, game plan to promote the betterment of American citizens. No. It is doing so because the man who is president and the henchmen he has surrounded himself with are themselves pathologically unethical people. And, they in turn have found like partners both domestically and in foreign allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia, etc.). The dismissal of human rights comes naturally to these folks.

And all of this was predictable from the beginning of Trump’s campaign for the presidency—that is, if you were paying attention. Well, more and more citizens are now paying attention. They ask, “what kind of country do we want to be?” The word “want” is a misleading one. The U.S. has always been a divided country. What enough of the American people did in 2016 was to allow the bigoted, barbaric part of the nation, assisted by the inattentive, to gain power in the person of Donald Trump.

There are congressional elections in November 2018. We will see how many of those who closed their eyes, held their noses and took a leap into the unknown by voting for Donald Trump now come to the polling stations hoping to atone for their sins.

Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history from West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic research focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He taught courses in Middle East history, the history of science and modern European intellectual history.

The Two Superpowers: Who Really Controls the Two Countries?

The Two Superpowers: Who Really Controls the Two Countries?

 Among the ruling interests in the US, one interest even more powerful than the Israel Lobby—the Deep State of the military/security complex— there is enormous fear that an uncontrollable President Trump at the upcoming Putin/Trump summit will make an agreement that will bring to an end the demonizing of Russia that serves to protect the enormous budget and power of the military-security complex.
You can see the Deep State’s fear in the editorials that the Deep State handed to the Washington Post (June 29) and New York Times (June 29), two of the Deep State’s megaphones, but no longer believed by the vast majority of the American people.  The two editorials share the same points and phrases.  They repeat the disproven lies about Russia as if blatant, obvious lies are hard facts.  
Both accuse President Trump of “kowtowing to the Kremlin.”  Kowtowing, of course, is not a Donald Trump characteristic.  But once again fact doesn’t get in the way of the propaganda spewed by the WaPo and NYT, two megaphones of Deep State lies.
The Deep State editorial handed to the WaPo reads: “THE REASONS for the tension between the United States and Russia are well-established. Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, instigated a war in eastern Ukraine, intervened to save the dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, interfered in the U.S. presidential election campaign to harm Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, poisoned a former intelligence officer on British soil and continues to meddle in the elections of other democracies.”
The WaPo’s opening paragraph is a collection of all the blatant lies assembled by the Deep State for its Propaganda Ministry.  There have been many books written about the CIA’s infiltration of the US media.  There is no doubt about it.  I remember my orientation as Staff Associate, House Defense Appropriation Subcommittee, when I was informed that the Washington Post is a CIA asset.  This was in 1975. Today the Post is owned by a person with government contracts that many believe sustain his front business.
And don’t forget Udo Ulfkotte, an editor of the  Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who wrote in his best seller, Bought Journalism, that there was not a significant journalist in Europe who was not on the CIA’s payroll. The English language edition of Ulfkotte’s book has been suppressed and prevented from publication. 
The New York Times, which last told the truth in the 1970s when it published the leaked Pentagon Papers and had the fortitude to stand up for its First Amendment rights, repeats the lies about Putin’s “seizure of Crimea and attack on Ukraine” along with all the totally unsubstantiated BS about Russia interfering in the US president election and electing Trump, who now kowtows to Putin in order to serve Russia instead of the US. The editorial handed to the NYT insinuates that Trump is a threat to the national security of America and its allies (vassals). The problem, the NYT declares, is that Trump is not listening to his advisors.
Shades of President John F. Kennedy, who did not listen to the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff about invading Cuba, nuking the Soviet Union, and using the false flag attack on America of the Joint Chiefs’ Northwoods Project (look it up online).  Is the New York Times setting up Trump for assassination on the grounds that he is lovey-dovey with Russia and sacrificing US national interests?
I would bet on it.
While the Washington Post and New York Times are telling us that if Trump meets with Putin, Trump will sell out US national security, The Saker says that Putin finds himself in a similar box, only it doesn’t come from the national security interest, but from the Russian Fifth Column, the Atlanticist Integrationists whose front man is the Russian Prime Minister Medvedev, who represents the rich Russian elite whose wealth is based on stolen assets during the Yeltsin years enabled by Washington.  These elites, The Saker concludes, impose constraints on Putin that put Russian sovereignty at risk. Economically, it is more important to these elites for financial reasons to be part of Washington’s empire than to be a sovereign country.  http://thesaker.is/no-5th-column-in-the-kremlin-think-again/ 
I find The Saker’s explanation the best I have read of the constraints on Putin that limit his ability to represent Russian national interests. 
I have often wondered why Putin didn’t have the security force round up these Russian traitors and execute them.  The answer is that Putin believes in the rule of law, and he knows that Russia’s US financed and supported Fifth Column cannot be eliminated without bloodshed that is inconsistent with the rule of law.  For Putin, the rule of law is as important as Russia.  So, Russia hangs in the balance.  It is my view that the Russian Fifth Column could care less about the rule of law.  They only care about money.
As challenged as Putin might be, Chris Hedges, one of the surviving great American journalists–who is not always right but when he is he is incisive–explains the situation faced by the American people.  It is beyond correction.  American civil liberties and prosperity appear to be lost.   https://russia-insider.com/en/politics/america-shows-many-signs-impending-catastrophic-collapse-pulitzer-prize-winner-explains 
In my opinion, Hedges leftwing leanings caused him to focus on Reagan’s rhetoric rather that on Reagan’s achievements—the two greatest of our time—the end of stagflation, which benefited the American people, and the end of the Cold War, which removed the threat of nuclear war.  I think Hedges also does not appreciate Trump’s sincerity about normalizing relations with Russia, relations destroyed by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes, and Trump’s sincerity about bringing offshored jobs home to American workers. Trump’s agenda puts him up against the two most powerful interest groups in the United States.  A president willing to take on these powerful groups should be appreciated and supported, as Hedges acknowledges the dispossessed majority do.  If I might point out to Chris, whom I admire, it is not like Chris Hedges to align against the choice of the people.  How can democracy work if people don’t rule? 
Hedges writes, correctly, “The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we [the American people] don’t count.”
Hedges is absolutely correct. 
It is impossible not to admire a journalist like Hedges who can describe our plight with such succinctness:
“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and banks destroy the economy.” 
Read The Saker’s explanation of Russian politics.  Possibly Putin will collapse under pressure from the powerful Fifth Column in his government.  Read Chris Hedges analysis of American collapse. There is much truth in it.  What happens if the Russian people rise up against the Russian Fifth Column and if the oppressed American people rise up against the extractions of the military/security complex? What happens if neither population rises up?
Who sets off the first nuclear weapon?
Our time on earth is not just limited by our threescore and ten years, but also humanity’s time on earth, and that of every other species, is limited by the use of nuclear weapons.
It is long past the time when governments, and if not them, humanity, should ask why nuclear weapons exist when they cannot be used without destroying life on earth.
Why isn’t this the question of our time, instead of, for example, transgender toilet facilities, and the large variety of fake issues on which the presstitute media focuses?
The articles by The Saker and Chris Hedges, two astute people, report that neither superpower is capable of making good decisions, decisions that are determined by democracy instead of by oligarchs, against whom neither elected government can stand.  
If this is the case, humanity is finished.  
Here are the Washington Post and New York Times editorials:

Washington Post - June 29, 2018 - EditorialTrump is kowtowing to the Kremlin again. Why?

Ahead of a summit with Putin, Trump is siding with the Russian leader, with dangerous results. 
THE REASONS for the tension between the United States and Russia are well-established. Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, instigated a war in eastern Ukraine, intervened to save the dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, interfered in the U.S. presidential election campaign to harm Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, poisoned a former intelligence officer on British soil and continues to meddle in the elections of other democracies. Yet on Wednesday in the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin brushed it all aside and delivered the Russian “maskirovka,” or camouflage, answer that it is all America’s fault.
Meeting with John Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, Mr. Putin declared that the tensions are “in large part the result of an intense domestic political battle inside the U.S.” Then Mr. Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov insisted that Russia “most certainly did not interfere in the 2016 election” in the United States. On Thursday morning, Mr. Trump echoed them both on Twitter: “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!”
Why is Mr. Trump kowtowing again? The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia did attempt to tilt the election using multiple campaigns, including cyberintrusions and insidious social media fakery. Would it be so difficult to challenge Mr. Putin about this offensive behavior? A full accounting has yet to be made of the impact on the election, but Mr. Bolton did not mince words last year when he described Russian interference as “a true act of war” and said, “We negotiate with Russia at our peril.” And now?
Summits can be productive, even – maybe especially – when nations are at odds. In theory, a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, now scheduled for next month in Helsinki, could be useful. But a meeting aimed at pleasing Mr. Putin is naive and foolhardy. A meeting aimed at pleasing Mr. Putin at the expense of traditional, democratic U.S. allies would be dangerous and damaging.
Just as Mr. Bolton was flattering Mr. Putin, Russia was engaging in subterfuge on the ground in Syria. The United States, Russia and Jordan last year negotiated cease-fire agreements in southwestern Syria, along the border with Jordan and the Golan Heights. In recent days, the United States has warned Russia and its Syrian allies not to launch an offensive in the area, where the rebel forces hold parts of the city of Daraa and areas along the border. The State Department vowed there would be “serious repercussions” and demanded that Russia restrain its client Syrian forces. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, saying an offensive would be unacceptable. All to no avail; Syria is bombing the area.
This is what happens when Mr. Trump signals, repeatedly, that he is unwilling or unable to stand up to Russian misbehavior. We are on dangerous ground. Either Mr. Trump has lost touch with essential U.S. interests or there is some other explanation for his kowtowing that is yet unknown.

New York Times - June 29, 2018 - Editorial

Trump and Putin’s Too-Friendly Summit

It’s good to meet with adversaries. But when Mr. Trump sits down with Mr. Putin, it will be a meeting of kindred spirits. That’s a problem.
It’s good for American presidents to meet with adversaries, to clarify differences and resolve disputes. But when President Trump sits down with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Finland next month, it will be a meeting of kindred spirits, and that’s a problem.
One would think that at a tête-à-tête with the Russian autocrat, the president of the United States would take on some of the major concerns of America and its closest allies. Say, for instance, Mr. Putin’s seizure of Crimea and attack on Ukraine, which led to punishing international sanctions. But at the Group of 7 meeting in Quebec this month, Mr. Trump reportedly told his fellow heads of state that Crimea is Russian because everyone there speaks that language. And, of course, Trump aides talked to Russian officials about lifting some sanctions even before he took office.
One would hope that the president of the United States would let Mr. Putin know that he faces a united front of Mr. Trump and his fellow NATO leaders, with whom he would have met days before the summit in Helsinki. But Axios reported that during the meeting in Quebec, Mr. Trump said, “NATO is as bad as Nafta,” the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is one of Mr. Trump’s favorite boogeymen.
Certainly the president would mention that even the people he appointed to run America’s intelligence services believe unequivocally that Mr. Putin interfered in the 2016 election to put him in office and is continuing to undermine American democracy. Right? But on Thursday morning, Mr. Trump tweeted, “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!”
More likely, Mr. Trump will congratulate Mr. Putin, once again, for winning another term in a sham election, as he did in March, even though his aides explicitly warned him not to. And he has already proposed readmitting Russia to the Group of 7, from which it was ousted after the Ukraine invasion.
Summits once tended to be carefully scripted, and presidents were attended by senior advisers and American interpreters. At dinner during a Group of 20 meeting last July, Mr. Trump walked over to Mr. Putin and had a casual conversation with no other American representative present. He later said they discussed adoptions – the same issue that he falsely claimed was the subject of a meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 between his representatives and Russian operatives who said they had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
It’s clear that Mr. Trump isn’t a conventional president, but instead one intent on eroding institutions that undergird democracy and peace. Mr. Trump “doesn’t believe that the U.S. should be part of any alliance at all” and believes that “permanent destabilization creates American advantage,” according to unnamed administration officials quoted by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.
Such thinking goes further than most Americans have been led to believe were Mr. Trump’s views on issues central to allied security. He has often given grudging lip service to supporting NATO, even while complaining frequently about allies’ military spending and unfair trade policies.
The tensions Mr. Trump has sharpened with our allies should please Mr. Putin, whose goal is to fracture the West and assert Russian influence in places where the Americans and Europeans have played big roles, like the Middle East, the Balkans and the Baltic States.
Yet despite growing anxieties among European allies, Mr. Trump is relying on his advisers less than ever because, “He now thinks he’s mastered this,” one senior member of Congress said in an interview. That’s a chilling thought given his inability, so far, to show serious progress on any major security issue. Despite Mr. Trump’s talk of quick denuclearization after his headline-grabbing meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, experts say satellite imagery shows the North is actually improving its nuclear capability.
While the White House hasn’t disclosed an agenda for the Putin meeting, there’s a lot the two leaders should be discussing, starting with Russian cyberintrusions. Mr. Trump, though, has implied that Mr. Putin could help the United States guard against election hacking. And although Congress last year mandated sweeping sanctions against Russia to deter such behavior, Mr. Trump has failed to implement many of them.
In a similar vein, should Mr. Trump agree to unilaterally lift sanctions imposed after Moscow invaded Ukraine and started a war, it would further upset alliance members, which joined the United States in imposing sanctions at some cost to themselves. Moreover, what would deter Mr. Putin from pursuing future land grabs?
Mr. Trump could compound that by canceling military exercises, as he did with South Korea after the meeting with Mr. Kim, and by withdrawing American troops that are intended to keep Russia from aggressive action in the Baltics.
Another fraught topic is Syria. Mr. Trump has signaled his desire to withdraw American troops from Syria, a move that would leave the country more firmly in the hands of President Bashar al-Assad and his two allies, Russia and Iran. Russia, in particular, is calling the shots on the battlefield and in drafting a political settlement that could end the fighting, presumably after opposition forces are routed.
What progress could be made at this summit, then? Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin may find it easier to cooperate in preventing a new nuclear arms race by extending New Start, a treaty limiting strategic nuclear weapons that expires in 2021.
Another priority: bringing Russia back into compliance with the I.N.F. treaty, which eliminated all U.S. and Soviet ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, until Russia tested and deployed a prohibited cruise missile.
Mr. Trump’s top national security advisers are more cleareyed about the Russian threat than he is. So are the Republicans who control the Senate. They have more responsibility than ever to try to persuade Mr. Trump that the country’s security is at stake when he meets Mr. Putin, and that he should prepare carefully for the encounter.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

"Officials" Attempt To Sabotage Further North Korea Talks

"Officials" Attempt To Sabotage Further North Korea Talks

  Several Congress people and some officials in the CIA and Trump administration try to throw a spanner into the negotiations with North Korea. They "leak" to NBC News about an intelligence assessment on North Korea's nuclear facilities. The result is a sensationalized piece that includes no surprising facts.

North Korea has increased nuclear production at secret sites, say U.S. officials
"Work is ongoing to deceive us on the number of facilities, the number of weapons, the number of missiles," said one U.S. official.

One of the NBC authors is Ken Dilanian who is well known for his tight cooperation with the CIA.
Its opening:

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months — and that Kim Jong Un may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions in nuclear talks with the Trump administration, U.S. officials told NBC News.
The intelligence assessment, which has not previously been reported, seems to counter the sentiments expressed by President Donald Trump, who tweeted after his historic June 12 summit with Kim that "there was no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea."
Analysts at the CIA and other intelligence agencies don't see it that way, according to more than a dozen American officials who are familiar with their assessments and spoke on the condition of anonymity. They see a regime positioning itself to extract every concession it can from the Trump administration — while clinging to nuclear weapons it believes are essential to survival.

The result of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore was a "freeze for freeze" deal. North Korea stopped its nuclear and missile testing while the U.S. stopped the large maneuvers it regularity held with South Korea's army. Both sides agreed to further talks. North Korea made some aspirational statements about denuclearization which have the same time frame as similar aspirational statements made by the U.S. in Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). There is no time frame to reach a certain state. There is no commitment towards declaring nuclear sites nor is there a commitment to stop the production of nuclear stuff.

Kim Jong Un will not only "try to hide" the North Korean nuclear facilities. He will surely keep them secret as long as he can. The security of his country depend on them.Trump declaration that there is "no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea" is correct in the sense that there is certainly no North Korean intent to launch a nuclear attack.
That "more than a dozen American officials" talk with NBC on that issue shows that there is a concerted operation to sabotage a possible deal. Those opposed try to move the goalposts.

While the North Koreans have stopped missile and nuclear tests, "there's no evidence that they are decreasing stockpiles, or that they have stopped their production," said one U.S. official briefed on the latest intelligence. "There is absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the U.S."Four other officials familiar with the intelligence assessment also said North Korea intended to deceive the U.S.

Why is it "deceiving" when North Korea continues something that it did not promise to stop? Why is it "deceiving" when North Korea rejects to submit targeting coordinates of its nuclear facilities? There is no deceiving in either.
The intelligence assessment the "American officials" (the term includes Congress staffers) talk about says that North Korea has the well known Uranium enrichment site in Yongbyon, a second one at an unnamed place and possibly a third one. All of this was known to people who read the details about the issue. They are not new and were certainly known to the CIA boss Pompeo and Trump while the negotiations took place:

Ankit Panda @nktpnd - 12:00 UTC - 30 Jun 2018
These assessments have been around since at least May, I understand, so POTUS should have been briefed prior to the Singapore summit.

The "leak" to the NBC/CIA's Ken Dilanian lacks any surprising content. The only interesting point is that it happened at all. It demonstrates that are are serious forces who will try their best to sabotage the talks and a possible agreement.
To take the next steps towards a larger deal and towards peace on the Korean peninsula will require month of diligent and detailed talk and serious attention by senior administration officials. Until a special envoy is named to lead further talksSecretary of State Pompeo will continue the negotiations. He will visit Pyongyang next week to push the issue.
In my view the Korea talks are one of the few things the Trump administration is doing right. It is sad that many are out to destroy them.

This article was originally published by " Moon Of Alabama" -

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

==See Also===

Fact or fiction: North Korea still secretly enriching uranium, say US officials

Fact or fiction: U.S. intel possesses evidence of North Korea’s deception

Anti-Gun Stupidity As Only the UN Can Do It

Anti-Gun Stupidity As Only the UN Can Do It
10 of the dumbest things heard at their recent conference.

The Ten Dumbest Things I Heard About Guns At The United Nations

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• Here are the ten dumbest things I’ve heard about guns at the United Nations over the past two weeks.
• Gender has absolutely no relevance whatsoever to the control of the illicit international trade in small arms

For the past two weeks, I’ve been attending the Third U.N. Conference to Review Progress Made in the Implementation of the Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects — mercifully abbreviated as RevCon 3 for the PoA.

In theory, the purpose of the PoA — which is a political instrument, not a treaty — is to encourage cooperation on the illicit international trade in small arms. If the PoA stuck to this, it might be modestly useful. It can only be modestly useful because far too many nations at the U.N. don’t right now have the ability, or the desire, to do the basic things they have repeatedly committed to do.

Unfortunately, the PoA doesn’t stick to the illicit international trade in small arms. And in the process of not allowing it to stick to its job, its supporters say a lot of stupid things. And yes, they do like to talk about gun control. Here are the ten dumbest things I’ve heard about guns at the United Nations over the past two weeks.

1. Mexico’s proposal to include IEDs. Make no mistake, IEDs are a problem. But they’re not one the PoA can usefully address. Many types of IED are already illegal. Many of them are not trafficked internationally. And above all, they’re used almost exclusively by terrorists. Putting IEDs into the PoA amounts to implying that Al Qaeda should sign up to it.
2. Europe’s invention of new kinds of guns. You’d think there would be just two kinds of guns: ones that can fire, and ones that can’t. If you want to make a gun that can fire into one that can’t, use a torch to cut the frame (or receiver) in half. Not so, according to Europe, which for some reason doesn’t like to cut guns in half. As a result, it doesn’t have a reliable way to deactivate guns, and so now recognizes five different kinds of guns: manufactured, downgraded, converted, deactivated, and reactivated firearms. And of course, it wants new rules for all of these, with numbers put in all the parts of every firearm. In theory, this will prevent terrorist attacks like the one in Paris in 2015, which used weapons that were supposedly deactivated. In practice, it will just create confusion. The simplest thing to do is to define and number a gun by its frame (or receiver), state that the way to deactivate a gun is to cut it in half, and move on.


3. The worship of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. The Goals, known as the SDGs, are a tedious laundry list of 169 separate targets, most of which are in reality merely pious aspirations or politicized goals. One of these targets is “by 2030 [to] significantly reduce illicit financial and arms flows.” The PoA isn’t likely to make a major contribution to this target, but the fact that the target mentions illicit arms flows has become an excuse on the part of the Europeans and the Africans to lard the PoA with loads of references to the SDGs. The point of this is to turn the PoA into a human rights and development agreement, and, by the by, to transform it into politicized mush with no relevance to actually reducing the illicit arms trade.
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5. Mexico’s proposal to regulate “the end user.” For years, Mexico has argued that the PoA shouldn’t simply concern itself with the international illicit arms trade, but should reach inside national borders and regulate “end users.” In the U.S., that means individual purchasers of firearms, which is precisely why Mexico wants what it wants: it’s trying to use the PoA to mandate gun control in the U.S. Mexico’s proposal is part of the PoA’s curious tendency to forget that it’s supposed to be focusing solely on the international trade, and to wade off into regulating the “end user.” The highlight of this tendency is the proposal, made in 2016 by the U.N. Secretary-General and included in a PoA draft this year, to use RFID chips to “track and document which individual has used a specific weapon, when and for how long.”
6. The demand to include ammunition. A lot of countries want the PoA to include ammunition. Right now, it doesn’t, and there’s a good reason for this: guns are durable, relatively easy to mark and trace, and don’t work without ammunition, whereas ammunition is consumable and is produced in enormous quantities that are impossibly burdensome to trace. The number of delegations here that can’t grasp this simple point is incredible. For the sake of the political thrill of including ammunition, they want to add an unworkable commitment to the PoA when most of the nations in the room aren’t fulfilling the much simpler ones they’ve failed to uphold for the past 17 years.
7. Worrying about 3-D printing and modular or polymer firearms. Apart from including ammunition, this is the big demand of a lot of nations here. They argue that 3-D printed firearms and modular or plastic firearms are scary new problems, and so the PoA needs to be updated to mention them. As the U.S. has pointed out, there is no recorded instance of a crime being committed anywhere in the world with a 3-D printed gun, and in any case, it doesn’t matter how a firearm is made or what it’s made of. As long as there’s a proper legal definition of what a firearm is, it doesn’t matter if it’s made from metal or plastic, or if — as with modular firearms — parts of it can be replaced. But too many countries here can’t bring themselves to simply define a firearm by its frame (or receiver), and fall prey to the sentiment that not including new things (such as 3-D printing) every time the PoA meets means it’s failing. In reality, the best way to ensure the PoA keeps on failing is to bloat it up like a beached whale.
   
8. Proclaiming the existence of unspecified synergies. One of the favorite talking points here is that the PoA has what are called “synergies” with a wide range of other international instruments, including the U.N. Firearms Protocol, the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, the so-called International Small Arms Control Standards, and above all the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). The point of referring to these “synergies” is, first, to cram a lot of things into the PoA that the U.S. doesn’t like and then, second, to cram so many references to the ATT into the PoA that the PoA becomes the agreed way to implement the legally binding ATT. In other words, it’s an effort to put all the U.N.’s small arms instruments into a pot, give them a big stir, and make them all legally binding and inseparable from each other.
9. Misusing ATF statistics. One of the favorite talking points of the activists — embodied by the Center for American Progress — is that an enormous percentage of crime guns recovered and traced in Mexico (70 percent) and Canada (98.5 percent) are traced back to the U.S. On its face, this is ridiculous: the idea that 985 out of every 1000 crime guns in Canada come from the U.S. is too high to be plausible. The activists get these numbers because, though they correctly cite the relevant ATF reports, they use them to imply something that’s untrue. The figure of 98.5 percent, for example, refers only to guns sent to the U.S. for tracing. In other words, the Canadian police are 98.5 percent accurate in sending probable U.S.-origin guns to the U.S. to be traced, whereas their Mexican colleagues are only 70 percent accurate. These numbers say nothing about the overall share of U.S. guns in Canadian or Mexican crime.
10. Whining about gender. Gender has absolutely no relevance whatsoever to the control of the illicit international trade in small arms . Nor do women have any special expertise in this area simply because they are women. Nor is it true that women are uniquely burdened by the results of this illicit trade — on the contrary, most of the victims are men. (Jamaica’s figures, for example, show that in 2017 male victims outnumbered female ones by over 6 to 1.) But yet the PoA has become a vehicle for talking about gender. There has been a lengthy debate over whether the PoA should promote the “full” or the “equal” (the latter mandating one woman for every man, regardless of their expertise) involvement of women. The highlight of the gender panic was probably a speech by a left-wing NGO on Tuesday which argued that “militarised masculinity is . . . the main impediment to disarmament, peace, and gender equality.” In other words, in order to address the illicit international trade in small arms, we need to rewrite all history, society, and culture from the perspective of the progressive left. A word of advice to people who think like this: the more you say stuff like this, the more anyone who doesn’t agree with you is likely to write off all the U.N. programs you say you support as a Trojan Horse for your own radicalism.
    
    
    
    
11. Promoting gun control. Well, you knew it would come to this. In theory, the PoA is tightly limited to the international illicit trade. But the people who back it make no secret of their support for gun control. On Thursday, 17 nations, including Mexico, proposed including civilian possession in the PoA. Last Friday, we had a visit from Wear Orange, of Everytown for Gun Safety, financed by Michael Bloomberg. They clearly see the PoA as relevant to domestic gun control. The best illustration of why came on Wednesday, when in a side event on domestic gun control laws an Australian representative stated that “every gun shop that disappeared was a point from which guns could no longer be diverted.” In other words, according to the gun controllers, the way to control the illicit arms trade is to make sure there are no legal places to buy guns, which will ensure that no legal guns exist to become illegal. The Australian representative went on to point out that the most important source of crime guns in Australia is thefts from legal gun owners. That sums up their point of view nicely: legal gun owners should be deprived of their right to buy a gun so that, when a thief invades their house, they will not have a gun that can be stolen. Also, they will be defenseless. The problem, by this way of thinking, is not the thief: it is the law-abiding gun owner, who should be punished accordingly.

All of this isn’t just dumb. It’s pathetic. Illicit trafficking in small arms is an actual problem — not as big a problem as many problems out there, but a problem nonetheless. And there are sensible things that could be done about it, things that wouldn’t cure the problem, but which would make it better. If the PoA would just focus on these things, it might actually make a modest, but positive, contribution.

The illicit international trade in small arms basically comes down to two issues. First, there’s border control: if you don’t control your borders, it’s inevitable that a lot of guns are going to cross it. But here’s what CAP has to say about the Trump administration’s border policies in the gun control context:

The Trump administration’s protectionist, isolationist, nativist, and racist immigration policy is founded on the scurrilous notion that the United States needs to close the borders . . .

Well, if the borders are not going to be closed to illegal immigration going north, they are going to be open to illegal firearms moving south. It really is as simple as that. But try to find a progressive gun controller who admits it. Indeed, when I asked Amb. Juan Sandoval, Deputy Permanent Representative of Mexico, whether he supported tight borders, he simply repeated that he was unhappy about Mexico’s murder rate. I’d be unhappy about it too, but blaming it all on the U.S. without expressing any willingness to control your own borders is totally unhelpful. In fact, it’s unfriendly.

Of course, no matter how good your border controls are, some arms are going to flow across your border illicitly. The second issue, therefore, is the need to mark firearms (both domestically-produced and imports), to maintain records of those markings, and to trace crime and other illicit weapons. This is a commitment that all nations participating in the PoA have already accepted.

But most of them don’t do it.

Continued from page 1

TWEET THIS

• Here are the ten dumbest things I’ve heard about guns at the United Nations over the past two weeks.
• Gender has absolutely no relevance whatsoever to the control of the illicit international trade in small arms

The single most useful thing the PoA could do would be to focus narrowly on the failure of the U.N.’s member nations to mark, record, and trace firearms. You simply cannot track, understand, or control the illicit international trade in small arms without doing this. But instead, what we get from the PoA’s cheerleaders are claimsthat “the world deserves better than the lowest common denominator.”

On the contrary — what world needs is precisely the lowest common denominator. Because right now, it doesn’t have anything close to it. The world is wildly below the level of the lowest common denominator. The best thing the PoA could do would be to insist repeatedly that every nation live up to the most basic commitments they have already accepted, and to explore in detail why they don’t do so.

But the PoA’s nominal supporters don’t do that. Incredibly, they all view a short, clear PoA that focuses on measures that might actually make a difference as a failure. They all believe that the only definition of success is adding even more requirements to an agreement that almost no one in the U.N. is complying with already. These supporters are more interested in advancing the left-wing agenda on gender, development, and gun control than they are in addressing the illicit international arms trade.

People who act this way are not part of the solution. They are part of the problem.

Dr. Ted R. Bromund is Senior Research Fellow in Anglo-American Relations in the Margaret Thatcher for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation.