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US Congress
Democrats warned time was being wasted on GOP infighting as infections soar and death toll rises More
The confrontation between the US and China is gathering pace with each passing week. In the past few days, the Chinese consulate in Houston has been shuttered amid allegations it was a spy hub, and the US mission in the south-western city of Chengdu was closed in retaliation, on similar grounds.The FBI has started arresting Chinese researchers at US universities with suspected links to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), one of whom temporarily took refuge in the consulate in San Francisco, before surrendering.US academics and businessmen are being put under greater scrutiny for ties to Beijing and have been warned to come clean about them under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.The tougher legal moves have been accompanied by a concerted set of speeches assailing China by the Trump administration’s major national security and foreign policy officials, culminating in an address on Thursday by the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, declaring: “The free world must triumph over this new tyranny.”Pompeo travelled to Yorba Linda, California, home of the Richard Nixon presidential library, to declare that the Republican president’s historic opening to China in 1972 had begun an exercise in failure in east-west detente.“The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change in China that President Nixon hoped to induce,” Pompeo said. “The truth is that our policies – and those of other free nations – resurrected China’s failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that fed it.”Some of the grand geopolitical language can be put down to the importance of anti-China sentiment in Donald Trump’s bid to salvage his presidency in the November election. And some of it is inspired by Pompeo’s own efforts, increasingly at the expense of his day job, to position himself for a presidential run in 2024.But much of what Pompeo had to say will have global resonance thanks to Beijing’s rising aggression on multiple fronts around the globe. At the same time as rounding up more than a million Muslim Uighurs in internment camps, the regime has quashed the liberties enjoyed by Hong Kong, taken over disputed atolls, reefs and shoals in the South China Sea and turned them into concrete redoubts, and conducted a dangerous land grab on its border with India.Pompeo argued that combatting the grip of the Chinese Communist party “is the mission of our time”, a declaration likely to get heads nodding in large parts of Asia and the Pacific at least. But his claim, in his next breath, that “America is perfectly positioned to lead it” will ring hollow among many of Washington’s bewildered allies.In their eyes, China has expanded in a vacuum left by the US retreat under the Trump administration into “America First” jingoism and unilateralism. More
A strange and necessary ingredient of America’s descent towards fascism is that it will have little impact on the majority of people. As militarized federal agents are deployed into major cities to snatch protesters and charge them with harsh federal crimes for daring to deface the ruling party’s monuments, most Americans will continue living their normal lives with no discernible changes, at least for the time being. People wake up and eat breakfast and spend their days doing mundane tasks in fascist countries, too.If there was ever a tipping point, we are past it. Trying to stare hard at the daily news to determine the exact point at which we slip into fascism is like staring at a baby to see when it turns into an adult. By the time you perceive it, it’s already happened. It is important to understand that the crackdown phase that we are now in – the unaccountable government forces, the riot police, the teargas, the targeted political prosecutions that will come next – are not something new, but something old. This isn’t about Donald Trump. This is about America, baby. This is what we do.Trying to determine when we slip into fascism is like staring at a baby to see when it turns into an adult. Once you perceive it, it’s already happenedTrump, a fool ruled by impulse rather than strategy, did not build the fearsome machine of government oppression that is now being aimed at his political opponents. This machine was systematically assembled and lovingly tended to by generations of presidents before him – Democratic, Republican, Whig. Trump is only broadening its aperture. All of these tools have been sharpened on the bones of Native Americans and Black people and immigrants and Muslims overseas. America has always needed someone to oppress. Mostly so that we could steal their stuff, but also so that the rest of us didn’t turn against one another. This country has managed to avoid a class war by giving poor white people an array of minorities to abuse, a trick that has benefited rich white people for centuries. We have used injustice not just as a way to get ahead, but as a release valve. Our leaders have long calculated that it is safer to subjugate and mistreat a minority of the population than to risk dissatisfaction in the majority. In doing so, the government has become very adept at creating enemies and wielding power against them in flagrant shows of force.These are trivial observations, basic facts that will only be disputed by those who are destined to land on the side of fascism anyhow. The question is what they mean for our present moment, which is distinguished not by the existence of government oppression but by its direction. We are finding out what happens when the war on terror is turned inward on ourselves. In addition to the federal agents already in Portland, more are coming to Chicago, Albuquerque, and Kansas City; that may well be just the beginning of a national rollout. “Protecting federal property” and “maintaining law and order” are twin fig leaves wafting in a cloud of teargas. The Department of Homeland Security has effectively become a White House-controlled paramilitary and domestic surveillance service unaccountable to anyone except Trump and his loyalists. (If we’re being honest, this moment has been inevitable since DHS was panic-created in the days after the September 11 attacks. If there is any more fascist word than “homeland”, I haven’t heard it.)The basic logic behind gun control is that if there are a bunch of guns lying around, sooner or later someone will get shot. The same holds true for the security state. If you build it, it will eventually come for you. Cloaked in the banality of federal bureaucracy, we have tolerated the creation of a terrifying set of powers that now rest in the small hands of a man who has been waiting his entire life to take revenge on each and every enemy who has slighted him. Barack Obama sat in the White House for eight years and did nothing to dismantle this bureaucracy of soldier-cops. He was too busy using it in foreign drone wars. It’s too seductive to have that power, when you are the one who controls it. Now a worse president has it, and it will be turned, at last, against a bigger chunk of us than ever before.The trick now is convincing that tranquil majority that their interests are more aligned with the protesters than with the cops in fatiguesEvery new outrage is a test of what we will tolerate. If the government can roll out troops to a large swath of major cities and shoot the eyes out of protesters with rubber bullets all under the guise of stopping some kids from spray-painting some courthouse, it is a fairly good indicator that the spirit of the broader American public will not rouse itself to stand in the way of fascism’s tightening grip. In a nation this big, you can make 100 million people official Enemies of the State and still leave a comfortable majority blissfully unaffected. The trick now is convincing that tranquil, all-American majority that their interests are actually more aligned with the protesters wielding spray-paint outside the courthouse than with the militarized cops in fatigues.That shouldn’t be an impossible task. When there is actual justice being done inside the courthouses, the protesters and the storm troopers will both disappear. More
Trump administration
Interview
Daniel Strauss
John Sandweg says the deployment of homeland security officials is a ‘manufactured crisis’ stemming from ‘a failure of leadership’ More
Chad Wolf wasn’t Donald Trump’s first pick for homeland security secretary – he wasn’t even his fifth or sixth.But now he is the figurehead for the federal government’s intervention in Portland, where his department’s militarized agents have been recorded pushing protesters into unmarked vehicles.When criticism of the government’s tactics flared late last week, Wolf tweeted: “Our men and women in uniform are patriots. We will never surrender to violent extremists on my watch.”The tweet has since been deleted – probably because the embedded photo was unauthorized – but it focused attention on Wolf, a former lobbyist who has ignored calls from local government officials in Oregon to remove federal agents from the city.The state’s governor, Kate Brown, said last week that in a phone call, Wolf’s “response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes”.Such an allegation tracks with how Donald Trump has used the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has become more politicized because of its role in enforcing the president’s hardline immigration policies.The department was founded in 2002 in response to 9/11. Its 240,000 staff are also charged with overseeing natural disaster response, anti-terrorism efforts and cybersecurity.Since becoming acting DHS secretary in November 2019, Wolf has denied there is a problem with systemic racism in US law enforcement and downplayed the threat of Covid-19. He has also overseen the implementation of extreme immigration restrictions the White House claimed would stem the spread of coronavirus.Wolf is the fifth person to serve in the role under Trump in an acting or confirmed capacity, while George W Bush and Barack Obama each had three people in the job over the course of their two presidential terms. Wolf was named to the post only after two of the president’s preferred candidates were ruled ineligible to take up the job.The Plano, Texas, native moved to Washington DC after graduating from Southern Methodist University. He was an architect of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and left DHS in 2005 to become a lobbyist.After more than a decade lobbying, Wolf returned to the department to work for the Trump administration, where he has held multiple roles. The most glaring item on his resume, until Portland, was his central role in the Trump administration’s family separation policy while working as the chief of staff for then DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.At a June 2019 hearing, Wolf testified that he learned about family separation in April 2018, just before it was publicly announced.“My job was not to determine whether it was the right or wrong policy,” Wolf testified. “My job at the time was to ensure that the secretary had all the information that [Nielsen] needed.”Months later, NBC News revealed that Wolf included family separation on a list of 16 policy recommendations he drafted for senior department figures in December 2017.Wolf’s name is on the list, and Trump approved the policy, but it was Nielsen who was the face of family separation. Her dismissal last year was emblematic of the Trump administration’s chaotic rule over the agency.Nielsen was pushed out of the job in April 2019, during a purge of senior homeland security officials orchestrated by the White House adviser Stephen Miller.Miller, who has white supremacist views, has an outsized role in the agency and has filled it with allies comfortable supporting his anti-immigration agenda. He is known to call and meet with junior staff to gather information or circumvent their managers.Miller, like Trump, is also a proponent of leaving “acting” in a senior official’s title instead of getting department leaders, such as Wolf, confirmed by the Senate. Trump has said doing so gives him “more flexibility”. Research has shown cabinet secretaries in temporary positions have less stature in the department and are less able to implement their own agendas.Skipping the confirmation process also allows Miller and Trump to insert their favored individuals into senior roles, without intervention from Congress.One of two people deemed ineligible to be DHS secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, is now acting deputy secretary of the agency and is performing the duties of director of US Immigration and Citizenship Services (USCIS), the agency which handles immigration administration.In the past decade, Cuccinelli has said homosexuality is “intrinsically wrong”, been tied to anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ+ campaigners and was criticized for a comment that seemed to compare rats to immigrants.On Monday, Cuccinelli said the use of unmarked vehicles to pick protesters off the streets was “so common it’s barely worth discussion”.Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, and Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, wrote to Trump in November warning that DHS vacancies threatened government accountability and national security.Similar fears are now being shared by DHS staff and former senior officials because of the government’s deployment in Portland.Tom Ridge, the first homeland security secretary, said DHS was not created to be “the president’s personal militia” in an interview with SiriusXM on Tuesday. Ridge said: “It would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to an uninvited, unilateral intervention into one of my cities.” More
Portland
Democrat Ted Wheeler gives backing to protesters against ‘Trump’s occupation of this city’
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Portland mayor teargassed by federal agents during protest – video
Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, has accused Donald Trump of conducting “urban warfare” after he was caught up in the teargassing of protesters by federal forces sent to quell Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the city.
But Wheeler, who was left gasping for air by the teargas, was himself the target of anger and mockery from activists who accused him of sending the city police to attack other protests.
“I’m not going to lie. It stings. It’s hard to breathe, and I can tell you with 100% honesty I saw nothing that provoked this response,” Wheeler said as he stood with protesters outside the federal courthouse that has become the focus of confrontation.
“This is flat-out urban warfare, and it’s being brought on the people of this country by the president of the United States, and it’s got to stop now.”
Protests into the early hours of Thursday morning were more contained than in previous nights after the authorities were finally able to erect a fence around the courthouse that could withstand attack by demonstrators.
Protesters quickly tore down barriers on other nights but the stronger fortification kept them from reaching the front of the courthouse which meant members of the Department of Homeland Security taskforce sent by Trump largely remained behind the fence firing teargas over it.
But the standoff showed how far the federal forces have fallen short of the president’s pledge to restore order in Portland, a liberal city with a long history of street protest.
The DHS taskforce is largely trapped inside the courthouse grounds with the protesters generally controlling the streets outside.
Earlier in the evening, Wheeler, who as mayor is also Portland’s police commissioner, attempted to reassure protesters at a large and peaceful demonstration that he was committed to police reform. But he was met with jeers and forced to admit that change had not come quick enough.
“Obviously we have a long way to go,” Wheeler told the crowd.
Large numbers of people at the demonstration remained sceptical of the man derided in graffiti as “Ded Wheeler” and “Fed Wheeler”.
“He’s two-faced,” said Jennifer Bradley, a grandmother who joined the Wall of Moms formed to act as a shield between the protesters and the police. “Wheeler’s been on the side of the police when it was attacking Black Lives Matters before the feds arrived. I don’t think he’s done anything to support this movement.”
A daily ritual has evolved in which thousands of protesters rally to the Black Lives Matter cause toward sundown in front of Portland’s justice center which holds the police department and county jail. More
Portland
Civil rights leaders in Oregon say the Trump administration’s involvement has upped the stakes on what was a localized conflict More
