18 April 20
Right now it’s all very small donations. It’s inspiring but we need to augment that with a few slightly larger donations. Even as much as one hundred dollars really picks up the effort of the smaller donors.
Who can manage a one hundred dollar donation?
Sincerely.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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PO Box 2043
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18 April 20
Frank Rich | Trump's War on the States
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "Nothing will stop Trump's attempts to grab power. His novel theory of presidential governance, as he himself has defined it, is to seize 'total' authority while bearing no responsibility."
EXCERPT:
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Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "Nothing will stop Trump's attempts to grab power. His novel theory of presidential governance, as he himself has defined it, is to seize 'total' authority while bearing no responsibility."
EXCERPT:
Nothing will stop Trump’s attempts to grab power. His novel theory of presidential governance, as he himself has defined it, is to seize “total” authority while bearing no responsibility. He will throw any power move against the wall to see if it sticks. When the coastal coalitions of governors chose to flatly ignore or, in Andrew Cuomo’s case, mock his bid to set himself up as a king, he pivoted in a blink to his dead-on-arrival push to adjourn Congress so he could staff governmental vacancies with a new round of C-list hacks who wouldn’t be subject to Senate approval. Every day a new tantrum, a new search for scapegoats for his catastrophic mismanagement of America’s public-health catastrophe, and a new attempted end run around the rule of law. The daily Trump show is the most predictable daytime television series since Romper Room.
Yesterday Trump again threatened to use his power to wreak vengeance against states who don’t do his bidding: “If we’re not happy, we’ll take very strong action against a state or a governor … As you know we have very strong action we can take, including a close down.” What “a close down” means is unclear; perhaps Trump will ask Bill Barr for authorization to put Cuomo under house arrest in Albany. But many governors — and not exclusively those in the coastal coalitions — will refuse to obey Trump’s much-hyped decision to “open” America by May 1. (For the first time, May Day may prove synonymous with Mayday.) Already, some of the Wall Street tycoons he strong-armed into White House conference calls yesterday told him that most Americans won’t return to work without a wholesale testing regimen to assure them their lives are not at risk. Since Trump continues to claim that America now has “the most expansive testing system anywhere,” a desperately needed federal testing initiative will continue not to happen and much of the country will continue not to reopen.
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Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Alexey Druzhinin/RIA Novosti)
Putin Leverages Coronavirus Chaos to Make a Direct Play to Trump
Nicole Gaouette, Marshall Cohen and Michael Conte, CNN
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin appear to have had more sustained contact with each other in the past two weeks than at any time since 2016, as the Kremlin tries to use the coronavirus pandemic and close personal ties between the two leaders to normalize long-strained relations with Washington."
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Nicole Gaouette, Marshall Cohen and Michael Conte, CNN
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin appear to have had more sustained contact with each other in the past two weeks than at any time since 2016, as the Kremlin tries to use the coronavirus pandemic and close personal ties between the two leaders to normalize long-strained relations with Washington."
The two leaders spoke on the phone at least four times over a two-week period, beginning March 30 and ending on Sunday, a record pace for publicly known phone calls between the leaders, according to a CNN tally.
Official readouts of their conversations indicate the leaders discussed the coronavirus pandemic and a price war that destabilized the oil markets. The flurry of phone calls follow a Kremlin campaign urging US-Russia cooperation against the coronavirus that used news outlets Trump follows, said Andrew Weiss, a vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The calls have taken place as both Trump and Putin face domestic political challenges and offer the embattled leaders a way to claim wins. But analysts such as Weiss warn that Putin's outreach involves risks to the US.
"Reaching out to the United States ... is part of part of Putin's long-term plan to basically undermine the credibility of the United States as an important stalwart player in the global system, to undermine our alliances, and then to create as many lasting sources of tension between Donald Trump and his own national security team," Weiss told CNN. "The more that Russia succeeds in doing that, the less pressure Russia itself is likely to face from a unified western camp."
Putin's appeal to Trump is meant to be an "end run around the US national security bureaucracy, the State Department, the Pentagon, the intelligence community," which are far more distrustful of Moscow than the President is, Weiss said.
US-Russia relations have been complex since Trump became president. Though his relationship with Putin has been warm, Washington has slapped Moscow with tough sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine, interference in the 2016 election, other malicious cyber activities, human rights abuses, use of a chemical weapon, weapons proliferation, illicit trade with North Korea, and its support for Syria and Venezuela.
Tensions occasionally spill outside the political realm.
On Wednesday, the US Navy said a Russian Su-35 jet performed an "unsafe" intercept of a US P-8 surveillance aircraft while it was flying in international airspace over the Mediterranean Sea., putting US pilots and crew at risk.
The same day, Russia conducted a test of an anti-satellite missile that Space Command commander Gen. John W. "Jay" Raymond said, provides "further proof of Russia's hypocritical advocacy of outer space arms control proposals designed to restrict the capabilities of the United States while clearly having no intention of halting their counterspace weapons programs."
The tension has impeded cooperation on a number of fronts, including any progress on Americans detained by the Russians and the extension of the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty, New START, which expires in February 2021.
On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov that any renewal of the New START Treaty will have to include China, a condition that is widely seen as a way to scuttle the deal and lay the blame on Beijing. China has a much smaller nuclear arsenal than either the US or Russia and has no incentive to sign on to a pact that curbs its arsenal at levels far below its geopolitical rivals.
And Congress is now readying still more sanctions, including a bill targeting Russia's oil sector and other legislation meant to punish ongoing and future election interference.
But Trump's stance toward Moscow has been much less hostile than that of Congress and some members of his administration.
Putin "has basically shown the rest of the US government that their views on Russia don't matter, that he has direct access to the US president."
Angela Stent, the director of Georgetown University's Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies, said that Putin's contacts with Trump reflect a well-established pattern. Stent and other analysts say Trump and Putin have often squeezed out US officials when they've met or had discussions.
"Obviously as we've seen, Trump and Putin have met and discussed things together where the rest of the people were not in the picture," Stent said, pointing to the leaders' first summit in Hamburg where the leading White House official on Russia, Fiona Hill, wasn't invited to the meeting, as is customary.
"This has been characteristic of Trump and Putin the times they've met. We still don't know what they discussed in Finland," she said, pointing to the July 2018 summit in Finland in which Trump and Putin met alone with only their translators, a highly unusual breach of standard practice.
Matt Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, points out that this dynamic is likely driven by Trump's distrust of the US bureaucracy.
Referring to the criminal investigation into whether Trump or his campaign associates conspired with the Kremlin to win the 2016 presidential election, Rojansky said, "we have a President who doesn't trust substantial chunks of his own administration because of the whole experience of Russiagate and impeachment. That more than anything" is affecting the way the two leaders interact, he said.
"The normal firebreaks of a policy process will not necessarily work here," Rojansky said.
Siding with Russia
Never before has Trump been in such in such regular, publicly disclosed contact with the Russian strongman. Trump and Putin have spoken on the phone at least 16 times and met face-to-face at least six times, according to CNN's tally. Their communications often increased up during moments of crisis, like the OPEC conflict this month, and previously after a foiled terrorism plot in 2017.
The Trump-Putin relationship has always been a point of intrigue, largely because of Trump's unorthodox Russia-friendly views and because of the investigation into possible 2016 collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Over the years, their conversations have included a mixture of routine and atypical moments.
They have worked together on ending the conflict in Syria, and they have discussed ways to reduce nuclear tensions in North Korea -- two areas of foreign policy where past US leaders, including former President Barack Obama, also tried to work with the Russian government.
But the relationship hit a low point when Trump and Putin met in Helsinki. Trump disavowed US intelligence about Russian meddling in US elections and publicly accepted Putin's denials. When Trump returned from the summit, he was met with bipartisan backlash, and his controversial comments were invoked at his impeachment trial this year.
Stent, who is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, pointed to Russian political pressures as one reason for Putin's outreach.
A month ago, Russia was refusing to make a deal with Saudi Arabia over oil supplies, a standoff that sent oil prices plunging.
Those plummeting oil prices, a fall in the value of the ruble and then the pandemic began to hit the Russian economy, which could contract as much as 20% this year, Stent said. The pandemic meant that Putin has had to postpone a referendum, set for later this month, that is meant to keep him in power until 2036. The combined crunch forced Russia to come to an agreement with OPEC and drove Putin's popularity rating down as well.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told CNN that the constellation of events now "present Putin's system with the worst crisis of all time."
Stent said that Putin's calculus in reaching out to Trump might be that "if Russia is seen to be treated by the US as a major player and relations improve, maybe that will help him."
She notes that the US-Russia relationship has always been compartmentalized, with some areas of cooperation and some of competition. "I think you just have to be clear eyed about what it is you're cooperating on and understand there are other things you can't cooperate on," Stent said.
Rojansky said the Kremlin is "of course" using the virus and the call to cooperate to serve its goal of normalizing relations. "But that doesn't mean the case for international cooperation amid this pandemic is wrong," he added.
Referring to an CNBC op-ed, written by a Putin ally, Kirill Dmitriev, calling for cooperation to fight coronavirus, Rojanksy said it was "slick, but it flies a moral flag and recalls dark hours when grand cooperative undertakings were needed."
Rojansky said there is room for Washington to take Putin up on his offer of cooperation, but on US terms.
"I do think the United States and Russia can help each other, if not now, certainly in the aftermath of this thing," he said. "Whether and to what degree Americans are willing to offer some normalization in exchange for this is entirely up to us."
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Many of the rallies have been inspired by a protest at the Michigan state capitol. (photo: Matthew Dae Smith/AP)
Thousands of Americans Backed by Rightwing Donors Gear Up for Protests Against Stay-Home Orders
Adam Gabbatt, Guardian UK
Gabbatt writes: "Thousands of people are preparing to attend protests across the US in the coming days, as a rightwing movement against stay-at-home orders, backed by wealthy conservative groups and promoted by Donald Trump, continues to take hold."
EXCERPTS:
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Adam Gabbatt, Guardian UK
Gabbatt writes: "Thousands of people are preparing to attend protests across the US in the coming days, as a rightwing movement against stay-at-home orders, backed by wealthy conservative groups and promoted by Donald Trump, continues to take hold."
EXCERPTS:
Yet while organisers claim the protests are grassroots- and people-driven, a closer look reveals a movement driven by traditional rightwing groups, including one funded by the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
The rallies have drawn comparisons to the Tea Party movement, which sprang into life in 2009 following the election of Barack Obama and was driven in part by Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by rightwing donors Charles and David Koch.
As with the Tea Party, the anti-stay-at-home movement has been promoted by a rightwing media eager for the economy to reopen, including Fox News which on Friday aired a segment on protests in Virginia, Michigan and Minnesota. Two minutes later, Trump tweeted to his 77.4 million followers the need to “liberate” those states.
A majority of Americans support the lockdowns, with a Pew Research Center poll finding that 66% are concerned state governments will lift restrictions on public activity too quickly. But protests, helped by media coverage, have spread around the country.
The two groups behind the “operation gridlock” rally in Michigan on Wednesday have ties to the Republican party and the Trump administration.
The Michigan Freedom Fund, which said it was a co-host of the rally, has received more than $500,000 from the DeVos family, regular donors to rightwing groups.
The other host, the Michigan Conservative Coalition, was founded by Matt Maddock, now a Republican member of the state house of representatives. The MCC also operates under the name Michigan Trump Republicans, and in January held an event featuring several members of the Trump campaign.
“Absolutely the Michigan event was a huge inspiration and it was a huge success,” said Evie Harris, organizer of a ReOpen Maryland protest planned for the state capitol on Saturday.
Yet while organisers claim the protests are grassroots- and people-driven, a closer look reveals a movement driven by traditional rightwing groups, including one funded by the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
The other host, the Michigan Conservative Coalition, was founded by Matt Maddock, now a Republican member of the state house of representatives. The MCC also operates under the name Michigan Trump Republicans, and in January held an event featuring several members of the Trump campaign.
“Absolutely the Michigan event was a huge inspiration and it was a huge success,” said Evie Harris, organizer of a ReOpen Maryland protest planned for the state capitol on Saturday.
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The New York Stock Exchange. (photo: Ben Hider/NYSE Euronext)
How Congress Gets Away With Insider Trading Even Though It's Against the Law
Greg Walters, VICE
Walters writes: "Members of Congress are already banned by federal law from buying or selling stocks using secret information they learned while doing their jobs."
Greg Walters, VICE
Walters writes: "Members of Congress are already banned by federal law from buying or selling stocks using secret information they learned while doing their jobs."
Farm workers harvest zucchini on the Sam Accursio & Son's Farm on April 01, 2020, in Florida City, Florida. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
COVID-19 Shows Why We Must Socialize the Food System
Matt Huber, Jacobin
Huber writes: "Coronavirus has emphasized a truth we knew before the pandemic: capitalist food systems are irrational and don't serve human needs. Socialists have to demand a food system based on social and ecological needs - one that can provide food for all."
Matt Huber, Jacobin
Huber writes: "Coronavirus has emphasized a truth we knew before the pandemic: capitalist food systems are irrational and don't serve human needs. Socialists have to demand a food system based on social and ecological needs - one that can provide food for all."
Employees of Regal, an assembly factory that manufactures electric motors, hold a protest to demand respect for the coronavirus quarantine. (photo: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)
Protests Follow Deaths at US Factories in Mexican Border Town
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Protests have erupted outside factories in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez in recent days after the deaths of several workers, including some employed by U.S. companies, from what the protesters said was the coronavirus."
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Protests have erupted outside factories in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez in recent days after the deaths of several workers, including some employed by U.S. companies, from what the protesters said was the coronavirus."
From April 3 until Tuesday, 15 percent of companies with non-essential activities had refused to stop work, Mexican Deputy Health Minister said.
So far, 82 people have tested positive for the new coronavirus in the city that lies across the border from El Paso, Texas, local authorities said on Thursday. A total of 19 have died, the city health department said.
Several workers for Lear Corporation, a Michigan-based car seat maker, have died from respiratory illnesses, the company said in a statement to Reuters.
Honeywell International Inc on Thursday told Reuters a worker at one of its plants in the city had died after being sent home to self-quarantine and receive medical attention.
The deaths and the protests about ongoing production at border factories follow outbreaks of the virus at meat-packing plants in the United States that have raised concerns over working conditions during the epidemic.
Lockdowns that aim to stop the spread of the coronavirus are disrupting supply chains in the US$1.2 trillion North America Free Trade Agreement region, with growing friction between governments and companies about which industries should continue to operate.
On Thursday, dozens protested outside the Honeywell site where the employee who died had worked, demanding its temporary closure, following similar rallies outside other U.S. and Mexican plants in the city.
“We want them to respect the quarantine,” said Mario Cesar Gonzalez, who said the Honeywell Ademco factory made smoke alarms.
“The manager said that we are essential workers. I don’t think an alarm is essential.”
Lear said it had ceased all employee-related activities by April 1 in Ciudad Juarez.
The Lear shutdown appeared to be in line with the Mexican government’s declaration of a health emergency on March 30, requiring companies to cease operations if their activities are deemed non-essential.
On Wednesday, dozens of other workers protested outside an assembly factory run by Regal Beloir, a Wisconsin-based manufacturer that produces electric motors for household appliances. They demanded the closure of that plant after the alleged death of one of their coworkers.
“A colleague already died last night. He had been working here. There are infected workers and we are not being told,” said one person who identified himself as a Regal employee at the protest but declined to give his name for fear of retribution.
The Mexican government is investigating whether some “non-essential” companies continue to operate. Refusing to follow the rules could constitute the crime of damage to health and could cost lives, Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell said on Wednesday.
A winding, dry river in Nevada. A severe drought has engulfed the American Southwest since 2000. (photo: Bim/E+/Getty Images)
Southwest Drought Could Be Worst in 1,200 Years, Due to the Climate Crisis
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
Davidson writes: "A severe drought that has engulfed the American Southwest since the year 2000 is likely to soon be the most severe drought since the 800s, according to a new study published in Science."
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
Davidson writes: "A severe drought that has engulfed the American Southwest since the year 2000 is likely to soon be the most severe drought since the 800s, according to a new study published in Science."
severe drought that has engulfed the American Southwest since the year 2000 is likely to soon be the most severe drought since the 800s, according to a new study published in Science.
"This appears to be just the beginning of a more extreme trend toward megadrought as global warming continues," the authors wrote in the study.
A team of researchers from Columbia University conducted the study. They described the ongoing dry spell, which has helped intensify wildfire seasons and threatened water supplies for people and agriculture, as an "emerging megadrought," according to The New York Times.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed. By comparison to the previous 19 years, 2019 was actually a fairly wet year. Unpredictable climate variability may also bring enough rain to the region to end the drought, but global warming boosts the chances that the drought will endure.
"We know that this drought has been encouraged by the global warming process," said lead author A. Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, as The New York Times reported. "As we go forward in time it's going to take more and more good luck to pull us out of this."
Scientists have suspected for a while that that the dryness is evolving into a megadrought. The new research not only confirms their suspicion, but also concludes this megadrought may be as bad or worse than anything known before.
"We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we're on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts," said Williams, in a statement, as USA Today reported. This is "a drought bigger than what modern society has seen."
The researchers say that man-made global warming caused about half of this drought. Changes in the climate have contributed to dwindling reservoirs and harsher wildfire seasons.
It all could get much worse.
"Anthropogenic global warming and its drying influence in (southwestern North America) are likely still in their infancy," the study warns, as CNN reported. "The magnitude of future droughts in North America and elsewhere will depend greatly on future rates of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions globally."
Without a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, these droughts are just the beginning.
"The effects of future droughts on humans will be further dependent on sustainable resource use because buffering mechanisms such as ground water and reservoir storage are at risk of being depleted during dry times," the study continues, according to CNN.
To conduct the study, the researchers performed a comprehensive long-term analysis of thousands of square miles, stretching across nine states from Oregon and Montana down through California, Arizona, New Mexico and part of northern Mexico. They looked at 1,200 years of tree ring data, modern weather observations and dozens of climate models, according to CBS News.
The tree rings allow scientist to gauge soil moisture dating back centuries. Williams and his team identified dozens of droughts across the region, starting in 800 AD. Four of those stand out as megadroughts — with extreme dryness that lasted for decades — in the late 800s, mid-1100s, the 1200s and the late 1500s.
The team then compared the ancient megadroughts to soil moisture records from the years 2000 to 2018. The current drought ranked as the second-driest, already outdoing the three earliest ones and on par with the fourth period which spanned from 1575 to 1603, as CBS News reported.
The warmer air during this drought is pulling more moisture from the ground, intensifying dry soils. Furthermore, temperatures in the West are expected to keep rising, meaning this trend is likely to continue.
"Because the background is getting warmer, the dice are increasingly loaded toward longer and more severe droughts," said Williams, as CBS News reported.
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